The Lomé Convention was a development cooperation agreement between the European Economic Community (EEC) and a large group of developing countries from Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP).Footnote 1 In 1975, the signatories of the first Lomé Convention considered it to be one of the most innovative cooperative agreements between developed and developing countries.Footnote 2 The Convention was based on the principles of equality among partners and political neutrality, and focused on industrial cooperation, trade and development aid. Among these principles, the importance of political neutrality was pivotal, and under the terms of the agreement, the EEC’s aid was to be free of any economic and political conditions.Footnote 3 As Claude Cheysson, the development commissioner of the EEC and one of the architects of Lomé I, noted to ACP representatives on the issue of the European Development Fund (EDF): ‘the EDF is your money … You do whatever you think is a priority with it’.Footnote 4 For this reason, Lomé I did not include any provisions regarding respect for human rights. The principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of ACP countries was one of the pillars of the first Convention.
This initial exclusion of human rights did not last for long. The notion of human rights was officially introduced with Lomé III in 1984 and gained increasing importance in the years that followed. However, formulating a working definition of human rights was a long process, involving passionate debates between EEC and ACP politicians and intellectuals. As a result, the Convention became one of the most important institutional contexts outside of the UN Framework wherein intellectuals and politicians from both developed and developing countries could debate the nature of human rights and their relation to development. One of the most significant periods of debate took place between 1988 and 1991 on the pages of the official periodical of Lomé, The Courier, in several joint meetings of intellectuals and politicians from the EEC and ACP and in the context of the negotiations that preceded the signing of Lomé IV (1988–9). During these years, the political and intellectual debate on human rights in Lomé exploded, which revealed fundamental differences in the theoretical understandings of human rights that were advanced by EEC and ACP intellectuals and spawned the first insertion of political conditionality in a context that had previously been characterised by political neutrality.
My research analyses this fascinating and understudied example of a debate on human rights between developed and developing countries. Despite its significance within the history of human rights, Lomé has not yet been systematically analysed by historians. Some scholars have studied Lomé as an important part of the EEC’s development cooperation strategy.Footnote 5 This scholarship reveals a growing interest in the study of the Community’s development cooperation policy, albeit with a particular focus on general features that overlook the juxtaposition between human rights and development. Lomé has also been briefly studied by Lorenzini and Unger in relation to global development within the context of the Cold War.Footnote 6 In contrast to historians, international political economists, political scientists and scholars of international law have extensively studied Lomé. International political economists have examined the Convention’s economic provisions with the aim of determining its effects on the economies of the ACP states and comparing it with other instances of development cooperation.Footnote 7 Political scientists have analysed the political relationship between the ACP and the EEC and attempted to determine whether this relationship was based on equality or dependency.Footnote 8 Many scholars of international law have examined the human rights provisions of the late Convention and its successor agreement, Cotonou. While they have identified Lomé’s contributions to international human rights law, they have primarily approached this from a juridical point of view, which disregards the impact of human rights discourse on the political and intellectual debates concerning the connections between human rights, democracy and development.Footnote 9 Aside from this scholarship, debates on human rights within Lomé have not been studied in depth by historians, despite the existence of excellent studies on the evolution of human rights discourses internationally and their connection with the Cold War, decolonisation and the evolution of the UN.Footnote 10 Only recently, the Lomé II negotiations concerning human rights have been analysed as part of the European Community’s role in the human rights breakthrough of the 1970s, or the more general evolution of the Community’s international policy, but scholars have not yet studied the further development of the human rights debate in Lomé during the 1980s and the 1990s.Footnote 11
By focusing on Lomé debates in the 1980s and 1990s, this article builds upon scholarship exploring the long-standing connections between human rights and development in various contexts. The general human rights policy of the EEC and its evolution have been analysed in connection with the Helsinki Final Act, the relationship with China after 1989 and the 1993 Vienna World Conference.Footnote 12 Furthermore, North–South debates concerning human rights and the right to development, the relationship between human rights and neoliberalism, and Third World approaches to international law (TWAIL) have been subject to extensive study.Footnote 13 Most importantly, in the last decade scholars have focused on the contributions of the global south to the progressive construction of the international human rights project and have questioned whether the 1970s were a ‘breakthrough’ decade in the history of international human rights by tracing back its main components to a long-standing North–South debate.Footnote 14 This literature has emphasised the contributions made by countries in the global south following their independence and questioned the traditional perception of post-colonial elites as mainly preoccupied with defending their national sovereignty and prioritising economic development and collective rights over individual liberties.Footnote 15 Others have traced the trajectory of human rights within the UN and other international institutions such as the World Bank and IMF.Footnote 16 Important contributions have shown how basic needs and ‘minimum core obligations’, rather than distributive justice, were consolidated in the realm of social and economic rights in the 1980s.Footnote 17
This article provides the first systematic examination of human rights and development debates in the Lomé Convention. It focuses on the strategies and public discourses adopted by EEC and ACP politicians and intellectuals and the effect that these debates had on the political evolution of the Convention and its actual implementation. In analysing the position of various ACP states and intellectuals in the Lomé framework, it emphasises the complexity of positions advanced by actors from the global south concerning the definition of human rights, their supposed universality and their relationship with development in a regional agreement between developed and developing countries. Lomé represents a unique framework for exploring global south approaches to international law, North–South relations and the evolution of the EEC’s human rights policy because it facilitated the development of a cooperation agreement between developed and developing countries and provided a space for ample political and intellectual debate.
