Abstract
During the eighties, the economic and financial marginalisation of the African continent underwent a brutal acceleration under the combined effect of the collapse of commodity prices and the increasing financial difficulties of middle-income countries. By the end of the decade, Africa’s share of world trade was down to 1.4 per cent while the continent’s GDP and population amounted respectively to 4 per cent and 14 per cent of world figures. Barely thirty years after decolonisation, the weight of Africa’s 51 states in Europe’s external trade was both insignificant (4 per cent in 1989 against 7.5 per cent in 1980) and a source of increasing asymmetry in relations between the two areas (half of the continent’s’ external trade was conducted with the European states concerned). As shown elsewhere, the decline in European direct investment and export guarantee credit was equally spectacular over the same period.1
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Notes
Cf. a detailed statistical survey in D. Bach, ‘Europe—Afrique: des acteurs en quête de scénarios’, Etudes internationales (Québec), XXII, 5 June 1991), pp. 324–8.
G. Chaliand, L’enjeu africain (Paris: le Seuil, 1980), p. 15; cf. also A. Gavshon, Crisis in Africa; Battleground of East and West (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1981); Centre québecois de relations internationales, L’Afrique des grandes puissances et des puissances régionales (Québec: Centre Québécois des relations internationales, 1985).
Cf. S. Amrani et N. Lairini, ‘Le Maghreb and le systéme international et régional’, Etudes internationales, XXII, 2(June 1991), pp. 339–56.
European Commission, Redirecting the Community’s Mediterranean Policy; Proposals for the Period 1992–96’, mimeo.
Le Monde, 23 May 1990, 2 February and 12 March 1991.
Commission des Communautés europeennes, ‘Politiques d’immigration et intégration sociale des immigrés dans la communauté européenne’, Brussels, September 1990, multigr., p. 11.
Ibid., pp. 12–13.
This theme was explicitly referred to by the Moroccan ambassador to the EC in Le Monde, 12 March 1991; it also features in the memorandum sent by Tunisia to the European commission on the constitution of an ‘integrated euro-mediterranean economic space’; Marchés tropicaux et méditerranéens, 4 May 1990.
C. Coker, ‘Experiencing Southern Africa in the Twenty-First Century’, Africa Insight, XX, 4 (1990), pp. 219–25.
D. Bach, ‘La réhabilitation de l’Afrique du Sud comme puissance régionale’, Revue de Défense nationale, 3éme trimestre 1991.
Decisions on the renewal of foreign labour contracts (40 per cent of the labour force in the mines) will provide a test case; cf. D. Anglin, ‘Afrique du Sud: politique extérieure et rapports avec le continent’, Etudes internationales, XXII, 25 (June 1991), pp. 369–91.
J. Fremigacci et L. Rabearimanana, ‘Du mythe au miroir: Madagascar colonie francaise et l’Afrique du Sud’, in D. Bach (ed.), La France et l’Afrique du Sud; histoire mythes et enjeux (Paris: Karthala, 1990), pp. 145–72.
L.-J. Grégoire, ‘Les modalités d’appréciation du risque sud-africain et d’engagement des agents économiques francais’ in ibid, pp. 314–19.
A. Tovias, The European Communities’ Single Market; the Challenge of 1992 for Sub-Saharan Africa, World Bank Discussion Paper, Washington, 1990.
Some African states will also be indirectly affected by European harmonisation in the norms and standards (reduction of cadminium in phosphates, nicotine content of cigarettes, reduction of the cocoa contents in chocolate…).
The share of the EC in world trade amounts to 20 per cent (14 per cent in the case of the United States) and its exports of goods and services represent (1988) around 16 per cent of the EC 12 GNP, against 13 per cent for Japan and 4 per cent for the United States.
J. Delors, President of the European commission in Le Monde, 6 October 1990.
WHO estimates that 6 out of the 9 millions of seropositive individuals in the world live in Africa, mostly south of the Sahara where during the 1985–90 period, AIDS increased by 10 per cent the mortality rate of the population aged between 15 and 49 years; World Health Organisation, ‘Projecting the demographic impact of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic’, Geneva, Global Programme on Aids, GMC(1)/91.8., 19 April 1991, mimeo, p. 3.
As computed from DAC-OECD statistical data.
L. J. Grégoire, ‘Les difficultiés récentes de la zone franc et l’oportunité d’une dévaluation du franc CFA’ et T. Vittin, ‘L’impensé de la zone franc: éléments pour des approches alternatives’ in CEAN-CREPAO, Année africaine 1987–1988 (CEAN: Bordeaux, 1990), pp. 39–88 and 89–110; cf. also ‘Crisis in the franc zone’, ODI Briefing paper, July 1990, pp. 1–4.
On this function inherited from the colonial period, cf. O. Vallée, Le prix de l’argent CM, heurs et malheurs de la zone franc (Paris; Karthala, 1989).
D. Bach, ‘Restructuration et multilatéralisation dans les rapports franco-africains: la fin d’un paradigme’, in CEAN-CREPAO, Année africaine 1987–1988, pp.143–56.
M. Lelart, ‘L’avenir de la zone franc dans la perspective de la construction européenne’, Revue d’Economie financiére, no. 8–9, March–June 1989.
D. Bach, ‘L’integration économique régionale: les flux paralléles à l’assaut de l’Etat’, in Economie, prospective internationales, 4th term 1991.
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© 1993 Terence Ranger and Olufemi Vaughan
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Bach, D.C. (1993). Reappraising Postcolonial Geopolitics: Europe, Africa and the End of the Cold War. In: Ranger, T., Vaughan, O. (eds) Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-Century Africa. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12342-1_9
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