Put a trade pact, any trade pact, up to a popular vote or to a vote by a popularly elected body, and it’s probably going to be rejected. From Don Quijones at wolfstreet.com:
The mother of all ironies.
Today’s generation of trade agreements seek to transfer key decision making powers and sovereignty from the traditional repositories of democracy, national parliaments, to the C-suites of the world’s biggest corporations.
In the mother of all ironies, to do that, they need national governments to sign along the dotted line, effectively voting themselves out of any meaningful existence. Although granting corporations full sovereignty rights – including the right to sue any government that threatens their ability to earn profits at literally any social, human or environmental cost – is explicitly endorsed by many national governments (including the U.S., the UK, Canada and Spain, to mention a few), not everyone is on board.
And as Britain’s vote to exit the EU just showed, democracy is a process that can be carefully managed; it can even be stage-managed, but it cannot be completely controlled.
That’s why the European Commission decided last week to renege on a promise it had repeatedly made to Europe’s citizens that it would consult the national parliaments of all Member States before ratifying game-changing trade agreements like the EU-US trade pact, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and the EU-Canada trade pact, CETA. When it realized that it would be impossible to guarantee the desired outcome — i.e., a unanimously supported agreement — with such an approach, the Commission changed tack, designating CETA as a unilateral EU agreement, not as a “mixed agreement.”
The decision sparked an immediate outcry from a number of EU countries, including France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, all of whom demand a say for their respective parliaments on CETA’s ratification. This prompted the Juncker-led Commission to execute a wholly unexpected U-turn this Tuesday, announcing that national parliaments would, after all, have to ratify the pact.
On the surface the Commission’s latest volte-face is a mystifying move. Handing over the decision on whether to ratify the agreement to national parliaments makes it far more likely that CETA, an agreement that has been under negotiation for seven long years, is rejected. It could also derail the much more important, much more controversial TTIP.
“Public pressure has forced the European Commission into a humiliating climbdown as they have been prevented from denying a democratic vote on whether to accept the toxic EU-Canada trade deal, CETA,” gloated John Hilary, executive director at the anti-poverty organization War on Want.
The agreements’ supporters are as livid as its opponents are delighted. Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, director of the European Centre for International Political Economy, told Politico that he was “shocked” how easily Brussels had surrendered its exclusive competence on trade. In a tweet, he described the Commission as “traitors, not guardians, of the treaty.”
As Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s trade minister, put it last month: “If the EU cannot do a deal with Canada, I think it is legitimate to say: Who the heck can it do a deal with?”
But what if it’s all a bluff? Or even worse, a carefully laid trap?
To continue reading: Did the EU just Kill Trade Pacts CETA and TTIP with Canada & the US? Or is it a Perfect Trap?
