Third Force Ambitions: Claude Cheysson and the Rebranding of Eurafrica into Europe's Grand Design

Abstract

This essay discusses how the European Community used its relations with the Third World to leverage increased power in the Cold War. It argues that resuscitating the interwar concept of Eurafrica to emerge as a credible alternative to Cold War superpowers went hand in hand with the systematic effort to distance themselves from the colonial legacy and the American strategy. It claims that it took a dynamic leader – Claude Cheysson – to make the Common Market a pivotal actor of globalism, with regional partnership and support of the new international economic order, until its transformative potential waned with the neoliberal turn of the 1980s.

‘The Europe of tomorrow must be a Europe that extends into the Third World’, stated the European Commissioner for Development Claude Cheysson in 1973, commenting on the future of European foreign relations.¹ His declaration was one in a series of similar statements aimed at inaugurating a new phase in European global ambitions: an era when the European Community (EC) would cease being the junior partner in the transatlantic Western strategy and move to become a new protagonist of international politics. This essay discusses how the EC used its relations with Third World countries, which stemmed from a reengineered colonial legacy, and channelled them through trade and development in order to play a greater part in the Cold War. It argues that resuscitating the interwar concept of Eurafrica so as to present a credible alternative to Cold War superpowers was a fundamental feature of West European strategy ever since the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, although it took some time to rebrand Eurafrica as a joint European policy able to transcend imperial legacy. Often downplayed as some garrulous politician, Cheysson, who was essentially in charge of EC Development and North–South relations for two decades,² was crucial in refashioning outdated imperial notions, pushing EC policies into a more decolonial direction by meeting Third World aspirations voiced internationally with the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and siding with developing countries to pursue a European Grand Design.

Eurafrica and the Ambitions as a Distinct Actor in Postwar International Relations

At its origins, the European Community was made up of once-powerful colonial empires and was intrinsically a project for preserving the empire. The imperial legacy in European cultural foundations is increasingly at the centre of historiography today, and the narrative of the construction of Europe as the work of national entities striving for peace on the continent, regardless of their colonial dependencies, is rejected as a cheap oversimplification.³ Peo Hanssen and Stephen Jonsson effectively sum up the extent to which the imperial nature was immanent in European construction ever since the early pan-European projects of the interwar years, explaining how Europeanist and Eurafrican ideologies remained dominant in the interwar years and beyond.⁴ The consensus around Eurafrica as a geopolitical panacea to avoid decline was ideologically fluid and resonated throughout the political spectrum in the interwar years, starting with Coudenhove-Kalergi's pan-European idea launched in 1923 and continuing into the 1930s, when economic rationale merged with fascist civilisational fantasies to gave birth to projects such as the Germans’ Mitteleuropa and Mittelafrika or the Italians’ Mediterranean mare nostrum.⁵

After the war, in a world where colonial empires were still attempting a comeback, betting on regional systems that coexisted side by side was an option on the table. In the words of economist Karl Polanyi, the postwar order was regional more than global, and it was about taming empires and adapting them to new international power structures.⁶ The construction of a European bloc by uniting European empires in a Eurafrican project was tossed by Labour British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin into the debate on the post-war international order to revive the European role as a ‘Third Force’ in the emerging Cold War.⁷ Although a last-minute addition, the development of the African continent was mentioned in the foundational document of Europe, the 9 May 1950 Schuman Declaration, as one of the essential goals to be achieved by the future European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).⁸ Expert meetings within the ECSC mentioned over and over again that it was essential to include former colonies in order to achieve a better market for raw materials.⁹ Other postwar West European institutions concerned with the shortage of raw materials, such as the Council of Europe and the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), discussed joint efforts to develop the overseas territories as well.¹⁰

In the 1950s, discussing Eurafrica meant talking about the economic union of the six Western European countries participating in the ECSC (France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, West Germany, and Italy) with their African dependencies. It was a Eurocentric concept and largely a French initiative that borrowed its language from the colonial tradition – especially the term ‘association’ introduced by the Overseas Minister Albert Sarraut in the 1930s. Frederik Cooper explains it as ‘a call for cooperation in exploitation’ with the Union Française (born in 1946) at its centre – an international task including West Germans.¹¹ Africa was represented as the Far West of Europe: it was essential to catch up with the accelerated growth and drive to modernity of the United States.¹² Eurafrica was a building site for postimperial Western Europe, argues Yves Montarsolo, who describes how it was fraught with domestic controversy in France, attacked as ‘international supercolonialism’ by opponents of free market ideas and American business groups from both the left and the right. In favour of a Jeune Eurafrique were instead both European federalists and African nationalists such as Léopold Senghor, who saw Eurafrica as the cornerstone of a civilisational project which could enhance African sovereignty.¹³ Among the French political elite, the discussion was how to make Europe without unmaking France, and although there were a few younger officers in the diplomatic corps who were not hostile to independence movements (Cheysson was one of them), the main concern was to ensure the continuation of the empire by Africanising local institutions.¹⁴ For example, socialist Overseas Minister Gaston Defferre, a staunch advocate of a united Europe since 1949 and author of the 1956 Loi-cadre, was adamant: France could not abandon its empire in order to opt for Europe, since its very constitutional system declared it imperial and colonial. For him, the inclusion of the colonies in the European Defence Community (EDC, the organisation meant to warrant Western Europe's active participation in Cold War military build-up) was essential to maintain peace in Europe and avoid both Soviet and American intrusions.¹⁵

