CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Alcazar III, Antonio Salvador Mesalucha |
|---|---|
| Title | Brussels's burden: (Un)making the global souths in the European Union's preferential trade policy |
| Summary | As a trade power, the European Union sees itself as a benevolent partner of the global souths. Often feted as the crown jewel of the EU’s common commercial policy is the Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP). Since 1971, GSP has liberalised the European single market to exports from the global souths without asking market access concessions in return. Not to be conflated with free trade, this one-sided opening purports to benefit so-called ‘developing’ countries—especially the ‘vulnerable’ and the ‘most in need’—by plucking people out of poverty through the workings of preferential trade. At the same time, the trade policy establishment in Brussels is busying itself with the pursuit of not only commerce but commerce attached to global norms, as opposed to parochial EU ones. Under GSP, the EU entices partner countries to live up to their obligations towards international conventions on human rights, labour standards, good governance, and environmental protection. Yet this partnership discourse obscures how trade encounters between the EU and its presumed others in world politics have been, and continue to be, entrenched in colonial/modern relations. Sitting at odds with common-sensical neoliberal and normative beliefs, this tension compels us to re-read the EU’s entanglements with those deemed to be on the peripheries of the global economic order. In this context, I ask: How are the global souths imagined in the EU’s preferential trade policy discourses? Grounded in decolonial and interpretive ways of knowing, I contend that the GSP regime discursively constitutes the global souths as sites to be ordered, governed, and intervened by the EU-self. In making these knowledge claims, this dissertation prioritises a methodological orientation of studying policy upwards. Drawing on extensive archival research, policy documents, and 65 semi-structured interviews with trade policy elites through fieldwork in Brussels, I engage with policy ethnography to interrogate those who are in positions of power and responsible for the (re)production of GSP. While entrusting itself in interpretivism, this work pushes the critique of policy further by making more legible how GSP reincarnates coloniality. 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-self for its presumed others to ‘strive a little more’ and ‘behave better’. Crucially, I implicate GSP into coloniality to counter celebrated EU discourses of ‘interde pendence’ ;, ‘global governance’, and ‘international partnerships’. This imperative upends scholarly, historical and political imaginaries about GSP and—in the end—ethically commits to emancipatory politics anchored in concrete sites of struggles in GSP-dependent economies on the outskirts of a world order far from being ‘post-colonial’. |
| Supervisor | Bodenstein, Thilo |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/alcazar_antonio.pdf |
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