Chapter 8

Turning regional plans into global strategy: the case of European Community Development Aid.

Sometimes I like to compare the EU as a creation to the organization of empire[…] what we have is the first non- imperial empire.

José Barroso, 2007

We fear that the experts would be too technocratic. The weak point of our current experts is neither their skills, nor their technologies, but their excess of skills and technologies, their inability to adapt these technologies to the country in which they are applied.

Jacques Ferrandi, 1964

“Le patron du FED s’en va”. This was the title in the daily newspaper Le Soleil, in Dakar, Senegal on December 10, 1975.1 Jacques Ferrandi, the technocrat who ruled the European Development Fund (EDF), the organization for planning and managing the technical assistance projects of the European community, had just resigned. His resignation marked the end of an era for many countries in . Ferrandi epitomized the idea of Eurafrica, which had placed French policies at the hart of the European Communities’ (EC) . He embodied a postcolonial élite that did not cut its ties with the history and features of colonial domination. He incarnated French predominance in laying out EC relations with the Third World. With the departure of Ferrandi, the common development assistance policies became more European and less French.

European integration has often been recounted as a project that does not share much with empires. Historians have insisted on the European Community (later ) as an alternative to colonialism, as a new mission, which diverted political, economic and strategic goals from the imperial dimension and directed them toward different projects. Similarly, it has held that freed resources that were previously used in the European project. This story, however, does not reflect the facts. Africa helped unite at a time when everyone,

1 Citato in Martin Rempe, Entwicklung im Konflikt: die EWG und der Senegal 1957-1975, Köln, Böhlau Verlag, 2012, p. 318. 1 and especially Europeans, was casting doubts on the success of the European Community, said Jacques Ferrandi in his farewell address. The colonial dimension was thus far from alien to the projects of European construction. In the 1950s, many European countries were still empires and were not willing to renounce their colonial identity. Ever since the earliest projects for a European customs union, relations with colonies and former colonies were topics that had been touched upon during negotiations for European unity. Far from being free from any imperial projection, the European construction was imbued by a colonial ideology that the 1970s rhetoric of “the new European exceptionalism” progressively transformed.2

This chapter deals with the regional development assistance model built by the European Community. It highlights its peculiarities amid prevailing international discourses on aid. Cold War rhetoric, which proved overwhelming in other settings such as the DAC (the development Assistance Committee in the OECD), was marginal within the EC. Screened by the cocoon of the Atlantic Alliance - so goes the narrative – the European Community was able to invest large resources in supporting cooperation with the Global South. This chapter sets out to illuminate the great successes of a complex make-up operation: designing the European Community as a distinctive actor, with goals different from both those of the superpowers in the Cold War and those connected to the imperial past of its members. This transformation was no small thing, and it did not happen all at once. It occurred gradually, and it was connected to changes in the political and institutional relations within the European Community, including its extension to the UK, but also with broader international phenomena, like détente and the economic and financial crisis. It was also connected to an important change in leadership and vision.

Eurafrica and the imperial roots of European development aid.

In the 1920s and 1930s, intellectuals in , Germany, and Italy interested in geopolitics were playing with the prospects of a homogenous bloc between Europe and Africa: Eurafrica. They

2 The concept of European exceptionalism is in David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, New York, W.W. Norton, 1998 where it is used to define European success in the 18th and 19th century. Some authors expand it to today’s Euope.; a definition is to be found in Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Southern Barbarians? A Post- Colonial Critique of EUniversalism, in Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Berny Sèbe and Gabrielle Maas (eds.), Echoes of Empire: Memory, Identity and Colonial Legacies, London, I.B.Tauris, 2015, pp. 283-304, p. 292. Several use it in connection with the European Court for Human Rights – see for a discussion Georg Nolte e Helmut Philipp Aust, European Exceptionalism?, in «Global Constitutionalism», Vol. 2, Issue 3 (2013), pp. 407-436. 2 often described this emphatically as a fateful destiny.3 The Mediterranean played a major role in this plan. It was a great lake that united, not a treacherous sea that divided. In 1927, the architect and philosopher Hermann Sörgel imagined Atlantropa, a utopian continent to be built by sealing the Strait of Gibraltar with a dam. Continents were simply a myth that stood in the way of Eurafrica, claimed supporters of the project.4 In the interwar years, Eurafrica schemes were imagined as ideal tests for European cooperation. In Coudenhove-Kalergi’s plans for Paneuropa, for example, Eurafrica played an important strategic role, as a counterweight to the United States and the Soviet Union. This idea was discussed in the League of Nations, too. In the 1930s many French thinkers and politicians, especially on the right side of the political spectrum, thought of Africa as a workshop for Europe. Among them were Albert Sarraut, long time minister of colonies and two times prime minister, the philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel, and the revolutionary syndicalist Georges Valois.5

After the Second World War, the idea of Eurafrica resurged. It was thought to be a way to revive the European role, a Third force in the new epoch of the Cold War. Tossed into the post-war negotiations by British Foreign Minister Ernst Bevin, with the aim of balancing the resource gap with the United States, Eurafrica did not seem viable at first because of the different traditions of colonial administration prevailing at the time.6 As a concept, Eurafrica pretended to describe a partnership, but this coat of paint of equality hid a fundamentally unchanged colonial discourse. The colonial dimension was prominent in the 1950s. Eurafrica as an idea was then applied in the “association” of former colonies through the process of . The idea of association was a legacy of the interwar years. Albert Sarraut first used the term association in the 1930s to describe relations between France and its colonies, and it was based on the idea of

3 So Eugène Guernier, the most notable representative of this thought. Eugène L. Guernier L'Afrique: Champ d'expansion de l'Europe, , Armand Colin, I933 and Id., Le destin des continents: Trois continents, trois civilisations, trois destins, Paris, Librairie Felix Alcan, I936. Eurafrica was listed as the French world utopia. In Italy, the debate was led by Paolo D’Agostino Orsini di Camerota. 4 Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism, London, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2014, pp. 44-68. 5 Yves Montarsolo, Albert Sarraut et l’idee d’Eurafrique, in Marie-Thérèse Bitsch and Gérard Bossuat (ed.), L'Europe unie et l'Afrique: de l'idée d'Eurafrique à la convention de Lomé 1, Bruxelles, Bruylant, 2005, pp. 77-95. 6 Anne Deighton, Entente Neo-Coloniale?: Ernest Bevin and the Proposals for an Anglo–French Third World Power, 1945– 1949, in «Diplomacy & Statecraft», 01 December 2006, Vol.17(4), pp. 835-852 and Id., Ernest Bevin and the Idea of Euro- Africa from the Interwar to the Postwar Period, in M.T. Bitsch e G. Bossuat (ed.), L'Europe unie et l'Afrique, cit., pp. 97-118; John Kent, Bevin’s Imperialism and the Idea of Euro-Africa, in Michael Dockrill and John W. Young, British Foreign Policy 1945-56, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1989, pp. 47-76; Id., The Internationalization of Colonialism: Britain, France, and Black Africa, 1939-1956, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992. 3 complementarity between metropolitan areas and dependencies. As a legal instrument, association was introduced in the Treaties of Rome in 1957.

Whether to involve the colonies in the European project was discussed early on, during negotiations for the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1950 and in the Consultative Assembly of the in 1952. For some countries, and especially for France, the issue was vital. On the eve of the negotiation of the Treaties of Rome, the French Overseas Minister, Gaston Defferre, listed the reasons why the participation of the colonies was an essential precondition. It was not acceptable for France to sacrifice the African vocation for a European one, he advocated: excluding colonial territories from the European project would undermine French identity. It would deny the 1946 constitutional system of the Union Française, which celebrated imperial identity.7 In France and elsewhere the idea prevailed that empires were there to stay for a long time. At the same time, many were convinced that peace in Europe could be maintained by sharing responsibilities but especially earnings in Africa. Colonies were not expected to enjoy many of the advantages of integration, such as the free circulation of citizens.

