Manufacturing Discontent: The Rise to Power of Anti-TTIP Groups - ECIPE OCCASIONAL PAPER 02/2016

Author: Matthias Bauer

Price FREE Publisher European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) Publication date 01 December 2016 ISBN

Publication synopsis Old beliefs, new symbols, new faces. In 2013, a small group of German green and left- wing activists, professional campaign NGOs and well-established protectionist organisations set up deceptive communication campaigns against TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the European Union and the United States. Germany’s anti-TTIP NGOs explicitly aimed to take German-centred protests to other European countries. Their reasoning is contradictory and logically inconsistent. Their messages are targeted to serve common sense protectionist demands of generally ill-informed citizens and politicians. Thereby, anti-TTIP communication is based on metaphoric messages and far-fetched myths to effectively evoke citizens’ emotions. Together, these groups dominated over 90 percent of online media reporting on TTIP in Germany.

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