Revisiting Regionalism and the Contemporary World Order

Front matter

Elise Féron Jyrki Kakonen Gabriel Rached (eds.)

Revisiting Regionalism and the Contemporary World Order

Perspectives from the BRICS and beyond

Contents

Notes On Contributors vecsie e a e Eae e a S 7 Listof abbreviations asnan A desl ee eee ees 13 Acknowledgement oncesi iiinn irii 19

Élise Féron and Jyrki Käkönen

1. Africa and World War II: The emergence of an imposed TEQIOMALZALON sone Roy aae aea a ra ea Ea Pe ERES R E 35

Chapter 1 Africa and World War II: The emergence of an imposed regionalization Tuomo Melasuo

TAPRI, Tampere Peace Research Institute, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

This contribution is an attempt to understand the importance as well as the role of regions and of region formation in Africa after World War II. Of course, this “regional dimension” has existed since time immemorial. In modern African history, it has been there since the beginning of European colonialism, especially since the nineteenth century. It was a part of colonial conquest in different ways — a tool of colonial expansion and a tool of administration and governance. This regional dimension has occurred in political, economic, cultural, social, and military-security domains. In a more significant manner, there are different phases in the recent African past when this regional dimension has taken different forms in the decades from the end of World War IL.

After the War, there has been a succession of phases in which, first, this regional dimension aimed to prevent decolonization, and second, it tried to protect all the possible privileges of the former colonial master. After the independence of the African countries, the regional dimension approach was applied within development politics. Here also the role of the former colonial master has often been overwhelming. This development approach is still continuing today in many ways. The last dimension concerns military-security issues, which is also the most recent approach of this regional dimension, especially in the Sahel. These security issues are coming back for several reasons and in different parts of Africa.

Today’s evolution contains many particularities and even serious problems. The “international community” is using the regional approach to impose its more or less questionable approaches to African societies and countries as a condition sine qua non of their security-development cooperation. Different operations in the Sahel show us the gravity of this issue.

The creation of the AfCFTA, the African Continental Free Trade Area is a sign that we can still believe in the future.

Keywords: Africa, colonial, decolonization, region formation, regional dimension, imposed regionalization, development politics, security issue

Most of the African continent, especially south of the Sahara, was subjected to European colonialism mainly in the second half of the nineteenth or in the beginning of the twentieth century. At the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, the main European colonial powers had decided the guiding principles on how colonial conquests should be organized. This “Scramble for Africa,” the dividing of the continent in the proposed zones of influence, was, in that epoch, already the pattern for the regional internal organization of the colonial empires. The division of these European empires or the demarcation of their internal boundaries completely disregarded the African realities. (Rodney 1974; Rosenberg 2019)

The “Scramble for Africa” has an important impact even today. Within the process of decolonization, when the Organization of African Unity (OAU) was created, one of the most important legal and political principles concerned respect of the borders inherited from the colonial empires. Politically, any other principle would have been unwise at the time. (Rodney 1974). As already indicated, the principal European colonial powers accomplished their main and final colonial penetration into Africa and African societies at the end of the nineteenth and in the beginning of the twentieth century. By doing so, they also created the embryos of the local and regional structures of their political rule and their colonial administration. In fact, the creation of regions was a strategic option for the colonial powers which they applied in order to organize their administration and domination.

This creation of regions has had long-term impacts far beyond decolonization and the independence of the former colonies reaching up until today. The UK with its Brexit problems and France with its military intervention, Operation Barkhane, in the Sahel are examples of this “imposed regionalization” in 2019 (Le Cam 2019; Tilouine and Zerrouky 2019). The more or less “imposed” regions are also a kind of intermediary structures between African states and societies and the rest of the world.

In 2019, within its Brexit negotiations, the UK has tried to use its former colonial regionalization to restructure relations after Brexit between the UK and the East African countries. France aims to get the regional organization, the G5 Sahel, to take the main responsibility for the security issues in the Sahel and replace its own Operation Barkhane there (Le Cam 2019; Tilouine and Zerrouky 2019).

