The Case of European Community Development Aid
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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 Africa. 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 European Union) 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 decolonization freed resources that were previously used in the European project. This story, however, does not reflect the facts. Africa helped unite Europe 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 France, 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 European integration. 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, Paris, 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 Council of Europe 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.