What were the differing conceptions of human rights that were advanced by politicians and intellectuals in the ACP–EEC context? Why was this debate so important in fashioning both the main text and the actual implementation of Lomé IV? This article addresses these questions by analysing the ACP–EEC debate over the concepts of human rights and democracy and their connection to development cooperation. In order to examine the multiple sides of debate, the article draws upon newly available sources from the Historical Archives of the European Union, the Historical Archives of the European Commission, the National Archives of the United Kingdom and the Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangers of France, along with contributions of ACP intellectuals on human rights in academic journals between the 1980s and the 1990s and periodicals concerning the ACP–EEC relationship, with a particular focus on the official periodical of Lomé, The Courier.
The analysis unfolds across four sections, beginning with a focus on the human rights debate through Lomé II and III, before moving on the address the Seminar on Human Dignity and the ACP–EEC Convention that was organised by the ACP–EEC Cultural Foundation in 1988. After this, focus shifts to the political side of the debate in the negotiations for Lomé IV (1988–9), which culminated with the introduction of human rights in the main body of the text. In the final section, I will analyse the political and intellectual evolution of the human rights issue following the signature of Lomé IV, focusing on the 1991 Seminar on Democracy and Development in Africa: The Experience of the African ACP Countries, during which democracy was raised in the Lomé context for the first time.
The Human Rights Debate in Lomé II and III
The EEC had already tried to include the notion of human rights in the Convention during the Lomé II negotiations (1977–9) following spectacular human rights violations that took place in some ACP states, including Uganda, Equatorial Guinea and the Central African Empire.Footnote 18 In particular, the violations committed by Idi Amins’s regime, and pressure from the United Kingdom, several NGOs and the European Parliament in their aftermath, resulted in the EEC suspending aid to Uganda in June 1977 on human rights grounds.Footnote 19 While initially accepting individual sanctions against Uganda, the ACP countries strongly opposed the insertion of human rights in the Convention, considering it a violation of their sovereignty and accusing the Community of ‘perpetrating some sort of civilizing neo-colonial mission and a Eurocentric vision of moral values’.Footnote 20 The Nigerian intellectual Humphrey Assisi Asobie regarded these attempts as ‘a useful opportunity [for the EC states] to impose their conception of the relationship between the individual and the State’.Footnote 21 ACP intellectuals, mainly from Africa, believed that the way in which Europeans conceptualised human rights was unsuited to African realities, within which commonality, socio-economic rights and the right to development were prioritised.Footnote 22 In the end, the ACP states were successful in avoiding any reference to human rights in Lomé II because they exploited the division on the issue among the Community states. On the one hand there were France and West Germany, who preferred to avoid human rights conditionality in the Convention, and on the other, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, who insisted on the need to include an operational clause in the Convention.Footnote 23
In the 1980s, following deteriorating economic conditions within the ACP and the increasing relevance of human rights discourses internationally, the Community continued to press for the inclusion of human rights in Lomé. This was accompanied by a reconfiguration of the concept of development, which was transformed from a mere economic theory targeting growth to a wide-ranging formula centred on ‘man’ and the promotion of his well-being, through the satisfaction of basic needs and the protection of human rights.Footnote 24 During the negotiations for Lomé III, the ACP continued to oppose the inclusion of human rights in the Convention, even though they were more open to human rights discourse.Footnote 25 The ACP states pushed the EEC to take a more active stance towards South Africa, suggested outlining the right to development as a prerequisite to the enjoyment of other categories of rights, and requested better treatment for their migrant workers and students who were based in EEC states. The human rights issue became a tool for political pressure and was used by both negotiating blocs to encourage the other to compromise. For the Community, the ACP insistence on the right to development represented a significant danger. Including the right to development in Lomé would have seriously risked damaging the EEC’s member states’ position at the UN level, where a working definition of the right to development was subject to complex negotiations that would eventually culminate with the 1986 UN Declaration on the Right to Development.Footnote 26 In the end, human rights were included in the preamble of Lomé III but excluded from the main text. No mention of the right to development was made, but the importance of development for the enjoyment of well-being