Unreachable, inescapable: sustainable development as normative camouflage in EU–MERCOSUR trade

This article examines how sustainable development functions as a mechanism of stabilising asymmetry in North–South trade governance, using the European Union (EU)–Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) agreement as a case study. Whilst sustainability is often framed as a normative good or institutional advance, the article shows instead how it operates within EU trade policy as a form of normative camouflage: embedding ethical language into governance structures that reinforce, not transform, asymmetrical relations. Drawing on interpretivist process tracing of draft texts and 62 elite interviews, the article reconstructs how sustainability became politically indispensable for both parties whilst remaining materially unreachable for MERCOSUR under the terms of the agreement. The analysis is organised around three dimensions: purpose, examining how sustainability enabled the EU to reframe liberalisation as ethical and MERCOSUR to signal credibility to investors; process, tracing how negotiations progressively removed MERCOSUR's structural tools for sustainable development; and outcome, which demonstrates how the resulting architecture institutionalises export‐led, dependent extractivism. The article contributes to critical political economy debates by showing how sustainability discourse stabilises rather than overcomes ecologically unequal exchange and hierarchical development pathways.