TTIP: Why did the negotiations start as late as 2013?

This thesis' focus is a free trade agreement between the European Union and the United States of America called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The main goal of the thesis is to answer the question of why the negotiations began as late as 2013. The thesis touches on the issue of regionalism; therefore it presents a short introduction on this topic in the beginning. It then follows to the Second World War and by chronologically analysing the trade relations between the EU and the USA it describes the factors which led to the negotiations of TTIP, as well as those that called them off. Among these main factors it primarily mentions the failure of multilateral negotiations within the WTO and various interest groups on both sides of the Atlantic, mainly trade and consumer organisations. Furthermore, it mentions the Great Recession of 2007 and the decline in the influence of the United States and the European union on the world geopolitical scene. The thesis also analyses which of the mentioned factors were relevant at certain moments and in individual cases, as well as if it shifted the negotiations back to the start. The whole thesis is written from the american perspective on this issue and it takes the european one into consideration only in the cases of dispute. In the end, it..