8 ms·

What really bothers me, as citizen of an european country, why is it possible to have secret deals? If I don't know about such deals how can I call my represent

• sehr 10y ago
  The full text is going to be released. I've heard most trade deals are negotiated this way, but I don't know how true that is.
  • erhardm 10y ago
    "... Upon the insistence of the US, the documents are not transmitted any more as electronic or even printed documents.[5] They are only made available [to authorised readers] in secure rooms at the European Commission HQ in Brussels, in a number of US embassies,[5] and at the offices of member states' trade ministries.[61] In all these secured rooms phones or other types of scanning device are forbidden.[5] Blank sheets of paper, marked with the reader's names, are provided on which visitors can jot down their notes.[61]..."[0] How can my representative be really productive in analyzing such a deal? Why all the barriers to understand the document? I didn't find out the time it's supposedly be public for debate, but if you're doing a deal for the people, you want people to negotiate, not just accept the deal as it is, which, as history taught us, it will be a really tight timeframe for debate and it's approved few days before a major holiday when people are distracted. Our representatives must have our [all citizens] best interest at heart. I don't see how this is in our best interest. And I didn't event talked about the deal itself, only the procedure which seems flawed. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investment_Partnership#Confidentiality_measures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Invest...
    • the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
      > I didn't find out the time it's supposedly be public for debate, but if you're doing a deal for the people, you want people to negotiate, not just accept the deal as it is, which, as history taught us, it will be a really tight timeframe for debate and it's approved few days before a major holiday when people are distracted. CETA was public for more than two years before it went for signing. Naturally nobody cared until the last 6 months.
    • evgen 10y ago
      That would be because your representative is not a negotiator. They get to approve or reject the deal once it is done, but "people" do not get involved in the negotiation because "people" have a lot of parochial interests and are, as history has taught us, quite ignorant. Sorry if this bothers you, but it is how trade deals have always been done and is how they will always be conducted going forward.
      • Scarblac 10y ago
        But the flip side is surely that the chance that the whole deal is overthrown by the time legislators finally get to see it becomes a lot bigger. I think they will not be done this way going forward, because these deals took ten years of negotations, and now they fail. It doesn't work anymore.
        • evgen 10y ago
          There is always the possibility of a deal not getting approved, but no trade deal would ever be negotiated in public. The problem with such public negotiation is that instead of a single deal where a country can decide to sacrifice industry X in favor of industry Y you get astroturfing and publicity campaigns from both industry X and industry Y seeking to gain favor in the negotiations. A pre-negotiated package may be a bitter pill to swallow for some, but the alternatives are non-starters; no one is going to bother to negotiate a deal with another country that tries this sort of public horse-trading so asking for the deal to be done in public is no different than simply asking for no deal in the first place.
  • raphman_ 10y ago
    Here is a nice explanation of the reasons for secrecy: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-trade-agreements-like-the-Trans-Pacific-Partnership-negotiated-in-secret https://www.quora.com/Why-are-trade-agreements-like-the-Tran... tl;dr: two reasons: if each minor step in the negotiations is made public, lobbyists and NGOs will constantly bug the negotiators. Furthermore, if one side publicly states which lines it will never cross in the negotiations, it loses leverage because the opposite side now knows on which points they can expect less resistance, and will use this knowledge as a tactical advantage.
    • fnj 10y ago
      Yeah, due process sure is a drag, isn't it.
      • SturgeonsLaw 10y ago
        We wouldn't want to bug those poor negotiators while they whittle away what's left of our democracy
        • yoplait_ 10y ago
          These deals take years to negotiate. It's just a matter of practicality. Democracy can always say no to deals if it wants to (as is happening here).
          • acqq 10y ago
            That the TTIP-like deals take years is not by accident, but by design: the nasty stuff is to be included in one big package and obscured, to be accepted "by the democracy" only because it's a part of the whole "and look, there's some pork there too." Otherwise the smaller deals, which would actually be in the clear interest of both sides would happen much more often. As the user walterbell posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12569891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12569891 : 5-min video on the major trade agreements and ISDS, https://youtube.com/watch?v=M4-mlGRPmkU https://youtube.com/watch?v=M4-mlGRPmkU
  • the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
    Why would it not be released? CETA has been public for two years now. No reason to assume different about other EU trade agreements.
    • sehr 10y ago
      I'm sure it will be released. I meant I don't know if it's true that most trade deals are negotiated in secrecy, sorry.
• cperciva 10y ago
  There are no secret trade deals. What there are is closed-door trade negotiations, because it's impossible to get anything done if every time you open your mouth you have street protests from the industries you're considering removing protectionist measures from.
  • marcoperaza 10y ago
    This, and it allows the negotiating countries to save face when they make compromises. All real diplomacy is done in private for this reason.
    • pluma 10y ago
      By the time elected representatives get to vote on the deal, the decision boils down to "completely reject it" or "accept it as-is and hope that maybe some of the concerns will be noticed and adjustments will be made". And considering how politics work there's a huge incentive not to make the entire deal fail that far into the process.
