EU Official: Pooling Sovereignty, Once “Unthinkable,” Now “the Model”
July 13, 2013
Source: New American
As reported here this week, the first round of Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations has been underway in Washington, D.C. with European Union and American officials, along with a select group of business, banking, environmental, and union “stakeholders.” President Obama has placed this planned political and economic merger of the EU and the United States on a fast track, with the intention of building support for it over the coming months so that it can be rammed through Congress next year.
Despite constant claims of commitment to “transparency,” “openness” and “democracy,” the TTIP talks have been conducted under a cloak of secrecy, with the negotiations closed to the press and the negotiated texts and documents unavailable to the public. This is standard operating procedure in the EU (see here,here, and here) which the United States would mirror more and more, should the TTIP merger succeed.
On Thursday, July 11, the fourth day of the TTIP talks in Washington, a top EU official made some interesting admissions during a speech in Europe. Addressing Lithuanian legislators in Vilnius, the nation’s capital, European Commission Vice-President for Inter-institutional Affairs and Administration Maros Sefcovic (shown above) explained the role of national parliaments under the new regime instituted by the so-called economic reforms known as the “Six-Pack” (2011) and the “Two-Pack” (2012). According to Sefcovic, due to the economic crisis, these reforms required an increased “pooling of sovereignty” by the member states of the eurozone. This means, among other things, that their national budgets will be scrutinized and approved or disapproved by the troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It is the job of national parliaments, Sefcovic said, in essence, to rubberstamp the decisions of the troika, thereby providing a façade of democratic legitimacy. And, ah yes, the parliaments are also supposed to organize “Europe days” confabs to discuss and debate the wonderful work and vision of the European Commission. Sefcovic told the parliament members that even more changes are headed their way:
The Euro currency is stable again. But the crisis has not gone away completely, of course, and we have to continue to follow these new rules if we want to ensure that it does not return.
And there are still more changes to be expected en route. For example, we will soon be entering a new phase of relations between national governments, national parliaments and the European Commission, when the first national budget proposals are scrutinised at the European level, as agreed as part of the ‘two-pack’.
This is a new procedure, and one born out of necessity — one of the key causes of the crisis was irresponsible budgeting in some Member States that had a knock-on effect in other countries. European level scrutiny of national budgets is designed to stop this from happening again.
This is an excellent example of just how far we have come, how far we have been willing to find new ways to do what needs to be done. Pooling sovereignty in this way would have been unthinkable a few years ago, and yet now it is likely to be the model for future development of the economic and monetary union.
That last sentence, especially, deserves a repeat: “Pooling sovereignty in this way would have been unthinkable a few years ago, and yet now it is likely to be the model.”
What Sefcovic and the EU officials in Brussels and Strasbourg refer to as “pooling sovereignty” is, of course, a very radical process that has been fundamentally transforming the relationship between the EU and its member states. The principal-agent relationship has been reversed, with the EU now assuming the principal position, and the member nations becoming the agents, although many critics say the master-servant description is now more apropos. National sovereignty has been, in effect, defined out of existence in the EU. That is precisely what is also in store for Americans, if we accept the TTIP.
“Since the onset of the euro crisis, we have witnessed a massive transfer of powers to the EU level,” notes the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), in a policy brief entitled, “What Is Political Union?”
It acknowledges that the European Central Bank’s recent intervention in national pension reform and labor markets “revealed the extent to which the ECB was acting as a shadow government.”
After surveying the new powers conferred by the Six-Pack and the Two-Pack agreements, the ECFR brief notes: “The shift does not stop there.” It then outlines a number of additional new power transfers in the works, and then observes: “There is still more to come: the EU is currently discussing plans for economic, fiscal, and banking union….”
“The fear now,” according to the ECFR brief, “is that European leaders might end up sitting at the top of an economic federation without the political structures that would democratically legitimise it.”
“The fear now”? Fear by whom? The ECFR is speaking for the EU’s ruling class, of course. The European Union’s political structures — they say — are still not big enough and powerful enough to handle all of the “crises” besetting the EU. National and local governments are getting in the way of the EU ruling class’s grand plans. This “structural flaw” will be remedied by constant accretions of power. But, as the ECFR brief outlines, there are differences of opinion among the EU ruling elites concerning the various federalist models and the timetables for achieving complete centralization of political and economic power. Regardless of the model and timetable chosen, the point is that the EU’s ruling elite view this evolution as an ongoing “process,” an irreversible process that will ineluctably lead to the formerly independent nation states becoming total and abject vassals of a superstate in Brussels.
Maros Sefcovic was careful to put a smiley face on this new vassalage, calling the EU’s new national servitors “partners in this process” — as he explained to them their new role in the unfolding drama scripted by the shadow government in Brussels:
We will all need to play our part in explaining to the citizens of Europe just what these proposals will mean and how parliaments at national and European levels will play a full part in the process. This will of course be even more necessary as we move deeper into economic and monetary union — as for example with our proposals for a full banking union….
As I said, we are all partners in this process, and can all contribute much to the debate; the more regularly and effectively we can do that, the better it will be for us all!
