Trump’s Transatlantic Impaired Partnership
The two shores, and lands, of the North Atlantic – the Eastern and the Western ones – are subject to a movement where, metaphorically speaking, the economy tries to beat the geography, while politics seem to team up either with the first one or with the second. The name of the game is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – TTIP –, the famously hard-to-get deal between the US and EU, whose first official round of talks began in 2013, with the intention to bring about lower trade tariffs and to reduce regulatory barriers that make exchanges between the US and the EU more costly than they should. Geophysics literally distances America from Europe, the orogenesis of the Mid-Atlantic ridge pushing aside the tectonic plates where “the new world” and “the old continent” sit. The geopolitical spasms of the 20th century brought closer a post-war patronizing America and (part of) a Europe that was politically tired to continuously break and patch itself. The paradigm of American security and prosperity thought that in a spherical world we are all in a great neighbourhood. The European geo-cultural step-father became a crux-vicinity.
Yet bygone times are a lab of memories. Post-Cold War Pax Americana has not coincided with a romantic dusk of history, readable as a battle between the good and the evil. America’s security and that of the civilization dome it (re)built started to be contested by hybrid enemies who escaped from their own failed geopolitical experiments, while its geo-economic supremacy became eroded by the mistakes of its pseudo-liberal capitalist project. With Russia being forever Tsarist in representation, with an anti-West radicalized Muslim space, with China taking both impetuous and imprudent measures in its endeavour of making more than one billion people taste the prosperity, today the United States needs reinforced relational resorts, and on duty for such adventures is the eternal ally, Europe (also via TTIP). The European Union has, in turn, a synthesis of disturbances, both endogenous (welfare, debt, currency) and exogenous (migration accommodation, terrorist infiltration, energetic dependency). The initial romance of bonding leaves room for the anxiety of bondage, by techno(-bureau)crats, politically correct gurus and other money and mind choppers.
Nearly one century and three quarters ago, C.F. Bastiat wrote, in his Economic Sophisms, an article called Reciprocity, where he was challenging, with irony, the twisted understanding of trade between nations in his era, bringing into discussion two cities – Stulta and Puera (comic language for Latinists). A beautiful road was built between these towns to facilitate bilateral trade, along with a lot of obstacles, not to… facilitate it too much. The situation got to the point where trade completely stopped between the two cities, the only way to unblock it being for each town to ensure that there exists a carefully weighted and proportioned gesture from its counterpart. The idea was not to allow more goods to come in than those that were going out. After long negotiations, the verdict had been given: it was much better to maintain those obstacles than to create an imbalance. The philosophy of sacrificing prosperity in the name of reciprocity is alive. The whole architecture of the multilateral trade system multiplies this silly situation: the “nation” pays the salaries of its negotiators/agents who grant them in exchange fairly greater import prices.
The sloth-moving TTIP represents an agreement to mutually relax US-EU trade, yet far from free-trade. By the way: just researching the difference between free trade and free trade agreement, it seems that it lies only in the inclusion of the word… agreement. Yet the difference is significantly deeper than just the number of words; actually, the idea of free trade involves an agreement, so the second expression “reinforces” the first one to the limit of redundancy. But, in the logic of the second expression, the “agreement” is not between the parties agreeing to the exchange, but between third parties who govern the jurisdictions. Dixit President Trump in his trade ars politica for dummies: “[W]e are absolutely going to keep trading. I am not an isolationist. And they probably think I am. I’m not at all. I’m a free trader. I want free trade, but it’s got to be fair trade. It’s got to be good deals for the United States.” The stake becomes a perfect reciprocity of (non)tariff adjustments, with competitive/comparative advantages politically “corrected” outside, despite and against the real free market and free trade – the lost Atlantis between Stulta and Puera.
