Managing neo-liberalisation through the Sustainable Development Agenda: the EU-ACP trade relationship and world market expansion

Abstract

The EU suggests that it is committed to ‘sustainable development’ including through its institutionalised relationship with the states of the African, Caribbean and Pacific group in the Cotonou Partnership Agreement. This paper reviews this relationship with a view to outlining the way in which concepts like ‘sustainable development’ and ‘poverty reduction’ act as legitimation for processes of world market expansion. The paper reviews a range of interpretations of this relationship which view it either from a constructivist or material – Uneven and Combined Development – perspective. We critique these interpretations and provide an alternative materialist reading.

Keywords:

• Sustainable development
• world market
• Cotonou
• constructivism
• historical materialism

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editor Mark Langan and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments which have helped to clarify and improve the quality of the argument in the paper considerably. They would also like to thank participants at a discussion on EU–ACP relations at the ISA in 2016, especially Nicole Lindstrom, Elitsa Garnizova and Jamie Scalera for helpful discussion and comments. Remaining errors or omissions are, of course, our own.

Notes

1. EC, “A Sustainable Europe for a Better World”; “Towards a Global Partnership.”

2. Nunn and Beeckmans, “The Political Economy of Competitiveness and Continuous.”

3. Council of the European Union, “Council Conclusions on a Transformative Post-2015 Agenda”; Council of the European Union, “A New Global Partnership for Poverty Eradication and Sustainable Development After 2015”; EC, “A Decent Life for All”; “A Decent Life for All”; “A Global Partnership for Poverty Eradication and Sustainable Development.”

4. EC, “Towards a Global Partnership.”

5. EC, “A Sustainable Europe for a Better World,” 9.

6. EC, “A Global Partnership for Poverty Eradication and Sustainable Development,” 12, 10, 9; “A Decent Life for All”; “A Decent Life for All,” 1.

7. Sachs, Planet Dialectics.

8. Wanner, “The New ‘Passive Revolution’.”

9. Ibid.

10. Nunn, “Saving World Market Society from Itself?”

11. Peck, “Political Economies of Scale.”

12. Brenner, Peck, and Theodore, “Variegated Neoliberalization,” 209.

13. Nunn and Price, “Managing Development”; Hurt, “Co-Operation and Coercion?”; and Brown, “Restructuring North‐South Relations.”

14. EC, Towards a New Partnership.

15. Gomes, “Reshaping an Asymmetrical Partnership.”

16. Carbone, “Rethinking ACP-EU Relations After Cotonou.”

17. EC, “Increasing the Impact of EU Development Policy.”

18. EC, “Joint Consultation Paper,” 6.

19. Ibid.

20. Anonymised for review.

21. Pape, “An Old Partnership in a New Setting.”

22. EC, “A Global Partnership for Poverty Eradication and Sustainable Development.”

23. EC, “Economic Partnership Agreements.”

24. EC, ACP Funding Programmes.

25. Ibid.

26. Heron and Murray-Evans, “Limits to Market Power.”

27. Nunn and Beeckmans, “The Political Economy of Competitiveness and Continuous.”

28. Brenner, Peck, and Theodore, “Variegated Neoliberalization.”

29. Carbone, “Rethinking ACP-EU Relations After Cotonou,” 745.

30. Brown, “Restructuring North‐South Relations.”

31. Farrell, “A Triumph of Realism Over Idealism?”; Gomes, “Reshaping an Asymmetrical Partnership”; Hurt, “Co-operation and Coercion?”; “The EU–SADC Economic Partnership Agreement Negotiations.”

32. Hurt, “The EU–SADC Economic Partnership Agreement Negotiations”; and Langan, “Decent Work and Indecent Trade Agendas.”

33. Langan, “ACP–EU Normative Concessions from Stabex to Private Sector Development”; “A Moral Economy Approach to Africa-EU Ties”; “Decent Work and Indecent Trade Agendas.”

34. Hurt, “Co-operation and Coercion?”; “The EU–SADC Economic Partnership Agreement Negotiations.”

35. Bieler, “The EU, Global Europe, and Processes of Uneven and Combined Development”; Brown, “The World Bank, Africa and Politics”; “Debating the Year of Africa”; “Reconsidering the Aid Relationship.”

36. Farrell, “A Triumph of Realism over Idealism?”

37. Carbone, “Rethinking ACP-EU Relations After Cotonou.”

38. Langan, “Normative Power Europe and the Moral Economy of Africa–EU Ties.”

39. Carbone, “Rethinking ACP-EU Relations After Cotonou.”

40. Manners, “Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?”

41. Storey, “Normative Power Europe?”

42. Rosamond, “Three Ways of Speaking Europe to the World.”

43. Peterson and Young, The European Union and the New Trade Politics; Young and Peterson, “The EU and the New Trade Politics.”

44. Carbone, “Rethinking ACP-EU Relations After Cotonou”; and Storey, “Normative Power Europe?”

45. Langan, “Decent Work and Indecent Trade Agendas.”

46. Anonymised for review.

47. Storey, “Normative Power Europe?”

48. Langan, “Normative Power Europe and the Moral Economy of Africa–EU Ties”; “A Moral Economy Approach to Africa-EU Ties.”

49. Langan, “A Moral Economy Approach to Africa-EU Ties.”

50. Bieler, “The EU, Global Europe, and Processes of Uneven and Combined Development.”

51. Brown, “Reconsidering the Aid Relationship.”

52. Brown, “The World Bank, Africa and Politics.”

53. Anonymised for review.

54. Brown, “Debating the Year of Africa,” 17.

55. Hurt, “Co-operation and Coercion?”; “The EU–SADC Economic Partnership Agreement Negotiations”; Nunn and Price, “Managing Development.”

56. Smith, Uneven Development.

57. eg Farrell, “A Triumph of Realism over Idealism?”

58. European Commission, “Employment and Social Developments in Europe 2011.”

59. Nunn and Beeckmans, “The Political Economy of Competitiveness and Continuous.”

60. Ibid.

61. Hurt, “The EU–SADC Economic Partnership Agreement Negotiations.”

62. Charnock, Purcell, and Ribera-Fumaz, “New International Division of Labour and Differentiated Integration in Europe”; and Starosta, “Revisiting the New International Division.”

63. Rioux, “Mind the (Theoretical) Gap.”

64. Cammack, “Poverty Reduction and Universal Competitiveness”; “The UNDP and the End of Human Development”; Nunn and Beeckmans, “The Political Economy of Competitiveness and Continuous.”

65. Brenner, Peck, and Theodore, “Variegated Neoliberalization”; and Peck, Theodore, and Brenner, “Neoliberalism Resurgent?”

66. Peck, “Political Economies of Scale.”

67. Bieler, “The EU, Global Europe, and Processes of Uneven and Combined Development.”

68. Brenner, Peck, and Theodore, “Variegated Neoliberalization,” 209.

69. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (1845).