Audacity, deception and guile
“Twenty years ago, when the process began, there was no question of losing sovereignty. That was a lie, or at any rate, a dishonest obfuscation.” So wrote British columnist/commentator Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, in London’s Sunday Telegraph, on August 4, 1991.
Worsthorne, an erstwhile supporter of the Common Market (as the EU was previously known), made the comment above a few months before the official adoption of the 1992 Single European Act (SEA). He recognized by then that the process of economic and monetary union to be set in motion by the SEA was a trap that would lead inexorably to political union, and a deathblow to national sovereignty and independence.
Especially since the launch of the euro currency, on January 1, 1999, many of the EU’s top architects and leaders have repeatedly confirmed in word what is already obvious by their deeds: that the “European Project” is a continuous process that will, if carried to their intended conclusion, eradicate all remaining vestiges of national sovereignty and render all EU inhabitants subject to the untrammeled powers of rulers in Brussels.
With the launch of the euro currency, Wim Duisenburg, president of the European Central Bank, matter-of-factly told The Daily Telegraph, on January 1, 1999: “From now on, monetary policy, usually an essential part of national sovereignty, will be decided by a truly European institution.”
In the same Daily Telegraph article, French Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn approvingly declared: “The Euro is a conquest of sovereignty. It gives us a margin of manoeuvre. It’s a tool to help us master globalisation and help us resist irrational shifts in the market.”
Gerhard Schröder, who was then chancellor of Germany, proclaimed in January 1999:
The time for individual nations having its own tax, employment and social policies if definitely over. We must finally bury the erroneous ideas of nations having sovereignty over foreign and defence policies. National sovereignty will soon prove itself to be a product of the imagination.
(Schröder, by the way, has turned his German and EU politicking into a profitable second career, as chairman of the board of Nord Stream AG, the giant Russian-EU gas pipeline project he had championed while chancellor — along with Vladimir Putin. Putin’s energy behemoth, Gazprom, owns 51 percent of Nord Stream and Gazprom Chairman Alexei Miller — along with fellow Putin oligarchs Alexander Medvedev and Vlada Russakova — sits on the board. Nord Stream’s managing director is Matthias Warnig, for decades a member of the Stasi, the former Communist East Germany’s secret police. Warnig and Putin worked together, while Putin was a KGB agent in Germany. With help from Putin’s Kremlin, Warnig jumped from Stasi agent to chairman of the board of the Russian branch of Dresdner Bank, one of Germany’s largest banks.)
Shröder’s vision of an all-powerful EU central government is shared by his successor, Angela Merkel, who told reporters in 2012:
My vision is one of political union…. We need to become incrementally closer and closer, in all policy areas… Over a long process, we will transfer more powers to the [European] Commission, which will then handle what falls within the European remit like a government of Europe.
Collapsing trust and confidence
The citizens of the EU countries have only recently begun to grasp the grim reality of what this vision would mean. But it has finally struck them hard. A recent study by the European Council on Foreign Relations entitled “The Continent-wide Rise of Euroscepticism” laments the fact that in virtually every EU country trust in the EU has plummeted dramatically. The ECFR study reports:
It was once seen as a British disease. But Euroscepticism has now spread across the continent like a virus. As data from Eurobarometer shows, trust in the European project has fallen even faster than growth rates. Since the beginning of the euro crisis, trust in the European Union has fallen from +10 to -22 percent in France, from +20 to -29 percent in Germany, from +30 to -22 percent in Italy, from +42 to -52 percent in Spain, from +50 to +6 percent in Poland, and from -13 to -49 percent in the United Kingdom.
“What is so striking,” admit the ECFR authors, “is that everyone in the EU has been losing faith in the project: both creditors and debtors, and eurozone countries, would-be members, and ‘opt-outs’. Back in 2007, people thought that the UK, which scored -13 percent in trust, was the Eurosceptic outlier. Now, remarkably, the four largest eurozone countries have even lower levels of trust in the EU institutions than Britain did back in 2007.”
Why should we join the disaster?
With dissatisfaction within the EU being so widespread, and with the EU architects so brazenly transforming what they originally promoted as a common market into a full-fledged central government, Americans might be wise to take a long, hard look at what is now being offered in the form of the much-hyped Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. As we reported previously (Transatlantic Danger: U.S.-EU Merger Talks Underway in D.C.), the key impetus for the TTIP in this country is being provided by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and its many banking, business, and think tank adjuncts. And we documented many years ago (United States of Europe) that the American CFR played a central role, following World War II, in launching the movement for an European Common Market and a European Union.
In September 2000 the mainstream media discovered that the post-war movement for a united Europe had been funded by the American CIA. What these MSM articles failed to mention was that all of the top CIA individuals mentioned in the newly released documents — William Donovan, Walter Bedell Smith, Allen Dulles, Paul Hoffman — were also key leaders in the CFR and were carrying out the CFR’s designs.
This merely confirmed what the late Hilaire du Berrier, a longtime contributing editor to The New American (and its predecessorsAmerican Opinion and The Review of the News) had been documenting for decades in his authoritative HduB Reports, which he published from Monte Carlo, Monaco.
