For much of the past two weeks, I have been taking in the sights, sounds, and tastes of the area around Frankfurt, Germany. It's been awesome. This is my second trip to Germany in the last few years, the previous trip being to Berlin. In fact, the photo of the Brandenburg Gate that forms the masthead of my Twitter page is from that trip. Germany regularly captures my attention because of its role in the postwar European Project, but has done so in recent years because of the prominent position it now awkwardly occupies in that Project.
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| On a light standard in Mainz, Germany |
The television in my hotel room has a surprising number of 24-hour news channels, including the English-language BBC and SkyNews. Yet, the language in which one watches doesn't matter, the news is all about the European Summit and the CETA-- the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the EU.
Regardless of the language in which I watch, it's easy to tell the news is bad.
A week ago, the tiny Belgian enclave of Wallonia (2.5 million people) spiked seven years worth of negotiations between the European Union (500 million people) and Canada by rejecting the terms of the CETA.
There's been a lot of this sort of rejection lately; the Greek debt crisis (which I've written about here a fair bit), to the near-miss of the 2014 Scottish Referendum, the economic nationalism of the U.S. presidential campaign, and, of course Brexit. There are days on which the drum-beat of bad news seems like the beginning of the end....
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| What a grumpy Canadian looks like |
It is now evident to me — evident to Canada — that the European Union is incapable of reaching an agreement, even with a country with European values such as Canada, even with a country as nice and as patient as Canada.Ouch!!! But she might be right about where the EU is these days. Indeed, there is talk among European trade experts that their internal approach to the CETA process has more or less destroyed Europe's capacity to negotiate as a block. Who is going to want to negotiated with 28 (for now at least) unruly members of the EU when any one of them, or even a small state within one (such as Wallonia), can scuttle the entire enterprise? What exactly is the point of the EU, then?
Such collective action problems are not unique to the EU, and in fact are a major problem for the United States in getting its own trade policy ducks in a row. In the United States, so-called Fast-Track Authority (now called Trade Promotion Authority) is designed to delegate to the U.S. President what is actually Congressional authority over trade. It empowers a single entity to bargain over trade and assures foreign partners they will not later have the deal re-written by the 535 members of the House and Senate.
I don't believe Wallonians can point to exactly what in the CETA they'd like re-written. Their worries about the influence of big, bad Canadian multinationals or agricultural interests are overblown-- Canada just isn't that big. I haven't looked at any exit polling from Wallonia, but I'd be willing to bet the rejection of CETA is about feeling disconnected from political decision-making (Brussels) and a certain alienation with respect to larger forces in global economics that have left some Wallonians behind-- it's a movie being played all over the planet these days.
More Brexit Blues
The problems here are not limited to CETA, however. Indeed, the problems of CETA loom ominously over the entire EU Summit. This was British Prime Minister Teresa May's first Summit sine the historic Brexit vote last June.
The machinations in Britain and other European capitals about what Brexit means, when it will happen, and what its terms will be are only slightly more clear than they were the morning after the referendum.
What is perfectly clear-- as the CETA mess suggests-- is that when the UK begins negotiating its economic arrangements with what remains of the EU, nothing about it is going to be easy.
Euro-Atlanticism On Hold?
The other bit of fallout from CETA is that, combined with the uncertainty over the terms and timing of Brexit, the proposed TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) will be put on indefinite hiatus. CETA was never really just about Canada and the EU. Looming large throughout the negotiations was the prospect of future talks between the EU and Washington. For Brussels, the precedents set in the CETA on a range of matters (investment, geographic indicators, etc) would, hopefully, carry over and establish base-lines for the TTIP. However, the TTIP is a political hot-potato that no one on either side of the Atlantic seems willing to pick up.
Many U.S. presidents, including Barack Obama, seem to find religion on trade once in office. Because her principles on trade policy are non-existent, I strongly suspect Hillary Clinton will eventually find religion too. However, I doubt it will be a powerful defense of liberalism that emanates from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in the next 4yrs. Candidate Clinton has voiced her opposition to Obama's signature trade initiative, the Trans Pacific Partnership. Mrs. Clinton will need to wiggle out of that one (not easy given the popularity of Obama) before going anywhere near TTIP. How, or whether, she succeeds will also depend on who controls Capitol Hill after November 8.
Who will pick up the torch in Europe? Very difficult Brexit talks loom. There's a pesky high-stakes constitutional referendum in Italy in early December that has yet to hit many radars, but looms large and could trigger a yet another EU crisis. Greece is hardly out of the woodwork. Who knows what Scotland will do in the context of Brexit? Migrant Crisis? I think Angela Merkel has her hands full.
Some Hope-y, Change-y Stuff
It's been said that you should never let a good crisis go to waste in terms of initiating bold reforms. I titled this post "Brexit, CETA and the beginning of the..." vaguely for a reason. It's quite easy these days to build a doom-and-gloom scenario that makes it feel like we are about to head over the cliff into 1930's-era economic and political nationalism and beyond. Indeed, the Washington Post recently ran a depressing series of photo-essays on the impact of borders and walls around the world. It began with the sober observation that "In 2015, work started on more new barriers around the world than at any other point in modern history. There are now 63 borders where walls or fences separate neighboring countries."
More difficult is to put forward a vision for how a lot of these challenges can be resolved. I am hopeful that in the very near term a constructive new case for greater liberalization and cooperation across the Atlantic and elsewhere can be built. In saying (via blog post) I was going to vote for Hillary Clinton this year, I complained that her agenda lacked a strong articulation of a hopeful agenda, no vision for what the United States could be in the years ahead.
I'd like to see that change. Part of Mrs. Clinton's agenda was about the importance of American leadership in the world, that she possessed a temperament and stability for the Oval Office that the nation needed (certainly relative to Donald Trump). My sincere hope is that President Clinton (45) will seize the opportunity to put forward a vision of Trans-Atlantic cooperation that includes TTIP, a re-affirmation of NATO, and tries to again hit the "reset button" with Russia, among other things.
More importantly, I would like to see a renewed emphasis on a battle of ideas, a more open debate over the merits of policy. In an age of "truthiness" in our politics, that will not be easy. Nor do I really see anyone who can carry the torch. Unfortunately, one of the better orators of our time, Barack Obama, is about to leave a post designed for this sort of thing.
My hope is that Mrs. Clinton can find a voice on these issues and in the process create a vision for her presidency that will make significant strides toward addressing the causes of the problems noted above. After all, as Winston Churchill once quipped, it is far better to jaw-jaw than war-war.
Here's hoping a new round of convincing arguments will soon begin....
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