THE EU’s SELF-SERVING POLICIES AND

PROGRAMS IN AFRICA[1]

DOT KEET[2]

Despite the threats posed to the world by aggressive US unilateralism and militarism, it has to be noted that, for Africa, the EU is the more direct problem and a source of many pressures and even threats, although these tend to be more economic and political than directly military. However, similar to the US, the economic policies and strategies of the EU are experienced in Africa as barely disguised unilateralist ‘proposals’, or demands, imposed by the EU Commission, endorsed the EU Council, and driven by individual EU governments as they pursue their strategic 'national interests' and the requirements of European corporations. The same self-interest is evident in the non-EU governments in greater Europe.

European non-governmental agencies, organised labour and other civil society organisations have a vitally important role and responsibilities in this regard. But their solidarity and sympathy with Africans and other peoples in the South must now be qualitatively deeper in the context of the aggressive "Global Europe" strategy formulated by the European Commission for vested economic interests in Europe and the EU's perceived global interests. This strategic global positioning and the accompanying neo-liberal (re)structuring of the EU confronts not only peoples of the South but also European citizens, themselves, with serious threats to their rights and aspirations within their countries and communities.

The particular susceptibility of African governments to European power pressures is clearly the expression of long-standing colonial and neo-colonial economic dependence, and political inter-linkages over many decades, although expressed in the liberal political discourse of ‘partnership’. The previous paternalistic programs of technical and financial aid and ‘preferential’ trade access for these countries into the European market had some positive aspects but also many limitations and

problems. However even these programs are now giving way in the ruthless neo-liberal era, to unabashed demands by the EC for ‘reciprocity’ from such countries to Europe.

Brussels is now demanding increasingly open access into African economies for European agricultural and industrial exporters, for European investors and manufacturing, mining and service corporations; guarantees on the intellectual property rights and other property holdings (especially mineral rights and land) of European companies in these countries, and much more. Brussels energetically promotes EU interests through multilateral institutions, such as the WTO, as well as bilateral trade-and-investment agreements with promising larger economies and economic groupings all over the world. But such interests are now also being promoted between the EU and regional groupings of 79 smaller and weaker African, Caribbean and Pacific countries within the framework of the Cotonou Agreement.

This framework proposes terms based on what the EU regards as the non-negotiable ‘principle’ of reciprocity and other EU rights and guarantees through so-called Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). These are also aimed to go well beyond only agricultural and industrial trade to include investment and services liberalisation and other openings for EU companies in ACP countries. Such relations of 'reciprocity' between the gigantic EU and the much smaller ACP countries and regional groupings hold out serious threats to their future development prospects. In fact, EPAs are already actively dividing and undermining the regional cooperation and development that ACP countries need and from the outset prioritised in their approach to the EPA negotiations with the EU.

Critical analysts and social movement activists within Africa have long seen through the ‘partnership’ claims, and have exposed the real economic and political features and dependency-creating effects of the established ‘aid’ relations and heavy trade orientation of African countries to Europe. This has also been taken up by progressive analysts within Europe, including some members of national parliaments and the European parliament, urged on by some well-informed development agencies and other progressive forces in Europe. However, many in Europe are still inclined to view the aid and trade dependence of African countries as a de facto given, 'a fact of life'. And the problems to be dealt with are considered to be essentially internal to Africa; with European aid seen to be as a self-evident ‘good’ to be defended and promoted.

Under the influence of ever-stronger African and other 'South' peoples movements, there are some apparently 'more supportive' proposals now moving into the mainstream in Europe. Unfortunately the way in which many of these proposals are framed and utilized are highly questionable in many ways ….although considered to be at the cutting edge of campaigns against the - now undeniable - iniquities of North-South relations. Many of the demands and proposals of European NGOs tend to reflect an unconscious internalisation of some of the currently dominant neo-liberal economic assumptions. Some even reflect other highly problematic (paternalistic, and substitutionist) political inclinations and cultural (prejudiced and presumptuous) attitudes. Above all, even where motivated by sincere concern about injustice and human suffering, many such proposals deal with the symptomatic effects rather than the systemic sources/causes and the forces driving Europe's interests and role in Africa.

