April 2004
Towards a solidarity agenda
An international experts' meeting was held on "Globalisation
and Africa" at the European Parliament, Brussels from April
15th -17th, 2004. The European United
Left Group (GUE/NGL), [See Report] in collaboration with a Netherlands-based
Convening Committee, sponsored this meeting at which African
experts presented an analysis of the African reality under globalization.
The analytical approach presented at this meeting differed from
the traditional statistical approach that usually presents a
desperate picture of Africa’s poverty and marginalization.
Africa’s reality was analysed instead in the context of
global forces.
The African and European participants agreed to take forward
the urgent issues formulated in the second part of this report:
“The immediate challenges for African-European relations”.
A. Our Collective Understanding of
Globalization
Our shared understanding of globalisation is that it is a process
of social, economic and political change driven by the demands
of corporate capital. The singular purpose of capital, concentrated
in a few global corporations, is to protect or expand the share
of profit. This is constantly diminished not only by competition
between factors of production, but also between corporations
for the share of total profits. To survive and to thrive over
competitors, corporations must constantly innovate to drive
down costs and increase economies of scale. Going global by
expanding into new markets and exploring low cost centres for
investments are imperative for their security. This process
at one level requires forced liberalization of markets for goods,
services and investments in third-party countries and at another
level, strong mercantilist policies to protect technology and
markets in their home countries.
For this globalization of the profit drive to sustain itself:
The process has to be essentially
hegemonic. A hegemon is required to enforce security, ensure
safe passage and movement of assets, protect the interest of
the corporation wherever it may be and resolve conflicts in
their favour. This hegemon becomes the “agency for the
good of the world”. Besides hegemonic political power there
is also a need for a hegemonic ideology presented in belligerent
choiceless terms and a hegemonic culture that seeks to supplant
indigenous specificities. In
today’s globalization, the Euro—American alliance
stands out clearly as the latter day hegemons and neoliberalism
the choiceless ideology.
- Requires inter-locking instruments
of control. These mechanisms must aim at controlling markets
for all potential areas of profit: goods, services, technology
and capital (investments). They must also be enforceable at
multiple levels through lock-in mechanisms such as bilateral
and multilateral enforceable agreements and the use of carrot
and stick policies, e.g. the use of aid and debt relief to
leverage greater market access for goods, services and investment
protection. The WTO and the proposed Economic Partnership
Agreements between ACP countries and the EU (EPAs) stand out
as the key inter-locking mechanisms confronting Africa and
the IFIs and the international aid system in general, the
instruments applying carrot and stick to promote unilateral
liberalisation of trade and investment regimes. These processes
result in the crowding out of policy choices available to
nations and require a weak and socially irresponsible state
to thrive.
- Technology is crucial but not
sufficient. Technology as the outcome of innovation is essential
to open up new forms of profit, to move goods, services, capital
and profit around and to drive down costs. But technology
by itself cannot create the “global”. It requires
the hegemon to impart political unity and enforce monopoly control
over the benefits of technology.
- The process is inherently unequal
and produces unequal benefits. As the process is necessarily
led by the large companies and hegemonic interests, large
parts of the world, and certain social groups within them,
are by design socially excluded or disadvantaged. The process
channels capital to already relatively capital rich countries
and skilled labour to relatively skill-intensive countries.
This process leads to increasing income divergence within
countries and between countries. Within countries divergences
are accentuated and in turn accentuate social cleavages in
terms of gender, ethno-regional, class and other differences.
In the context of weak and socially irresponsible states left
by the process, these social cleavages translate into desperate
poverty for some and in some cases violent conflict.
We agree that this process produces unjust social outcomes
B. Immediate Challenges for Africa-Europe
relations
Among the many issues that this process imposes on Africa,
the following issues are urgent.
1. Address
the unjust trading and investment system imposed on the continent
in particular the EPA process.
The victory of Cancun is a victory of collective resistance
of African governments and their civil society organisations;
along side their counterparts in all periphery countries and
in solidarity with progressive minded organisations and persons
within the hegemons. Cancun has provided respite, not a total
victory.
Unfortunately, Africa is facing an even more destructive force,
in the form of the EPA than the WTO presented. The EPA is particularly
dangerous to the African people for the following reasons:
- A free
trade area project for the benefit of corporate Europe is
presented as a “partnership”.
