China swaggers into Europe's 'back
yard' By Julio Godoy
PARIS - The new African-Chinese economic
and diplomatic partnership, manifested in the pact
signed by China and 48 African countries in
Beijing this month, is unsettling European leaders
and analysts, who continue to see Africa as
Europe's back yard.
French analysts and
politicians have been calling attention to China's
growing presence in Africa for many months. In
January, Jean-Pierre Tuquoi, diplomatic
correspondent for the French daily newspaper Le
Monde, said the Chinese expansion in Africa is
"indisputable".
According to figures by the French
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, African-Chinese trade
has grown fivefold since 2000, and will reach the
record sum of US$50 billion in 2006. Similarly,
some 800 Chinese enterprises invested more than
$5.5 billion in 43 African countries, making China
Africa's third-largest economic partner, only
behind the United States and France.
Tuquoi pointed out that Chinese
construction workers can now be seen all over
Africa, from Angola, Gabon, Mauritania and Nigeria
in the west, through Sudan to Kenya, Rwanda,
Mozambique and Tanzania in the east. "They are
working in all sectors, from public construction
works to agriculture, oil and telecommunications,"
said Tuquoi.
Although the "amounts of
money involved are still modest", he said that
"Chinese trade and investment has never registered
such growth in any other region of the world".
These economic actions are likely to
increase, leading to a growing Chinese political
influence in Africa, as the African-Chinese summit
of Beijing documented, said Tuquoi. The summit,
which closed with the announcement of a new
Chinese economic cooperation package worth $5
billion over the next three years, has intensified
European concerns about China's expansion in
Africa.
"We Europeans should not leave the
commitment to Africa to the People's Republic of
China," German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a
conference on urban development in Berlin last
Saturday, less than a week after the
African-Chinese summit in Beijing.
"We
must take a stand in Africa," Merkel added,
underlining that one of the subjects Europe has to
consider in its policy toward Africa is "a fair
dealing with [African] natural resources". She
added that Europe's cooperation policy toward
Africa would be a "substantial subject" of
Germany's European Union presidency in the first
semester of 2007.
For Maritta Tkalec, a
commentator with the German daily newspaper
Berliner Zeitung, Europe's access to African
natural resources and economic interests should be
at the heart of any policy toward the continent.
"So far, Europe has ignored what its African
neighbor offers in large amounts: natural
resources, millions of consumption-eager people,
and cooperation," Tkalec wrote.
A point
Merkel made in her speech was that European policy
toward Africa should not be conceived based on
"charity arguments, as it has been in the past,
but on our stalwart interests".
But
instead of "charity arguments", Merkel could have
spoken of "paternalistic", or "neo-colonialist",
European behavior toward Africa.
French
leaders and analysts continue to describe Africa
as notre pre carre, meaning "our back
yard", more than 40 years after the last French
colony in Africa achieved political independence.
France organizes a French-African summit
every two years, in which heads of state and
government from practically all African countries
participate. It addresses development, the fight
against poverty, and strengthening democracy in
Africa. So far, these summits have been modestly
successful at best.
In addition, European
and North American leaders in general, and French
politicians in particular, tend to give their
African counterparts lessons on democracy, respect
for human rights, and governmental transparency -
even if such lessons are also exercises in Western
hypocrisy.
France, for instance, maintains
privileged relations with the corrupt regimes of
oil-rich Gabon, ruled since 1968 by Omar Bongo,
and the Congo Republic (Congo-Brazzaville). And
the United States has been wooing African
dictators such as Teodoro Obiang and Eduardo dos
Santos, who have ruled oil-rich, poverty-ridden
Equatorial Guinea and Angola, respectively, since
1979.
Chinese leaders prefer to circumvent
such sensitive subjects, and focus instead on
business, access to natural resources, and
international political cooperation, says Pierre
Haski, a diplomatic analyst at the French daily
newspaper Liberation.
"China has been
knotting firm ties with some of the most
controversial regimes in Africa, like Sudan and
Zimbabwe," Haski noted in a commentary on the
African-Chinese summit.
For Denis Tull, an
expert on African politics at the German Institute
for International and Security Affairs, "China, by
offering Africa aid without preconditions, has
presented an attractive alternative to conditional
Western aid, and gained valuable diplomatic
support to defend its international interests."
The African votes in international bodies,
such as the United Nations, could be decisive in
designing a new multipolar balance of power.
"China sees opportunity where Western leaders see
only terror, corruption, refugees, and decay of
state institutions," Tull wrote in a paper on
Chinese-African relations published in September.
"African leaders are happy that their
Chinese counterparts are not repeating the Western
sermons on human rights, good governance, and
transparency," he pointed out.
However, he
added, this "generally asymmetrical relationship,
differing little from previous African-Western
patterns, alongside the support of authoritarian
governments at the expense of human rights, makes
the economic consequences of increased Chinese
involvement in Africa mixed at best, while the
political consequences are bound to prove
deleterious".
But African observers see
China as an example. Said Adama Gaye, an author
from Togo: "So far, African democratic experience
has been reduced to changing one corrupt regime
for another, be it by electoral means or by civil
war. The question now is, would it not be better
if an autocratic regime would lead our countries
on the development path for a while?"
