The
man who killed TTIP
Free
trade is a political nonstarter in Europe. Thilo Bode is fighting to
keep it that way.
By HANS VON DER
BURCHARD 7/14/16, 11:00 AM CET
BERLIN — When the
European Union and the United States announced they would seek to
strike a free-trade pact three years ago, the path to a deal looked
straightforward.
Today, that
agreement, named the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
or TTIP, is politically dead. Protectionist winds are blowing
stronger than in a long time on both sides of the Atlantic — the
product, in part, of a coordinated campaign by a panoply of
organizations skeptical of globalization. So while politicians in the
U.S. and Europe voice their support for the deal, few are willing to
brave the return fire over TTIP and other free-trade initiatives.
If there is one
person most responsible for this reversal, it’s Thilo Bode.
Gray-haired and grandfatherly, Bode directs a consumer advocacy
organization called Foodwatch from an old factory complex in central
Berlin that houses mostly startups. He is an unlikely insurgent, more
given to lectures about the minutiae of the regulatory process than
tub-thumping speeches on the evils of international capitalism.
Since
Bode, who is 69, entered the fray in 2014, support for TTIP in
Germany has plummeted from 55 down to 17 percent.
The mild-mannered
former development worker gave a face and a voice to a broad-based
movement that has wrong-footed German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left
EU leaders with their mouths agape, and derailed what would have been
the largest free-trade deal in history. He did so by stirring up and,
on current evidence, winning an argument over TTIP that Europe’s
political establishment only realized had started when it was
virtually over.
Since Bode, who is
69, entered the fray in 2014, support for TTIP in Germany has
plummeted from 55 down to 17 percent, putting pressure on the most
powerful country in the EU to drop its support. Major German trade
unions, which once supported an agreement, now oppose it.
Bode’s book “The
Free Trade Lie,” (in German, Die Freihandelslüge) is a
best-seller, having sold 70,000 copies in the past 16 months. An
anti-TTIP rally in Berlin in October 2015, which Bode helped
organize, drew more than 150,000 people, making it the country’s
largest political demonstration since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
TTIP — an acronym
that resonates with few American voters but is part of the daily
political conversation in Germany — is now a wedge issue ahead of
federal elections next year. Merkel continues to defend the deal, but
Sigmar Gabriel, the economy minister and leader of the center-left
Social Democrat Party (SPD) whom she will most likely face off
against, is now attacking it. In May, he described Merkel’s desire
to conclude negotiations by the end of the year as “wrong.”
Last week, leading
SPD politicians called the deal “dead,” and Gabriel elaborated on
the possibility of aborting the talks. “My impression is that the
negotiations aren’t moving forward, and if they fail to make
progress, then there’s a point where we need to say this openly,”
the minister said.
Negotiators gathered
in Brussels last week for the 14th round of TTIP negotiations, but
made only slow progress. Barring a radical change the chances for a
concluded deal this year, if ever, are almost nonexistent. Thanks to
Bode and his movement, the seemingly inevitable has become impossibly
stalled. “Germany and the European Union concluded trade and
investment deals for decades, without causing much public turmoil,”
said Wigan Salazar, chief of MSL in Berlin, one of Germany’s
leading public relations agencies. “All of a sudden, this has
become very toxic.”
Bode entered the
world of advocacy through the boardroom. The native Bavarian spent
the first decades of his career working in Africa and China for the
Reconstruction Credit Institute, a development bank owned by the
German government. He was then employed for three years at a
mid-sized metal processing firm, doing consulting and strategic
management, before finding a job as director of Greenpeace’s German
branch in 1989.
At first, Bode was
less interested in activism than in bringing order to the group,
which was struggling with financial and organizational issues. “Bode
professionalized the organization’s structures and set the founding
stone for today’s success,” said Heinrich Strößenreuther, a
Berlin-based activist who worked with him at the time. “But he was
also able to learn from Greenpeace: How to run a campaign, how to get
a message out.”
By 1995, Bode was
spearheading the organization’s most spectacular campaigns. In
April of that year, together with other activists, he boarded Shell’s
Brent Spar oil rig in protest against plans to drill in the North
Sea. For Bode, it was a watershed moment. “That campaign went
completely out of control,” he said.
“We created so
much public attention that even the then-[German] Chancellor Helmut
Kohl urged the British premier to stop Shell’s plans. In the end,
they had to back down.”
