Post-colonial perspectives on EU trade politics

Abstract

The EU continues to champion the arena of international trade. In this arena scholarship has extensively studied the EU as a conflicted normative trade actor. Weight has been put on trade agreements as a developmental-instrumental tool, bringing about progress to so-called ‘less developed’ countries, protection of European interests, and promotion of labour and environmental standards. Conflictual lenses have predominantly included domestic, institutional, societal and international factors undermining the efficiency of the EU’s trade policy in the analysis. Thereby, the EU’s virgin-birth-myth, which reaffirms the narrative of a peaceful post-war construct detached from the colonial past of some of its most powerful member states has remained largely unchallenged. Less emphasis has been put on postcolonial dimension of the EU’s regulatory trade policy except from some studies on European Partnership Agreements with the African continent. In this panel four papers will be presented that will shed light on colonialities in EU trade agreements with countries of the global South. The four case-studies will explore the post-colonial perspective from four different theoretical angles, which have one point in common: challenging the predominant narrative on the EU. Importantly, the aim of this panel is to not only welcome critical theory perspectives, but to instead spark a dialogue with scholars presenting institutionalist and hermeneutical approaches in studying the colonial variable in EU trade relations. The discussant will critically asses these inputs from a more hermeneutical perspective. This includes the more established critical neo-colonial perspective on the EU’s EPAs with Africa; but also post-developmental decolonial perspectives on EU trade scholarship, post-colonial perspectives on EU perceptions, and a proposition for a good global governance model, which takes into account the colonial legacy of the EU.

Title	Details
Disruption as dialogue: Decolonising EU trade relations with the global souths?	View Paper Details
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Pan-Africanism and Neo-Colonial Desire in Europe: A Critique of the EU’s response to the African Continental Free Trade Area	View Paper Details