The Self-Deception Trap

In the lead-up to the 31st AU Summit in Nouakchott in July 2018, an unexpected honour came my way. The then AU Commission President, Faki Mahamat, approached me with a proposition that surprised me: the opportunity to guide AU’s efforts in EU-ACP agreements post-2020. These discussions eventually led to an invitation to address the African Heads of State on this topic directly. As I stood before the Heads of State, my message was simple: there was a need to acknowledge the diverse pathways inherent in the European-African relations. While the ACP grouping covered many African States, it might not be the most suitable conduit for fostering a structural partnership with Europe. Subsequent developments proved me right.

The colonial experience has profoundly marked both Europe and Africa, the coloniser and the colonised. From the start of the scramble for Africa in the fifteenth century, African culture, language, identity, and agency have been systematically minimised and discounted while European supremacy has been amplified. This has set a tone that has persisted as the two struggle to achieve an equitable partnership. To this day, the language used by African and European leaders, writers, and influencers reflects that many are trapped in an outdated worldview that masks the true colonial legacy.

It takes conscious work to do away with the heavy presence of colonial narratives and perceptions. This chapter reviews the works of many scholars who have attempted to do just this. From seminal books such as Born in Blackness (French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, 2021), African Europeans (Otele, African European: An Untold History, 2020), and The EU and Africa (Adebajo & Whiteman, 2012) to others that frame the discussion in terms of the historical reasons for continuity in the stigmatisation of Africa, this chapter seeks to capture some of the critical insights of those who can help us construct a new narrative. Frantz Fanon’s and Amilcar Cabral’s theories on decolonising minds are also mentioned. Additionally, references to the current post-colonial academic debates are included.

The Western paradigm of developmental assistance in Africa can trace its origins back to the colonial era. As such, it is tarnished by the asymmetry of the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. This chapter revisits the debates about aid in Africa. It explores how tools such as structural adjustment programmes, aid effectiveness discussions, macroeconomic conditionality, and rating agencies’ risk perceptions reinforce an outdated aid logic founded on the principles of charity. This logic has formed the basis for development cooperation between ACP countries and the EU since 1975, as formalised in the Cotonou Agreement (formerly Lomé Convention) and other agreements between the EU and North African countries.

The impact of this logic over decades has not been positive for the continent. The global aid industry effectively shackles aid-dependent nations by keeping them perpetually reliant on the generosity of the wealthy. At the same time, focusing on African external economic obligations as a marker of good performance rather than a fundamental transformation of the countries means that the real impact of aid has been limited. The debacle of structural adjustment opened new opportunities to move away from a charity perspective and subsequently allowed for a less prescriptive approach towards Africa. However, this opening proved to be short-lived, an unfortunate lost opportunity.

A convergence of economic imperatives, including the need for raw materials and markets, alongside inter-European power struggles and social factors such as rising unemployment kickstarted Europe’s scramble for Africa. The resulting colonial era has left an indelible impact on Africa’s economic, political, and social dimensions. Much of this legacy is now encoded in the international protocols that govern trade between Africa and the rest of the world. These systems tend to protect the interests of established leaders and have systematically penalised latecomers. This puts Africa at an enduring disadvantage despite its bountiful resources and much-vaunted potential.

In this chapter, we revisit data and anecdotal evidence showing how countries that have ‘made it’ in the global trade arena often counted more on dynamic comparative advantages than on simplified comparative advantage theory interpretations based on their natural resources bounty. We also compare African and Asian countries after the independence movement of the 1960s regarding economic and social indicators, where they are now, and what it will take for Africa to chart a new course to a fairer trade system.

Economic depression and stagflation during the late 1970s as a result of the oil and debt crises heralded a new era of economic hardship for Africa. As Western powers grappled with the consequences of diminished energy resources and heightened inflation, Africa's role in the crisis narrative became paradoxically amplified, and the continent was wrongly blamed as the architect of its own economic turmoil. The ‘remedy’ proposed was free-market reforms to be delivered via structural adjustment.

