African Foreign Policy in a Multipolar Age

African Foreign Policy - Part 1

This is the first of three posts on African foreign policy under multipolarity. The first post outlines what African countries should prioritize as they engage the world; the second looks at how China ought to approach its Africa policy moving forward; and the third examines potential opportunities to improve US (and Western) Africa Policy.

I: Why Africa Matters:

Does it matter what the African Union does? Back in 2017 a potential research collaborator asked me this exact question. At the time I was trying to convince him of the importance of understanding intra-African cooperation across dimensions such as security, governance, migration, trade, etc. He was not convinced. I ended up shelving the project.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have. While the last 200 years may make one conclude that Africa is geopolitical backwater, there are several reasons to believe that this will not always be the case (especially since it wasn’t always so).

First, demographics. For much of history Africa was largely empty (and therefore lacking strong states that could sustain well-ordered economies). UN projections indicate that the world’s demographic future is in Africa, with the region’s population expected to double by 2050 (to 2.5 billion). Not enough people currently appreciate the fact that by the year 2100 half of all humans being born will be African. This seismic change in demographics will mean more African brains, stomachs, workers, and markets — all concentrated in large urban areas. I struggle to see why these changes will not increase Africa’s geopolitical importance, irrespective of how well individual countries are run or perform.

Second, Africa’s challenges are already global challenges. For example, in an increasingly interconnected world, the human tragedies caused by climate change, entrenched poverty, and chronic state weakness in West Africa cannot simply be confined to the region. Indeed, the resulting flow of climate, conflict, and economic refugees is already a “problem” for several countries outside the region. And it is likely to worsen (even though most refugee flows are within the region). Absent a drastic correction, many African countries will remain stuck in a self-reinforcing suboptimal equilibrium of mass poverty and low state capacity (and associated conflicts) — both of which will continue to result in significant amounts of out-migration.

The figures blow put these facts in sharp relief. Africa is already the epicenter of global poverty. It is also not a surprise that the least developed countries in the region (especially in the Sahel) also face the worst security challenges. Finally, economic precariousness and generalized insecurity have pushed many (young) people to leave in search of livelihoods elsewhere.

Third, Africa’s opportunities are global opportunities. As noted above, Africa is finally rapidly accumulating the most valuable resource the world has ever seen — human capital. While it is true that bigger populations will come with their own challenges (e.g. potential for food insecurity in the face of climate change or mass unemployment), there is no reason to believe that they will also not create opportunities for growth. More people will mean cheaper labor and bigger markets, not just for intra-African trade, but also trade with the rest of the world. The chances of this happening will likely increase as several middle income Asian countries experience demographic transitions and associated rises in labor costs (and if the West aggressively pursues the idea of “friend-shoring”). The green shoots area already visible in countries like Kenya and Ethiopia.

Beyond human capital, Africa’s natural resource potential (from arable land, to fossil fuels, to transition minerals) still has enormous potential to contribute to growth and be a source of geopolitical leverage. However, I would not put too much faith in the natural resource sector as a catalyst for economic takeoff. There will be no way around the productive use of human capital as the basis of economic takeoff in the region.

Overall, there is absolutely no reason to believe that African countries will remain poor into the future. As everyone who has witnessed the depth of economic change in the region over the last 20 years will attest, the notion of permanent economic stagnation in Africa is a myth. The African Development Bank (AfDB) projects that by 2050 the region’s total output will reach more than $16 trillion in PPP terms (double the current $8 trillion). The projected sustained growth will come, in part, because of greater resilience of African economies. As experiences through recent global shocks have shown, it is highly unlikely that the region will go through anything like the disastrous long decade (1980-1995) of anaemic economic performance and chaotic political collapses that continue to color most observers’ views on the region’s economic prospects. This is, in part, because of ongoing political institutionalization in the region (regardless of regime type).

