Negotiations pending: A post-colonial obstacle in I-EU CEPA negotiations?

The European Union’s (EU) ‘global Europe’ and ambitious ‘fit for 55’ strategy require the EU to conclude greener Free Trade Agreements (FTA) with countries of the Global South. After the successful conclusion of two FTAs between the EU and Singapore and the EU and Vietnam, the Indonesia-EU Cooperative Economic Partnership Agreement (I-EU CEPA) is the third FTA in the pipeline between the EU and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Indonesia, as a major producer of crude oils, timber and other precious raw materials, has also been a major target of the EU’s (perceived) competition in South East Asia: China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In the meantime, frictions over the EU’s sustainability demands, in the context of palm oil, have fueled resistance against I-EU CEPA. Indonesia’s historically informed skepticism towards China’s BRI is slowly being sidelined by Indonesian economic priorities and the slow progress of I-EU CEPA negotiations. This paper argues that Indonesia’s post-colonial national memory of EUropean colonization, largely overlooked in the context of trade, is a crucial obstacle in finding societal support for I-EU CEPA negotiations. Through an interpretivist variant of framing analysis of the three largest national Indonesian online newspapers (The Jakarta Post, Kompas and Tempo), 342 articles published between 2016-2021 were analyzed to address the question of how the EU is perceived as an actor in the field of trade. Two larger competing narratives were identified. One narrative supported by the current Indonesian administration draws a friendlier picture of the EU as a powerful patron contributing to more economic prosperity, stressing economic imperatives and largely echoing the developmental growth paradigm. The other narrative put forward by the palm oil lobby latently accuses the EU of being a hegemonic post-colonial actor and demands retaliation in international fora, nourishing Indonesia’s economic nationalism.