Le Parlement européen face à la politisation du CETA : l’influence des campagnes de contestation menées par la société civile sur les positions parlementaires

Details

Supervisors

Delreux, Tom ; Beaudonnet, Laurie

Faculty

Faculté des sciences économiques, sociales, politiques et de communication

Degree label

Master [120] en études européennes, à finalité spécialisée: gouvernance et sociétés européennes

Abstract

enThe common commercial policy of the European Union is an exclusive competence that has evolved considerably over the course of the various EU treaties, covering more and more areas. Since the Lisbon Treaty, it has notably extended to the field of foreign direct investment protection, giving rise to so-called “new generation” free trade treaties, such as the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), negotiated with the United States but never concluded, and the CETA (Comprehensive economic and trade agreement), which provisionally entered into force with Canada in 2017. The negotiations of these two agreements were the subject of major protest movements, denouncing in particular a lack of environmental, social and health provisions, as well as a threat to state sovereignty and democracy due to the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism provided for in these agreements. Many authors subsequently observed a politicization of the trade and investment policy (Mancini, 2022; Roederer-Rynning, 2017; Young, 2017), generally conceived as a three-dimensional phenomenon involving an increase in salience, the polarization of opinion and the expansion of the number of actors involved towards a policy or reform (De Wilde, Leupold & Schmidtke, 2016; Dür, Hamilton & De Bièvre, 2023). Civil society organizations, as actors newly engaged in the issues surrounding European trade policy (Dür and De Bièvre, 2007), then play a crucial role in focusing their campaigns on certain aspects and arguments in order to mobilize public opinion on what is nonetheless a technical subject. In particular, the campaign against the CETA focused on the European Parliament as a representative institution with a newly acquired right of veto in common trade policy. Taking the politicization of the CETA as a case study, this research will aim to answer the following question: to what extent did civil society organizations, in their contestation of the CETA, influenced the position of the European Parliament during the negotiation process of the agreement? The method will be based on a qualitative study with a framing analysis of the arguments used by the civil society and their potential transposition into resolutions, amendments and questions tabled by European parliamentarians, enabling them to communicate their position on the negotiated agreement.