The multitalented German economist – albeit naturalized British - Uwe Kitzinger wrote in 1960 that the European idea was able to bridge historical cleavages of all kind, including the fact that Empire and Community were not alternatives but rather parts of the same project. For postwar French governments, the European Economic Community had a colonial DNA and was in fact “a Eurafrican as much as a European scheme”.8 In the 1950s the correlation between discourses on European integration and on the European civilizing mission was very strong. In January 1957, Alexandre Kojève, the Hegelian philosopher who was serving as a high-level official in the French ministry of economics, spoke of colonialism as a special kind of capitalism, which extracted resources from colonized people and gathered them in the hands of a few. The recipe to transform European influence, he suggested, was a gebender Kolonialismus, a “colonialism of giving,” focused on building infrastructures especially in the most promising area for

7 Guia Migani, La France et l'Afrique sub-saharienne, 1957-1963: histoire d'une décolonisation entre idéaux eurafricains et politique de puissance, Bruxelles, P.I.E. Peter Lang, c2008, pp. 50-63; Véronique Dimier, The Invention of a European Development Aid Bureaucracy: Recycling Empire, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 11. 8 Uwe W. Kitzinger, Europe: The Six and the Seven, in «International Organization», Vol. 14, No. 1, 1960, pp. 20-36, here p.31; C.A. Cosgrove, The Common Market and Its Colonial Heritage, in «Journal of Contemporary History», Vol.4, Issue 1 (1969), p. 76. 4 development: around the shores of the Mediterranean.9 Interpretations which see the European project as a replacement for empire are therefore inaccurate. Empire was part and parcel with integration, and an incentive for integration. Integration was a common project for joint imperial management, rather than a project built on the ashes of empires after decolonization.

France also used the Cold War as a lever to justify the prosecution of empire. Excluding colonies from the European project would mean surrendering them to the Soviets. This argument had a certain weight and was obsessively repeated between 1955 and 1957. France brought up the political risks involved in decolonization and alluded to the disappointments in getting technical assistance right through the United Nations, where the debate on the Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development (SUNFED) was still ongoing. France offered to open colonial markets to the goods and business of other European countries. In exchange, it required contribution to a Development Fund and preferential treatment for the goods imported by French colonies. Most European partners doubted it was a good deal. The Dutch and the Germans were against it, while the Italians complained because of the competition of colonial goods with the products of their backward area, the Mezzogiorno. The decision on association, however, ultimately pandered to French wishes. It was an important political compromise, and a great success for France. Grudgingly accepted by the other members after the Suez crisis, it was not even submitted to the attention of legislative assemblies in Africa. No African representative was ever invited to take part in decisions on the European Development Fund. The Senegalese politician and later president, Léopold Senghor, voiced his disappointment early on, and described the European project as a “marriage of convenience”. Africans, he said, could maybe agree to be “the servants who carried the veil of the bride” but they definitely could not accept to enter a bargain where they were the wedding present.10

In 1957, many European leaders saw in the Treaties of Rome the opportunity for an expansionist policy, permitting “the continuation of her grand and global civilizing mission”– so said the Dutch Foreign Minister Joseph Luns.11 The “Fathers of Europe”, especially Konrad Adenauer and Paul-

9 Alexandre Kojève, Kolonialismus in europäischer Sicht, Düsseldorf 1957; English translation Erik de Vries, Colonialism from a European Point of View, in «Interpretation», Vol. 29, No. 1, 2001, pp. 91–130; James H. Nichols, Alexandre Kojève: Wisdom at the End of History, Lanham, Md., Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007. 10 Senghor in Marches coloniaux du monde, 1953, in V. Dimier, The Invention of a European Aid Bureaucracy, cit., p. 15. 11 Luns is quoted in Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica. The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism, London, Bloomsbury, 2014, p.238. 5 Henri Spaak, did not think of independence as incumbent for African colonies, and trusted the resilience of the colonial system. In 1955, however, with France in the minority at the United Nations on , the prospects for colonial powers rapidly changed.12 The fear of a sudden collapse, the sense of being under siege, and the necessity to defend white man’s civilization became part of the European discourse.

The choice of association was not just about trade. Hanssen and Jonsson offer convincing evidence that security issues were at stake. The possibility of having NATO carrying responsibility in Africa was part of French and West German reasoning.13 The Federal Republic of Germany insisted on discussing in the Atlantic Alliance the prospects of communist threat in the less developed countries. They argued that cultural exchanges, scholarships, technical and financial assistance should form part of a strategy to promote Western-style democracy in the Third World.14 The discovery of oil and gas in Algeria, and the possibility of joint exploitation of the riches of a territory still under French colonial control were factors strengthening the viability of Belgian and French projects for association.15 France and Germany, although moving from different assumptions, were like-minded on the inclusion of the colonies in the Economic Community: it was a shared geopolitical imperative.16

With the negotiation of the Rome treaties, Europe built a regional system that would have a long life, notwithstanding the end of colonial empires. Agreement on association was achieved in Brussels, in January 1957, but details were left to the Conference of Foreign Ministers that met in Paris, one month later. The association regime with overseas territories became part IV of the Treaties signed in Rome. It was meant to achieve the social and economic development of associated territories. A preference system of trade between members and associated territories was to be established soon afterwards at one ad hoc conference. A fund for the development of

12 Matthew James Connelly, A diplomatic revolution : Algeria's fight for independence and the origins of the post-cold war era, Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2002. 13 Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica, cit, pp. 196-209. 14 NATO Restricted Working Paper AC/119-WP(58)58 del 17.8.58, in PA AA B34 Ref. 307, 114. 15 Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica, cit., p. 217. René Girault, La France entre l’Europe et l’Afrique, in Enrico Serra (a cura di), Il Rilancio dell'Europa e i trattati di Roma = La relance européenne et les traités de Rome : actes du colloque de Rome, 25-28 Mars 1987, Bruxelles, Bruylant ; Milano, Giuffrè ; Paris, L.G.D.J. ; Baden-Baden, Nomos, 1989. 16 Thomas Moser, Europäische Integration, Dekolonisation, Eurafrika : eine historische Analyse über Entstehungsbedingungen der Eurafrikanischen Gemeinschaft von der Weltwirtschaftskrise bis zum Jaunde-Vertrag, 1929 – 1963, Baden-Baden, Nomos, 2000. 6 associated territories was a part of the deal, which listed financial contributions of the members for the first five years.

After decolonization, the Eurafrica scheme changed, and links to colonial ideology were denied, especially in those countries that did not have a recent colonial past. In June 1960 the German newspaper “Die Welt” feared a loss of European influence on the African continent, mentioning the flee of Africa from Europe, “Läuft Afrika der EWG davon?”17 Not perceived as imminent at the time when the European Community treaties were signed, after a mere three years decolonization became a pressing concern for the European powers. The structure built for securing relations with the South threatened to crumble together with the idea of association. With independence, former colonies plummeted into a legal void, a no man’s land. The editorial in “Die Welt” pressed for immediate action. One particular group of African countries reclaimed a radical change in perspective, regarding pan-Africanism as a political project capable of countering colonial powers. Another group, equally aware of their dependence on their former colonial authorities, asked for maintaining existing links and preferential access to European markets. When in July 1963 eighteen independent countries in Africa decided to continue association by adhering to the Yaoundé Convention, supporters of Eurafrica cheered. The Convention retained preferential trade with the Associated African and Malagasy States, on a bilateral basis and entailing reciprocal obligations. It guaranteed non-discrimination and the continuation of the aid regime.18 With decolonization, a break in public discourse was accompanied by significant structural continuities: people, projects, and institutions hardly changed in what Belgian historian Véronique Dimier, describes as a client and neo-patrimonial system.19

Building after the French model.

