Africa international relations

Africa has always been inextricably linked to the global stage and has long played a role in international politics and economy from the 19th century to the current time and that despite several myths of non-existence or even irrelevance. By critically analyzing the input of African countries as well as the modalities of governance in large parts of Africa, the notion of passivity or irrelevance is quickly brushed away. African elites have generally proven themselves to be excellent actors and somehow influencing in the international arena.
Initial Analysis and Issues
According to many analysts, early studies of African foreign policies indicated that foreign policy began and ended with the desires of the first generation of African presidents. This form of centralized foreign policy was and still detrimental to the population. As results, foreign policies pursued were tied to those of the former colonial power and were called “dependent” foreign policy caused by the shared culture and political values of colonially trained African presidents and their European counterparts. And although they have actively fought for independence, several first generation presidents benefited from colonial efforts designed to ensure victory of leaders sympathetic to European concerns. The outcome of this situation is that these leaders were more responsive to the foreign policy concerns of their external patrons that to the popular demands of their own people. This situation is still prevailing especially among those presidents who have been in power for 25 plus years and few other new comers. Several examples exist such as Leopold Sedar Senghor who was described as more French than Senegalese. And among today’s leaders, we can cite Alasane Ouattara, Ali Bongo and others. In francophone Africa for example, several treaties were signed and among them military treaties designed to ensure the longevity of the presidents rather than protecting their respective country against treats.
But today, the combination of the Cold War’s end, the rise of new leaders and the democratization movements is contributing to changes in African foreign policies.
Pan-Africanism and the Organization of African Unity
Inspired by the anti-colonial activities of the African descent living in North American and the West Indies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, African nationalists sought to promote a unified African front against colonial rule, which became known as the pan-African ideal. The first meeting was held in Manchester, England in 1945 and ended with the adoption of a Declaration to the Colonial Peoples that affirmed the rights of all colonized people to be free from foreign imperialist control whether political of economic and the use of force as last resort to achieve freedom. The pan African deal gained momentum during the heady independence era of late 1950s and early 1960. According to Nkrumah during the first gathering of independent African nations on African soil in Accra, Ghana, the realization of the pan African ideal required commitment between Africa leaders and their peoples to guide their countries through four stages: the attainment of freedom and independence, the consolidation of that independence and freedom, the creation of unity and community between African states and the economic and social reconstruction of Africa. Unfortunately, disagreement appeared in how to ensure proper unity and led to the creation of three groups: The Brazzaville group, of primarily francophone groups, the Casablanca group and the Monrovia group that rejected the idea of political union as both undesirable and unfeasible, primarily due to the assumption that African leaders would jealousy guard theirs countries new found independence. The Monrovia group called for the creation of a looser organization of African states that would guard their independence but promote growing cooperation in a variety of functional areas such as economic, scientific, educational and social development.
To that end, on May 25 1963, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) was launched by thirty-one African heads of states, constituting the first intergovernmental organization of its kind and based on African soil, precisely in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The sovereign equality of all member states was an important guiding principle of the organization. The organization effectiveness could be assessed by exploring several elements of the organization charter of which holds important implications for the dependency-decolonization debate.
Inviolability of Frontiers
The most important theme of the OAU charter was support for the inviolability of frontiers inherited from the colonial era. African leaders were concerned that changing even one boundary would lead to further balkanization of the African continent into even smaller economic and political units. Several events such as the Biafra war as well as the Ethiopian-Eritrean war tested the union resolve to the concept of territorial integrity. But nonetheless, the Union continued to affirm its commitment to the concept of integrity and sovereignty.
Non interference
The second guiding principle of the organization was noninterference in the internal affairs of member states. In the early years, confusion reigned in regards on the application of this charter because that period was marked by several coups and human rights abuses. And the most notable confusion was whether to allow military leaders who had illegally deposed civilians to maintain their OAU eats. Although still highly reluctant to criticize their counterparts, African leaders began to accept a growing role for the OAU in addressing human rights abuses at the beginning of 1980s such that in 1981, the annual assembly of heads of states and government held in Banjul, Gambia, adopted the African Charter on Human rights and People’s Rights, code that went into effect October 1986. And despite the ratification of the Banjul treaty, the Nigeria 1995 execution of the Nobel Prize candidate Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists were executed demonstrated the continued difficulty of translating human rights rhetoric into policy action.
Peaceful settlement
The third guiding principle was the peaceful settlement of all disputes by negotiation, meditation, conciliation or arbitration.
And finally, the most successful principle embodied within the OAU charter was the unswerving opposition to colonialism and white minority rule. To that end, the OAU established a Liberation Committee based in Dar es Salam, Tanzania to aid liberation movements with both economic and military assistance. Particularly concerned were the existence of minority white-ruled regimes in Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and former Portuguese controlled territories. The work of the Liberation Committee largely came to an end in 1994 when South Africa transitioned to a multiracial, multiparty democracy.
The OAU was replaced in 2002 when African leaders met in Durban, South Africa to launch the African Union, a pan African organization designed to build on the successes of the OAU in the continuing search for African unity. And several guiding principles of the organization clearly indicated a new path in African regional cooperation that builds on both successes and failures of the OAU.
