Dissonant Paths to Partnership and Convergence: EU-Africa Relations Between Experimentation and...

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Dissonant Paths to Partnership andConvergence: EU-Africa RelationsBetween Experimentation andResistanceMarie V. Gibert a & Bastien Nivet ba Division of Politics and International Relations, Nottingham TrentUniversity , Nottingham , United Kingdomb Leonard de Vinci Graduate School of Management (EMLV/CEREM)and Institute for International Relations and Strategy (IRIS) , FrancePublished online: 07 Dec 2013.

To cite this article: Marie V. Gibert & Bastien Nivet (2013) Dissonant Paths to Partnership andConvergence: EU-Africa Relations Between Experimentation and Resistance, African Security, 6:3-4,191-210, DOI: 10.1080/19392206.2013.853584

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African Security, 6:191–210, 2013Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1939-2206 print / 1939-2214 onlineDOI: 10.1080/19392206.2013.853584

Dissonant Paths to Partnershipand Convergence: EU-AfricaRelations BetweenExperimentation andResistance

Marie V. Gibert1 and Bastien Nivet2

1Division of Politics and International Relations, Nottingham Trent University,Nottingham, United Kingdom2Leonard de Vinci Graduate School of Management (EMLV/CEREM) and Institute forInternational Relations and Strategy (IRIS), France

ABSTRACT. In the official discourse, “convergence” between the European Union andits African partners takes place through partnership and common goals. The concreteactions undertaken (or not) by both sets of actors to turn this apparent convergenceinto reality are, however, far more complex and uneven than the official discourse sug-gests. They are on some occasions dissonant, both in the actual objectives pursued onthe ground and in their implementation by the two sides of the partnership. In trying toexplain this convergence/dissonance gap, this contribution underlines the highly exper-imental nature of the EU-Africa relations and accounts for some of the contradictionsand inefficiencies so often pointed out in previous studies.

KEYWORDS. European Union (EU), African Union (AU), Economic Community ofWest African States (ECOWAS), Southern African Development Community (SADC),Common European Security and Defence Policy (CSDP)

INTRODUCTION

Policy documents and official statements published by both the EuropeanUnion (EU) and its African partners, whether states or regional organizationssuch as the African Union (AU), the Economic Community of West AfricanStates (ECOWAS), or the Southern African Development Community (SADC),

Address correspondence to Marie V. Gibert, Division of Politics and InternationalRelations, Nottingham Trent University, Burton Street, Nottingham, NG14BU, UK.E-mail: [email protected]

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192 Marie V. Gibert and Bastien Nivet

emphasize the notion of partnership and common goals such as peace and sta-bility, development, democracy, and good governance. In this, European andAfrican actors followed, alongside other international actors, the trend born inthe 1990s that led to an increasing integration of development, governance,and security issues understood as inter-dependent and inseparable.1

Following the signature and implementation of the Cotonou agreement in2000 and the progressive quest for the development of multilevel EU-Africarelations beyond the traditional development field in the fields of securityand governance,2 a flourishing literature has studied these deepening rela-tions. Institutional and organizational studies, case studies, and interregionalstudies have prevailed, turning EU-Africa relations into a dynamic and multi-faceted research object.3 Whether overtly or not, the notion of partnership andthe idea of an increasing convergence between the two actors or sets of actorsis usually at the core of these works. Previous studies and our own fieldworkexperience, however, tend to show that another reality lies behind this sharedpolicy discourse.

Beyond obvious convergence at the official level of discourse productionand institutional commitments (conceptual convergence), the concrete actionsundertaken (or not) by both sets of actors to turn this apparent convergenceinto reality—into technical, practical, and/or political convergence—are farmore complex and uneven. They are on some occasions dissonant (i.e., theydiffer in their interpretation and implementation of the alleged convergencerather than being altogether divergent) both in the actual objectives pursuedon the ground and in their implementation by the two sides of the partnership.In trying to explain this convergence/dissonance gap, we will refer to the exper-imental nature4 of the decision making and implementation processes of theEU-Africa agenda in the fields of governance and security and to resistance5 tothese same processes both at the regional and national levels.

This contribution seeks to go beyond current descriptions of EU-Africarelations as deeply unequal and imbalanced and looks at two significant dimen-sions of EU-Africa cooperation, governance and security. It shows, first, howboth sides have used the partnership in order to experiment with concepts andpolicies and develop their continental and regional institutions. In doing so itunderlines the highly experimental nature of both the relationship and thisparticular policy field for the European and African partners and accounts forsome of the contradictions and inefficiencies so often pointed out in previousstudies. Second, it shows how the EU and its African partners navigate onan uneven path between an increasing conceptual convergence and, at times,strong resistance to technical, practical, and political convergence. It will con-clude by considering how the two sides react to these expressions of resistance,by redefining the policies and concepts initially agreed on, by reforming theirinstitutions, or by seeking to involve other international actors.

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Dissonant Paths to Partnership and Convergence 193

Within this special issue this article therefore explores the nature andlevel of conceptual convergence and its link to technical, practical, and politicalconvergence.6 In line with the introduction to this special issue, it understandsconvergence as “a process of alignment in which actors occupy a common fieldto reach a common goal resulting in a more unified system of complex but alsodispersed responsibilities and tasks.”7 Building on symbolic cases of debatesbetween European and African actors it shows that the level of convergencemay be very uneven depending on the type of convergence one is looking at(conceptual, technical, practical, or political). In doing so, it will concentrate onregional and continental actors as stakeholders and main actors of EU-Africaconvergence8 and will use examples drawn from the authors’ research in west-ern and southern Africa, two regions that have reacted very differently to theemergence of the African security regime and the simultaneous expansion ofthe EU-Africa agenda and who thus best illustrate the different forms, anddegrees, EU-Africa convergence and dissonance have taken and reached.

