From Rivalry to Partnership?

New Approaches to the Challenges of Africa

Gordon Cumming, Tony Chafer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409405177
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317131823
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'From Rivalry to Partnership' is the first to study a potentially valuable way forward in tackling the challenges of Africa, namely bilateral partnerships. The book evaluates the significance and strength of the emerging Anglo-French partnership and explores how far this and other forms of 'bilateral' and 'bi-multi' cooperation might serve as a valuable alternative or complement to traditional unilateral and multilateral approaches in Africa. Practitioners, established academic experts as well emerging scholars in the field bring to bear a sophisticated synthesis of neoclassical realism and 'discursive institutionalism' and findings from over 100 research interviews to explore how joint approaches and bilateral partnerships have been used to address the challenges of Africa. In developing this argument, the editors explore: * Anglo-French cooperation in Africa * other bilateral partnerships in Africa, notably the Nordic states and the US * the Africa-EU Strategic Partnership * the China-Africa partnership and its implications for the EU-Africa partnership and for leading European states Written in a clear and accessible style, 'From Rivalry to Partnership' offers a much needed fresh insight into whether and how bilateral partnerships make a real difference to people's lives on the African continent.'

PART I
Introduction and Theory

Introduction

Tony Chafer and Gordon Cumming

Throughout the early post-colonial decades, the challenges of Africa, whether in terms of poverty, conflict or human rights violations, were largely of peripheral concern to Western (or as they became known in the post-Cold War era ‘Northern’) states. While developed countries recognised the scale of these challenges, they tended to see the African continent primarily through the prism of their own geopolitical, economic and strategic interests (McKinlay and Little 1986) and they competed, among themselves and with the Soviet bloc, for the influence, prestige and resources that a foothold in Africa could offer (Martin 1985; Amin 1975). In line with this hard-nosed approach, most Western states engaged in unilateral initiatives and, less enthusiastically, in multilateral action to help solve Africa’s problems. Britain’s Military Assistance Training Teams, France’s 30 high profile military interventions in Africa between 1960 and 1990 and the support by the United States to anti-Marxist forces in Southern Africa and the Horn are all examples of the former. The half-hearted commitment of developed countries to the North-South dialogue in the 1970s (Fitzgerald 1979; Brown 2002: 49) and the timidity of their multilateral debt reduction schemes in the 1980s (Brown 2002: 81) are illustrations of the latter point.

Over the last decade or so, and in particular since the UN Millennium Summit in 2000, Africa has been identified as a moral and strategic priority by the international community. Already in 1999 Madeleine Albright had labelled it ‘a major battleground in the global fight against terror’ (Albright 1999). Then, at the 2001 Labour Party conference, Tony Blair described Africa as a ‘scar on the conscience of the world’. The scale of the African challenge has been used by some Northern governments to legitimise a new military and to some extent politico-economic interventionism. This new-found activism has not generally been translated into large-scale unilateral initiatives, which can be extremely costly and can lead in many cases to allegations of necolonialism. Instances of interventionism by individual donors can nonetheless be cited, including the French RECAMP peacekeeping project, the British military intervention in Sierra Leone and the American AFRICOM scheme. Instead, the more pronounced forms of interventionism have taken place at the multilateral level, where a plethora of initiatives – including the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt cancellation scheme, the Paris Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as well as some that overlap such as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the Blair Commission – have been launched in a renewed effort to resolve the challenges of Africa.

Reflecting this new readiness to intervene, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali stated in his Agenda for Peace (1992): ‘The time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty … has passed; its theory was never matched by reality. It is the task of leaders of States today to understand this and to find a balance between the needs of good internal governance and the requirements of an ever more interdependent world’. However, while this new interventionism helped to show that Northern donors were serious about tackling the problems of Africa, it has also been used to spread the blame more evenly for the developmental and political failures that Africa has suffered over the last half century.

This heightened activism on the part of Northern donors has, however, met with at best limited success in tackling African crises. A case in point is the poor performance of most of the African continent relative to the MDGs, not to mention the equally unimpressive performance of some donors in relation to aid pledges designed to facilitate Africa’s achievement of those goals (OECD 2010). Another illustration might be the delays to the formation of an African Standby Force as an effective Africa-wide force with which Africa can peacekeep itself. There are many reasons for the limited success of such initiatives. They include the failure of African governments to stand by their own commitments to clean up corruption and practise sound forms of governance, the reluctance of many African regimes to divert money away from military expenditure towards poverty reduction, the failure on the part of the donor community to understand that the recipient governments with which they are dealing are often little more than a front for more powerful, even criminal elements to ply their trade. Other factors relate to the failure of Western governments to reform the international trading system, notably in agriculture, to enable African farmers to compete on a more level playing field, their frequent collusion with autocratic regimes in Africa despite a rhetorical commitment to good governance and human rights, the failure of donors to honour their aid pledges, their reluctance to work together and share the credit for their activities south of the Sahara, and the double standards of some donors who are unwilling to accept lessons from others. More sceptical commentators might also argue that many of the recent initiatives were predestined to failure because many of them are based on a technocratic set of targets which are meaningless to African governments that do not have the capacity or in many cases the will to achieve such goals.

