par Nessel, Camille
Président du jury Kellner, Thierry
Promoteur Orbie, Jan;Crespy, Amandine
Publication Non publié, 2023-05-23
Thèse de doctorat
Résumé : The EU continues to be a formidable power through trade, concluding trade agreements with countries of the Global North and South, including with formerly colonised countries. In the context of the latter group, the EU's problematic colonial past has increasingly been recognised as influencing perceptions of the EU as a trading partner. Specific for the EU's normative trade agreements are attempts to combine economic interests with soft dialogue seeking cooperation in the field of labour and environment through specific chapters in its trade agreements. Depending on where one stands, this mechanism can be viewed as benevolent friend- or predatory foe. This research dissertation steps into this debate by analysing perceptions of the EU in the context of its trade agreements with two formerly colonised countries: Indonesia and Vietnam. For this, the project adopts a hermeneutic discourse analysis to uncloak how latent embedments of the colonial experience in Vietnam's and Indonesia's post-colonial national identities influence perceptions of trade agreement negotiations with the EU on the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (concluded in 2018) and EU-Indonesia Free Trade Agreement (continuously negotiated).For the EU's internal audience, the trade-labour-environment nexus has been a crucial legitimizing aspect for the continued pursuit of a neoliberal trade agenda. This performative narrative builds on a distinction between the EU and the Member States' past colonial ambitions. The EU now acts benevolently, i.e., the EU acts responsibly and ethically, to peacefully ensure the world's well-being and promote human rights and democracy. The EU's external audience has presented more scepticism towards the EU as a friend in its trade relations, i.e. the benevolence of the EU's trade identity. Building on memories of colonialism enshrined in their national identity, the EU's trade-labour-environment nexus has also been viewed as a foe or predatory. From the viewpoint of the trade partners, a clear-cut demarcation between past European imperial ambitions and the EU's current trade policy cannot be attested. On several occasions, doubts over the true intentions of the nexus have come to the foreground in the international arena. Whereas in the 1990s and early 2000s, disputes over the EU's benevolence took place at the World Trade Organization level, at the latest since the intensification of the climate crisis, the climate summits witnessed doubts over the EU's friendly self-image. Instead of viewing the EU as well-intentioned, countries of the global South accuse the EU of being a foe behaving in a protectionist and unfair manner. Oblivious to the counter-narrative of the EU's trade identity, the dominant trade policy debates within the EU further sustain the benevolent EU narrative, with EU policymakers seeing EU trade agreements as examples of this force for good. EU trade agreements' sustainable development chapters (TSD) ensure EU trade relations are economically beneficial to the EU and the partner countries, fostering sustainability in the environment and labour relations. In its newest narrative turn, the EU narrative placed additional focus on the EU's need to foster respect for human rights while no longer being naïve. Thus, the EU has announced that it would make the TSD chapters binding, slowly preparing for the comeback of a logic of unilateralism where the ends justify the means. However, the core of the EU's narrative for its internal audience remains untouched: the EU and its trade agreements are a force for good. Through this, EU policymakers and technocrats have given the EU trade policy a political identity and raison d’être. However, it is unlikely that meaningful trade-labour-environment cooperation will emerge if the EU's trade identity is viewed as predatory. This is even stronger as the EU uses a predominately soft mechanism in its trade agreements. Being viewed as a foe would make cooperation in this field unlikely. Against this background, a media analysis of public and state media in two former EU Member States’ colonies is conducted in this PhD dissertation. Vietnam and Indonesia were colonised by France and the Netherlands and engaged in trade negotiations with the EU. In both negotiations, conflicts over the trade-labour-environment nexus came to the fore with the EU's Member States’ past colonialism appearing as a disrupting factor. Theoretically anchored in the nationalism literature, chapter 3 shows that Vietnam's and Indonesia's national identities contain accounts of the past, present and future, which inform foreign policies. In post-colonial countries, these identities are unique because the EU's colonial history continues to live on. Through a hermeneutic discourse analysis of 1916 state (press releases, speeches of heads of state) and public media (online newspaper) articles