A STORY OF CONVERGENCE AND DISSONANCE: TAKING STOCKOF DIFFERENTIATED LEVELS OF CONVERGENCE AMONG A SAMESET OF ACTORS

The development of EU-Africa relations in the fields of security and gover-nance is a recent and somehow unexpected addition to the diplomatic relationsbetween both continents. This emergence can be explained with reference tothe recent evolutions of the EU and African actors themselves and in past bilat-eral relations between specific EU members and African countries. Becauseof its new and unexpected nature, this field of dialogue and cooperation isasserted in a top-down direction, in a kind of speech act such as describedby John L. Austin.9 EU-African diplomatic and institutional declarations andagreements are indeed very active in showing that common goals are pursuedand a grand partnership is on its way to achieve them. In other words, it isassumed that to say that something, is, is to, somehow, do it.

A Progressive Diplomatic Discourse ConvergenceEU-Africa official convergences are to be found both in terms of content

(principles, ambitions, and agenda) and in terms of container (institutions,methods, and processes) and have emerged through three different channels:the progressive politicization of the European Commission’s cooperation anddevelopment policy since the early 1990s,10 the building of an EU “speechon Africa” through the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) after1993 and the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP)11 after 2000, and

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the parallel building of an African “discourse on governance and security coop-eration with Europe” through the AU and the Regional Economic Communities(RECs).

In terms of content, the agenda of EU-Africa cooperation has focusedmainly on issues such as the prevention of crisis and conflict, crisis manage-ment and peacebuilding, democratization, and long-term stabilization.12 ThesePan-African issues were complemented by more specific issues of cooperationin specific regions, such as the fight against the spread of small arms and lightweapons (SALW) in West Africa, the fight against maritime piracy in EasternAfrica, the fight against terrorism in the Sahel countries, etc. Common princi-ples of action have been asserted that are supposed to define a Euro-Africanway of managing these challenges: the appropriation and predominance byAfrican actors themselves of the prevention, management, and resolution ofcrises; the importance of cooperation and coherence among various actors atvarious levels (EU, AU, RECs, UN, etc.); the necessity to develop African capac-ities of crisis prevention and management, mainly through the RECs; the needto prioritize prevention and to take into account the nonmilitary dimensionof crisis prevention, management, and resolution; and the linkage betweendevelopment, governance, and security.13

In terms of container, the EU agenda has focused on the building of asecurity architecture attempting to bring together the different actors alreadyor potentially engaged on the African continent. In this respect, regional-ization has been a key point of official convergence between the EU andAfrican actors, around the idea of a consolidation of the African Union (AU)as the main African body for governance and security, and with the RECsacting as local relays and operators. The official Euro-African convergenceon the African security architecture rests largely on a deliberately region-alist approach, asserting that what comes from above (continent, region) ismore effective, legitimate, and relevant than what comes from below (statesand national actors). This emphasis on region has some significant diplomaticand strategic relevance, but account must be taken of its limits and nuances.This Euro-African strategy has been promoted as a way to reconcile the ideaof African ownership and appropriation with that of international governanceand cohesion. This ostensible convergence of views has therefore been based ondifferent sets of criteria and interests. For European actors such as Franceand the UK, it was a way of changing forms of engagement on the conti-nent and promoting African responsibility and commitment to African securitywhile ensuring a political presence and influence on the ongoing processes ofAfricanization. This concerned the global security architecture as well as thestructures and rules of the different organizations themselves. As a formeractor of this institution-building process on the European side recalls, “Thegreat European design towards Africa has been to put into place, to copy theAfrican institutions after the European model.”14

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For African actors, converging with Europe was a way to maintain linkswith—and financing from—European actors while sending signs of greatercommitment and self-sufficiency. It was also a way to try and obtain greaterweight and visibility through the expression of collective stances within theRECs and the AU, just as some Europeans have occasionally perceived theEU as a potential multiplier of their international influence, legitimacy, andvisibility.

Last but not least, the notion of partnership, supposed to describe anequal and collaborative relation free of domination and oriented toward jointaction, has also emerged as a key word in EU-Africa relations.15 However, ifboth European and African actors have built a converging discourse on gov-ernance and security (conceptual convergence), this remains a rather partialconvergence, forged on different grounds.

Dissonant PathsAs underlined, European and African actors’ readiness to adopt a common

vocabulary and discourse with regard to African security and governance wasbased on very different rationales. It should therefore come as no surprise thatthese common declaratory stances are often translated into different, at timesopposed, forms of implementation, thus revealing a political and practical dis-sonance between the EU and Africa. The affair surrounding the indictment ofHissène Habré, the former leader of Chad, is a case in point and shows thatthere can be a significant gap between an official discourse on convergence andthe actions of European and African actors. Habré, after having been oustedby the current president of Chad Idriss Déby in 1990, took refuge in Senegal,where he has lived since. Criminal complaints against abuses committed underhis rule were filed in Dakar in 2000 by victims. This marked the beginning of along judicial battle between Senegal and the international community, includ-ing the EU, over Habré’s indictment and prosecution. While the Senegalesejustice initially seemed willing to prosecute the former Chadian leader, pres-sure exercised by the newly elected president Abdoulaye Wade quickly led to areversal of this position. The rest of the decade witnessed the constant hesita-tion and obvious embarrassment of the Senegalese government over the case.In March 2006, the European Parliament called on Senegal to either bringHabré to trial in Africa or to extradite him to Belgium, where other victims hadalso filed complaints. Later that same year, the AU, after hearing a report bythe Committee of Eminent African Jurists, asked Senegal to prosecute Habré“on behalf of Africa,” thus clearly expressing its preference for an African solu-tion. Wade accepted the request, and over the following years, from 2007 to2010, the Senegalese legislature and judiciary took the necessary steps to pre-pare the Senegalese justice system for the trial while negotiations with theAU and the EU were ongoing over its funding. However, in November 2010,

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the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of the West African States(ECOWAS) ruled that Senegal should prosecute Habré before an extraordi-nary or ad hoc international tribunal. This put the preparations on hold andattempts by the AU to find a compromise were rejected by the Senegaleseauthorities.16