      • marcoperaza 10y ago
        In the US, that's the intended design. The President negotiates treaties and the Senate ratifies them in an up or down vote.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • joelthelion 10y ago
    If negotiations are completely secret, by the time the deal is ready it's too late to debate on the large orientations of the deal. Sorry but a large treaty like this cannot be completely negotiated completely behind closed doors. Negotiators need to deal with it.
    • dash2 10y ago
      One way to solve that would be to have a period in which politicians had to justify their plans, including the kinds of trade deals they would negotiate, to the electorate. Then we could all vote for the politician we preferred. We could call it an "election campaign".
• DominikR 10y ago
  A trade deal has to be negotiated, and your position as a negotiator improves when you and the other side know that you can follow through on any commitment you make. Therefore it follows that anyone who can negotiate from a position of secrecy or absolute power (dictatorship) is in a better position to achieve his goals during a negotiation. You might laugh at this but I believe this is exactly how the EU commission thinks about this. Maybe they will try later again in a more dictatorial manner since secrecy has failed, who knows. The other extreme would be that you negotiate from a position where you are constantly attacked by NGOs and your own people, which certainly doesn't help with creating trust that you can follow through on anything you sign. You can certainly place your signature on a document but it means nothing because you can't execute. This was actually a problem during the Cold War crisis between JFK and the Soviet leaders. The Soviets were hard to convince that JFK could follow through because he was so heavily opposed by his senior military staff. They actually believed that there was a real possibility that JFK would be disposed by a military coup so they thought a war between the Soviet Union and the US was imminent and acted accordingly.
  • Silhouette 10y ago
    You can certainly place your signature on a document but it means nothing because you can't execute. But how is this any different from signing a deal that you've happily made in secret, only to find that the people you claimed to represent won't honour that deal because something in it was unacceptable to them and rejecting it in its entirety is the only possible action you've left them that doesn't accept the unacceptable element?
    • DominikR 10y ago
      Well as I see it there are only two possibilities: a) They let their people vote on it before ratifying the finalised treaty (maybe let them even vote multiple times until the result is right, the EU likes doing that) b) They know for some reason or another that they will be able to enact it (they control media, the courts and the men with guns which definitely helps) How is it any different? Well both parties start out a negotiation not knowing what the other sides limits are in certain areas, having society not interfere allows you to not give away this information to the other side. If the negotiators are acting in the interest of their own people then you could assume that they will know quite well how far they can go. So hopefully the result of such a negotiation will be a treaty that is acceptable to your population and beneficial in the way you wanted it to be. My problem is not that there are secret negotiations, but instead that it is an immense uphill battle against mainstream media and politicians to get them not to ratify a treaty they have negotiated. In most cases they do not allow us to vote on it, and the media acts as if they are directly controlled by politicians. And if they let us vote they'll repeat it indefinitely until they get the result they want as I wrote before. To me the EU acts like a dictatorship that monitors it's populations closely and responds (only where absolutely necessary and often with lies - see their lies that there definitely wont be an EU army before the Brexit vote) to ensure that they wont revolt. But they certainly have their goals and they try to bring them about no matter what. You cannot vote if you want to achieve this goal, they wont even tell you what their goal or vision exactly entails. (except for some utopian phantasy nonsense, but they've dialled down on that since it is obvious that no one buys it anymore)
• atmosx 10y ago
  > What really bothers me, as citizen of an european country, why is it possible to have secret deals? Indeed. That alone, makes me not want to even take a look at the text and dismiss it right away as negative for the vast amounts of the population.
  • TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Imagine building a website for a client, and having them hover around you all the time, 24/7, looking at your screen and going: - Oh, why did you put that button in here? What do you mean "temporary"? - Why are you wasting time browsing that "documentation" site instead of writing code? - What is this "class" thing? We're egalitarian company! - Is this Ruby? Everyone knows websites are best done in PHP! Usually you'd like to have a chance to at least finish a basic prototype in peace, before gathering customer feedback.
    • enraged_camel 10y ago
      Yeah but your client also knows that the features you develop won't actively fuck them over. Besides, the public didn't find out the TTIP details as it was a "prototype", but more like a "release candidate."
    • mickronome 10y ago
      But this is not about a basic prototype, as the deal was/is only supposed to be made public in it's final form - and then voted upon. It's more like the heads of two partially rival companies decide they need to develop a new product, one ostensibly important enough that the companies future depend on it, or the rivals would not have a reason to do it. Enormous resources are poured into the project while stock owners, employees and nost of the board are kept in the dark. After a long time which have much contributed to the sense of urgency being much higher the board and stock owners get to vote. There will likely be a strong tendency to ratify such a plan no matter the quality, not only because of sunk cost fallacy, but also in the sense of urgency and importance the construction of the process conveys. No stock owners - or board - in their right minds should ever allow such a project to start, if they had the power to do so. If producing a prototype is not possible, then if something is important enough to be negotiated for years, the decision to ratify it must be prescribed to take at least as long time as the negotiations themselves took. Otherwise the negotiators clearly are expecting to manipulate the ratification by construction.