This chapter explores the evolution of European Union (EU)-Africa relations against the rise in interest of both China and the US in the African continent. It describes the role of the three different actors in Africa, concentrating on two important policy fields, namely security and development aid. The EU has been particularly active in promoting security in Africa, both through military and civilian missions, and by supporting the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). The chapter proposes a theoretical framework which is mainly inspired by neo-classical realism, complemented with some elements of small state theory. It also proposes to place the neo-classical realist approach within a broader theoretical framework, linking the concept of 'intentional ideas' and soft power to the significance of values and norms in international affairs.

This volume sets out to provide a concise and accessible overview of the history of today’s European Union. A brief account of such a sprawling topic obviously cannot be comprehensive. Instead, I hope to lay out the broad sweep of developments, without getting bogged down in the details. These days all the EU’s significant moves are documented online, including all its treaties, major decisions, national positions, specific policies, and other technicalities. The institutions themselves provide deep insights into their ongoing work, often also supplying snapshots of historical developments. Even more importantly, there are entire libraries of books on specific policies and the roles of institutional actors such as the European Commission, the Parliament, the Council, and the various member states. Amidst such a wealth of information, it is all too easy to get tangled up in the details. In response, this book seeks to provide a coherent survey of the EU’s history for the general reader.

This chapter explores how the European Union (EU's) strategic preferences, as evidenced by its behaviour in Africa, inform the notion of a strategic culture in the Union's external relations. It examines Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) operations. Sub-Saharan Africa is of considerable interest as a 'test-bed' of CSDP activity. The chapter introduces the notion of strategic behaviour and its relation to the concept of strategic culture as applied to the EU. It identifies three frames of EU external relations, derived from an analysis of strategic declarations: the security-development nexus, the human security imperative and preference for local enforcement. The chapter argues that these frames, which motivate the EU's CSDP activities, constitute a basis for understanding the EU's strategic culture. By assessing CSDP missions in Africa based on these types, the chapter gives context to the EU's foreign and security policy in the region.

Though focusing chiefly on Weimar Germany, this chapter broadens its argument to Europe overall. Weimar culture’s vitality contained multidimensional antagonisms between secularizing reforms and their Christian-nationalist opposition. Complicating that enmity were the consequences of commercial entertainment cultures, which troubled socialists as much as conservative, Christian, and other rightwing critics. Such commentaries clustered around the political symbolics of the New Woman. If the latter’s proponents saw an ideal of happy personhood and emancipated living, the rightist enemies railed against change in the name of an imagined past of orderly families and settled gender inscriptions, often in idioms of angry, masculinist misogyny. Across interwar Europe during the 1920s, from Spengler, Huizinga, and Eliot through Ortega y Gasset to the Conservative Revolution, Schmitt, and Heidegger, conservative intellectuals fashioned a declensionist, deeply reactionary critique of the evolving present.

Prohibitions, Permits, Power

A mill owner in Salem conducted his own social experiment in sobriety in February 1939. He assembled his workers and instructed them to sit and stand several times in rapid succession, noting that they would ‘never have been so responsive to orders in the days when they drank’. Salem went dry on 1 October 1937. Chittoor and Cuddapah followed suit a year later, and North Arcot went dry in 1939. Prohibition's introduction occurred at the convergence of state-directed reform, political competition, entrenched social anxieties and waves of resistance to the policy. Official assessments painted a glowing picture of its successes, reflecting the ‘idiom of enthusiasm’ so characteristic of Congress mass mobilisation. English and vernacular newspapers joined studies commissioned by Rajaji's government in heaping praise on prohibition for apparently improving the lives of former addicts. Much of the extant literature has echoed this bias while dismissing non-elite resistance to prohibition as ‘local nuisances’ to a policy of great societal importance.

That there would be such a bias is not surprising. Prohibition had been won after a long, hard struggle. By the time the policy was introduced, the priority was proving that it would work. Policymakers found themselves having to justify the sacrifices that had already been made and that were yet to come. Publicly, they feted prohibition. Privately, however, the policy continued to function as prohibitioning between political elites, between the authorities and society, and between different social groups. Prohibition thus developed a double life until the colonial government suspended it in September 1943.

Chapter 5 offers a new reading of Cuba’s most famous enslaved writer, Juan Francisco Manzano, who started publishing in 1821 and became legally free in 1836. While it engages with his well-known autobiography, the chapter focuses on his poetry. To the degree that slavery was justified through race, Manzano’s emergence as an author produced racial doubt among those who believed that poetry and literary skills were the exclusive domain of white people. At the same time, he explicitly disidentified from blackness, prompting many generations of critics to discuss how Black he was. As new generations return to his texts, the palimpsest of conflicting ideas about his Blackness or lack thereof keeps changing. The chapter examines some of these layers by focusing on the paradox of enslaved authorship – of a writer who built his authority on the basis of his deauthorization. Poems, the chapter shows, were Manzano’s most elaborate literary form of back talk, as they allowed him to evade the abolitionist pressure to write about slavery.

This chapter examines the theological and political ramifications of Sancho’s imaginings of the afterlife. While he doesn’t believe in Hell, Sancho uses the figurative language of infernal character to criticize chattel slavery, religious bigotry, and British colonialism. When he describes Heaven, meanwhile, Sancho projects himself and his readers into an ideal religious collective that includes American Quakers, enslaved West Africans, Roman Catholics, Hindus, and Muslim clerics, as well as fellow Anglican Protestants. Attending to Sancho’s notion of the afterlife reveals the distinctiveness of his religious thought among Black anti-slavery intellectuals. His pluralistic definition of religious virtue allows him to extend belonging further than his contemporaries – beyond co-religionists and even beyond the category of the Christian. Logics of mixture and mingling in Sancho’s letters enable him to enlarge divine love and salvation without universalizing belief, holding a multiracial and trans-denominational community together without eliding differences.

Although oil is not the only potential source of rent from the rest of the world for contemporary states, it is by far the most important. The increase in oil prices post 1970 facilitated the emergence of rentier states, especially, but not exclusively, in the Gulf region, hugely increasing the volume of the rent at their disposal. This allowed consolidation of political regimes which otherwise would probably not have survived, and gave power holders an unprecedented degree of autonomy from their societies. The chapter then explains how the rentier state needs to engage in large-scale public expenditure to circulate the rent domestically, nurture a private sector and promote economic development along a peculiar model of its own. In order to counter the phenomenon known in economics as the ‘Dutch Disease’, the Gulf states have opened their doors to massive temporary immigration of foreign workers, creating a very peculiar labour market structure which has ended up damaging the opportunities for productive employment available to nationals, especially the young. This model must now be overcome, but while some states are in a position to remain rentiers, thanks to large accumulation of financial resources, others face an eroding oil rent and the need to increase domestic taxation to pay for their ever-increasing expenditure. Increasing reliance on taxation of nationals is inevitably coupled with increasing demand for accountability, which will eventually need to be accommodated through political reform.

Both the Euro-Africa Summit in Lisbon and its successor in Tripoli illustrate Europe's difficulty in marrying its rhetorical goal of a strategic partnership with Africa and its trade policy towards the continent. This chapter describes the light that the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) saga throws on the ability of the EU to conduct a coherent negotiation that advances its objective interests whether these are defined in terms of values or of realpolitik. It analyses the evolution of the EPA, and its place within broader European trade policy, from the early 1990s. The chapter examines the arguments for and against the EU's position and asks how far EPAs have advanced European interests. It argues that there is a low likelihood of measures favoured by the European Commission actually being implemented fully by governments that have agreed EPAs under duress and remain unconvinced of the benefits.

This chapter examines the profound impact of the Arab uprisings on the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)). While initially perceived as distant from the epicentre of the unrest, these countries underwent significant economic, political and security transformations as a result of it. It describes key events initiated by the Tunisian revolution, emphasising the interconnectedness of the Gulf region with the wider Arab uprisings. Furthermore, it explores the economic and socio-political conditions in the GCC countries that shaped their responses to the uprisings, particularly in the context of the challenges posed by the oil-based developmental model. In terms of implications, it dwells on the growing polarisation and intra-GCC rifts, particularly the conflict between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, on the one hand, and Qatar, on the other, between 2017 and 2021, jeopardising regional integration. The Arab uprisings revealed the vulnerabilities of the GCC countries’ status quo, leading to a reassessment of their political and economic trajectory both from the domestic and the external relations points of view.