What is notable in this case is, first, the discrepancy between the dis-course and instructions emitted by the African (and European) regionalorganizations—calling for a trial, within a reasonable delay, in Senegal—andits implementation by national actors, here the Senegalese authorities. Butwhat is also interesting is that the divisions cut across the sometimes over-stated Europe versus Africa lines. President Wade, a declared Pan-Africanistleader at the head of a country party to the Rome Statute since 1999, vehe-mently rejected the AU’s request that Habré be prosecuted in Senegal—arequest that could have been read as a sign of trust toward the West Africanstate and of strong desire for Africa to achieve international justice on the con-tinent and through its own judicial institutions. Moreover, while the EU andAU have seemed to take a united stand on the issue, the role of ECOWAS andits Court of Justice appears more ambiguous. It could be read as either a gen-uine desire to ensure that Habré’s trial took place in the fairest conditions, oras a wish to help Senegal find a pretext for not abiding by the AU’s request,thus revealing divisions between Africa’s continental and regional organiza-tions. The Habré affair shows in any case, that implementing the convergingEU-Africa discourse on governance and security on the ground is far fromstraightforward and can expose contradictory interests and perceptions on theAfrican scene and reveal a political and practical dissonance between the EUand Africa.

Another example of dissonant paths toward the fulfillment of the officiallyconvergent attachment to the Africanization and regionalization of governanceand security is to be found, in the uneven expectations and attitudes of actorstoward regional integration. The vision of an African security architecturecharacterized by an ascendancy of the AU, which would lean then on the var-ious RECs, is unevenly shared throughout sub-Saharan Africa. According tosome local or European observers, the EU and its member states are mis-taken in wanting to apply a preconceived regionalist vision, according to whichregions are necessarily a more reliable, efficient, and legitimate level of man-agement for governance and security issues. If this approach can, at best, giverise to budding relations and limited partnerships between Europeans andAfricans in certain regions, it cannot work in the presence of local actors thatare cautious, if not reluctant, with respect to the AU as well as the EU.

This is particularly visible in SADC’s resistance to becoming the regionalpartner the EU wished it was. The question of the sharing of the roles betweenthe AU and the RECs arises here. Contrary to certain “Pan-African” actorsfavoring the AU, the member states of certain RECs seem to give priority to

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the regional framework, at least at first. They are very keen in particular tobe the main actors of the mediation and resolution of crises emerging in theirregion, something the statuses and the fundamental principles of the AU guar-antee in principle. This is the case in particular in the SADC region. There,local actors have showed a strong will to manage among themselves the succes-sive Zimbabwean and Malagasy crises and have set up a real resistance againstextraregional attempts at mediation or intervention. The EU is confronted herewith an alternative form of “regionness”: a regionness not defining itself eitherby a very detailed and bureaucratically successful regional organization noras a regional partner such as the one European actors are looking for but asan exclusive and excluding position feeling toward third actors. This example,which is widely understandable in view of the political history of the SouthernAfrican region, reminds us that there exist maybe as many definitions anddemonstrations of regionness as there exist institutionally defined regionsand that the Brussels perception of what constitutes a successful regionaliza-tion can be in contradiction with the regional aspirations or nonaspirations ofAfrican states.

The expectations of the local actors toward the various organizations can-not be the same, given that the regional processes and the relationships of thelocal actors with the AU and the foreign partners are heterogeneous. The veryuneven impact of the RECs on their own member states also constitutes anundeniable stumbling block for this essentially regionalist European approachto the African continent. These different views on regionalization are just oneexample indicating how an officially convergent view on the management ofsecurity and governance does not prevent European and African actors fromtaking different paths when it comes to implementation. This overview con-firms that the efficiency of rhetorical and conceptual convergence for resultingin practical and technical convergence remains questionable.

AFRICA AS A LABORATORY FOR GOVERNANCE AND SECURITYCOOPERATION: EUROPEAN AND AFRICAN EXPERIMENTATION ASAN EXPLANATION FOR DIFFERENTIATED LEVELS OF CONVERGENCE

The gaps between conceptual convergence and practical and political disso-nance underlined here may have several explanations. They reflect first andforemost an obvious, classical disparity between discourse and reality wherebyactors usually give a more ambitious and favorable vision of what they wantand can do together than their actual capacity to deliver. In the present case,it might also be argued that because the two sets of actors operate in a newand unexpected frame and field of cooperation they naturally develop thepromised cooperations following an experimental path, trying to forge concepts

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and instruments that did not exist before and testing their viability and feasi-bility on the ground. The nature of the cooperation between the EU and Africais also deeply marked by the fact that it has as its main focus the African con-tinent, where African actors’ interests are by definition more directly involvedthan those of European actors.

This experimental nature of the EU-Africa relations in governance andsecurity turns sub-Saharan Africa into a kind of laboratory and leads to bothEuropean and African experimentations.

European Experimentation: Using Africa as a Laboratory,17 or theLimits of PartnershipThe investment of sub-Saharan Africa by the CSDP did not just represent,

as has often been asserted, a simple realization among others of the virtuouscontribution of the EU to international peace and security. It served, in par-ticular in the years 2003–2010, as a real laboratory for the CSDP: concepts,tools, and institutional and operational plans were tested in Africa before theywere clearly codified and strengthened in Brussels; the EU undertook coop-eration and policies on issues that it was itself laboriously appropriating ordeveloping; and Africa served as a place where models and policies conceivedelsewhere were exported.

Sub-Saharan Africa was of use first of all as a field test for severalEuropean institutional, conceptual, and technical projects. Operation Artemis,launched by the EU in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 2003 forinstance represented a political test and opportunity for the EU. Described bysome as “an opportunity to recover a kind of innocence after Turquoise,”18 itwas indeed perceived, not least by the French, as an opportunity to show anew, more multilateral trend in peacekeeping in Africa after the interventionin Rwanda in 1994 and other past interventions had raised much criticism.Operation Artemis, the first CSDP mission in Africa, was also an opportunityfor the Europeans to test the possibility of undertaking a mission outside theEuropean continent without recourse to the means of the North Atlantic TreatyOrganization (NATO) and despite the absence of any permanent common struc-ture of command and control. It thus allowed them to test the possibility ofresorting to a framework nation (France in that case), supplying a major-ity of the staff and providing the strategic command of the remote operationwhile the operational command was assured on the ground by a multinationalgeneral staff. Artemis also constituted a life-size test for the operational andinstitutional EU-UN relations or the interoperability of the European armies.So Artemis constituted unmistakably what Niagalé Bagayoko called a “field ofvalidation of the institutional frame of CFSP and of the European security anddefence policy.”19

