General François Gérard Marie Lecointre, the now retired French Army
Chief of Defence Staff. Eurafrica image by Francisca Roseiro.
In an interview
uploaded onto the YouTube channel of Le
Figaro in April 2024, General François Lecointre, the former Chief of
Defence Staff of France, made controversial remarks which were interpreted by
many as meaning that he desired the recolonisation of Africa. Lecointre
appeared to suggest that France needed to invade and militarily reconquer its
old colonial territories including those from which France has recently been
unceremoniously ejected. In doing so, he was in fact alluding to a long-held
geopolitical concept known as “Eurafrica.” This idea, which has found
expression in Herman Sorgel’s “Atlantropa” and in Count Richard
Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-Europa Movement, is one in which the destinies of the
continents of Europe and Africa have been inextricably interwoven. In earlier
years, Eurafrica, which was developed during the age of the colonisation of the
African continent by European powers, was explicitly paternalistic and
exploitative in its exposition. But even in more recent times, its theoretical
enunciations through terms such as “partnership” do not hide its extractivist
raison d'etre: That Europe requires untrammelled access to Africa’s mineral
resources. This has been the demonstrable modus operandi of Eurafrica’s
institutionalised application: Via France-Afrique,
the device through which France managed its shadow empire in post-independence
Francophone Africa, and also through the workings of the European Union. For
unknown to many Eurafrica lay at the very heart of the creation of the European
Economic project in the 1950s. Indeed, the Eurafrica-based relationship between
the EU and African states persists to this day, a state of affairs which from
the European perspective is threatened by resource-starved China’s expanding
presence on the African continent.
During his
interview General Lecointre said the following:
We must return and help these African
countries. Rebuilding state structures, restoring administrations, and
fostering development are all crucial steps.
Many
interpreted the word “return” as a direct reference to the recent expulsions of
the French military from the Sahelian states of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso,
implying that a resurrection of French power could only be achieved in the
foreseeable future by military force. Further, his use of the word “help,”
despite its link to fostering development did not strike critics as being
predicated on philanthropic motives. Instead, his language, given a
paternalistic import, was suggestive of the sort which has been used in the
context of an enduring concept which fuses the destinies of Europe and Africa
in a political and economic union.
The original
concept of Eurafrica was a political project through which African colonies
would be merged prior to the process of European integration. The resultant
entity would serve as a counterweight to competing continental blocs in the
Americas and Asia. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, the man who created and led the
Pan-European Movement, believed European technical advancement and "high
culture" would merge with the "primitive” vitalism of Africa to
create a geopolitical power bloc. Coudenhove-Kalergi wrote that “Africa has
become our closest neighbour and its destiny a part of our own destiny.” He
also argued that “the future of Africa depends on what Europe makes of it.” It
is therefore not difficult to see Lecointre’s choice of words as forming a
continuum of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s approach of the twinning of destinies in an
enterprise combining a latter day insistence on a sphere of influence with
a modern Mission civilisatrice.
However, what
Lecointre did not specifically address was the underlying motivation for
returning to Africa, which of course is about France regaining and maintaining
access to a continent which is abundant in crucial raw materials. It is
important therefore to explain France’s two-tier application of Eurafrica as a
national endeavour and as part of a supra-national enterprise. This refers
respectively to France’s relations with its former colonies through France-Afrique, as well as the
relationship between the European Union and Africa. In the post war years,
Eurafrica was a central tenet of France’s foreign policy strategy aimed at
reconciling French efforts in integrating with Europe while maintaining a hold
on its African empire. This strategy was clear to one American analyst who
stated in the early 1950s that France envisioned an economic link between
Europe and Africa “with Paris in control.”
France-Afrique, an expression coined by Felix Houphouet-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire in
1955, formed the basis through which France’s extraction model was perfected.