This study aims to investigate how regionalization, understood as imposing regions, has played an important role in African history since the nineteenthcentury colonization until today. All the stakeholders — the colonizers, the colonized, but also the “outside world” and international organizations, including development agencies — have used or are using African regions as a tool and instrument in their performances. Different actors have different aims and goals when using the regional approach, they could even be totally opposite and used in different ways. We can find at least five different principal ways of how regional approaches have been used in Africa.

Primo, a regional approach was there already at the beginning of the colonial conquests: this was very visible in both the British and French empires. They created or wanted to create regions in order to rule and master huge territories and large human entities using this regional approach. This was also a weapon to keep other European pretenders out, as we can see at the Berlin Conference or in the aftermath of World War I, for example.

Secondo, the colonized learned quickly how to use this regional approach for their own political and even emancipatory purposes. Good examples of this can be found in North Africa where the diaspora in Europe mobilized around La Revue du Maghreb (La Revue du Maghreb 1916-1918) with a regional sensitivity already during World War I. In the second half of the 1920s, Algerians in Paris created their first movement for independence and named it the North- African Star.! Even though it was an Algerian movement, it had a clear North African, that is regional, vocation.

On a more general level, this kind of regional sensibility of the colonized can be found in different Pan-African structures since the beginning of the twentieth century. These regional movements occurred in almost all colonized societies. Their aim was to have an impact on political and socio-economic evolution in their countries and regions. Pan-Arab and pan-Islamic movements already at the end of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century were a part of this phenomenon as were the Fifth Pan-African

1 Since 1951, a Finnish board-game called "Star of Africa" has become very popular. Some five million copies have been sold to date. Therefore, I wonder if this board-game has the North-African Star as the main model for its name.

Conference and the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) during and after World War II.

Terzo, the importance of a regional approach in the decolonization process was crucial for all the stakeholders: the colonial masters tried to use regions as a platform for organized decolonization, and the colonized societies and their independence movements used them in order to negotiate the best possible result from the process for independence. Moreover, the former colonial masters tried to use them to maintain maximum influence in the new “neo-colonial reality.”

Quarto, after the independence of the former African colonies, the regional heritage imposed by the colonial empires was used, firstly, to organize the “neo-colonial structures” where the former masters tried to obtain the maximum benefit from their influence. Secondly, all kinds of development cooperation and aid programs were and still are often organized and structured by the regions created during colonialism. This can be seen in national development agencies like the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and the Finnish International Development Agency (FINNIDA) or international ones such as the Red Cross.

Quinto, today the international community tries to impose a regional approach on all kinds of African problems. The attempts are often located in the economic, environmental, or even security domains. This last one is an innovation where outside superpowers have tried to impose a regional approach and compel African countries to take collective regional responsibility for security and to fight the regional “troublemakers.”

This study is structured in four main parts. In the first section, we try to see how the roots of the regional approach were established in the early phase of the colonial enterprise and how they were developed in the 1930s. Then we will focus on World War II and attempt to understand how this regional approach was a crucial part of warfare in Africa leading to impactful changes in the colonial relationship. Third, during the last years of World War II, all the stakeholders of the colonial relationship started to prepare themselves for the new post-War world. In the fourth and last section, we examine the different decolonization processes through the decades of development until today, when it seems to me that the former colonial masters and their American cousins are dictating their security wishes with regard to troublemakers and potential human mobility on a regional basis. In the last section of this chapter, because of the Sahel, we will concentrate more on the French domain over other external actors in Africa.

1.2. Ante-inferno

At the beginning of World War I in 1914, the European colonial empires had already built up the structures of their colonial domination in Africa. Both World Wars challenged this domination and the structures, as did the two decades between the Wars. Though Indian historian Kavalam Madhava Panikkar called World War I a European civil war, it provoked such fundamental changes in the colonial order that the premises of decolonization were already evident in the aftermath of that War (Panikkar 1953).