Fourth, Africans are growing out of the region’s historical geopolitical naïveté. For the better part of the last 60 years, Africa’s ruling elites governed as little more than (post)colonial Native Administrators — completely out of touch with their citizens’ objective realities, with their focus permanently fixed on serving neocolonial foreign interests. Few countries had elites interested in real sovereignty (or policy autonomy), instead opting to collude with corrupt foreign actors in pillaging their countries’ resources. In other words, too many African leaders viewed their countries as geopolitical appendages to their former colonizers, seldom posing to consider their countries’ interests. There were few exceptions, of course, like Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere and Thomas Sankara.

Catalysts for the ongoing geopolitical awakening are many. Top of the list include: (1) the rise of leaders like Paul Kagame and Abiy Ahmed (warts and all) who have demonstrated that elites need not take the rules handed down by the “international community” as a given; (2) a secular loosening of the West’s psychological stranglehold in the region, in part because of wider common knowledge of the real history behind how the West became so dominant and its ongoing internal contradictions (i.e., the Western model has lost its shine); (3) blossoming relations with China, Russia, Turkey, China, India, South Korea, and other mid-tier powers that provide outside options beyond Africa’s “traditional” North Atlantic allies; and (4) the spread of the idea of African Agency in African affairs (sometimes colloquially dubbed, African solutions to African problems).

Whether at the level of bilateral relations, Regional Economic Community (REC), or the African Union (AU), African elites are no longer uniformly geopolitically naive. This is a much welcome improvement (for Africa and the rest of the world). African states should be squarely in the business of championing African interests.

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II: African Foreign Policy for a Multipolar Age

Does it make sense to think of “African foreign policy”? The simple answer is yes. Individually, African countries are weak as geopolitical actors (including the likes of Nigeria, South Africa, and Egypt). But collectively, they can be a force to recon with. When it speaks with one voice, the African Union (AU) commands 54 votes at the UN and significant moral authority. Evidence from the last 60 years suggest that African states have been most effective on the international stage when they leverage their collective numbers (see, for example, challenges to the authority of the International Criminal Court). Furthermore, the ideological commitment to Pan-Africanism remains strong throughout the region.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to think in terms of “African foreign policy” is the fact that within both the AU and Regional Economic Communities (RECs), strong norms of equality have resulted in flat organizational structures. This has over the years earned regional hegemons like Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt significant goodwill with their weaker peers. The idea here is that regional hegemons stand to benefit from leveraging African unity (at the continental and REC levels) in pursuit of their particular and collective interests. To that end, I propose below a number of pillars of African policy for the current age of multipolarity.

This is not to say that intra-African relations will forever be egalitarian. It is conceivable that in the future the region we shall have sub-regional hegemons influencing foreign policy choices within their spheres of influence. It is also likely that weaker African countries will continue championing the idea of a Pan-Africanism built on equality of sovereign states and consensus, if only as a means of blunting the effects of raw power differentials within the region.

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By multipolarity I simply mean the expansion of options of countries/blocs with which to form strategic alliances due to (1) the rise of China as a rival power to the United States, (2) greater agency to the European Union (independence of the United States), and (3) increasing assertiveness of other aspiring global powers and/or high-income countries like Russia, India, Turkey, and South Korea.

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1. African states should individually and collectively get their house in order.

Most of Africa’s problems start and end with low state capacity. While acknowledging that there are strong disincentives against effective state-building in the region (see here and here), elites interested in being serious players on the grand stage of history must keep trying. Strong African states will guarantee physical safety and order in their territories, implement growth-promoting policies, protect African sovereignty, and be the basis for effective regional cooperation. For example, the African Union’s continued reliance on donors hobbles its mission of promoting beneficial intra-Africa cooperation and championing African interests on the global stage (latest available figures show that 61% of the total budget comes from “partners”).

To achieve this goal, African states should aggressively champion norms in favor of state-building and institutionalization of politics in the region. This means helping member states figure out how to project power throughout their territories and provide public goods and services on the cheap. It also means promoting constitutionalism (regardless of regime type) and creating mechanisms to promptly defeat armed challenges to state authority before they transmogrify into full blown civil conflicts. In this regard the African Union’s standby forces are a welcome beginning. However, significantly more needs to be done to strengthen state capacity in the region.

