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his paper examines mobilisation of civil society organizations (CSOs), focusing primarily on the highly-contested politics engendered by the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), by posing the question, ‘how can we account for strong opposition to TTIP in the EU, while being nearly non-existent in the US?’ It is argued that European CSO opposition to TTIP and mobilisation of European public opinion against TTIP can be traced to the European Commission’s employment of myths – specifically a green, social, and humanitarian Europe in a process of ‘othering’ to build a sense of European national identity. Salient issues in transatlantic trade and regulatory capacity both factor into CSO opposition, themselves also a function of myth making, but also a product of the EU’s governance system. It will be difficult for the EU to accommodate and appease such oppositional groups because of perceptions among many Europeans that Americans tolerate lower regulatory protections.
