A
surprising German poll showed Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) tied for second place with the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) just before this weekend’s regional elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The incumbent Social Democrats are at 28 percent, the CDU and the AfD at 22. Do these numbers capture the real strength of the AfD? We’ll see, but Germany is not the sort of place where one brags to strangers about casting a ballot for the most right-wing party in the country. (This, by the way, is the most mainstream of mainstream pollsters: Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, working for the TV network ZDF.)
It is a warning. In about 12 months, France and Germany will have national elections. Top politicians face the equivalent of a Brexit /Trump/Sanders vote. Maybe that is why they have just killed a planned American-European trade pact. They will now inter the
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement. (The pact is called TTIP where
associations with NAFTA are toxic and TAFTA where “tip” is the preferred word for dumpster.)
On the last Sunday of August, Germany’s vice chancellor, the Social Democrat Sigmar Gabriel, gave a progress report on years of negotiations. TTIP has 27 chapters.
Negotiators haven’t agreed to a single one of them. Time to forget it, Gabriel said. Two days later, France’s trade secretary Matthias Fekl said that he would travel to a summit in Bratislava at the end of September, and there, “in France’s name,
I will call for a halt to negotiations on Tafta.”
One is inclined to suspect a trick familiar from American politics: the
ol’ double vote. It was deployed to splendid effect last summer when Congress was considering giving President Obama unpopular “fast-track” authority for TTIP’s sister agreement the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Congress voted the measure down, ringing up a (phony) “no” vote that members in tight races would be able to boast of in campaign-season town halls. Then, a few days later,
Congress “reconsidered,” passing a (real) “yes” vote, which got President Obama’s signature. Corporate donors could be discreetly reminded of it when politicians went around shaking the cup.
European pols have mastered the double vote, too, none better than Angela Merkel. She poses with women in Muslim garb while her own party’s prosecutors urge banning it. She “distances” herself from a condemnation, passed by her own Bundestag, that calls the 1915 Turkish mass killings of Armenians genocide. Then she has a party spokesman “distance” her from the distancing! (
Turkey is permitting German lawmakers to visit the NATO airbase in Incirlik only if they publicly repudiate the vote.) Merkel sings the praises of trade even as her vice chancellor runs it down.
But the end of TTIP is no trick, because Germany does not have the only vote on the matter. Shortly after Fekl spoke, President François Hollande delivered what Le Figaro called the
coup de grâce. He averred that TTIP had “stalled out” and that France would no longer go along with the charade. “France prefers to face up to reality,” he said, “and not to nurture the illusion that an agreement can be negotiated
by the time the president of the United States leaves office.”
That’s a curious formulation. Hollande is not alone in making it: The EU trade representative Cecilia Malmström of Sweden has also alluded to
Obama’s term as the window in which the EU’s bureaucrats are comfortable negotiating this thing. How come?
Well, outside of the Obama White House and the EU, there is
little support for these agreements. (The pollster YouGov says only 17 percent of Germans favor TTIP, and only 18 percent of Americans.) Trade between the United States and Europe is about as free as it can get, with tariffs averaging just 3 percent. What TTIP does is harmonize regulation—constraining the sovereignty of the nations that sign it. The free-market economist
Mark Thornton of the Von Mises Institute calls TTIP a free-trade agreement only in name. The
Naderite activist Lori Wallach of Public Citizen agrees, and accuses the administration of operating in secret to bring such treaties about. The
Yale University trade law expert David Grewal lays out how sovereignty is surrendered. Particularly unpopular is the system of so-called
Investor-State Dispute Settlement, under which an international tribunal can order money paid out of national treasuries to compensate aggrieved corporations.
A world order laid down by well-informed and well-intentioned international lawyers has always been a dream of the Obama administration, albeit less explicitly now than when Yale lawyer Harold Koh was the State Department’s legal adviser. There are presentable arguments for such a vision, even if it means tossing away one’s hard-won sovereignty. But tossing away one’s hard-won sovereignty is not, to put it mildly, a vision historically associated with the Republican party. And if the old Republican establishment had spent more time thinking about sovereignty and less time corralling votes for President Obama’s trade policies, it would not be in the
position it finds itself in right now. This is a lesson that politicians in France and Germany seem to be taking to heart.