The Communaute Francaise ensured that
France maintained access to a range of natural resources produced by its former
colonies including oil, bauxite, tin and uranium. France was able to maintain
control of what was a shadow empire in the areas of economics, security and
culture. These would be strengthened over the decades through various formal
and informal agreements. A key feature of the economic stranglehold France had
over most of Africa’s Francophone states was through monetary union. The
creation of two sets of currencies, the Communauté
Financière Africaine in West Africa and the Coopération Financière en Afrique centrale in Central Africa, each
set of which France is responsible for printing, provided a formidable device
for controlling a collection of satrapies.
The CFA has
been referred to as a “colonial currency” not only because of the restrictive
terms under which it operates, but also because of its effect of stultifying
the economic development of participant nations. For instance, the pegging of
the currencies to the French Franc in yesteryears and today to the Euro is for
African states a debilitating arrangement given the strength of both Franc and
Euro. Right from the outset of the creation of CFA in 1945, its overvaluation
in French colonies meant that while African countries had the purchasing power
to buy products from metropolitan France, they were restricted in their ability
to export. But they were for the
most part purchasing products processed from the raw materials they had sold. France
at the same time was granted special access to vital raw materials from its
colonies in regard to which it had a right of first offer. This
arrangement was extremely helpful in reviving the French economy which had been
devastated during the Second World War. French control of CFA would also enable
it to access raw materials in Africa in its own currency, in the process
bypassing the US dollar which had become the de facto world reserve currency.
The CFA system
is also an affront to the sovereignty of African subscriber states who do not
participate in the process through which monetary policies are decided. The
free transferability of the regional currencies was not part of an equal
bargain since each nation was for many decades obliged to deposit at least 50
per cent of their foreign exchange reserves with the French treasury, a rule which
has been abrogated in West Africa but still applies to the Central African CFA
zone. Free transferability also negatively impacts on African nations tied to
the monetary system because French individuals and companies who invest in these
countries can just as easily divest and repatriate their profits.
Although
President Franklin Roosevelt was strident in his insistence that the European
powers break up their empires after the end of the Second World War, his
successors did not oppose the neocolonial features of France-Afrique because it served as a bulwark against the spread of
communism in the Cold War era. France was careful to deploy French military
forces in each of the countries and it employed economic leverage against
recalcitrant political leaders.
The man who
“enforced” French hegemony among its former colonies was Jacques Foccart. Known as
President Charles de Gaulle’s Monsieur
Afrique, Foccart was the co-founder of Service d'Action Civique (SAC), a
Gaullist militia that specialised in undertaking covert operations in
Francophone Africa. He was also influential in the conduct of clandestine
operations undertaken by the French foreign intelligence service, once
admitting that the French secret service was responsible for assassinating
Felix-Roland Moumie, the Cameroonian Marxist leader in Geneva, while the French
state was orchestrating a “dirty war” in that country.
Foccart
oversaw “Operation Persil” after
President Sekou Toure of Guinea
refused to join Communaute Francaise,
famously declaring that Guineans would prefer “freedom in poverty to riches in
slavery.” Toure proceeded to create a central bank and a new currency. In
retaliation, France withdrew its civil servants and technical staff during
which equipment was destroyed. Then Foccart ordered the SDECE (Service de
documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage) to sabotage the Guinean
economy by covertly flooding the country with fake currency. Operation Persil
ultimately failed.
In July 1973,
President Francois Tombalbaye of Chad led a demonstration in the capital city
Fort-Lamy (later N'DJamena in protest against what he alleged to be French
interference in the internal affairs of his country. Foccart was reported to
have told friends that he intended to "save" Chad and predicted that
Tombalbaye's government would not survive beyond December 1973. He was
assassinated in 1975 during a coup d’etat. But France-Afrique, later pejoratively spelt as Franceafrique, because of its inherent neocolonial basis, weakened
over the course of time because of France’s growing commitment to the European
Economic project, and the deaths of key figures such as Foccart.