With the failure of the EDC, Eurafrica entered the negotiations leading to the Treaties of Rome signed in March 1957, where discussions largely revolved around the association of colonial territories. Colonial links – now shrouded behind terms such as development, progress, interdependence, and mutual benefit – were still deemed necessary to secure an expanded economic base and geopolitical influence vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and the United States, especially against liberation movements across the Third World.¹⁶ A union with Africa with ‘the consent of Africans’ was specifically referred to as the only way for Europe to thrive as a Third Force in the Cold War, as opposed to a lonely, small Western Europe ‘crushed between the USSR and the USA’.¹⁷ With the EEC, Western Europe built a regional system of dependent territories, hoping for it to be long-lived. The design, included as Part IV of the founding Rome Treaty, was based on trade and aid as its main pillars: preferential trade between members and associated territories, with a gradual abolition of tariffs, and the establishment of a European Development Fund (EDF), designed for developing the associated regions.¹⁸ Ever since the beginning, and throughout the whole Cold War era, development policy was used ‘to enhance Western Europe's role and influence in the postcolonial world, as well as to deal with the legacy of colonialism’, sums up Giuliano Garavini.¹⁹ Many European leaders saw European integration as the opportunity for the continuation of Europe's ‘grand and global civilising mission’, as Dutch Foreign Minister Joseph Luns put it in 1957, and understood the EEC as a project for joint imperial management, ‘a Eurafrican as much as a European scheme’.²⁰

Transitioning into a Postcolonial World: Development as a Foreign Policy for the EEC in the Cold War

Divorcing the nation from the empire became problematic in Europe as decolonisation sped up at the end of the 1950s: it implied creating projects that would make it easier to cope with the loss of the empire.²¹ Eurafrica was one of these projects. In 1957, in an address to the Council of Europe, the French Christian Democrat Pierre-Henri Teitgen (former president of the MRP, the Popular Republican Movement) imagined the future of international relations after decolonisation. After independence, he said, Africa had several options: the American bloc, the Soviet world, the Bandung coalition, the Afro-Asian group, or Free Europe.²² Their choice would involve much more than a mere economic link. The world Teitgen pictured was multipolar, not bipolar. He could see a distinct international role for Europe in the Cold War framework. Eurafrica was a project per se, manifestly different from neutralism or pan-Africanism but also distinct from the American idea of a Western-Atlantic alliance. General Charles de Gaulle, who returned to power in 1958, was at best lukewarm toward Eurafrica. He did not think that a joint European framework was ideal to serve French strategic priorities, and though he attempted to twist the European project toward his interests, he preferred to have an independent voice in the Cold War.²³ As for Africa, the Gaullist design, implemented by the all-powerful Jacques Foccart, was to choose empire over Europe.

With decolonisation, the joint European administration systematically claimed to be something different from the individual countries and their imperial structures. For national independence leaders such as Senghor of Senegal or Félix Houphouët-Boigny of the Ivory Coast, maintaining relations with the former colonial power in the watered-down version offered by the European Commission with its trade and aid policies was less problematic. In July 1963, when eighteen independent African countries decided to continue association by adhering to the Yaoundé Convention, links to colonial ideology were underplayed, even though the fundamental elements of the colonial system survived. The machinery of empire had been based on unequal relationships, and such relationships were there to stay, decolonisation notwithstanding. The Convention retained preferential trade with the Associated African and Malagasy States on a bilateral basis with reciprocal obligations. It guaranteed non-discrimination and the continuation of the aid regime.²⁴ Yaoundé was not seen as something positive in the post-independence UN system. It was a project opposed to pan-African ideals, a rival of pan-Africanism and the Organisation of the African Union. Many leaders in developing countries attacked it as another tool of capitalist dominance, with the world economy split into three macroeconomic areas: the Americas dominated by the United States, Eurafrica dominated by the EEC, and Asia dominated by Japan. They were also critical of the protectionist Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the limited aid which was provided to the developing nations.²⁵