“The CFR,” wrote du Berrier in January 1973, “saw the Common Market from the first as a regional government to which more and more nations would be added until the world government which the UN had failed to bring about would be realized. At a favorable point in the Common Market’s development, America would be brought in. But the American public had to be softened first and leaders groomed for the change-over.”
Nearly 20 years later, in 1991, German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, an avid advocate of the EU superstate, validated du Berrier’s point, in an address in Lisbon, Portugal, entitled “The Future of Europe,” in which he declared:
The road points not backward to the nation-state of the past…. Basically, it is a matter of constructing a world order of peace in which the United Nations must at last play the central role assigned it in its Charter.
The CFR and ECFR are doing their best now to, as Hilaire du Berrier foresaw, “soften” the American public, so that the United States may be brought into “The Project.”
As reported here this week, the first round of Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations has been underway in Washington, D.C. with European Union and American officials, along with a select group of business, banking, environmental, and union “stakeholders.” President Obama has placed this planned political and economic merger of the EU and the United States on a fast track, with the intention of building support for it over the coming months so that it can be rammed through Congress next year.
Despite constant claims of commitment to “transparency,” “openness” and “democracy,” the TTIP talks have been conducted under a cloak of secrecy, with the negotiations closed to the press and the negotiated texts and documents unavailable to the public. This is standard operating procedure in the EU (see here,here, and here) which the United States would mirror more and more, should the TTIP merger succeed.
On Thursday, July 11, the fourth day of the TTIP talks in Washington, a top EU official made some interesting admissions during a speech in Europe. Addressing Lithuanian legislators in Vilnius, the nation’s capital, European Commission Vice-President for Inter-institutional Affairs and Administration Maros Sefcovic (shown above) explained the role of national parliaments under the new regime instituted by the so-called economic reforms known as the “Six-Pack” (2011) and the “Two-Pack” (2012). According to Sefcovic, due to the economic crisis, these reforms required an increased “pooling of sovereignty” by the member states of the eurozone. This means, among other things, that their national budgets will be scrutinized and approved or disapproved by the troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It is the job of national parliaments, Sefcovic said, in essence, to rubberstamp the decisions of the troika, thereby providing a façade of democratic legitimacy. And, ah yes, the parliaments are also supposed to organize “Europe days” confabs to discuss and debate the wonderful work and vision of the European Commission. Sefcovic told the parliament members that even more changes are headed their way:
The Euro currency is stable again. But the crisis has not gone away completely, of course, and we have to continue to follow these new rules if we want to ensure that it does not return.
And there are still more changes to be expected en route. For example, we will soon be entering a new phase of relations between national governments, national parliaments and the European Commission, when the first national budget proposals are scrutinised at the European level, as agreed as part of the ‘two-pack’.
This is a new procedure, and one born out of necessity — one of the key causes of the crisis was irresponsible budgeting in some Member States that had a knock-on effect in other countries. European level scrutiny of national budgets is designed to stop this from happening again.
This is an excellent example of just how far we have come, how far we have been willing to find new ways to do what needs to be done. Pooling sovereignty in this way would have been unthinkable a few years ago, and yet now it is likely to be the model for future development of the economic and monetary union.
That last sentence, especially, deserves a repeat: “Pooling sovereignty in this way would have been unthinkable a few years ago, and yet now it is likely to be the model.”
What Sefcovic and the EU officials in Brussels and Strasbourg refer to as “pooling sovereignty” is, of course, a very radical process that has been fundamentally transforming the relationship between the EU and its member states. The principal-agent relationship has been reversed, with the EU now assuming the principal position, and the member nations becoming the agents, although many critics say the master-servant description is now more apropos. National sovereignty has been, in effect, defined out of existence in the EU. That is precisely what is also in store for Americans, if we accept the TTIP.
“Since the onset of the euro crisis, we have witnessed a massive transfer of powers to the EU level,” notes the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), in a policy brief entitled, “What Is Political Union?”
It acknowledges that the European Central Bank’s recent intervention in national pension reform and labor markets “revealed the extent to which the ECB was acting as a shadow government.”
After surveying the new powers conferred by the Six-Pack and the Two-Pack agreements, the ECFR brief notes: “The shift does not stop there.” It then outlines a number of additional new power transfers in the works, and then observes: “There is still more to come: the EU is currently discussing plans for economic, fiscal, and banking union….”
“The fear now,” according to the ECFR brief, “is that European leaders might end up sitting at the top of an economic federation without the political structures that would democratically legitimise it.”
“The fear now”? Fear by whom? The ECFR is speaking for the EU’s ruling class, of course. The European Union’s political structures — they say — are still not big enough and powerful enough to handle all of the “crises” besetting the EU. National and local governments are getting in the way of the EU ruling class’s grand plans. This “structural flaw” will be remedied by constant accretions of power. But, as the ECFR brief outlines, there are differences of opinion among the EU ruling elites concerning the various federalist models and the timetables for achieving complete centralization of political and economic power. Regardless of the model and timetable chosen, the point is that the EU’s ruling elite view this evolution as an ongoing “process,” an irreversible process that will ineluctably lead to the formerly independent nation states becoming total and abject vassals of a superstate in Brussels.