17 «Die Welt», 2 June 1960, http://www.cvce.eu/obj/"lauft_afrika_der_ewg_davon_"_in_die_welt_2_juni_1960-de- 8cd03eec-c84b-4de4- 9694-0c7a36e4a4bc.htm (last visit, May 2016). 18 Enzo R. Grilli, The European Community and the Developing Countries, Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp.18-21. 19 Véronique Dimier, Bringing Neo-Patrimonialism Back to Europe: Decolonization and the Construction of the EEC Development Policy, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 48/2008, p. 433-460. 7 In the Treaties of Rome, development aid had an important role, and in 1957 the introduction of the European Development Fund (EDF) was called “a new deal for the Dark Continent”.20 In the patronizing rhetoric of the 1950s, it was about securing true independence for Africans. EDF was endowed with EUA (the unit of account) 581 million over five years.21 France and Germany were meant to pay the greatest part thereof, 200 million each. The Fund was modeled on the French development fund for the colonies, the Fonds d'investissement pour le développement économique et social (FIDES). Recipients had to express their needs by submitting their projects for funding. The was in control and had to follow a set of rules for the apportionment of resources, according to geographical area, but also the characteristics of the project – economic or social development. The EDF became operational in 1959. Just like FIDES, it did not follow rigid budget rules. Amounts were established on a five-year basis, and there was no strict financial control. 22

The making of a European policy toward the South, and especially of a European Development Aid policy, is well described through the history of the Direction Générale (Directorate General) that dealt with development policies, the DG8.23 France more than other countries shaped the institutional architecture that structured relations with developing countries. A broad EC bureaucracy was established. Given that until 1962 there were no specific rules on hiring, each DG ended up being a small national enclave.24 DG8 was guided by a French Commissioner, , and became a French national fief- with a German administrative director, Helmut Allardt, in order to grant participation of the other big contributor to the fund.

A businessman with experience in African matters, former President of the Societé Commerciale des Ports Africains (1941-1958), vice-president of the International Chamber of Commerce (1942-1958), member in the board of directors of the East Africa Company (Compagnie de l’Afrique Orientale) and of the West African Bank (Banque d’Afrique Occidentale), Lemaignen endeavored to include in his group “the best elements available in France”. He asked them to separate themselves from their national vision and adopt a new point of view, one of European

20 Karis Muller, Iconographie de l’Eurafrique, in M.T. Bitsch, G. Bossuat, L’Europe Unie et l’Afrique, cit., pp. 9-34. 21 Enzo R. Grilli, The European Community and the Developing Countries, cit. 22 Sulla nascita del FED in particolare: HAEU, BAC 25/1980 1034. 23 La ricostruzione in questo capitolo, ove non indicato altrimenti, si fonda sui documenti della Commissione europea, conservati all’Archivio Storico dell’Unione Europea (fondo BAC) sulle pagine della rivista “Courier”. 24 Kleine Mareike, Trading Control: International Fiefdoms in International Organizations, in «International Theory» 5.3 (Nov.2013), pp. 321-346; Edward C. Page, People Who Run Europe, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 49. 8 Community institutions. At the same time, he suggested a course of action imbued with a colonial mentality. Solving political or economic controversies in African countries, he contended, depended on trust given to your interlocutor, more than to the logic in your reasoning.25 Interpersonal relations were fundamental in his discourse, and this implied that European Community policy making could or should be molded by counterparts. It also suggests that patron-client relations were going to weight a lot in Community policy-making, just as much as they did during colonial times.

Two visions antagonized one another: the regionalist vision supported by France, and the world vision supported by Germany and, outside the Community, by Great Britain and the United States. The divergence turned into a conflict within the DG8 between the first architect of community development policies, Lemaignen, and his Director General, Allardt. Previously West German ambassador in Jakarta and, earlier than that, German representative in Ankara with von Papen, Allardt said he had accepted the appointment out of friendship and esteem for the President of the Commission, .26 Relations with Lemaignen, however, proved untenable from the very beginning. Lemaignen did not trust Allardt and dealt mostly with his deputy, Jacques Vignes, who was there, he maintained, in order to reassure Africans who feared a revival of Hitler’s racism. Allardt did not mask the gap between his views and the commissioners’.27 Disagreeing with French regionalism, he asked for there to be an opening up to a global perspective. Opposing the diversion of funds into “dozens of small pointless projects”, he requested general planning.28 He was forced to resign within two years. As a tool for discrediting his views, his past as a top diplomat under von Papen came in handy. The more malleable Heinrich Hendus, formerly German representative in Algeria, replaced him.

In 1958 Lemaignen chose his Head of Cabinet. He appointed Jacques Ferrandi, a former colonial officer who had been director general of economic affairs in Dakar, managing FIDES.29 Ferrandi was responsible for the EDF. He became the reference for a system based on methods of indirect rule that former colonial officers now in the service of the community, especially French, had learned in colonial schools. A flexible system of governance which was based on personal

25 Robert Lemaignen, L’Europe au berceau. Souvenirs d’un technocrate, Paris, Plon, 1964, p. 117. 26 Helmut Allardt, Politik vor und hinter den Kulissen, Düsseldorf, Econ Verlag 1979, pp. 187-188. 27 In December 1959 Allardt suggested not to focus on the recipient, but rather on the donor. HAEU BAC 25/1980 1034 28 Allardt in Läuft Afrika der EWG davon?, in «Die Welt», cit. 29 Robert Lemaignen, L’Europe au berceau, cit. 9 relationships, trust, loyalty and mutual obligation, grounded on the principle that in order to deal with local population it was necessary to adapt to their customs, at the cost of violating the rules. Ferrandi, the eminence grise of Community development aid, largely operated with full autonomy, aided first by Lemaignen’s unconditional support, and by the indifference of following commissioners, (1962-67) and Jean François Denieu (1967-73).

Managing European Development Aid was a complex task. The DG8 was divided into four areas, called directorates: study and programs, cultural and social issues, development fund, and trade policies. The Research department, headed by young Belgian economist Jean Durieux, produced studies and statistics to be used for decisions on fund allocations, but the results of these works were often surpassed by other priorities. Choices resided firmly in the hands of Ferrandi and a small group including his deputy Jean Chapperon and the press officer Pierre Cros. This does not mean that ideas on aid performance were not admitted. Community bureaucracy did not fail to point to objective criteria at the basis of its decisions. This was spurred by Germans’ requests for feasibility studies and for procedures granting publicity and transparency.30 Martin Rempe makes a convincing case when he argues that in the case of Senegal European practices had a positive influence of development practices, and the European Community financed the more efficient projects, while the others were taken care of by bilateral aid.31

European Community circles did not trust, and often abhorred, technocratic ideas typical of international organizations, which they viewed as part of the Anglo-Saxon culture. Robert Delavignette was the main inspiration for most French officials and consultants in the DG8. One of the most well known French colonial officers in Africa (he served in Cameroon, Niger and Upper Volta –then Burkina Faso), Delavignette was for a long time the director of the École Nationale de la France d’Outremer and from 1947-1951 was the Director for Political Affairs in the Overseas Ministry. He praised traditional rural African societies and could not stand planners who “played with statistics” and were guided by what he dubbed as a fanatic intolerance they called progress, by a blind trust in technology and by the total negligence of local cultures.32 The notion that some knowledge of local situations was crucial to designing effective aid plans