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Beyond the technical and capacity aspects, Artemis and other EU oper-ations in Africa were also experimental at the conceptual level. They oftenpreceded the clarification of the political concepts, which they were supposedto implement. Artemis was made without a European concept on peacekeepingand stabilization. Despite the attempts at conceptual clarification at theEuropean level, the European Union mission to provide advice and assistancefor security sector reform in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (EUSEC-RDCongo) launched in June 2005 was led in the absence of a common definition ofsecurity sector reform (SSR) and on the back of persisting differences betweenEU member states on what constitutes a transparent, effective, and democrat-ically controlled security sector and by states managing their security sectorsdifferently. As underlined by the then director of the EU military staff, “EUSECin DRC constitutes the first tangible demonstration of the actions of advicein security sector reform (SSR), which the EU at present hardly tries to cod-ify within the framework of an EU concept on SSR, currently being writtenby the EUMS.”20 It is after this operation that the European actors devel-oped an EU concept for SSR operations, by basing themselves precisely on thelessons learned from the operation EUSEC in DRC. A subsequent mission inGuinea-Bissau then appeared to serve as an “experimental case”21 to test onthe ground these first elements of European doctrine. On the technical as wellas conceptual and political plane, sub-Saharan Africa thus acted as a labora-tory allowing to build on the ground, through practice, the embryonic Europeantools (command structure, etc.) and concepts (civil-military crisis management,SSR, etc.). We are here very far from the image of a deeply thought strategicpartnership co-elaborated by two equal sides.

A laboratory is also a place where hypotheses are being tested, wheretheories and concepts forged elsewhere are exported in the hope of pre-dicted results. Under the cover of African appropriation and of Africanizationof matters of governance and security, the European actors (EU as suchthrough the Brussels institutions but also member states) express expecta-tions towards sub-Saharan Africa and encourage projects corresponding moreto what Brussels (or London or Paris) sees as being within the competence ofthe African states than to the actual aspiration of these very states. As rec-ognized by a member of the European Delegation in Abuja (Nigeria), whomwe asked to describe his vision of the EU-ECOWAS “partnership”: “Duringthe negotiations, the EC and ECOWAS agree on priorities . . . . We are in apartnership, but we are the ones holding the pen.”22 There thus exists a kindof hiatus on the Africanization or the appropriation of matters of governanceand security by local actors. The stakes on which the Europeans try to favora development of the African capacities (peacekeeping and crisis managementcapacities for example) are not necessarily local priorities nor domains of coop-eration with actors such as the EU and its member states. It is nevertheless

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the European institutions in the statements of the concerned European actorsthat fix the agenda of the discussions and negotiations.

Hence there is a possible distortion between the local security agenda andthe cooperation agenda between the EU and its African partners. The contribu-tion to peacekeeping operations, in particular within the framework of the AU,is not a priority for numerous African states. It constitutes nevertheless the cor-nerstone of what the EU intends to urge the Africans to do together. The samegoes for the political dialogue that the EU tries to set up with the RECs andthe African states. This answers, as in the case of SADC in particular, neitherto a demand nor to expectations of local actors and even raises reluctance andfears since African states sometimes prefer to discuss among themselves, with-out third-party intervention, the political crises affecting their region. This gapbetween what the Europeans understand by the Africanization of matters ofgovernance and security and the aspiration of the African states is also obviousin the respective expectations and attitudes of the actors toward regional insti-tutions. The permanent insistence on regionalization, while not diplomaticallyand strategically irrelevant, follows the same characteristics of an exportedpreconceived agenda that deserve to be at least confronted and adapted tothe different local and regional realities of sub-Saharan Africa. African lead-ers have hopes and aspirations toward their own regional organizations, butthese may differ from the European vision and deserve to be better taken intoaccount.

These various experimental trends of the EU’s action are sources of dis-tortion between the converging official EU-Africa agenda and its conditions ofpractical implementation.

African Experimentation: Converging Enough WithoutConverging Too Much?There are multiple examples, in the recent history of EU-Africa coopera-

tion, of a very hesitant convergence on the part of the African actors toward thesecurity and governance positions advocated by the EU. Such convergence isvisible in the efforts accomplished by African states and organizations to adoptand appropriate the reforms recommended by the EU. The interaction betweenEuropean and African actors in Guinea Bissau’s prolonged security sectorreform (SSR) process is an eloquent example. SSR has been on Guinea-Bissau’sagenda ever since the civil war of 1998–1999, which had clearly exposed thelimits of the democratization process as well as the dangers posed by anoversized army that felt entitled to interfere in the country’s civilian politics.A plethora of internal and external actors, including the EU, the UN, ECOWAS,and the Community of Portuguese-Language Speaking Countries (CPLP), havesince been involved in its implementation. The EU was at first hesitant to getinvolved, but in 2008, after several rule of law and justice reform programs

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implemented by the European Commission and a number of exploratory mis-sions, the EU launched a CSDP mission to assist Guinea-Bissau with its SSR,EUSSR Guinea-Bissau.23 EUSSR Guinea-Bissau, whose mandate expired in2010, was not succeeded by a second mission as had originally been planned.The limited progress achieved during its two years of existence and, morecrucially, the army mutiny of April 2010 and the appointment of the chief muti-neers at the heads of the army and navy, led the EU to adopt its hardest lineever in Guinea-Bissau. EUSSR Guinea-Bissau left the country in September2010, and an article 96 consultation procedure, following the rules laid out inthe Cotonou Agreement in cases of breach of good governance, was opened atthe beginning of 2011 with the government of Guinea-Bissau.

