We Choose Our Partners: Africa’s New Internationalism and Global Reform

• In Event: Foreign Aid and Financing: New forms and New Uses

Abstract

A stern warning by the African Union Commission Chair, Moussa Faki Mahamat, to the European Union, proclaimed that the world should, “Stop this stereotypical idea of Africa as a hapless terrain where Europe, China or others have free rein to battle for influence! We choose our partnerships, and create conditions based on mutual interest and benefit”. The statement marks another incident in a series of dialogues about global Africa, and captures the complexity of a global order in which developing world regions struggle for equality and recognition in the transaction of international relations. The paper analyzes the continent’s increasing engagement in global power relations and inclination to define global politics on African-interested terms. This phenomenon is explained as a new African internationalism and uses the AU’s 2005 ‘African Common Position’ to reform the UN as an exemplar that exposits the emergence of this genre of internationalism in the early Post Cold War era. The reform proposal exemplifies the continent’s pioneering efforts to democratize international relations during this era in which Africa’s African Union (AU) emerged as an active participant in the reform debates. The UN's Africa Bloc led the developing world to demand a stronger voice and representation in UN decision-making. The paper argues that this new genre of African international relations seeks to bring about reform of the existing international system to give Africans more geopolitical voice and influence to coexist in the system equitably. To this end, Africa's interplay of global interaction emerges in-and is complicated by- a new Post Liberal, “Multiplex World” order.

Author

• Rita Kiki Edozie, Ph.D., University of Massachusetts - Boston