The key tenets
of Eurafrica nonetheless survived in France’s relationship with most of its
former colonies and persists in the European Union’s relationship with the
African continent. For as the Swedish professors Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson
explained in their book Eurafrica: the
Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism, the foundation of
the original European community of states which evolved into the European
Union, was predicated on the principles theorised by Coudenhove-Kalergi. Key to
this was the extractivist relations between a group of integrated European
nations and the African continent. The rationale for European integration was,
Coudenhove-Kalergi effectively argued, to exploit Africa as efficiently as
possible. “Africa,” he said, “could provide Europe with raw materials for its
industry, nutrition for its population, land for its overpopulation, labour for
its unemployed, and markets for its products.” The unity of Europe as a
precondition to the effective exploitation of the African continent was
explicitly articulated by French Prime Minister Guy Mollet when he met with US
President Dwight Eisenhower in February 1952. Mollet stated that he wanted
Africa to be integrated into the European project through French and German
capital, Italian labour, American and German machinery and French
administrative expertise.
Both academics
have thus challenged what they refer to as the Immaculate Conception narrative
of the EU’s founding. This holds that tired of cyclical wars often centred on
the rivalry between France and Germany, a group of Western European states
grouped together to form an economic association of states which would “unite
for peace, freedom and democracy.”
But there were
clues that the creation first of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)
in 1951, and then of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European
Atomic Energy Commission (EURATOM) in 1957 were not simply a peace project. For
instance, at the time of the EEC’s establishment in 1957, a headline in the
French newspaper Le Monde proclaimed
the development to be a “First step towards Eurafrica”.
There were many
other similarly worded headlines. One, a short dispatch from Rome by a
correspondent for the International News Service (INS) which was published in The Rockland County Journal News on
March 26th, 1957, reflected Kalergi’s twin idea of a union with Africa being
predicated on mineral resource exploitation and the formation of a geopolitical
bloc able to hold its own against rival continental power blocs. Titled
“Signing of Unity Treaties Seen Step Toward Eurafrica”, the writer reflected
the former by stating “...the pacts contain the seeds of an even bigger dream,
a ‘Eur-Africa’ pooling of European and African marketing and political
schemes”, and the latter which noted that “one aim of the two pacts is to raise
the level of manufacturing methods in all of the nations in all so that ‘Little
Europe’ and its 160,000,000 population will be able to compete on equal terms
with the United States and Russia.”
As Jean-Michel
de Lattre wrote in Politique etrangere
in 1955: “It is in Africa that Europe will be made”.
France and its
vast colonial empire in Africa would be central to this. In an article written
5 years earlier in the May 16th edition of the Edmonton Journal, which was titled “French Idea Of Eurafrica”,
George W. Herald expounded on the meaning of Eurafrica. It meant, he wrote,
“that the French would like to link colonial Africa to the forthcoming
Federation of Europe.” And given that France controlled most of these colonies,
Herald continued, “If that area and a federated Europe could be welded into one
supra-national community, they say, unprecedented new vistas would be opened to
future generations.”
He stressed
that geological experts had asserted that the “mineral wealth buried south and
west of the Sahara is virtually inexhaustible.” These he informed his readers
included gold, diamonds, uranium, copper, lead, zinc, mercury, iron ore,
phosphate and sulphur. It was also clear that at this stage France was not at
all keen to pursue a course of decolonisation and was actively opposing independence
movements in Tunisia and Morocco. It also did not appear to Herald to be
enthusiastic about embarking on what he termed a “share-the-wealth” programme
with other European states. The reluctance to embark on decolonisation and the
unwillingness to give up the primacy of French access to the mineral wealth of
her African colonies of course went against the key tenets of Eurafrica
established by Coudenhove-Kalergi including that which insisted that those
European states such as Germany which had been dispossessed of its African
colonies would be granted access to African resources in order to solidify the
unity of a future European Union. France of course relented by granting its
colonies independence under the stringent condition of joining the Communaute Francaise.
In an era of
decolonisation, the purveyors of Eurafrica needed to portray the concept as
being one which was far removed from the naked exploitation of Africa as had
been the motive behind the division of the continent at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885.