It would be deeply unfair to attribute recent lack of progress on Africa’s challenges entirely to the donor community. There is nonetheless clearly an element of truth in the claim that donors have continued with the traditional mindset of rivalry, exacerbated in some ways by the emergence of new and powerful players in Africa, such as China, India and Brazil (Lafargue 2008). Many of the recent grand initiatives such as the NEPAD and Blair’s Commission for Africa have in effect involved leading Western or ‘Northern’ powers competing among themselves and seeking to portray themselves as Africa’s champion, whether this be through the writing of reports by think tanks such as the Commission for Africa, the French President’s invitation to African leaders to attend the 2003 meeting of the G8 or George W. Bush’s launch of the Millennium Challenge Account.

Towards Bilateral Cooperation and Partnerships?

One ‘new’ approach that could make a difference and break free from or at least limit the impact of imperial and other rivalries involves bilateral and ‘bi-multi’ cooperation. In this volume we use the term ‘bilateral cooperation’ to refer to collaboration between two donor states, often two leading players in Africa working together towards common goals, sharing mutual interests and, in some cases, with some form of joint-decision making mechanism. In some cases this can be seen as a prelude to ‘bi-multi’ cooperation, meaning that efforts are then made to bring other members of the donor community on board.

It should be stressed that bilateral cooperation on and in Africa has of course taken place in the past. Indeed during the Cold War, there was an implicit, at times explicit, agreement between the United States and former colonial powers with continuing links to Africa that the ex-colonial power would be responsible for keeping its formal empire within the Western orbit. This coordination was, however, the product of necessity, a common fear of Soviet penetration and a desire to curry favour with the US Superpower. It was not an active form of cooperation or one that involved anything resembling partnership. A case in point was the crisis in the Congo in the early 1960s when the UK and France, out of concern for their own mineral interests, neither worked together nor gave their full support to the United States and the US-led mission, ONUC. Other instances of joint cooperation have tended to be on a case by case basis. To illustrate, France and Belgium worked together in response to incursions into Congo-Zaire in 1977 and 1978 (Chipman 1989: 133) while the French also relied on US support in Chad in 1983–8 (ibid.: 164–5).

Collaboration was therefore typically implicit and ad hoc rather than formally adopted as a matter of policy or practice, or for that matter as an effective means of tackling the problems of Africa. The most loudly trumpeted example of bilateral cooperation to emerge in recent years is between the two most important former colonial powers, Britain and France. Agreed at Saint-Malo in December 1998 and subsequently reaffirmed in 2001 and 2004, this initiative seeks to go beyond earlier unilateral and multilateral initiatives and establish a joint or ‘bilateral’ approach to African issues. Anglo-French cooperation will be central to the focus of this study but other bilateral arrangements between Northern powers will also be examined and used as a barometer for assessing whether there is anything exceptional about the Anglo-French ‘partnership’, whether such cooperation is a common phenomenon and the extent to which Anglo-French relations really do represent a partnership.

Aims

This book will evaluate the significance and strength of the Anglo-French partnership and will explore whether this and other forms of bilateral and ‘bi-multi’ cooperation serve as a valuable alternative or complement to traditional approaches to the challenges of Africa. As well as exploring how far the UK, France and other donors have moved away from rivalry to partnership, this volume will also seek to identify, with the help of a theoretical framework, the drivers behind, and constraints on, policy change.