Maros Sefcovic was careful to put a smiley face on this new vassalage, calling the EU’s new national servitors “partners in this process” — as he explained to them their new role in the unfolding drama scripted by the shadow government in Brussels:
We will all need to play our part in explaining to the citizens of Europe just what these proposals will mean and how parliaments at national and European levels will play a full part in the process. This will of course be even more necessary as we move deeper into economic and monetary union — as for example with our proposals for a full banking union….
As I said, we are all partners in this process, and can all contribute much to the debate; the more regularly and effectively we can do that, the better it will be for us all!
Audacity, deception and guile
“Twenty years ago, when the process began, there was no question of losing sovereignty. That was a lie, or at any rate, a dishonest obfuscation.” So wrote British columnist/commentator Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, in London’s Sunday Telegraph, on August 4, 1991.
Worsthorne, an erstwhile supporter of the Common Market (as the EU was previously known), made the comment above a few months before the official adoption of the 1992 Single European Act (SEA). He recognized by then that the process of economic and monetary union to be set in motion by the SEA was a trap that would lead inexorably to political union, and a deathblow to national sovereignty and independence.
Especially since the launch of the euro currency, on January 1, 1999, many of the EU’s top architects and leaders have repeatedly confirmed in word what is already obvious by their deeds: that the “European Project” is a continuous process that will, if carried to their intended conclusion, eradicate all remaining vestiges of national sovereignty and render all EU inhabitants subject to the untrammeled powers of rulers in Brussels.
With the launch of the euro currency, Wim Duisenburg, president of the European Central Bank, matter-of-factly told The Daily Telegraph, on January 1, 1999: “From now on, monetary policy, usually an essential part of national sovereignty, will be decided by a truly European institution.”
In the same Daily Telegraph article, French Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn approvingly declared: “The Euro is a conquest of sovereignty. It gives us a margin of manoeuvre. It’s a tool to help us master globalisation and help us resist irrational shifts in the market.”
Gerhard Schröder, who was then chancellor of Germany, proclaimed in January 1999:
The time for individual nations having its own tax, employment and social policies if definitely over. We must finally bury the erroneous ideas of nations having sovereignty over foreign and defence policies. National sovereignty will soon prove itself to be a product of the imagination.
(Schröder, by the way, has turned his German and EU politicking into a profitable second career, as chairman of the board of Nord Stream AG, the giant Russian-EU gas pipeline project he had championed while chancellor — along with Vladimir Putin. Putin’s energy behemoth, Gazprom, owns 51 percent of Nord Stream and Gazprom Chairman Alexei Miller — along with fellow Putin oligarchs Alexander Medvedev and Vlada Russakova — sits on the board. Nord Stream’s managing director is Matthias Warnig, for decades a member of the Stasi, the former Communist East Germany’s secret police. Warnig and Putin worked together, while Putin was a KGB agent in Germany. With help from Putin’s Kremlin, Warnig jumped from Stasi agent to chairman of the board of the Russian branch of Dresdner Bank, one of Germany’s largest banks.)
Shröder’s vision of an all-powerful EU central government is shared by his successor, Angela Merkel, who told reporters in 2012:
My vision is one of political union…. We need to become incrementally closer and closer, in all policy areas… Over a long process, we will transfer more powers to the [European] Commission, which will then handle what falls within the European remit like a government of Europe.
Collapsing trust and confidence
The citizens of the EU countries have only recently begun to grasp the grim reality of what this vision would mean. But it has finally struck them hard. A recent study by the European Council on Foreign Relations entitled “The Continent-wide Rise of Euroscepticism” laments the fact that in virtually every EU country trust in the EU has plummeted dramatically. The ECFR study reports:
It was once seen as a British disease. But Euroscepticism has now spread across the continent like a virus. As data from Eurobarometer shows, trust in the European project has fallen even faster than growth rates. Since the beginning of the euro crisis, trust in the European Union has fallen from +10 to -22 percent in France, from +20 to -29 percent in Germany, from +30 to -22 percent in Italy, from +42 to -52 percent in Spain, from +50 to +6 percent in Poland, and from -13 to -49 percent in the United Kingdom.
“What is so striking,” admit the ECFR authors, “is that everyone in the EU has been losing faith in the project: both creditors and debtors, and eurozone countries, would-be members, and ‘opt-outs’. Back in 2007, people thought that the UK, which scored -13 percent in trust, was the Eurosceptic outlier. Now, remarkably, the four largest eurozone countries have even lower levels of trust in the EU institutions than Britain did back in 2007.”
Why should we join the disaster?
With dissatisfaction within the EU being so widespread, and with the EU architects so brazenly transforming what they originally promoted as a common market into a full-fledged central government, Americans might be wise to take a long, hard look at what is now being offered in the form of the much-hyped Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. As we reported previously (Transatlantic Danger: U.S.-EU Merger Talks Underway in D.C.), the key impetus for the TTIP in this country is being provided by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and its many banking, business, and think tank adjuncts. And we documented many years ago (United States of Europe) that the American CFR played a central role, following World War II, in launching the movement for an European Common Market and a European Union.
