"The Evolution of European-African Relations"

[From the Introduction]. The relationship between Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa is made up of tightly structured bilateral policies and institutions and networks of multilateralism. Over the past 30 years attitudes, policies and prevalent theories on the subject of "development" and the descriptive and normative aspects of the relationship between "developed" and "developing" societies has been reflected in the discussions, the policies and the institutions which link Europe with Africa. It is interesting that the European-African relationship has tended to mirror the policies, strategies and theories developed in other contexts, while the African-European context itself has produced no major new thinking either about development strategy or the relationship between development and international policy. Perhaps the key exception is the literature, which argues that the asymmetric relationship between the developed and the developing states is neocolonial. A considerable range of policy analysis, multilateral institutional analysis and descriptive analysis has used Africa as the continent and individual African states as objects for description and analysis of neocolonialism