The scars in Africa-Europe relations

The UN General Assembly recently declared the 400-year-long transatlantic slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations for its victims in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Of the 193 UN members, 123 voted to adopt the resolution, with an Afro-Caribbean bloc joined by many Latin American and Asian countries. Notably, the European countries most culpable for transatlantic slavery, and thus most responsible for paying reparations, abstained. 

It is fair to say that, despite their proximity — the Strait of Gibraltar that separates the African and European continents is just 13 km wide at its narrowest point — Europe has rarely been a good neighbor to Africa. For all the European talk of “partnership,” relations between the two continents continue to be shaped — and distorted — by the historical trauma of centuries of slavery and colonialism. 

True, the EU has generously provided more than €3.5 billion ($4 billion) in security funding to Africa since 2004. But the bloc’s heavy-handed approach to negotiating economic partnership agreements with African countries between 2002 and 2016, and the revocation of non-reciprocal trade preferences in 2007, has left Africans feeling stuck in an unequal, paternalistic relationship, with their development concerns repeatedly dismissed. The EU’s increasingly draconian migration policies have only reinforced this sentiment. 

Africans feel trapped in an unequal relationship

Adekeye Adebajo

To understand how the imperial hangover still lingers, consider the most recent summit between the African Union and the EU held in Luanda, Angola, last November. Policymakers trotted out the same tired platitudes about “shared values” and “mutual interests.” But the meeting followed the pattern set by the previous six AU-EU summits. EU leaders put on a show of consulting civil society groups and businesses asked to speak on behalf of African and European constituencies, but largely ignored their input, having turned over the drafting of most of the “joint” documents to Eurocrats. 

To be sure, the EU is widely admired across Africa as the world’s most successful example of regional integration, and the AU’s institutions are modeled after the bloc’s. That cohesion has brought prosperity to the EU, where gross domestic product reached $19.5 trillion in 2024, while roughly 67 percent of its trade was intraregional — by contrast, only 14.4 percent of African trade was intracontinental that year. But the EU’s share of global GDP, based on purchasing power parity, fell from 25 percent with 12 members in 1990 to 14.2 percent with 27 members by 2024. Despite its pretensions, the bloc is no longer an economic giant. And, perhaps more importantly, US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has exposed its political weaknesses. 

From Africa’s perspective, Europe seems to be in an abusive relationship with America — one that the bloc feels it cannot leave. Collective therapy is required before the Continent becomes a museum exhibiting only paeans to past glory. As Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank and former Italian prime minister, outlined in his 2024 report on EU competitiveness, the bloc’s technological backwardness and heavy regulation have resulted in sclerotic growth. 

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s nativist speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, which elicited a standing ovation from the mainly European audience, portrayed Berlin as the symbol of the Western alliance’s victory in the Cold War. Berlin, however, was also where 14 states, mostly from Europe, met in 1884-85 to set the rules for an orderly partition of Africa. 

Contrary to Rubio’s rosy picture of a beneficent age of empire, European rule was violent and brutal. Belgian King Leopold’s tyranny resulted in 10 million Congolese deaths by the end of the 19th century, while Germany committed the 20th century’s first genocide in Namibia. One million Algerians died in France’s brutal war to prevent Algerian independence; British forces killed an estimated 25,000 Kenyans during that country’s independence rebellion; and Italian soldiers used chemical weapons in a bid to exterminate Libya’s Bedouins. 

European countries have made deep cuts to aid

Adekeye Adebajo

Today, Europe’s efforts to gain dominance over Africa are more subtle, but no less harmful. African negotiators have accused the EU of using “divide and rule” tactics in recent trade talks, while the EU Commission has sought to force open African markets in sensitive sectors such as services, communications, government procurement, and intellectual property rights. Moreover, complaints that the bloc’s protectionist Common Agriculture Policy is flooding African markets with cheap products, and that its Critical Raw Materials Act is delaying the continent’s industrialization, are multiplying. 

In 2022, the EU announced a $150 billion Global Gateway Investment Package to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has helped build infrastructure across Africa, but the initiative has been less than effective. The bloc has also failed to back policies that would provide debt relief, lower borrowing costs, and support value-added industry in Africa — all of which are in the continent’s interests. No wonder that when the EU wanted African countries to support a resolution to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the UN in March 2022, only around half voted in favor. 

The second Trump administration has exposed Europe’s lack of confidence and moral fiber. Following Washington’s lead, European countries have made deep cuts to foreign aid, with total official development assistance projected to fall by up to 17 percent in 2025. Clearly, the EU is far from being the “ethical power” it often claims to be. Its conspicuous silence over genocide in Gaza and illegal US intervention in Iran and Venezuela will make it even more difficult to mobilize diplomatic support for Ukraine in the global south. 

Only Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has taken a moral stand against the violence that Trump has unleashed on the world, refusing the US use of Spanish military bases to attack Iran. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni absurdly described Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro as “legitimate” self-defense, while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has seemed to fade into the background. This abiding failure to speak up for international law and multilateralism, coupled with a continued unwillingness to treat Africa as an equal, will come back to haunt Europe. 

• Adekeye Adebajo is a professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Center for the Advancement of Scholarship.

Copyright: Project Syndicate