The Moral Economy of EU Association with Africa

Mark Langan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138797734
• eBook ISBN: 9781317631620
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Africa's association with the European Union has long been hailed as a progressive model of North-South relations. European officials, in particular, have represented the Africa-EU 'partnership' as a pro-poor enterprise in which trade interests are married to development prerogatives.

Applying a moral economy perspective, this book examines the tangible impact of Africa-Europe trade and development co-operation on citizens in developing countries. In so doing, it challenges liberal accounts of Europe's normative power to enable benevolent change in the Global South and illuminates how EU discourse acts to legitimise unequal trade ties that have regressive consequences for 'the poor'. Drawing upon the author's own fieldwork, it assesses the difference between norms and the actual impact of EU concessions in relation to:

• budget support
• aid for trade
• private sector development (PSD)
• decent work

It concludes by considering the value of a moral economy approach in the assessment of free trade structures more widely.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of Africanist IPE, European studies, and more broadly international political economy, international development, and international relations.

1 Moral economy and critical IPE ¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781315756929-1

From the beginning of ‘Association’ with overseas territories in 1957 to the African, Caribbean, and Pacific–European Union (ACP–EU) Cotonou Agreement (2000–2020), Europe has taken great care to frame trade and development relations with African states within highly ethical discourses. In so doing, it has disseminated legitimating norms and portrayed itself as a benevolent actor working in solidarity with ‘the poor’. As the Introduction noted, the fusion of development language to Europe’s trade agenda has most recently represented Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) as the vehicle for pro-poor growth. Moreover, the moral economy of EU–Africa Association under Cotonou has been bolstered by Europe’s aid concessions. EU contributions to budget support and Aid for Trade, for example, legitimise a ‘reciprocal’ free trade agenda as an opportunity to make ‘globalisation’ work for ‘the poor’. Accordingly, certain scholars state that EU aid has provided normative cover for pursuit of developmentally dubious commercial interests in Africa (Orbie 2008: 47).

This chapter examines a moral economy perspective within International Political Economy (IPE). It is understood as an approach which makes it possible to un-blur ethics and economics. With reference to contributions from Polanyi (1957), Thompson (1971), Sayer (2000; 2004; 2007), and Bernstein (2007), a moral economy approach is viewed as a critical standpoint from which to examine how economic structures are instituted in negotiation with moral norms. It is understood to facilitate assessment of how ‘moral economies’ evolve in contorted interplay between ethics and (potentially overriding) commercial and political pressures. A moral economy perspective thereby offers scope to examine discrepancies between norms and the material outcomes of economic structures. Moreover, a moral economy perspective can underscore the role of norms, when conveyed within discourse, in legitimating economic relations that may either fail to deliver, or else actively undermine, ethical objectives.

Accordingly, the chapter argues that a moral economy perspective is useful in examination of the moral economy of EU–Africa Association. A moral economy perspective facilitates assessment of the evolution of the moral economy of EU–Africa ties, as norms have been discursively reconfigured in response to institutional changes. Additionally, a moral economy perspective is understood as useful in assessment of aid concessions. It allows us to underscore how aid instruments have reupholstered the moral economy of EU–Africa Association, particularly as Europe consolidates its free market approach to ‘development’ under EPAs. A moral economy perspective is also seen to facilitate case study analysis, notably of the Ugandan cut-flower industry in Chapter 6. It allows us to contrast the discourse of EU officials with the narratives of African business stakeholders. This illustrates the strategic illusion of aid concessions, and discrepancies between ethical ‘development’ language and material outcomes.

Critical discourse analysis is then examined as the means by which a moral economy perspective can be applied to the assessment of EU–Africa Association. The chapter considers contributions from Fairclough (1989; 2003; 2005), Van Djik (2006), and Wodak (2002) and emphasises how this method underscores the ‘role of discourse in society’, and to dialectics between ethical language and social change. Critical discourse analysis is understood to recognise the role of narratives in constructing social reality and in disseminating norms. However, it is also seen to acknowledge the agency of dominant actors to reconfigure discourse in response to changing political or socio-economic interests. In this context, critical discourse analysis offers scope to examine the historical role of ‘development’ narratives in constructing Europe’s relationship with former colonies (as well as to assess the morphing of narratives in response to institutional changes). A critical discourse analysis focused on official representations of EU–Africa Association can thereby examine the role of official EU language in reupholstering the moral economy, and in ostensibly legitimising Europe’s ‘essential task’ to promote African development.