30 HAEU, BAC 25/1980, 1034. 31 Martin Rempe, Decolonization by Europeanization? The Early EEC and the Transformation of French-African Relations, in «KFG Working Paper», 27, 2011. 32 Robert Delavignette, Service Africaine, Paris, Gallimard, 1946. On the influence of Delavignette see Dimier, The Invention of a Development Aid Bureaucracy, cit., pp.33-4 and 116-120. 10 became the tenet of the DG8, which did not believe in it playing a theoretical role. The successor of Lemaignen as Development Commissioner was Henri Rocherau, who served between 1962 and 1970. He made it clear that the Directorate General was not a think tank: “we are no theoreticians of development, we are men of action and of good will”, he claimed. Associated Countries, he contended, did not mean to adopt a European way of life, and even less European political conceptions. They meant to achieve “progress in their own way”.33

The head of the EDF, Ferrandi was especially critical of ready-made recipes for development. He held that development was not a technocratic move; it was not about “applying a solution developed in a lab onto a specific situation”.34 The same concept was sometimes expressed as a rebuttal of perfectionism, of the “perfectly tailored technical solution” which could fit Europe but did not match African requirements – it was not about finding generally applicable solutions, but about devising specific solutions to specific problems.35 Likewise, and possibly even more decidedly, Ferrandi rejected development doctrines predicting the success of a project, regardless of the economic and social context. Ideas in the DG8 were not too far from the “Latin” thought on development, which included people like Giorgio Ceriani Sebregondi, and a strain of the thinking of Social Catholicism in the 1950s.36 This interpretation strongly departed from the ideas then prevailing in the international system, since it disdained industrial planning and dubbed it as “not desirable”. Jean Durieux, an economist specializing in industrial policies, was disenchanted by Community Aid. He had started his career in the Research department at the DG8 and in 1964 became adjunct Director General,. Community officers, he argued, knew well that Africa was not ready for industrial development, and could elaborate better ways to help these countries create the conditions for future industrial development.37

33 Quotation from Rochereau address, 8-11 December 1964, in quoted as in V. Dimier, The Invention of a European Aid Bureaucracy, p. 34. 34 Jacques Ferrandi, La Communauté européenne et l’assistance technique, in «International Development Review», 8, 1964, pp. 8-9. 35 Marches tropicaux, 1974 pp.1055-56, Conference donnée par J. Ferrandi devant le Comité européen d’ingennieurs- conseils, Bruxelles (s.d.), cit. in Véronique Dimier, Négocier avec les Rois nègres: l’influence des administrateurs coloniaux français sur la politique europeenne de developpement, in M.T. Bitsch, G. Bossuat,L’Europe unie et l’Afrique, cit., pp. 392- 409 qui p.403. 36 Carlo Felice Casula, Credere nello sviluppo sociale. La lezione intellettuale di Giorgio Ceriani Sebregondi, Roma, Lavoro, 2010. 37 Durieux to Ferrandi, 28 February 1973 in AEC/25/1980/2947. 11 EDF management under Ferrandi was no doubt opaque. Under the crossfire of critics for his personal connections, Ferrandi used to say that politics was made out of relationships, and that he did not have a policy, he had partners. Human relations were the key to get development work, he contended. Criteria adopted for choosing projects were variable. Sometimes they rewarded expected profits. Sometimes they gave priority to the condition of poverty of the recipients. Other times, it was about keeping old promises. The Cold War had a role to play, too: it was not possible to tell African leaders what to do, claimed Ferrandi: it was about suggesting what was not feasible, trying to prevent them from turning somewhere else to seek financing. The requests for more objective criteria in the distribution of EC aid came from several places: from Great Britain, when it entered the Community, but also from countries like the Senegal or the Côte d’Ivoire, which were critical for the amounts of aid provided to small countries like Gabon.38

In 1970, the new Director General Hans-Broder Krohn reacted to the criticism against Ferrandi, and introduced new forms of control by assigning external technical personnel as project supervisors, which had to maintain a balance in terms of national representation. These were called contrôleurs délégués and progressively became a network of diplomatic representatives of the Communities. Recruiting procedures were introduced, and a requirement of rotation. These supervisors became prefects, in charge of a specific territory where they were meant to promote the Community. Some ended up being recruited by local governments or moved into the national administrations of their country of origin.39

Although not free of shadows, the experience of European Community Aid during Ferrandi’s years was in the whole perceived as a positive one. The DG8 had created its own traditions, modeled on the French legacy and screened from the influence of the prevailing methods at the international level. Once dismissed by Ferrandi, the DG8 entered a stage of rationalization of procedures and embraced international standards on development aid, adjusting some of its specific features. It did so, because it was dragged into it by the momentous transformation on the international scene in the 1970s, especially in the economic field; in order to keep up with the

38 V. Dimier, The Invention of a European Aid Bureacracy, cit., p.36 39 V. Dimier e Mike Mcgeever, Diplomats Without a Flag: The Institutionalization of the Delegations of the Commission in African, Caribbean and Pacific Countries, in «Journal of Common Market Studies», 09/2006, Vol.44(3), pp. 483-505. 12 requests of the Third World; and especially because it needed to adapt to the amendments required by the accession of Great Britain to the European Community.

A new role for Europe in Africa: and the “Lomé revolution”.

At the beginning of the 1970s, the European Community offered the image of a new power, upholding the legacy of the nation states that formed it and being intent on promoting values of peace, democracy, and a new socio-economic development model. In 1972 François Duchêne, former close assistant of Jean Monnet in the European Coal and Steel Community, invented the concept of “Europe as a civilian power”. Europe was a new kind of polity, a normative power. Its attention to social justice, claimed Duchêne, was bound to provoke new interest in poverty even outside its borders, and make Europe a dispenser of civic and democratic standards through collective action.40 The region where this normative power would be projected first was Africa. The main instrument for promoting the European Community in the Third World was the journal The Courier, founded in 1961 by Pierre Cros and Jaap Van der Lee.41 The official organ for development assistance towards the associated countries, the Courier – formerly Le Courrier de l’association - was originally just a bulletin with very limited distribution: only a few copies were printed. In the 1970s it became a real journal, bimonthly in English, with a new readership: élites and cadres in the associated countries. It became a showcase for the Commission but also for recipient countries, a mirror of cooperation between Africa and Europe – so said Hans Broder- Krohn in a letter to the Somali diplomat Hassan Mohamed Shabbeleh in June 1970.42 The construction of a new picture of European action stood in stark contrast to the tendency by some authors fro the developing countries to represent EC policy as a form of disguised imperialism. A wonderful example of these kinds of allegations is the book by Max Liniger-Goumaz, L’Eurafrique utopie ou realité? Les metamorphoses d’une idee, published in 1972. Here, the European project was associated with infrastructural projects for Eurafrica developed in the years of imperialism (Sörgel’s project of the Sea in the Congo and the Inga basin development) and to the geopolitics of

