![]() As a direct result, after more than ten years after the original deadline of December 2007, most African countries were still refusing to sign and implement the EPAs, showing (as Heron and Evans surmised) that the EU’s power over its former colonies may have been exaggerated all along (Heron and Murray-Evans Citation2017, 15). ![]() But even more crucially, the current Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) (the Cotonou Agreement) was the first of the trade agreements whose negotiation was led by the EU, which insisted on the form and content of the agreement. Furthermore, in their original form, the Lomé Conventions were in practice prepared by officials from Africa in a form of collective clientelism (see Ravenhill Citation1985 Gruhn Citation1976). ![]() For example, William Zartman showed that some of the trade measures identified by some critical writers as neo-colonial in the 1960s, during the Yaoundé Conventions, were actually proposed and insisted on by African ruling elites (see Zartman Citation1971, 188). This article will go one step further by placing Africa at the core of the trade and development partnership without necessarily absolving European actors.Įven a superficial overview of the process of negotiating these trade agreements reveals the central role played by African ruling elites. Although there is a version of the early critical literature (see Nkrumah Citation1965) that documented the tendency for African elites to side with the (neo)colonisers or seek neo-colonial relations in order to secure their own political survival. The glaring problem is that both the liberal school and the critical school have placed the EU at the core of the trade systems, as either a hero (the liberal school) or a villain (the critical school), to the near-complete exclusion of Africa or African ruling elites. According to William Brown ( Citation2000), and Mark Langan ( Citation2014, 267), the literature has generally developed around two broad schools of thought: (1) the liberal school, which is broadly aligned with the EU’s official account of the trade systems, viewing the partnership as fulfilling the development needs of the former colonies (see Rivkin Citation1966 Zartman Citation1970 Rivkin Citation1966 Gruhn Citation1976) and (2) the critical school, which criticizes the trade partnership in the language of neo-colonialism (in the 1960s), dependency theory (in the 1970s-1990s), and more recently neoliberalism (see Soper Citation1965 Wall, Citation1975, 152 Nwoke, Citation2009). These trade and development partnerships are as follows: Yaoundé Conventions I and II (1963–1975), Lomé Conventions I, II and III (1975–2000) and the Cotonou Agreement (2000-present). Analysis of the differences between the countries in these three areas (economic crisis, political crisis with economic origins and diversification) reveals two trajectories in West Africa: neo-colonialism (for affiliated countries) and economic change (for unaffiliated countries).Ī problem/gap arises in the three generations of literature assessing the three generations of trade and development partnerships between the European Union (and its progenitors since 1957, the European Community, EEC) and its former African colonies. ![]() ![]() As not all West African countries joined the Yaoundé Conventions (1963–1975), a comparison of the affiliated and the non-affiliated countries was conducted from 1960 to 1975. The counterfactual argument, demonstrated clearly in a comparative study (of the Yaoundé era), is that in the absence of the EU’s trade partnership, ruling elites would have had to negotiate their survival by promoting economic change instead of colonial continuity. This article argues that the limited economic transformation in West African countries is a function of the interaction between domestic elites’ quest for political survival and the EU’s international trade partnership with former colonies (Yaoundé Convention 1963–1975 Lomé Convention 1975–2000 and Cotonou Agreement 2000–present). ![]()
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