The potential significance of these partnerships is widely recognised in most of the donor administrations and governments covered in this book. It is not of course universally acknowledged, with one senior official at the Department for International Development (DfID) going so far as to comment: ‘Why do bilateral … just go directly for the multilateral’ (personal communication, 2009). A priori it might also be argued that such ties are anachronistic in a context of Europeanisation, globalisation and indeed of universal targets such as the MDGs. This scepticism is not, however, widely shared by officials or politicians in the donor countries examined in this book, whose policy-making elites overwhelmingly saw the benefits of closer cooperation with a key donor, in areas where views were shared or potentially compatible. The possibility of reducing duplication of effort, saving money, avoiding contradictory policies, practices and statements was seen as a goal worth pursuing and the scope for bringing others on board later (bi-multi cooperation) was also widely acknowledged. More broadly, there has, since the turn of the century, been increasing pressure on donors better to coordinate their support for Africa, as the costs of wasteful duplication of effort became increasingly clear to both donors and their African partners. It was clearly in the interest of donors to ensure a more efficient use of the resources they deployed in support of African development, as it was in the interest of African governments for donors to make less demands of their limited state capacities. Thus the 2005 Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness and donor harmonisation requires donors to work together in order to meet their commitment to coordinate their aid efforts. Meeting this target inevitably means more bilateral and bi-multi consultation and negotiation between donors than in the past. A good example of this is the creation of the African Union (AU) partners group in Addis. Moreover, at EU level, with the European Council rather than the Commission now taking the lead on EU Africa policy and with the Council also responsible for the European Security and Defence Policy and taking primary responsibility for implementation of the EU-Africa strategy, bilateral and bi-multi consultation between member states on Africa policy have become a necessity. Indeed, a measure of the importance with which this concept is treated in some UK government circles might be the fact the editors of this book have been invited to brief the Conservative Minister for Africa and the Liberal Democrat spokesman on African affairs on these questions.

Yet, despite the need for bilateral and bi-multi cooperation for improved donor policy coherence and for enhanced effectiveness in tackling African challenges such as unaccountable government, unrelenting poverty and chronic instability, this concept of closer working relations between two donor states – ‘bilateral cooperation’ – has mostly been overlooked in the literature. The focus of this literature has been on multilateral and unilateral donor approaches. There is inevitably some discussion of donor coherence at the multilateral level, partly in the context of the 2005 Paris Declaration, partly in relation to poverty reduction strategies (Craig and Porter 2003; OECD 2010) and partly in connection with ESDP missions (Olsen 2009; Howorth 2007). Equally, there have been surveys of donor cooperation in fragile states (Browne 2007) and in relation to debt reduction (Birdsall and Williamson 2002). There have also been numerous analyses of aid regimes (USAID 2004; Noël and Thérien 1995). Another set of studies has homed in on and compared the different approaches of different individual donors. These include works by Schraeder 2000; Crawford 2001; Cumming 2001; Gaulme 2003; Taylor and Williams 2004; Engel and Olsen 2005; Chafer and Cumming 2010.

It is worth emphasising two points about the above literature. Firstly, despite the acuity of the above analyses, very little of this work is underpinned by any meaningful theoretical framework with which to explain Northern state policies towards Africa or indeed towards other Northern donors. Indeed, Noël and Thérien (1995), with their focus on regime theory, and Engel and Olsen (2005), with their focus on Africa’s place in IR theory, are exceptional in this regard. This dearth of theoretical analyses of relations between the North and Africa will be recognised here, and an attempt will be made to explain policy towards Africa with reference to neoclassical realism (discussed below and in Chapter 1). The second point worth noting is that none of this body of literature looks seriously at bilateral cooperation between donors or at the concept of partnerships. Clearly the bulk of writings on partnership are to be found in business (e.g. Roberts 2004) and there is also a growing literature on NGO-government (e.g. Owen 2000) and NGO-business (e.g. Heap 2000; Jamali and Keshishian 2009) partnerships. However, rather than draw on a literature which focuses on partnerships that are either entirely private or that involve one state and one non-state actor, it makes more sense here to take as one of the baselines for comparison two examples of actual partnerships between states: the Anglo-US special relationship and the Franco-German tandem. The former is instinctive, based primarily on security concerns but also draws on shared language, history and culture (Dumbrell 2009). The latter has economic concerns at its core but has also expanded into the cultural and security domain; it is more institutionalised and less ‘natural’ (Cole 2001).

Needless to say, it would be unfair to expect any of the ‘partnerships’ outlined in this book to approximate to the two special relationships outlined above. There has not been sufficient time for such a relationship to develop and there are less vital economic and strategic interests at stake in Africa for such a partnership to develop. That said, it might be reasonable to expect progress to be made towards greater two-way consultation, possibly even joint decision-making mechanisms, joint actions and a range of informal joint working practices. Have such forums, mechanisms as well as informal arrangements actually emerged? This will be a key question considered in this study and one which should shed light on whether such bilateral cooperation is extensive or marginal, or indeed whether partnerships actually exist at all in the context of Africa.