Despite the EU’s retreat and the political instability that has markedGuinea-Bissau’s recent history, SSR has become an integral part of both thegovernment’s and external African actors’ discourse and political agenda in thecountry. The adoption by the National Assembly of the legal package essen-tial to the implementation of SSR was thus completed in December 2011,while an Angolan military mission, Missang, contributed to the long-delayedrefurbishment of some of the army’s barracks in 2011–2012. SSR also movedto the top of the agenda of the two organizations most heavily involved inGuinea-Bissau after the EU’s retreat—ECOWAS and the CPLP, which repeat-edly emphasized their determination to implement the common roadmap forSSR adopted in 2010. The ECOWAS mission, the ECOWAS Mission in Guinea-Bissau (ECOMIB), which was deployed in 2012, took over from Missang andwas expected to push the SSR agenda forward.

Given the lack of progress made in Guinea-Bissau’s SSR, it is difficult tomeasure any effective level of convergence between national and internationalactors and between the different external actors (European and African). Thissuggests a familiar cat-and-mouse game played between the recipient countryand its major donors whereby the government adopts a set of reforms, donorsand African allies (partially) resume or readapt cooperation, and the govern-ment then seemingly makes every effort to slow down the reforms or block themaltogether. The fact that SSR, originally an international/European initiative,has consistently remained at the top of the agenda of all actors involved, how-ever, also indicates that there is more political convergence between Europeanand African actors than is sometimes assumed. There is also a process of exper-imentation: the SSR is a relatively new concept for both the EU and its Africancounterparts and they share a common, often hesitant path. ECOWAS’s con-vergence with the EU is perhaps more evident. It is visible, first, in theinstitutional arrangement of ECOWAS, which has, like the EU, an executiveauthority/council (of heads of states and governments/ministers), a parlia-ment, a commission, a court of justice and a similar set of financial institutions(a bank of investment and a development fund). This institutional modeling,

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however, is a historical form of mimicry very different from the more contem-porary and in-depth form of conceptual and political convergence studied inthis article. Examples of the latter are obvious in the growing role playedby ECOWAS in resolving and preventing the region’s crises and in push-ing for and accompanying democratization. From the first interventions byECOWAS’s monitoring group, ECOMOG, in Liberia (1990) and Sierra Leone(1997) and the adoption in 1999 of the ECOWAS Protocol Relating to theMechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, Peacekeeping and Security,ECOWAS developed and strengthened its governance and security tools in amanner that seems very much in line with the EU’s. Like the EU, it has alsoadopted a longer-term approach to political crises by deploying special repre-sentatives and offices in postcrisis situations, as was done in Guinea-Bissauin 2004. Like the EU, it now reacts to coups, army mutinies, or the contesta-tion of electoral results extremely quickly and does not hesitate to suspendmember states, adopt sanctions, send high-profile mediators, and organizeextraordinary summits to exercise further political pressure.24 In so doing, bothorganizations are no doubt following an international trend that encouragesregional actors to interfere in security and governance matters, long consideredthe monopoly of states, but there are also numerous signs of deliberate, practi-cal EU-ECOWAS convergence, with EU financial support to ECOWAS (throughthe EU’s Regional Indicative Programme for West Africa and the African PeaceFacility), an ongoing high-level political dialogue between the two organiza-tions, and regular in-country meetings between their representatives in crisiscountries such as Guinea-Bissau. While this EU-ECOWAS convergence is alsoregularly met with resistance (we will come back to this) there is no doubt thatthe EU has acted as a powerful institutional and norm socializer in West Africaand that West Africans are willingly adopting a strong security and governanceagenda that resembles the EU’s in many regards.

To some extent, the way SADC is showing an alternative model and def-inition of regionness and relations with third actors also reflects a specificexperimental path toward the accommodation of national and regional inter-ests, principles of African appropriation, and regionalization of security andgovernance. A path that is dissonant to that expected in Brussels but not fullycontradictory.

In trying to implement the official convergences of the EU-Africa partner-ship, European and African actors are following experimental paths, testingmethods and actions that are trying to fit the agreed ambitions and prin-ciples within their preconceived diplomatic habits, strategic culture, andnational or regional interests and ambitions. This experimental behavior partlyexplains the “convergence-dissonance gap” between Euro-African conceptualconvergences and their uneven, practical, and political implementation, a“convergence-dissonance gap” that also stems, paradoxically, from resistancesto this very experimentation by both European and African actors.

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FROM EXPERIMENTATION TO RESISTANCE: THE “BACKLASH” EFFECTOF EXPERIMENTATION

The experimental nature of the development of EU-Africa relations in the fieldof governance and security would not, in itself, be responsible for a conceptual-practical gap if the actors concerned were fully willing and capable of puttingthe asserted principles and goals into practice. Yet EU and African experimen-tations face a multifaceted set of resistances that helps understand the gapbetween conceptual EU-Africa convergence and the dissonant paths followedby actors on the ground leading to limited practical, technical, and politicalconvergence.

Resistances to Convergence: Forms, Attitudes, PatternsAs mentioned, resistance to convergence with the EU generally takes

subtle forms in West Africa. Convergence is often embraced initially, whileresistance is later expressed through the reluctance to implement commondecisions. One such example is, once again, in Guinea-Bissau, where the fivemain organizations involved in the country’s postconflict transition—the EU,the UN, ECOWAS, the AU and the CPLP—reacted with one voice to recentattempts by the military to step onto the political scene. All five actors imme-diately condemned both the mutiny of April 2010 and the coup of April 2012,calling for an immediate return to stability and constitutional rule. The twoAfrican organizations, the AU and ECOWAS, were among the most vocal, withthe AU immediately suspending Guinea-Bissau on both occasions, and bothorganizations sent special mediation teams, organized extraordinary summits,threatened the military with targeted sanctions, and emphasized their supportfor a quick relaunch of the SSR. At first sight, therefore, reactions to Guinea-Bissau’s instability seem to illustrate a clear pattern of conceptual convergence.ECOWAS and the CPLP, however, also softened their attitude soon after the2010 mutiny. While they strongly condemned the events, their decision to stepin with an SSR roadmap and new cooperation plans at a time when the EU wasadopting a harder line indicated some serious disagreements within the EU-Africa relationship and beyond. Some suggested that this “good cop-bad cop”scenario could be potentially productive, with ECOWAS and the CPLP offer-ing the Bissau-Guinean leadership another chance while the EU maintainedits political pressure for change and thus implicitly gave the two organizationsadditional leverage.25 The recent coup of April 2012, however, has underlinedthe limits of this, most probably unintentional, strategy.

