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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 August 2023
Even though the TTIP negotiations have run aground, the reasons that motivated them and those that caused their demise can be instructive. Although the TTIP negotiations had a number of features that made them distinctive, with care, valuable lessons can be drawn for future trade negotiations. These lessons are arguably particularly relevant for the United Kingdom as it negotiates its departure from the European Union and embarks on its own trade policy agenda. By way of conclusion, therefore, this chapter identifies those key lessons.
The chapter begins by specifying the reasons for caution in drawing lessons from the TTIP negotiations and setting out why doing so is still appropriate. It then rehearses the main conclusions from the preceding chapters on the motivations for, and the impediments to, reaching an agreement. It wraps up by applying these lessons to the UK’s incipient trade policy.
Causes for care when drawing lessons
As this book has made clear, the TTIP negotiations were unique for a variety of reasons. They sought to integrate the world’s two largest economies. As a consequence, they represented the first time that either the EU or the US had negotiated a bilateral trade agreement with a nearpeer. Both had been used to negotiating with smaller trade partners, with whom they could be more confi dent about dictating terms, or at least avoiding particularly painful concessions. The prospect of meaningful concessions and the promise of improved access to a very large market raised the stakes for both the EU and the US. The aspiration to agree rules that would become global benchmarks only heightened the salience of the negotiations. The TTIP negotiations, therefore, had far more riding on them than any other bilateral trade negotiations and many plurilateral talks.
A second distinctive feature of the TTIP negotiations was that they were motivated by the unusually high degree of interpenetration between the two economies. As discussed in Chapter 2, the transatlantic economic relationship is built on FDI as much as, or more than, on trade.
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