The political economy of technical market access: the case of TAFTA.

Summary The subject of this thesis is The Political Economy of Technical Market Access: The Case of TAFTA. It is structured in two main parts. Comprising Chapters One through Three, Part One illustrates the importance and contradictions of technical market access in contemporary international trade. Chapter One traces the emergence of the concept of deep integration from the perspective of economic theory and trade policy, and analyzes it as a contemporary extension of free trade. Chapter Two illustrates the special place of technical infrastructure in the context of deep integration: Technical standards and regulations have become a central topic as they condition access to foreign markets and as such contain considerable potential for increasing trade flows, while at the same time constituting an institutionalized pre-market arena in which private and public actors, often located at different spatial scales, compete to secure competitive advantages. Chapter three proposes three theoretical approaches to understanding the formation of an international technical infrastructure. Part Two analyzes attempts to form a transatlantic technical infrastructure (between the European Union and the United States) since 1990. Chapter four traces the history of repeated failures of this project between 1990 and 2012 and highlights the contradiction between a shared desire for liberalization and disagreement over the form of this liberalization. Chapter Five offers an empirical analysis of the technical negotiations under the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TAFTA). It shows that each party attempted to extend its own technical infrastructure, and the inherent competitive advantages, across the Atlantic, making compromise impossible.