Despite these limits, cooperation between the EU and ECOWAS or the AUin the field of governance and security is usually mentioned as rather exten-sive. This is probably due to the contrasting situation in other regions. SADChas, for instance, frequently provided a very different picture of the capacity

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of the African security architecture to endorse and transpose European views,principles, and structures. The resistances there to the European experimenta-tions have taken many forms, different from the ones observed in the ECOWASregion.

SADC is, to our knowledge, the only region where the EU has faced directresistance to proposed cooperation or financing. It has, for instance, refusedthe deployment of an EU liaison officer and the EU financing of some of itsinitiatives following the disagreement on the Regional Peacekeeping TrainingCentre (RPTC) in Harare. Beyond direct refusal—a form of active resistance—the SADC case also illustrates other, more passive, forms of resistance. Theextreme reluctance of the organization and its member states to develop coop-eration with third actors within the RPTC or within the organization’s Organon Politics Defence and Security (OPDS) indicates a capacity of local actors toresist by not cooperating. A third form of resistance is found in the way localactors, while apparently fulfilling pan-African or EU-Africa processes, do so ina way that partly creates an alternative way of doing things, therefore resistingthe preconceived model. The fact that the SADC Brigade (SADCBRIG) does notrely on a permanent command and the overwhelming contribution of the SouthAfrican Republic to the SADC exercises and operations is not in tune with theideas of African ownership, reinforcement of African capacities and regional-ization of security issues, and capacities, as officially promoted by both sides.

Unsurprisingly, European actors tend to explain this relative failure withregard to EU-SADC relations not so much by the inadequacies of the Europeanactors and processes but by those of their partners, SADC, and its memberstates. For some, SADC is simply not a functional organization able to act asa partner for the EU: “SADC is not really a political organization. It is veryold fashioned, it functions in the old way. It is therefore very hard to turn itinto a modern organization.”26 For others, the problem lies not so much withSADC as such but simply with the fact that SADC real priorities do not coin-cide with the kind of priorities other actors expect: “SADC’s member states donot expect too much from it as far as security and defence are concerned. Fromthen on, why should SADC expect anything from the EU in these fields?”27

The region then offers an original form of “resistance by nonconformity” tothe official convergent expectations of European and African actors. Thesedifferentiated patterns of convergence between the EU and African RECs pro-vide useful insights into the gap between a rather high level of conceptual orpolitical convergence and a lower level of practical or technical convergence.

Resistances to convergence are also to be found on the EU’s side. As isfrequent in the field of European foreign policy, institutional explanations areusually the main reason given to the EU’s own non-implementation of itsambitions and principles. Until very recently, the evolving nature and pro-cess of CFSP and CSDP, both in Africa and in the wider world, was, forinstance, most frequently mentioned by European actors to explain the limits of

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European coherence and efficiency. As underlined by a member of the EuropeanDelegation in Gaborone (which is the one in charge of relations with SADC):“The delegation has at present no role on security and defence. But becauseI am there and because I had participated in the elaboration of the PeaceFacility, I am interested in it.”28 Despite the ongoing implementation of someprovisions of the Lisbon treaty, such as the setting up of the European ExternalAction Service (EEAS), this institutional explanation of the discourse-actiongap at the European level is still frequently heard, both from officials andanalysts.29

Other actors of EU-Africa relations, however, point out that “Suspicionsand fears towards ongoing processes as far as EU-Africa relations are con-cerned are the same in Africa as the ones observed in Europe.”30 The lack oftrust and cooperation among member states, the desire to magnify politicalinfluence while limiting financial and human commitments, and the promo-tion of national interests and views through regional organs and policies areall sources of resistance to the regionalization of security on both sides of theMediterranean. As a member of a European Delegation in Southern Africareported, “Member states are not really inclined to say exactly which kinds ofdiscussions or cooperation they have with SADC and its member states,” and“if we know that member states such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Francedevelop relations in the field of security and defence with local actors” they have“no idea what they are doing exactly.”31 Information sharing between Europeancapitals, between these capitals and the representations of the EU in the field,and even among EU institutions is intermittent and incomplete, leading to asituation of fluidity, nobody knowing exactly what the other does or is trying todo in this or that country or region. Indeed in some cases the divisions betweenEuropean institutions and actors in Africa can verge on caricature, as whenthe European Commission and the Council of the EU appealed to the EuropeanCourt of Justice to decide which one of them was competent to manage the fightagainst the proliferation of small arms and light weapons in western Africa.32

This lack of unity, coherence, and cohesion raises obvious problems since part ofthe ambition of the EU-Africa partnership is to push local actors toward moreunity, coherence, and convergence. These examples show that the study of con-vergence must also take into account the challenges of internal cohesion andcoherence of actors themselves and not just the coherence between the actorsof the security regime under consideration.

CONCLUSION: EXPLAINING AND OVERCOMING RESISTANCE TOCONVERGENCE

The experimental nature of the EU-Africa relations in the fields of gover-nance and security plays a large role in actors’ and observers’ perceptions

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of uneven achievement and diverging paths. It partly explains, for instance,the “promises-achievements gap” that marks this relation: the declarations ofintention of EU-Africa discourse convergence on governance and security aremore trial balloons than concrete agreements and action plans. They may atbest be regarded as budding regimes or convergence in the making, althoughone should avoid regarding organizations through the lenses of ideal types.They illustrate that conceptual convergence, even quite detailed and inten-sive, may not automatically turn into similarly intensive technical, political,or practical convergence.