40 François Duchene, The European Community and the Uncertainties of Interdependence, in M. Kohnstamm, W. Hager (eds.), A Nation Writ Large? Foreign Policy Problems before the European Community, London, Macmillan, 1973, p. 20. 41 La storia editoriale del Courier è anche in BAC 25/1980 n.1614 e 1615. 42 Note a l’attention de M. le Directeur General, Obj: publication destinée à l’information des pays associés, Bruxelles, 20 fevrier 1961 and Letter to the Somali representative Hassan Mohamed Shabbeleh, 11 giugno 1970, in BAC 25/1980 n.1613. 13 Eugène Guernier and Orsini di Camerota.43 Several governments resisted anti-European rhetoric by showing a new commitment to development aid.44 The 1972 European Community Summit held in Paris, which is remembered as the starting point of a European foreign policy, mentioned development aid and cooperation with the Third World as priority areas.45

Most scientific and historiographical literature interprets the signing of the Lomé convention in February 1975 as an accomplished response to the requests of the Third World. Lomé is still described as a political turning point: a great leap forward, quantitative and qualitative, in relations with the South. Some refer to it as a revolution to appease requests from poor countries. Others - and maybe the most striking example is John Ravenhill - are extremely critical and talk of “collective clientelism”.46 The Lomé convention responded to the necessity of adapting to the accession of Great Britain and the inclusion of Commonwealth countries, described in protocol 22 of the adhesion treaty. With British entry, it became necessary to find a way to absorb new imperial burdens from within the community. The issue was whether a Eurafrican dimension still made sense. A new clash between the regional and the global took place, this time with a different level of intensity and on another scale, given the British contribution. This clash has been defined as “a new Fashoda” because, just as in the famous colonial encounter in 1898, a potentially disruptive challenge turned into an agreement which safeguarded the interests of both France and the United Kingdom.47 As for trade, the main issue discussed was the abolition of reverse preferences, i.e. mutual reductions of custom duties. A stronghold in the Lomé convention, this element was the legacy of the colonial trade, and it was an element of contention with the United States, who asked for immediate termination especially in the GATT. As for the aid provisions, it was clear that the position of absolute prominence held until then by France would require adjustments. A situation where France contributed to 30% to the budget, but its

43 Max Liniger-Goumaz, L'Eurafrique: utopie ou réalité? Les métamorphoses d'une idée, Yaoundé, Éditions CLE, 1972. 44 On this and specific country studies see Sara Lorenzini, Globalising Ostpolitik, in «Cold War History», Vol.9, Nr. 2, May 2009, p. 223-242; Elena Calandri, Prima della globalizzazione: l'Italia, la cooperazione allo sviluppo e la Guerra Fredda 1955-1995, Padova, CEDAM, 2013, pp. 111-123; Lorenzo Ferrari, Speaking with a Single Voice. The Assertion of the EC as a Distinctive International Actor, 1969-79, PhD dissertation, 2014, p.127, now published as Sometimes Speaking with a Single Voice. The European Community as an International Actor, 1969–1979, Bruxelles, Peter Lang 2016. 45 Statement from the Paris Summit, in «Bulletin of the European Communities» 10 October 1972, No 10, pp. 14-26 http://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/1999/1/1/b1dd3d57-5f31-4796-85c3-cfd2210d6901/publishable_en.pdf, ultimo accesso 24 marzo 2016. 46 John Ravenhill, Collective Clientelism: The Lomé Conventions and North-South Relations, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985. 47 V. Dimier, The Invention of a European Aid Bureacracy, cit., p. 80. 14 former colonies benefitted for 80% of the funding, was no longer tenable. The UK asked for a change in methods, a switch from project to program: this meant evaluating and financing consistent development plans rather than single projects, in an effort to consider the overall economic conditions of the recipient, and solve the worst poverty situations. Poverty was measured on per capita GDP.48

The man put in charge of turning old association into something different was the Frenchman Claude Cheysson, who became Development Commissioner in 1973. He soon became a key figure, delivering the sense of a quantum leap in the external actions of the community. He was a pillar in European action toward developing countries and the Mediterranean until the end of the Cold War, in 1989. He was Commissioner for Development and Cooperation in 1973-1977, then Development Commissioner in 1977-1981 and - after a period as Foreign Minister during the François Mitterand Presidency (1981-1984) – again Commissioner in charge of Mediterranean Policy and North-South Relations between 1985 and 1989. An officer in the French foreign ministry right after the war (1948), he was removed in the mid-1950s from diplomatic service because he stood in favor of Algeria’s independence. He then worked for the Commission for Technical Co-operation in Africa (CCTA) South of the Sahara in 1950 with the aim of coordinating the action of colonial powers on the continent.49 He became its Secretary General and in that position he revolutionized its composition and function. He moved the seat from London to Lagos, extended the participation of newly independent African countries, and eventually deprived the colonial powers of voting rights. In the beginning a discussion chamber reserved for white colonizers, the Commission became a political body governed by black Africans. In 1962 Cheysson was called by Charles De Gaulle as a head of the Organisme Saharien, the Franco- Algerian cooperation body for management of subsoil resources. Here he strived to involve Algerians in decision-making. After three years as Ambassador in Indonesia he returned to Africa (1970-1973) as a President of Entreprise minière et chimique (EMC) and of the Compagnie des potasses du Congo. Again, he attempted, although this time not as successfully, to confer

48 L. Ferrari, Speaking with a Single Voice, cit., p. 131. «The Courier», 30, 1975. 49 John Kent, The Internationalization of Colonialism, cit., cap. 3. 15 management on the Congolese government – and discharge herewith the costs of a failed project.50

President Georges Pompidou chose Cheysson, a member of the French Socialist Party, as for Development because he was welcomed by Third World leaders and by the British, who had sponsored his activities in the past.51 With a CV that granted him huge credibility among African countries, and experience in managing strategic resources, he was able to immediately achieve a change in outlook that radically transformed the image of the European project. Cheysson applied the “model CCTA” to Euro-African relations, so that Africans could unite around the plan of radically redesigning European Community aid in the belief that “tomorrow’s Europe has its extension in the Third World”. Cheysson explicitly evoked OPEC, the international organization which brought together oil-producing countries: “if Africa talks through one speaker only, it will be a huge political power, just as OPEC: only when united they were paid attention to”.52 Both the presidents of the Ivory Coast, Félix Houphouet-Boigny, and of Senegal, Léopold Senghor, were hostile to the idea of a dialogue with a united front of African states and feared the prospect of an agreement too dissimilar with the Yaoundé Agreement, which they saw as being fit for their own interests. Others, like Nigeria, did not accept the idea of being on equal footing with much poorer former colonies. African opposition was overcome during negotiations, given that the prospected agreement, eventually signed in Lomé and known as the Lomé convention, embraced several requests of the Group of 77, the coalition of developing nations built on the eve of UNCTAD in 1964 and designed to promote its members' collective economic interests and enhance their joint negotiating capacity in the United Nations.