The members of the Common Market, as the EEC was often referred, were quite
conscious of the colonial backdrop to their formation and were at pains to
explain that the relationship with Africa was not the story of a one way street
of exploitation which socialist and communist ideologues were often keen to
assert. Thus, in July 1962 it was announced in Brussels that associated African
states would receive $1,000 million in development aid which would double the
amount that they had received since its inception in 1957. The overall package
which included guarantees related to price stabilisation for African raw
materials and unrestricted, tariff-free access for African products to the
Common Market one newspaper reported had “great political significance in
counteracting communist propaganda that (the Common Market) is an instrument of
neocolonialism.”
While as
mentioned earlier, the burdens associated with increased integration in the
European project weakened France-Afrique,
the European Community, as it then was styled, nonetheless continued to plot an
economic path that bound it to Africa and also to other nations which today are
referred to as the “Global South” in preference to the previous designation of
“Third World”.
First, was the Yaoundé
Convention of 1963, which was signed between the EEC and the Associated African
States and Madagascar. A second Yaoundé Convention was signed in 1969 which
included Mauritius, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Prior to this in 1966, the
military government of Nigeria signed an agreement
with the EEC which granted it the status of an Associate Member State. And
building up on this the Lome Conventions of 1975 and 1979 were signed with the
ACP Group consisting of African, Caribbean and Pacific states.
All these
agreements reflected the extractivist model, with the Lome Convention aiming to
transform the economies of the African and other states into
“quasi-industrialised” ones. Although the combined agreements signed in Yaoundé
and Lome were essentially dismantled following American claims that the
provisions were incompatible with those of the World Trade Organisation (WTO),
the EU, Hansen and Jonsson remind, continues to aggressively exploit minerals
on the African continent including the oilfields of Libya, the goldmines of
Ghana, and the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of Africa’s most
minerally endowed countries.
The idea of
Eurafrica is being brought back to public consciousness because of the rise of
China as an economic power and an increasingly multipolar world. Although
European trade and investment far outstrips that of China in Africa, the EU has
been rattled by the challenges posed to its access to African raw materials by
raw material-hungry China’s increasing presence on the continent. This has been
magnified by the increased animus between resource-rich Russia and the EU which
has imposed an extraordinary range of sanctions on the country over its
conflict with Ukraine.
The European
Commission’s Raw Materials Initiative launched in 2011 was a response to what
is perceived as the threat posed by China, a country on which it was heavily
dependent on rare earth minerals, lithium and magnesium. The idea behind this
is to create a list every three years of designated Critical Raw Materials
(CRMs) which are utilised in energy transition and digital technologies. This
enables an assessment to be made of those which are at risk of short supply or
of disruption in the supply chain. The European Critical Raw Materials Act came
into force in May 2024. The Act acknowledges that the EU "will never be
self-sufficient in supplying such raw materials and will continue to rely on
imports for a majority of its consumption.”
Given the drift
of geopolitical currents, it has been clear for some time to many political and
economic analysts that the historical criticality of the EU’s relationship with
Africa needed to be re-emphasised. This was reflected in the headline of an article
in The Economist in September 2018
which was titled “The rebirth of Eurafrica” (“Why Europe should focus on its growing interdependence
with Africa” in its online edition). 2018 also saw the
launching of the Africa-Europe Alliance for Sustainable Development and Jobs
and in the following year, the European Commission stressed that Africa was the
EU’s global priority. Under the new president, Ursula von der Leyen, a policy
paper titled “Comprehensive Strategy with Africa” was presented. Using words
which resonated with past enunciations of Eurafrica, Josep Borrell, the High
Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said “A part of Europe’s
future is at stake in Africa. To face our modern challenges, we need a strong
Africa, and Africa needs a strong Europe.”
Yet, despite
these positively expressed sentiments, including former German Chancellor
Angela Merkel’s pledged commitment to launching “a Marshall Plan for Africa,”
the aura of an exploitative motive remains. For example, in 2021 when speaking
of the need for the EU to become “a more active global player” in formulating a
strategy to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), von der Leyen remarked that “It
doesn’t make sense for the EU to build that perfect road between a
Chinese-financed copper mine and a Chinese-financed harbour.”
