The debate on NPE (Normative Power Europe) has flourished for more than a decade. NPE has shaped Africa-EU relations considerably, especially since the founding of the AU (African Union). Yet while the EU aspires to be a post-imperial, normative power, this postcolonial critique suggests NPE is a neo-Kantian, Eurocentric discourse that reinvigorates an outdated European moral paternalism. The article explores the role of NPE in Africa-EU relations through a Foucauldian conceptualization of knowledge in EU foreign policy, and insists particularly on how pan-African regionalization and NPE led to unwarranted optimism about deploying European norms in Africa. To the contrary, a decolonial perspective reveals that AU-EU inter-regional structural and organizational convergence enchains only frail normative convergence, which will diminish as the pan-African project unfolds further.
Security partnerships between unequal partners walk a fine line between mutually beneficial cooperation and coercion. This article theorizes resource provision in security partnerships in which a funder substantively supports a recipient organization. Specifically, I develop an argument concerning the effect of principal–agent interactions in security partnerships on the recipient’s agency through mechanisms of agenda-setting and capacity-building. The European Union’s (EU) peace and security partnership with the African Union (AU) illustrates the contentious politics of resource mobilization in security partnerships, and how these politics affect the secretariat of the recipient organization. The article arrives at the rather optimistic conclusion that the EU is a generous partner with an explicit goal of cooperative engagement. Furthermore, opportunities for coercion are minimized by the EU’s internal bureaucratic obstacles, the AU’s strategic sequencing of the resource mobilization process, and the overarching post-coloniality of the partnership. However, occasional episodes of coercive EU behaviour have led to considerable tensions in the partnership. These findings add important contrast to postcolonial critiques of AU funding: the AU Commission exercises considerable organizational agency, which relegates the EU – despite being a large payer – to the role of a small player, particularly when it comes to directly influencing the AU.
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