SOME ALTERNATIVE VIEWS FOR EUROPEAN CIVIL SOCIETY

TO MOVE FROM FOCUSSING ON SYMPTOMATIC PROBLEMS TOWARDS DEALING

WITH SYSTEMIC SOURCES/CAUSES, AND THE DRIVING FORCES WITHIN EUROPE

There are many apparently progressive 'humanitarian' proposals now being promoted around and even within official inter-governmental debates, in large measure as a result of the lobbying efforts of reform-minded NGOs and so on. However, such seemingly reasonable and 'concerned' proposals are essentially located within - and do not, in fact, challenge - the global status quo, and they often have embedded within themselves many questionable assumptions deriving from currently dominant economic theories and the neo-liberal paradigm. These need to be unpacked and challenged, and real alternatives arrived at by European campaigners together with their African counterparts. The key issues relate to:

'POVERTY'

After years of cumulative evidence and campaigning by African social movements and their supporters in Europe and elsewhere, 'poverty’has now moved on stage in much official international discourse; and even in the policy pronouncements of the World Bank. The focus on 'poverty' is now also expressed in the UN Millennium Development Goals, which aim to halve global poverty by the year 2015, including reducing infant mortality by two thirds and maternal mortality rates by three quarters. The official rationale is that these are 'realistic' and 'realisable' goals, although this is becoming increasingly doubtful on the evidence and calculations so far. More fundamentally, however, viewed from the ranks of the billions of poor:

  • Such officially endorsed aims are adopted by many well-meaning NGOs without questioning the implications of such limited 'poverty reduction' with regard to the fate of the other hundreds of millions of people who are thereby expected to remain in dire poverty[i]. Is this to continue for another fifteen years beyond 2015… another generation …. another century? What are the real long-term solutions to poverty beyond limited short-term ‘poverty alleviation’ for some? And might not the MDG focus on such short term goals encourage in many people the impression that they are 'at least doing something' … and yet actually distract attention from the fundamental solutions. This is especially problematic since many of the paradigmatic assumptions and neoliberal institutions, such as the World Bank, and private sector agencies, that are incorporated within the MDG program and approach are actually central to the causes of poverty; part of the problem rather than the solution.
  • Continuing poverty for many millions of the world's population clearly has dreadful consequences for the people excluded from limited plans for poverty 'reduction'[ii]. Furthermore, those well-intentioned campaigners who 'realistically' accept the continuation of 'some' poverty, must be persuaded to recognise that the understandable survival struggles of vast swathes of humanity will inevitably, and even in the coming decade, impact not only on their own immediate societies and environments, but also on the rest of the world and the entire planetary eco-system…. even as the poor are already the main victims of increasing 'natural disasters' and impending greater global ecological dis-equilibrium and crises.
  • Viewed from within Africa, and other areas of the world so affected, the determined commitment of all governments, other public authorities and all people, and the dedication of all the necessary financial and technical means is absolutely fundamental to respond to this looming social/economic/ecological disaster. Resources appropriate to these epochal challenges already exist in the world. What is lacking is 'political will', above all the active commitment of governments. But what needs to be fundamentally changed are not only the priorities of governments – at some point in the future - but the immediate functioning of the globalised economic system. The unfettered operations of global corporations and financial operators that have been ‘liberated’ by governments at home and through global institutions, the uncontrolled cycle of escalating production and consumption, and the spoliation and depletion of global resources is creating widening gaps between rich and poor countries and people, growing social suffering, surging global ecological instabilities, and impending social and political crises at local, national, regional and global levels.

'INTERNATIONAL AID'

Hitherto, official governmental aid (ODA) to African and other lesser developed countries has been widely projected by many concerned European NGOs, parliamentarians and others as the essential response to the crises of poverty and instability in the rest of the world. But bilateral aid per se is not a self-evident 'good'. Even where given with the best of intentions - and this is not often the reality - aid reflects, and reinforces, objective power relations between donor and recipient. Aid intrinsically demeans the recipients and empowers the donors in many different ways. More concretely, from the point of view of the objects of such aid:

  • Aid can only be really effective and justified if it is conceived, shaped and implemented as transitional and targeted means to overcome fundamental problems and not to merely alleviate the symptoms. Aid is positive and effective only if it is explicitly designed to change the nature of the existing relationships, and to rapidly eliminate the very need for aid. Most fundamentally, however, aid cannot be conceived and applied separately from - and pervasively contradicted by - other economic, social, environmental and political policies being simultaneously imposed by the same governments on such countries. It is these policies that often create and most often exacerbate the very poverty that 'aid' is supposedly responding to.
  • The self-serving political/propaganda purposes, and economic (and even military) aims of much governmental 'aid' will only be eliminated if aid is removed from the remit and the direct self-interests of specific governments. Proposals are made for more active participation by EU parliamentarians and civil society in the formulation of European aid programs. But this can only be legitimate if there is full and equal participation by their African counterparts, and that is extremely difficult to achieve in circumstances of very uneven resources. International aid is probably best guaranteed within agreed multilateral institutions: as UNDP, WHO, FAO and other such UN agencies have sometimes been and should be. And the multilateral and fully inclusive systems of planning, design and implementation of such programs should include the 'recipients' taking up active collective roles and responsibilities throughout and at every level.
  • The demand by many European NGOs for their governments to fulfill their undertakings in the

