Chapter 4 - Comparing the European Union's Relations with the East African Community in the 1960s and the 2000s.pdf (original) (raw)

The main goal of this chapter is to assess the extent to which post-colonial theories can shed light on the historical development of the EAC. In particular, I examine the relationship between the EAC and its single most important external donor, the EU. I ask a number of related questions: what is the nature of the EU’s relationship with the EAC? Has this relationship changed over time? What political impacts has the EU-EAC relationship had on East African regional integration? Is there any evidence that EU financial contributions to the EAC have affected the latter’s policy-making? Rather than confine my analysis in this chapter to only recent EU-EAC ties, I instead examine EU-EAC relations during two historical moments. Section 4.2 concerns the period between 1960 and 1970, when the first EAC and the then-European Economic Community (EEC) began formally interacting. Section 4.3 focuses on the period since 2005, following the relaunch of the second EAC, when the EU and the EAC have reached an unprecedented degree of cooperation. This cooperation has involved significant financial transfers from external actors to the EAC—about half a billion USD since 2000—as discussed in Section 4.4, but also a wide variety in the forms of interaction, including day-to-day contacts, trainings and study tours, secondments, and high-level reports (discussed in Sections 4.5.1-4.5.4, respectively). Section 4.5.5 discusses the formal negotiations that occurred throughout the 2000s between the EU and the second EAC concerning the Economic Partnership Agreement, a controversial free trade agreement that was eventually signed in 2014. Building on the previous empirical sections, Section 4.6 is more big-picture and proposes that the main lens through which the EU views contemporary East Africa is a “developmentalist” one, by which I mean that being able to disburse development assistance has become the European Commission’s main raison d’être in East Africa. Indeed, the EU’s need to have a fiduciarily reliable partner on the ground that shares its technocratic and export-friendly mindset arguably explains why it has so assiduously partnered with the EAC Secretariat and is so willing to spend large sums of money on an otherwise minor, unproven regional organization. Finally, Section 4.7 rounds out the chapter by drawing attention to the profound differences between EEC-EAC relations in the 1970s and EU-EAC relations today—differences which resist being pigeonholed into a crude post-colonial argument but still reflect post-colonial theorists’ attention to how development assistance can distort local incentives, as well as the frequent tradeoff between a DWRO’s capability and its legitimacy.