Although European public opposition to TTIP has attracted the lion’s share of media and academic attention, the challenges of intra- and intergovernmental coordination, particularly in the US, contributed significantly to the limited progress of the TTIP negotiations prior to the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election. The challenges of coordination were particularly intense in the TTIP negotiations because of their focus on “behind-the-border” measures. The emphasis on regulatory cooperation required, at the very least, the engagement of regulators and sometimes state and local governments in the US and member-state and subnational governments in the EU. Addressing public procurement and subsidies crucially engaged subcentral governments. At the very least, the breadth of the agenda increased the number of actors that needed to be involved in the negotiations. The number and diversity of the governmental actors affected by the TTIP negotiations, therefore, presented substantial coordination problems.

These coordination problems were more acute in the US than in the EU. US regulators are more independent of central authority than their European counterparts, and US states are subject to fewer disciplines regarding government procurement and state aids than are EU member states. These institutional features impeded the US’s ability to make concessions sought by the EU. At the ratification stage, however, the EU’s multilevel polity asserts itself with a vengeance. TTIP would have had to be ratified by the EU as a mixed agreement, which would mean that European national and subnational legislatures would have to give their assent to it, in addition to the Council and the European Parliament (see Chapter 1). There would, thus, have been many veto players in the EU, which had the effect of amplifying the political implications of the popular opposition discussed in Chapter 5.

This chapter begins by describing how the ways that the EU and the US make regulatory policy mean that the US had greater horizontal coordination problems and it identifies how those problems have aff ected the TTIP negotiations. It then explores the vertical coordination problems experienced in the US and the EU, including a discussion of the likely ratification process in the EU and how that heightened the policy significance of popular opposition.