Traumatic birth for EU-US trade talks EU agrees on mandate for US trade talks after day-long battle over cultural safeguards.

The European Union’s member states have agreed to launch talks to liberalise trade with the United States – but only after nearly 13 hours of talks dominated by France’s insistence on cultural safeguards.

The decision by trade ministers will enable EU leaders and US President Barack Obama to proclaim, when they meet next week (17-18 June) at a meeting of G8 economies, that they are determined to drive through the biggest bilateral trade deal in history.

However, the painful nature of the trade ministers’ debate, which concluded shortly before 11pm, 13 hours after their start, underscores the scale of the challenges that negotiators will face when they begin setting the terms of a deal that the EU believes could expand the EU’s economy by €65 billion a year.

The sticking point in today’s discussions between trade ministers was whether to allow the European Commission to include audiovisual services in negotiations.

France feared that this could undermine Europe’s ‘cultural exception’ – a clause in EU law that allows EU countries to subsidise, protect and impose quotas for products of national cultural value. In May, it gained the broad backing of cultural ministers from 13 other states, but support ebbed away over the weeks, leaving France isolated at today’s meeting in Luxembourg.

Other member states argued that it would be wrong tactically to prevent debate of all aspects of the audiovisual industry in order to protect cultural rights that were already legally protected. To exclude the audiovisual sector in its entirety would encourage the US to exclude sectors that its industries want protected from EU competition.

Over the course of the day and evening debate about the wording gradually moved in France’s favour, to a point when the UK, the principal proponent of talks without preconditions, said that too much had been conceded.

The final agreement excludes the audiovisual sector from the initial negotiations, but says that it could be integrated into the talks at a later stage.

The other major concern of the EU’s member states – a US demand to talk about the terms of protection for each other’s investments – was settled early on, with a decision to allow talks. However, a majority of states, a diplomat from an EU member state said, are extremely wary at the prospect of the advent of US-style corporate litigation. The EU would, he said, need a big trade-off before they would be willing to harmonise investment-protection law.

The US is due shortly to agree on the mandate for its negotiators. They are expected to face no restrictions in the scope of their discussions, a far cry from the US position when the idea of trade talks was first mooted. At the start, according to a diplomat on the EU side, the US did not want the talks to range beyond tariff reduction and food rules.

The EU hopes to complete talks by the end of 2014, when the current Commission reaches the end of its term. Some suggest, though, that the end of Obama’s second term, in early 2017, may prove to be a more realistic timeframe.