Procedural strengths, political weaknesses? Transparency and parliamentary oversight in ttip negotiations

Commonly understood as a synonymous of access to information and participatory rights for stakeholders in deliberation processes, transparency is becoming an alternative means of promoting the spread of information and the legitimacy of the new global actors at the international and supranational level. The path of transparency has been followed also by supranational polities such as the European Union, which has enshrined it in its primary and secondary law. It is however questioned whether the higher degree of transparency the EU has achieved, in particular after the Lisbon Treaty, also in the domain of international relations, is enough to bridge the well known European democratic deficit. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations provide an interesting case study in this respect. Having analysed the role played so far by the European Parliament and by National Parliaments in the TTIP negotiation process, the article aims at evaluating the attempts to reconcile transparency and democratic accountability, on the one hand, and confidentiality on the other, in a multilevel system of government. The article argues that the debate around the agreement has been more transparent than the average of international treaties negotiations. The criticism surrounding the on-going process seems to be due, rather than to its lack of transparency, to the Wertordnung and the institutional framework of the EU, which is a post-political polity, oriented towards the maximization of specific market-oriented goals.