From TTIP to coronavirus: what happened to EU trade policy campaigning?

The EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) talks sparked considerable scholarly interest in the politicisation of EU trade policy. Commentators have been particularly interested in the mobilisation of European civil society activists and their subsequent influence on the talks. With TTIP ‘in the freezer’ since 2016 this paper asks what has happened to EU civil society activism? In doing so, it focuses on what might be called a ‘trough’ in civil society activism. Where most preceding literature has focused on the ‘peaks’ and successes of civil society activism, this paper seeks to account for what happens between the big campaigns. It argues that rather than just represent fallow periods, these troughs are important periods for the construction of collective action frames that drive and sustain mobilisation at ‘peak’ times – with the post-TTIP period offering both challenges and opportunities. The paper begins by documenting the episodic nature of campaigning on EU trade policy since the late 1990s – concentrated around specific trade negotiations such as TTIP or the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) – and the key role of the Seattle-to-Brussels network therein (S2B). It then turns to examine the impact of Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic on S2B and other European civil society groups campaigning on trade. Brexit largely represents a challenge in two senses. Firstly, it forces such groups to differentiate their message from that of economic populists. Secondly, while in the past S2B and other groups have relied on collective action frames that stress their Europeanness, such framings have potentially become more problematic for UK-based groups previously at the heart of European-based campaigning on trade. The coronavirus crisis, in contrast, has potentially furnished fertile discursive ground for trade policy campaigners, who are accustomed to using online tools. That said, we have yet to see a significant campaign take off against recent EU trade and investment policy, such as the EU-Mercosur trade agreement.