This exploration of EU-Africa convergence in the fields of governance andsecurity has also shown the many forms convergence can take and the limitsof a single definition, however broad, to encompass this diversity. Between thehistorical institutional mimicking, on the one hand, and very deliberate formsof technical, political, or practical convergence (through funding mechanisms,meetings or shared policy declarations), on the other, EU-Africa convergencecan also be less obvious or seemingly unintentional, taking the form of ashared but overall broad and consensual discourse, similar concepts, and poli-cies or a common preference for certain political options. In the case of thesemore ambiguous forms of convergence, it is much more difficult to determinewhether EU-Africa convergence is the result of a deliberate strategy betweenthe two continents’ regional organizations, of broader international trends, or ofAfrican political dynamics that have, over the past two decades, led to the emer-gence of an African security regime of which the EU is only one player amongmany others. Going back to the definition of convergence proposed in the intro-duction to this special issue (“a process of alignment in which actors occupya common field to reach a common goal resulting in a more unified system ofcomplex but also dispersed responsibilities and tasks”), we are thus tempted toadd a degree of qualification in that the notions of “process of alignment” and“common goal” need not, and should not, conceal the many, at times coinciden-tal, at times contradictory, drivers that account for EU-Africa convergence andmake it a very ambiguous and complex process.

Beyond this conceptual qualification, it is also worth noting that severalchanges in method and approach, from both sides, could help reduce the limitsin EU-Africa convergence described previously. As far as the EU is concerned,a shift of attitude from a top-down (EU-Africa) relation and agenda settingto a more multichannel relation, with both top-down and bottom-up (Africa-EU) determination of agenda and principles, could prove very beneficial. Thisimplies a revolution in the way the different levels and actors of EU policy-making interact, to grant more space to the local intermediaries (Europeandelegations, local embassies of member states, African experts and officials,etc.) in the shaping of EU-Africa relations, whereas they have usually been lim-ited to a role of implementer of decisions taken in Brussels and the Europeancapitals. A broader normalization of Africa as a field of action for the EU’s

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external relations is also needed. Beyond its experimental character, the EU’sinvestment in issues of security and governance in Africa has been extremelyopportunistic rather than strategically planned and determined. As a for-mer actor involved in the development of EU-Africa relations in the 2000srecalls,

When the instruments of the CFSP/CSDP were put in place, we naturallyasked ourselves: “where can we go?” We were limited by several factors, suchas capacities and possible zones of action. Europe was for instance pre-emptedby NATO, which was predominant in the Balkans and where the EU came as asecondary actor. Africa appeared as a place where we could do something.33

This sense of improvisation and opportunist engagement is not a valuable oper-ating mode for a strategic partnership. A true cooperation would require thecooperation agenda, methods, and tools to be much more field-determined andresult-oriented.

As far as African actors are concerned, much will depend on their capac-ity to assert themselves in the fields of governance and security. Indeed, theirrepeated and increasingly consistent efforts to directly confront and deal withany threat to their region’s political stability and security, although largelydriven by African dynamics, suggest a genuine convergence toward a discourseand concepts shared with the international community, notably with the EU.The dissonance and acts of resistance outlined in this article can thereforeessentially be read as expressions of defiance. While there clearly is an ongo-ing struggle among African actors to position themselves and take the lead onthe continent or within its regions, the development of the African peace andsecurity architecture and its implementation on the ground will most certainlymean that these organizations will progressively acquire the confidence andreceive the necessary assurances from the other African actors that they leadin their own regions. The AU’s recent declarations on Guinea-Bissau, for exam-ple, clearly indicated the continental organization’s acceptance of ECOWAS’slead in the resolution of the crisis.34 This exercise in confidence-building wouldmost probably be facilitated by better and clearer communication on the part ofAfrican actors with regard to their preferred division of labor. While the contin-uous rise of new actors on a politically dynamic continent means that tensionsare bound to occur time and time again, these two elements—increased confi-dence and improved communication—naturally go hand in hand and will mostlikely be developed over time.

NOTES

1. This integration has been documented elsewhere and has led to a broader under-standing of governance and security whereby good governance is seen as a preconditionfor security and vice versa so that the two concepts cannot be readily separated.

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Security sector reform, one of the concepts explored in this article, is a perfect exam-ple of this interdependence whereby the governance of the security sector (police, army,and other security forces) and its relations with the executive, legislative, and judicialbranches of the state are seen as essential to long-term peace and political stability.Likewise, transitional justice is seen as an integral part of long-term good governanceand security. See David Chandler, “The Security-Development Nexus and the Rise ofAnti-Foreign Policy,” Journal of International Relations and Development 10 (2007):362–386; Roland Paris (2003), “Peacekeeping and the Constraints of Global Culture,”European Journal of International Relations 9, no. 3 (2003): 441–473; Chandra LekhaSriram, “Justice as Peace? Liberal Peacebuilding and Strategies of Transitional Justice,”Global Society 21, no. 4 (2007): 570–591.

2. The terms security and governance are now so widely used in international pol-icy discourse that they have become elastic and, to a certain extent, all-encompassingand never precisely defined. Returning to the European Security Strategy, one of thekey documents defining the EU’s relations with the rest of the world, one gets a betterindication of what governance and security are not rather than of what they are. Goodgovernance is thus the opposite of “corruption, abuse of power, weak institutions, andlack of accountability,” while security is understood as the absence of conflict, criminal-ity, and external and internal threats to long-term peace and political stability. Councilof the European Union, A Secure Europe in a Better World: European Security Strategy(Brussels: EU, 2003).

3. See, inter alia, Niagalé Bagayoko, “Gouvernance multiniveaux et politique de sécu-rité africaine de l’UE,” in L’Union européenne et la sécurité internationale: Théories etpratiques, eds. R. Schwok and F. Mérand (Louvain-la-Neuve: Bruylant-Academia, 2009):191–206; Malte Brosig, “The Emerging Peace and Security Regime in Africa: The Roleof the EU,” European Foreign Affairs Review 16 (2011): 107–122; Bruno Charbonneau,“Dreams of Empire: France, Europe, and the New Interventionism in Africa,” Modernand Contemporary France 16, no. 3 (2008): 279–295; Bastien Nivet, Security by Proxy?The EU and (Sub-)Regional Organisations: The Case of ECOWAS, occasional paperno. 63 (Paris: European Union Institute for Security Studies, 2006); Gorm Rye Olsen,“The EU and Conflict Management in African Emergencies,” International Peacekeeping9, no. 3 (2002): 87–102; Daniella Sicurelli, The European Union’s Africa Policies: Norms,Interests and Impact (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).