Both the main European empires — the British and the French — tried to renew their colonial system between the two World Wars. Already in spring 1917, during World War I, Britain had increased the statute of her main dominions in the Imperial War Conference. Following that reasoning, India joined the Paris peace negotiations and also signed the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. The British government announced in the Balfour Declaration at the 1926 Imperial Conference that Britain and its dominions agreed they were equal in status and united by common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations, which was officially created by the Statute of Westminster in 1931 (Melasuo 1983a; Melasuo 2019). During World War II, it became clear that there was no possibility of restoring the colonial status quo ante at the end of the War. The British Commonwealth was ended by the London Declaration in 1949 and it became the Commonwealth of Nations where member-states were “free and equal” in theory. It is clear that using this “Commonwealth” philosophy, Britain wanted to create and maintain, if not regional, at least a kind of organic unity with its dominions and colonies. The statute of the Commonwealth of Nations prevailed until Britain joined the European Union (EU) in 1973. Entering the EU reduced the UK’s commercial connections with its dominions and colonies, which no longer enjoyed the earlier privileges of free entry to British markets. As pointed out earlier, Brexit might change this situation, but we do not know yet in what direction (Tilouine and Zerrouky 2019).

France re-enforced the organization of its African “territories” in such a way that they clearly formed French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, both of them being rather artificial political and administrative structures, with no regard for traditional political, cultural, and social heritages. France’s colonies in Africa consisted of two major areas, Afrique-Occidentale Frangaise (AOF, or French West Africa) and Afrique-Equatoriale Frangaise (AEF, or French Equatorial Africa). French West Africa comprised nine colonies, and its capital was first Saint-Louis and then Dakar, both in Senegal. The nine colonies were Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Niger, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Bénin. French West Africa was created in 1895 and its structures were modified several times. It was only in the mid-1920s that its structures and practices became more stable.

In fact, the beginning of the French colonial empire in Africa was the creation of the Four Communes of Senegal, which were administrated more or less as French communes, electing their “maires” (chief municipal officers). These four communes were Saint-Louis, Corée, Dakar, and Rufisque. Dakar and Saint-Louis had been partly considered to be French communes since the seventeenth century. In 1848, the inhabitants of these four communes got full citizenship of the French Republic. (Abbé Boilat 1853/1984). French Equatorial Africa was created as an administrative entity just a few years before World War I, in 1910. It consisted eventually of five large colonies in central Africa, with its capital in Brazzaville (today in Republic of the Congo). The five colonies were Gabon, Republic of Congo, Chad, Cameroon, and the Central African Republic. However, the history of French colonialism in equatorial Africa had started already in the middle of the nineteenth century. In fact, the formation of French Equatorial Africa was a kind of regional administrative reform in 1910.

Both these huge entities formed two federations whose administrative structures and organization were modified after their contribution to World War I from the mid-1920s onwards. In the early 1930s, they had their African representatives in the colonial councils, a kind of indigenous council or assembly that dealt with issues concerning African inhabitants. Those Africans having French citizen rights participated even earlier in the election of the representative that the federation sent to the French National Assembly in Paris. The first African deputy, Blaise Diagne, was elected to the French National Assembly in 1914. Diagne was re-elected to the French National Assembly until his death in 1934. He was also the first African to become a member of the French government as undersecretary of state in the ministry of colonies (Chathuant 2009). After the reforms of the early 1930s, the two structures of the AOF and AEF remained unchanged until World War II.

2 This literary work of Abbé David Boilat was one of the first modern historical studies done by a scholar of African origin. As a matter of fact, this work of Abbé Boilat was originally published just a few years after the confirmation of the “Four Communes.”

