9 - The Negotiating Capital of Trade Experts: Transparency in EU-Asian Free Trade Agreements

Summary

While witnessing the dismantling of a rule-based multilateral trading system, trade negotiators and diplomats in the US and the EU have revamped trade liberalisation through free trade agreements (FTAs). The failed TPP, TTIP, the renegotiation of NAFTA, and the rise of the Pacific Alliance in Latin America have put trade policy under scrutiny by media and civil society. As a result, trade negotiators have acquired new legal expertise in administrative and investment law to justify the need for innovative FTAs. As part of their limited negotiating capital, trade negotiators and diplomats have deployed neutral concepts of transparency and efficiency to justify the incorporation of domestic preferences. An analysis of the EU’s four Asian FTA transparency commitments offers insights into how national transparency mandates, together with geopolitical realities of international trade regimes, constitute the bargaining power of trade negotiators. The politicisation of legal expertise and trade negotiator’s negotiating capital creates a set of constraints and agency that allows for wiggle room in articulating, bargaining, and drafting what appears as neutral transparency provisions in FTAs.