4. When referring to “experimentation” or the “experimental nature” of decision mak-ing and policy elaboration in the field of EU-Africa relations, we are in effect followingother authors who have noted that the EU takes action on issues or with tools that havenot yet been clearly defined or solidified and that it uses the African continent as a the-ater to test its possible future concepts or tools. See, for instance, Niagalé Bagayoko, “Lespolitiques européennes de prévention et de gestion des conflits en Afrique subsahari-enne,” Champs de Mars 16 (2005): 93–110. Frédéric Mérand and Mireille Rakotonirina,“La force européenne au Tchad et en Centrafrique, le baptême du feu,” PolitiqueAfricaine 114 (juin 2009): 105–125; Bastien Nivet, “Du laboratoire au miroir: Quandl’Afrique subsaharienne construit l’Europe stratégique,” Politique Africaine 127 (2012):135–153.

5. The notion of African resistance, not least to external actors, has already been thesubject of a rich literature. We are using it here initially as “intentions and concreteactions taken to oppose others and refuse to accept their ideas, actions or positionsfor a variety of reasons,” Karl van Walraven and Jon Abbink, “Rethinking Resistancein African History: An Introduction,” in Rethinking Resistance: Revolt and Violence inAfrican History, eds. Jon Abbink, Mirjam De Bruijn, and Karl van Walraven (Boston:Brill, 2003): 8.

6. See Table 3 in the introduction to this issue.

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7. See Malte Brosig, “The African Security Regime Complex: Exploring ConvergingActors and Policies,” introduction to this issue.

8. Other actors such as individual states, international organizations such as theCommunity of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), or the United Nations (UN) willbe mentioned and taken into account as far as their integration is necessary to under-stand the nature of the African security regime. The authors of course do not neglectthe fact that the EU, mainly taken here as a single actor, is also far from unitary on allissues studied here and would deserve to be studied as a composite actor itself.

9. John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1976). The notion of speech act, as mentioned here, refers to the idea that anutterance may actually have a performative function and may therefore be consideredas an action having consequences.

10. If the EU-ACP Cotonou Agreement of 2000 is usually mentioned as the startingpoint of this evolution, this could already be perceived in the 1990s through punctual ini-tiatives such as the Franco-British proposals on preventive diplomacy and peacekeepingin Africa of 1994 and through the reforms of the Lomé agreements, which precededCotonou.

11. The European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) of the EU has been renamedCommon Security and Defence Policy since the implementation of the Lisbon Treatyin 2009. For editorial reasons, the acronym CSDP will be used throughout thiscontribution, even when reference is made to pre-2009 developments.

12. For a synthesis on this agenda, see Catherine Gégout, “EU Conflict Management inAfrica: The Limits of an International Actor,” Ethnopolitics 8, no. 3–4 (2009): 404–407.

13. Niagalé Bagayoko and Marie V. Gibert, “The Linkage Between Security,Governance and Development: The European Union in Africa,” Journal of DevelopmentStudies 45, no. 5 (2009): 789–814.

14. Interview with a former member of the EUMS, Paris, March 26, 2012.

15. The term partnership is repeatedly used in EU-Africa policy papers, agreements,and declarations, including in the Cotonou Agreement; Council of the European Union,The EU and Africa: Towards a Strategic Partnership (Brussels: EU, December 2005);African Union and European Union, The Africa-EU Strategic Partnership: A JointAfrica-EU Partnership, adopted December 8, 2007 (Brussels: EU, 2007).

16. For a detailed chronology of the case, see Human Rights Watch (2012), “Chronologyof the Habré Case,” March 9, 2012, http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/03/09/chronology-habr-case, accessed May 18, 2012).

17. Bastien Nivet, “Du laboratoire au miroir: Quand l’Afrique subsaharienne construitl’Europe stratégique,” Politique Africaine, 127 (2012): 135–153.


19. Niagalé Bagayoko, “Les politiques européennes de prévention et de gestion desconflits en Afrique subsaharienne,” Champs de Mars 16 (2005): 93–110.

20. Speech by General Perruche, then director of the EUMS, during a WEU con-ference on peacekeeping in Africa. Jean-Paul Perruche, WEU Assembly Conferenceon “Peacekeeping in sub-Saharan Africa: A Practical Approach,” Brussels, September20–21, 2005.

21. Interview with a member of the European Commission, Brussels, November 9,2005.

22. Interview with a member of the European Delegation in Abuja, Nigeria, phoneinterview, November 2005.

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23. On the long process that eventually led the EU to launch EUSSR Guinea-Bissau,see Marie V. Gibert (2009), “The Securitisation of the EU’s Development Agenda inAfrica: Insights from Guinea-Bissau,” Perspectives on European Politics and Society 10,no. 4 (2009): 621–637.

24. For a detailed overview of the tools and instruments that ECOWAS can deploy inreaction to political crises in the region, see Gilles O. Yabi, Le Rôle de la CEDEAO dansla Gestion des Crises Politiques et des Conflits: Cas de la Guinée et de la Guinée Bissau(Abuja: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2010).

25. International Crisis Group, “Au-delà des compromis: Les perspectives de réformeen Guinée-Bissau,” Africa Report 183 (Dakar and Brussels: International Crisis Group,2012).

26. Interview with a French official based in Pretoria, made by phone November 25,2010.

27. Interview with a member of the Directorate for Security and Defence Co-operationof the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Paris, December 17, 2010.


29. Resistance may be defined here as being institutionally incompetent to fulfill officialrequests for and expectations of convergences.

30. Interview with a member of the European Delegation in Gaborone, made by phoneNovember 25, 2010.

31. Ibid.

32. Case C-91/05, delivered by the European Commission February 21, 2005.


34. See African Union Peace and Security Council, Report of the Chairperson of theCommission on the Situations in Guinea-Bissau, Mali and Between the Sudan andSouth Sudan, April 24, 2012 (Addis Ababa: AU, 2012); African Union, Press Release: TheAfrican Union Reaffirms Its Support to the Efforts Aimed at Ensuring an Early Returnto Constitutional Order in Guinea-Bissau, May 11, 2012 (Addis Ababa: AU, 2012).

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