By Jan Orbie, Antonio Salvador Alcazar III and Tinus Sioen
The notions of ‘developing countries’ and ‘development cooperation’ have been waning in discourses by scholars, policymakers and civil society actors. At least rhetorically, the colonial and patronising nature of these notions has been recognised at the European Union (EU) level. For instance, the Development Commissioner has been rechristened as the ‘Commissioner of International Partnerships’ since 2019. In recent years, the EU has pursued plenty of ‘partnerships’ in areas such as climate, energy, trade and deforestation.
To be clear, this partnership discourse is not new. Ever since decolonisation, the language of ‘partnerships’ has served to obfuscate global power asymmetries that continue to exist today. However, in times of increasing assertiveness of non-Western powers as well as rising geopolitical competition with China and Russia, EU policymakers claim to be presumably enacting a ‘paradigm shift’ beyond traditional development cooperation in a bid to win over ‘partners’ in the global souths.
Curiously, one EU policy area has totally ignored these tendencies: the Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP). Since 1971, the EU’s GSP has provided more access to the European single market for ‘developing’ countries. Tariffs differentiate depending on the type of country (e.g., ‘least developed’ countries receive zero tariffs and zero quotas under the Everything but Arms initiative) and the type of imports (e.g., sensitive products may still face high barriers). Market access has also been made conditional depending on the compliance of target countries with international conventions on human rights, labour standards, climate protection, and good governance – the so-called GSP+.
This trading system still fully embraces the development discourse. Our research, based on 241 texts produced by the EU institutions, civil society organisations, media and political elites in Cambodia and the Philippines, shows the Eurocentric, colonial and modernist assumptions behind the EU’s trade and development encounters with the global souths.
Indeed, the language around GSP reforms since 2021 reveals how EU public officials and policy stakeholders continue to imagine the so-called ‘Global South’: they are not yet developed, but we Europeans are developed; and this difference gives us the responsibility not only to help them, but also the necessity to leverage the EU’s power to inculcate ‘our’ values, enforce domestic reforms elsewhere, and improve their ‘unruly’ behaviour.
The language of GSP continues to be entrenched in colonial tropes that have been strategically downplayed in other EU policy areas. We summarise our argument in seven points:
- First, the GSP regime unilaterally divides the world into countries according to their level of development. These hierarchies are endorsed through purely economic and supposedly ‘objective’ World Bank criteria. The EU also created a sui generis definition of ‘vulnerable countries’ in order to include Pakistan and exclude other countries. This paternalising language includes notions such as ‘graduation’, which happens when ‘developing’ countries have reached a certain level of development.
- Second, the logic that export-led economic growth leads to development is uncritically endorsed. The EU’s GSP sustains this logic without considering asymmetrical impacts on certain producers and communities and neglecting studies that point to the exploitative impacts of GSP on the environment, on human rights, and on land grabbing in ‘partner’ countries.
- Third, EU policymakers consistently stress the GSP’s origins in UNCTAD demands of the 1960-70s. They omit, however, that the GSP was only a small element of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), that the wider NIEO agenda has been completely abandoned, and that the NIEO architects objected to any conditionality attached to the GSP.
- Fourth, donor-recipient relations are reinforced through ubiquitous references to the EU ‘granting’ or ‘offering’ ‘preferential access’ to ‘beneficiary countries’ that ‘enjoy’ this treatment. This conceals not only the GSP’s limited effective use in most cases and tendency to build up mono-sectoral export dependencies in some cases, but also the observation that EU importers, distributors and consumers are themselves major beneficiaries of the GSP by importing cheap raw materials and (semi-)manufactures, thus perpetuating unequal exchange.
- Fifth, the EU’s saviour complex legitimises itself not only to provide technical assistance but also to intervene in third countries. EU policymakers and stakeholders are proud of the ‘carrot and stick’ conditionalities that ‘leverage’ the EU’s market power to ‘reward good behaviour’ and ‘punish bad behaviour’. This is done through increasingly sophisticated monitoring technologies, including ‘scorecards’ that adjudicate on the political performance of GSP targets on ratifying and implementing international conventions.
- Sixth, EU stakeholders celebrate the power and leverage that the unilateral GSP provides. Even when talking about ‘engagement’ and ‘dialogue’, they cannot hide the desire to force third countries into complying with EU standards and conditions. The burden of proof increasingly lies with the ‘beneficiary’ countries themselves, where all sources of underdevelopment are situated, while omitting Western responsibilities and systemic injustices that are often colonially configured.
- Seventh, these highly political issues are obscured behind a technocratic discourse that relies on economic data and ‘scientific’ studies which completely neglect lived experiences of the very people the EU claims to champion. Alternative visions to development are silenced and rendered unintelligible.
The EU praises its GSP policy as ‘the most generous scheme of its kind in the world’, the ‘crown jewel of European trade policy’, and the ‘flagship’ of EU trade policy supporting sustainable development and good governance. Nonetheless, our analysis suggests that GSP maintains colonial imaginaries and practices of how the European ‘gardeners’ should maintain power over the underdeveloped and perhaps even dangerous actors in the ‘jungle’ of the global souths.
Remarkably, this is also supported by EU politicians and civil society members. These ostensibly progressive actors seem so mesmerised by the power potential of this unilateral trade system to enforce EU political conditions on third countries that they remain blind, wilfully or otherwise, to the colonial and Eurocentric assumptions behind their actions. This assertive orientation risks normalising or fuelling right-wing demands for even more aggressive trade policy stances in a geopolitical world, not least when it comes to the trade–migration nexus.
Governments in ‘partner’ countries, such as those of Cambodia and the Philippines, have deployed anti-colonial sentiments in reaction to requirements from the EU’s GSP. However, political elites within these countries have also embraced the vested interests within export-led growth and succumbed to the idea that there is no alternative, thereby asphyxiating possible counterhegemonic perspectives.
The latest GSP reform processes entailed heated debates, for instance, around the thwarted proposal of linking third countries’ GSP market access to cooperation on readmissions of allegedly illegal migrants in the EU. However, the problematic assumptions behind the project have not been discussed in official policy debates. To our knowledge, there are also no academic studies on the economic benefits of the GSP for EU businesses.
Without any consideration of the seven points mentioned above, the previous system has been extended from 2023 until 2027. The extended timeframe demands a window for epistemically reparative research and genuine political dialogue that consider ‘grassroots’ views on pluriversal alternatives to development, taking seriously the lifeworlds of the very people the EU GSP regime is intent on regulating, reforming, and rescuing.
Jan Orbie is Professor at the Department of Political Science at Ghent University. He researches and teaches about the external policies of the European Union and attempts to do this from critical and normative perspectives.
Antonio Salvador Alcazar III is a Global Teaching Fellow at Universidad de los Andes. Grounded in decolonial and interpretive perspectives, their work critiques the EU’s entanglements as a global (trade) power and engages more broadly in the politics of knowledge.
Tinus Sioen is a political assistant in the Belgian Federal Parliament. He holds a M. Sc. In EU Studies and completed an internship at the Centre for EU Studies (CEUS) where he worked on EU trade policy.
Note: This article is based on the paper “A Post-Development Perspective on the EU’s Generalized Scheme of Preferences” in Politics and Governance. It gives the views of the authors, not the position of the EADI Debating Development Blog or the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes.