Introduction: Fair Trade and the ‘Alternative Milieu’

In the early 1990s the Association for the Advancement of the Partnership with the Third World (Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Partnerschaft mit der Dritten Welt; GEPA) – Germany's leading import organisation for fair trade products – discussed new strategies aimed at expanding their range of customers. To this end, it decided to cooperate with several consulting agencies to evaluate their work and sketch out new business opportunities. This was a surprising step, considering the well-established scepticism towards marketing and advertising within the German fair trade movement.Footnote ¹ In the subsequent months, these agencies sketched plans for new marketing techniques, a professionalisation of world shops and the creation of a shared corporate identity.

The most important goal, it was argued, was to arrive at a more precise definition of the GEPA's target group. As the authors of the study argued, fair trade had thus far almost exclusively reached members of the so-called ‘alternative milieu’, a relatively small group of mostly left-leaning members of the middle classes of which many had participated in the political struggles of the 1960s.Footnote ² As the authors acknowledged, the GEPA directly corresponded to this milieu's ‘goals in life, their lifestyles, and their attitudes towards work, family and partnership’.Footnote ³ But if fair trade aimed at expanding its consumer constituency, it had to reach out to other segments of the German population, in particular to those members of the affluent middle classes who did not identify themselves with the legacy of ‘1968’. To reach these new consumers, fair trade would have to create a ‘corporate identity’ that also spoke to this more conservative milieu, for example by emphasising the individual character and high quality of their products that set them apart from mass consumer products.Footnote ⁴

As these considerations and decisions show, the processes of market integration and fair trade certification of the early 1990s did not only consist in the integration of fair trade products into supermarkets and other commercial shops but also gave momentum to a process of modernisation and professionalisation of the world shops and import organisations themselves.Footnote ⁵ In the context of this forum, these developments refer to three broader dimensions of the relationship between fair trade and ‘1968’: first, it shows that by the early 1990s it had become almost unquestioned that fair trade was a project of the ‘alternative milieu’, and especially members of the 1960s student movement. Second, the future plans show that even though fair trade was perceived as a project of this particular milieu, it was also seen as a consumer lifestyle that could potentially be shared by other segments of the German population – especially by large parts of the upper and middle classes. Third, the consulting agency's advice to frame the products as cultural objects and antipodes to mass consumer products demonstrates that it was precisely its anti-consumerist impulse that made fair trade so attractive for a broad range of new consumers. A critique of consumer society had become an asset of fair trade as a genuine consumer segment of its own.

In reality, the underlying assumption that fair trade was a project of the ‘1968’ student movement is, to some extent, a misperception. Especially at the beginning of the fair trade initiative, church members and church organisations had played a much more important role than left-wing students and activists. It was only in the late 1970s and 1980s that members of the ‘alternative milieu’ began to dominate the fair trade movement – but even then they were not able to claim full authority over the movement, requiring them to negotiate with the church-based institutions that remained the key financial sponsors.Footnote ⁶ These left-wing activists pushed hardest for the politicisation of fair trade and the attempt to use consumer products as a means of political protest. So even though church based groups and institutions remained important in the 1980s and 1990s, they were, by and large, less visible within the political and conceptual debates.

It is thus not surprising that the consulting agencies’ recommendations and the conclusions drawn therefrom by the GEPA proved highly controversial within the movement. The ambivalence between radical criticism of consumer society on the one hand and the emergence of an ‘alternative’ consumer lifestyle on the other constituted a central line of division between different groups of fair trade activists. This was particularly true in Germany, where the critique of mass consumerism played a pivotal role within the movement – much more so than in the United Kingdom where these debates were less important. More generally, this simultaneity of a critique of consumerism and the emergence of a genuine lifestyle of ‘alternative’ consumption corresponds to the ambiguous relationship between ‘1968’ and consumerism. While some scholars have emphasised the importance of a critique of mass consumerism as part of an anti-capitalist consensus of the 1960s student movements, others have stressed the fact that the ‘68ers’ were deeply influenced by modern consumer lifestyles and have argued that the cultural criticism of the 1960s was often easily integrated or merged with new consumer patterns.Footnote ⁷

In this article I argue that fair trade corresponds to both of these ‘legacies of 1968’. On the one hand, fair trade activists strongly emphasised attempts to criticise global terms of trade and Western consumer patterns. A central aim of the fair trade initiative was to illustrate the global consequences of individual consumer decisions. On the other hand, the fair trade concept relied on a new interpretation of consumer items as socially and politically meaningful objects. This also referred to a new generation of consumers who had learned to navigate through modern consumer society and were thus able to speak and understand the ‘language of consumption’. The profound changes in wealth and family income throughout these decades were a basis for this transformation, giving private consumers more leeway to pursue and demand values in consumer products other than price, quality and longevity.Footnote ⁸ The article emphasises this ambivalent development by concentrating on how the fair trade movement linked its products to political and moral discourses. As I will argue, fair trade activists often tried to downplay the consumer dimension of their products, presenting them instead as political objects and educational devices. By looking at the material culture of fair trade, my aim is to argue against an unduly simplistic interpretation that contrasts a political model of fair trade in the 1970s to its commercialisation in the late 1980s and early 1990s.Footnote ⁹ Instead, I argue that the tension between a critique of consumerism and its transformation into a style of consumption was inscribed into the movement from the beginning and remained a contested topic in the subsequent decades.Footnote ¹⁰

The article is divided into four parts: First, it refers to competing interpretations of the relationship between ‘1968’ and consumer society and relates this research to the conceptual debates of fair trade activists in Germany. The next sections focus on three different strategies of presenting fair trade products to an audience of alternative consumers: first the attempt to use the products as political objects aimed at a radical criticism of global economic structures, second the attempt to use the products to educate consumers about their everyday consumer decisions and third the attempt to hold fast to a critical account of consumption in the context of the mail-order catalogues that the GEPA distributed in the early 1990s.

‘1968’, Consumer Society and the Early Concepts of the Fair Trade Movement

The political debates of the 1960s were closely connected to a left-wing critique of capitalism and mass consumer society.Footnote ¹¹ In Germany, it was not only the Frankfurt School that voiced a radical critique of mass consumption but also a younger generation of scholars and intellectuals who based their arguments on Marxist and psychoanalytical concepts,Footnote ¹² as well as conservative philosophers such as Arnold Gehlen and Hans Freyer.Footnote ¹³ Even though consumption critique (Konsumkritik) has a particularly strong tradition in Germany,Footnote ¹⁴ it was essentially a transnational phenomenon. In France, Jean Baudrillard's Consumer Society (La Société de Consommation) was published in 1970, arguing that consumption had come to dominate the whole sphere of public and individual life.Footnote ¹⁵ In the United Kingdom, ‘affluence’ became a buzz word with which critics from a diverse intellectual background – the mainstream Labour Party, the new left, and intellectuals from cultural studies – interpreted the development of mass consumer society within a critical framework.Footnote ¹⁶ In the United States, works by John K. Galbraith, Vance Packard and others, as well as new forms of consumer activism, became influential as early as the late 1950s.Footnote ¹⁷ Besides academic discourse, alternative lifestyles became an important aspect of youth groups and subcultures such as hippies, provos and gammler, who experimented with new ideas about simpler lifestyles and a new definition of ‘quality of life’ in contrast to a Fordist concept of ‘living standard’.Footnote ¹⁸

In contrast to these well-known aspects of 1960s political discourse scholars have also emphasised that the ‘68ers’ were at the same time a particularly active consumer generation that helped to establish new consumer patterns and practices. Some twenty years ago Eric Hobsbawm already pointed to the paradox that ‘the rebels against the conventions and restrictions shared the assumptions on which mass consumer society was built’. For him, it was ‘a world of self-regarding individualism pushed to its limits’ that constituted the most enduring legacy of the cultural conflicts of the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁹ More recently Frank Trentmann argued in a similar vein that ‘1968 appears in the story of consumption as a climax rather than a sharp break, let alone a revolution’.Footnote ²⁰ Even though small groups denounced consumption of ‘planting artificial needs’, for the most part ‘consumer culture and radical culture lived together openly’, while the ‘potential of such affinities’, as Trentmann argues, ‘was not lost on business’.Footnote ²¹ In the same vein, Stephan Malinowski and Alexander Sedlmaier have even interpreted ‘1968’ as a ‘catalyst for consumer society’.Footnote ²² While Malinowski and Sedlmaier understand this development as a paradoxical side effect of ‘1968’ and its subsequent ‘commodification of dissent’,Footnote ²³ Thomas Frank and Detlef Siegfried have convincingly argued that 1960s protest movements were from the outset defined by a close relationship to consumer cultures and consumer lifestyles.Footnote ²⁴

The fair trade initiative was shaped by the very same ambivalence. While it referred to the intellectual debates that condemned modern consumerism, it was at the same time an integral part of the changing consumer patterns in West Germany since the 1950s. It criticised global terms of trade and the emerging post-war economy, but it simultaneously relied on trade agreements and technological innovations that made international trade cheaper and easier.Footnote ²⁵ The same is true for the products that fair trade activists sold: it is no coincidence that the most successful fair trade products were often those that had also symbolised the first experiences of post-war affluence, like coffee and chocolate. But fair trade was also successful in selling handicrafts, which catered for the demand for products that were made by hand and not part of standardised industrial production. Finally, the ‘world shops’ themselves need to be understood within these transformations. Consumers perceived them as an ‘alternative’ to conventional shops only because they were established during the time in which most German supermarkets had introduced self-service. The ‘world shops’, in contrast, put a strong emphasis on customer service and personal conversations which partly responded to a widespread nostalgia for traditional German corner shops.Footnote ²⁶ In all these cases, fair trade can be interpreted both as a critique of modern consumerism and as an integral part of it.

Fair trade evolved in Germany around 1970. It took up earlier developments in the Netherlands and used mainly handicrafts produced in the global south to accompany political protests about development politics. These campaigns were led by church based youth groups and supported by the Catholic and Protestant charity organisations, Misereor and Brot für die Welt. These campaigns were therefore not a direct offspring of the 1960s student movements, even though many of these activists became involved during the 1970s. The first ‘world shops’ were opened in 1973. Two years later, a group of these shops founded an umbrella organisation.Footnote ²⁷ The ‘world shop’ became the most important sales outlet for fair trade products in Germany. They were meant to sell only fair trade products and were managed independently by small groups of volunteers. In the beginning, these shops often opened in churches or community centres, but later often moved into commercial spaces. ‘World shops’ had much in common with British charity shops, but they did not sell any second-hand items or other charity gifts.

In 1975 the GEPA was founded, which became the largest import organisation for fair trade products in Germany. Its sales rose steadily from 1.5 million deutschmarks in 1974–5 to 7 million in 1979–80, and 18 million in 1989–90.Footnote ²⁸ Within the conceptual debates of the German fair trade movement, the GEPA regularly argued for an increase in sales volumes while the ‘world shops’ tended to emphasise the political and educational dimension of the campaigns. This regularly led to controversies between the GEPA and the world shops. The key question was whether fair trade should aim to become a real alternative to conventional trade and therefore focus on increasing sales and market shares, or if it only constituted a ‘symbolic’ critique of global trade and should therefore focus on its political campaigns.

The conceptual debates during the first years of the fair trade movement exemplify this tension. While the campaigns stemmed from a critique of global terms of trade and consumption, they also emphasised a market based approach in opposition to charity and development aid projects. In the first theoretical paper on fair trade in Germany, written in 1970, Ernst-Erwin Pioch reflected upon the possibilities and limitations of an ‘alternative’ trade with the ‘third world’ as a campaign model. On the one hand, his ideas were embedded into a critique of global terms of trade and Western consumer patterns. As he argued, the central aim of an ‘alternative third world trade campaign’ was to criticise ‘unjust global terms of trade’ and to educate Western consumers on the destructive consequences of their consumer practices.Footnote ²⁹ On the other hand, however, the very same consumer society became an argument for the possibilities and the practicability of the fair trade approach. As Pioch argued, ‘department stores and mail-order catalogues have shown that there is a genuine interest for handicrafts from the third world on our markets’. It was hence a worthwhile target to help cooperatives from the ‘third world’ to ‘produce in line with the European market’. The task of fair-trade-organisations, he argued, was to ‘sell these products in line with the market.Footnote ³⁰

The same tension can be found in Gerd Nickoleit's ‘Development of Underdevelopment’, which soon became a key text for the whole movement. Nickoleit also referred to the dual character of the ‘third world trade campaign’ which, on the one hand, constituted a symbolic critique of capitalism, and on the other hand an attempt to create an alternative and more just trade system. As Nickoleit argued, ‘the third world trade campaign does not claim to be able to replace the capitalist trading system by a more just one’. But as a business model that does not strive for financial profit, it would ‘necessarily call capitalism into question’.Footnote ³¹ For Nickoleit, the objective of the campaign was primarily an educational one. As he argued, most people already knew a lot about living conditions and poverty in third world countries. The main problem was that they failed to connect this knowledge to their own way of life. Consciousness regarding the economic situation of the ‘third world’, he argued, must begin ‘exactly where our consumer patterns, our economic interests, our political affiliations are called into question because they hinder the development of the third world’. Such information would necessarily raise resistance, and for Nickoleit it was precisely in this context that consumption became an important means of communication: ‘to bring the European consumer-citizen closer to this unpleasant truth, we need an “initiating device”. We use the drive to consume for this purpose.’Footnote ³² Exotic handicrafts and other products were meant to trigger interest so that consumers themselves would begin to ask questions about the products and the people that had made them. For Nickoleit, consumer society thus had a double dimension. On the one hand, it was a key aspect of the economic injustices that the fair trade movement had set out to criticise; on the other hand, a presumed ‘natural’ inclination to consume became a means to communicate this criticism and to start an individual process of reflection upon global trade inequalities.Footnote ³³

Other papers highlighted similar arguments, showing that activists were often undecided on how to evaluate the role of markets and consumer society.Footnote ³⁴ While most activists argued that the primary goal of the campaign was to raise awareness for global economic inequalities and to criticise the ‘development of underdevelopment’ inscribed into the structures of global trade, they concurrently referred to a rather optimistic interpretation of the transformative potentials of free markets in which individual consumers could use their money to change social and economic structures.Footnote ³⁵ As I will argue in the following section, this tension was also inscribed into the fair trade products themselves. For activists, it was crucial to underscore that the products were not primarily consumer items but rather political objects or educational devices. The consumer dimension of fair trade was therefore often negated or at least downplayed. To consume differently did not only mean to consume different products, but also to consume those products differently – i.e., in recognition of their modes of production, the living conditions of the people that had produced them and the political problems of global trade.

Consumer Products as Political Objects: The ‘Alu-Schok’ Campaign, 1973–1975

A central aim of the early fair trade movement was to inform consumers about global terms of trade and modes of production. Fair trade activists tried to transform simple consumer items into signifiers of a particular political discourse.Footnote ³⁶ But this transformation did not occur automatically. The political dimension of the products had to be communicated within a broader media context, for example through leaflets, posters and flyers that were distributed to customers along with the products, as well as through social practices that customers were requested to perform in addition to the purchase of the products, like writing letters to MPs and ministers or talking to the managers of their local supermarkets about including fair trade products to their product range. Broadly speaking, there were two approaches to connecting fair trade products to moral and political discourses: first, they were meant to trigger political campaigns. Second, they aimed at transforming individual lifestyles and consumer choices. Even though both dimensions cannot be neatly separated, the question whether fair trade campaigns were meant to constitute an explicitly political critique or rather aimed at a moralisation of lifestyles was an important argument in contemporary debates.

In Germany, a typical example of the first approach was the so-called ‘Alu-Schok’ campaign.Footnote ³⁷ The campaign had a lot in common with the ‘Cane Sugar Campaign’ that was initiated in the Netherlands in 1970,Footnote ³⁸ as well as with the Instant Coffee Campaign from 1973–4.Footnote ³⁹ The name ‘Alu-Schok’ referred to aluminium and chocolate, or, more precisely, cocoa and bauxite as the raw materials for these products. The campaign tried to call attention to the global trade agreements and economic structures that were connected to these two primary products. Much like the Dutch campaign, it tried to use a consumer product to criticise EEC tariffs and subsidies, calling for better market access for developing countries.Footnote ⁴⁰ At first sight, these arguments had a lot in common with liberal concepts of free markets and economic globalisation.Footnote ⁴¹ In the case of the ‘Alu-Schok’ campaign, this connection was particularly obvious as the organisers explicitly referred to the GATT negotiations that were taking place at the same time in Tokyo.Footnote ⁴² Although development economists of the 1960s and 1970s had generally called for both better market access for the countries of the global south and accompanying measures to safeguard their developing industries, the latter argument was not picked up in the ‘Alu-Schok’ campaign leaflets.Footnote ⁴³

In this article, I am not primarily interested in the organisational development and the detailed unfolding of the arguments of the campaign.Footnote ⁴⁴ Instead, I want to call attention to the way the campaign made use of consumer products to communicate its arguments. Its main idea was to convert the chocolate itself – and the aluminium foil it was wrapped in – into a political object. An everyday item was thereby turned into a means of political protest, partly replacing the leaflet as the traditional medium of protest. To be sure, the campaign continued to use flyers and other means of protest, but the chocolate bar itself contained all the necessary information. By reading the text on the chocolate bar, the consumer learned that the European tariff for raw cocoa was at a mere 4 per cent, while the tariff increased to as much as 27 per cent once the raw product was processed into cocoa butter or other products.Footnote ⁴⁵ A similar argument was made in the case of bauxite. In the final paragraph, the authors concluded: ‘our tariff policy robs the developing countries of their chance to process their raw products by themselves and thereby confine the threat of unemployment’. As a consequence, the authors argued: ‘we must reduce our tariffs to grant developing countries new and fair terms of trade’.Footnote ⁴⁶

Even though the chocolate itself was meant to convey all this information to the consumer, activists put a lot of effort into the political campaign that accompanied the sale of the products. They printed one million flyers, 15,000 brochures and 5,000 posters. They also cooperated with a research institute to gather information about tariffs and other important aspects of the trade with cocoa and bauxite. Nevertheless, consumer reactions were mixed. Even though the organisers claimed that the campaign constituted a good example of how to exemplify global trade with the help of an everyday product, experiences on the ground were not always as enthusiastic. Activists reported that most consumers knew very little about development politics and the situation in the ‘third world’. In their sales conversations, they were regularly confronted with stereotypes about corruption and the misuse of development aid. As one group argued, especially older customers often still relied on ‘knowledge from their school instruction during the German Empire’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Other activists were asked if they were communists. They concluded that it was futile to try to persuade people with ‘highly politicised arguments’.Footnote ⁴⁸

These disappointments notwithstanding, the ‘Alu-Schok’ campaign introduced a new way to link everyday consumption to political protest. It used the act of consumption to transform questions of global trade into an individual consumer decision. Moreover, the campaigns tried to generate additional activities beyond the mere act of consumption, such as talking to shop owners or sending a postcard to the federal government. Put into connection to a ‘legacy of 1968’, the ‘Alu-Schok’ campaign partly referred to a concept of symbolic political protest and thus shared key characteristics with the protest strategies of the 1960s student movements. On the surface, it also shared its critical view on capitalism, global trade and Western consumerism. Nevertheless, it did not constitute a clear-cut rejection of market society or consumption as such, but rather an attempt to point to alternatives within the framework of capitalist societies. Some arguments even referred to very traditional views on global economic development – for example concerning the influence of consumers and the positive effects of market access for developing countries.

The approach of singling out and politicising consumer items remained important in future campaigns. The so-called ‘Nicaragua-Kaffee’ was a case in point. Nicaraguan coffee became the single most important product of the German fair trade initiative in the 1980s, both in terms of sales volumes and through the iconic status the product acquired within the fair trade movement and the ‘alternative milieu’. The example is different from the ‘Alu-Schok’ campaign because it was linked to a solidarity movement with the Nicaraguan revolution that emerged independently from fair trade activism. It was therefore much easier for activists to attach a political dimension to the product. At the same time, the example also shows that an explicitly political approach remained contentious within the fair trade movement. The product wrapping of the Nicaraguan coffee was again used as the medium to articulate a political view and to transform the act of consumption into an act of political solidarity. However, it was exactly this explicit politicisation that turned many church based activists and institutions against the campaign. Consequently, the dispute about the text on the coffee package turned into one of the fiercest debates between different groups of fair trade activists. In its original version, the text had described the positive developments in Nicaragua after the revolution and argued that the ‘US government’ used ‘military, political, economic and media-related means to bring down the Nicaraguan model’.Footnote ⁴⁹ But when news about human rights violations and the rights of ethnic minorities became more widespread in the mid-1980s, the campaign was criticised by some as too one-sided. In 1985 the Catholic charity organisation Misereor heavily criticised the wording on the coffee wrapping and demanded a more balanced text. In its new version, the text no longer referred to the United States but instead the geopolitical context of the Cold War, and also mentioned human rights violations in Nicaragua itself. Eventually, this dispute resulted in an independent import of coffee from Nicaragua by a group of world shops and organisations that created the so-called ‘Sandino-Dröhung’ that adhered to a more radical interpretation of the situation in Nicaragua. As Ruben Quaas has argued, this dispute can be interpreted as a symbolic battle between the different factions of the fair trade movement which did not only concern the varying political interpretations but also the symbolic value they ascribed to the products they imported and sold.Footnote ⁵⁰

Reflecting Lifestyles Through Consumer Items

Politicisation was only one possible option. A second approach tried to use fair trade products to initiate a transformation of individual lifestyles. While the political approach described in the previous section can be traced back to a tradition of anti-capitalist ideas of the 1960s protest movements, this educational approach partly mirrored the emphasis on individual lifestyles and a transformation of private lives as another legacy of ‘1968’. Alternative consumer patterns are therefore a key example for the transformation of the political movements of the 1960s into lifestyles that were shared by the so-called ‘alternative milieu’ during the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ⁵¹ While political statements became less important in these cases, the basic challenge for fair trade activists remained largely the same: again, it was paramount to present the products not as consumer items, but as educational devices that were used to educate consumer about global terms of trade, production and consumption.

To do so, three strategies of embedding the products into a broader moral and political discourse were important. First of all, the materials that the GEPA distributed along with the products highlighted and explained the fair trade concept itself. The material accompanying primary products such as coffee tea, and sugar all contained general information about the GEPA and explained its goal to ‘support the economic and social development of its project partners’ through higher prices and other forms of support.Footnote ⁵² As the flyers further outlined, fair trade aimed at ‘furthering the awareness for global economic discrepancies and development politics within the German population’.Footnote ⁵³ One example for this approach was the fact that all flyers comprised a detailed calculation of the price of the products. Consumers could thereby reconstruct how much money went each to the producers, the costs of transport and packaging, the expenses of the GEPA itself and the percentages of taxes and tariffs. In part, this is reminiscent of the ‘Alu-Schok’ campaign and its detailed delineation of European tariffs. But in this case, the reference to taxes and tariffs was not used as a political strategy to criticise European economic policies (in the case of coffee, for example, tariffs made up only 2.48 per cent of the final price). Instead, it primarily aimed at rendering prices more transparent to consumers, thereby educating them on price structures of globally traded goods.Footnote ⁵⁴

Secondly, detailed information about the products themselves and the producer cooperatives was of paramount importance. In the case of honey, for example, the flyer described the special taste and quality of the product, as well as the southern Mexican region from which the products stemmed. It also emphasised that the honey was produced without the use of pesticides.Footnote ⁵⁵ More important, though, was a detailed description of the local cooperative and the economic framework into which the production was embedded.Footnote ⁵⁶ As the author of the flyer argued, the population of Chiapas was the victim of a failed national economic policy. The region had massively increased its cultivation of agrarian products for the domestic market. As a result, large areas such as the Lacandona rainforest whence the honey stemmed were in the process of being destroyed, and especially the indigenous populations had come under immense pressure from incoming settlers and companies. Since honey was one of the few products that generated additional income for the small-scale subsistence farmers, the GEPA supported the Sociedad Cooperativa de Apicultores de la Selva Lacandona, a cooperative that had been founded in 1979 to sell the honey independent from commercial traders and intermediaries. As the leaflet outlined, the GEPA paid 70–80 per cent above the official market price and thereby supported the social development of the cooperative by providing health care and other services.Footnote ⁵⁷

Describing the producer cooperatives and their social and economic contexts in such detail had a twofold effect. First, it showed consumers that buying the product had a tangible impact in terms of development politics. This mirrored similar strategies by charity organisations during the same period.Footnote ⁵⁸ Second, the aim was to use a concrete example to illustrate the interconnectedness of national politics, global economic structures, individual consumer practices and the private lives and livelihoods of local farmers, thereby delineating a morality of ‘glocalisation’ that was a focal point of the whole fair trade approach.Footnote ⁵⁹ This points to the third aspect that was crucial for the moral framing of the products, namely the demand to reflect upon one's own consumer choices. This aspect was particularly important for the books that the GEPA co-published about many of their products such as coffee, bananas, rice, honey and spices.Footnote ⁶⁰ These books provided further information about the products, for example concerning their cultivation, their connection to the history of colonialism and imperialism and their current role in the global economy. Most relevant, though, was the reference to past and present Western consumer patterns and how these were connected to the global dimensions of production and trade. Once more, the books emphasised the interconnectedness of global and local phenomena and highlighted the need to raise awareness for everyday consumer decisions.

This focus on individual lifestyles did not only try to inform consumers about the right products but also about how to consume and use these products correctly. This was particularly important for products that were not yet universally known in European households and kitchens. Spices are a good example of this phenomenon. When the GEPA started to sell spices from Sri Lanka, it not only provided consumers with information about the local cooperative that produced them but also outlined the appropriate use of the spices. The box that contained amongst others coriander, curry and curcuma was accompanied by a small cookbook that provided customers with some basic recipes.Footnote ⁶¹ Implicitly, fair trade thereby aimed at globalising everyday practices and introducing consumers to new foodstuffs, tastes and dishes.Footnote ⁶² While many leaflets concentrated on rather abstract political and economic discourses, these products also integrated an emotional and bodily dimension that referred to new tastes and new experiences. At the same time, these private practices were again interlinked with global contexts like the overconsumption of meat in the global north.Footnote ⁶³ As the authors argued, Asian spices could help explore new vegetarian dishes as a substitute for meat as a special dish.Footnote ⁶⁴ The GEPA even introduced a ‘box of spices’ that was used in schools to familiarise pupils with these new tastes and recipes.Footnote ⁶⁵ Put into a broader context, these endeavours focused on eating habits as a key area of personal lifestyle transformation, both within the fair trade movement and contemporary public discourse more generally.Footnote ⁶⁶

The political dimension remained significant for both the Mexican honey and the spices from Sri Lanka. But in comparison to the ‘Alu-Schok’ campaign, these products put a stronger emphasis on individual consumer decisions. In a way, this was again a legacy of ‘1968’ and its concept of a politicisation of everyday life. Through a different lens, though, this development could also be interpreted as a ‘lifestylisation’ of politics, arguably another legacy of ‘1968’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Both dimensions reflected a critical attitude towards mass consumerism, yet at the same time implicitly acknowledged the importance of consumption as a representation of personal lifestyles and attitudes.

Fair Trade on Delivery: GEPA's Mail-Order Catalogues

The previous two case studies have pointed to different means of using fair trade products to politicise or educate consumers. The third case study regarding the mail-order catalogues that the GEPA issued in the early 1990s at first sight stands in contrast to this tradition. As I have argued, fair trade's political and educational approach was closely linked to a social and medial contextualisation of the products, not only through the accompanying leaflets and other materials but also through the world shops as social spaces and the sales conversations with fair trade activists. These strategies could not be applied in the same way when fair trade products were sold through mail-order catalogues. My question in this section is, therefore, how – and to which extent – the GEPA tried to hold on to its approach of socially embedding the products outside the established context of the world shops and political campaigns.

Mail-order catalogues were a contentious issue within the West German fair trade movement – much in contrast for example to the United Kingdom, where fair trade products were from the outset sold both through shops and through catalogues. Once more, this is linked to the critique of mass consumerism as an important legacy of ‘1968’. Mail-order catalogues had become a key symbol of mass consumption in German public discourse in the 1950s and 1960s, leading for instance to the famous article ‘Our Petit-Bourgeois Hell’ by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in which he offered a ‘literary critique’ of the ‘Neckermann’ mail-order catalogue.Footnote ⁶⁸ It does therefore not come as a surprise that the GEPA's plan to establish a mail-order catalogue was highly controversial.Footnote ⁶⁹ Such plans first surfaced in the 1980s. When a forerunner of the catalogue was introduced in 1988, the GEPA decided to call it a ‘shipping list’ (Versandliste) and argued that it was primarily directed at the world shops themselves to facilitate their orders from the GEPA. The world shops, however, were of a different opinion and heavily criticised this new development. It was indeed quite obvious that the shipping lists primarily aimed at private consumers who could now conveniently buy fair-trade products directly from the GEPA. World shops had two reasons for opposing this development. On the one hand, they worried that the GEPA was establishing an alternative way to sell its products and thereby entering into competition with the world shops and their quasi-monopoly on fair trade products. On the other hand, a mail-order catalogue also put into question the interpretation of fair trade products as a means of political education. For many within the fair trade movement, a mail-order catalogue hence constituted a threat to the original idea of an ‘alternative third world trade’ – a few years before the process of fair trade certifications made this debate even more pivotal.

In the end, the shipping lists constituted less of a break than the world shops had feared. As far as the archival documents reveal, the lists were not distributed to prospective customers proactively by the GEPA but were instead mainly disseminated through the world shops themselves or sent out to customers who had either already ordered products from the GEPA prior, or had explicitly requested a shipping list.Footnote ⁷⁰ In terms of promotional strategies and design, though, there were indeed fundamental changes. The shipping list presented the GEPA products in modern design on high-gloss paper with a large number of close-up photographs. For a reader who was accustomed to the fair trade discourse and iconography, the most startling fact must have been that the products were by no means put into a political or social context. The catalogue itself did not include any descriptions of the producers and cooperatives or of the political and social goals that were connected to the sale of the products. Instead, the descriptions exclusively focused on the quality or aesthetical values of the products. Even the product descriptions of the fair trade coffees from Mexico, Tanzania and Nicaragua, which had always been clearly distinguished from each other according to their different political connotations, were now consciously restricted to questions of taste and quality.Footnote ⁷¹

References to the fair trade concept and the producer cooperatives were not eradicated, however, but shifted to a separate brochure titled: ‘GEPA: Who We Are – What We Do – Why We Do It’.Footnote ⁷² This brochure explicitly called on customers to buy the products in their local world shop and only use the catalogue in case there was no world shop in the region. To help customers find their nearest shop, the brochure contained a comprehensive list of all world shops in West Germany. Apart from this information that aimed at easing the critique and worries of the world shops, the brochure also complemented the catalogue with the political and social contexts that were mostly absent in the catalogue itself. It described the concept of ‘alternative third world trade’ and the criteria that the GEPA set for the products as well as the producers they cooperated with. It also called on consumers to see their purchase only as a first step that should lead to a more profound political or charitable activism. As the authors of the brochure argued, fair trade products could contribute to a more equal world economy, but such a world was above all prevented by ‘our exaggerated living standard, the profit-seeking of the major companies, and our egoistic economic policy’. Again, consumers were therefore asked to reflect upon their consumer habits, explicitly arguing that it was not enough to buy a few GEPA products without thinking about a more profound participation in development politics and political protest. As these political statements show, the GEPA tried to stick to its political approach toward fair trade and the attempt to raise awareness for Western consumer patterns. But by putting these political considerations into a separate brochure, it also largely separated them from the products themselves.

The GEPA partly revised this strategy when it published its first official mail-order catalogue in autumn 1991. By now the catalogue was no longer disguised as a promotional device for world shops, but was directly sent to private homes, accompanied by a covering letter from Ingo Herbst, GEPA's chairman, who emphasised that this was the first time consumers were able to gain a full overview of the range of products that the GEPA had to offer.Footnote ⁷³ Compared to the shipping lists of the previous years, the catalogue had seen significant changes in style and content. The first page introduced readers to the fair trade concept and GEPA's business philosophy.Footnote ⁷⁴ Readers were explicitly asked to write to the GEPA to receive additional information about the products and its producers. Answering to widespread criticism about the high-gloss paper of the shipping lists, the catalogue was now printed on recycled paper. More importantly, the catalogue had also seen significant structural changes. The products were now arranged according to the producer cooperatives, which were introduced in much more detail than before. In the middle of the catalogue, a double page titled ‘World Trade and Us’ introduced the fair trade concept and argued that ‘changes in the third world have to begin with ourselves’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Compared to the shipping list from 1988, the products were now more closely intertwined with the description of the fair trade concept itself. The GEPA was again careful to present the catalogue not as a challenge, but as a supplement to the world shops. Nevertheless, it argued that there were far more ‘critical consumers’ in West German than had until now been reached by the world shops alone.

The structural changes from the shipping list to the mail-order catalogues show that the GEPA made a serious effort to ensure that the catalogue remained compatible with a critical approach towards consumption and a moral and political embedding of the consumer items it offered. This becomes particularly evident if one follows the internal debates that led to the final versions of the catalogues. For the copy from 1996, for example, a preliminary version can be found in the archive of the GEPA, which was excessively commented by a GEPA employee.Footnote ⁷⁶ Most of the comments refer to badly exposed pictures, unconvincing arrangements of the products or to mistakes in the descriptions of the products. At the same time, however, the employee also emphasised the fact that the products had to be presented according to the cultural context from which they stemmed. In one case, for example, carved wooden animals had been arranged as if they were drinking from a small hole of water lending the figures a childish, playful air, which was criticised with the exclamation ‘Kitsch!’ and the indication that the figures originally had a religious background.Footnote ⁷⁷ Another picture that showed a couple having breakfast wearing dressing gowns was commented on dryly with the words: ‘I better not comment on this picture’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Such comments show that fair trade activists remained sceptical about the possible outcomes of an introduction of fair trade to new customers who were much more consumer-oriented than the traditional fair trade buyers from the ‘alternative milieu’. The texts and images were meant to show that the catalogues did not aim exclusively at commercial success, but were also meant to provide a social, political and cultural background to the products it offered. As such, some of the rather harsh annotations by the GEPA employee might ex negativo pick up Hans Magnus Enzensberger's radical critique of the Neckermann catalogue, in which – as he argued – ‘the barbarism of the language’ mirrored ‘the barbarism of the consumer items it described’.Footnote ⁷⁹

As the examples show, there is no clear-cut answer to the question whether the introduction of a mail-order catalogue marked an important step in the direction of a commercialisation of fair trade in Germany. The debates within the movement and the different steps that were taken to integrate a political dimension show that the discrepancy between a critique of mass consumerism and the creation of an ‘alternative’ consumer market remained two sides of the same coin throughout the entire history of fair trade. It thus seems more interesting to examine the ways in which the fair trade movement tried to navigate between these two approaches than to outline a clear periodisation between a political and a commercial era of fair trade. There is no doubt that commercial considerations became more important in the 1980s and 1990s – due both to the pressure from producers in the global south as well as the emergence of commercial competitors in the realm of ‘ethical consumerism’ during this period. Nevertheless, a critique of consumerism and the attempt to politicise individual acts of consumption remained important even in this period, not least because the fair trade consumers themselves often shared the critical sentiments towards consumer society. Both aspects belong to the tradition inherited from the political protests and intellectual discourses of the 1960s protest movements.