[CTC] Five arguments against the self-defeating secrecy of the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Tue May 19 18:21:27 PDT 2015

http://blogs.ft.com/the-world/2015/05/five-arguments-against-the-self-defeating-secrecy-of-the-trans-pacific-partnership/ <http://blogs.ft.com/the-world/2015/05/five-arguments-against-the-self-defeating-secrecy-of-the-trans-pacific-partnership/>

Five arguments against the self-defeating secrecy of the Trans-Pacific Partnership

The Financial Times
By Alan Beattie
May 19, 2015

If you think that getting fast-track authority from Congress to negotiate trade agreements is hard <http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c231f440-f988-11e4-ae65-00144feab7de.html#axzz3aV8uaizP>, just wait for the deal that it is designed to pass.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) between the US, Japan and 10 other economies in Asia and Latin America has run into a barrage of criticism <http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/102d56f2-cdf2-11e4-8760-00144feab7de.html#axzz3VE3wtOpO>. Some of it is probably justified; some of it is not. The problem is that we don’t really know.

The governments involved, and particularly the US administration, have gone toextraordinary lengths <http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/secrecy-eroding-support-for-trade-pact-critics-say-117581.html> to keep the negotiating texts secret. Even senators and congressmen are only allowed to look at them in a secure location without taking away notes.

Most of the Washington trade establishment seems to think this secrecy is justifiable, an attitude I find baffling. Here are various arguments I have heard against publishing the negotiating texts, and why I think are mistaken.

1. You shouldn’t show your hand in a negotiation with other countries.

This would be a valid objection to publishing individual countries’ internal negotiating strategies in great detail, but not to releasing the draft negotiating texts already shared between the different governments. There are no secrets from each other in there: check out the detailed statements of each country’s current stance in the intellectual property (IP) rights chapter <https://wikileaks.org/tpp/static/pdf/Wikileaks-secret-TPP-treaty-IP-chapter.pdf> obtained by Wikileaks. It’s the public that are being kept in the dark. Who, or what, has been harmed by that text being leaked? Have the IP talks collapsed because it was published? No.

2. You don’t let the public into other negotiations e.g. the nuclear deal with Iran.

Not at all analogous. Nuclear weapons negotiations involve national security secrets about technology and deployment that can never be revealed lest terrorists and rogue states get hold of them. Senator Barbara Boxer put it well <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oT1O_4C430>: the TPP is a matter of commerce, not national security. Neither North Korea nor Isis is going to try to undermine the US by setting up a patent regime for pharmaceuticals copied and pasted from the TPP.

3. Interim texts aren’t published for other important negotiations.

Yes they are. Here is the draft text <http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/adp2/eng/01.pdf> for this year’s climate change conference <http://newsroom.unfccc.int/unfccc-newsroom/un-communicates-negotiating-text-for-climate-agreement-to-capitals/> in Paris (and I submit the future of the planet is more important than the US getting a 0.4% increment to GDP <http://www.iie.com/publications/pb/pb12-16.pdf> after ten years). Here is a draft text <https://www.wto.org/ENGLISH/tratop_e/agric_e/chair_texts08_e.htm> for the Doha round: Doha had a whole bunch of problems and collapsed, but I never heard anyone claim excessive transparency was one of them. And here is a draft text <http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2015/april/tradoc_153403.pdf> proposed by the EU in the EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations.

4. Don’t worry – we’ll see the agreed text at the end.

By which time it will be too late to amend it. The fast-track negotiating authority which president Barack Obama is trying to get from lawmakers – also known as Trade Promotion Authority – permits only an up-or-down vote in Congress on deals that the president brings for ratification. Resistance to TPA is clearly linked to the secrecy of the trade deals that it will be used to pass.

5. It’s not necessary because there won’t be any big surprises in the final texts.

So release them now.

More generally, trade agreements aren’t just a technical exercise or even a straightforward pursuit of national interest. They address issues on which domestic constituencies are often sharply divided. Secrecy retards discussion and undermines the legitimacy of the final outcome.

An example: in 2011-2012, there was a vigorous public debate in the US about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), aimed at clamping down on copyright violations and counterfeiting. The content industry (Hollywood and the music industry) were ranged against the internet platform lobby (Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia and so on). A bunch of campaigners and pressure groups chimed in, the White House added its views, and the bills were stopped. The whole process took a little over eight months. One side might not have liked the outcome, but they can’t complain they didn’t have their say.

By contrast, around the same time, there was a not dissimilar argument about the US’s negotiating position on copyright in TPP, conducted behind closed doors. It dragged on literally for years while the United States Trade Representative, America’s top trade negotiator, flailed about trying to get a coherent position, and academics and campaign groups were cut out of the conversation.

It may be annoying to have gales of populist rhetoric swirling around a highly technical debate, but hey, that’s democracy. Ultimately, this kind of control freakery is self-defeating. TPP might pass, and it might not. But given how it’s been managed, it doesn’t really deserve to. If it does, a deal forced through under this kind of hide-the-ball secrecy will make a nice bogeyman for all the perceived ills of globalisation in the future.

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