Her words, Peo
Hansen, argues encapsulate the Eurafrican mentality and expose that “agency,
sovereignty and autonomy are alien to the EU concept of Africa.” It is such
attitudes particularly those predicated on the exploitative mechanism of Franceafrique which have caused the
military regimes in Sahelian West Africa to boot out the French. It is also the
reason many African states have been turning to China and Russia, both
presently building BRICS as an alternative to the EU and other Western
institutions which they assert are not respectful to the specific needs and
interests of Africans.
Eurafrica in
both its theory and application is the antithesis of the spirit of multipolarity in which, in
contrast to the hegemonic and neocolonial models of the EU and Bretton Woods
institutions, is predicated on an equal partnership and respect for national
sovereignty.
It is also
worth noting that the EU has often not lived up to its concept as a peace
project. For while the EU has succeeded in keeping the peace as far as wars
among its member states are concerned, it chose to be silent and inert while
the Algerian war raged. Oil and gas rich Algeria was at the time of the
uprising of the Front de libération nationale (FLN) considered to be part of
Metropolitan France, but no voices were raised in Brussels over the widespread
atrocities including massacres and torture committed by the French armed
forces. What is more, French state-sponsored terrorism was brought to European
soil by “La Main Rouge” (The Red
Hand), a terror group which was actually a covert arm of the French state.
Under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Red Hand
assassinated several key Algerian figures in the FLN, as well as West German
arms dealers suspected of supplying weapons and munitions to the FLN.
The EU has also
served to give cover to the illegal military adventures embarked upon by NATO,
a military organisation to which most of its member states belong. This has
included the destruction of the Libyan state which was led by Colonel Muammar
Gaddafi. The voices of independent spirited political leaders such as the
Austrian Bruno Kreisky and the German Willy Brandt, both of whom Peo Hansen
noted “spoke in the name of Europe,” are virtually non-existent.
This
clarification of the colonial origins of the EU and its fundamentally
extractivist relationship with the African continent needs to be correctly
understood by Africa’s political leaders and the policymakers who have
uniformly pursued the resource rental model as the default basis of running
their economies. Contentment with an arrangement in which African states
possess no ambition further than selling their minerals and raw materials to
developed countries and supra-national entities such as the EU only serve to
relegate them to the permanent state of unequal partners. It not only places
limits on their ability to exercise economic statecraft, but it also sets a
perpetual barrier on maximising national prosperity. There cannot be a future
in leasing mining rights to their resources when they would be infinitely
better off by extracting their resources and developing such resources into
products that can then be sold on the world market under a single currency
regime.
Eurafrica would
be a much sounder concept if it were shorn of its neocolonial trappings. But
for Africa and Europe to operate in genuine equal partnership, much of the onus
in achieving this state of affairs will be on Africans who must embark on a
quest to transform their consumer orientated, resource-based economies into
productive ones by developing for themselves industrial base economies.
© Adeyinka
Makinde (2024).
Adeyinka
Makinde is a writer based in London, England. He has an interest in both
history and geopolitics.
A note:
The origins of the EU are both fascinating and
multifaceted. But the official narrative of it being guided to birth by the
efforts of Robert Shuman whose plan was inspired by the ideas of Jean Monnet is
incomplete. The bringing to fruition of the dream of a federated Europe owed a
great deal to the covert efforts of the United States through the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its precursor the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS) both of which funded the post war European Movement. This has been backed
up by scholarly research. The United States believed that a united
Europe would serve as a bulwark to the spread of communism and provide a means
for rehabilitating the successor state to Nazi Germany. It was envisaged as a
means through which the United States could control Europe in an age of US
global domination.
However, despite its foundational association
with the idea of Eurafrica, the claim that it was purposefully set up to
engineer the genocide of white Europe is one without any basis in fact. While
Coudenhove-Kalergi, himself of mixed European and Japanese descent, predicted
the development of a Eurasian-Negroid race with an appearance similar to that
of the Ancient Egyptians, this was not an integral component of his specific
project to unite Europe in a mission to exploit Africa. That Eurafrica was not
a concept inexorably attached to racial interbreeding is clear from the fact
that the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley incorporated his own vision of
Eurafrica as part of his “Third Position.” At its inception, the Common Market
acted with stealth and decisiveness in ensuring that Muslim Arab Algerians, as
mentioned earlier then citizens of a country considered as Metropolitan France,
did not have the same rights as other citizens in the European Economic
Community.
