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AFRICA-EUROPE: Goodbye Rhetoric, Hello Political Dialogue

Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Mar 16 2007 (IPS) - In recent years the ties between the European Union and Africa have produced good results in terms of aid, but there has been a serious lack of political dialogue. Now Portugal, with its extensive experience in Africa and the support of the 27 EU leaders, is planning to change this.

Portugal will assume the presidency of the EU in the second half of 2007, and Foreign Minister Luís Filipe Marques Amado has promised to make every effort to make the Africa-EU summit slated for November a success.

He has on his side the unconditional political backing of the leaders of the other EU countries, and the close cooperation of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs João Gomes Cravinho, one of Europe’s leading experts on African affairs.

Amado told IPS that the summit would involve not only sub-Saharan Africa, but the whole continent. “In the Mediterranean, we want a more committed EU,” he said.

“Our view is that the EU must somehow adjust its international relations in the light of what has been happening in the world since Sept. 11, 2001,” said Amado, the prime mover behind the initiative.

The last Africa-EU summit was held in Cairo in 2000, during the previous Portuguese presidency of the European bloc.

After the 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, “special attention must be paid to Europe’s southern border with the Arab world, building on our good relations with Islamic countries,” Amado said.

The current international priority ought to shift towards the south, because “the agenda is still overly tied to the last decade, when after the fall of the Soviet empire, the main concern was to achieve stability and peace on the eastern border of the EU,” the foreign minister said.

Fifteen years on, Europe should concentrate on the Mediterranean, as “what is happening from Mauritania to the Middle East is worrying.”

According to Amado, the EU should “put its efforts into solving conflicts in Africa, and establish a clear policy of regulated migration.”

Asked about the cancellation of a 2003 Africa-EU summit, when the United Kingdom vetoed the idea that the EU should sit at a table with President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe because of human rights abuses against white farmers during land redistribution, Amado said “it’s important to reaffirm human rights values, but it’s also necessary not to break off Africa-EU dialogue.”

“It’s against Europe’s interests to cut off dialogue with an entire continent, which is also its nearest neighbour, because of a specific problem with Zimbabwe. Our proposal is to hold the summit and at the same time to continue exerting political pressure on the government of that country,” Amado said.

Europe and Africa are separated by only 13 kilometres at the Straits of Gibraltar.

In an interview for this year’s first issue of the bimonthly magazine Africa 21, published in Angola and distributed in Portuguese-speaking countries, Gomes Cravinho spoke out unequivocally, saying “Aid without political dialogue is neocolonialism.”

Gomes Cravinho, a 41-year-old economist of Portuguese-Angolan descent who earned his doctorate at the University of Oxford in the U.K., said that “emphasising aid, to the detriment of political dialogue, promotes or sustains a relationship that is neocolonial in nature.”

That is why in present conversations with the African Union (AU) “we are developing a joint European-African strategy, which incorporates concerns from both sides,” he said.

So far, the dialogue “has focused on ‘our money’ and on what ‘you have to do’ to spend it, a relationship that takes no account of sovereign states and their particular needs, and reduces African interlocutors to merely technical agents,” Gomes Cravinho pointed out.

Alpha Oumar Konaré of Mali, chair of the Commission of the African Union, “has been a great promoter of the summit, but it should be said that this was possible because of the support he received from the rest of Africa’s leaders,” he said.

The four pillars of the summit, agreed beforehand by Africans and Europeans, are peace and security, trade and regional integration, governance and development.

On a visit to Lisbon in December, Konaré said that “relations with Europe are fundamental to Africa, and we are sufficiently adult to know how to choose our allies.”

Corruption is not on the agenda because “there are no corrupt people without others who corrupt them,” explained Guinea-Bissau economist Carlos Lopes, who was resident representative of the United Nations in Zimbabwe and later in Brazil.

“Big international contracts have shown that corruption in Africa is, to a large extent, generated by suppliers and speculators,” said Lopes, who has worked for the U.N. for two decades and is now assistant secretary-general.

Interviewed by Africa 21 for its latest issue, Lopes said he was in favour of giving priority to the concept of tolerance over that of democracy.

His reasons were clear: “There is a tendency to use elections to legitimise authoritarian governments, which have even been known to annihilate the opposition.”

The U.N. official said that taking into account the fact that “the excluded are often those who are ‘different’, ethnically, linguistically or racially, we have a recipe for using democracy perversely, for obtaining a result opposite to democracy’s real aims.”