<p>Since the beginning of the new millennium, China has opened itself to the outside world and in an enormous pace increased its contacts and relationships with other countries. The trigger to these dramatic changes of economic and foreign policies is the insight that China can no longer sustain its rapid economic growth, largely based on industrial production, on energy and raw materials from China alone.</p><p>Good relations with African countries have been of highest priority in China’s strategy of “Going global”. The new African policy is based on the two principles of mutual benefit and non-interference in internal affairs – as opposite to the West’s strategy of structural adjustment programmes (SAP), which include massive interference in internal affairs. China’s renewed interest in the African continent has spawned much enthusiasm from African leaders, paving the way for massive contracts of infrastructural construction and official aid as well as grants and loans. There has, however, also been massive protests from the West on the Chinese presence in African countries and on its emerging role as the continents preferred business and development partner. China has been accused of propping up anti-democratic regimes as well as of blunt disregard of the human rights and the environment. Albeit when viewed over time, much of the Western criticism of China’s supposed crimes, and worse, was committed during the colonial era. Behind the accusations lies instead a very real threat to the Western control over Africa’s natural resources, particularly oil and natural gas.</p><p>Because of the Chinese presence and activities in 48 of 54 African countries and the strikingly prosperous sino-african relations, the West has been forced to reconsider its aid and development policies to be able to compete with China. This has created a unique situation for African countries where two opponents compete in offering advantageous development and aid packages in exchange for extraction contracts on various natural resources. As a result of what could rightfully be called a new scramble for Africa’s resources, African countries now have the opportunity to play the contending China and West against each other in an attempt to benefit from the best possible offer. The dangers of this game should however, not be disregarded.</p>

Since the beginning of the new millennium, China has opened itself to the outside world and in an enormous pace increased its contacts and relationships with other countries. The trigger to these dramatic changes of economic and foreign policies is the insight that China can no longer sustain its rapid economic growth, largely based on industrial production, on energy and raw materials from China alone. Good relations with African countries have been of highest priority in China’s strategy of “Going global”. The new African policy is based on the two principles of mutual benefit and non-interference in internal affairs – as opposite to the West’s strategy of structural adjustment programmes (SAP), which include massive interference in internal affairs. China’s renewed interest in the African continent has spawned much enthusiasm from African leaders, paving the way for massive contracts of infrastructural construction and official aid as well as grants and loans. There has, however, also been massive protests from the West on the Chinese presence in African countries and on its emerging role as the continents preferred business and development partner. China has been accused of propping up anti-democratic regimes as well as of blunt disregard of the human rights and the environment. Albeit when viewed over time, much of the Western criticism of China’s supposed crimes, and worse, was committed during the colonial era. Behind the accusations lies instead a very real threat to the Western control over Africa’s natural resources, particularly oil and natural gas. Because of the Chinese presence and activities in 48 of 54 African countries and the strikingly prosperous sino-african relations, the West has been forced to reconsider its aid and development policies to be able to compete with China. This has created a unique situation for African countries where two opponents compete in offering advantageous development and aid packages in exchange for extraction contracts on various natural resources. As a result of what could rightfully be called a new scramble for Africa’s resources, African countries now have the opportunity to play the contending China and West against each other in an attempt to benefit from the best possible offer. The dangers of this game should however, not be disregarded.

The theory of ‘security communities’ is generally understood as ”dependable expectations of peaceful change” between groups and whether or not the African Union can be said to meet that criteria has been contested in the research community. One of the central disagreements lie in the nature of the region’s conflicts, of which a majority are intrastate but with tendencies of transnational involvement. This paper seeks to understand how extensive this involvement is and how it affects the possibility of classifying the African Union as a security community. The findings show that, despite some increased development in terms of cooperation between former adversaries, there is not sufficient support for the African Union to be a security community because of the deeply destabilizing effect some of the conflict involvements have on the perception of security and reciprocal trust in the region.