From the beginning, the Common Market was linked to the West within the context of the Cold War divide. The Atlantic defensive cocoon covered the whole EEC system and its imperial dependencies and NATO had plans to promote cultural exchanges, scholarships, and technical and financial assistance to advertise Western-style democracy and to counter communist threats in the Third World.²⁶ The US administration counted on the EEC as an agent to promote Western values, methods, and goals. In the DAC, the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD set up in 1960 with the task of coordinating foreign aid, the EEC performance was submitted for evaluation just like any other national donor. As Véronique Dimier points out, EEC officials were not interested in following the US example. They were products of the colonial system of their country of origin and abhorred the modernisation theories of Anglo-Saxon sociologists who ‘played with statistics’.²⁷ They had the distinctive mentality of members of an international organisation and believed they were carrying a superior morality, acting for the common good of the organisation independently of bleak national interests. Jacques Ferrandi, for example, the prominent head of the European Development Fund who decided on aid allocation, despite being a French national and the former director-general of economic affairs in Dakar, was not acting to promote French national interests (much to de Gaulle's dismay), nor did he submissively follow American instructions, or agree with ‘applying a solution developed in a lab onto a specific situation’.²⁸

In 1964, despite differences deriving from national or imperial traditions, the EEC started conforming to the mainstream ideas on development prevailing in the DAC, investing in rural development, the food processing industry, and infrastructure. However, it resisted American pressures to contribute specifically to the Cold War effort by politicising development. When the United States insisted that the EEC ‘use the weight of its financial contribution to guide the policy of the states which were aided’, the Community opposed their requests. They were not playing with old power politics nor serving the American Cold War, stated the Director General of the Department of Overseas Territories and head of the EEC delegation, Dr. Heinrich Hendus.²⁹ In truth, the criteria for aid included preventing African leaders from seeking funds from the Soviet bloc, but this conditionality was not explicit. The Cold War always played a role: to prevent African leaders from seeking funds elsewhere, admitted one EC officer, one had to accommodate their demands.³⁰

A Revolution? The Controversial Trajectory of Claude Cheysson

While in the 1950s and 1960s the project of European integration refashioned the old concept of Eurafrica as a means of gaining more power in the post-war international order, at the beginning of the 1970s its prospects changed dramatically. West European ambitions took a leap forward, helped by changes in international relations during the years of détente and the rise of social movements. In the golden age of European social democracy, new national and international political leaders opened a new cycle, bringing a new flair to transatlantic relations – and plunging them into crisis soon thereafter. Enlargement, with the entry of the United Kingdom into the Common Market, led to ambitions that reflected a whole new global potential and contributed to a new concept of ‘civil power Europe’.³¹ The financial crisis (1971), the oil crisis (1973–4) and the resurgence of Third World activism, spurred on by the success of OPEC and the renewed calls for urgent structural reform of the international economic system, helped to set a new course.³² Instead of building on imperial foundations, the EC would project an entirely new image of itself as a friend of the Third World so as to establish itself as an alternative to the United States and to the Soviet Union in the changed international system.

Development Commissioner Claude Cheysson was crucial to this reshaping of EC relations with the South. As a representative of the socialist opposition, he was chosen by the new French President Georges Pompidou because of his reputation in the business world, because of his previous experience in Asia and Africa, and because the British liked him. He was the key to this change, precisely because he supported a shift in strategy based on the promotion of national independence. A man of ‘the finest intelligence and legendary egotism’, he was not particularly popular at home, but he was welcomed by Third World leaders.³³ The most remarkable feature of Cheysson's style was his very distinct way of promoting French interests within a European framework while taking care to involve Third World leaders. Cheysson's fondness for the European project began early on when, as a young French diplomat, he worked closely with Konrad Adenauer in Bonn in 1948–9.³⁴ In 1952, he was sent to Vietnam, where he set up Franco-Vietnamese companies within the Union Française. It was there that his fundamental conviction emerged: that France should not be afraid of the prospect of abandoning the empire and that technical assistance was essential for good relations with the newly independent countries. In 1955, in his article ‘Presence Française dans les Etats Associées’, he argued that economic cooperation was critical to keep independent states firmly within the French orbit. French private companies had to involve the local elites in their capital structures, and the state needed to support them by creating the Zone Franc, subsidising local production and providing aid. Educating local elites in France was essential to strengthen a common cultural background.³⁵ Essentially, he launched human bonding through aid projects. Technical assistance was a way to win affection and trust. His attitude was not unique among the late colonial elites.³⁶

