Imperial Competitiveness: the European Union’s Legal Capture of Resource Futures in the Chile Trade Deal

When: Monday, November 24, 2025, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Where: Room 313, Third Floor, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS

This talk examines the European Union’s (EU) evolving trade and investment policies as a contemporary form of imperialism rooted in its quest for capitalist competitiveness. It argues that the EU’s relations with Chile exemplify a capitalist imperialism that extends long-standing neoliberal strategies of the EU’s competition state to secure resources and markets for EU-based capital. Focusing on the modernization of the EU–Chile Framework Agreement, it analyzes the agreement’s energy and raw materials provisions and investor protection mechanisms, showing how these legal structures constrain Chile’s sovereign development and ensure the flow of strategic resources like green hydrogen into EU supply chains. By conceptualizing the EU as a competition state, the talk reframes the EU–Chile agreement as part of a broader imperial strategy that binds Chile’s political economy to the interests of EU-based capital and consolidates future profitability under the guise of green transitions. Highlighting the imperial dimension of the EU’s internal market reveals the dialectical relationship between its internal energy politics and their externalized effects on the global South—producing uneven and often violent geographies and foreclosing democratic energy futures.

Speaker: Maria Cariola, postdoctoral fellow, Department of Food and Resource Economics (IFRO), University of Copenhagen.