Australia, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil: Suddenly the EU is again negotiating trade agreements with nothing but states. It seemed that their time had long since run out. What is the reason for the miraculous return?
From
Björn Finke and Claus Hulverscheidt
It had been nerve-wracking, often cold, frustrating, and sometimes dangerous. But in 2016, after a decade of demonstrations and sit-ins, protests by tens of thousands of globalization critics against free trade agreements in general and the European-American TTIP agreement in particular finally seemed to be paying off. The talks with the USA had “de facto failed,” declared the then Federal Economics Minister Sigmar Gabriel, and the Institute for Financial Services in Hamburg even stated: “The time of free trade agreements is over.”