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With the Cotonou Agreement due to expire in 2020, formal negotiations towards a new partnership agreement between the EU and African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states began in September 2018. Based on the acceptance of the EU's negotiating mandate, the new arrangement will be primarily organised via three specific regional protocols with each of the ACP regions. Meanwhile, the Joint Africa-EU Strategy (JAES) launched in 2007, has seen the African Union (AU) gain increased prominence as an institutional partner of the EU. Given its ambitious pan-African agenda, it adopted an alternative 'African' vision for future EU-ACP relations, to the mandate agreed by the ACP states and expressed a willingness to become directly involved in the negotiations. This article contributes an important new case-study to the existing literature on 'African agency' in international politics by considering the scope for Africa to exert agency within the post-Cotonou negotiations, given the negotiation of a specific regional compact with Africa. It adopts a structurally embedded view of agency, based on Cox's understanding of historical structures, as a fit between institutions, ideas and material relations. The central argument is that, in comparison to the negotiation of the Cotonou Agreement two decades ago, there is greater scope for African agency. However, both the ideational and material aspects of Africa's relationship with the EU, condition the limits to how effective such agency might be. Moreover, tensions at the institutional level between the ACP and AU further undermine the potential for effective African agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the European Union and the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) nation-states are the most recent construct in a long history of developing countries' dependency and reliance on developed European countries. Even though Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) are widely used by countries party to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the European Union is hiding behind illusions of non-economic trade benefits, such as increased stability and health benefits, in their EPAs with ACP countries. The European Union has the economic bargaining power, creating an upper hand in the trade negotiations with the former colonial countries and other developing countries. The EPAs, like other PTAs, consistently have provisions that should be found to violate the most-favored nation (MFN) clause. Even though GATT Article XXIV allows for PTAs, in order for the WTO to achieve one of its initiatives to liberalize world trade, the MFN clause should penetrate throughout the EU-ACP agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effectiveness of political conditionality by looking at the European Union's suspension of development cooperation with three African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states (Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast and Niger) perceived to have violated the principles of human rights and democratic principles as laid out in the Cotonou Partnership Agreement adopted in 2000. Analyzing the effectiveness of democracy promotion activities raises the question about its impact upon political processes in the recipient countries. This task is complicated, and it is beyond the aim and capacity of this paper to find a complete answer. Therefore, our conclusions will be cautiously assessed since other factors could intervene and undermine or contribute to the changes in the political system of a given country. Our findings reveal that, in most of the cases, political dialogue and appropriate measures have a modest effect on each country's performance on democratic principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Via partnership agreements like the Cotonou Partnership Agreement, the EU provides African countries with access to its markets and asks for compliance with a given set of good governance norms and procedures. While the EU markets are significant for African countries, African markets are not significant for the EU. This asymmetric relationship should give the EU the power to "convince" the African countries to adopt better governance practices. Results from panel data regression analyses indicate that for 34 African countries, an increase in the intensity of trade and imports from the EU over the period of 1984-2009 reduced the level of corruption, but not always the intensity of exports to the EU. These findings do not provide strong evidence in favor of the idea that the EU has effectively used its asymmetric trade relationship in convincing African countries to adopt better governance practices, but they consistently support alternative-rival-hypotheses, namely trade openness and imports-as-market discipline hypotheses. Further research needs to takes into account the increasing influence of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we present a new proposal for the measurement of development, applied to the Pacific Countries of the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group (ACP), conditional on their insularity, and with privileged relations with the European Union. Our index has been constructed attending to the criteria defined in the Goals of the Millennium Declaration. For this purpose we will use the P distance method for the year 2007, the last year for which data are available. This index integrates socio-economic variables that permit a territorial ordering of the Pacific ACPs, in terms of those partial indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The WTO-sanctioned waiver for the extension of the Lomé system of preferences to the African, Caribbean Pacific (ACP) countries expired in December 2007. This deadline coincided with the scheduled conclusion of the EU-ACP Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) negotiations, initiated in 2002. The origins of the EU-ACP relationship stretch back to the early days of the European Community, and were formalised in 1975 with the signing of the Georgetown Agreement. However, there has been a notable `cooling' of the relationship since the signing of the Cotonou Partnership Agreement in 2000. For many, the new EPA framework is perceived as a diktat rather than a true partnership agreement. This article reviews the culmination of six years of talks between the two sides and the EU's apparent `rationalisation' of a decades-old partnership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines two limited forms of preferential trade arrangements: the African Growth and Opportunities Act of 2000 (AGOA) enacted by the U.S. Congress, and the Cotonou Agreement between the European Union and the African, Caribbean and Pacific Countries (ACP). Both of these regimes are motivated by the belief that allowing trade status for developing economies will accelerate their economic growth and development.

The Cotonou Agreement, signed on 23 June 2000, defines the new relationship between the European Union (EU) and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states. It was the result of 18 months of negotiations to decide the future of EU-ACP relations after the Lomé Convention's expiry on 29 February 2000. This article highlights the significant changes represented by the Cotonou Agreement and emphasises some of the dangers that may result for the ACP states. In doing so, the article adopts a neo-Gramscian perspective showing how the nature of the new EU-ACP agreement has significantly shifted the relationship further from one of co-operation to one of coercion. The new approach taken by the EU can be understood within the context of the hegemonic dominance of neoliberalism within political elites. This is most explicitly demonstrated by the EU's major justification for the proposed changes: the need to comply with the core principles and rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]