Conceptualising partnership: Africa-EU relations through the lens of historical-structural injustice

Through the Lomé Convention (1975), the European Union (EU) adopted a new rhetoric to refer to its engagement in the development of former African colonies. From being defined as a relation between a donor and a recipient, development cooperation between the Organization of African Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS) and the EU started to be addressed as a partnership of equals. Since then, partnership has been a buzzword in EU development cooperation and is used to define EU agreements both with the OACPS and with the African Union (AU). Scholars agree that despite its extensive use, the term partnership was never endowed with a precise reference meaning in this application field and constitutes an empty signifier. Concretely, this means that the equality entailed by these partnerships is more apparent than real and that dynamics of domination and oppression risk being reproduced and reiterated. Against this backdrop, this paper aims at understanding how the AU, the OACPS, and the EU conceptualise Africa-EU partnerships in light of their historical legacy. Namely, depending on the weight placed on the colonial past shared by AU, OACPS, and EU member states, a multiplicity of ways of conceptualising partnerships with Africa emerges. I assume that the different circumstances in which the OACPS and the AU were born, together with their distinctive values and ambitions, are reflected in how they conceive what it means to be equal partners with the EU. Besides, since its origins, the European integration project has been connected with an engagement of the EU in the development of former colonies. At the same time, the EU has always tried to decouple its relations with Africa from its colonial past. My aim is to comprehend what the term partnership means when we take this intertwining of historical events and structural dynamics seriously. Empirically, this paper is based on elite and expert interviews (18) involving both African and European officials and researchers and focusing on normative aspects of partnerships, specifically equality, domination and oppression in the context of the Post-Cotonou agreement negotiations (2018-2021). Theoretically and normatively, the paper adopts a historical-structural approach to injustice, for which the shared past between Africa and the EU has generated structural dynamics that systematically put Africa in a condition of vulnerability. In this way, it aims at taking a perspective that is conscious in respect to the past and epistemically decentred (not pre-eminently Eurocentric). The paper maps a variety of demands and values that are attached to the notion of partnership by the sides involved, showing how this is interpreted by officials and experts involved in the design and negotiation of AU-EU and OACPS-EU partnership agreements. This research fills an empirical gap in the literature and constitutes a first crucial step towards a comprehensive understanding of what being equal partners means in North-South relations.