CETA, TTIP, and TISA : new trends in international economic law

Abstract

These new orientations in international economic law and the EU’s external economic relations are analysed in the following chapters of this volume. This chapter discusses mega-regional free trade agreements and other plurilateral trade agreements as ‘new trends’ in international economic law (IEL). CETA, TTIP, and TiSA use ‘legal fragmentation’, ‘regulatory competition’, and ‘methodological pluralism’ as instruments for WTO-consistent, piecemeal reforms of the world trading and investment system. The competing conceptions of IEL result from diverse conceptions of ‘principles of justice’ and diverse ‘legal methods’ for further developing IEL. CETA, TTIP, and TiSA are likely to enhance productivity, competition, and consumer welfare. By disregarding the EU’s ‘cosmopolitan foreign policy mandate’ to act as ‘protector of citizens’, CETA and TTIP risk undermining fundamental rights, democratic accountability, and judicial remedies in the EU. The less the WTO succeeds in liberalizing world trade and regulating ‘market failures’, the more important becomes the policy option of plurilateral agreements, which could ultimately replace ‘WTO 1994’ by a new ‘WTO 2020’ based on a ‘merger’ of mega-regional and plurilateral agreements.