Eurafrica

(official name: the Association of the African and Malagasy States with the European Economic Community), a political and economic association of African countries and Madagascar with the European Economic Community (EEC).

Eurafrica was created upon the initiative of the countries of the EEC (Common Market) as part of their neocolonialist policy in the economically backward countries. The initial convention on the automatic inclusion of the African colonies and trust territories of France and Belgium in the EEC system was signed simultaneously with the Treaty of Rome, which proclaimed the creation of the EEC in March 1957 for a period of five years, until Dec. 31, 1962. By the end of this period almost all the French colonies and all the Belgian colonies had become independent states. In negotiating a new agreement on the association, they demanded specific economic concessions from the EEC members, particularly guarantees for the marketing of their exports. The First Yaoundé Convention was signed in 1963 and the Second Yaoundé Convention of Association in 1969, for the 1970–75 period. The association includes 18 African states: Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the People’s Republic of the Congo, Dahomey, Gabon, the Ivory Coast, the Malagasy Republic, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Ruanda, Senegal, Somalia, Togo, Upper Volta, and the Republic of Zaire. Officially it is claimed that the convention will promote the economic and social development of the African partners. But its actual aim is their economic and political subjugation, in particular through the abolition of customs and quantitative restrictions on the import of goods from the EEC members to Africa, as well as the elimination of obstacles to the free flow of capital from Europe into the associated countries and of profits to Europe.

Membership in the association restricts the African countries’ national sovereignty in foreign trade and in domestic economic policy. The associated states must take the interests of the EEC members into account and consult with them in setting customs duties and quotas on goods imported from third countries. The associated countries do not partici-pate in the distribution of resources within the European Development Fund (EDF). These questions are the exclusive prerogative of an EEC commission that is composed only of representatives of the European members of the Common Market. Afraid of the development of the state sector in the African countries, the EEC members introduced into the convention a clause prohibiting the use of EDF “aid” in ways that would compete with private capital. The association did not eliminate the contradictions between the African and European partners to the agreement and laid bare the neocolonialist aims of its creation.