Cheysson was often involved in negotiating independence agreements. After participating in the French Delegation to the 1954 Geneva Conference that dismantled French Indochina, he worked on the independence agreements with Morocco and Tunisia (1956). Stationed in Algiers, in June 1957, he contributed to the report ‘Quelques données du Problème Algérien’ (Some Facts about the Algerian Problem), which examined the economic and demographic reasons that made French rule over Algeria burdensome and argued that sovereignty was not a prerequisite for exploiting the Sahara. What was essential were good relations with local leaders and with neighbours, especially Tunisia, and avoiding the hostility of the Muslim population. The report stressed the need to promote Algeria's independence.³⁷ Le Monde published extracts from it, and it caused a lot of clamour. Soon thereafter Cheysson quit the diplomatic service, ostensibly to protest the kidnapping of National Liberation Front leader Ahmed Ben Bella. Kicked out of Parisian circles (de Gaulle would rehabilitate him one year later), he moved to Africa in November 1957 as the Secretary General of the Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa South of the Sahara (CCTA), which he restructured as a more effective agency for technical aid. In his time at the CCTA, he worked towards the Africanisation of the institution. He started with moving the seat from London to Lagos and extending membership to African countries as soon as they got independence. This was widely acknowledged by African politicians, such as the minister for Transport and Communication of Mali: ‘We have managed to join thanks to the concern of the Secretary General of the CCTA, Mr Cheysson, whose ardent desire to make the CCTA work for Africa with the active support of Africans I am pleased to underline.’³⁸ Under his leadership, the Commission lost all of its character as a white man's club: in the new statute, the colonial powers contributed financially to the organisation and were stripped of their voting rights. Unsurprisingly, they all left, starting with South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal, and the CCTA was absorbed into the Organisation of the African Union.³⁹

During his period at the CCTA, Cheysson was consulted by President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on communism in Africa: ‘He has some enormously preceptive and valuable suggestions and comments about our operations in Africa’, recited an info sheet on him.⁴⁰ Because of his formidable reputation as a supporter of anticolonial policies, he was recruited by de Gaulle as the Managing Director of the Organisme Saharien, an Algerian public body set up under the Evian Agreements to foster technical cooperation between Algeria and France in the Sahara, dealing with all oil extraction operations, until the establishment of the new oil system under the Franco-Algerian Agreement of 1965. It was not easy to convince the local elites to build an oil industry together with France, he commented.⁴¹ The staunch defence of French interests was part of the problem. Promoting infrastructures for joint energy production was his primary duty in his next post as the French Ambassador to Indonesia (1966–1970). Arriving at the time of the rocky transition from President Sukarno to his successor Suharto, just after the mass killings of Indonesian Communist Party members, he successfully promoted an agreement between the Compagnie Française de Petroles and Indonesia's Pertamin for joint oil production in Sumatra. He then returned to France, leaving the diplomatic service for industry and business, as Chairman of the Board of Enterprise Minière et Chimique (EMC), France's leading state-owned chemical company in the capital-intensive fertiliser sector. In the same year, he was also the director general of the Compagnie des Potasses du Congo (1970–1973). His expertise with mineral resources and oil, his impeccable anticolonial credentials, and his impressive talent for networking made him a key actor for European global projection in the early 1970s when raw materials entered centre stage.

Siding with the Third World

In 1973, Cheysson was ostensibly chosen as the new Commissioner for Development because he was considered an ideal candidate to eradicate French colonial practices in European development aid. When he took office, he presented himself as someone who, after eleven years ‘spent in the employ of the countries themselves’, was speaking ‘as an African as much as a European’. Some historians stress his ambivalence and the fact that he intended to modernise colonialism, accommodating French and British interests alike, and that he was explicit about this.⁴² He clarified that colonial history implied responsibilities and the correction of past wrongdoings. In response to the vitriolic critique of neo-colonialism, he argued that enlargement would transform traditional colonial relationships. The difference between Europe and America was that, unlike the Americans, who were reluctant to open their markets to developing countries, Europeans were open to granting trade privileges, as a consequence of the traditional trade links dating back to colonial times. Moreover, building on a shared past made it possible to preserve a human dimension, with individuals interacting on the basis of personal relationships and rejecting the idea of aid as a huge, impersonal machine. After all, Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean were members of a special club with a shared past that could be used for a unique dialogue. He envisioned a transformation somewhat similar to the one he had promoted in the CCTA. ‘The association of tomorrow – he said – will be Africa's thing, governed by Africa, driven by Africa.’⁴³