Select sources.
Books:
Hansen, Peo and
Jonsson, Stefan. Eurafrica: the Untold
History of European Integration and Colonialism. Bloomsbury, 2014.
Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard N. Pan-Europe. Knopf, 1926.
Journal Articles:
Thorpe,
Benjamin J. “Eurafrica: A Pan-European Vehicle for Central European
Colonialism (1923–1939,” European Review, Cambridge University Press, Volume 26, Issue 3,
June 2018.
Aldrich,
Richard. “OSS, CIA and European Unity: The American Committee on
United Europe, 1948-60,” Diplomacy
& Statecraft, Frank Cass, Volume 8, Number 1, March 1997.
De Lattre,
Jean-Michel. “Les grands ensembles Africains,” Politique etrangere, Volume 20, Number 5, 1955.
News Magazine:
“The new scramble for Africa,” The Economist, March 7th,
2019.
“The rebirth of Eurafrica” (Online title: “Why Europe should focus on its relationship with Africa”), The Economist, September
22nd, 2018.
Newspaper Articles:
Fleming, Sam
and Khan, Mehreen. “EU proposes new infrastructure programme to rival China,” The Financial Times,
September 15th, 2021.
“Eurafrica
Concept Gets Another Boost,” National
Post, July 28th, 1962.
International
News Service. “Signing of Unity Treaties Seen Step Toward Eurafrica,” The Rockland County Journal News, March
26th, 1957.
“Nations Seek
Strength in Economic Unions: Will Dream of ‘Eurafrica’ Come True?” Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, March 24th,
1957.
Herald, George
W. “French Idea Of ‘Eurafrica’,” Edmonton
Journal, May 16th, 1952.
Pearson, Drew.
“Mollet Emphasizes Eur-Africa,” The News
Herald, February 26th, 1952.
Video:
“Crazy
or Laughable? Why The EU (Still) Thinks It Rules The World | Professor Peo
Hansen,” Neutrality
Studies YouTube Channel, uploaded April 21st, 2024.
“Sahel,
Russie, Ukraine... Le Général François Lecointre se confie,” Le Figaro YouTube Channel,
uploaded April 14th, 2024.
“Nigeria Becomes An Associate Member State Of The EEC |
Brigadier Ogundipe Signs Deal | July 1966,” Adeyinka Makinde YouTube Channel,
uploaded July 2nd, 2023.
“Eurafrica:
The Colonial Origins of the European Union,” Institute of European Studies, UC Berkeley
YouTube Channel, uploaded March 19th, 2021.
Podcasts:
EURO—VISION / “📢 Colonial
Currencies & Other Investment Stratagems — a conversation with Ndongo Samba
Sylla,” Episode 3, April 21st, 2021.
. Listen also
at Soundcloud.
. Read Pdf transcript.
EURO—VISION / “📢
EURAFRICA — a conversation with Stefan Jonsson and Peo
Hansen,” Episode 2, April 6th, 2021.
. Listen also
at Soundcloud.
. Read Pdf transcript.
EURO—VISION / “📢
The Curse of Berlin – a conversation with Adekeye Adebajo,” Episode 1, April 1st, 2021.
. Listen also
at Soundcloud.
. Read Pdf transcript.
Blogs:
Hansen. Peo. “The colonial origins of European integration,” European Politics and Policy
Blog, London School of Economics, October 31st, 2023.
Makinde,
Adeyinka. “From Hegemony to Multipolarity: How Post-Cold War U.S.
Foreign Policy Towards Russia is Creating a Modern Eurasia,” Adeyinka Makinde, Writer Blog,
March 23rd, 2023.
Makinde,
Adeyinka. “Rethinking the Legacy of Ahmed Sekou Toure of Guinea,” Adeyinka Makinde, Writer Blog,
September 10th, 2022.
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