UN to provide 0.7% of their gross national incomes as official aid, fails to acknowledge that this has always been a minimal gesture and, even if fulfilled, would still be outrageously inadequate in the context of the vast and continuing economic disparities between Europe and Africa in the decades since the original aid targets were set in 1971. As UNCTAD (TDR 2007) reports, the per capita income ratios of developed to developing countries that was of the order of 23:1 in 1980, still stands at a yawning 18:1 in 2007. Furthermore, despite great public acclaim by and on behalf of the richest governments of the world at the G8 meeting in Gleneagles in 2005, promising that they would increase ODA to $50 billion by 2010, the OECD research institute of the most industrialised countries of the world reports that its members' official development aid (ODA) has actually decreased by 8.4% in real terms in recent years [iii].

  • In principle, and beyond debates on the figures, aid should not be viewed as magnanimous 'philanthropy' or ‘charity’ from the rich to the poor. Financial and technical aid has to be recognised as a profound human obligation and a forward-looking strategic responsibility for all of humanity in a highly interdependent and increasingly unstable world, economically, politically, socially and environmentally. Above all, viewed from Africa, ‘aid’ is fundamentally the recompense and the return to the continent and its people of the vast net transfers of resources - human, material and financial - from Africa to Europe that has long characterised the relationship - and that continues to do so - despite self-congratulatory European government and mainstream media propaganda to the contrary.

INTERNATIONAL TRADE

Trade, too, has a role in all economies. But international trade is not the unquestionably positive and fundamental economic force for growth that is claimed in neo-liberal theory. Nor is the quantitative 'growth' purportedly created by increased trade synonymous with qualitative social and economic development and transformation in such weaker economies. This is beginning to be recognised in some international discourse, particularly in the research and analysis by the UNDP and UNCTAD. From Africa's point of view there are a number of more specific issues and challenges.

  • With 11% of the world’s population, Africa accounts for a mere 2.8% of global exports. However, the much touted ‘improved market access’ for African and other least developed country exporters into Europe and other rich countries is not the answer to their ‘trade’ limitations… unless they can achieve their own improved productive capacities to be able to take advantage of such (still hypothetical) full access. In turn, improved capacities demand, at the very least, the ending of destructive IMF/World Bank neo-liberal policy prescriptions and WTO rules constraining the policy options of African and other developing country governments to pursue their own effective production development and economic diversification strategies.
  • The ‘fair trade’ promoted by many well-intentioned European NGOs, which aim to remove some of the most blatant tariff barriers in Europe, and many other market iniquities, may marginally improve the export earnings of small African producers of cocoa, coffee, fruit, flower, vegetables and other ‘cash crops’. But, without other broader transformative measures within African societies and in their broader relations with Europe (and other richer countries) the 'fair trade' approach could merely reinforce rather than change the heavy dependence of most African countries on such basic commodity exports into the markets of the rich. This role would also perpetuate their extreme vulnerability to external price fluctuations, commodity market manipulations/speculations, and other 'external shocks' over which they have no influence. The repeated counter-proposal from developing country strategic analysts and producers is for the re-establishment of the international commodity agreements that used to provide some protections and buffers against such adverse pressures. These proposals are vehemently opposed by powerful neo-liberal institutions and the governments of rich countries enjoying the supply of cheap products from Africa and the rest of the South.
  • More fundamentally than improved prices for their exports, the countries of Africa actually need stronger and more diversified domestic production in order to reduce their dependence on extremely narrow ranges of crops and products. In order to counter the extreme ‘extroversion’ (heavy international orientation) of most of their economic production they also need more diversified trade within and between their own economies and their immediate regions. Such a re-orientation is also highly relevant in the broader context of the essential recognition globally that the vast expansion of international trade and associated transport costs and pollution is hugely wasteful of resources and energy and is contributing heavily to global CO2 emissions and global warming. In fact, for Europe as much as for Africa and the rest of the world, international trade has to be re-evaluated, redirected and actually reduced - not continually expanded.

'PROTECTIONISM'