During his mandate, Cheysson invested significant resources in staging proximity to the Third World, with travel and exchange, and in promoting the EC as an alternative to the superpowers, willing to accommodate demands for a change in the international order.⁴⁴ According to his aide Philippe Soubestre, he was ‘deeply convinced of the danger posed to these new countries by the tensions arising from the Cold War’ and of the role that Europe ‘could play in promoting or facilitating their non-alignment, through intelligent cooperation policies’.⁴⁵ Having assumed his duties as Commissioner when developing countries launched the NIEO, Cheysson immediately set up a dialogue on their platform. He spoke of the necessity to create a new world economic order and argued that his policy was complementary to non-alignment, supporting their demands for a systemic change.⁴⁶ Instead of moaning about ‘the so-called economic crisis’ and turning to an alarming isolationist mood, the industrialised countries ‘must recognise that they have a historical responsibility in having established this international economic order whose control seems to have slipped away from them’, he complained.⁴⁷ The way to go was a ‘cooperation policy’ that resulted from the colonial past and implied taking up responsibilities to help newly independent countries.⁴⁸

Cheysson's support for Third World strategies included the adoption of OPEC as an organisational model. Africa should try to speak through one spokesperson as the Arab countries did.⁴⁹ Like young men, young countries were to learn that unity provided strength to a group of ‘still unbalanced and economically poor’ nations. Other speeches used the patronising language typical of the infantilisation of the colonised. Like young people, he said, the newly independent countries were ‘proud, anxious to prove themselves and to stand together in spite of their mutual rivalries’; they yearned for economic security and needed stability to plan their development.⁵⁰ In June 1975, commenting on Lomé's innovation, he used the comparison again: ‘A nation is like a young man. To develop it needs money, but mostly it needs training […] so that it can develop by its own means.’⁵¹ To him, creating an institutional setup where developing countries could speak with one voice was a priority. Some of his co-workers described this as a fixation. He was proud to achieve this goal with the Lomé Convention of February 1975, which he called ‘a unique act in the world's history’ precisely because the developing countries acted as a united front before Europe. ‘I assure you that it has not been easy’, he commented.⁵² Europe, which had contributed to the division of Africa in the past, was now ‘contributing to its unification’ simply by encouraging the solidarity and unity of the ACP group: it was ‘an extraordinary historical turnaround’.⁵³

The Lomé agreement signed between the EC and forty-six former European colonies (the ACP countries – Africa, Caribbean and Pacific) defined a new partnership. Although it perpetuated preferential links (in trade and aid) between the Community and the former colonies, it was cast as a revolutionary achievement because it was structurally based on equality. ‘There is no cooperation without equality’, was one of Cheysson's refrains. The convention was a contract that implied mutual obligations, not a unilateral concession. Its main point was free access to European markets, which gave the ACP countries ‘the chance to develop on their own more than giving them our money’. It was not about charity but about promoting responsibility, Cheysson stressed – like a new edition of the Marshall Plan, with the EC instead of the United States and the ACP countries as the recipients.⁵⁴ Famously, he would say about development aid: ‘It's your money! You will use it best according to your own priorities. We are here to give you technical advice if needed.’ The goal was the creation of a self-reliant economic system. The language (partnership, equality, self-reliance) winked at the successful discourse embraced by Chinese aid, the socialist alternative popular with developing countries at the time. It was Europe's challenge to ‘the Soviet Union, the United States, Japan, and the entire industrialised world’.⁵⁵

The Lomé Convention was a very extensive document. In its trade provisions, it incorporated several of the requests of the developing countries. It established that agricultural and mining products would enter Europe free of duties and, differently to the past, without reciprocity clauses. Commodities that competed with European products (such as sugar) were governed by quota systems negotiated separately. Cheysson's most celebrated innovation was STABEX (the acronym stands for Système de Stabilisation des Recettes d'Exportation), the mechanism for price stabilisation for agricultural commodities applicable to the export earnings of listed commodities.⁵⁶ It was quite a paradox, given that STABEX had been on the EEC agenda since 1959 when it had to contend with the hostility of West Germany, the Netherlands and, from the outside, the Americans. The market economy cannot be sacrificed on the altar of Europe, wrote Wilhelm Röpke, a superstar ordoliberal economist who loathed the ECSC as a bloc version of Europe and the EEC as a project to keep empire and protectionism alive in the era of the liberal world economy. West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard agreed with him: STABEX was a French-inspired plot to Europeanise the costs of empire.⁵⁷ For this reason, it ended up in a drawer until it was resuscitated by Cheysson's predecessor, Jean-François Deniau, in a famous 1971 ‘Memorandum on a Community Policy on Development Cooperation’. Upon his arrival, though, Cheysson did not immediately embrace a mechanism that he described as a ‘far-fetched story of price stabilisation’. ‘You won't see me supporting this bullshit in front of member states’, he allegedly commented at first.⁵⁸ He then changed his mind, when it became clear that STABEX was being enthusiastically welcomed by the developing countries united in the G77.

