The deal between the US and the EU is destined to remove regulatory barriers and trigger economic growth in those regions, but simultaneously it might become the largest free trade bloc in the world.
Critics argue that it would deprive citizens of transparency and grab power from the 99% to put it in the hands of the 1% who control multi-national corporations. The big fear is also that the TTIP will undermine the existence of an institution as crucial as the World Trade Organization, which would create a rift between advanced countries, on the one hand, and rising powers, on the other.
John Hilary, the executive director of War on Want, has another concern.
The idea is that this is going to set the model for all the future trade and investment deals across the world. And that’s why it is being considered to be such an important deal, because it is not just about the EU-US relations, but it will be a template for everybody else. And the idea is that the TTIP really removes any barriers which block the maximization of profits by the big companies trading or investing across the Atlantic.
Pooling resources and free circulation of goods is no doubt a peaceful way forward, but it’s not without potential drawbacks. There’s a view that TTIP is a response to globalization, technological change, and the rise of emerging markets, most of all China. US trade chief Mike Froman announced in September that trade is one of the country’s most promising tools in revitalizing the post-World War II international economic order. He also called it probably the most consequential strategic project of our time. But there is an emerging force to set off, says Catherine Grant Makokera, head of the Economic Diplomacy Programme at the South African Institute of International Affairs.
"The BRICS has refocused … the attention of a country like the US on other parts of the world… Certainly, the BRICS most recently have made some big steps forward in terms of the nature of their cooperation. And I'm sure that the Americans have been watching that with interest."
There is another economic force located primarily in northern Eurasia, and it got into the game only recently, when the Eurasian Economic Union agreement, signed by the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, comes into force. The pact combines previous agreements reached between the three countries under the Customs Union and the Single Economic Space, and implies gradual integration of the three former Soviet countries' economies, to establish free trade, unbarred financial interaction and unhindered labor migration.
"The Eurasian Economic Union creates a single economic market of 183 million people and a gross domestic product of over 4 trillion dollars. Its combined territory is a hydrocarbon treasury, possessing a fifth of all global natural gas resources and 15 percent of all oil reserves."
How –or even if — this purely economic bloc will cooperate with another economic entity, created by the US-EU agreement – remains to be seen. But some analysts say it could give the world a glimpse of how the Soviet Union may have looked if it was reformed in a better manner, and revive the economies of a number of states that fell into disrepair in the 1990s.
