Re-crafting EU-ACP Relations: Institutional and International Forces

The Cotonou Partnership Agreement (CPA), which has been governing relations between the European Union (EU) and 79 countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP) since 2000, is due to expire in February 2020. A number of signals, such as the adoption of competing policy frameworks in the areas of trade (with strengthened focus on sub-regions) and security (with continental actors such as the African Union as key interlocutor) coupled with the lack of interest of some Member States and declining interest of traditional ACP champions, seemed to suggest that the EU would no longer be interested in renewing its partnership with the ACP countries, at least not in its current format. The adoption of a Green Paper by the European Commission in November 2016 that proposed a renewed EU-ACP partnership consisting of a common foundation applicable to all ACP countries and three separate regional partnerships caught everybody by surprise. This paper looks at the key forces behind the EU’s change of preferences and, ultimately, the EU’s proposal for negotiating with the ACP group for the post-2020. Specifically, it shows how such changes could be seen, to a great extent, as the unintended consequence of three factors: the rise of a number of emerging powers with norms and values that are alternative to those of the EU (thus requiring the preservation of the CPA acquis on democracy and human rights); the need to ensure a general framework so as not to re-open the highly controversial Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs); and the one-off successful EU-ACP cooperation in the international arena in the context of the Paris Agreement on climate change.