The European Union and Civil Conflict in Africa
| Author | Charles C. Pentland |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200506000403 |
| Published date | 01 December 2005 |
| Date | 01 December 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
The European Union
and civil conflict in
Africa
I N T R O D U C T I O N
It is famously said of the Balkan countries that they produce more history
than they can consume. From the 1920s on, the discourse of European
international relations drew on similar imagery in distinguishing between
countries that were producers of security and those that were consumers.
The Balkans could be said then, as more recently, to exemplify regions of the
world that both produce history and consume security in ruinous excess.
In the interwar years, that vivid language served to draw an almost civi-
lizational demarcation between the western and central Europe of the great
powers, and that unruly, semi-oriental south-eastern quarter of the continent
where the Great War had been sparked—a demarcation promptly shown to
be illusory by the events of the 1930s. Since the end of the Cold War, howev-
er, that language has returned, if sometimes only as an eerie echo of the past.
The Europe increasingly encompassed by the European Union (EU),
marked by unprecedented levels of complex interdependence and innovative
forms of collective governance among its member-states, is often described
as a part of the international system that has achieved a kind of Kantian state
of grace. It is a collection of liberal democracies that have effectively ruled
out the use of force in settling their differences with one another.
Charles Pentland is director of the Centre for International Relations and professor of
political studies at Queen’s University.
| International Journal | Autumn 2005 | 919 |
| Charles C. Pentland |
Two points seem to follow from this condition. The first is that a group
of relatively capable states with few, if any, classic security issues with each
other are likely to become—individually or collectively—producers and
exporters of security to the world outside. As a European export, security can
be expected to flow primarily to areas of strategic and economic interest to
the major EU powers—notably their immediate neighbourhoods in the for-
mer Soviet Union, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean basin. And in
response to demand—humanitarian and other—it may be exported to lower-
priority areas farther afield.
The second point is that this zone of peace, or security community, prob-
ably comes closest to what Francis Fukuyama was thinking of in the early
1990s when—a bit prematurely as it turned out—he wrote of the “end of his-
tory.”1 What he meant was that there were no more great doctrinal divisions
abroad that would drive peoples to or over the brink of war—civil or interna-
tional. If that has emphatically not proven to be so for most of the world,
some Europeans claim that, in this narrow sense at least, their continent has
indeed come to the end of history—with much relief and self-congratulation,
it must be added. Robert Cooper has found a less dramatic but equally
provocative way of making a similar assertion: to describe the EU as a clus-
ter of post-modern states is to say, in effect, that those states have ceased to
produce history.2
Thinking of the EU in this way, as a zone of peace and postmodernity,
gratefully short on new history but with a surfeit of security ready for export,
recalls the powerful image invoked by Goldgeier and McFaul: a Kantian core
of wealthy, democratic states in whose relations with each other war is no
longer an option, and a Hobbesian periphery of premodern (weak, failed,
dysfunctional) and modern (classic Westphalian) states for which civil and
international violence remains a plausible expectation, if not a perpetual
condition.3
1 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992).
2 Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations (London: Atlantic Books, 2003).
3 James M. Goldgeier and Robert McFaul, “A tale of two worlds: Core and periphery in the post-
Cold War era,” International Organization 46 (spring 1992): 467-91. See Michael Ignatieff’s ref-
erence to “zones of safety” and “zones of danger”: The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the
Modern Conscience (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1999), 6-7, 107-8.
| 920 | International Journal | Autumn 2005 |
| The European Union and civil conflict in Africa |
B E F O R E M A A S T R I C H T:
E U R O P E A N I N T E G R AT I O N A N D A F R I C A N S E C U R I T Y
Let me now turn these general reflections to a more specific use, in consid-
ering the relationship between Europe and Africa. If Africa may be said to be
generating history—largely of the tragic, cyclical sort often associated with
the Balkans—and requiring the provision of security in large measure from
outside, must it—and can it—rely on Europe to be its chief provider?
An attempt to answer this question must of necessity leave aside the
question of historic responsibility for the current insecurity and instability of
so many African states. We may, I think, take for granted that European colo-
nialism and the postcolonial policies of European states toward Africa have a
great deal to answer for in this respect, although it may also be asked at what
point and in what measure African elites must be called to account for the
continent’s collective misery. This debate I must leave to one side, while rec-
ognizing that positions taken on those matters will colour thinking on both
sides as to Europe’s current and future response to Africa’s security needs.
Until the end of the Cold War and the coming into force in 1993 of the
Maastricht treaty, creating the EU in its current form, the Brussels institu-
tions played at most an indirect role in African security. From its inception
in the 1950s, the European Community (EC) was restricted in its foreign
relations largely to an economic role. For Africa this meant a succession of
privileged trade-and-aid relationships with Brussels, given a uniform multi-
lateral character with the series of Lomé agreements initiated in 1975.
These, in effect, shifted the burden (if not always the privileges) of the post-
colonial relationships of nearly all African (and some Caribbean and Pacific)
states from their erstwhile metropoles to the EC as a whole. To the extent
that it had anything to do with Africa’s security, the Lomé model was a long-
term, indirect approach: domestic stability through economic and social
development, or regional security as a by-product of prosperity.
Moreover, the EC as such had little capacity to respond to African secu-
rity needs in a more immediate fashion. It had no common policy or capac-
ity for security—that was NATO’s job—and a common foreign policy under
the rubric of European political cooperation that was largely declaratory and
generally ineffective. When African civil strife or interstate conflict called for
direct European intervention, it was generally an EC member-state—usually
the former colonial power in the region—that responded. The residual
French military presence in west and central Africa was mobilized for this
purpose on many occasions.
| International Journal | Autumn 2005 | 921 |
| Charles C. Pentland |
Until Maastricht, then, the character of the EC’s security role in Africa
was a direct reflection of the policy priorities and institutional design accord-
ed it by its member-states. Beyond the indirect and long-term effects of trade
and aid, security was largely a matter for individual European states, whose
obligation to consult their peers was minimal.
The 1990s changed the Europe-Africa security relationship in at least
two respects. First, on the demand side, the post–Cold War withdrawal of
superpower rivalry from much of Africa changed the character of its region-
al conflicts, arguably for the worse.
The Cold-War strategic overlay, responsible for some wars—as in the
Horn—but also for domestic order, was gone. Combined in some instances
with western-inspired structural adjustment schemes for the economy, this
superpower recessional led to a contagion of domestic breakdown across
sub-Saharan Africa, resulting in a rash of civil wars with a notable trans-
national quality. With some exceptions, local African diplomatic and military
resources proved inadequate to the task of managing these conflicts.
Second, on the supply side, the Maastricht treaty marked the end of the
EU’s self-imposed security taboo and the launching of a common foreign
and security policy (CFSP) which, as the treaty put it, might in time lead to a
common security policy and “a common defence.” While the Yugoslav wars
and the troubles of several post-Soviet states suggested the new instruments
would find their first application in Europe’s immediate neighbourhood, it
soon became clear that the horizons of Europe’s CFSP could be somewhat
broader. With an eye, first, to its members’ collective interest and, secondly,
to humanitarian concerns, Brussels might intervene when and where called
upon in the wider world.
A F T E R R W A N D A : T H E E U A N D A F R I C A N S E C U R I T Y
As Maastricht was coming into force at the end of 1993, the world was being
made aware of the gravity of Africa’s new security deficit. Liberia had been the
first instance, followed by Sierra Leone and Somalia. Just over the horizon lay
Rwanda. Since the early 1990s Africa has accounted for over 40 percent of
the UN security council’s peace-and-security agenda, and African states have
continued to occupy the lowest rungs of the UN Development Program’s
human development index. In the ten years since the slaughter in Rwanda,
however, Africa has acquired a growing capacity—diplomatic, institutional,
military—for...
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