Abstract
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is now a failed trade agreement, which was negotiated in the 2013-2016 period. If it had been ratified, TTIP would have been the largest ever negotiated trade agreement. Concerns, related to the environment, energy and Public Procurement (PP) galvanized public contention of this Free Trade Agreement (FTA), yet their role in the legitimation or contestation of the FTA has predominantly been assessed from the perspective of civil society activists, rather than scholars.The present study is premised upon the centrality of intentionally-deployed language as a key to understand the ways in which power functions in the TTIP debate. Consequently, the research inquiry is operationalised via a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of discourses, frames and imaginaries, attendant to the FTA’s polemic. Interdiscursivity is a guiding analytical concept, so a range of representations of TTIP’s impact, and the constitutive contribution of the three analytical foci to it, were collated and analysed: ranging from those, strongly supportive of the trade deal, to those vehemently opposed to it. The discursive sources that were taken into account, are as follows: official negotiation documents of the European Commission (EC); an Atlanticist community of intellectual elites associated with major Transatlantic think tanks; German and Bulgarian Parliamentary political parties (across the political spectrum); and major German and Bulgarian NGOs. These documentary sources were triangulated by thirty-one research interviews, conducted in Brussels, Germany and Bulgaria.
The research analysis maps a fuller, multi-faceted, and thus more insightful understanding of the systems of meaning, attendant to TTIP’s polemic. The study’s neo-Gramscian theoretical framework draws on political ecology and neo-Polanyian studies, in order to unpack arguments about the environmental nexus of environment, energy and PP domains, and question how they function within the TTIP debate.
Several analytical dimensions guide the study’s research focus. Firstly, the forms of state and world orders, articulated by the discourses, are analysed by evaluating the contribution of the three analytical foci to these. The second analytical dimension explores the ways in which the environment, energy and PP have contributed towards the legitimation or contestation of TTIP. As part of this inquiry, the study seeks, with the three analytical foci, to understand what kind(s) of state-society and social-environment relations are articulated by TTIP’s mode of governance. Thirdly, the rallying power of representations of the environment, energy and PP is queried. A fourth analytical axis seeks to map the findings on a core/periphery analytical dimension, comparing TTIP’s debates in Germany, the current European economic hegemon, and Bulgaria, the poorest EU member-state.
The central argument of this research is that the environment, energy and PP exemplified TTIP’s disciplinary neoliberalism that was paving the way for policies, which would have facilitated a heightened stage of commodification and depoliticized governance of the three analytical foci. The analysis addresses the inter-discursive constitution of the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic TTIP polemic. The study deploys a critical analysis of the ways in which the environment, energy and PP informed the debate, attesting their uneven bearing and variegated deployment of relevant issues.
The analysis also advances an argument about the existence of core/periphery ideational variegations of the dominant economic imaginaries and attendant forms of state, informed by varying consideration given to state-society and social-environmental relations, as well as about the role of persisting power/knowledge imbalances for TTIP’s legitimation or contestation. The study’s findings also emphasise the formative role of transnational and international influences on the emergence of a counter-movement in a peripheral European economy.
| Date of Award | 1 Sept 2022 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Magnus Ryner (Supervisor) |