Introduction to Part I
Toni Haastrup
Studying Africa-European Union (EU) relations as ‘EU-Africa Relations’ is now an established subfield, particularly within studies on EU foreign policy. This particular framing of how we know, theoretically, this relationship is important since it in part animates this handbook. Because the relationship engages two partners external to each other, the study of Africa-EU relations mainly sits within International Relations (IR).
While recent years has seen the expansion in practice of Africa-EU relations outside of its traditional focus on development assistance and trade to new areas of cooperation such as science and technology and gender equality, among others, the former continue to dominate how we understand the relationship. As the bulk of this literature invariably shows, there persists an asymmetry of power between the two regions, with the EU dominating. The reality of power imbalances explains, in part, why perspectives in IR continue to have relevance. Importantly though, it is not enough to simply locate this scholarship; we have to understand its implications for how we know Africa-EU relations.
Here, I reflect on IR’s entry point, highlighting (as articulated by Faleye in Chapter 1 of this volume) the ways in which IR theorising can undermine African agency. Yet, the emergence of regionalism, and especially comparative regionalism as a subfield, has allowed for a more robust engagement with Africa’s own integration processes. While this provides an opening to take Africa seriously, the dominance of the EU as the core model for regional integration and its power vis-à-vis its African counterparts mean that comparative regionalism does not necessarily seek to excavate the ways in which African agency are manifested. A move away from IR to International Studies, however, allows for the consideration of Africa (as a continent and with respect to individual states) as constitutive of the ‘international’ or the ‘global’. It is worth acknowledging that knowledge creation and the practices of Africa-EU relations, including those that have privileged the European side, are co-constitutive. Thus, theoretical approaches that allow us to reflect on this co-constitutiveness are especially important to this moment in Africa-EU relations. Here is where Weldeab Sebhatu’s account (Chapter 3) of postcolonial approaches to Africa-EU relations challenge the existing blind spot in theorising.
This chapter is a reflection on the whole of the relationship in three parts. First, it contextualises how Africa-EU relations has been theorised. In the subsequent section, I advocate for a broader emphasis on International Studies and show how this has helped us conceptualise African agency. Yet, the sustainability of this focus is only possible when we pay attention to the co-constitutive nature of knowledge and practice in Africa-EU relations. To this end, postcolonial (and decolonial) approaches come in useful to lay out, theoretically, the implications of the existing blind spots in how we understand the dominant relationships within Africa-EU relations. Finally, I contend that Africa-EU relations can no longer afford the privileging of European perspectives in theorising the relationship as a result of the current realties of our current age.
Contextualising the theorising on Africa-EU relations
Until about a two decades ago, the literature that examined the relationship between Africa and the EU did not see Africa on its own terms. The implication of this was that the majority of theorising also started outside of Africa. This literature ensured that the EU’s relationship with the group of African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries was the main conduit for understanding the relationship. The focus of this relationship was on economic development assistance, poverty reduction and trade, and ultimately the EU had the most power. Moreover, by focusing on these aspects of the relationship, these literatures also missed the development of new African institutions created to articulate African agency and represent African interests in the various practices of international politics.
The evolvement of policy areas apart from development and the economy has, of course, pushed research to consider new ways of knowing. Pursuit of these studies has revealed some of the blind spots in traditional IR theorising. For example, Haastrup’s (2013b) study on security drew on new institutionalism to illustrate the impact of the past on Africa-EU relations but also to underscore African agency. Despite these innovations, these works remain situated within the EU foreign policy subfield of IR and consequently only offer limited challenge to the hegemonic processes of knowledge production.
To be sure, and as Faleye shows, the grand IR theories are not entirely useless for understanding elements of the relationship between the two continents. However, as Söderbaum and Stålgren (2010) note, the implication of drawing on these traditional approaches is that the EU is really the focus of inquiry. The EU’s role as an actor is ‘implicitly or explicitly framed within rather conventional statecentric notions about world politics’ (ibid.: 2). Framing the EU’s role as an international actor through state-centric lenses is, however, limited. When the emphasis is on the EU, Africa, whether through its states or institutions, can only play one role: as receivers of international relations practices rather than active participants. Of the main IR approaches, constructivism perhaps offers the more generous reading of the relationship, since it goes beyond a focus on power and state-centrism to potentially acknowledge the changes in the relationship.