Moral economy: making sense of EU–Africa Association

Questions about the moral purposes of ‘the economy’ have long been debated within IPE and within adjacent disciplines, notably in sociology, history, and moral philosophy. Reflection upon the contribution of economic activities to the moral good of individuals and societies dates as far back to Aristotle’s examination of the ‘use values’ of the economy (O’Neill 1998: 5). Moreover, ‘political economy’ from its beginning as a coherent academic discipline has paid attention to the moral purposes of economic institutions, in terms of how they can best contribute to the well-being of societies and polities.

Significantly, however, a growing body of literature focused upon the study of moral economy has sought to provide a distinctive approach to the examination of the normative dimensions of economic structures. This endeavour is distinguished by its explicit assessment of how economic systems are instituted, and socially embedded, in negotiation with norms as to the operation, objectives, and outcomes of economic activity. Focusing upon the moral language involved in this instituting, studies of moral economy seek to assess the contorted dialectics between founding normative principles and potentially overriding power interests. In this task, studies of moral economy are critically reflexive as to the possibilities for economic agents to utilise constitutive moral norms as justifications for economic activities that enhance dominant actors’ status yet materially bear scant relation to nominal ethical objectives (Sayer 2007).

Rather than solely consider philosophical questions as to how the economy should operate, a critical moral economy perspective thereby examines how economic structures are socially constructed and then sustained through actors’ embedding of, and overture to, moral norms. In this process, a moral economy perspective investigates how shared norms of what constitutes just behaviour pervade economic systems and are discursively maintained by actors who, in many instances, seek to legitimise economic practices that fail to promote ostensible moral goals (see, for example, Arnold 2001; Bernal 1997; Bernstein 2007; Booth 1994; Bruyn 1999; Calabrese 2004; De Sardan 1999; Etzioni 1988; Fassin 2005; Goodman 2004; Lonsdale 1992; Keat 1993; Nattrass 2004; Olsen 2009; Olson and Sayer 2009;Salter and Salter 2007; Sayer 2000, 2004, 2007;Scott 1976; Thompson 1971; Velayutham and Wise 2005;).

This critical approach has been most articulately defined by Sayer (2007). He explains that the term moral economy refers both to the study of how moral norms are infused within economic structures, as well as to the object of study, that is to instituted ‘moral economies’. This definition has become widely accepted with, for example, Bernstein (2007: 2), adopting this conception of moral economy as both object of study and as a critical perspective that assesses the ‘social embeddedness of all economic institutions and practices and their moral and normative meanings to the social agents who inhabit those institutions and pursue those practices. Let’s call this “moral economy”’.

This focus upon the embedding of norms in the institutionalisation of economic structures owes much debt to Polanyi (1957). As Bernstein (2007) notes, Polanyi is one of the ‘grandparents’ of moral economy. His historical assessment of how modes of economic exchange were shaped, regulated, and confined by social norms – whether religious or cultural – has clearly informed the approach. Notably, Polanyi (1957: 54) stressed the central place of social norms in the instituting of economic relations in the pre-modern and early modern eras. For instance, with reference to European feudal societies, Polanyi (1957: 54) noted that:

All economic systems known to us up to the end of feudalism in Western Europe were organized either on the principles of reciprocity, or redistribution, or householding, or some combination of the three. These principles were institutionalized with the help of a social organization … custom, law, magic, and religion co-operated in inducing the individual to comply with rules of [economic] behaviour.

