Suchergebnisse

With the Cotonou Agreement due to expire in 2020, formal negotiations towards a new partnership agreement between the EU and African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states began in September 2018. Based on the acceptance of the EU's negotiating mandate, the new arrangement will be primarily organised via three specific regional protocols with each of the ACP regions. Meanwhile, the Joint Africa-EU Strategy (JAES) launched in 2007, has seen the African Union (AU) gain increased prominence as an institutional partner of the EU. Given its ambitious pan-African agenda, it adopted an alternative 'African' vision for future EU-ACP relations, to the mandate agreed by the ACP states and expressed a willingness to become directly involved in the negotiations. This article contributes an important new case-study to the existing literature on 'African agency' in international politics by considering the scope for Africa to exert agency within the post-Cotonou negotiations, given the negotiation of a specific regional compact with Africa. It adopts a structurally embedded view of agency, based on Cox's understanding of historical structures, as a fit between institutions, ideas and material relations. The central argument is that, in comparison to the negotiation of the Cotonou Agreement two decades ago, there is greater scope for African agency. However, both the ideational and material aspects of Africa's relationship with the EU, condition the limits to how effective such agency might be. Moreover, tensions at the institutional level between the ACP and AU further undermine the potential for effective African agency.

A contribution to a symposium, "Marxism and African Realities," explores European Union (EU) policies related to the African, Caribbean, & Pacific (ACP) group of developing states, drawing on Stephen Gill's Gramscian notion of hegemony as self-reflexive, actively constructed, & incorporating both consensual & coercive features. It is argued that the EU has played an important role in redesigning development strategies to complement the global shift to neoliberal accumulation that targets the increasingly integrated project to "lock-in" the gains of capital over labor. Complementary projects of "redesigning" & "locking-in" are applied to the Lome & Cotonou Agreements to show that they represent a hegemonic shift in the form of a transition away from the social-democratic compromise of the welfare & developmental state. The process of redesigning ACP countries into regional economic partnership agreements leads many African governments to see conformity to World Trade Organization rules as the only viable developmental option. Consequently, these states surrender important future policy options & commodification is expanded to unprecedented levels. Resistance to neoliberal global constitutionalism is discussed. 58 References. J. Lindroth

The EU is currently negotiating a successor to its Cotonou Agreement of year 2000 with the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states. The political and economic con­text has changed enormously over the past two decades, with trade relations between the EU and the more developed ACP countries now largely regulated by bilateral and regional Economic Partnership Agreements. Since 2015, in line with international sustainability targets, social and environmental aspects must be taken into account in international treaties, while in 2018 the African Union (AU) agreed to establish an African Continental Free Trade Area. A successor to Cotonou offers an opportunity to modernise the rules on issues including investment, services and migration. This could also generate greater interest in the talks in Germany and the EU. But the cooperation need to be placed on a new foundation and the African states will have to decide whether they want to negotiate together, as a continent. (Autorenreferat)