European Union

The EU's trade chief travelled to China to send a clear message: the EU does not want to cut off ties, but fair competition is needed and more action is necessary to rebalance the current Brussels-Beijing €400bn trade deficit.

What can critical and postcolonial European Studies scholars learn from W.E.B. Du Bois’ sociological thought? And how can this contribute to the agenda of  ‘decolonising’ Europe? A UACES Microgrant report on the 53rd Annual European Studies Conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

A UACES Microgrant report by Joshua M. Makalintal.

 

 

Critical European Studies has gained some ground, particularly at the recent UACES Annual Conference that took place at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland earlier this month. Uniting 11 panels and over 30 contributions under the themed track entitled ‘(En)countering Europe as Global, Othered and Transperipheral Voices’ (EUROGLOT), this year’s event enabled a space to elevate pressing issues and critical works that have mostly been and are still usually marginalised within the field. The contributions under this themed track engaged in questions of how to approach Europe and its various historical legacies as well as its encounters with the broader social world.

For the EUROGLOT panel on ‘Theorising Europe, Otherwise’, I took the opportunity to present my working paper reassessing W.E.B. Du Bois’ immanent critique of Europe and empire. This paper forms part of a more comprehensive theoretical research project of mine that aims to reconstruct his ideology-critical and anti-disciplinary sociological work. My contribution in this context foregrounded an attempt to intervene in critical and postcolonial European Studies.

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was an Afro-American historian, sociologist, and a leading figure of the US civil rights and pan-African movements. While substantial debates within the social sciences have erupted intensively in recent years regarding Du Bois’ place in the classical canon, his disruptive scholarship has yet to be acknowledged in other disciplines. Indeed, Du Bois’ critique of European imperialism remains undervalued in both mainstream and critical European Studies; however, as I have argued in Belfast, his anti-imperial thought may offer us a vast array of crucial resources in problematising the myths that persist within contemporary imaginaries of the European project’s history and modern trajectory. This would consequently pave an alternative pathway towards more radical and reflexive understandings of modern Europe struggling to account for its colonial pasts.

For instance, I highlighted a key concept coined by Du Bois — the notion of the colour line, which depicted the global racialised structure of his era that had governed societal relations and practices, thus producing multiple patterns of subjugation, and in turn, various forms of resistance. Using the colour line as an analytical anchor and ideological resource, Du Bois reiterated an immanent critique of European subjugation — a domination “through political power built on the economic control of labour, income and ideas”, as he wrote in 1946. Excavating the inherent contradictions within such domineering practices, Du Bois underlined how these dynamic antagonisms would stimulate the critical consciousness necessary to trigger practical opportunities for resistance and social transformation.

Du Bois has long been one of the social sciences’ marginalised voices, and rectifying this epistemic neglect entails proactively recuperating his subversive scholarship. Reclaiming and re-applying his critical thought and practice in this sense would no doubt contribute to the project of ‘decolonising’ Europe by innovatively enabling us to uncover patterns of domination and forms of injustices that are otherwise unobtrusive. By further enriching critical European Studies scholarship through various transdisciplinary (and anti-disciplinary) perspectives, coupled with the aim of subverting the epistemic hegemonies that persist within the field, we as scholars would undoubtedly be better equipped to assess the current European societal conjuncture — prone to failures, crises, and various antagonisms. This entails confronting these contradictions, compelling us to understand their immanent inevitability and consequently prevail over them, thus further stretching the space for effective interventions in the broader social world.

I was able to share these insights at the 53rd Annual European Studies Conference in part thanks to the UACES Microgrant. I am grateful for the fact that there are academic associations that are determined to financially support students and scholars of all levels in their research pursuits. My participation in this conference provided me not only with valuable feedback, but also inspiration from the other panels that would certainly further broaden my knowledge in the rich interdisciplinary field of European Studies scholarship. I am also grateful to my fellow panellists as well as to the impressively attentive audience for the insightful discussions. It was great to be part of an important and long-overdue conversation on studying, theorising, and critiquing Europe otherwise, especially in such a compelling academic setting.

 

 

The post Theorising Europe from the Margins: A Reappraisal of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Critical Thought appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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Still not very far away

We’re at a bit of a junction in EU-UK relations right now.

Having bumped back from the questions of good faith with February’s Windsor Framework, the two sides got to work on the next obvious target: Horizon membership.

Seven months later – and with enough discretion that I could record a podcast saying it wasn’t coming soon, two days before it came – we got a deal.

And now?

Well, now we appear to have slipped into a gap of some kind.