Before Bode picked
up the banner, the campaign against TTIP had gained little traction
with the German or European public.
Later that year,
Bode traveled on a tourist visa with other activists to Beijing’s
Tiananmen Square to unfurl a banner in protest against China’s
ongoing nuclear tests. The small group was quickly surrounded by
police, and Bode spent several days in Chinese custody. “Many
people inside Greenpeace were shaking their heads” in admiration,
Strößenreuther said. “You need to have balls to do that kind of
stuff.”
In 2001, after a
stint as director of Greenpeace International, Bode left the group to
found Foodwatch. He quickly found no shortage of high-profile targets
— mad cow disease, high counts of dioxin in eggs, horsemeat in
frozen lasagna.
His opponents
accused him of scaremongering. Bode “lives from scandalization,”
Germany’s then-Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner said in
2010.
“That’s his
business model, to gain as many members and as much funding as
possible.” But as food scares dominated the headlines, Bode quickly
became a public figure, giving frequent interviews and becoming a
regular on television talk shows.
It was not until he
joined the fight against TTIP that he became something of a household
name.
All the ingredients
Before Bode picked
up the banner, the campaign against TTIP had gained little traction
with the German or European public. When the start of negotiations
was announced, U.S. President Barack Obama heralded a potential deal
as a “groundbreaking partnership.” Then-European Commission
President José Manuel Barroso spoke of “real strategic
importance.” Merkel quickly became one of its strongest advocates,
arguing that free trade between the world’s two largest economies
would create thousands of jobs, set new standards for global trade,
and be of particular benefit to Germany, where exports account for
every fourth job.
Opponents of the
deal had concentrated their fire on fears that hormone-treated beef
and chlorine-treated chicken would flood the European market. It was
an alarming narrative, but one that threatened to backfire. Officials
in Brussels and Washington, as well as outside experts, dismissed the
fears, leaving the campaigners at risk of looking uninformed and
sensationalist.
Bode saw his opening
when Maritta Strasser, an activist with the advocacy group Campact,
confronted then-EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht during a panel
discussion with German Economy Minister Gabriel and U.S. Trade
Representative Michael Froman. From the back of the audience,
Strasser announced that her group had collected 470,000 signatures
against the trade deal, and raised her concerns about Europe’s high
consumer protection standards getting undermined.
Bode presents
himself as cautious, conservative, a careful watchdog reasonably
concerned about encroachments on the German way of life.
The former
commissioner recently told POLITICO that he had meant to tell
Strasser that, in his opinion, half a million Germans should not be a
determinant factor in a deal that concerned the entire EU. But the
way he phrased it was clumsy, seemingly dismissive of German public
opinion.
Bode recognized the
ingredients for an explosive campaign: a mammoth, mysterious trade
deal, an increasingly unsettled public, and distant, seemingly
unfeeling officials uninterested in addressing their concerns. “I
instantly had the feeling: This is a big thing,” he said in an
interview at his office. What he would need to do was rip into “the
arrogance” of politicians who ignore the concerns of ordinary
people.
The technicalities
The secret of Bode’s
appeal lies in his delivery. While other activists might highlight
their anti-American credentials or rail against free trade, Bode
presents himself as cautious, conservative, a careful watchdog
reasonably concerned about encroachments on the German way of life.
“He’s clever in framing his arguments,” said Jacob Schrot,
founder of the Young Transatlantic Initiative, who frequently faced
off against Bode in panel discussions. “He knows what triggers to
pull in order to win the hearts of the audience.”
Rather than stir up
fears about chlorinated chicken, Bode steered the message in a
different direction, highlighting the long-term, systematic threat to
Germany’s strong regulatory tradition. “The risk of food or
consumer protection standards getting directly lowered is rather
unrealistic,” Bode said. “The real concern with TTIP is that
necessary improvements to these standards will be delayed, watered
down or completely blocked.”
Bode is careful to
emphasize that his resistance to TTIP is not rooted in a blanket
opposition to international trade. “Supplying the world with food
would not be possible without it,” he said. “But these agreements
are something completely new. They serve big business instead of
ordinary people, and they undermine our democratic standards.”
“He succeeded
indeed in giving the protest movement a veneer of seriousness,”
said Friedrich Merz, a senior politician from Merkel’s Christian
Democratic Union, and a strong advocate of the trade deal.