In their constructivist analysis of EU activities in international politics, Bretherton and Vogler (2007) account for the possibility of third parties’ impact on the EU’s foreign policy practices. This is important in the context of Africa-EU relations, as it suggests the capacity of African actors ‘to behave actively and deliberately in relation to other actors in the international system’ (Sjöstedt, 1977: 16). In other words, Africa and Africans have the capacity to exercise agency. Yet, this trait is often reserved for the EU, not African states or equivalent organisations like the African Union (AU). Beyond the grand IR theories, many of the new analytical frameworks only reinforce the EU perspective. These literatures focus on the internal dimensions of the EU’s international identity as the path to determining its relationship with other actors, including African ones. Consequently, the dominance of IR largely obscures African actorness and the possibilities of its agency.
In recent years, the literature has caught up such that African perspectives can inform some theorising of Africa-EU relations. The development of comparative regionalism, especially, has facilitated this attention to the African side of the story (see Fawcett and Gandois, 2010; Haastrup, 2013a; Shaw, 2015; Börzel and Risse, 2016). In his contribution (Chapter 2), Mattheis rightly argues that the diversity of regionalisms in Africa itself demands that we pay attention to Africa when we think about regionalisms. Yet, the dominant literature still tends to locate Europe as the originator of regionalism. Indeed, Mattheis notes an inherent Eurocentrism has often characterised theorising regionalism.
The normative turn in regionalism and the empirical changes in regionalism in the Global South (especially Africa and Latin America) have created the space for Africa’s visibility in regional integration discourses. In particular, the creation and capacities of institutions like the AU and the more recent African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) have demonstrated Africa’s regionalism apart from Europe and European parameters. This is reflected in the tensions that have emerged as African countries attempt to negotiate new terms within the EU-ACP relationship that is the bulk of Africa-EU interregionalism. Yet, the aspirations of the AU and AfCFTA have existed since at least 1963 when the Organisation of African Unity was formally established. So why has Africa not received as much treatment in the literature? Further, what implications does this have for the practice of so-called ‘EU-Africa’ relations? While comparative regionalism provides an opening, African agency is at best an unintended consequence. So, these questions remain.
Their implications for the absences in knowledge and practice are increasingly being examined by those who seek to understand African agency through Africa’s international relations (Beswick and Hammerstad, 2013; Tieku, 2013; Bah, 2017). These newer inquiries are in fact not new; rather, they continue the work that African scholars have been doing, only bringing them to wider attention. In this sense, they deal with what might be termed International Studies (as opposed to IR), drawing on multidisciplinary knowledge and centring the African experience.
African agency in theory or a brave new world for Africa-EU relations?
Shifts in Africa-EU relations have implications for political outcomes due to the changes in the characteristics of the political context. We see this especially in the aftermath of the agreed Joint Africa-EU Strategy which seemed to shine a light on the capabilities of African actors to underscore African regionalism. At the same time, the broadening of the ambit of African and European actors, including the interregionalisation of new policy areas, demand close attention. As Bah (2017) notes, the creation of an organisation like the AU pushes back against the hegemonies of actors like the EU while articulating alternatives that reflect Africans within a pluralistic global order.
So how do we understand African agency? There is no definitive answer to this question. It is a question that scholars of Africa’s relationship with the EU are increasingly drawn to asking, though they certainly did not originate it. For instance, Murray-Evans argues for African agency as ‘influence or resistance’ (2015: 1847). This notion of African agency is to an extent tied to a universalist understanding of agency. This is captured by Hay’s definition of agency: ‘the ability or capacity of an actor to act consciously and, in so doing, to attempt to realise his or her intentions’ (2002: 94). To accept this definition is also to accept a definition of agency that situates Africa (as a whole continent of 55 states) as playing to the rules of an often-hostile international system. This understanding, however, limits the possibilities for a holistic engagement of African capabilities and experiences.