1.3. World War II

World War II had a major impact on the regional formations in Africa. This was because Africa had an important role in the war efforts of both main colonial empires — France and the United Kingdom — and they were obliged to improve the living conditions and the general situation of their colonies. At the beginning of World War II, the French colonial empire in Africa was rather clearly divided into three regions. The first one, North Africa, or the Maghrebin countries, comprised Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, each of which was administered differently. Morocco and Tunisia were protectorates and under the French Foreign Ministry. Algeria formed three French departments and so was a part of the French Republic administered by the general governor and the Ministry of the Interior. The southern part of Algeria, which includes the Sahara desert, was under the military, that is under the administration of the French Ministry of Defense and the Armée d’Afrique (Army of Africa) (Lormier 2006).

When World War II broke out, it took until summer 1940 before it was extended into Africa. After the armistice between Germany and France, the British Royal Navy attacked the French Navy in the military port of Mers-el- Kebir, near the city of Oran, in Algeria in early July 1940. The attack killed some 1,300 French marines besides incurring material losses like damaging five battleships and sinking one (Brown 2004; Lacouture 1984). This incident had long-lasting impacts on British-French relations and it made the joining of the French military in the Free French Forces of General Charles de Gaulle much more difficult. The British reasoning for the attack was based on the real risk of the French Navy joining the Axis powers’ operations against the Allies or against the French empire. After Mers-el-Kebir, the French Navy did not fight the Axis powers any longer, but it did fight the Allies on several occasions. Only the modest navy of the Free French Forces participated in the Allied operations. At least partly because of the tragedy of Mers-el-Kebir, North Africa remained with Vichy France until Operation Torch, the Allied landing on 8 November 1942. It was only at the end of November 1942, after the Allied disembarkation to North Africa that the Vichy France sank its own naval fleet in Toulon to avoid its capture by Germany (Brown 2004; Lacouture 1984).

In the second region, French West Africa, during the last days of September 1940, the Allies and the Free French Forces tried to conquer Dakar and to convince the local Vichy France authorities to join them. However, they were not successful as Vichy France fought back vigorously (Lacouture 1984; Smith 2009; Thomas 1995). The Allies’ failure had two main consequences. Firstly, French West Africa stayed under Vichy France’s command until the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942. Secondly, the political clout of the Free French Forces and General Charles de Gaulle among the Allies was reduced. This meant that in near future, the Free French Forces based its own military activities, especially its African activities, mainly in French Equatorial Africa.

The third region, French Equatorial Africa (AEF), under the governorship of Félix Eboué, was thus the only one of the three regions to join the Free French Forces almost from the beginning of the War in Africa, in August 1940. The Vichy government condemned Felix Eboué to death, but de Gaulle nominated him Governor General for all of AEF in November 1940. This was a huge territory from the southern part of the Sahara Desert, from Chad to the Congo River. French Equatorial Africa was thus extremely important strategically for the Free French Forces. It was the first territory it administered in its own name and authority. And it was the base for extending the Free French Forces’ war efforts across the Sahara Desert to North Africa and even to the Middle East and Europe.

With regard to the British colonial empire in Africa, only East Africa and the military campaign to free Ethiopia from Italian occupation had similar impacts on regionalism. These impacts became more real and visible after the War when regional cooperation between the former British colonies really started to develop. As a matter of fact, the East African campaign during World War II might have been perhaps one of the last, if not the very last, episodes of the pure colonial wars, where European colonial powers abused the African countries, the African populations, and the combatants just to protect their own colonial interests. The way in which the East African societies reacted to “European colonial warfare” has not really been studied yet. In the decolonization after World War II in Eastern and Southern Africa, these societies followed the more general trends seen in British and Portuguese colonial empires in Africa. Ghana was the first to gain her independence already in 1957, but the others got it only in the 1960s. Still this happened much sooner than the expectance of independence through what Harold Macmillan then British Prime Minister, called the “Wind of Change” which would take two centuries along him.

In fact, British imperialism had major plans for regional integration in Africa already in the early twentieth century. British governor and businessman Cecil Rhodes planned to have a kind of mega-region from Egypt to South Africa and a north-south Cape to Cairo railway connection. The German East Africa was an obstacle to this plan, but after World War I, when Tanganyika became a mandate of Britain by the decision of the League of Nations, the British plan was close to being accomplished, at least for some years.

