Post/decolonial perspectives on Africa-EU relations and negotiations for international partnerships: An analytical framework

Meaning-making around the concepts of development and partnership are shaped by history and perceptions that are informed by history. When discrepancies in such meaning-making manifest in the postcolonial encounter, what is often seen as intercultural miscommunication is, in fact, colonial difference. As African agency in negotiating with the EU and its member states come across as increasing over the last decade, an analytical framework for studying Africa-EU negotiations that take African agency seriously becomes necessary to explain the phenomena we are witnessing in contemporary Africa-EU relations. The aim of the paper is to present an analytical framework developed through postcolonial feminist theories that can and should be used to analyse all types of negotiations between Africa the EU, and its member states, including in regard to foreign, development, and trade policies implemented by both sides. The aim of the analytical framework is to disrupt the binary of symmetry/asymmetry to show when and how such a binary erases the fact that there have always been multidirectional power struggles in negotiating development, trade, and foreign policies (among other policies and cooperation agreements) that navigate the postcolonial encounter between Africa and Europe, while also demonstrating how and to what effects negotiation strategies cause either cooperation and tensions/friction/deadlock in postcolonial diplomatic encounters. The topic of the paper is negotiation processes for development cooperation and international partnerships between African states and the EU, and is done in the context of major shifts of negotiation outcomes and cooperation agreements between the Cotonou Agreement and Post-Cotonou negotiations. Many agreements and strategy papers have been negotiated and signed over the last decades, and the frequency of which they have been negotiated is telling of the multi-directional power struggles between Africa and Europe. The focus of the paper is not development projects, but the politics of postcolonial development and how such politics are negotiated between (postcolonial) states. In other words, it is not about development aid but about diplomacy and negotiation strategies at states negotiate with the aim of fostering relations through the dominate discourse of development. This dominant discourse of development is one where Africa is almost always discursively constructed as being in ‘lack’ and that development policies, programs, and projects coming from the west provide the answers to solving Africa’s ‘lack of’ development. African states have negotiated many things with the EU, including trade agreements, security pacts, and in relation to migration control. This study purposely focuses on the negotiation of development cooperation and international partnership because of its domineering significance in shaping discourses around African-European relations. With the desire to problematize taken-for-granted assumptions of asymmetry, the analytical framework identifies different levels of agency and the possible outcomes or indicators of such agency when it is practiced in a postcolonial encounter. It also identifies the driving forces and factors that make power struggles multi-directional and ambiguous rather than set in the binary of symmetry/asymmetry.