ABSTRACT
Reflecting on Africa’s contemporary predicament, Professor Dennis Austin recalled Samuel Johnson’s tale about Prince Rasselas of the ancient African kingdom of Abyssinia, who, having grown tired of the “gardens of fragrance” and the “fortress of security” in his native land, wandered through Egypt, “where every man was happy”.2 This study has shown that the African condition today is far from being a happy one. The object of this investigation was to analyse ECAfrican diplomacy in the context of adjustment, debt and macroeconomic reform. Our central question was the claim that the EC has a “unique” approach to adjustment which is different from the orthodox model of the Bretton Woods institutions. We set out to consider EC-African diplomacy from the viewpoint of power, influence and social exchange. We traced the historical origins of Lomé from the colonial era up to the Rome Treaty in 1957. We saw how EC-African relations metamorphosed from the epoch of colonialism, when concepts of “Eurafrica” were fashioned as ideological tools of Empire, to the postwar era of decolonization, when “association” became the dominant idiom of Euro-African diplomacy. Although taken up at the insistence of France, “association” soon became a major pillar of Europe’s international policy, as the nascent Common Market sought to maintain some influence in the emerging African nations. We argued that the colonial model of development under “association” was, to echo von Clausewitz, a continuation of Eurafrica by other means. In the 1970s, EC-African diplomacy entered a new, qualitative phase. The uncertainties following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, Western anxieties about raw materials shortages following OPEC, and the Southern challenge to the international economic order, all contributed to Europe’s willingness to negotiate a new multilateral agreement with the ACP
countries. In terms of bargaining power, the South seemed to hold the stakes, even if temporarily. A “social exchange” relationship was evident in Europe’s desire to maintain its traditional influence and secure access to ACP raw materials: in exchange for financial and trade political equality, the ultimate levers of power remained firmly within the European Community.