During and after World War II as well as after the decolonization, the independence of the former colonies, the British attempts to foster some kind of regionalization in eastern and southern Africa remained rather far from Cecil Rhodes’s hopes and plans for a well-connected region reaching from the Cape to Cairo. The political leaders of the former British colonies in Africa, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, and Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia paid maybe more attention to the “pan-African” Organization of African Unity (OAU), which is today called the African Union (AU), than to the Commonwealth of Nations. Anyway, these former British colonies had a more important role in all-African structures like the OAU than was expected in the immediate post-World War II period. This strong impact of the former British African possessions took place especially in the 1960s. Among these British colonies in Africa, the most difficult independence processes took place in Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya in the early phase of British African decolonization. Later, in the 1980s, the transition in Southern Rhodesia, called Zimbabwe today, was also rather violent.

The southern African countries, which participated in World War II more “individually,” but still in a very important manner, joined the regional cooperation efforts within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in 1992, much after World War II. Of course, the South African apartheid regime had had an important impact as an outsider on this cooperation before the end of that regime in 1994, when South Africa also joined the SADC. The evolution of Zimbabwe also strongly influenced the whole region. Since its beginning, the SADC paid its main attention to the economic development of its members. The Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan (RISDP), the term of which lasts until 2020, tries to encourage economic cooperation between its member-countries.

The independence struggle of Namibia also had a general impact on international, or it might be better to say interregional, relations in southern Africa. However, this might not have much to do with the imposed regionalism during World War II. Until World War I, Namibia had been a German colony called “Deutsch-Stidwestafrika,” and it was then given to South Africa, on behalf of the UK, to be administered as a mandate of the League of Nations. When it began its independence struggle, it was connected, first of all, to the South African anti-apartheid struggle, but also to the Angolan and Zambian cases (Katjavivi 1988).

3 The SADC had several predecessors. First came, in 1975, the Frontline States, then in 1980, the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), and finally, in 1992, the SADC, or the Southern African Development Community. Its members are Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

The Portuguese colonies in Africa — Angola, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and Cape Verde — got their independence only in the mid-1970s after very difficult wars. Thus, their decolonization occurred about a decade later than those of the main empires did. In spite of the delay, the importance of their difficult decolonization process was reflected in the political evolution of many independent African countries and in how the outside world saw the continent. In fact, those difficulties had an impact on global international relations because the main Cold War antagonists were involved in those processes directly or via their proxies. For instance, Cuba showed strong anti-colonial solidarity by involving itself in the Angolan independence war (Melasuo 1983b).

We cannot speak about regionalization in these former Portuguese colonies in the same way as the British and French colonies, but there certainly is a kind of “lusophone sensitivity,” a loose feeling of belonging to the Portuguese speaking community and the sense of sharing a common history under the same colonial master. This common affinity is interesting and perhaps best reflected in the strengthening relations between Brazil and Portuguese-speaking Africa. Let us also remember that Portugal was a kind of forerunner of European colonialism and, together with Spain, one of the two main colonial empires from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries.

Partly because of the length of Portugal’s colonial experience, human contact between the mother country and the colonies was perhaps more dense than in many other cases. Let us remember that already in the year 1500, the African origin population was about 15 percent of the total population in Lisbon. Brazil was an important part of the Portuguese empire, and during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the Portuguese royal court was established in Rio de Janeiro and governed the “transatlantic kingdom” more or less until the independence of Brazil in the mid-1820s. During World War II, Brazil participated in the military operations with the Allied forces in Europe, especially in Italy.