In September 2000 the mainstream media discovered that the post-war movement for a united Europe had been funded by the American CIA. What these MSM articles failed to mention was that all of the top CIA individuals mentioned in the newly released documents — William Donovan, Walter Bedell Smith, Allen Dulles, Paul Hoffman — were also key leaders in the CFR and were carrying out the CFR’s designs.
This merely confirmed what the late Hilaire du Berrier, a longtime contributing editor to The New American (and its predecessorsAmerican Opinion and The Review of the News) had been documenting for decades in his authoritative HduB Reports, which he published from Monte Carlo, Monaco.
“The CFR,” wrote du Berrier in January 1973, “saw the Common Market from the first as a regional government to which more and more nations would be added until the world government which the UN had failed to bring about would be realized. At a favorable point in the Common Market’s development, America would be brought in. But the American public had to be softened first and leaders groomed for the change-over.”
Nearly 20 years later, in 1991, German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, an avid advocate of the EU superstate, validated du Berrier’s point, in an address in Lisbon, Portugal, entitled “The Future of Europe,” in which he declared:
The road points not backward to the nation-state of the past…. Basically, it is a matter of constructing a world order of peace in which the United Nations must at last play the central role assigned it in its Charter.
The CFR and ECFR are doing their best now to, as Hilaire du Berrier foresaw, “soften” the American public, so that the United States may be brought into “The Project.”
UNITED STATES Washington, 10 July 2013
Update on the first round of Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations
Today, U.S. and European Union (EU) negotiators paused Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations to meet with approximately 350 stakeholders at a series of events, including an engagement event hosted by the United States. Representatives from academia, labor unions, the private sector, and non-governmental organizations spoke with and heard from the U.S. and EU negotiators about priorities for and progress on the proposed trade agreement. TTIP negotiators also had the opportunity to listen to 50 formal stakeholder presentations.
Following the three-hour engagement event, U.S. Chief Negotiator Dan Mullaney and EU Chief Negotiator Ignacio Garcia-Bercero convened a stakeholder briefing session at which they provided updates on the first round of negotiations and answered questions related to the proposed agreement.
Negotiating groups responsible for the following issues met on July 10th, at times not in conflict with the stakeholder event: regulatory issues, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, e-commerce and telecommunications, intellectual property rights, investment, labor, and small- and medium-sized enterprises. Negotiating groups responsible for the following areas are scheduled to meet on July 11th : sanitary and phytosanitary measures, agricultural market access, investment, dispute settlement, the environment, financial services, competition, labor, customs/trade facilitation, and state-owned enterprises.
Press inquiries should be directed to Andrea Mead for the Office of the United States Trade Representative at amead@ustr.eop.gov
and Eva Horelova for the European Union atEva.horelova@eeas.europa.eu.
and Eva Horelova for the European Union atEva.horelova@eeas.europa.eu.
http://systemicdisorder.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/transatlantic-partnership-intended-to-duplicate-secret-trans-pacific-partnership/
‘Transatlantic Partnership’ intended to duplicate secret Trans-Pacific Partnership
Neoliberalism knows no borders, so perhaps it should not come as a bolt out of the blue that the United States and European Union are set to negotiate a “Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.”
It might be thought that the Obama administration would have its hands full with the ongoing, top-secret Trans-Pacific Partnership talks, but it seems that much can be done in the absence of any pesky oversight. It might be thought that European Union officials would have their hands full with their series of financial crises, but it appears this is an irresistible opportunity to safeguard austerity.
Ah, can’t you just imagine corporate leaders sitting around a camp fire singing, “We are all the Cayman Islands now.” Surely they would be jolly folks and allow the political leaders who so graciously granted their wishes seats close to the fire.
This dystopia is sponsored by the usual corporate organizations. The trans-Atlantic trade agreement evaded all radar until U.S. President Barack Obama’s announcement in his State of the Union address but had been in the works for more than a year. To the applause of business groups on both sides of the Atlantic.
No details of any kind have emerged about the trans-Atlantic trade agreement, only generalities. It would seem that holding two sets of negotiations among dozens of countries would be difficult, but then it is remembered that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is designed to be “scalable” — a euphemism meaning that the terms will be final. Any countries not among the present negotiators can join at any time but must accept that no terms already agreed upon are negotiable. Could this be the model for the Trans-Atlantic pact?
Big Business already cheering on the negotiators
A “U.S.-E.U. High Level Working Group on Jobs and Growth” was created at a United States-European Union summit meeting in November 2011, tasked with “identifying policies and measures to increase U.S.-EU trade and investment to support mutually beneficial job creation, economic growth, and international competitiveness,” according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative. It is unknown who sat on the “high-level” group, but it is chaired by European Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk. Early in February 2013 — this seems to account for President Obama’s timing — the group said talks should go ahead.
