The European Union has the ambition—and the promise—of being a powerful actor for the promotion of democracy in international affairs. European integration could serve as a model for the integration of democracies in other regions of the world. The EU is also a powerful actor in economic terms. Granting preferential access to the EU market conditional on democratic reforms could serve as a powerful incentive for states to democratise, and could subsidise the costs of democratic transition. However, several aspects limit the EU’s ability to promote democracy effectively and coherently. First, despite a rhetoric of cooperation and coordination, the EU generally imposes a standard trade model on partner countries. This undermines a democratic ethos whereby partner countries are conceived of as (potential) democratic partners who determine their own economic and trade policies. Second, the EU has sometimes inadvertently empowered autocratic actors in partner countries, partially through the inconsistent application of normative conditionality, undermining the expressive coherence of democracy promotion. Third, actors in European foreign policy too often ignore Europe’s colonial legacy, undermining democratic values through paternalism and the lens of securitisation. Fourth, democratic backsliding in European Union member states undermines the idea of the EU as a ‘model’ union of democratic states. We conclude with a wider perspective, suggesting that moving towards a decolonial paradigm may be a way to fulfil the EU’s promises as a democratic actor in international affairs.

In 1971, the ‘Third World’ prevailed in its struggle to gain preferential market access to the European Economic Community (EEC) without giving anything in return. By legislating a generalised scheme of preferences (GSP), the EEC acquiesced to long-standing demands by newly independent ex-colonies and dependent territories on radically reforming the Western-centric global economic order within the framework of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). In this context, I interrogate how the EEC erected a dominant discourse on GSP in the sixties and seventies as it derogated from one of the established norms buttressing the liberal world trading order: the most-favoured-nation principle. To this end, my contribution relies mainly on historiographical research conducted in the Historical Archives of the European Commission in Brussels and the Historical Archives of the European Union in Florence. I argue that the Community constructed a meta-discourse around its deep sense of responsibility for being the first major industrialised power to institute a GSP regime as ‘an act of faith and solidarity towards disadvantaged countries’. Not only did the Community act responsibly in disproportionately carrying the ‘burdens’ of offering trade concessions to the rest of the ‘Third World’, but also towards shielding the interests of its African associates and its own industries at home. Yet a critical reinterpretation of this meta-discourse unmasks how the EEC GSP regime reinscribed hierarchical relations of power within a historical milieu supposedly characterised by ‘solidaristic ties’ and ‘economic interdependence’ in line with Global South calls for a New International Economic Order undoing economic imperialism and dependency. Firstly, parochial considerations drove the highly politicised process of defining the ‘developing’ world and, in effect, who could and could not claim preferential access to the Common Market. Secondly, the Community’s GSP policy fractured the ‘Third World’ by differentiating between associated African countries and non-associated Global South countries. Thirdly, GSP regurgitated colonial logics as the United Kingdom defended to preserve its traditional commercial ties with Asian Commonwealth countries and Hong Kong as a dependent territory within an enlarged EEC. Finally, the EEC’s geopolitical considerations in its market relations with the Gulf States, Yugoslavia, China, and Romania subdued the so-called ‘generosity’ of GSP. Recovering these historiographical erasures renders critical interpretations of the Community’s GSP policy and its contemporary iteration more legible, especially in the context of wider conversations today on overcoming Eurocentrism within EU trade policy scholarship and the field of European Studies.

