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Although the main route to Europe lay further east in the Mediterranean, Africa-eu relations continued to be dominated by what has since been dubbed the ‘refugee crisis’. Unfortunately, on this key issue European and African interests could not be further apart: while most African governments would welcome increased opportunities for legal migration to Europe, the eu was politically not willing and therefore not able to move in this direction. (Unless indicated otherwise, in this chapter the abbreviation eu refers to the European Union and its Member States.) Instead, and contrary to its nature as a trade liberalisation project, the eu’s discourse accentuated the desire to ‘manage’ migratory flows and tackle ‘root causes’ of migration.
The year saw a continuation of the strong contrast between the eu’s discourse of emphasising equal partnership with Africa, and its practice of launching unilateral initiatives towards Africa. European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker devoted a substantial part of his annual State of the Union address on 12 September to “Europe’s twin continent”, asserting that “Africa does not need charity, it needs true and fair partnerships. And Europe needs this partnership just as much”. In the subsequent puzzling sentences, Juncker reported that he had consulted his “African friends”, in particular au chair Paul Kagame, and that they had all agreed that “donor-recipient relations are a thing of the past” and that “reciprocal commitments are the way forward”.
A key highlight of the year was the third Africa-eu Summit, which was held in Brussels. The summit was considered a step forward in relations but left many controversial areas untouched. The year also saw the beginning of the end of a major headache in Africa-eu relations through the completion of epas, which had dragged on for an additional seven years after the passing of the initial negotiations deadline in December 2007. The Ebola crisis presented formidable challenges to Africa that went far beyond the states and people directly affected by the outbreak. Migration continued to be high on the agenda of eu-Africa relations.
In many respects, 2016 defied imagination – or at least expectations – in the evolving Africa-eu relations. While in Africa key steps were taken towards Morocco’s accession to the au, fundamental choices in the opposite direction were faced by the eu following the United Kingdom’s referendum in which a narrow majority voted to leave the eu. The year marked an important step forward in eu-Africa economic and trade cooperation through the provisional application of the epa with sadc and the ratification by a number of middle-income countries of their bilateral interim epas. The same uk referendum, however, was a key factor in Tanzania’s reluctance to ratify the eac’s epa with the eu, although concerns over the implications for its industrialisation strategy played a more important part. The same motivation informed Nigeria’s blocking of the West African epa.
The year’s agenda was packed with an eu-au summit and the launch of a European External Investment Plan (eip), as well as Africa featuring on the G7 and the G20 agendas – both chaired by European countries. The year also marked the tenth anniversary of the Joint Africa-eu Strategy, which had been welcomed at the time as a fundamental shift towards a more equal partnership, and a move from “aid to trade and investment”. It is telling that ten years later the eu’s discourse was advocating a similar shift, with the eu’s High-Representative for Foreign and Security Policy arguing in September that the eu had made a shift from doing things “for” to doing things “with” Africa, or put differently “from the aid perspective to the partnership perspective”.