The Lomé Convention signed on 28 February 1975 extended association to 46 countries.53 The bulk of the agreement was Eurafrica, but the terminology changed significantly: association was substituted with partnership; associated countries became ACP Countries (Africa Caribbean and Pacific). Just as in the Yaoundé agreement, two kinds of policies prevailed: trade and technical

50 Jacques Giri, Du Tiers monde aux mondes émergents: un demi-siècle d'aide au développement, Paris, Karthala, 2012, pp. 91-92. 51 Georges Sunier, Claude Cheysson. Histoire d’une pensée politique (1940-1981), PhD dissertation, Paris, Université de Paris VII, 1995. 52 Declaration at Yaoundé, 29 December 1973. Citata in Georges Sunier, Claude Cheysson, cit. p. 91. 53 Lomé Dossier, in «The Courie»r no. 31 Special issue, marzo 1975. Sulla cooperazione allo sviluppo dopo Lomé si veda anche E. Bussière, V. Dujardin, M. Dumoulin, P. Ludlow, J.W. Brouwer, E. Palmero, (eds.), La Commission européenne 1973-1986 histoire et mémoires d'une institution, Luxembourg, Publications Office of the EU, 2014, pp. 401-421. 16 assistance. In both cases, and especially in trade policies, innovations were appreciable. As for trade, just like in the past agricultural and mining produce entered the communities free of duties. Now, though, the mutual clauses were not there anymore. Commodities in competition with European products were to be governed by quota systems negotiated separately - the first was the sugar protocol. The most lauded innovation was Stabex, the mechanism for price stabilization of raw materials. Based on the requests of Third World countries, Stabex was meant to stabilize revenues from the trade of primary commodities. It was a sort of insurance that protected against price volatility. In the case of imbalances it provided funds to overcome the emergency. As for aid, Lomé introduced a new industrial cooperation and further funding for technical assistance amounting to three billion of ECU - European Currency Unit, the new unit of account. The specifics on the operation of EDF were to be dealt with on a later stage. Lomé was welcomed with great satisfaction on all sides, including previous detractors. Houphouet-Boigny, critical in the beginning, described Lomé as a starting point for a new era as “one of the greatest adventures in the Century”.54

In Cheysson’s plans, Lomé was the first step toward a more general review of Community development aid. It was a showcase, a model designing procedures that could be repeated and projected at a global level.55 It was not about “world government” but about promoting a multiplication of regional agreements that resembled Lomé. It was about establishing a sound regional framework of economic and social relations that could then serve as a basis for a further extension.56 A staunch supporter of Third World countries groupings, Cheysson adopted their point of view and the ideological interpretation according to which poor countries had exported class struggle in international relations. The Third World, he declared in 1979, is the world’s proletarian class and solicits the same entitlements once claimed by the European working class in the nineteenth century: rights, security, and a fair share in wealth.57 Countries in the OECD, who were uneasy with this new situation, had to cope with this changed situation. They had to

54 «Le Courier», 38, luglio-agosto 1976, p.55 55 Communication de M. Claude Cheysson à la reunion tenue à Rotterdam des Comités Directeurs d’Organisations Privées tournés vers l’Afrique, 9 Avril 1974, cit. in Sunier, Claude Cheysson, cit., p. 101. 56 Resoconto di una riunione coni sindacati, Ginevra 22 giugno 1974, HAEU BAC 25/1980 n.1878. 57 Intervention de M. Claude Cheysson, debat organisé par la revue «Croissance des jeunes nations», 18 mars 1979, HAEU, BAC 25/1980 n.1878. 17 acknowledge their historical responsibilities, and act accordingly.58 Facing a new unity of intent and political cohesion, in a revival of the Bandung moment, the European Community had to be the first to launch a new model and assert that Europe and the Third Word needed each other.59 Cheysson was convinced that prosperity and growth in Europe could stem from deeper and more integrated relations with the Third World. The Third World was essential, he claimed: “it is not excessive to state that we will be saved by the poor”.60

Finding a role for the Cold War

The European Commission invested resources in political communication, with a dense schedule of visits and tireless coverage in the Courier in order to promote its new strategy. It was about staging proximity to the Third World and the great equality innovation of Lomé. This propaganda assigned a new role to Cold War rhetoric. Cheysson successfully reversed criticism and fashioned Community policies as a positive answer to non-alignment and to the demands of NIEO. The Cold War served as a framework and was ever-present.61

Eurafrica was not a synonym for the West. Since the very beginning, associated countries were considered a European “hunting reserve”, even though it became apparent early on that at the time of independence they could opt for other loyalties. In 1957, the former French Overseas Minister Pierre Henri Teitgen, one of the most cautious politicians as to Eurafrican relations, addressed the Council of Europe. At the time of independence, he stated, African countries had several options: the American bloc, the Soviet world, the Bandung coalition, the Afro-Asian group, or Free Europe.62 The world he pictured was multipolar, not bipolar. Eurafrica was a project per se, clearly different from neutralism or panafricanism, but also from an American idea of a Western bloc. All pan African leaders, starting from Sekou Touré and Kwame Nkrumah, and all

58 New Delhi, 24 Jan 1975, (2nd International workshop economic journalists), nota all’attenzione dei membri della commissione, 18 feb 1975, cit a p.94-95). 59 Preparation du Conseil européen de Dublin. Document de Travail de la Commission sur les problèmes des relations avec les PVD, 21 fevrier 1975. 60 Claude Cheysson, La contribution du Tiers Monde à la relance de l’économie mondiale, in «Studia diplomatica», vol XXXI, 1978, p. 98. 61 Piers Ludlow, History Aplenty but Too Isolated, in: Michelle Egan, Neill Nugent e William E. Paterson, (eds.) Research Agendas in EU Studies: Stalking the Elephant, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 62 Ambiguity in France, in «The New York Times», 15 June 1957, quoted in Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica, cit., p. 267. 18 Third World friendly intellectuals, like Franz Fanon or Jean Paul Sartre, were clearly against a European project.

In the 1970s, Cheysson was able to turn the table even in this respect. He used the Cold War instrumentally, in order to serve his rhetoric of a community of interests between the European Community and the Third World, counting on the identification of the less developed countries with the proletariat in the global system. He presented the European strategy as complimentary with non-alignment, taking credit for a renewed solidarity among ACP countries.63 He recovered the concept of equality, in explicit competition with the socialist discourse: the Europe of tomorrow, he claimed, had to rethink interdependence as a way to describe its relations to the Third World, and had to think of an integrated policy, different from the nation states’, bolder and less connected to the past.64 Community action was helping create a multipolar world, which was perceived as far less dangerous than a bipolar setting.65 With time, criticism against the Socialist countries became more focused. In a 1978 interview, for example, Cheysson argued that Russia was not a good partner in development, and that there was no example from the history of the Soviet Union that could deny the USSR’s total incompetence at aiding other peoples’ development. The Soviets, he argued, were good at providing military support in preparation for a war of liberation. At the end of the war, however, aid went back to risible levels, and Soviet technical capacities revealed their inadequacy.66

Socialist countries did not eschew competition. They described the European Community as collective colonialism and pointed to antagonism among its members.67 References to the Scramble for Africa and the 1885 Berlin Conference were typical. UNCTAD was a perfect stage for denunciation. Very harsh in 1964, criticism was softened in later years. At the third UNCTAD in Santiago de Chile in 1972, the effects of détente were visible. Socialist countries complained about EC policies especially in the East-West commission. Their aim was link their requests to Third world’s demands, in order to promote a comprehensive change in international trade.

63 «The Courier», n.38, jul-ag 1976, p. 54. 64 Claude Cheysson, An Agreement Unique in History, in «The Courier» no.31 Special Issue March 75, p.13 65 Note for the members of the Commission, 18 February 1975, in Sunier, cit., pp. 94-95. 66 In un’intervista del 1978 a Jacques Docquiert, su «La Croix», p. 4. 67 V. Kollontay, The EEC and the Developing Countries, Moscow, 1963. Si veda anche Peter Føge Jensen, Soviet Research on Africa with special reference to international relations, Uppsala, The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1973, disponibile all’indirizzo http://nai.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:276760/FULLTEXT01.pdf (ultimo accesso: gennaio 2017). 19 Hungary and Bulgaria added their criticism against the Community’s agricultural policies to the claims stemming from Brazil and Algeria.68 The Lomé convention was described as a colonial or neo-colonial policy69, as a compromise between packs of imperialist wolves, where everyone tried to impose his own will at the expense of the others.70 Hungarian economist Tibor Palàmkai, at a conference on Lomé and the New International Economic Order, argued that the new agreement simply offered a broader regional community and did not change the division of labor. Association agreements, he maintained, were bringing just short-term advantages: the EDF and Stabex were not allocated enough resources, while industrial cooperation simply paved the way for multinationals.71

Transplanting Lomé: a Mediterranean step toward globalization.

