Playing Different Games: EU-West Africa Negotiations of Economic Partnership Agreements

This paper inquires the negotiations the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the EU and West Africa. The negotiations resided at the nexus between trade and development as EPAs are trade agreements that aim to foster development in Africa. West Africa, however, was highly critical and so far resisted signing an EPA. The aim of this paper is to inquire the reasons for the deep-seated stalemate in the negotiations. It pushes forward the argument that a deep-seated disagreement on the rules for trade cooperation between highly unequal negotiation partners underpinned the continuous stalemate in the negotiations. Framing EPA negotiations in terms of trade and development did not necessarily evoke the same expectations on both sides. Divergent causal beliefs about the benefits of neo-liberal reform and emotionally charged understandings of the EU-West Africa relationship in a ‘post-colonial’ era underpinned different understandings of what the essence of EPA negotiations was about. As a consequence, actors disagreed on the basic means and goals of cooperation and were unable to overcome the stalemate. It therefore becomes necessary to situate the negotiation process within the long-standing debates on how to shape North-South relations. With regard to IR theory, this paper builds on the constructivist argument that states need to agree on the so-called rules of the game before they can negotiate cooperation. While states have been able to reach a relatively firm consensus on the ‘rules of the game’ in trade cooperation between equal partners –manifest in the WTO regime–, the rules for North-South cooperation on economic matters have always been subject to fierce contestation. Hence, it becomes necessary to pay attention to the history and particularities of North-South relations to explain the dynamics of trade cooperation between developed and developing countries. In terms of methodology, the paper relies on discourse analysis and process-tracing.