Replicating Lomé: Europe's Grand Design to Transcend Bipolarity

Cheysson's vision was finally offering ‘the forest of political vision’ instead of ‘the trees of tariff reductions and social security improvements’ the press commented cheerfully, saluting the new EC global approach.⁵⁹ Lomé was the cornerstone for ‘the Europe of tomorrow’ able to offer to the Third World an integrated policy different from that of its member states – bolder and less tied to the past.⁶⁰ In this way, it was contributing to a multipolar world that was less dangerous than a bipolar setting ruled by two superpowers ‘fundamentally antagonistic despite their efforts to promote détente.’ Europe's specific interests coincided with those of the developing countries that hoped to find a better balance in international relations.⁶¹ Lomé was therefore a model to be replicated globally. ‘Development policy is only significant if it's coherent’, Cheysson said. With this, he meant that the EC should consider multiplying regional agreements resembling Lomé.⁶² He did not think that regionalism and globalism were in conflict: they could reinforce each other, and the multiplication of Lomé was a way to prove it. Britain was pressing for greater attention to the non-ACP world, including important Commonwealth countries such as India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore. But Cheysson preferred to start with the Mediterranean, a region he knew well and where Western Europe had fundamental interests: markets, energy sources and raw materials.⁶³ In 1975, he presented the Lomé method at the Trilateral Commission, the think-tank on global issues set up by David Rockefeller and composed of experienced government and private sector leaders from the United States, Europe, and Japan. On that occasion, Lomé was praised as a regional contribution toward a global understanding, as Europe's own way of acting in the Cold War.⁶⁴ The applause of this audience was far from obvious, for the rhetoric of ‘Lomé as a method’ emphasised European independence from Cold War logic and American strategy and did so in an assertive tone. The Lomé policy, Cheysson stressed, was ‘a special contribution to détente, and a special responsibility towards the Arab countries and Africa’. Quoting Julius Nyerere, he stressed that aid to developing countries should be ‘a matter of right not a system of begging’, based on a deep respect for identity and non-interference, agreed with a group of countries, rather than individual countries.⁶⁵

The Cold War continued to serve as an ever-present framework, although Cheysson did not like to think of himself as a player in that arena. ‘In my career and for the places where I have served, I have been more of an actor in North–South relations than in the East–West conflict.’⁶⁶ However, he confessed, the European construction was ‘a good framework to stand up to the Soviets, to prevent them from going any further’. In turn, the Cold War was ‘an element that favoured a specific policy’ and gave Europe ‘an identity of its own’.⁶⁷ The special relationship with the Third World was a fundamental element of European identity. When the socialist countries attacked the Lomé Convention as a neo-colonial policy resulting from a compromise between packs of imperialist wolves, he responded with scathing criticism: the Eastern bloc was absent from any serious economic discussion of the world's future, and while the Soviet Union was excellent at providing military support for a war of liberation, it was utterly ‘incompetent’ at helping other peoples to develop.⁶⁸ Elsewhere he commented: ‘The Eastern Europeans […] contribute almost nothing to development.’ The total amount of grant aid from Eastern Europe, he added, was less than $1 billion a year, while OECD countries provided $14 to $15 billion and Arab countries $4 to $5 billion. But ‘everyone in the Third World is convinced that they are making a great effort’ and that they can rely on Eastern Europe for support, not only for their liberation but also for their development. It would therefore make sense to include them in North–South talks on a new world economic order.⁶⁹

With the energy crisis, establishing closer relations with Arab countries became a strategic priority for Western Europe, and the relations with the Third World were construed as the way out of the crisis. Houari Boumedienne's invitation to choose the Third World over American imperialism was tempting. Saudi Prince Abdul Aziz spelt out what he saw as the terms of a profitable mutual exchange: ‘We need European expertise in the field of land reclamation, industrialisation, and armaments. The Europeans need our oil, our other raw materials, and our markets.’⁷⁰ ‘We are doomed to cooperate’, added Ismail Khelil, the Tunisian Ambassador to Brussels. The dialogue between the Arabs and the Western Europeans was based on ‘affinities between two regions which have everything to gain from cooperation’ and on an important trade partnership.⁷¹ The growth of the Arab world was Europe's trump card, Cheysson believed. ‘We want to have a Middle East policy’, he said at the inauguration of his first term as a European Commissioner at Chatham House in 1973.⁷² Europe should not be afraid of competition but should look to the new market on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. The problems of Arab countries had to be seen by Europeans as domestic problems. Cheysson was well aware that Lomé represented a rupture in the Western partnership with the United States: ‘The Lomé policy cannot be a marginal one for us’, he maintained. ‘It sets us apart – it is true – from our usual industrialised partners and allies, because our past is different and – let us acknowledge it simply and modestly – because our needs are not the same.’⁷³

