TTIP Movement and Procedural Injustice

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a free trade agreement being negotiated between the United States Department of Commerce and the European Commission. The movement against it (NoTTIP) gained momentum in 2014 in many European countries including the UK and is still alive today although it has widened its remit to include various other free trade agreements.

The movement at large has utilised the “Frame Amplification” alignment process in its framing of its grievances against TTIP. Via relatively informal on-line conversations and one conference on the continent, UK activists learnt that the “moral indignation about ..(the) state of affairs” (Klandermans, 1997 as cited in Van Stekenleburg 2010) was shared and strong amongst all who opposed TTIP.

There was consequently an unofficial acceptance that what collectively outraged us was the attack on our values and beliefs and so part of movement’s function was to “amplify” such values and belief. Each country did it in their own way and so it could be argued that we did share a master frame (Polletta 2004).

In the case of TTIP the master frame umbrelled our values about the most basic elements of democracy and transparency. It included also our “beliefs about the probability of change or the efficacy of collective action (Klandemans, 1983, 1984; Oberschall, 1980; Olson, 1965; and Piven and Cloward, 1977); and ….beliefs about the necessity and propriety of “standing up” (Fireman and Gamson, 1979; Oliver, 1984; Piven and Cloward, 1977)” (Snow 1986)

Procedural justice refers to the fairness of decision- making procedures and the relational aspects of the social process….. Tyler and Smith proposed that procedural justice might be a more powerful predictor of social movement participation than distributive justice, although they never tested this idea directly (Stekelenburg & Klandermans, 2010). In reference to the NoTTIP movement Tyler and Smith proposal applied!

There were many controversial elements about TTIP but the fact that it was being negotiated in unprecedented secrecy was unacceptable to many. Not only could journalists not view the text and report on it, but our elected MEPs in the EU could not view it properly either.

Furthermore the ratification of TTIP included the Investment State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism which was an abomination in terms of procedural justice. It was a proposed parallel legal framework, overseen by corporate lawyers, through which foreign multi national corporations (MNCs) could sue governments if governments passed laws that compromised their profits. Governments, civil led groups or domestic business could not however, in turn sue the MNCs if the MNCs broke the contract. ISDS would violate two key principles of the rule of law (equitable access to justice and judicial independence) and its proposal was enough to motivate relatively huge groups of people, more so in Germany and France than in the UK. It has been suggested that this is because both those countries have a more diverse media than the UK.

Trade Agreements were not considered news worthy by mainstream media in the UK until activists and NGOs made them so through a combination of spectacle activism and numerous reports. However their work is no match for the fundamental rejection apparent in much of main stream media to combat corporate power and in this case the contract to garner more power. The EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) which is also known as the Canadian TTIP is still being negotiated and campaigned against. Now that the UK has brexited, Germany and France will not be able to thwart free trade agreements such as TTIP from the UK, because make no mistake it is Germany and France who are holding up the pillars of democracy, not the UK’s representatives in the EU. Watch this Space.

References :

Stekelenburg, J. V., & Klandermans, B. (2010). The social psychology of protest. Sociopedia
Polletta, F. (1998). Contending Stories: Narrative in Social Movements. Qualitative Sociology, 21(4), 419–446.

Snow, D. A., Burke Rochford, E. J., Worden, S. K., & Benford, R. D. (1986). Frame Alignment Processes, Micrmobilization, and Movement Participation. American Sociological Review , 51 (4), 464 – 481.