The European Union and Civil Conflict in Africa

INTRODUCTIONIt is famously said of the Balkan countries that they produce more history than they can consume. From the 19205 on, the discourse of European international relations drew on similar imagery in distinguishing between countries that were producers of security and those that were consumers. The Balkans could be said then, as more recently, to exemplify regions of the world that both produce history and consume security in ruinous excess.In the interwar years, that vivid language served to draw an almost civilizational demarcation between the western and central Europe of the great powers, and that unruly, semi-oriental south-eastern quarter of the continent where the Great War had been sparked-a demarcation promptly shown to be illusory by the events of the 19303. Since the of the Cold War, however, that language has returned, if sometimes only as an eerie echo of the past.The Europe increasingly encompassed by the European Union (EU), marked by unprecedented levels of complex interdependence and innovative forms of collective governance among its member-states, is often described as a part of the international system that has achieved a kind of Kantian state of grace. It is a collection of liberal democracies that have effectively ruled out the use of force in settling their differences with one another.Two points seem to follow from this condition. The first is that a group of relatively capable states with few, if any, classic security issues with each other are likely to become-individually or collectively-producers and exporters of security to the world outside. As a European export, security can be expected to flow primarily to areas of strategic and economic interest to the major EU powers-notably their immediate neighbourhoods in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean basin. And in response to demand-humanitarian and other-it may be exported to lower-priority areas farther afield.The second point is that this zone of peace, or security community, probably comes closest to what Francis Fukuyama was thinking of in the early 19905 when-a bit prematurely as it turned out-he wrote of the end of history.' What he meant was that there were no more great doctrinal divisions abroad that would drive peoples to or over the brink of war-civil or international. If that has emphatically not proven to be so for most of the world, some Europeans claim that, in this narrow sense at least, their continent has indeed come to the of history-with much relief and self-congratulation, it must be added. Robert Cooper has found a less dramatic but equally provocative way of making a similar assertion: to describe the EU as a cluster of post-modern states is to say, in effect, that those states have ceased to produce history.2Thinking of the EU in this way, as a zone of peace and postmodemity, gratefully short on new history but with a surfeit of security ready for export, recalls the powerful image invoked by Goldgeier and McFaul: a Kantian core of wealthy, democratic states in whose relations with each other war is no longer an option, and a Hobbesian periphery of premodern (weak, failed, dysfunctional) and modern (classic Westphalian) states for which civil and international violence remains a plausible expectation, if not a perpetual condition.3BEFORE MAASTRICHT: EUROPEAN INTEGRATION AND AFRICAN SECURITYLet me now turn these general reflections to a more specific use, in considering the relationship between Europe and Africa. If Africa may be said to be generating history-largely of the tragic, cyclical sort often associated with the Balkans-and requiring the provision of security in large measure from outside, must it-and can it-rely on Europe to be its chief provider?An attempt to answer this question must of necessity leave aside the question of historic responsibility for the current insecurity and instability of so many African states

Development economics · Economics · European union · International trade · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Global Peace and Security Dynamics

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