(emphasis added)

In such circumstances, the economy could be seen to be ‘embedded’ and to serve as a ‘function’ of the society in which it was ‘contained’. That is, the economy was regulated by the community’s norms – in the above case to social norms informed by ‘custom, law, magic, and religion’ (1957: 54, 71). Crucially for Polanyi, however, a ‘great transformation’ had since occurred during which traditional forms of embedded markets had been made obsolete by the emergence of modern liberal varieties of free market economies. In this great shift, dominant forms of the market had been radically transformed across Western society, leading to a situation in which the economy no longer served as an adjunct of society but had instead become ‘disembedded’ – that is, released from past constraints relating to the observance of social customs. This disembedding of the market had, for Polanyi (1957: 75), resulted in the rise of the contemporary ‘market society’ in which the norms, customs, and practices of the community had become mere adjuncts of an all-ruling market and its economic dictates. In short, modern Western society no longer stood as the true master of the economy but had become an ‘accessory of the [disembedded, free market] economic system’ (1957: 75).

Polanyi’s focus upon the institutionalisation of economic structures in negotiation with social norms clearly informs the focus of moral economy upon the constitutive role of norms in constructing, and thereafter shaping, economic systems. Notable contributions to the moral economy literature, including Sayer (2007) and Bernstein (2007), draw upon Polanyi’s insights. Following Polanyi’s concept of social embeddedness, studies of moral economy pay attention to the significance of norms in ‘settling’ ethical issues during the institutionalisation of economic structures.

Nevertheless, studies of moral economy have sought to rein back strict applications of Polanyi’s concept of disembeddedness. Rather than emphasise a divorce between free market structures and society’s norms, studies of moral economy have instead argued that moral norms are infused within all economic practices – in the words of Keat (1993: 1), that ‘every economy is a moral economy’. Accordingly, recent contributions to moral economy’ have emphasised that free market economic structures are themselves instituted in negotiation with moral norms with an eye to attaining public acceptability. For example, Booth (1994: 661) has stressed the moral dimensions of free markets and has challenged certain usages of ‘the embedded/disembedded language [which] may easily be seen as misconstruing the normative character of modernity’ (emphasis added). In this discussion, he has argued against a false dichotomy between allegedly ‘moral’ embedded, traditional economies and so-called amoral or non-moral modern, free market economies. Instead, free market economic institutions themselves have been emphasised as economic structures that contain clear normative dimensions.

This recognition of the normative dimensions of free market structures responds, in particular, to criticisms of early usages of the concept of moral economy. E. P. Thompson (1971: 78), another ‘grandparent’ of this nascent approach, introduced the term moral economy to modern academic vernacular. Thompson (1971: 98) assessed what he defined as the ‘moral economy of the poor’ as a driving force behind crowd riots that arose in opposition to the laissez-faire Corn Laws. While gifting the term moral economy, Thompson (1971: 78), however, faced criticism on the grounds that he allegedly presented the English crowds’ more traditional normative assumptions as being somehow more ‘moral’ than those of ‘amoral’ or ‘non-moral’ laissez-faire reformers. Thompson (1991: 269), in response, stressed that liberal economic practices did also contain ‘normative’ content regarding ethically acceptable parameters of economic activity. He emphasised that the shift from traditional/feudal to modern/liberal economic practice had done ‘not so much to separate morality and economics, as to adopt a particular type of morality in the interests of a particular type of economy’ (1991: 269). Namely, that laissez-faire, liberal economic systems also possessed a clear normative dimension but that their constitutive moral norms were very different to those that had been infused within traditional economic structures.

Following Thompson (1991: 269), studies of moral economy acknowledge that free market structures are instituted in negotiation with normative understandings of what constitutes moral economic behaviour. As a result, a false dichotomy between ‘moral’ traditional and ‘non-moral’ liberal systems is avoided. However, with clear parallels to Polanyi’s critique of the subordination of social norms to the dictates of the free market economy, critical studies of moral economy draw attention to the ways in which the constitutive norms of economic systems – particularly t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Moral economy and critical IPE
• 2 A normative history of EU–Africa relations
• 3 Moral economy of EU–Africa relations under Cotonou
• 4 Budget support and the moral economy of EU–Africa ties
• 5 Aid for Trade: delivering ‘pro-poor’ EPAs
• 6 Private sector development and African livelihoods
• 7 Decent work and the moral economy of EU–Africa ties
• 8 Moral economy and African agency: resisting ‘neo-colonialism’?
• Conclusion
• Index