Top officers of the Directorate General for Development and Cooperation were assigned to the Mediterranean question with a precise cultural objective. In the hands of Klaus Meyer, the Euro-Arab Dialogue was defined as a contract of civilisation.⁷⁴ In 1975, to promote cultural affinity, the Commission sponsored the journal Eurabia, which hosted intellectuals supporting Euro-Arab unity.⁷⁵ The construction of the dialogue was to become Europe's Grand Design, emphatically proclaimed Cheysson.⁷⁶ To those who felt that the dialogue did not aim high enough, he objected that it was imperative to bring together ‘the Arab nation and the European nation’, united by neighbourly solidarity, geography, history, and culture.⁷⁷ The Euro-Arab Dialogue was met with derogatory comments by Henry Kissinger, who dismissed it as an element of tension and confusion in the international system, just as he did with any European initiative that did not fit his plans.⁷⁸ The Economic Community of Europe and the Arab Countries – a grand Eurafrica project centred on the Mediterranean as a laboratory for civilisation – became instead a shared goal with Third World leaders.⁷⁹ One of them was Léopold Senghor who, during a Club of Rome meeting in Stockholm in September 1977, presented Cheysson's approach as a fundamental step towards Eurafrica, the utopian project that would remedy Balkanisation and unite all of its components, black and Arab, and eventually include Israel and Iran.⁸⁰ Undoubtedly, it was a far-fetched geopolitical fantasy.

Cheysson stubbornly insisted that Europe and the Third World countries were ‘gradually becoming indispensable to one another’;⁸¹ that trade with the Third World was a ‘condition of survival’ for a United Europe that could count on cooperation with the Third World to gain growth and prosperity;⁸² and that it was ‘not excessive to state that we will be saved by the poorest’.⁸³ In 1978, he ventured to define his idea of Europe in a speech entitled Une idée qui s'incarne (An Idea Taking Shape). Relations with the Third World were the area in which Europe had set in motion a true reconceptualisation, a shift from unilateral concessions to ‘a freely negotiated contract between two parties made equal by representing a regional grouping’. Europe's policy towards the Third World was strengthening the European edifice, and the progress of the Third World was ‘one of the best, or perhaps the only chance to create new markets and promote general growth worldwide’.⁸⁴ Increasingly, however, such statements sounded like worn-out refrains. Expanding the Lomé method to the Mediterranean and the Middle East did not yield the desired results: countries in the area could barely talk together and resisted establishing binding horizontal economic partnerships, let alone a real community. Moreover, the negotiations for Lomé renewal were vexed by the disappointing economic performance of the system, worsened by the second oil crisis of 1978–79. The human rights issue, that is making Europe's aid conditional to respecting human rights, was critical to winning over European public opinion, but a treacherous area for many African governments.⁸⁵

The years 1978–79 were marked by the North–South Dialogue, the process through which the developing countries in the Third World engaged the industrialised countries of North America and Western Europe in negotiations over changes to the international economic system. Cheysson insisted on championing the cause of the developing countries waging an international class struggle. It was a matter of class solidarity that had to be inspirational for the whole European project: ‘The Europe that will be capable of such a renewal of relations with the Third World, of projecting itself into the future, can only be the Europe of all Europeans, the Europe of workers as well as employers, the Europe of the people.’⁸⁶ Our workers ‘must understand that the fight for a new, more just and more equitable, economic order cannot be confined to the frontiers of Europe, that the struggle of the proletarian nations […] is the same as their own’.⁸⁷ The Third World was ‘the world's proletarian class’ and thus was entitled to the benefits the European working class claimed in the nineteenth century: rights, security, and a fair share of wealth.⁸⁸ However, the prospects of playing the privileged relations to the Third World as a card to gain exceptional leverage in the Cold War gradually eroded with the waning of the decade, when the NIEO, inspirational and propulsive in the early 1970s, was crushed by the ‘divide and rule’ attitude of the newly born G5. To political realists such as Henry Kissinger, global negotiations were just another round of ‘global bullshit’.⁸⁹

