Disruption as dialogue: Decolonising EU trade relations with the global souths?

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 as a normative/market power. 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 approaches 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 paper asks how we might puncture decolonially the study of 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 in the social sciences. We borrow heavily from the International Relations work of Meera Sabaratnam whose ‘decolonising strategies’ 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 as scholars from Belgium, Germany, and the Philippines as well as the ruptures it triggers as to what EU trade policy is and its political significance for the dispossessed, the peripheral, and the southern within Europe itself.