Although it is impossible to be specific about the influences on the working group, the corporate interests who promote and benefit from “free-trade” agreements were not likely absent from the room. Eurochambres, a regional network of European chambers of commerce, published the paper it presented to the working group online. Eurochambres calls for harmonization of regulations, elimination of all tariffs and “the highest possible standards of protection for investors.”
That last wish should set off alarm bells. In pursuit of “protection for investors,” Eurochambres advocates that trade negotiators “Build on the Joint Statement of Principles on the Treatment of Foreign Investment elaborated by business organization on both sides of the Atlantic.” Those “principles” include:
These demands are staples of “free-trade” agreements, whether bilateral or multi-national. Bland-sounding calls for “equal treatment” for foreign and domestic investors and property rights only thinly mask a thicket of detail-loving devils. These platitudes form the basis of undemocratic, drastically one-sided trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, which in turn provides the starting point for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a negotiation being conducted in secret by 11 countries.
These agreements use the same language as that of the Big Business pressure groups quoted just above. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership will contain rules mirroring those proposed for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP goes beyond NAFTA in several ways, via rules granting additional “rights” to multi-national corporations and further expanding the definition of “investor,” while containing no rules concerning labor, the environment, public health or safety.
For example, the TPP, if ratified, would overturn the policies of countries like Australia and New Zealand that force lower prices on medicines, significantly tighten corporate control of the Internet, and require that speculators be paid the full face value of a government bond even if bought at a deep discount from a third party.
The TPP would require disputes be judged in the International Centre for Settlement of Investor Disputes — a secret tribunal closed to the public that is an arm of, and controlled by, the World Bank. ICSID, and similar tribunals, are bodies that adjudicate disputes between investors and governments, but the judges who sit in judgment are often corporate lawyers who specialize in representing investors in disputes with governments. These tribunals issue a steady stream of rulings favoring corporate interests, and these decisions then become the standards to which future trade agreements will be held, building a floor for subsequent decisions that will be still more harsh.
The rules governing the TPP, if enacted, would require that maximizing corporate profits be the highest priority for governments, by law. Measures to reign in financial speculation, even during economic crises, would be illegal, and rules safeguarding workplace safety or the environment would be struck down as interference with corporate profits.
It is difficult to imagine that the corporations goading on the trans-Atlantic governments intend to settle for anything less. And also at risk for Europeans are laws blocking genetically modified foods — U.S. agribusinesses have sought to eliminate E.U. rules safeguarding food safety and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership may well be their route. “Harmonizing” rules ordinarily means “harmonizing” at the lowest level, and in this case that would mean the weaker safety regulations, and lackadaisical enforcement, of the U.S.
No Trans-Pacific Partnership text has ever been made available; the little that is publicly known is due to leaks published on the Internet by consumer organizations. The White House TPP page offers no substance. In its report on the most recent negotiation round, the White House provides this less than scintillating summary:
Different ocean, but same concept
Information on the details of the Trans-Atlantic agreement are likely to be as scarce. Nonetheless, European leaders are mostly lining up in support. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron, for example, are pushing the idea. The corporate media is also lining up behind it, with “resistance” to an agreement portrayed as “interest groups” stubbornly clinging to parochial concerns. An excellent specimen of corporate ideology at work is provided by the centrist German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, which is presented not to single it out but rather because it is typical. Der Spiegel writes of potential opposition:
The only clue as to the contents of what a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership might contain are in the final report issued by the High Level Working Group on Jobs and Growth. Two key passages in the final report’s six pages state:
Market forces demand a race to the bottom
In the High Level Working Group’s six-page report, environment and labor safeguards are discussed in one paragraph. Here it is:
In the context of European Union elites sparring over financial policy, Chancellor Merkel is not a stubborn holdout nor obsessed with Weimar-era inflation; she is simply reminding other national political leaders that financial harmonization will conform to the tightest policy among them and Germany so happens to have that tightest policy. Trade harmonization, regardless of where the borders are drawn, will follow a similar dynamic. The United States will seek to impose its looser regulations and weaker labor laws on Europe, and further weaken its own.
That is not because there is something inherently evil about U.S. officials or due to some particular moral failing of the Obama administration, but because the U.S. government, like all capitalist countries, reflect the dominant interests within their countries. Large industrialists and financiers dominate their societies through control of the mass media and a range of other institutions to the point that their preferred policies become, through heavy repetition, the dominant ideas across society and the ideas adopted by the political leaders who become intellectually and financially dependent on them. That is a crucial part of the puzzle as to why governments around the world enter into agreements that are so one-sided against themselves.
Coordinated international struggle is the only counter-force that can block these draconian trade agreements.
It might be thought that the Obama administration would have its hands full with the ongoing, top-secret Trans-Pacific Partnership talks, but it seems that much can be done in the absence of any pesky oversight. It might be thought that European Union officials would have their hands full with their series of financial crises, but it appears this is an irresistible opportunity to safeguard austerity.
Ah, can’t you just imagine corporate leaders sitting around a camp fire singing, “We are all the Cayman Islands now.” Surely they would be jolly folks and allow the political leaders who so graciously granted their wishes seats close to the fire.
