[25][26] It was first initiated in 1990, when, shortly after the end of the Cold War, with the world no longer divided into two blocs, the European Community (12 countries) and the US signed a "Transatlantic Declaration".

This called for the continued existence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as well as for yearly summits, biannual meetings between ministers of State, and more frequent encounters between political figures and senior officials.

[33] Documents released by the European Commission in July 2014 group the topics under discussion into three broad areas: Market access; Specific regulation; and broader rules and principles and modes of co-operation.

[34][35] For "Trade in Services, Investment and E-commerce", a draft text dated 7 July 2013 was leaked by the German newspaper, Die Zeit in March 2014.

Article 14 contains proposed rules that forbid governments to "directly or indirectly nationalise, expropriate" unless it is for a public purpose, under due process of law, on a non-discriminatory basis, with compensation.

Chapter IV, Articles 24 to 28 would allow free movement of business managers, and other employees of a corporation, for temporary work purposes among all countries party to the agreement.

In September 2015, the Commission proposed an "Investment Court System" to replace the ISDS clauses, with the scope for investor challenge much reduced and with "highly skilled judges" rather than arbitrators used to determine cases.

[67] German Vice Chancellor and Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel said that free trade talks between the European Union and the United States have failed, citing a lack of progress on any of the major sections of the long-running negotiations.

"In my opinion the negotiations with the United States have de facto failed, even though nobody is really admitting it" the German broadcaster Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen quoted the minister, according to a written transcript of an interview aired on 28 August 2016.

[73] TTIP aimed for a formal agreement that would "liberalize one-third of global trade" and, proponents argued, would create millions of new paid jobs.

[16] As noted above, elected representatives may only view the texts in a secure "reading room" in Brussels, to avoid any further leaks of information about TTIP negotiations into the public domain.

To answer the criticism, and months after their leaks by Greenpeace, the European Commission has made negotiation documents public, including all EU proposals in the regulatory and rules components of the agreement.

[14][15] The Independent summarizes the negative impact of TTIP as "reducing the regulatory barriers to trade for big business, things like food safety law, environmental legislation, banking regulations and the sovereign powers of individual nations",[16] or more critically as an "assault on European and US societies by transnational corporations".

[16] German economist Max Otte stated that the proposed (ISDS) court of arbitration and protection of foreign investment would mean a "complete dis-empowerment of politics"[19] and that, regarding labour economics, free trade agreements typically enforce lower standards and that TTIP would put European workers into direct competition with Americans (and in effect because of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexicans), which would impact European social models.

[82] Anti-poverty group Global Justice Now asserts that TTIP would undermine job security as well as current minimum labour standards agreed in the EU.

[83] British Labour Party politician John McDonnell, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, has described TTIP as resulting in a huge transfer of powers to Brussels and corporate interests that will bring about a form of "modern-day serfdom".

[11] In spite of a study by the Munich-based Ifo Institute for Economic Research (on behalf of the German Federal Ministry of Economics) claiming that up to 400,000 jobs could be created in the EU by TTIP,[84] Stefan Körzell, national board member of the Confederation of German Trade Unions (DGB) has said "Whether TTIP can create jobs, and 'how many' and 'where' is unclear.

[90] In December 2013, a coalition of over 200 environmentalists, labor unions and consumer advocacy organizations on both sides of the Atlantic sent a letter to the USTR and European Commission demanding the investor-state dispute settlement be dropped from the trade talks, claiming that ISDS was "a one-way street by which corporations can challenge government policies, but neither governments nor individuals are granted any comparable rights to hold corporations accountable".

[93][94] A recent study shows that investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) indeed generates strikingly large and consistent opposition to the trade agreement and this effect of dispute settlement characteristic cuts across individuals’ key attributes, including skill levels, information, and national sentiment, which have been viewed as key determinants of trade attitudes.

[95] In December 2013, Martti Koskenniemi, Professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki, warned that the planned foreign investor protection scheme within the treaty, similar to World Bank Group's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), would endanger the sovereignty of the signatory states by allowing for a small circle of legal experts sitting in a foreign court of arbitration an unprecedented power to interpret and void the signatory states' legislation.

[96] Faced with such broad and vociferous criticism, ISDS was abandoned in September 2015; in its place, the European Commission proposed an Investment Court System (ICS).

[83] In June 2015, the BBC reported that food safety had become "a stumbling block" because of differing US and EU attitudes to genetically modified crops, pesticides (endocrine disrupting chemicals), growth promoting hormones in beef and pathogen reduction treatments of chicken, that cause public health concerns for consumers and put European farmers at a cost disadvantage.

[104] According to Joseph E. Stiglitz, TTIP could have a "chilling" effect on regulation and thus "undercut urgently needed action on climate that the Paris agreement requires".

He says that industries that do not pay for the "social costs" of pollution in effect receive hidden subsidies, and that TTIP would give companies many more opportunities to sue governments over environmental protection mechanisms.

[106] According to The Guardian, this draft could "sabotage" European efforts to implement mandatory energy savings measures and to favor the switch to renewable electricity generation.

[16][110] Critics of TTIP argue that its proposals on intellectual property and user privacy could have a similar effect as the EU-rejected Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

According to Leif Johan Eliasson of Saarland University, "For the EU these include greater access to the American public procurement market, retained bans on imports of genetically modified organisms (GMO) crops and hormone treated beef, and recognition of geographic trademarks on food products.

[132] European negotiators pressed the United States to loosen its restrictions on the export of crude oil and natural gas, to help the EU reduce its dependence on energy from Russia.

[133] Karel De Gucht responded to criticism in a Guardian article in December 2013,[134] saying "The commission has regularly consulted a broad range of civil society organisations in writing and in person, and our most recent meeting had 350 participants from trade unions, NGOs and business" and that "no agreement will become law before it is thoroughly examined and signed off by the European parliament and 29 democratically elected national governments – the US government and 28 in the EU's council"[135] However, the Corporate Europe Observatory (cited in the original Guardian article) had pointed out, based on a Freedom of Information request, that "more than 93% of the Commission's meetings with stakeholders during the preparations of the negotiations were with big business".

[136] In early 2013, Canadian media observers had speculated that the launch of TTIP talks put pressure on Canada to secure ratification of its own three-year-long FTA negotiations with the EU by the close of 2013.