Certainly, there are things that need attention right now, like car batteries, but despite pressure on both sides to rework tariff schedules, the Commission seems not to want to play ball. On the UK side, joining the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean (PEM) Convention also looks a bit distant.

Outside the narrow confines of the Trade & Cooperation Agreement (TCA), the UK is also still working out how it handles the European Political Community (EPC) summit it’s supposed to host next summer (dates and location still TBC).

In short, there’s not much sign of things going on. Which is either because those things that are going on are being kept very far from the limelight, or because there aren’t things going on.

To be clear, there is a baseline of on-going contact and interaction, to service the various agreements, but that’s rather different from substantive work on opening out new areas.

If we assume that an absence of public comment is the best marker of in-camera activity, then Breton’s statement on car batteries looks like a signifier of inactivity, or impasse. And that’s for the most obvious next step in working together.

Which takes us back round to my title: are we in a holding pattern right now, and if so, what kind of holding pattern is it?

As I’ve argued before, Sunak has approached EU relations through a strong lens of his domestic political situation. Windsor made sense as a closing-off of an obvious problem (plus a clear differentiation from his predecessor but one), and Horizon was self-contained enough to be worth the effort, but getting into bigger resets looks like a hiding to nothing, either with his backbench or with voters that increasingly don’t rate the matter as that important.

So the British government is arguably in a fire-fighting mode for the rest of this administration.

But what about the EU?

Domestic factors obviously apply here too. We’re on the run-in to European elections next spring – witness Von Der Leyen’s State of the EU speech last week, with all its pitch – which means lots of people changing jobs, even if the underlying political balance doesn’t move very much.

Add to that all the other things the EU is concerned with, from rule of law to enlargement to post-Covid reconstruction, and it might be understandable if attention is elsewhere than the UK.

But at the same time, the Union has held a long-term position of deepening ties with its neighbourhood, especially with those bits of it that aren’t actively antagonistic. That’s an uneven track, but as a rule of thumb, there’s a clear preference to doing more together.

Perhaps the current hiatus is a temporary thing, a product of everyone waiting to clear the coming election year on both sides, so that everyone can pick up in late 2024 with a clearer sense of what’s what.

However, Windsor shouldn’t leave us thinking that we’re back to regular business. The scars of the Internal Market Bill and the Retained EU Law Bill and the noises off about ECHR membership are still there and still fresh in the minds of EU policymakers.

Even if there is a change of party in London next year, that will still leave issues.

Firstly, Labour have put so many fences around policy that there might not be scope for doing much. With dynamic alignment apparently also off the table, some in Brussels might be forgiven for thinking that a full and frank discussion in the UK of trade-offs might not be about to happen.

Secondly, even if Labour are willing to conclude new deals, then at least half an eye will be on the trajectory of the Conservatives in opposition. With the possible sole exception of Michael Heseltine, the general view is that the party will drift right under new leadership, given its membership. While that might make a second Labour term more likely, the past seven years will give enough pause for thought about What Britain’s Like. Is there risk in setting up more entanglements with Labour, if a returning Tory government is going to tear things up again?

Such views are understandable, but also come with the risk of setting up a new stasis.

As a case in point, look to Switzerland.

Here we have a much closer relationship, but one with significant issues, both political and institutional. Both sides bump along, sometimes making progress, but often not: we’re nearing a decade of to-and-fro on an institutional accord that still has no clear endpoint, even if the Swiss are moving once again to get things going.

In both the Swiss and the British case, the EU has arrangements that function acceptably, even if other opportunities are left on the table, so if there are more pressing issues to work on, why not just leave things as they are, on a semi-permanent basis?

The EU’s built up a lot of experience and expertise in handling crises (you can read about this is in a couple of volumes (here and here) that I’ve contributed to), but we’re not in a crisis any more.

Regular governance doesn’t have the glamour of an emergency situation, but it still requires attention and effort. Not least because several of the crises the EU has faced have come out of the failings of that regular governance: Brexit is a case in point.

As a recovering historical institutionalist, I’ll end by noting that institutions are sticky: the arrangement you put in place in a hurry because you had to often end up sticking around for a very long time, even when they don’t really work so well. Again, the Swiss model is a good example.

Whether the UK is now locked into the TCA model remains to be seen, but the next year will give us a pretty good idea.

The post Pausing, stalling or stuck? Thinking about the next steps of the EU-UK relationship appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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Committee and political group meetings, Brussels

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

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Committee on Foreign Affairs
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Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

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Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

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Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP

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AMENDMENTS 1 - 233 - Draft report Implementation of the Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument – Global Europe
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Committee on Development
Michael Gahler, Pedro Marques, Charles Goerens, Tomas Tobé

Source : © European Union, 2023 - EP