Lomé’s revision of the association agreements was meant to be a first step within a wider strategy, which was described in the October 1974 publication Development Aid: Fresco of Community Action Tomorrow. Here, the Commission listed a whole spectrum of policies to aid Third World countries.72 In a speech to the House of Commons, in December 1974, Cheysson listed his priorities. He started with food aid in the spirit of the World Food Conference just concluded in Rome – an issue the European Parliament also cared about. Then, he introduced an emergency package for poor countries hit by the rise in oil prices: the ECU 500 million-endowed Cheysson Fund. The third point was a scheme to promote technical cooperation in the Mediterranean. Cheysson thought of trilateral relationships combining technical abilities and the easy access to markets of European countries with oil producers’ money.73 It was about creating “responsibility zones” between industrialized and developing countries, a trilateral cooperation, reminiscent of the one started, in the early 1970s, in Eastern Europe. Technically, this action was

68 Rapporto di Jean Durieux, EU Historical Archives, BAC 25/1980, 304 e 305. 69 Ad esempio C.M. Tibazarwa, ‘The Lomé Convention as a Grandchild of the Berlin Conference of 1885’, in From Berlin to Brussels - 100 Years of Afro-European Cooperation,, Pentland Press, Durham, 1994, E.A. Tarabrin, The New Scramble for Africa, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1974. 70 V. Kazakevicius, The Common Market and the Developing Countries, in «International Affairs», June 1979, pp. 57-66. 71 Frans A. M. Alting von Geusau, The Lomé convention and a New International Economic Order, Leyden, Sijthoff, 1977, p. 153. 72 Development aid: fresco of community action tomorrow; Communication of the Commission transmitted to the Council on 5 November 1974, COM(74) 1728, 30 October 1974, in Bulletin of the European Communities, Supplement 8/74. 73 Luncheon at the House of Commons, 9 December 1974. 20 put forward by director general Hans-Broder Krohn. It included the extension of the Lomé policy to the southern shore of the Mediterranean, the provision of food aid, the onset of a Euro-Arab dialogue, of a North-South dialogue, and of the special aid for less developed countries hit by the oil crisis.74

The formula was “Lomé as a method”. It meant exporting the characteristics of the agreement to other settings, starting with the southern shore of the Mediterranean: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria. Cheysson set out his vision in a meeting with the representative of ACP countries at the signature of the Convention.75 Europe was running for global leadership by setting the Mediterranean at its center. The project acquired poignancy with the crisis of authoritarian regimes in Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, Greece), which promised acceleration in strategic projections of the European Community. Of course, the project of a Global Mediterranean Policy was there before Cheysson took his office. Its first appearance dated back to Paris 1972. But Cheysson gave it a new push. The European Community offered bilateral agreements within common guidelines to make agreements homogenous. Mediterranean agreements included trade – with preferential treatment for both agricultural and industrial products, economic and financial agreements with new credit lines, cooperation in social matters expanding guarantees for migrants from North Africa and Turkey. The final goal was an Economic Community of the Near East, similar to the EEC. The prospects were discussed by the Conference for International Economic Cooperation, CIEC. Also known as North-South Dialogue, the CIEC was held between December 1975 and June 1977. On the agenda were oil, trade, development and the financial crisis. Organized in thematic commissions, it did not achieve important results because each group had different expectations. Developed countries were thinking of a permanent forum on energy, whereas developing countries thought of an UNCTAD- like agency, where they could advance requests on industrial cooperation and technology transfer. The distance between these goals obstructed negotiations. 76

With the energy crisis, Europeans aimed at securing sources of oil. Strategically, this meant establishing much closer relations with Arab countries. Cheysson, who was known as a friend

74 Editorial in «The Courier», no.44, Jul-Aug 1977. 75 Lomé Dossier, in «The Courier», no. 31 Special issue, Mar. 1975, p. 169. 76 The Paris Conference on International Economic Co-operation (CIEC) - ODI Briefing Papers, disponibile online al link https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/6602.pdf. Last view December 2016. Ian Skeet, Opec: Twenty-Five Years of Prices and Politics, Cambridge e New York, Cambridge University Press, 1988. 21 ever since his years in Algeria, was tasked with negotiating with Arab countries. Many top officers of the DG development were assigned to the Mediterranean question. Durieux for example was in charge of industrial development and of signing specific agreements with Israel and the Maghreb countries in 1976. This operation had a clear cultural dimension. The Euro-Arab Dialogue, in the hands of Klaus Meyer, was defined “un contrat de civilisation”, a contract of civilization.77 But while Europeans prioritized economic issues, Arab countries did not, and were keen on discussing politics, especially the Arab-Israeli conflict. In 1975 in an effort to promote cultural affinity, the Commission sponsored the journal , published by the Comité européen de coordination des associations d'amitié avec le monde arabe, with its headquarters in Paris, which included intellectuals supporting Euro-Arab unity.78 Issues of Arab countries, argued Cheysson, had to be dealt with by Europe as domestic issues, and the growth of the Arab world had to be turned into a trump card. Europe should not be anxious about competition but see the potential new market on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Cheysson’s Mediterranean dream was presented at the Trilateral Commission, the famous think tank originally created in 1973 to bring together experienced leaders both in government and in the private sector to discuss issues of global concern in Europe, North America, and Asia. Here, the Lomé method was praised as a regional contribution to reaching global understanding.79 Cheysson’s ideas were now shared by leaders who were originally very skeptical, like Léopold Senghor. Senghor mentioned the prospect of an Economic Community of Europe and of the Arab Countries as the first step to finally achieve the grand Eurafrica project centered on the Mediterranean as a laboratory for civilization. In his talk at a meeting of the Club of Rome in Stockholm in September 1977, Senghor depicted Cheysson’s view as a fundamental step toward Eurafrica, the utopian project that would eventually remedy African balkanization and include all of its components, black and Arab, plus eventually Israel and Iran.80 It was clearly a geopolitical imaginary. Expanding the Lomé method to the southern shore of the Mediterranean did not yield

77 «Le Courier», n.38, July-August 1976, p. 54. 78 Ali A. Mazrui, Eurafrica, Eurabia, and African-Arab Relations: The Tensions of Tripolarity, in Dunstan M. Wai (ed.), Interdependence in a World of Unequals: African-Arab-OECD Economic Cooperation for Development, Boulder, Colo., Westview Press, 1982, pp. 17-46. 79 ESPPA, Strong Papers, box 103, folder 975. 80 L. S. Senghor, Pour une Afrique qui integre le Moyen-Orient, Club de Rome, Colloque de Stockholm, 27-28 September 1977, in Strong Papers, box 58, file 567. 22 the expected results, though. Countries on the Southern shore resisted the idea of establishing binding horizontal economic partnerships between each other let alone a true community.

The limits of change.

