The Politicization of Legal Expertise in the Ttip Negotiation

In pursuing a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the European Union (EU) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Obama Administration aims to create economic growth while strengthening the Western bloc to contain the rising Chinese power and the regulatory challenges posed by the expansion of the Chinese markets. In entering into such a bilateral, rather than multilateral, negotiating framework, the U.S. and EU administrations are choosing an alternative route to the World Trade Organization (WTO) for international cooperation. Beyond the geopolitical implications of TTIP, the battle turf for its negotiation is embedded in a complex regulatory web of private and public governance mechanisms in which administrative legal experts and their ideological orientation play a large, and often unspoken, role. This article examines legal tools and ideological choices that administrative law experts have put forward to respond to the demands of civil society and politicians regarding the need for greater transparency and participation in trade negotiation. Although trade negotiations happen in secret, negotiators on both sides of the Atlantic have strategically used notions of transparency and participation in administrative law to advance their respective bargaining power and to gain more legitimacy toward the general public. One of the central goals of TTIP revolves primarily around deepening international regulatory cooperation (IRC); namely, eliminating inefficient and unnecessary incompatibilities created by differing administrative structures that burden industries and trade across the Atlantic. This notion was already present in President Obama’s Executive Order (EO) 13,609 issued in 2012, which aimed to promote IRC as a way to ensure that divergent regulatory approaches adopted between U.S. agencies and their foreign counterparts do not impair the