This dystopia is sponsored by the usual corporate organizations. The trans-Atlantic trade agreement evaded all radar until U.S. President Barack Obama’s announcement in his State of the Union address but had been in the works for more than a year. To the applause of business groups on both sides of the Atlantic.
No details of any kind have emerged about the trans-Atlantic trade agreement, only generalities. It would seem that holding two sets of negotiations among dozens of countries would be difficult, but then it is remembered that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is designed to be “scalable” — a euphemism meaning that the terms will be final. Any countries not among the present negotiators can join at any time but must accept that no terms already agreed upon are negotiable. Could this be the model for the Trans-Atlantic pact?
Big Business already cheering on the negotiators
A “U.S.-E.U. High Level Working Group on Jobs and Growth” was created at a United States-European Union summit meeting in November 2011, tasked with “identifying policies and measures to increase U.S.-EU trade and investment to support mutually beneficial job creation, economic growth, and international competitiveness,” according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative. It is unknown who sat on the “high-level” group, but it is chaired by European Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk. Early in February 2013 — this seems to account for President Obama’s timing — the group said talks should go ahead.
Although it is impossible to be specific about the influences on the working group, the corporate interests who promote and benefit from “free-trade” agreements were not likely absent from the room. Eurochambres, a regional network of European chambers of commerce, published the paper it presented to the working group online. Eurochambres calls for harmonization of regulations, elimination of all tariffs and “the highest possible standards of protection for investors.”
That last wish should set off alarm bells. In pursuit of “protection for investors,” Eurochambres advocates that trade negotiators “Build on the Joint Statement of Principles on the Treatment of Foreign Investment elaborated by business organization on both sides of the Atlantic.” Those “principles” include:
“[T]he rule of law, transparency and predictability in government administration, regulatory fairness, the sanctity of contracts and private property, respect for intellectual property rights, and sound macro-economic policies. … This general approach should apply to the widest possible definition of investments, including all forms of assets and tangible and intangible property; property rights such as leases, mortgages, liens and pledges; intellectual property rights; rights conferred by law or contract, such as licenses and permits; business enterprises and equity and other forms of participation in them; claims to money and to performance; and returns.”On the other side of the Atlantic, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — a hard-line organization that has never seen a regulation it likes or a tax that is justified — has similarly provided its wish list. The Chamber calls for the same things as its European counterpart, including a “a highest standard investment agreement.” The Chamber did go a bit further by demanding an immediate deal, insisting that negotiators:
“Complete a bilateral investment agreement between the United States and the 27 EU member countries. An updated and comprehensive bilateral agreement would improve the flow of capital, prevent discrimination against investors, and provide protection from expropriation. … The Chamber calls for a swift time frame to avoid delays from election calendars in any participating country.”Trans-Atlantic echoes of the Trans-Pacific Partnership
These demands are staples of “free-trade” agreements, whether bilateral or multi-national. Bland-sounding calls for “equal treatment” for foreign and domestic investors and property rights only thinly mask a thicket of detail-loving devils. These platitudes form the basis of undemocratic, drastically one-sided trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, which in turn provides the starting point for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a negotiation being conducted in secret by 11 countries.
These agreements use the same language as that of the Big Business pressure groups quoted just above. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership will contain rules mirroring those proposed for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP goes beyond NAFTA in several ways, via rules granting additional “rights” to multi-national corporations and further expanding the definition of “investor,” while containing no rules concerning labor, the environment, public health or safety.
For example, the TPP, if ratified, would overturn the policies of countries like Australia and New Zealand that force lower prices on medicines, significantly tighten corporate control of the Internet, and require that speculators be paid the full face value of a government bond even if bought at a deep discount from a third party.
The TPP would require disputes be judged in the International Centre for Settlement of Investor Disputes — a secret tribunal closed to the public that is an arm of, and controlled by, the World Bank. ICSID, and similar tribunals, are bodies that adjudicate disputes between investors and governments, but the judges who sit in judgment are often corporate lawyers who specialize in representing investors in disputes with governments. These tribunals issue a steady stream of rulings favoring corporate interests, and these decisions then become the standards to which future trade agreements will be held, building a floor for subsequent decisions that will be still more harsh.
The rules governing the TPP, if enacted, would require that maximizing corporate profits be the highest priority for governments, by law. Measures to reign in financial speculation, even during economic crises, would be illegal, and rules safeguarding workplace safety or the environment would be struck down as interference with corporate profits.
It is difficult to imagine that the corporations goading on the trans-Atlantic governments intend to settle for anything less. And also at risk for Europeans are laws blocking genetically modified foods — U.S. agribusinesses have sought to eliminate E.U. rules safeguarding food safety and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership may well be their route. “Harmonizing” rules ordinarily means “harmonizing” at the lowest level, and in this case that would mean the weaker safety regulations, and lackadaisical enforcement, of the U.S.
