Eurafrica and its Business: the European Development Fund Between the Member States, the European Commission and European Firms (original) (raw)

2017, Journal of European Integration History

When the British joined the EEC they immediately asserted that the European Development Fund (EDF), and by extension, the European Commission, were serving French interests. 1 As they were contributing to the fund, it was essential that the money should be well managed and spent, i.e., that UK firms and UK former colonial territories should get their fair share of it. 'UK firms continue to take a proportionately low share of business from the EDF. At 31/12/83, with a UK contribution of 18.7% to EDF IV and 17.76% to EDF V, UK firms had only won 9.8% of overall business from EDF IV (or 14.44% of Member States' contracts only) and 11.71% of business overall from EDF V (or 15% of business won by Member States only). The position is improving steadily but still compares unfavourably with most of our multilateral contribution'. 2 In 1967, EDF Director Jacques Ferrandi, confronted with similar criticisms from the Germans, warned that the Community '[was]not a piggy-bank, from which each Member State could draw the exact amount of money that it initially gave'. 3 After all, was the EEC, as a political experiment, not supposed to enhance solidarity among the Member States and, through the Association, between the EEC and the African associates? Indeed, as laid down in the Treaty of Rome, the Association was meant to ensure 'the development and well-being' of what were still in 1957 overseas territories (mainly French and Belgian colonial territories in Tropical Africa). Renamed after decolonization of those countries, the Yaoundé Convention with Associated African and Malagasy States, (AAMS, 1963), then, when the British joined the EEC and some of their former colonial territories were associated, the Lomé Convention with the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries (ACP, 1975), it purported to be a 'grand oeuvre de solidarité' ('great charitable solidarity effort'). 4 The EDF was the main financial instrument of those conventions and one of the first financial instruments run by the European Commission. While the Member States of the EEC contributed directly to its funding, it was the European Commission that was responsible 1. This research has been financed through the Gutenberg Chair, funded by the local councils of the Alsace Region and hold by SAGE, the research Centre on Society, Stakeholders and Governement in Europe, at the University of Strasbourg. I am grateful to Louis Bataille and Julia Mussig for their help in translating German documents.