In simple terms, structural adjustment linked aid to a set of political and economic reforms that a country had to adhere to in order to secure a loan from the IMF or World Bank. Such free-market reforms were intended to deliver a new socioeconomic dawn to Africa, but instead, the continent moved backwards on almost all indicators. This tutorship approach was maintained primarily by European countries, although African intellectuals and some African leaders contributed to the situation. The lost decades that followed this ill-conceived approach allowed some actors to amass enormous profits and for corruption to thrive while social spending declined, and economic growth stagnated. In this chapter, we explore how foreign, mostly European, influence has endured in Africa even as countries have gained their independence and how late colonialism, characterised by a rent-seeking and extractive approach, and other post-independence economic assistance mechanisms have conspired to limit African nations.

The complex relations between the EU and Africa have their roots in history, but more recently, the tone of their interactions has been determined by a series of instruments, agreements, and initiatives that the EU and its most influential members decided to launch, often unilaterally. For example, the recent Global Gateway Initiative was announced days before an EU-AU Summit without any prior consultation or warning. This means that frequently, African negotiators have faced interlocutors without a clear strategy and have been undermined by their own fragmentation and shifting priorities along the way. The EU negotiating tactics in the last two decades of this century have taken stock of the previous two, where results did not match expectations, obliging international actors in the development space to accept a shift from prescriptive policies towards goals. African agency got a boost but stumbled, nevertheless, due to weak negotiating capacity.

By 2050, one in four people in the world will be African, according to population projections. As such, Africa’s burgeoning youth population could be a boon for the world’s economy, helping to offset ageing populations across the rest of the planet, including in Europe. However, EU attitudes towards African migration are often clouded by a neo-Malthusian lens that emphasises scarcity, incapacity, unemployment, and other negative undercurrents. This view is influenced by the historical legacy of colonisation, a legacy that has worked to undermine much of the work done to address migration between the two continents over the past two decades.

In this chapter, we look beneath the hood at how the EU deals with African migration, unpack the actual size and flows of African migration, and explore the moral and political underpinnings of the debate. Contrary to the notion that Africa is a continent experiencing mass exodus, data sets show that Africa’s role in the global migrant population is significantly smaller than other regions. Additionally, we see that a proliferation of initiatives to address migration and a tendency to focus on short-term security measures at the expense of paying attention to the root causes mean that migrants’ needs and rights are often side-lined. This fragmentation of approaches also weakens African agency and undermines the unified, continent-wide framework that the AU seeks to establish.

Free trade is fêted as a cornerstone of a competitive economy, essential to build prosperous nations and create socioeconomic benefits. But in Africa, this has not been a universal experience. Far from integrating African economies into the world economy, free trade appears to have cemented Africa’s marginalisation. This is largely because trade agreements have been systematically used to impose norms, standards, and preferences that perpetuate extractive colonial structures and create a dependency on external trade partners for processed products.

This chapter provides a background to and overview of the trade agreements that have shaped African trade, including a deep dive on EPAs, which brought about a sea change in how Africa engaged with its largest trading partner, the EU. We also highlight the EU’s conflicting involvement with the AfCFTA process and how this is influencing Africa’s positioning on trade issues as the AU attempts to redefine its trade relationships in a way that prioritises African interests, aligns with continental goals, and contributes to sustainable development.

A prevailing sense of insecurity pervades the world, fuelled by a surge in high-intensity conflicts and shifting geopolitical dynamics among traditional and emerging global powers over the past two decades. These changes are disrupting global trade and politics and testing the legitimacy and efficacy of existing multilateral institutions. They have also reverberated in the relationship between Europe and Africa.

Both Europe and Africa have sought to strategically reposition themselves in this dynamic global landscape. For Africa, this has been a positive shift. The continent is carving out a new role in a multipolar world, diversifying its partnerships and offering attractive growth opportunities to investors; Africa contains some of the world’s fastest-growing economies and is anticipated to be the fastest-growing world region by 2027. However, read most assessments of Africa’s prospects, notably those from Europe, and this is not the perspective that emerges.