Europe scuttles African unity

A MAJOR contradiction of globalisation is to integrate and centralise certain regions while disintegrating and marginalising others.

While the former has produced large and powerful blocks like the EU, the latter tends to produce what sociologist Manuel Castells has described as "black holes in informational capitalism: regions (where there is) no escape from suffering and deprivation".

Africa is progressively acquiring that image.

The rapid integration and growth of European and North American economies and the steady centralisation of political authority, particularly in Europe, stand in stark contrast to the marginalisation, impoverishment and fragmentation on the African continent.

Almost all African countries still remain vertically integrated to Europe.

This is being re-enforced by the signing of economic partnership agreements (EPAs) between the EU and countries from Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP) which will open up Africa's resources to European multinationals, block Africa's integration and obstruct south-south cooperation.

This constitutes a major obstacle to horizontal integration between African countries and may create obstacles in Africa's relations with China.

The irony is that while Europe is creating greater unity through an expanded EU, Africa - under EU pressure - is disintegrating into regional EPAs linked to the EU with the effect of weakening existing regional economic communities and eventually scuttling the dream of a politically unified Africa.

There are four EPAs proposed for Africa (West, Central, Eastern and Southern Africa - the Southern African Development Community) and one each for the Caribbean and the Pacific.

It is not surprising that European Trade Commissioner Barroso at the Lisbon EU-Africa summit in 2007, claimed the EPAs ".will turn our trading relationship into a healthy, diversified, development oriented partnership".

Senegalese' President Abdoulaye Wade countered this by saying, "It is clear that Africa rejects the EPA. the EU was losing out to China in Africa. Europe is about to lose the battle of competition in Africa."

AU president Alpha Konaré highlighted the danger of interim agreements playing African regions off against each other.

Africa's vertical integration to Europe has undermined the state's capacity.

Loss of control over resources combines with structural dependence and indebtedness to produce what George Beckford described as "persistent poverty" for the majority of the population.

Persistent poverty precipitates the disintegration of national societies as well as the fragmentation and polarisation of ethnic communities.

Politicisation of these by political elites produces and sustains many conflicts.

The convergence of external integration and internal disintegration also creates a crisis of legitimacy, resulting in authoritarian rule, state failure or collapse, ethnic conflicts and internecine warfare.

For Africa globalisation has unleashed a chain reaction: economic marginalisation, resource plunder, impoverishment, state failure, political disintegration, social fragmentation, community polarisation, conflicts.

Ironically, the socio-economic marginalisation of Africa in its share of international production, consumption and trade, as well as its impoverishment, is the same process intensifying the exploitation of Africa's resources.

Africa's role in the international division of labour is changing again.

Prior phases over the past 500 years have been driven by external forces and promoted their interests.

The crucial question is whether Africa will seize the opportunity to shape and drive its own future to serve its own interests.

During the slave trade Africans provided the labour that opened up the New World and supplied commodities that led to the industrialisation of Europe.

Africa lost most of its able-bodied population, and the continent was depopulated, losing the pressure that could have provided the spurt for transformation à la economist Ester Boserup.

One contentious issue mainly in the impact of the slave trade, particularly on Africa's development, is the number of people pressed into slavery.

Two things are clear: it left the continent's demographic structure tilted towards the very young and old for a long time and it decimated Africa's population.

Socially, slave raiding left a legacy of social violence which survives to this day.

Politically, it not only destroyed stable and expanding empires but also perverted political authority.

From protecting the people and promoting their interests, African political systems exposed them to external danger and predation.

This affliction continues to reproduce itself and to haunt the post-colonial state, to the extent that the African state continues to serve external interests and neglect internal needs is the source of endemic political instability.

When the slave trade was no longer economically viable and politically sustainable, the Scramble for Africa culminated in its partition in 1884.

During nearly 80 years of colonial occupation that followed, Africans were forced to produce industrial and food commodities for Europe on their own land.

Population declined so precipitously it prompted some observers to remark: "Africa was able to survive the three centuries of slavery but is likely to succumb to one century of colonisation."

This condition has largely persisted post-independence, with Africa continuing to produce and export colonial crops and failing to create "new economic space" for itself.

Meanwhile, traditional markets have been collapsing from oversupply, growth of substitutes or changing tastes.

• The writer is a professor at the School of Graduate Studies, St Augustine University of Tanzania. This is a shortened version of an article in The African Editor.