Traditional trade negotiations centre on exchanges of market access: one jurisdiction offers improved access to its own market in some areas in exchange for greater access to the other jurisdiction’s market in others. As discussed in Chapter 3, such reciprocal negotiations have both domestic and international political implications. Domestically, it is suggested that the primary contestation should be between export-oriented firms (and their workers), which support domestic liberalization affecting others in order to secure greater foreign market access for themselves, and import-competing firms (and their workers), which want to avoid increased competition from imports. Internationally, reciprocity suggests that firms in the same industry should be rivals – improved access for one jurisdiction’s firms means increased competition for the other jurisdiction’s firms in the same industry. The business politics of TTIP looked nothing like this.

There was strikingly little opposition to TTIP from business interests on either side of the Atlantic. Thus, domestic contestation among firms was unusually muted. Moreover, European and American manufacturing, services and peak associations cooperated extensively, adopting common positions on a range of issues. Such extensive transnational cooperation is unique to TTIP.

This chapter argues that the prevalence of transatlantic business alliances in TTIP was due to two reinforcing factors. First, extensive cross-investment means that the same firms are established in both markets and are prominent in the associations in both jurisdictions. As a result, they are not dealing with rivals, but with themselves. Second, for manufacturers and service providers, the main aim of the TTIP negotiations was to enhance their effi ciency by eliminating nuisance tariffs and mitigating the adverse trade effects of regulatory differences. Such effi ciency gains do not have the same distributional implications as market access: all parties expect to gain, albeit not necessarily equally, rather than some gaining at the expense of others. These conditions do not exist in transatlantic agricultural trade and are largely absent from other preferential trade negotiations. The extensive business support for TTIP encouraged expectations that the negotiations would be relatively easy and swift.