Eurafrica and its Business: the European Development Fund Between the Member States, the European Commission and European Firms

• Published in: Journal of European integration history , Vol.23 (2), p.187-210
• Main Author: DIMIER, Véronique
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0947-9511
• DOI: 10.5771/0947-9511-2017-2-187

This article deals with the role of the European Commission in the management of the European Development Fund, the main financial instrument of the Yaoundé and Lomé Conventions with the African, Caribbean and Pacific States. It also deals with the strategies of the Member States and their firms to get EDF contracts. It argues that the European Commission put in place a system of EDF management well adapted to dealing with the neo-patrimonial administrations of most African countries. In this sense, the authority and legitimacy of the European Commission, in administering the fund, was based less on expertise than on clientelistic practices, featuring arbitrariness in the decision making, permanent exception to rules, opacity and the primacy of personal relationships with the Commission constituency, in this case, the African elite. The article also demonstrates that those clientelistic practices were largely fuelled by the Member States themselves, in their attempts to secure funding for ‘their’ firms and their ‘political’ clients in Africa. Hence, each Member State tried to derive as much benefit as possible from the fund, either by trying to change the rule of competition in its own favour or by playing the clientelistic card to its own advantage. This process resulted in an increasing of the autonomy and power of the Commission in running the EDF. It also led to many contradictions in the management of the EDF.