Decolonising EU trade relations with the Global Souths?
Journal of Contemporary European Research | Volume 19, Issue 2 (2023)
Decolonising EU trade relations with the Global Souths?
Authors:
- Antonio Salvador M. Alcazar III, Central European University & Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals
- Camille Nessel, Université Libre de Bruxelles & Ghent University
- Jan Orbie, Ghent University
Abstract
That the European Union’s common commercial relations with ex-colonies and more
broadly the ‘tiers monde’ now rest variously on benevolence, depoliticised practices, equal
partnerships and values fuels reigning foundational myths about the EU in global politics.
Efforts to disrupt these received presuppositions have come from interpretivist,
postcolonial, post-development, post-structuralist and other heterodox research
traditions. Yet the academy has been largely impervious to knowledges that genuinely
question and subvert, in both theory and praxis, Eurocentric ways of seeing the world and
understanding the EU as a ‘benevolent’ trade actor on the world stage. In dialogue with
existing heterodox approaches, this article asks how we might puncture the coloniality of
dominant knowledge regimes about EU trade relations vis-à-vis the global souths, i.e.,
peoples and places that the EU deems peripheral and, as such, in need of trade-related
interventions in the name of development. To this end, we propose different ‘subject-
positions’ with which to unthink and rethink our ways of knowing EU trade policy and the
Eurocentrism lurking behind it by turning to decolonial thought. We borrow heavily from
the work of Meera Sabaratnam whose ‘decolonising strategies’ in studying world politics
we attempt to exemplify through a critical interrogation of the canonical scholarship
around three distinct ‘policy worlds’ of EU external trade relations: Economic Partnership
Agreements (EPAs), Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP) and Trade and Sustainable
Development (TSD) chapters in free trade agreements. Finally, we think reflexively about
the decolonial option and the ruptures it triggers as to what EU trade policy is and the
colonial logics sustaining ‘normative’ and ‘geopolitical’ narratives on/by the EU as a trade
power.