published in a time frame between 2012-2022 focusing on the meaning attributed to social reality, I draw a complex picture of perception of the EU’s trade identity in Vietnam and Indonesia, as argued in chapter 4,. I reveal latent elements of media discourse leading to two distinct framings of the EU's trade identity. We find different framings of the EU's trade identity, as benevolent in Vietnam and predatory in Indonesia. In both cases, the EU Member States' colonial past is crucial but leads to a different framing of the EU's trade identity. In neither of the countries did TSD chapters or sustainability elements inform the trade identity framing of the EU. The EU's normative trade policy thus plays no role in legitimising the FTAs in Vietnamese and Indonesian media. I show how, in both countries, the framing of the EU results from the specific embedment of the colonial experience in national identity. Whereas Indonesia has constructed itself as a victim of colonialism, Vietnam has taken a victorious position in its national narrative. The latent embedment of colonial experiences – values, norms and social structures that transcend the individual and exercise social control on individuals – can be regarded as social facts to a culturally knowledgeable audience but invisible to other audiences. The empirical chapters (chapters 5 and 6) unpack the results for Vietnam's controlled public and state media. Following this structure analogously, chapters 7 and 8 present Indonesia's public and state media reporting. The EU is associated with past Member States' colonialism in Vietnam's and Indonesia's media landscape. Despite these common colonial associations, the empirical chapters show different perceptions of the EU's trade identity. Vietnam's media landscape frames the EU as benevolent. When unpacking this, it becomes apparent that Vietnam's benevolent framing is not a result of the EU's ethical actions but instead serves the national interest of Vietnam in lowering dependencies on China and fostering a multi-directional foreign policy. We see how Vietnam's media landscape depicts the EU-Vietnam trade agreement as contributing to this goal, in which notably Eastern and Central European countries are used to defuse a colonial image of the EU. Chapter 5 shows how Vietnam's controlled public media focuses on the agreement's economic benefits to specific sectors and national development. Vietnam's state media embeds the agreement in its national narrative; it serves as a tool to glorify the parties' efforts and bring pride to the glorious Vietnamese ethnic nation, as demonstrated in chapter 6.In Indonesia's media landscape, a more ambivalent framing of the EU oscillates between a benevolent and predatory framing of the EU's trade identity. Demonstrating Indonesia's long-standing leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement, Indonesia rejects the hypothesis that the EU aims to align economic interests and sustainable development. As a dispute over the EU's renewable energy directive II, with consequences for Indonesia's most important export product (palm oil), parallels the negotiations, the conclusion of a trade agreement is put into question. With this, the EU's identity increasingly appears predatory. However, this predatory EU's trade identity framing takes different forms in the public and state media. In the public media, EU Member States' capacity-building efforts frame the EU as benevolent, despite the palm oil dispute (chapter 7). This contrasts with the state media's framing. The government refers to the colonial history of the EU Member States to show that the EU's current trade agreements and sustainability efforts are not a new beginning but a continued neocolonial behaviour.In the comparative chapter 9, the Indonesian and Vietnamese media framing is compared. This comparison shows that the EU Member States' past colonialism has been remembered in formerly colonialised countries. Self-identity and foreign policy in both countries still depend on production patterns inherited from the colonial era, leading to the perceived necessity to conclude a trade agreement with the EU. At the same time, both countries and media outlets clearly show scepticism towards the EU's sustainable development ambitions. Nevertheless, different images emerge of the EU. Influenced by the different processing of colonialism in the national identities and issues accompanying the negotiations, perceptions of the EU as an actor in trade appear more predatory or benevolent. The concluding chapter reflects on colonialism and Eurocentrism in studying EU trade relations and trade policy. Albeit in complex and paradoxical ways, while past colonialism cannot be disentangled from the EU's trade identity, the EU is not necessarily viewed as a foe because of this colonial past. This interwoven character of the EU and colonialism in its external perception has been neglected in EU trade policy scholarship and even more so in EU politics.

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