- It is
1884 all over again – a new balkanisation of Africa.
The EPA seeks to destroy tentative efforts to build an effective
African market for African peoples through the aspirations
of the African unions and the sub-regional integration arrangements,
all young and fledgling initiatives.
- The
EPA takes the liberation agenda several leaps forward by demanding
zero tariffs far beyond the WTO agenda of progressive tariff
reduction. This demand carries severe consequences for producers
and for revenue essential to the building of a social state.
It also seeks to steamroll especially the Singapore issues,
which have been rejected as part of the WTO agenda by the
ACP, and pushes for rapid liberalization of services that
are not obligatory under Cotonou and WTO.
- The
proposed non-execution clause seeks to take cross-conditionality
beyond anything known before, by seeking to punish all members
of a region through withholding aid to all if one member violates
the trade agreement. This form of peer pressure to conform
and its boldness underscores the degree of loss of independence
that Africa finds itself in after only 40 years of post-colonialism.
- EPAs
throw the entire burden of adjustment on Africa.
In view of the seriousness of this development, it is urgent
to confront this new development with vigour. In this respect,
we commit ourselves to working to:
·
Promote the principle of non-reciprocity in international trade
arrangements as valid and necessary for a socially just trading
system and a fair world.
·
Mobilise populations and political institutions in Europe to
put on hold the EPA process until Africa builds its institutions
to a level that they can effectively negotiate, and that the
EU stops undermining the regionalization effort in Africa. The
EU-based partners commit to taking lead on this in Europe.
·
Build consciousness among African populations and their political
institutions to bring pressure to bear on African leaders to
suspend further progress in the EPA process. The African partners
commit to taking leadership in this area.
·
To mobilise like-minded governments and civil society organisations
all over the world to support African-EU solidarity in the struggle
to suspend the EPA process.
·
To continue to work in solidarity at the WTO and other forums
to restrain liberalization and promote a socially just world.
·
Support the right of African nations to develop their domestic
and regional markets.
- Addressing the debt-aid-recessionary
trap. Africa’s economic
history has been one dominated by the extraction, exportation
and retention of natural resources abroad. Efforts made by
post-colonial nationalist leaders to build productive capacity
were swiftly swept aside by the SAPs that followed the fiscal
crisis of the late 1970s. Although designed ostensibly to
enable the economies grow out of debt, this period instead
witnessed relative stagnation. Twenty years or so later, the
continent is left in a vicious cycle of expanding external
and domestic debt, production crisis and dependency on external
credit. The increasing aid dependence further exacerbates
the forces of external control leading to further crisis of
the social state, decline in its ability to stand up to alternatives
and exacerbating the crisis of legitimacy. This cycle has
to be broken for Africa to advance.
To break this cycle, we commit ourselves to work in
solidarity in our respective political arenas and collectively
in the global arena to:
·
Challenge the governments of Europe and America to prevail
on the creditor institutions to cancel all debts.
·
Mobilise African peoples to strengthen the resolve of their
governments to take a defiant position against further debt
servicing in the interest of the protection of the lives of
their people.
·
Fight for restoration of the social state in Africa in contrast
to the current “governance” language, which seeks
to make African states compliant instruments of the liberalisation
process.
·
Fighting for the right of African countries to alternative
forms of economics and social restructuring to the model imposed
by the Bretton Woods Institutions and the international aid
system.
3. Address the challenges of trade,
aid, debt, and investment and technology access in an integrated
and inter-connected fashion. We observed earlier how trade, debt, aid and investment deregulation are used
as cross-conditioning instruments to structure African and developing
country economies in the interest of corporations. We have also
noted the importance of breaking the aid-debt-recession trap
in order for Africa to have a chance of building a productive
economy and a social state. In this regard, we commit to:
·
Approaching our respective focus in these areas in an integrated
manner.
·
Support each other’s work whether the focus is trade,
debt or investment, in order to build a mutually re-enforcing
power to tackle the multiple interests and channels employed
by corporations.
·
We commit to sharing information and remaining in close contact.
We call for urgent action, and sustained
and greater commitment to build a fair and equitable international
cooperation.
