Brussels’s burden complicates the politics of knowledge on the preferential trade relations between the European Union (EU) and the global souths by mounting a decolonial critique. To this end, this book explicates how scholarly, historical and political discourses constitute the global souths within interpretive frameworks of normative global governance, interdependent economic relations, and international partnerships. As a counterpoint to these dominant discourses, my research contends that Eurocentric, hierarchical and interventionist logics permeate such discourses that in turn reproduce what Aníbal Quijano theorises as coloniality or the persistence of colonial/modern modes of ordering the world despite the formal end of European colonialism.

In advancing these claims, I mobilised interpretive methods to elucidate the (inter-)subjective relations within the community of interpreters responsible for knowing, producing, and (re)regulating EU trade policy. I relied on extensive archival research, document analysis, and 65 semi-structured interviews with policy elites during my fieldwork in Brussels from October 2021 to September 2022.

This interdisciplinary research contributes to global political economy and European studies in three ways. First, it empirically advances the nascent interpretive scholarship on EU trade policy outside positivist approaches. Second, it wrestles with normative assumptions about EU trade policy as a well-intentioned act of partnership with the global souths by engaging with decolonial thought to unmask how trade encounters continue to be colonially configured today. Last but not least, it challenges existing critical approaches for their refusal or inability to critique the coloniality of EU trade policy.

In doing so, Brussels’s burden generates a counter-Eurocentric account of the EU as a global trade power. It coheres with the goals of ISRF to promote new modes of social and political inquiry by taking seriously decolonial and interpretive ways of knowing. These alternative knowledges render more legible how the EU perpetuates colonial/modern relations through trade in world politics.