Political Trust and the Politics of Security Engagement: China and the European Union in Africa by Benjamin Barton

Author:Benjamin Barton [Barton, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351714273
Google: N2E1DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-13T12:26:23+00:00

Concluding remarks

More than a decade has passed since fighting broke out in Darfur between the various rebel groups and the Sudanese government, backed by its militia forces. As the intensity of the fighting has progressively waned, the Darfur conflict has come across as a relic of yet another civil conflict in post-Cold War Africa, despite all the talk of genocide having been the source of much debate during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Looking back at the political dynamics surrounding the crisis, one is soon hit by the relatively chaotic nature of proceedings towards which endogenous and exogenous actors each contributed to render more complex regardless of their respective ambitions. The EU and its member states initially saw Darfur through the prism of their aspirations to normalise their reputations in the African security realm, by being seen as doing their best for the most vulnerable in the context of the crisis. This intention was undoubtedly sound but as this chapter has highlighted, the EU did not possess sufficient collective political will or resources to implement these aspirations, whilst constricted activism narrowed Brussels’ realm of possibilities.

Therefore, following numerous failings over the first half of the conflict, the EU – in tandem with other Western government and civil society actors – sought to indirectly pressure third parties perceived to hold leverage over Khartoum to use this leverage to the benefit of Western objectives for Darfur. This resulted in deflecting Western shortcomings and turning the attention towards the shortcomings of these other select third parties, notably the PRC – an easy target at the time for a number of aforementioned reasons. Instead of trying to build the rapprochement needed with China on the ground in Darfur so as to allow a cooperative bilateral mindset to guide Beijing towards channelling its leverage over the GoS more in line with Western objectives, actors such as the EU had to indirectly coerce China to fall in line by relying upon the global message of outrage voiced by certain civil society groups. As some analysts have pointed out, the EU and its member states should never have relied in the first place on the momentum generated by this civil society movement which coerced leaders in Beijing into adopting a more proactive stance on the conflict (Abramovitz and Kolieb 2007). They argue that because of the difference in political values between the two sides, the EU (and the US) should not have been looking to China to act as its “moral compass” on Darfur towards the latter stages of the conflict. Had they opted for a strategy based on rapprochement over coercion, they may have set bilateral interaction on Darfur on a different course – one which possibly may have improved the overall situation on the ground.

Nevertheless, such claims remain purely speculative as practically speaking the levels of cognitive-based trust needed to spark a bilateral rapprochement between officials on both sides were unlikely to ever materialise. European officials did not believe it necessary to steer clear

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