Reform cycle after reform cycle, the Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP) of the European Union (EU) has been generally understood, since its inception in the 1970s, as a depoliticised policy script in pursuit of developmentalist desires in the ‘tiers monde’ by virtue of trade. Yet the EU is today asserting an increasingly muscular stance on its nonreciprocal GSP regime through the technologies of political conditionalities, monitoring missions, and trade sanctions. At the same time, the EU exploits these technologies to distinguish its normative standing as a global policy actor that claims to defend its values, such as democracy, good governance, human rights, labour standards, and sustainable development, particularly in its relations with ‘unruly’ trading partners from the so-called ‘developing’ world. Questioning the conventional idea of policymaking as rational problem-solving, this paper situates the EU GSP regime as a discursive field where struggles over meaning-making collide. Working within a critical-interpretive methodology and recognising my positionality as a post-colonial Pilipino subject, I propose to interrogate the worldviews of, and the hierarchical power relations (re)produced by, those engaged in articulating a more assertive/normative EU trade policy vis-à-vis the global souths. Drawing on 65+ semi-structured elite interviews with trade policymakers and experts in Brussels, I attempt to recast the policy world of EU GSP as a transnational site of intervention, rather than as a technocratic regulatory fix, that governs the EU’s market relations with ‘developing’ and ‘least developed’ countries. While entrusting itself in interpretivism, this paper pushes critique further and claims to render more legible how Aníbal Quijano’s notion of the ‘coloniality of power’ operates in and through the unilateral strand of EU trade policy, despite the feted technospeak of ‘dialoguing’, ‘enhanced engagement’, and ‘international partnerships’. As such, I gesture to decolonial thought and join ongoing un-disciplinary conversations today on subverting the promiscuous problem of Eurocentrism in why and how we generate knowledge about the EU as a global (trade) power.

This paper advances the notion of white cities in order to analyze how contemporary architectural preservationists remake the histories of the racialized built environment produced through early 20^th century settler colonialism. In 1965, Frantz Fanon described French-occupied Algiers as divided between European settler and Indigenous “compartments” that were resonant with the forms of power exercised by French colonizers. Fanon’s notion of compartments and the “colonial world” resonates with what Janet Abu-Lughod referred to as “dual cities” and “urban apartheid” in reference to Rabat. Indeed, scholars like Gwendolyn Wright, Nezar AlSayyad, Paul Rabinow, and Mia Fuller demonstrate that colonial authorities – British, French, and Italian – used the built environment as integral to pacification efforts, but what is the current status of such sites?

I argue that there has been a marked shift in the interpretation of the racialized built environment produced through early 20^th century settler colonialism, what colonial authorities and urban designers referred to as “European zones” in cities like Casablanca, Rabat, and Addis Ababa. I advance this argument by developing the notion of white cities, a term coined by Sharon Rotbard to refer to how contemporary architectural preservationists remake the histories of racialized European zones of 20^th century modernist architecture produced through settler colonialism in Tel Aviv. I develop Rotbard’s concept as a tool for analyzing how the histories racism and settler colonialism are remade through the historiography of modernist architecture. I do so by developing the concept of white cities, then in using the term to analyze the World Heritage List inscription materials for “Rabat: Modern Capital and Historic City, A Shared Heritage”, added to the World Heritage List in 2012. By showing how the European zone was reinterpreted as demonstrating respect for local “Moroccan” aesthetics, I demonstrate how the notion of white cities accounts for the afterlives of the racialized built environment.

To study/research foreign policies and diplomacy in a postcolonial world through realist or even constructivist approaches too often fall short of explaining how formally colonized states and people view the possibilities of interdependence and cooperation with former colonizers. The concepts, methodologies, and analytical tools for analyzing foreign policy choices and negotiation strategies do not fully explain postcolonial perspectives. It is for this reason that I propose decolonial approaches to theorizing Africa-EU relations through Africana critical theory.

After attempting to develop a theoretical framework that engages with literature on diplomacy and development, it became apparent that the postcolonial perspectives that I was trying to highlight were being lost and the voices of African/Global South scholars who have theorized on related concepts were being ignored. Research designs and strategies that are promoted through the western university—especially in defense of adhering to a certain discipline—have not encouraged different disciplinary approaches that are rooted in ontological and epistemological groundings outside that of the disciplines, including in relation to EU studies. Accordingly, I will present a different approach and perspective that can and should decolonize the way we study diplomatic relations between the Global North and the Global South, and particularly between Africa and Europe. Through presenting a different approach, the goal is to provide a theoretical and analytical framework that takes postcolonial perspectives seriously and—in time—improve Africa EU relations.