Search

That the European Union's common commercial relations with ex-colonies and more broadly the 'tiers monde' now rest variously on benevolence, depoliticised practices, equal partnerships and values fuels reigning foundational myths about the EU in global politics. Efforts to disrupt these received presuppositions have come from interpretivist, postcolonial, post-development, post-structuralist and other heterodox research traditions. Yet the academy has been largely impervious to knowledges that genuinely question and subvert, in both theory and praxis, Eurocentric ways of seeing the world and understanding the EU as a 'benevolent' trade actor on the world stage. In dialogue with existing heterodox approaches, this article asks how we might puncture the coloniality of dominant knowledge regimes about EU trade relations vis-à-vis the global souths, i.e., peoples and places that the EU deems peripheral and, as such, in need of trade-related interventions in the name of development. To this end, we propose different 'subject-positions' with which to unthink and rethink our ways of knowing EU trade policy and the Eurocentrism lurking behind it by turning to decolonial thought. We borrow heavily from the work of Meera Sabaratnam whose 'decolonising strategies' in studying world politics we attempt to exemplify through a critical interrogation of the canonical scholarship around three distinct 'policy worlds' of EU external trade relations: Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP) and Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapters in free trade agreements. Finally, we think reflexively about the decolonial option and the ruptures it triggers as to what EU trade policy is and the colonial logics sustaining 'normative' and 'geopolitical' narratives on/by the EU as a trade power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a general overview of the evolution of the European Union trade preferences with the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Countries, giving due attention to the reform of the Sugar Protocol (SP) in light of the anticipated Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). The EU sugar trade relationship with the ACP, as captured in both a reformed SP for ACP non-least developed countries and in the Everything-but-Arms initiative for the world's least developed countries, is analysed and contextualized within the ongoing negotiations toward achieving EPAs, which will substitute the Lomé Convention and give a new order to EU-ACP relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a general overview of the evolution of the European Union trade preferences with the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Countries, giving due attention to the reform of the Sugar Protocol (SP) in light of the anticipated Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). The EU sugar trade relationship with the ACP, as captured in both a reformed SP for ACP non-least developed countries and in the Everything-but-Arms initiative for the world's least developed countries, is analysed and contextualized within the ongoing negotiations toward achieving EPAs, which will substitute the Lomé Convention and give a new order to EU-ACP relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Relações Internacionais is the property of Relacoes Internacionais and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper assesses the potential effects from trade facilitation in terms of increased trade flows both on average and specifically for the six regional groups of ACP countries negotiating Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with the EU. Data from the World Bank's Doing Business Database on the time required to export or import are used as indicators of cross-border transaction costs, and a gravity model on two-way bilateral trade between 22 EU countries and 100 developing countries is estimated using a sample selection approach. The results suggest that time delays on the part of the exporter and the importer generally significantly decrease trade flows, but also that this effect is not constant, in the sense that the elasticity of trade with respect to border delays declines at higher levels of time requirements. On average, lowering border delays in the exporting country by one day from the sample mean would yield an export-increasing effect of about 1 percent, while the same reduction in the importing country would increase imports by about 0.5 percent. Significant negative effects are also found of both export and import transaction costs for most EPA groups, and the effects tend to be at least as large as the average or larger. The results are generally robust for a number of alternative estimation methods such as Poisson estimation, IV estimation taking sample selection into account and the sample selection approach suggested by Helpman et al. (2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of the article is to analyse the basic problems regarding the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) negotiations between the European Union (EU) and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries. The negotiations so far have been controversial, and discussions about them have been inconclusive. In the first section of the article, the negotiations are set within the context of global politics and are especially examined in the context of new regionalism/inter-regionalism and international trade relations to clarify the motives behind the EPAs. Then the negotiation parties are introduced and a brief overview of the ACP economies follows, since they all have a considerable impact on the EPA discussions. Next, an analysis of possible positive and negative impacts of the EPAs on the development of ACP countries follows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]