Panel 82: The European Union in Africa: One Actor, Many Actors or No Actor?

This panel addresses to what extent and under what circumstances the EU should be seen as a unified actor in its relations with Africa. Whereas the EU often speaks with one voice in trade policy, EU policies toward the outside world tend to be more ambiguous and pluralistic in other policy areas, such as development cooperation and security policy. Many policymakers, especially from the European Commission, emphasize that the making of the EU as an unified global actor calls for a strengthening of the EU’s central institutions, instruments, and policies, where the Commission or the Council must, so the argument goes, play a leading role (Bretherton and Vogler 2006). Such attempts at centralization and communitarization are contested, however, and there is a real need to analyze the tensions and paradoxes between the central EU institutions and those of the individual EU member states. Sometimes the EU’s external policies are supranational and common, whereas in other areas cases they are either “shared” between EU institutions and EU member states or based on national and intergovernmental policies. In other cases still, there appears to be little in the way of articulated EU policy, and the member states pursue their own national policies outside of the EU framework. Thus, there are complex interrelationships between the EU’s external relations and those of the member states, and this panel explores the fact that this “coordination game” varies across and between different policy areas — hence the focus on trade, aid and security policies.