Previous Attempts at Transatlantic Trade Agreements, and the Rationale for Launching the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Negotiations

Abstract

In this chapter, Eliasson and Garcia-Duran contextualize the decision to launch negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and provide a summary of previous attempts at forging a transatlantic marketplace. They discuss how the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries witnessed several developments in transatlantic trade relations, with numerous attempts at agreements across several sectors, but that most of these agreements were highly aspirational and substantively weak. For a variety of political and regulatory reasons, more than half of the signed mutual recognition agreements were never implemented. Interwoven with the presentation of TTIP’s proposed content is a discussion of the content of modern trade agreements, as well as a section highlighting some of the many pertinent, and enduring, political problems that preceded TTIP negotiations.