ABSTRACT
The Cotonou Agreement was supposed to revamp the European Union’s (EU) relationship with developing countries in Africa, the Pacific and the Caribbean. Seven years down the line, the EU seems to be caught in a quagmire of stalled negotiations, mutual incriminations and disastrous press coverage. The negotiations over the Cotonou-mandated Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) have provoked much criticism with both developing countries and Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) berating the EU for its aggressive approach to the trade negotiations with the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries. In the eyes of some commentators, the EU is essentially trying to pry open the fragile markets of the ACP countries and reintroduce the shipwrecked World Trade Organization (WTO) ‘Singapore issues’ through the regional EPAs. In the daily press of several ACP countries, the EU is thus portrayed as a bull in a china shop, forcing defenceless ACP Trade Ministers to lower their tariffs. Headlines such as ‘EU accused of trying to introduce colonialism through EPAs’ (The Post, Zambia, 31 July 2007), and ‘Civil society warns against EPAs’ (The Post, Zambia, 3 July 2007) provide a fairly accurate description of the tone of the debate. Similar images are common in the Western NGO community. The irony should be readily apparent: the flagship Cotonou Agreement which makes the EU the world’s most important and generous development partner, is simultaneously showing the Union brutishly protecting and promoting narrow European trade and investment interests. The EU is thus widely portrayed as a mercantilist predator on the lookout for new virgin markets to devour, and the steadily growing amount of EU development assistance would appear to be completely overshadowed by the bad press created by the EPA debacle. How did this conundrum come about? Surely, the EU never entertained the current impasse as a policy objective. A number of arguments have been proposed to explain these developments, but none are particularly convincing. The EU has an obvious interest in gaining a stronger foothold in these markets and reining them in as potential allies in the broader trade negotiations. However, the spoils in terms of increased access to ACP markets would hardly justify the political costs of bullying the ACP countries around (see also Chapter 3). The
vast majority of the ACP markets are relatively insignificant for the EU, which makes the Commission’s unrelenting insistence on reciprocal market access all the more puzzling. The notion that the EU would somehow be constrained by the WTO to insist on limited deadlines for achieving reciprocity has also been thoroughly questioned (see Chapter 3 of this volume). The ‘rules’ of the multilateral trade system are open for interpretation and given the weight of the EU-ACP grouping in the WTO, it would be fair to assume that the former would be able to get away with relatively long transition phases before moving to full reciprocity. The WTO is not a straitjacket and the ‘pressure’ exerted by the organization is at most guiding the EU in a certain overall direction. The question thus remains: Why would the EU willingly be compromising its credibility as a development partner of the ACP countries for the sake of achieving some relatively insignificant trade concessions, or achieving credits for a zealous adherence to the spirit of the world trade system? In search of an answer to this question, it will be argued that an institutionalist perspective on the EU as an international actor provides a valuable understanding of the present state of affairs. In some important sense, the puzzle delineated above is a product of the preconceived notions we have of the EU as an international actor. To the extent that we assume that the EU is a relatively coherent – perhaps even rational – actor, we are rightly puzzled by what can hardly be described as anything but inconsistent behaviour. If, on the other hand, we accept that the EU is a cluster of different policy systems, the notion of incoherence or inconsistent behaviour becomes much less puzzling. The following section provides the theoretical perspective, which is inspired by historical institutionalism. Based on a brief introduction to this literature, a simplified model of the EU as a compartmentalized policy system is developed. This model is subsequently applied in an analysis of the main lines of the proposed EPAs and the ensuing negotiations with the ACP countries, the argument being that this approach makes for an analysis and understanding of the dynamic of the EPA negotiations that is both empirically relevant and thought-provoking. The fundamental ambiguity of the trade provisions of the Cotonou Agreement, and the fact that the EPA negotiations were structured and conducted by the Directorate General for Trade (DG Trade) has had a significant effect on the negotiation process and the relatively aggressive stance of the Union. In the meantime, the development arm of the EU has played ‘second fiddle’ providing too little input, too late. The final section argues that the likely consequences of the current impasse could in fact be beneficial for both parties and the EPA process. The policy compartmentalization of the EU has significantly reduced the value of the Cotonou Agreement and the EPAs, but this realization could be used to develop a new approach to the central challenge, which remains the same – namely how to encourage broad-based, trade-led economic growth in structurally disadvantaged economies that are marginal to the fiercely competitive global markets?