The African Union should do this with the understanding that the current (post-WII) international system disincentives state-building. Because to a large extent internationally-recognized borders are sacrosanct, rulers and rebels alike care not about effective territorial control but gatekeeping rents. It is easier to control rents in the capital (or a rebel-held enclave) than to do the hard work of building effective control and service provision throughout one’s territory.

Strong states will boost effective African cooperation via two mechanisms. First, strong states don’t hesitate to share sovereignty if they stand to benefit; while weak states typically hoard the little sovereignty they’ve got — there is a Somali saying that you only give your walking stick to someone from whom you can take it back. Second strong states are the mechanisms through which continental agreements would be implemented. This is to say that the African Union or the RECs will alway only be as strong as their weakest links (which at the moment are legion).

2. African elites should be very clear about what the region needs.

What specific priorities should guide African foreign policy? Given the variety of potential actors out there, what is the best mix of strategic alliances to address Africa’s most pressing needs?

These are questions that African leaders must individually and collectively answer before engaging external partners. For far too long African countries have largely been willing to accept whatever is thrown at them in the name of “assistance” (including “donations” of [obviously bugged] computers! or buildings!) The lack of ownership and disinterest in policy autonomy at the very highest levels of government (primarily due to low quality ruling elites, lack of state capacity, and geopolitical naïveté) means that foreign actors drive the agenda in many strategic sectors in the region — from infrastructure to healthcare, agriculture to education.

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It is not uncommon to have twenty-something foreigners out for personal adventure, unburdened by any knowledge of history or politics, and armed only with their Economics 101 “expertise” serving as “technical advisers” in the most sensitive government agencies (like Ministries of Finance) in African countries.

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This has to change. Ideally, African countries should have coherent policy agendas that friendly external actors can support. Any form of assistance that is not aligned with domestic or regional policy priorities should be rejected. Full stop. At the regional level, the AU can play an important coordinating role to ensure that donors and other external actors internalize this reality; and that African countries build their policymaking capabilities instead of always relying on “technical advisers” and all manner of ill-informed (often faddist) off-the-shelf reform initiatives from outsiders without a clue or care about their respective countries’ prospects.

3. Understand the motivations behind foreign actors’ Africa Policies

I am often surprised by how many African policymakers and public intellectuals believe in the sincere altruism of foreign actors (file this under geopolitical naïveté). You see this in the ease with which most countries cede policy initiatives to foreign actors — whether it is on building roads, designing education curricula, or fiscal policy (why play cat-and-mouse games with the IMF on macro stability?) Here, I do not mean a conscious ceding of control as a strategy (which can happen successfully). What I mean is the total belief that “altruistic” foreign actors know best and ought to be in charge (sometimes with comically predictable outcomes).

What should one expect to be the outcome when Western “donors” fund Africa’s negotiators at climate talks? Or when Chinese companies conduct feasibility studies, design, and build infrastructure projects?

To remedy this problem, there is a need for investing in understanding the policy motivations of Africa’s potential partners; and how individual countries and the region can leverage those partners’ institutions, economies, and politics to strength their bargaining positions.

First, there is a need to map foreign actors’ self-interested strategic intentions in the region and how those can be leveraged for win-win ends, or opposed in the case of nefarious intentions. African scholars can play an important role here in generating common knowledge and disabusing critical policymakers of the belief in the unalloyed altruism of foreigners.

Second, instead of waiting for decisions from foreign capitals, African states and the region should actively cultivate pro-Africa attitudes among foreign policymakers and economic elites. In some countries this would mean dealing directly with specific industrialists, businesspeople, or media owners. In others it would mean forging alliances with party leaders. Meanwhile, in some democracies it would mean actively cultivating support among pivotal constituencies and elected officials.

4. Keep all options open

Different likely partners of African countries offer different value propositions. African leaders should pursue strategic friendships with all. India can be a source of know-how on pharmaceuticals. Turkey is excellent in residential construction and white goods. Russia can be a source of cheap weapons for defense. China and Japan do big infrastructure projects very well (Turkey is gaining mileage on this, too). Vietnam, Germany, and South Korea can share industrial know-how. The United States has cash, excellent universities, and technology. Gulf states have cash. All regions of the world are potential export markets.

