October 19, 2015 12:47PM # Is TTIP the European Union’s Last Chance to Right the Ship? By [Daniel J. Ikenson](https://www.cato.org/people/daniel-j-ikenson) --- SHARE Harvard University Center for European Studies fellow John Gillingham doesn’t exactly make the case that the European Union is worth saving, but [he argues](https://www.cato.org/publications/cato-online-forum/european-union-ttip-preliminary-observations) in his Cato Online Forum essay that a successful Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreement is essential to its survival. Among last week’s [Cato conference participants](https://www.cato.org/events/will-transatlantic-trade-investment-partnership-live-its-promise), Dr. Gillingham was perhaps the most skeptical that the EU would be able to get its act together and achieve success, arguing that TTIP’s fate will hinge less on the deal’s specifics and more on the politics of the EU, which are poisonous. > Put quite simply, the adoption of TTIP, as it is presently conceived by the negotiating parties, would put the EU back onto a course of liberalization, from which it swerved in the mid-1990’s, and thereby bring it abreast of the concurrent globalization process being driven by China and the United States. Within Europe, the Single Market, something only half-complete, would become a reality. State interventionism would be sharply reduced and international competitiveness restored. Will this happen? To help answer that question, check out the [collection of essays](https://www.cato.org/economics-geopolitics-architecture-ttip-cato-online-forum) from Cato’s TTIP conference participants. ##### Related Tags [Defense and Foreign Policy](https://www.cato.org/defense-foreign-policy), [Trade Policy](https://www.cato.org/trade-policy), [Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies](https://www.cato.org/herbert-stiefel-center-trade-policy-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).