EU trade preferences: A post-development critique.

Trade policy instruments are generally considered to be a key leverage in the pursuit of normative goals such as labour norms, environmental standards, and human rights. This is even more so for the European Union (EU), which has an extensive market power and exclusive competences in trade while lacking a full-fledged foreign and security policy. Over the past decades, the EU has developed different trade mechanisms for the pursuit of sustainable development. Specifically, these concern the ‘human rights and good governance’ conditionality system of the EU’s Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) and the Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapters of the EU’s bilateral trade agreements. As the putative benefits of neoliberal globalization have been increasingly questioned, these mechanisms have received growing attention from politicians, civil society and academics. For instance, there has been much debate about the effectiveness of GSP sanctions and about the non-enforceability of TSD commitments. On the face of it, it seems that civil society, businesses and European policy makers hold radically different positions on the desirability and feasibility of trade conditionality for sustainable development. Taking a post-development perspective, this article aims to problematize the EU enforceability discourse around the trade-sustainability nexus. We argue that both proponents and opponents of the current arrangements are very similar in their colonial, modernist and Eurocentric assumptions. In doing so, we also problematize the discourse of EU trade conditionality in terms of ‘rewarding’ and ‘punishing’ respectively ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behavior of ‘developing’ countries (the so-called ‘beneficiaries’). We also point out how the trade-sustainable-development nexus legitimizes the underlying neoliberal trade paradigm. Methodologically, our contribution integrates a literature study of post-development and EU GSP systems and applies an interpretivist frame analysis of EU trade preferences and the political debates around them, particularly in relation to Bangladesh, Cambodia, Myanmar/Burma, and the Philippines. In the concluding section, we also reflect on alternative trade reforms that avoid the pitfalls of incentives or sanctions for the realization of wellbeing and sustainability.