African decolonization and the emergence of developmentalism

Based on these observations, it can be argued that, in the short run, the institutionalization of the secondary institutions for association in the EEC formed a compromise between the competing logics on the primary level, rather than resolving them. In the medium to long run, however, the new secondary institutional framework further disturbed the feedback effects supporting the reproduction of gradual sovereignty and national imperialism as a primary institution. It did so primarily by changing the preference structures of the national governments and let unilateral imperialism appear as anachronistic. National imperial ambitions were harder to justify

53 A similar pattern can be found in the Euratom framework, which applied to all overseas territories (Treaty Establishing the European Atomic Energy Community 1957; Müller 2001: 445–446).

54 Italy, by contrast, supported the resolution, pointing to crumbling intra-European support for continued colonial adventures.

55 These were Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain and the UK, all of which were retaining colonial dependencies at the time of the adoption.

126

when the prospects of a common market promised security and prosperity in Europe (Holland 1985: 163; Waites 1999: 274). It also raised the imperative of securing influence on political developments in Europe, rather than in the empires. Holland (1985: 172–173) notes that, in an effort to secure French leadership in the EEC, the government reallocated political, economic and military resources from the overseas territories to Europe. On top of this, the prospect that preferential economic relations could be maintained by association with the EEC even if the ‘overseas territories’

gained independence weakened the argument of colonial possessions as a matter of national security and prestige. By consequence, the struggle between national and European orientations in France was decided in favour of the latter with the advance of the Fifth Republic in 1958 (Kahler 1984; Rempe 2011).

The UK constitutes a special case in this respect as it was not a founding member of the EC, not least because of the significance of its preferential trading arrangements with the Commonwealth (Dinan 2004: 70; Hansen 2002: 492). Still, the creation of the EEC increased the rhetorical leverage of advocates of (regional) free trade over those favouring classical imperial trade relations, leading to a reorientation towards European markets and finally to a first, albeit unsuccessful, application to the EEC in 1961 (Holland 1985: 206–207; Schenk 2003; Springhall 2001: 15). Beyond purely economic arguments, Europe also served as a new source of international identity and status for the colonial powers. In this line, Kahler (1984: 134–135) writes that “Europe would become for the Conservatives the substitute for empire, a new source of international prestige and influence”, and Hansen (2002: 494) calls Europe

a space in which ruling elites were provided an opportunity to trade the grievances over the loss of empire – and all that this would encompass in terms of damaged national pride, international prestige, sense of national direction, and, not the least, the humiliating experience of being defeated by peoples often designated as inferior races – for a new beginning, a new project, and a new national purpose in a ‘new Europe’.

Against the background of such favourable conditions, European empires reacted differently to the wave of decolonization that spread the African continent in the early 1960s than to the earlier phase of decolonization in Asia. The challenge directed at constitutional secondary institutions by independence movements were more readily accepted and, in fact, entirely unilateral declarations of independence were the exception. Violent repression of independence was increasingly delegitimized, forcing

127 France to accept complete Algerian independence in 1962 despite its effective earlier military victory over the National Liberation Front forces. Arguments defending the notion of gradual sovereignty or the instrument of territorial control in relation to the non-European world all but vanished from the discourse. The well-known Wind of Change speech given by Harold Macmillan (1972) in South Africa in 1960, which acknowledges the strive for national self-determination in African dependencies, and the affirmation of a right to independence for the overseas territories in Charle de Gaulleʼs second Brazzaville speech in 1958, which evidenced the transition of Gaullism from an imperial to a “nationalism of the ‘hexagon’” (Kahler 1984: 99) during the French Fifth Republic, illustrate that this shift was also reaching the former colonial empires of the region.

Subsequently, the primary institutions of gradual sovereignty and a concert of empires were replaced by a developmentalist discourse, which emphasized the sovereign equality of the developing countries and called for more symmetrical relations (Hansen and Jonsson 2014: 256). Interpretations of external relations in terms of development were not new at that time. The Strasbourg Plan had spoken of the development of the overseas countries as a goal of the Councilʼs economic cooperation (Council of Europe 1952: 127). In French politics, développement (and the roughly synonymous mise en valeur) had been a buzzword in discussions of colonial reform since at least the Brazzaville Conference in 1944 (De Gaulle 1944; Rempe 2011: 7).

The concept can even be seen in the tradition of the mission civilisatrice idea dating back to the heyday of colonialism – in fact, the very term was used by the Dutch Foreign Minister Joseph Luns (1957, see also Hansen and Jonsson 2012: 1035) at the occasion of the signing of the Treaties of Rome.

Until well into the 1950s, however, this goal of development was usually connected to a purported necessity to assume sovereign rights over the underdeveloped subjects. By contrast, the idea of sovereign equality became deeply inscribed into the new interpretation of development. Accordingly, the Yaoundé convention (1963) formalizing trade relations between the EEC and the newly independent African states, which was signed in 1963, explicitly affirms the principle of “complete equality”

between the parties and makes reference to the principles of the UN Charter.

128

Thus, while it continued to develop the primary institution of pooled sovereignty internally, the European international society came to accept the principle of sovereign equality in its external relations. An argument can even be made that communitarized developmentalism became a new primary institution of the emerging European International Society replacing the concert of empires: it is a coherent set of principles and norms containing ideas about actorness – the EEC as a part of the developed world and its partners from the developing world – and legitimate practice, namely Europeʼs duty to assist the developing countries in their economic, political and cultural advancement. It also constitutes practices such as developmental policy and secondary institutionalization, e.g. the trade rules and procedures laid out in the Yaoundé convention and its successor agreements.

The power positions constituted by this institution continued to be stratified and geographically distributed along the lines of Europeʼs former empires.⁵⁶ The argument, made by some scholars (e.g. Galtung 1973; Hansen and Jonsson 2014; Müller 2001;

Wæver 1996), that elements of an imperial or neo-colonial logic of dependence, control and centre-periphery structures have been a feature of European external relations even after formal decolonization certainly cannot be dismissed. Indeed, the secondary institutions of Yaoundé mainly contain the same rules and procedures as the association provisions for ‘overseas territories’ in the Treaty of Rome. However, these continuities should not lead researchers to overlook the important discursive changes that attest to changed beliefs about legitimacy that accompanied the decolonization of international society in Europe (cf. Diez and Whitman 2002a).