The breakthrough, after 13 hours of talks, should enable Britain to hail the start of the trans-Atlantic trade round when the leaders of the Group of 8 biggest economies hold a summit meeting on Monday in Northern Ireland.
“The formal launch of negotiations between the world’s two largest trading blocs is now imminent,” said Vince Cable, the British business secretary. “Achieving an agreement is in all our interests and would deliver a much-needed boost to the economies of all involved.”
A trade pact would aim to cut tariffs and streamline regulations between the world’s two biggest trading partners.
The sticking point during the all-day talks on Friday was France’s demand to exclude films, TV shows and other audiovisual services, including any future digital services, from the talks. Such an exclusion could prompt the United States to require protections of its own. Any excluded areas of commerce could limit the value of an eventual deal for both sides of the Atlantic.
France was arguing on behalf of Europe’s so-called “cultural exception” — in practice, a thicket of quotas and subsidies for audiovisual productions that promote locally and regionally produced content. Excluding such material from a trade deal would disappoint American technology and media companies, including the online movie distributor Netflix, which want easier access to European markets.
Early this week, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, told filmmakers in France that “the total exclusion” of audiovisual services from the negotiations “is not necessary.”
Arriving at the meeting Friday, Germany’s trade state secretary, Anne Ruth Herkes, said that “now France has to move a bit,” and that “sometimes we all have to do this.”
One proposal ministers discussed during the evening was to delay a decision on whether to include audiovisual services at the start of the talks with the United States.
That compromise plan would leave the European Commission with the option to make a proposal, once the talks with the United States were under way, to include audiovisual services as long as all 27 countries including France agreed that the advantages — in exchange for concessions from the United States, for example — had become sufficiently attractive.
From the start of the talks on Friday, France dug in its heels.
Nicole Bricq, the French trade minister, told her 26 counterparts in Luxembourg that she did not understand why most other European governments were opposed to the French stance.
“You want to call into question a fundamental principle that’s part of the European project — the cultural exception,” Ms. Bricq told her counterparts. “And you have chosen to do this with a partner that dominates the world in the areas of audiovisual production with the tendencies and temptations that go with power,” Ms. Bricq said, referring to the United States.
In a thinly veiled reference to the European outcry over recent disclosures that the National Security Agency in the United States had gained access to e-mail, Web searches and other online data from many of the biggest Internet companies, Ms. Bricq added that “current events unhappily remind us” of American influence over the online world.
A day earlier, Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French prime minister, had threatened to veto the start of the trade talks if audiovisual services were not sufficiently protected.
In contrast to France, however, Britain, Spain, Sweden and Denmark want to move quickly to begin talks to open protected business like the transportation of goods along the United States coastline and American government procurement markets at both the federal and state levels.
“Huge benefits are expected from this initiative,” Jaime García-Legaz, the Spanish secretary of state for trade, and Mr. Cable of Britain said in a joint message on Thursday.
But how much progress Europe and the United States can make is an open question. Tariffs are already low, and the main goal — harmonizing regulations — is likely to pose a huge challenge for negotiators.
Europeans are generally more likely to see a need to regulate new technologies, including genetically modified foods and online services that already are dominated by American companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft. There are also questions about their differences over regulations on car safety, pharmaceuticals and financial derivatives.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/business/economy/european-trade-ministers-debate-terms-of-us-talks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss