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EU Committee: EU and Africa

My Lords, I join my colleague on the sub-committee, the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, in thanking our former chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, for his patience and the determination with which he handled an extremely lengthy and quite complex report. The report we are discussing today covers a massive field. It is an attempt by the European Union, composed of 25, soon to be 27, countries and by Africa, with some 55, to forge a strategic partnership designed to cover a range of policies from development to security and from human rights to good governance. The complexity of all this, in part, derives from the nature of the institutions at either end of the proposed partnership. In neither case is the allocation of policy responsibilities straightforward or even, in some cases, very clear. In neither is it static, as both the European Union and the African Union are in a constant process of institutional evolution—sometimes by conscious substantial changes of responsibility and sometimes simply by the application of pragmatic common sense. Hence the proliferation of acronyms and the need to explain the institutional diversities at both ends of this equation, for which, as a co-author of the report, I offer some apologies to the normal reader. No one could say that the proposed strategic partnership lacks ambition—but is it practicable? Will it be likely to add value to what is already taking place bilaterally between the countries of Europe and those of Africa? What is the capacity of both the EU and Africa to act collectively, to deliver results and to avoid confusion and duplication? What are Africa’s needs for which it would welcome an external contribution and is the EU in a position to meet them? What about the growing role of China? Several speakers have referred to that. Will it cut across and undermine the objectives being pursued by the European Union? These are the main questions that we set out to address in the report we are debating today. There are others we decided not to cover, most importantly that of trade which had already been reported on by the EU Select Committee in the context of the Doha development round of multilateral trade negotiations. On the big question of the practicability of forging an effective strategic partnership between the EU and Africa, our answer really had to be that given by Prime Minister Chou En-Lai of China to a question about the French revolution—““too soon to say””. It really is not possible at this early stage to state categorically that the approach is going to work. What can be said is that both parts of the equation are committing substantial effort and resources to making it work and seem to be making progress both in the institutional handling of the dialogue and in the achievement of practical objectives. Much of course will depend on the development of the African Union, a much younger entity than the European Union and one whose predecessor, the Organisation for African Unity, was notorious for its ineffectiveness. One can note with some concern that in the coming year at least two African leaders who have done most to set the African Union on its feet—President Mbeki of South Africa and President Obasanjo of Nigeria—will be quitting the political scene. Strong political leadership from the larger member states is as important in Africa as it is in Europe. It seems clear from past experience that a fragmented and divided Africa will be less well equipped to confront the problems facing it and, given Europe’s undoubted stake in an Africa which is achieving stability and overcoming poverty, it must be in our interest that its efforts to find collective responses succeed. We should thus regard the success of the African Union as a European interest which we should do our best to assist. But can the European Union as such add value to what its member states are already doing? Answering that question is particularly difficult for a country like our own, which has had a long, if not entirely untroubled, relationship with Africa, and which has been in the vanguard of recent international efforts to mobilise external support for Africa. The same siren tunes of national interest and pride of authorship play too in Paris, perhaps even more strongly. I believe that it would be wrong to listen to them. The European Union brings together a large number of European countries, many of which have hitherto had no tradition of working with Africa and many of which have devoted few resources to that continent, and harnesses their collective resources to objectives which are entirely consistent with the policies we ourselves have been pursuing. Viewed from the other end, Africa has much to gain from dealing with a properly concerted European effort, rather than with a multiplicity of different national efforts shot through with traditional rivalries. Our own Government will need to check a certain ambivalence that we detected between pride in our national programmes and working more closely with our European partners. The opportunity for Britain to play a leading role in shaping European Union policy towards Africa seemed to us one that should be grasped without ambiguity or afterthought. It seems clear from all the evidence we took that Africa’s needs go far beyond the straightforward provision of more resources and better programmes to deal with poverty, malnutrition and pandemic diseases such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis—important though all those requirements are. They relate, too, to the phenomenon of state failure, which has afflicted Africa more than any other part of the world, and which throws up complex issues of security policy and post-conflict peace-building. In countries either slipping towards state failure or just emerging from it, the normal prescriptions of development aid are quite simply inapplicable. The African Union is just beginning to develop some capacity and some of the instruments for handling state failure, but, as its experience with the African Union mission in Darfur has shown, it is still far from being able to handle these costly and complex missions on its own. Nor would the European Union acting on its own be a politically acceptable substitute. Even the UN, as we have seen in Darfur, raises strong, if, in my view, entirely misconceived, objections. There is a crying need for some joint approach that enables Europeans and Africans to work together—normally, no doubt, under UN legitimisation—in such peace operations. The Europeans have many of the resources in money, training and expertise that would complement African efforts. That is one obvious field in which a strategic partnership could bring major benefits to all concerned. Nothing is more sensitive in relations between Europe and Africa than the issues of human rights, governance and corruption, but they cannot simply be ducked. Fortunately the Africans themselves have begun to address them. The African Union’s peer review process, which has been referred to by other speakers, is a laudable attempt to get to grips with these most difficult subjects. Relatively few African countries have so far subjected themselves to this new mechanism. It is greatly to be hoped that that number will grow. Certainly, the European Union should take full account of countries’ records in accepting the peer review mechanism and in implementing its recommendations when they, in their turn, decide on their own developmental priorities. In all these areas the crucial objective must be for Europe to try to work with Africa’s own efforts, not to be seen as imposing policies from the outside. Achieving African ownership of the strategic partnership in all its elements will be difficult and frustrating, but it is essential. It will not always succeed at the first, or even the second, attempt. The case of Zimbabwe, about which some, including my noble friend Lady D’Souza, have spoken so movingly, is an obvious and lamentable one, where no progress has been made and none is in prospect. Europe, however, should not allow such bad cases to take hostage its relationship with a whole continent, even if it may impose some legitimate limits on the holding of high-level meetings. One issue that is covered in our report which is receiving much media coverage, particularly since the holding of a Chinese-African summit meeting recently in Beijing, is the impact of the strengthening Chinese relationship with Africa. We need to be clear from the outset: there is nothing objectionable per se in a stronger Chinese interest in Africa, in greater Chinese trade with, or investment in, the countries of that continent. Europe, if it stands for anything, stands for an open competitive approach to such matters, not a mercantilist one. But problems could arise if China were to allow its desire to acquire scarce commodities to develop in a mercantilist—dare one say it, a neo-colonialist?—direction. The same would be true if it were to cut across or undermine Africa’s own efforts to strengthen policies against corruption, bad governance or the abuse of human rights. I doubt whether it is in China’s own long-term interest—there I entirely share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall—to be clearly associated with regimes and practices which the majority of African states are trying to put behind them. The EU needs to discuss all these issues with China in an open and frank way and on a continuing basis. It should not be seen as some continuation of the Cold War by other means and in other regions but rather as an attempt to understand better the policies each is pursuing within the framework laid down by the UN’s millennium development goals to which we have all subscribed. If this report and debate demonstrate anything, it is the importance of Africa for the European Union’s emerging external policies. This is, I believe, a part of the world where the European Union, as such, has an important role to play and is capable of playing it. If Europe does not play that role, let us be quite clear: no one else will. No one else will step forward to do so. It is clear that Africa is not about to shoot up the United States’ order of external priorities. Who else, other than the European Union, has the resources and the political will to offer a genuine strategic partnership? The question, surely, answers itself. So let us hope that in the years ahead, Europe and Africa will make further progress down the road they have set for themselves.