Bode’s critics say
that he exaggerates or even twists the facts.
To argue his point,
Bode refers to a chapter in the draft trade pact that aims to
increase cooperation between regulatory agencies on both sides of the
Atlantic by granting stakeholders, including companies, the
possibility to comment on new legislation at an early stage. This
“reinforces the tendency of lobbyists to influence the creation of
new regulations,” said Bode.
Bode’s other,
remarkably dry talking points include a provision in the treaty that
would allow investors and companies to sue governments that introduce
environmental or public health standards that damage their bottom
line, as well as concerns that the agreement would undermine Europe’s
“precautionary principle,” which allows regulators to take action
against potentially harmful products even as the science is still
being debated.
“The threshold for
introducing tough laws or regulations will be higher,” the
Foodwatch-chief said, who also managed to mobilize people and
increase the reach of his campaign thanks to emails and
online-petitions.
Emotional debate
Bode’s critics say
that he exaggerates or even twists the facts. “Thilo Bode is very
good in issuing sharp warnings, while politicians or representatives
from the industry are often sluggish in their response,” said
Joachim Pfeiffer, a German lawmaker from Merkel’s party. “There’s
a complete imbalance in the public perception about what TTIP
actually is.”
Gosia Binczyk, a
trade consultant at the European Commission’s representation in
Berlin, accuses Bode of stirring up fears about the more
controversial aspects of the agreement. “In Germany, we did not
have a debate on trade for many years,” she said. “Now all the
particularities of this debate emerge at once and are being discussed
very emotionally.”
Berend Diekmann,
from the external economic policy division at the German ministry of
economic affairs, dismisses Bode’s claim that transatlantic
regulatory cooperation will straightjacket consumer standards. “What
we are trying to achieve is that our regulators sit together more
often to see where they can find commonalities,” he said. “We can
challenge speculation with facts, but whether that would have an
effect is another question.”
One of Bode’s
principal arguments was undermined in December, when a legal
challenge by the tobacco giant Philip Morris against an Australian
law mandating gruesome health warnings on cigarette packets was
dismissed by an arbitral tribunal.
The case had been
one of Bode’s prime exhibits of the threat posed by TTIP, and its
collapse has spurred his critics to redouble their accusations of
scaremongering. “The fact that he’s speaking of hypothetical
scenarios … demonstrates that he can’t find anything in the texts
to prove his point,” said Friedrich Merz, a former MEP and former
member of the Bundestag.
In response, Bode
doubled down, commissioning a legal study that argues that the
fundamental principles of the EU will be undermined by the trade
deal. Bode raised his concerns about a “regulatory freeze” in
letters to Germany’s economic, justice and consumer protection
ministers. And when they answered, with several pages of explanation
of how the European Union and Germany will preserve democratic rights
and protect consumer standards, he accused them of deliberately
distorting the truth.
“I can’t think
of any campaign in which I was lied to so much,” he said. “That’s
what mobilizing people to go on the streets and demonstrate. They
have the feeling that they are not being told the whole story.”
The domino principle
Recently, Bode came
a step closer to claiming his first scalp. Since the beginning of the
year, he has expanded his campaign geographically and substantially,
opening a new office in France — where skepticism over TTIP is
mounting — and shifting his focus from the negotiations with the
U.S. to the smaller but already completed EU-Canada deal, the
Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. “If CETA [is
successful], then TTIP will follow,” he said. His domino logic
works the other way as well: If he can bring down one deal, he can
also wreck the other.
Bode’s efforts
were instrumental in creating the public pressure that caused the EU
to drop plans to ratify the deal without involving national
parliaments. The decision, taken by the European Commission, could
prove to be a mortal blow to CETA, subjecting the treaty’s every
deal to the approval of 38 national and regional legislative bodies.
It also sets a precedent for TTIP and other future trade deals,
potentially subjecting them to the same legislative bottleneck.
The Commission,
however, wants to apply the deal provisionally, even before all
national parliaments get to vote on it, a decision Bode calls “a
slap in the face of democracy.” However, he admits that the
decision might not be too bad news for the treaty’s opponents, if
they can use it to lambast the deal and its backers as undemocratic.
“The secret of a good campaign is that the opposite side has to
make such mistakes.”
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