Importantly, however, these sorts of limitations of understanding show why the move away from traditional IR is essential. Thomas Kwasi Tieku, for his part, defines African agency as ‘the autonomy of African citizens, through their lawful representatives (governments), have to define, act, own, control and lead on issues that affect them’ (2013: 514), whereas Brown and Harman, refer to African agency as taking ‘African politics, actions, preferences, strategies and purposes seriously, to move past the tired tropes of an Africa that is victimised, chaotic, violent and poor’ (2013: 1–2). In this framing, Africa is constitutive of the international or global, rather than relying on the international to define it.
African agency vis-à-vis the EU must thus integrate the socio-historical dimension not just descriptively but as fundamental to mythologising the relationship. The postcolonial nature of the relationship is ontological, just as it is epistemological and methodological. In a manner, this is the insight that postcolonial/decolonial theorising brings to the theorising of Africa-EU relations.
In her contribution, Weldeab Sebhatu argues for the utility of postcolonial theory in understanding Africa-EU relations broadly and in explaining the lack of attention to African agency and its implications in existing studies. Where constructivism via International Relations is arguably quite malleable in how it may be able to give Africa more space our understanding of Africa-EU relations, postcolonial theory unabashedly seeks to challenge the Eurocentrism of both ‘EU-Africa’ knowledge production and the practices of ‘EU-Africa’ relations. It is a critical theoretical tradition that sits within a broader international study whose genealogy extends to before the discipline of IR and fuses normative, material and practical accounts of the relationship. In applying a postcolonial lens to Africa-EU relations, the roles of the EU is also recast in ways that had not been previously excavated.
In their book, Eurafrica, Hansen and Jonsson (2014) also draw on postcolonial theory to show how the postcolonialism re-narrates European integration as dependent on the colonisation and then the exploitation of Africa. Importantly, they contend that the architecture of European integration has rested on the manner of this relationship, thus articulating ‘dependency’ in this relationship quite differently to received knowledge. This perspective on Africa-EU relations, in decentring Europe and questioning the motivations and justification of European engagement with Africa, allows for a more nuanced accounting of interregionalism that upsets prevailing arrangements of power. Postcolonial theory thus shines a light on the blind spots of the nexus between theory and practice.
Conclusion
In this first section of the handbook, three scholars seek to articulate different perspectives on how particular theoretical approaches have been and can be used to understand Africa-EU relations. While this chapter has tried to introduce the relationship between the different theoretical traditions and African agency with Africa-EU relations, it is important that attempts at articulating agency not simply be a theoretical exercise.
As the three contributions show, Africa-EU relations are often co-constituted by their practice. This is manifested in the policy arena, though dominated by development assistance, trade agreements and increasingly security engagements. The new instruments of regionalism in Africa and extended capabilities in Europe facilitate this practice of interregionalism. Yet, the theories presented in the three contributions also reveal that the EU’s continued dominance in the relationship has the tendency to obscure African agency.
Africa-EU relations are now at a critical juncture. The quest for African agency does not seek to idealise it in relation to the EU, however. In other words, to seek African agency is no guarantee to a progressive outcome. True agency accounts for the complexities of the relationship, reflected in the different chapters in the handbook (see also Haastrup, forthcoming). Yet, the new instruments of regionalism in Africa do have important implications for its position in the international system and vis-à-vis the EU that can no longer be ignored. There is already pushback against what is considered the modus operendi of the EU’s approach to the continent. This defines the manifestation of agency. Nowhere is this more evident as the EU seeks to renegotiate its flagship Cotonou Agreement. While the EU continues to push for continued engagement within the ACP arrangement, the AU seeks more continent-to-continent engagement, partly to ensure the success of the AfCFTA. For the EU, there is a rhetorical commitment to ‘partnership’ with its African counterparts. The extent to which this is possible remains to be seen. What is clear from ...