No Trans-Pacific Partnership text has ever been made available; the little that is publicly known is due to leaks published on the Internet by consumer organizations. The White House TPP page offers no substance. In its report on the most recent negotiation round, the White House provides this less than scintillating summary:
“Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiators were pleased to report further solid steps forward in closing the remaining gaps between them during the 15th round of negotiations. … [T]he Leaders reaffirmed their mutual priority of concluding a state-of-the-art, comprehensive agreement as quickly as possible.”The next round of TPP talks is in Singapore from March 4 to 13, where similar communiqués are likely forthcoming. Once again, it must be asked: What is being hidden?
Different ocean, but same concept
Information on the details of the Trans-Atlantic agreement are likely to be as scarce. Nonetheless, European leaders are mostly lining up in support. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron, for example, are pushing the idea. The corporate media is also lining up behind it, with “resistance” to an agreement portrayed as “interest groups” stubbornly clinging to parochial concerns. An excellent specimen of corporate ideology at work is provided by the centrist German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, which is presented not to single it out but rather because it is typical. Der Spiegel writes of potential opposition:
“Some interest groups have refused to budge. The powerful US agrarian lobby, for example, insists on unlimited access to European markets, including such products as genetically modified produce, which is controversial on the Continent. European companies, for their part, refuse to accept the diktats of US regulatory authorities regarding whether and how they can pursue state contracts. … Furthermore, promoting a trans-Atlantic agreement would allow Obama — on the eve of his planned visit to Berlin in June — to address European concerns that the US has turned away from the Continent in favor of Asia. … But in his Tuesday evening speech, Obama still lauded the benefits of a trans-Pacific trade agreement with Australia and Asian countries before he mentioned the trans-Atlantic deal.”The primary controversy, a reader might be led to believe, centers on a potential lack of resolve in giving corporations what they want. That there might be interests other than that of corporate profits — say, workers’ ability to have jobs with good pay and dignity, or a desire not eat food untested and unlabeled, or avoiding environmental damage — are not mentioned. Such matters are immaterial, evidently, at most the concern of “interest groups.”
The only clue as to the contents of what a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership might contain are in the final report issued by the High Level Working Group on Jobs and Growth. Two key passages in the final report’s six pages state:
“The [High Level Working Group] recommends that a comprehensive U.S.-EU trade agreement should include investment liberalization and protection provisions based on the highest levels of liberalization and highest standards of protection that both sides have negotiated to date. … The HLWG recommends that the two sides explore new means of addressing these ‘behind-the-border’ obstacles to trade, including, where possible, through provisions that serve to reduce unnecessary costs and administrative delays stemming from regulation.” [page 3]These provision could include:
“[R]educ[ing] redundant and burdensome testing and certification requirements … [and inserting p]rovisions or annexes containing additional commitments or steps aimed at promoting regulatory compatibility.” [page 4]Stripped of bureaucratic niceties, what the above passages mean is that the most one-sided trade agreements (and tribunal interpretation) will be in force. For now, that arguably means the standards of NAFTA, under which taxation and regulation constitute “indirect expropriation” that require compensation for corporations. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, however, would supersede NAFTA if implemented, mostly because it would be more draconian but also because Canada and Mexico have formally joined the nine original TPP negotiating countries, making NAFTA superfluous. To add to the complexity, Canada is negotiating its own secret trade pact with the E.U. and, like the U.S. Congress vis-à-vis the TPP, Canadian members of parliament are being left in the dark.
Market forces demand a race to the bottom
In the High Level Working Group’s six-page report, environment and labor safeguards are discussed in one paragraph. Here it is:
“The EU and the United States are both committed to high levels of protection for the environment and workers. The HLWG recommends that the two sides explore opportunities to address these important issues, taking in to account work done in the Sustainable Development Chapter of EU trade agreements and the Environment and Labor Chapters of U.S. trade agreements.” [page 5]There are no effective environment or labor chapters in U.S. trade agreements, only boilerplate language that is meaningless. If that is the standard, then labor rights, workplace safety rules and environmental safeguards will be under sustained assault under any Trans-Atlantic trade agreement. Protections for the environment and employees are barriers to corporate profits, and will be treated as such. Regulations will be “harmonized” at the lowest level because that is what the “market” demands — the market simply being the aggregate interests of the most powerful industrialists and financiers.
In the context of European Union elites sparring over financial policy, Chancellor Merkel is not a stubborn holdout nor obsessed with Weimar-era inflation; she is simply reminding other national political leaders that financial harmonization will conform to the tightest policy among them and Germany so happens to have that tightest policy. Trade harmonization, regardless of where the borders are drawn, will follow a similar dynamic. The United States will seek to impose its looser regulations and weaker labor laws on Europe, and further weaken its own.
That is not because there is something inherently evil about U.S. officials or due to some particular moral failing of the Obama administration, but because the U.S. government, like all capitalist countries, reflect the dominant interests within their countries. Large industrialists and financiers dominate their societies through control of the mass media and a range of other institutions to the point that their preferred policies become, through heavy repetition, the dominant ideas across society and the ideas adopted by the political leaders who become intellectually and financially dependent on them. That is a crucial part of the puzzle as to why governments around the world enter into agreements that are so one-sided against themselves.
Coordinated international struggle is the only counter-force that can block these draconian trade agreements.
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