Europe’s multiple security strategies towards Africa

Styan, David (2017) Europe’s multiple security strategies towards Africa. In: Economides, S. and Sperling, J. (eds.) EU Security Strategies: Extending the EU System of Security Governance. Routledge Studies in European Security and Strategy. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. ISBN 9781138210417.

Abstract

The European Union’s attempts to ‘strategize’ its actions in Africa are frequently contradictory, largely because the formulation of strategy has occurred retrospectively. Strategies have been crafted to encompass a wide range of often pre-existing policy instruments and agencies, each with its own broad range of specific means, goals and ends. This is true for each of the three geographic dimensions - global, continental and regional - for which the EU has now formulated strategies in Africa. Thus a key challenge in examining security strategy in Africa is making sense of what lies beneath this thin spray-on ‘strategy sheen’. Has a semblance of strategic coherence simply been wafted across a myriad of competing European foreign policy objectives, loosely linked to the notion of ‘security’? This chapter argues that relations between the European Union and African states occupy a unique position in Europe’s ambitions to devise a credible ‘strategy’ due to three specific characteristics of EU-Africa relations. The first is that EU-Africa relations have spawned a uniquely dense, yet frequently contradictory, series of strategies The second unique characteristic of EU-Africa security ties arises from the reality that since 2003 Africa has served as an experimental theatre for many of the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) military missions. Thus interventions in several civil wars in Africa have become Europe’s favoured terrain for joint-military experimentation and innovation; what we might term the ‘military laboratory’ characteristic of Brussels’ CSDP. The third characteristic of EU security strategy in Africa is that it is explicitly, repeatedly and insistently presented in Brussels as being the product of a ‘partnership’ of equals with African governments, however implausible that claim may be in reality.

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