Regional Economic Cooperation and Integration
Early African leaders sought to create regional entities capable of promoting regional cooperation and integration, and that was encouraged by the success of the European Union and the UN (United Nations) sponsored economic Commission for Africa. This vision was best captured by the publication in 1981 of a document, Lagos Plan of Action for the Economic Development of Africa, 1980-2000, which proposed the establishment of an African Economic Community that would be based on an African Common Market. To support their objectives of regional cooperation and integration, African leaders offered several rationales. The simplest reason was the firm belief that there is strength in number, and in order to successfully compete with increasingly competitive international economic system dominated by economic superpowers and powerful regional economic entities, African countries must band together and pool their respective resources. Second, there was a desire to promote self-sustaining economic development and particularly the industrialization of the African continent. The leaders believed that they can build upon the individual strengths of their neighbors to forge integrated self-sustaining regional economies.
The regional economic schemes are perceived as the best means of creating self-reliant development thereby reducing and ultimately ridding the African continent of ties of dependency inherited from the colonial era. For this reason the primary objective of early regional economic schemes was to promote intraregional trade with neighbors who share a common set of development objectives so that by strengthening ties, a stronger African economic entity is expected to emerge that will be capable of reducing foreign influence and strengthening Africa’s collective ability to bargain with non-African power on a more equal basis. Several regional economic blocks were created such as the EAC (East African Community) but unfortunately collapsed. In the case of the EAC for example and according to experts, an initial problem was the polarization of national development and the perception of unequal gains among members. Second, there were issues due to the inadequacy of compensatory and corrective measures. Third, were the ideological differences and the rise of economic nationalism and finally, was the impact of foreign influences.
These failures prompted African leaders to undertake looser forms of regional economic cooperation in a variety of functionally specific areas such as transportation infrastructure, energy and telecommunications. These types of regional economic cooperation have been gathering strengths because they don’t require the creation of supranational authorities nor does it require policy makers to sacrifice national control over the sensitive areas of foreign trade and investment.
The Role of Foreign Powers in African International Relations
Although many important policies affecting the future of African policies are decided outside of the African continent, the specific impact of foreign powers in Africa can be illuminated by analyzing the evolving policies of France and the United States which foreign policies were driven by different sets of motivating factors from the beginning of the cold war era to now. During the cold war era, US policy makers were principally guided by the ideological interest of containing the former Soviet Union and its communist allies while French policymakers sought first and foremost to consolidate and promote the spread of the most notable aspects of French culture, including the French language and intellectual traditions but in reality was a way of maintaining control over former colonies. So France sought to maintain or preserve economic influence by the creation of the zone franc enclosing former colonies and for which France served as the central bank. During the cold war, the conception of francophone Africa was accepted and encouraged by US policymakers to the point that Washington expected France and other allies to take the lead in their former colonial territories.
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the beginning of the end of the complementary Cold War order among the Western democracies and its gradual replacement with what is best described as cold peace. In the case of the United States, the end of the Cold War fostered the decline of ideologically based policies in favor of the pursuit of trade and investment. In 1996, Bill Clinton administration unveiled the first formal US trade policy for aggressively pursuing new markets throughout Africa including in Francophone Africa. To that end, The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) passed both the congress and the senate and culminated by the visits of Clinton visit to Africa in 1998 in order to promote and improve US-Africa ties.
This transformation of foreign policy interests in the post-Cold War era has contributed to the rise of Great Power economic competition throughout Africa particularly in high lucrative petroleum, telecommunications and transport industries. And in the eyes of French policymakers, the penetration of the US and other Western companies constituted at best an “intrusion and at worst an aggression into France’s chasse gardee” in francophone Africa.
The emergence of economic competition during the Cold Peace has also affected Great Power support for democratization because the r raised expectations that Western democracies could make democracy and human rights the cornerstones of a new democratic international order that would be consistently applied to all regions of the world. So democracy promotion as emerged as the most salient foreign policy of the post-Cold War era. France also embraced African democratization process with its La Baule doctrine. But these democratization policies were many times contradicted by responses from both French and US governments on several occasions such as the support by France to a coup d’état in Niger and the support of the US to the military dictatorship in Nigeria.
Rising competition between the United States and France holds important implications for the dependency-decolonization debate. From the viewpoint of the second generation of African leaders, rising economic competition among great powers provides an opportunity to lessen previous privileged ties of dependence and pursue special relationships and especially economic contracts with countries willing to provide the best offer.
The UN and International Financial Institutions
During the independence era of the 1960s, a variety of facts suggested that membership in the UN was facilitating the ability of the first generation of African leaders to assume greater control over the international relations of their respective countries. In the aftermath of the cold war, some leaders began associating the UN with foreign intervention and imposition of Western values which was perceived by the increasing involvement of the UN in a variety of largely ethnic based crises in Africa (Rwanda, Sierra Leone). The series of UN-sponsored military interventions in Somalia serves as one of the most notable examples of the UN’s increasing interventionist role in African policies and society. Also, African perceptions of eroding sovereignty have been reinforced by the rising influence of international financial institutions in African economics called economic conditionalities first signaled in 1981 by the publication of a World Bank study, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action. These economic and political conditionalities imposed by the IMF and the World Bank have been repeatedly challenged by African policymakers and academics.
Today’s Africa’s newly elected democratic leaders face the critical dilemma of the extent to which they will attempt to work with international institutions. Some have sought to curb the impact of economic and political conditionalities by formulating alternative framework for development.
Now and the future
African relations have evolved since the decolonization era to the end of the Cold War era. The fall of the Berlin Wall positively sparked changes for the African continent: a new competitive international market, and the spread of democratization throughout Africa. Today, great Powers are fighting for influence and power in the African market places, and democratization is paving the way for a new generation of leaders who are no longer bound by their countries’ historical ties. These factors are enabling African states to broaden their international relations beyond their previously strict colonial ties, thus giving them greater power and control over their resources and their destiny.

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