Abstract
Africa entered the field of foreign policy vision of the United States and the Soviet Union at a time when the Cold War was at peak intensity. Initially, both superpowers plunged into the African arena with vigor and enthusiasm, mirroring the mood of optimism concerning future prospects for the continent. Quickly, however, both parties encountered disappointments that drove African affairs downwards on the priority listing. Long before the desperate decade of African crisis in the 1980s, both powers had come to rank Africa at the bottom of their scale of strategic concerns.
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Notes
Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 119.
Carol Lancaster, US Aid to Sub-Saharan Africa: Challenges, Constraints, and Choices (Washington: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1988), p. 1.
Despite the indisputably good intentions and often dedicated labors of the aid apparatus and their counterparts in African states, only a few really bright spots can be found. Certainly the disaster relief efforts are one; countless lives have been saved by these efforts in Ethiopia, Sudan, and the Sahel region during the drought years. Hampering the aid effort are high administrative overheads, constant churning of policy doctrines, political priorities in its distribution, the innumerable compromises made in the gauntlet a project runs from field request to congressional approval, its bureaucratic bias toward larger-scale projects, administrative weaknesses in the recipient states, and the many difficulties in the developmental environment. See Jennifer S. Whitaker, How Can Africa Survive? (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 57–86
Donald R. Mickelwaite, Charles F. Sweet, and Elliott R. Morss, New Directions in Development: A Study of US Aid (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979)
David R. Obey and Carol Lancaster, ‘Funding Foreign Aid’, Foreign Policy, vol. 71 (1988), pp. 141–55
First advanced in Graham T. Allison, ‘Conceptual Models of the Cuban Missile Crisis’, American Political Science Review, vol. 69, no. 3 (1969), pp. 689–718.
David E. Albright, The USSR and Subsaharan Africa in the 1980s (New York: Praeger, 1983), p. 35.
An estimated 20 per cent of Soviet bauxite needs were supplied by Guinea by the late 1970s; Elizabeth K. Valkenier, The Soviet Union and the Third World: An Economic Bind (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1983), p. 17.
East European COMECON partners probably have a stronger interest in a number of African commodities, as the Soviet Union itself becomes less able to meet their raw material needs; for evidence, see Christopher Coker, NATO, the Warsaw Pact and Africa (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985)
Valuable recent reviews of Soviet African policy include the chapters by David E. Albright, Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, and Francis Fukuyama in Marshall D. Shulman, East-West Tensions in the Third World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986)
Michael Clough (ed.), Reassessing the Soviet Challenge in Africa (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California-Berkeley, 1986)
Zaki Laidi, L’URSS vue du Tiers Monde (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1984).
Carol R. Saivetz, ‘The Soviet Perception of Military Intervention in Third World Countries’, in W. Raymond Duncan (ed.), Soviet Policy in the Third World (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), p. 144.
This thesis is by no means unchallenged. Kiva asks rhetorically in a 1988 article, ‘Why should patriotic, nationalist-minded army officers strive to build socialism as we conceive it? For what objective reasons?... It is we who attributed to them the intention to follow a non-capitalist path in its Marxist sense.’ Kiva,’ socialist Orientation’, p. 84. On this subject, see also Mark N. Katz, The Third World in Soviet Military Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
See, for example, Nikolai Kosukhin, Revolutionary Democracy in Africa (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980)
Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, The Soviet Union and the Third World: The Economic Bind (New York: Praeger, 1983)
Francis Fukuyama, Moscow’s Post-Brezhnev Reassessment of the Third World (Santa Monica: Rand, 1986).
Particularly valuable sources for this thoroughly documented episode are Madeleine G. Kalb, The Congo Cables (New York: Macmillan, 1982)
Richard D. Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)
Stephen R. Weisman, American Foreign Policy in the Congo 1960–1964 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974).
To capture this dimension of the external factor in African politics, see Pierre Pean, Affaires africaines (Paris: Fayard, 1983).
Harvey Glickman, ‘Perspectives on Africa from the Fourth American-Soviet Symposium on Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa’, Issue, vol. 17, no. 1 (1988), p. 5.
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© 1991 Roger E. Kanet and Edward A. Kolodziej
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Young, C. (1991). Superpower Cooperation in Central Africa. In: Kanet, R.E., Kolodziej, E.A. (eds) The Cold War as Cooperation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11605-8_7
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