Description
Historical, scholarly and political discourses normalise the European Union (EU) as a ‘benevolent’ global power in its trade encounters with the Global Souths. In these interpretive frameworks, the EU ostensibly uses trade as a leverage to inculcate global norms. Drawing upon political ethnography in Brussels, research at the Historical Archives of the European Commission, and 65 semi-structured interviews with EU policy elites, this contribution moves beyond the state of the art and the disciplinary boundaries of European Studies by 'studying up' and retheorising the EU as a colonial/modern trade power within decolonial globalisation studies. In particular, I explicate how the EU, in discourse and practice, perpetuates coloniality through the principle of special and differential treatment in the world trade order, as embodied by the Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP). Since 1971, GSP has liberalised the Single Market to exports from the Global Souths without asking market access concessions in return. By virtue of this ‘gift’ of nonreciprocity, GSP purports to benefit so-called ‘developing’ societies by plucking people out of poverty through trade that does not only propagate commerce, but commerce attached to normative ideals. Under GSP, the EU entices trade partners to live up to their obligations towards international conventions on human rights, labour standards, good governance, and environmental protection. Yet GSP obscures how the EU sustains civilisational, epistemic, gendered, racialised, and environmental modes of exploitation. By inferiorising the targets of GSP into a perpetually sorry state of becoming, neediness, and vulnerability, the EU encodes the Global Souths into colonial/modern logics of Eurocentrism, hierarchies, and intervention. These regimes of meanings, then, replicate the necessary presence of the EU for its presumed others to ‘strive a little more’ and ‘behave better’. Crucially, by implicating GSP into coloniality, this paper stresses the need for pluriversal alternatives in global trade relations.
