Brussels, 11/01/2007 (Agence Europe) - Elmar Brok (EPP-ED), Erika Mann (PES) and James Elles (EPP-ED) pressed on Thursday for a transatlantic partnership agreement to be sealed with the United States as a framework for the creation of a barrier-free Transatlantic Market by 2015. The next EU/USA summit in June 2007 (probably in Berlin) should give the go-ahead for preparing both projects, the three MEPs said during a joint press conference. They also specified that a Transatlantic Market (TAM) of this kind would not be a free trade area and would under no circumstances replace the WTO multilateral system. Elmar Brok explained: “This will not be a free trade area” as the European Commission had suggested in 1998 to no avail, “but a project aimed at abolishing all existing non-tariff barriers between the European Union and the United States, mainly in the field of services and investment”. James Elles took this line up saying: “The TAM project would not be opposed to the Doha Round, but would complement it”. Brok said agriculture would not be included in the agreement, which should allow the more reticent Member States to come round to the idea, “especially France”.
Talks between Europeans and Americans on harmonisation of a regulatory framework have been underway since the official launch of the Regulatory Dialogue in 2005, but “progress is slow”, Brok said, judging it necessary to give “fresh political impetus” to the process. He pointed out that the US Congress and the European Parliament should be involved in the process from the outset. He did not rule out the possibility of creating joint control and legal bodies to ensure that common rules and standards governing the TAM are correctly applied according to the NAFTA model (North American Free Trade Agreement). Refloated by the German EU Presidency (Angela Merkel had evoked the matter with President Bush last week in Washington), the idea of a transatlantic market is “not new”, Erika Mann said, “as we have been speaking about it within the Transatlantic Policy Network (TPN) for years now”. The idea was also included in the European Parliament's resolution of 1 June 2006 and is supported by European and American business and industry (UNICE and AMCHAM respectively), as well as by the Transatlantic Business Dialogue (TABD), Ms Mann stressed. (hb)