The Demise of Third World Centred Strategies in the World Economic Disorder

In the context of Cold War détente, the idea of the European Community as a Third Force alternative to the United States and the Soviet Union, possibly in partnership with the Third World, had become fairly popular, especially among socialist leaders, and Cheysson was one of its champions.⁹⁰ When he moved on to become the French Minister of External Relations in May 1981, selected by François Mitterrand to inject a touch of socialism into French foreign policy, he imagined a robust Third World oriented strategy, making of Western Europe a companion to non-alignment. This did not mean a policy of neutralism between East and West. To him neutralist tendencies surfacing in Germany and Britain were a ‘cause of despair’.⁹¹ Cheysson may have hoped for systematic cooperation between France and the EC, but his departure was followed by the restoration of the old technocrats, originally close associates of Ferrandi, including Jean Durieux and Dieter Frisch, who had often clashed with Cheysson from the outset in 1973–74.⁹² Moreover, his successor as the EC Development Commissioner, Edgard Pisani (1981–84), a former Gaullist turned socialist, was not keen on solidarity with the Third World. To them, Cheysson's pro-Third World strategy, which they pejoratively defined ‘laissez-faire’, was anathema. They moved on to align the EC policies with international organisations, substituting project aid with programme aid, introducing conditionality. Pisani's mandate ‘started from the premise of the failure of the North–South Dialogue and of the New International Economic Order’ and with a focus on food issues, correcting the ‘historic scandal’ of neglecting agriculture and food production in the developing countries.⁹³ Although paying lip service to Lomé, Pisani completely reversed the previous strategies, replacing them with ‘policy dialogue’ and mutual commitments, and did not refrain from fighting with Cheysson in public.⁹⁴

Disinvesting from foreign aid became a trend in the Global North, and the Lomé approach was now considered inapt to foster economic growth. Monetarism, supply-side economics, structural adjustment programmes and the Washington consensus, encouraged by the debt crisis, conquered EC policy making. More broadly, globalisation lost its emancipatory character. The 1980s reflect dramatically the sense of a missed opportunity for the EC to become a special partner to the Third World and promote its role in the international order. The Cancun summit of 1981, remembered as a ‘substantial success’ but in truth unpleasant for everyone involved, played the requiem for the NIEO and sanctioned the marginalisation of the EC, which was not even invited to the meeting. Cheysson, who was there as the French Foreign Minister, insisted that ‘the best possibilities for growth in the First World are to be found in the Third World’. But no European leader dared to take this up. The fruitless attempts promoted by Indira Gandhi in 1983 to revive the Cancun moment did not involve the EC in any way.⁹⁵ By then, Cheysson had fallen out of grace with President François Mitterrand, who was now embarrassed by his diplomatic gaffes and called him ‘the least diplomatic of all the diplomatic corps’.⁹⁶ The two disagreed on almost everything: the Middle East, South East Asia, China, and Central America.⁹⁷ Cheysson may well have been the man of the day in the mid-1970s when friendship with the Third World seemed to promise significant payoffs, but he was certainly not the man of the neoliberal future. Mitterrand thought of getting rid of the problem by promoting him to a top position in the EC. However, Margaret Thatcher vetoed his candidacy for President of the European Commission in retaliation for Cheysson calling the Falkland War a colonial conflict. When he returned to Brussels for a final four-year term as a commissioner in 1985, the architect of a global development policy on a European scale now had a different touch. Financial issues were more central to his discourse, substituting the previous focus on compensatory trade. Cheysson was concerned with the lack of growth and a unitarian political view in Western Europe. Free societies need growth, he repeated obsessively. Debt rescheduling, the threat of protectionism, and an inadequate monetary system were the main threats to Europe's growth.⁹⁸ The rescheduling of most of the Third World's debts was a great success, a marvellous effort of solidarity, he said, and rigorous structural adjustment policies were necessary. But such measures were not enough to contain economic disorder. Europe had to become more constructive and aggressive, he contended, calling for the EC to be involved in World Bank and IMF initiatives on monetary stability.⁹⁹ Despite the monetary fixation of his speeches on the international disorder, he was still convinced that Keynesianism retained its value on a global scale and that the exemplary initiatives of the past (Lomé) needed to be continued. But his arguments now sounded inconsequential.¹⁰⁰

‘I was never seduced by the idea of Eurafrique. I didn't understand what it meant and I still don't’, confessed Cheysson in a late interview.¹⁰¹ His biography offers evidence of Western European ambitions to regain centrality in international politics during the Cold War through projects to refashion the imperial legacy into an entirely new alliance with the newly independent countries of the Global South. Since the 1950s, Cheysson, a keen observer of the changes in the international order brought about by decolonisation, had pioneered the idea that national independence was an inalienable right to be supported and accompanied by joint development projects based on mutual interest. His strategy, centred on a close political cooperation with Third World leaders, was successful as long as the international system was receptive to the prospect of a new global projection of the EC based on a unique partnership with the Third World. In the window of opportunity of the 1970s, Cheysson's plan was to promote a socialist alternative within the orbit of a Western partnership. He was creative, surpassing bipolarism in favour of a multipolar, regional strategy. Ultimately, he failed. His ideas during the 1980s were a mere shadow of his earlier commitment, and were not always consistent. The lack of political support from a network in the EC played a large role: it surely takes more than the individual commitment of a charismatic personality to bring about lasting change.