Brussels’s burden or: Why the European Union is a colonial/modern trade power

This event is co-organised by the Decolonising the Law Discussion Group and the EU Law Discussion Group. Dr. Antonio Salvador Alcazar III will be presenting a chapter from his doctoral dissertation, titled Brussels's Burden: Unmaking the Global Souths in the European Union's Preferential Trade Policy, which he is currently revising to turn into a monograph. 

Abstract

Historical, scholarly and political discourses normalise the European Union (EU) as a benevolent global power in its trade partnerships with the Global Souths. In these interpretive frameworks, the EU ostensibly uses trade as a leverage to inculcate global norms. Resisting these entrenched accounts, this chapter draws on 65 semi-structured interviews with trade policy elites in Brussels and uncovers how the EU increasingly asserts interventionist logics in the context of monitoring missions and sanctions through the Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP): a unilateral preferential trade regime often feted as ‘the crown jewel’ of EU common commercial policy. This contribution shows how the EU discursively uses market access for political ends by policing the political performance of GSP targets on a wide array of international conventions on human rights, labour standards, good governance, climate, and the environment. By analytically employing the logic of intervention through trade, I scrutinise how the (geo)politics of asserting a more normative trade agenda discursively unfolds through GSP—a policy constituted within hierarchical power relations that stubbornly centre EU presence. Intervention through trade does not only reinforce objectifying the Global Souths in global politics as perpetually in need of external assistance but also further crystallise the EU’s ostensibly ethical imperative of ‘becoming the intervener’ (Rutazibwa 2010) rather than prioritising indigenous views and solutions. The official discourse of partnerships as a way of seeing GSP relations with the Global Souths obscures intervention as a colonial/modern technology (Shilliam 2013). Puncturing this discourse, coloniality forces us to re-read the GSP policy and how it enshrouds both symbolic and material power hierarchies wherein the ‘unruly’ Global Souths ought to be disciplined and transformed through the interventionist regimes of the ‘normative’ EU in external relations.