In the 1920s, a Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre* formulated a kind of cultural ideology called “Lusotropicalism” to define, in particular, the Brazilian cultural evolution. After World War I, “Lusotropicalism” became the official doctrine of Portugal, aiming to stress the racial, ethnic, and cultural harmony prevailing in Portugal, her African colonies, and Brazil as well as in their reciprocal relations. It was natural for this special cultural relation to continue even when other European colonial empires failed. In reality, the Portuguese colonial system was as racist and problematic than those of the other European nations, and there was no kind of “cultural” reason why it should have continued in Africa (Melasuo 1983b).

4 The sociologist Gilberto Freyre should not be confused with the well-known pedagogue, Paolo Freyre, both from Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil.

Can we speak about some kind of “lusophone” entity or “virtual region” in Africa? During the decolonization process, there was clear cooperation between the three main African colonies and their liberation movements. In Guinea-Bissau the African Party of the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), in Angola the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) in Mozambique* coordinated their efforts for independence via the Conference of Nationalist Organizations of the Portuguese Colonies (CONCP), created in 1961 in Rabat, Morocco. The CONCP went on until the independence of Mozambique in 1975. Its importance in concrete, especially military, cooperation was modest, but in the political arena and in international relations, the CONCP was a part of the “Third World” © movement that tried in several ways to improve the decolonization process and the position of the newly independent countries in the world. From the point of view of later “lusophone” regional cooperation, an important and leading figure in the CONCP was Aquino de Bragança, originally from Goa, an intellectual, scholar and journalist who became a Mozambican citizen after the country's independence in 1975. He was instrumental in fine-tuning the coordination efforts of the three movements. From the early 1960s, Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon, together with Aquino de Bragança, made considerable efforts to boost the decolonization process. 7

It is clear that the fact that they had the same colonial master somehow pushed these far-spread countries to engage in cooperative action, “lusophone” cooperation in this case of the former Portuguese colonies. The Comunidade dos Paises de Lingua Portuguesa (CPLP, Community of Portuguese Language Countries) was created in 1996 and today it consists of nine countries and 19 observers and encompasses a population of almost 300 million.’ This kind of community, more virtual than geographically coherent, is a clear legacy of European colonialism.

s PAIGC was the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) and led by Amílcar Cabral. MPLA was the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola), and FRELIMO was the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambique Liberation Front).

6 “Third World” or “Tiers monde” is a concept created by geographer Alfred Sauvy in the publication edited by Balandier, Georges (1956): Le Tiers Monde. Sous-développement et développement. Paris: PUF, Presses Universitaires de Franc see also Melasuo (1983c).

7 CONCP, or Confederação das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colonias Portuguesas (Conference of Nationalist Organisations of Portuguese Colonies). See more in de Braganga (1990).

s CPLP refers to the Comunidade dos Paises de Lingua Portuguesa (Community of Portuguese Language Countries).

As already mentioned, today, there are many different kinds of relations within the lusophone world, especially between Brazil and the African countries. The Portuguese themselves, facing economic difficulties in their own country, are now moving and investing much more in their former colonies in Africa than at the end of the twentieth century, in the same way as they did in Brazil in the early nineteenth century. Between 2000 and 2010 their number in Africa increased by 42 percent (Poli, Alexandra 2019). Brazil is also increasing its economic activities in southern Africa, especially in Angola and Mozambique, with the aim of counterbalancing its dependence on Europe and North America. With the re-enforcement of African cultures in Brazil, there are attempts, based on local linguistic studies, to better understand the origins of the cultural heritage emanating from different parts of Africa. Besides the Serer in Senegal and the Yoruba in Nigeria, the cultural importance of the Bantu civilizations in southern and south-western Africa are today better recognized in Brazil than a few decades ago (Pessoa de Castro 2009). This is important for understanding these cultural affinities, but also in order to strengthen economic and political relations, within the lusophone world, between Brazil and Africa. It is difficult to say whether this kind of “lusophone evolution” has a future in today’s world. It seems that the presidential elections that took place in the autumn of 2018 in Brazil might be catastrophic to all its lusophone and African activities because the new regime stresses white superiority and holds in great admiration the military dictatorship that prevailed in Brazil from the 1960s to the 1980s. °