The University Of Sheffield

Chapter 1: Introduction

Gaps in the existing literature on EU-Africa Trade System

Table 1 Timeline and Summary of EU trade systems

1. 
   The EEC Six were the founding members of the European Economic Community (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany). As France had the most colonial assets, the inclusion of former colonies into the EEC as part of the European integration project under the Rome Treaty primarily entailed the inclusion of French colonies.
   
2. 
   The EEC’s trade system with former colonies is fundamentally an extension of French trade monopoly to other EEC countries (see Marcussen and Torp, 1982, Chapter 3; Zartman, Politics of Trade Negotiations between Africa and the European Economic Community, Chapters 1 and 2). Indeed, this was the submission of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) working group commissioned to investigate the trade system installed under the Rome Treaty (Barnes, 1967).
   
3. 
   ECOWAS is the regional body of West African countries. Whereas the previous trade systems were negotiated by the ex-colonies as a group, EPAs are negotiated regionally rather than by all of the former colonies, which include members from other regions.
   

The EU-Africa trade relationship has attracted interest from three generations of scholars. Research on the Yaoundé Convention (1963-1975) focused on the colonial heritage of the trade systems (Nkrumah, 1966; Aliboni, 1968; Cosgrove, 1969), along with the negotiation process (Zartman, 1971) and its effects on welfare (Hutton, 1974; Young, 1972; Rivkin, 1968; Ekue, 1968; Soper, 1965). Researchers investigating the Lomé Convention (1975-2000) investigated the negotiation process (Ravenhill, 1985; Hill, 1985); showed how the trade system fitted into what was then known as the New International Economic Order ¹ (Anyiwo, 1977; Minta, 1984; Simmonds, 1976); estimated the welfare effects of the agreement (Nabudere, 1976; Shaw, 1979; Frey-Wouters, 1980; Tsanacas, 1989; Babarinde, 1994; Cosgrove, 1994; Faber and Roelfsema, 1997; Sissoko et al., 1998); and discussed the effects of specific parts of the Lomé Convention, such as the price-stability scheme (Wall, 1976; McGregor, 1978; Kokole, 1980; Herrmann, 1982; Ravenhill, 1984; Hewitt, 1993; Herrmann and Weiss, 1995). Research on the current Cotonou Agreement (and the EPA) is much more diffused and voluminous. Scholars working in this area have described a shift from the partnership of the Yaoundé and Lomé eras to coercion in the EPA (Hurt, 2003) due to the EU’s insistence on a free-trade agreement despite disagreement from Africa. Others have estimated the welfare impact of the agreement (Busse and Großmann, 2007; Karingi et al., 2005; Nwoke, 2009; Fontagné et al., 2011; Morrissey and Zgovu, 2007), as well as its influence on the region’s future development prospects (Nwoke, ‎2009; Patel, 2007; Aganga, 2014) and the rise of African agency in defying the EU (Hurt et al., 2013; Trommer, 2011; 2014; Kohnert, 2014). However, very little attention has been paid to the domestic politics or political processes driving the trade system from the African perspective.

Researchers addressing the current EPA have placed increasing emphasis on the rise of African agency (Trommer, 2011; Hurt et al., 2013), no doubt prompted by the evident challenge to the EU’s position by African ruling elites (demanding that development considerations be accommodated, for example). This points to a neglected area of the literature on trade systems: the role of African domestic elites in the formation of these systems, going back to the Yaoundé Convention. This is an important gap, because scholars have continuously theorized the trade relationship with little consideration given to the roles of African domestic ruling elites and domestic politics. Only in the wake of African resistance to the current version of the trade system is African agency being considered.

In terms of the effect of the trade systems, the literature has developed around two broad schools of thought, both of which discount the role of African ruling elites in the construction of the systems. One is aligned with the EU’s official account of the trade systems as fulfilling the development needs of the former colonies, while the other diverges from the official explanation and criticizes the EU for its neo-colonial, imperial and neoliberal agendas (Langan, 2014, 267).

The first group of scholars use the language of liberal co-development/ interdependence to codify the trade system. After the EEC set the terms of the debate in its founding document (the Rome Treaty) by expressing a self-imposed duty to develop the former colonies through a trade and development system (Part IV of the Rome Treaty), liberal writers such as Arnold Rivkin (1958, 1966), Jacob J. Van der Lee (1963, 1967) and Thomas Balogh (1962) published articles acknowledging the development needs of the association. Rivkin and Lambert separately argued that given the traumatizing legacy of colonialism, the EEC must construct a program to assist in the development of the decolonizing countries (Lambert, 1961, 344; Rivkin, 1959, 17). During the Yaoundé Convention, therefore, writers such as Van der Lee, Rivkin and William Zartman framed the trade systems in terms of the provision of development assistance to Africa. Zartman referred to the Yaoundé Convention as “the EEC’s New Deal with Africa” (Zartman, 1970, 20). During the Lomé Convention in the 1970s and 1980s, second-generation liberal writers altered their language to stress interdependence and co-development (Zartman, 1976; Gruhn, 1976). This shift followed a change in the language used by the EC to explicate the trade systems. Therefore, as Mark Langan observed, “there is a significant parallel between the language of EU policy makers and liberal institutionalists” in terms of the developmental function of the trade system (Langan, 2014: 468). Modern liberal writers have stressed the need to integrate the former colonies into the global economy through a free-trade system (MacLeod, 2015; Coste and Uexkull, 2015).

In contrast with the liberal school, early critics argued that the departing colonizers had neo-colonial ambitions and thus installed the trade system as a means of preserving some part of the colonial system (Nkrumah, 1966; Cosgrove, 1969; Soper, 1965). Kwame Nkrumah (the first president of Ghana) formulated the most frequently quoted line of argument: “the limited colonialism of the French period is now being merged in the collective neo-colonialism of the European Common Market which enables other States, hitherto outside the French preserve, to profit by the system” (Nkrumah, 1965, 19). Most critics of the Lomé Convention used the language of dependency theory. David Wall, for example, argued at the time that the Lomé Convention institutionalized a system of dependence through the commodity compensation scheme and extended the colonial division of labour (Wall, 1975, 152). Michael Dolan and Lynn Mytelka used the sugar protocol and price stabilization, respectively, to advance the same argument (Dolan, 1978; Mytelka, 1977). More recently, the critical literature (on the Cotonou Agreement) has moved away from the anti-colonial language of the 1960s, gaining a neoliberal emphasis. The current generation of critical scholars view the recent incarnation of the trade system as part of a global process of neoliberal restructuring: an ideological exportation from the EU to the former colonies (Hurt, 2012; Canterbury, 2009; Gathii, 2011). Stephen R, Hurt, for example, used a neo-Gramscian framework to describe the ongoing “neoliberalization” of the ACP-EU trade system (Hurt, 2003: 161).

Both the liberal and the critical school have placed the EU at the core of the trade system as either a hero or a villain, to the near-complete exclusion of African ruling elites. Indeed, international-relations (IR) literature generally marginalizes Africa’s contribution, even though the continent is the main case study for much IR empirical research – the geographical space in which much that is systematically important to IR has played out (Harman and Brown, 2013, 71; Jones, 2011).

Even a superficial overview of the process of negotiating the trade systems reveals the central role played by African ruling elites in their form and content. For example, William Zartman showed that some of the trade measures identified by critical writers as neo-colonial in the 1960s, during the Yaoundé Convention, were proposed and insisted on by African ruling elites (Zartman, 1971). Furthermore, in its original form, the Lomé Convention was in practice prepared by officials from ACP – notably negotiators from Nigeria (Ravenhill 1985; Gruhn, 1976). Finally, the current EPA is the first of the trade systems whose negotiation was led by the EU, insisting on the form (free trade) and content of the agreement. As a result, almost ten years after the original deadline, most African countries have refused to sign the EPA, to the chagrin of the EU (Heron and Evans, 2016, 15). There is thus a wide gap in the literature regarding the role of African domestic ruling elites in the trade formulation. The current thesis in part fills this gap.

However, the overarching objective of this thesis is to examine the effects of the trade systems with West African countries through their interaction with domestic political elites, with particular reference to Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. By turning the theoretical focus away from the EU to domestic ruling elites in Africa, the study fills the above gap and also addresses the effects of the trade systems in light of the motivations of domestic political elites. The research problem with which this thesis is engaged is not simply the need for a more robust understanding of the EU-devised trade system from the African perspective, but also the need to explain the limited extent of economic transformation or change in West African countries. The effects of the trade systems will be analyzed with this research problem in mind.

The thesis contends that the limited economic transformation in West African countries is a function of the interaction between domestic ruling elites and the EU’s trade systems. The argument of the thesis is that the ruling elites of West African countries have historically used and continue to use the trade and development system to ensure their own political survival, and that this process (which may have complemented or merged with Europe’s neo-colonial ambitions in Africa after 1957) has perpetuated a static production system and prevented economic diversification and institutional change in West Africa, whether through political inducement or through factor reallocation.