The European Union (EU) has fully adopted the current international trend that stresses the linkage between development, good governance and security - what is called here the 'development triangle'. Through the implementation of this holistic understanding of development, the EU has widely expanded the range of its policies in West Africa. This thesis identifies three relatively new and closely inter-related fields of European intervention and pressure for reform: security, governance and regional integration. The programmes implemented by the EU in these fields in West Africa, and studied here, all have in common that they are technical in appearance, and yet have profoundly political dimensions. The thesis outlines different reasons for this evolution of the EU's agenda in West Africa, which has failed to 'multilateralise' and 'politicise', i.e. has failed to question the traditional bilateral link between former European colonial powers and African colonies and to adopt a more political, and less technical, understanding of West African development issues. There are, first, clear institutional limits to what the EU can do in West Africa. These limits are obvious both in the field - in the European delegations' lirilited capacities and mandates -and in Brussels - in the often . unclear division of labour between Council and Commission and some member-states' continuing monopoly over relations with Africa. The thesis shows that multilateral and bilateral arrangements may co-exist for many' more decades and can even reinforce each other, so that there is little prospect for a replacement of one by the other. Africa, moreover, is still seen as a field for essentially technical and administrative interventions, not a place for politics, i.e. not a place where politics take place arid even less a place where political analysis and diplomacy are needed. The EU's agenda in West Africa is much more about adapting West African states - thus a transformational agenda - to Europe's understanding of the international order - one dominated by the Westphalian perspective -, institutional imperatives and self-promotion strategies than about adapting Europe's political strategies to West African realities and a more Weberian ideal of the state that would focus on domestic legitimacy and efficiency.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:629177 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Gibert, M. V. |
| Publisher | SOAS, University of London |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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