The New Political Economy of Transatlantic Economic Cooperation: Divergent Preferences, Regime Complexity and the Changing Distribution of Global Economic Power

Heron, Tony and Quaglia, Lucia (2015) The New Political Economy of Transatlantic Economic Cooperation: Divergent Preferences, Regime Complexity and the Changing Distribution of Global Economic Power. [Conference Proceedings] (Submitted)

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Abstract

The launching of the EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) initiative has coincided with renewed scholarly interest in the idea of transatlantic economic cooperation as a source of norm diffusion, policy coordination and institutionalisation. In this paper, we assess the significance of the TTIP initiative by deliberately situating it in the broader context of the changing global order. Understood in these terms, the significance of TTIP, we argue, rests not solely, or even predominantly, in the scale of the proposed economic agreement, but also as part of a wider of political strategy - shared by both EU and US policy actors - to use transatlantic cooperation to lay claim to a broader leadership role in a global system increasingly defined by shifting power configurations and corresponding levels of conflict regarding trade and development norms, policy institutionalisation and global governance itself. Briefly summarized, we find that even though TTIP itself represents the outcome of a sustained – if uneven – pattern of transatlantic economic cooperation, the initiative is yet to overcome significant differences between the two parties over the scope of the agreement. Hence, the realization of TTIP is far from assured and, even then, it is far from clear that either the agreement or the renewal of transatlantic economic cooperation more generally will prove to be pivotal in the wider emerging regime complex of global governance.

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