Cheysson introduced a great innovation with Lomé. His new approach had an impact both on the political and trade strategy of the Community, even though it did not keep pace with the high pitched expectations on regional cooperation in strategic areas like the Mediterranean. In 1979, on the eve of negotiations for the renewal of the Convention, Cheysson could proudly boast that the experiment had turned into a strategy: the Lomé policy, with the goal of promoting a new more equitable economic order.81 However, while the 1975 Convention was praised as an attempt to set new foundations for relations with the South, later negotiations, despite the involvement of more ACP countries, were generally painted as steps backwards, meant to favor Europe’s interests, instead of the Third World’s.82

Whereas the trade element in the Lomé agreement had several aspects of novelty, the development aid component instituted less change. This allowed interpretations of European Development aid as an excellent case study for theories on = institutional layering, proving the limits of incremental transformation in complex systems. The renewal of the leadership was in fact accompanied by a significant change in discourse, but institutional adjustments were minimal.83 Commissioner Claude Cheysson used to recall that upon arrival in the DG8 he had found a typically colonial-style form of rule, an indirect rule “the French way”.84 It was obvious, though, that with British entry the European standard had to undergo a change as to development aid, too. The United Kingdom had served as a referee in the DAC annual peer review

81 Claude Cheysson, An Agreement unique in History, in «The Courier», 31 (March 1975) pp. 12-13. 82 Kunibert Raffer, Hans Wolfgang Singer, The Foreign Aid Business: Economic Assistance and Development Cooperation, Cheltenham, E. Elgar, 1996, pp. 88-102. For the disappointment: Jean-Marie Palayret, Da Lomé I a Cotonou: Morte e trasfigurazione della Convenzione Cee-Acp, in Elena Calandri (ed.), Il primato sfuggente: l'Europa e l'intervento per lo sviluppo, 1957-2007, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2009, pp. 35-52. Guia Migani, Lomé and the North South relations (1975- 1984). From the New International Economic Order to a New Conditionality, in Claudia Hiepel (ed.), Europe in a Globalising World. Global Challenges and European Responses in the ‘long’ 1970s, Baden Baden, Nomos, 2014, pp. 123-146. 83 Kathleen Thelen, How Institutions Evolve. Insights from Comparative Historical Analysis, in James Mahoney and Dietrich Reuschemeyer (eds.), Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 208-240. 84 Oral History Interview with Claude Cheysson, Collection Voices on Europe,http://archives.eui.eu/en/oral_history/INT600 (last view: May 2016). 23 of European Community aid, in 1962 and in 1970. On both occasions, it had been critical of the ambiguous distribution criteria of EDF funds. How to manage development aid was one of the important topics of negotiation at the time of British entry. It was not just about revising the regional vs. global dynamics, thus enlarging the group of potential beneficiaries. It was about changing existing criteria for the apportionment of resources. Old “Ferrandi style” criteria were not acceptable because they were dubbed nepotistic, and other more objective norms were required, especially for evaluating needs. In the British view, this meant offering more aid to poor countries, according to a measure of poverty with per capita parameters. This meant that Africa would lose its primacy as a recipient. British Overseas Minister Judith Hart did not fail to notice that using per capita data the poorest countries were overpopulated Asian members of the Commonwealth –India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. These were not part of European Development Aid because they were not associated countries. The British would see to it that they would soon receive special funding to compensate.85 As for country programming, this element was characteristic for aid0giving in international organizations, while many European countries had fought a constant battle in the DAC promoting project financing.

Cheysson was very keen on complying with the British requests, which were supported by arguments of economic efficiency. He pushed for a strategy of programming and evaluation of results, which had been previously requested by Jean Duriex and the economists in the DG8. The newcomers to the DG8, including the British Maurice Foley, a severe censor of the previous administration, did not subvert criteria for allocation. Decisions on funding, insisted the Commission, were political choices and could not simply depend on computational methods of evaluation.86 Resolutions on technical assistance were still taken autonomously by local project managers, whereas the central offices dealt with more general issues of programming.87 Programming was indeed included in the Lomé convention. Priorities and long-term objectives needed to be clarified periodically, and were discussed anew each time the convention was renewed. Only in the 1980s did the new Development Commissioner Edgar Pisani consistently stress programming.

85 The Courier, N.30, January 1975, p.4 86 HAEU, SGCI 8765, Note, Bruxelles 18 juillet 1974 I/96/74 (ACP 30) (FIN 24). Oral history interview with Klaus Roeh, http://archives.eui.eu/en/oral_history/INT254 87 Oral history interviews with Hans Carle (INT 119) and Bernard Raylandt (INT 257), HAEU, Collection The European Commission 1973-1986. Memories of an institution. 24 The main areas of intervention in the 1970s were rural development and transport. In both cases, the Community tried to promote an idea of novelty. Projects, however, mostly displayed continuity with earlier histories. An idealized vision of African reality prevailed, where traditional agriculture was the sector where investments should concentrate.88 This commitment was endorsed in The Courier, with several special issues on rural development.89 Rural cooperatives were considered the structural basis for community projects. Participation was voluntary. Personnel were educated in rural training camps. Surveillance was such that it recalled coercive methods typical for colonial contexts. These features persisted throughout, and were maintained into the 1980s. The Ethiopian famine (1984-5) challenged the European Community, which tried to link emergency assistance with long-term development aid. Commissioner Pisani extolled the novelties of Community’s long-term strategy, with the organization of rural cooperatives and the introduction of microcredit, then the last trends at the international level. The scheme, with soil conservation and the rotation of traditional crops, did not differ that much from previous projects financed in the Ferrandi era. Pisani shared in the end the same distrust for modern technology: responding to the need for development did not necessarily mean transferring the most modern technologies, but rather finding an adequate solution to local problems.90 As for infrastructure, the front covers of the Courier tell a story of strong preference for transports. Investments privileged the railway, according to the colonial model: railways were built squarely along the coast, connecting harbors with mines in the interior. The main problem was maintenance, but in this the community did not differ from national donors or colonial tradition, showing no interest for taking care of the structures once they were in place.

In the 1980s, another general change reflected on the European Community model: the move toward evaluation. Ambassador Lucio Guerrato masterfully sketches this novelty in his four- stage description of European Community aid. At first, recounts Guerrato, there was the time of engineers and colonial officials. Then, in the 1970s, came the economists, along with their cost- benefit analysis, but because their analyses were so superficial, they were “pure fabrication”. In a third stage, in the 1980s, came sociologists, who favored small rural projects adapted to the local

88 V. Dimier, The Invention of a European Aid Bureacracy, cit. pp. 118-119. 89 Especially numbers 8/1971, 12 / 1972, and 32 / 1975. 90 Edgar Pisani, La main et l'outil: le développement du Tiers Monde et l'Europe, Paris, Éditions R. Laffont, 1984, p. 137. 25 reality, but unable to spark development. In the end came managers and accounting officers. Colonial officers, economists, and sociologists had the same goal in mind: implementing projects. Financial control officers, instead, measured success according to “how many projects had been stopped”.91 This was the fulfillment of the worst dystopia imagined by the first hour officials: an empty technical bureaucratic perfectionism mistaken for efficiency, characterized by a pathologic obsession for detail, and a systematic request of overabundant information which ended up hampering the decision making process.

Guerrato’s words reveals a bitter picture of European Community aid that emanates nostalgia for the pragmatic Ferrandi era, when the system, absolutely inefficient in distributional terms, nevertheless met the requests of the recipients and was able to complete the projects on time. In the 1980s, however, the regional model proposed by the European Community continued intact, in a general climate where the feeling prevailed of the progressive irrelevance of North-South relations.

91 Lucio Guerrato, Interview, cit. in V. Dimier, The Invention of a European Aid Bureacracy, cit., p. 175. On this Véronique Dimier, Adieu les artistes. Here are the managers: la réforme de la DG Développement , in «Sociologie du travail», n°52, 2010, p. 234-254. 26