8 - North Africa in the World

Summary

As the preceding chapters have shown, the way in which North Africa is addressing major global challenges such as economic stagnation, the decline of rentierism, climate change and socio-economic inequality has direct implications for North African citizens as well as those in surrounding states and regions. This chapter will examine the opposing directional effects – how external actors engage with North African states. It will look at five major actors – that is, the West (United States and Europe), the Gulf States, Sub-Saharan Africa, China and Russia – to understand both their interests in North Africa as well as the challenges and opportunities that those interests offer.

The West

The international community (in particular the United States, the European Union and the EU member states) have deep and important diplomatic and economic relationships with North Africa. Europe is inextricably tied to North Africa through geography as well as history. While the US has placed less emphasis on North Africa than on other parts of the MENA region (apart from Egypt), the country also maintains important security and economic ties with most North African states. As Richard Youngs notes, ‘the EU's main focus has been on one part of the MENA region: the Mediterranean’. Europe's contemporary approach towards North Africa began with the 1995 Barcelona Process (or the Euro Mediterranean Partnership Initiative), which developed a multi-lateral framework on security, political, social, cultural and economic relations between Europe and the countries of the southern Mediterranean. Through this process, North African states signed association agreements that opened the door to free trade agreements and allowed them access to aid from Europe; however, as Adel Abdel Ghafar and Anna Jacobs argue, ‘[t]hese free trade agreements suffered from blatant imbalances, and countries such as Algeria remained hesitant for several years to sign them because of the privileging of European industry over North African agriculture and the political conditions attached to the agreements’. The Barcelona process evolved into the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in 2004. The ENP was set up to ‘create a ring of friendly, stable and prosperous countries around the European Union in order to guarantee stability along the outer borders of the EU’.