EU Trade and Development Policy After the Crisis: Subordinating Developmental to Commercial Imperatives

With the stagnation of the EPA negotiations, the centrepiece of the EU’s trade and development strategy following the crisis has been a series of proposed reforms to the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP). Although EU policymakers have argued the need to ‘refocus’ these preferences on those most in need, this paper argues that the proposals are actually aimed at increasing EU leverage in Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiations with emerging economies. These would lose their preferential access to the EU market under the proposed changes without much gain accruing to the supposed beneficiaries (‘vulnerable’ and least developed economies). The GSP proposals form part of a broader ‘reciprocity’ agenda being pursued by the current Trade Commissioner. Reciprocity here is ultimately about ensuring the EU possesses sufficient offensive leverage in on-going trade negotiations, rather than representing any mercantilist move towards greater domestic protection as might have been expected in the wake of the crisis. In arguing that the EU’s developmental trade agenda is increasingly subordinated to commercial imperatives, but in ways that the rationalist IPE literature on collective action may find difficult to explain, this paper seeks to make a contribution to constructivist accounts that focus on the ideas internalised by policymakers.