EKONOMISKT PARTNERSKAPSAVTAL & REGIONAL INTEGRATION

Abstract

The Economic Partnership Agreement between the European Union (EU) and Southern African Development Community (SADC) is a reciprocal asymmetric trade agreement in which contributes to encouraging more trade between African partners and Europe, by ensuring consistency with regional development policies and integration programmes. Previous research in this field has focused on explaining the establishment of EU’s political and economic relations with Africa or expressing EU’s views on less developed ACP-regions. Little research has been done on how EPAs has contributed to regional integration in Southern Africa from a theoretical point of view, such as regionalism and neocolonialism. This study aims to analyze how this EPA has contributed to SADC in regional integration after the implementation of the partnership agreement. The study is based on qualitative analysis of the EPA and policy documents, in which has resulted in three main findings. Firstly, both EU and SADC use similar themes when presenting and discussing their partnership. Secondly, the EU rarely mentions any disadvantages with EPA despite meeting critique. Thirdly, EPA and its contribution to the regional integration in Southern Africa seems to benefit the EU more than the SADC-region.