The year 2020 proved to be a pivotal year for Europe and Africa, but by no means as anticipated. The EU had already built up serious ambitions by prioritising future relations with Africa on the European Council’s strategic agenda, and Commission president Ursula von der Leyen confirmed this direction in her political manifesto.
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”.
At the end of 2020, EU high representative Josep Borrell declared that 2021 would be Europe’s ‘Africa Year’. The problem, though, was that Africa did not declare 2021 to be its ‘Europe year’, and for various reasons, for most of 2021, au–eu relations found themselves in the proverbial freezer. At the same time, other partners continued to foster their ties with Africa. Towards the end of the year, the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (focac) convened in Dakar in November, followed by the Turkey–Africa Partnership Summit in Istanbul in December. Formal engagement with the eu, meanwhile, remained limited to a meeting of foreign ministers in Kigali in October, the first such meeting since January 2020, during which the au ‘took note’ of the EU’s intention to host the next au–eu summit in Brussels on 17 and 18 February 2022.
In 2022 the desired narrative of a renewed partnership between Africa and Europe, as adopted in a February summit of heads of state and government, was disrupted by Russia’s war against Ukraine and its global implications. Notwithstanding challenges in the relationship on areas including Ukraine, the green transition, and vaccine equity, several initiatives in the area of trade and investments sought to deepen cooperation between the EU and African states in an era of considerable international competition. This includes the EU’s Global Gateway initiative as well as its support for South Africa’s Just Energy Transition Partnership. At the same time, South Africa’s decision to leave the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States showed that the discussion on rationalising the EU’s fragmented institutional frameworks with Africa is far from over.
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”.
While the criticism that the eu is too inward-looking is generally unjustified, the year 2019 did provide some strong evidence for this claim. Such evidence of a Union entangled in domestic challenges prominently included the European Parliament elections in May, followed by extensive horse-trading over the eu’s executive positions during the summer period, a delayed start to the von der Leyen Commission in December, and the time invested in the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the Union.