Scope

Before proceeding to address these questions, it is important to stress that the focus of this book is on donor state-to-state relations, particularly ties between elite officials and politicians. This approach is consistent with the theoretical approach adopted here, neoclassical realism, which homes in on elite officials and other policy-makers who act as the filter through which systemic pressures flow and whose perception of the national interest can have a determining influence over the foreign policy of a particular state. These comments should not, however, be taken to imply that this study will ignore the views of civil society, the donor public and the media, since these are incorporated into the neoclassical framework of analysis (see Chapter 1).

Second, this study focuses on states that have claimed to engage at some level in some kind of bilateral cooperation. The rationale for the choice of these case studies is set out below. This should not, however, be taken to signify that other states have not been involved in bilateral cooperation (e.g. the UK’s DfID has a special agreement with the Australian Agency, AusAID). Nor will it be assumed that because the concept of partnership has been introduced into the discourse of these donor states that it has been implemented even to the most basic extent in practice.

Third, and linked to this, while we would argue that improved cooperation between donors, such as the UK and France, should enable them better to tackle the challenges of Africa, space constraints will not allow for an assessment of the impact of Anglo-French cooperation or indeed other bilateral collaboration between Northern countries on African issues in terms of policy outcomes. This is clearly an important question but it must be left to future researchers to identify and analyse the huge array of factors that determine the results of any such partnerships.

Finally, it should be emphasised that the focus here is Northern-centric. It is about cooperation between donors. To be sure, if Africa is taken as the object of proposed cooperation, this begs questions about African perceptions and about ‘actor-ness’. Only a series of case studies of interactions between donor partnerships and African governments and multilateral organisations would make it possible to address these questions. It is nonetheless clear that, if, as might be inferred from Paul Simon-Handy’s preface to this volume, cooperation between donors is seen by Africans as above all addressing donors’ needs, rather than the needs of Africa, then the bilateral and ‘bi-multi’ partnerships examined here will not provide a new and sustainable means of supporting Africa.

Methodology

How then are we to answer the questions set out above? A number of methodological tools have been deployed towards this end. Thus contributors to this commissioned volume have been working to a clear but flexible set of guidelines. They have, where relevant, undertaken a review of the literature in respect of partnerships and looked, usually unsuccessfully, for precedents for this kind of arrangement.

Secondly, most contributors have carried out semi-structured interviews with elite officials. The editors for their part have, thanks to a large British Academy grant, conducted over 160 interviews with officials, politicians and practitioners in Paris, London, Brussels, Dakar, Abuja, Kinshasa, Khartoum, New York and Washington D.C.

Thirdly, the contributors of the empirical chapters have made use, explicitly or obliquely, of a single theoretical framework, namely neoclassical realism. As will be explained in detail in Chapter 1, this theoretical framework goes beyond classical realism and neo-realism by seeking to explain not the pattern of outcomes of state interactions but the behaviour of individual states. As Gideon Rose (1998) has observed, ‘Neoclassical realism argues that the scope and ambition of a country’s foreign policy is driven … by the country’s relative material power. Yet … the impact of power capabilities on foreign policy is indirect and complex, because systemic pressures must be translated through intervening unit-level variables, such as decision-makers’ perceptions and state structure’. Domestic governmental variables thus may be accommodated within foreign policy analysis. Neoclassical realism has mainly been used in the past to analyse Superpowers’ behaviour. However, its integration of domestic political variables into foreign policy analysis is useful in the context of the issues addressed in the present volume as it can help us appreciate to why states sometimes cooperate in ways that are, on the face of it, not entirely self-interested.

This book is not primarily aimed at corroborating or refuting the validity of neoclassical realism as a theoretical tool. Rather, as a commissioned volume structured around the theme of cooperation and bilateral partnerships, its aim is to lay down a broad theoretical framework and examine whether it might have the potential to help us to understand better the complexity of foreign policy-making and the multitude of factors and actors driving and/or hampering recent joint approaches to the challenges of Africa and, in particular, the case of the British an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• First Preface: A UK Perspective. The December 1998 Saint-Malo Declaration on Africa
• Second Preface: A French Perspective. A Helping Partner at Hand: Enough to Forget Old Rivalries?
• Third Preface: An African Perspective: Divergent Views of Anglo-French Cooperation
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Part I: Introduction and Theory
• Part II: The UK, France and Cooperation in africa
• Part III: Other Bilateral ‘Partnerships'
• Part IV: Working Together on the Ground
• Part V: Other Models of Cooperation
• Part VI: Concluding Remarks
• Bibliography
• Index