Community Between Europe and Africa. IHS Political Science Series 64, September 1999

The study analyses the kind of community which was established through the various Lomé Conventions. The relationship between the EC/EU and the ACP countries has undergone profound changes. While in the beginning the relationship was based on the (contrafactual) supposition of equality between the partners and fair exchange the situation turned into a more openly unbalanced one. The real status of the ACP countries turned from client to supplicant because the socio-economic and political rational for upholding the fiction of equality vanished. The special “post-colonial” relationship between the EC/EU and the ACP countries is likely to come to an end as is the particular form of community between these two groups of states. Even in the past the relationship was characterised by political and economic conditionality aimed at internal political reform, conflict prevention, and poverty alleviation. Nevertheless, as long as the EC/EU is not ready and willing to directly intervene in these countries it will rely on development aid as an indirect means to address its political concerns which now include refugee flight, the spread of cross border epidemic disease, and the growth of narcotics trade