Drivers of Asymmetrical Bilateralism/Interregionalism: The TPP and TTIP in Comparative Perspective

Not unrelated to the ongoing global financial crisis there has been a rapid acceleration in the negotiating of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) both in Asia and the Pacific and between the European Union and other international partners. In July 2013 Japan finally joined the negotiations for a United States-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), while early in the same month the first session of negotiations for a European PTA with the US, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), were held in Washington DC. This chapter brings together the literature on PTAs as well as that on the economy-security nexus in Asia with the literature on the nature of the EU as a global actor to contextualize and analyze the drivers toward the TPP and TTIP. This chapter argues that the experience of the TPP and the TTIP negotiating processes to date suggests that the drivers of these particular expressions of interregional relations involve two additional elements above those pertaining to regional integration. These are shared hegemonic efforts to impose far-reaching standards and a concomitant upturning of the economic-security nexus.