Given their enormous developmental needs, African countries need as many constructive friends as they can get. Mass job creation is the only way out of poverty. That means finding cheap financing for agriculture, infrastructure, and industrial inputs. It means being able to save scarce forex by manufacturing drugs and developing the human capital needed to do so. And yes, sometimes it also means having the capacity to ruthlessly defeat rebels in the battlefield or deter them from setting up shop in the first place.

Encouraging competition among would be partners is good for Africa (and its partners). For example, it is a shame that it took the rise of China for the United States to start taking African states seriously. Most observers would agree that being serious about Africa is good for the United States. Not only is it good diplomacy, it is also good economics and can dovetail with some of America’s national security goals for the simple reason that it pays to have competently run and prosperous allies. Despite its current sizable advantage vis-a-vis the US, China, too, stands to benefit from serious American competition in the region.

In the spirit of maintaining maximum policy autonomy, African countries should identify their priority areas and let their partners make incentive compatible win-win pitches. This, of course, does not exclude the possibility of favored bilateral partnerships. However, any partner that demands exclusivity of any shape or form should pay up for lost opportunities.

African states and the region should stop being cheap geopolitical dates. Any and all foreign policy positions should be informed by well-grounded considerations of the region’s strategic interests. There are no (earthly) rewards for being “the conscience of the world” or any such pablum.

5. Encourage constructive intra-Africa competition

Points (1)-(4) necessarily imply a diversity of approaches across Africa’s 54 sovereign states. The African Union and respective RECs should constructively manage the diversity of approaches in order to avoid the region becoming merely a host to global great power competition. Top of the agenda should be constant reinforcement of Pan-Africanist norms of cooperation and community. Individual countries should be dissuaded from entering into external commitments that undermine regional trade and security agreements.

While accepting overall commitments to Pan-Africanism, there is room for intra-Africa competition in figuring out the specifics of cooperation with foreign actors. Competition towards having the best infrastructure, the most productive workforce, the best healthcare system, or the most productive agricultural sector would encourage individual African countries to continuously invest in their policy chops and offerings to external partners. The African Union’s role would be to limit opportunities for race-to-the-bottom dynamics by establishing formal rules on the range of acceptable policy inducements to foreign partners.

Competition is also possible across regional economic communities. The de facto hegemons within Africa’s RECs should be incentivized to compete with each on on the dimensions outlined above. South Africa has no excuse presiding over a moribund SADC. Nigeria should do more to stabilize itself and the wider Sahel, not to mention serving as the engine of economic takeoff within ECOWAS. The East African Community can be the economic engine driving prosperity from the DRC to the Horn.

III: Conclusion

We are at a pivotal moment in African history. After 60 years of independence, many African countries are coming of age. They are institutionalizing their politics, improving on the quality of policymaking, and further cementing strong national identities. Challenges still abound, but the Africa of today is fundamentally different from the region where the bottom fell out under a confluence of crises in the 1980s. The process of getting to this point necessarily had to take time under very difficult circumstances. Unfortunately, for much of it, Africa’s ruling elites were content to be bystanders to history.

What I propose here is that in the next chapter of African history, the region should be more proactive in plotting its own destiny. Given that autarky is off the table and that we are entering a multipolar age, it is important that the region develops a clear-headed approach to engagements with foreign partners. To this end African countries must improve on both dimensions of government and governance, be clear about what they want from external partners, understand the real motivations behind partners’ foreign policies, keep their options open and constructively engage all partners of goodwill, and encourage healthy intra-Africa competition.

Above all, African countries should abandon the false comfort of geopolitical naïveté that characterized much of the region’s foreign policy over the last six decades. And as they (re)take their rightful place on the grand stage of history, African leaders must understand that, in the hostile world we inhabit, there are no easy shortcuts to building strong states and coherent well-ordered multi-ethnic societies.