and human dignity of the populations of ACP states was reaffirmed. Lomé III represented a significant watershed moment because it was the first development agreement to include human rights, as noted by the Director General for Development of the Commission, Dieter Frisch.Footnote 27 Despite being confined to the preamble and thus having no repercussions on the actual implementation of the Convention, the inclusion of human rights in Lomé signalled the pertinence of the issue within the ACP. It also constituted the beginnings of a more expansive understanding of development that moved beyond narrow economic theory to consider the broader social, cultural and political context. Furthermore, human rights became an important issue for the parliamentary body of the Convention, the ACP–EEC Joint Assembly, which included European parliamentarians and ACP representatives. In February 1983, the Assembly approved a resolution asking for human rights to be accounted for in Lomé III and for a joint working group of the Assembly to analyse the issue in order to find a common definition that was acceptable to both groups.Footnote 28 The working group reported its findings in January 1985, which foregrounded the importance of human rights and considered respecting human rights an obligation for both parties to the Convention.Footnote 29
The Intellectual Debate on Human Rights before Lomé IV: The ACP–EEC Cultural Foundation 1988 Seminar
The negotiations for Lomé IV were characterised by a heated intellectual debate on radically different conceptions of human rights. In the preceding years, ACP officials had advanced the idea of a specific understanding of human rights that was suited to the social and economic realities within developing nations. These ideas were strongly influenced by the contributions of many ACP intellectuals. In a 1987 article, the Nigerian political scientist Claude Ake formulated an African human rights system that was based on collective rights. In his contribution, Ake considered the ‘individualistic’ outlook of the Western concept of human rights to be unsuitable for Africa, where societies placed ‘less emphasis on the individual and more on the collectivity’. Furthermore, individual civil and political rights were considered to be ‘abstract rights’ that did not fit within the context of a developing nation, where satisfying the right to food and survival of the population ought to be prioritised.Footnote 30
The issue of human rights quickly became an object of interest for the ACP–EEC Cultural Foundation. Established in 1986 at the initiative of the Mauritian diplomat and ACP Ambassador Raymond Chasle, the Foundation was a private institution charged with promoting social and cultural cooperation between the Community and the ACP states.Footnote 31 In December 1988, when the negotiations for Lomé IV were beginning, the Foundation hosted a seminar in Brussels entitled Human Dignity and the ACP/EEC Convention. The seminar was organised with the aim of facilitating debate on the concept of human rights, which were considered an important issue of the Lomé IV negotiations.Footnote 32 Throughout the event, ACP and European intellectuals debated the supposed universality of human rights. The seminar was opened by Chasle, who stressed the right of ACP states to pursue independent policies, potentially policies that differed from their European partners. He warned against ‘shutting oneself up in an absolute relativism and in a universality that does not take account of specificities … we must not universalise certain concepts that are proper to certain traditional cultural contexts’.Footnote 33 Chasle believed that ACP states needed to avoid adopting a European hierarchy of values, which he claimed was characterised by a radical individualism that was unsuited to the social reality of the developing world. In a similar vein, Isaac Nguema, President of the African Commission on Human Rights and Peoples’ Rights, reflected on the contentious issue of the universality and specificities of human rights:
And how could our ancestral communities be led to have confidence in the pre-established rights enshrined in declarations largely inspired by the Western view of things? … In this Africa, the individual’s only value is as part of his ethnic group. Outside that group, he is seen, and sees himself, as a slave, a beast, a bird, or a thing. He has no legal personality … The concept of the human person in Western thinking is an abstract, mechanical, static, and materialistic thing. A person’s only value depends on the part he plays in the economic production apparatus. … The world must not be a collection of individuals. … Feelings of solidarity and brotherhood … are only some aspects of the African specificity which may be an inspiration for the building of a new universality of human rights, one that is open, dynamic, and humane.Footnote 34
Nguema strongly criticised what he saw as the European approach to human rights, which he viewed as overly centred on the individual and the protection of their civil and political rights against the intrusion of the state. He contrasted this with the African concept of human rights, which he claimed was based on the importance of the community and the priority of collective rights over individual rights. The values of collectivity and solidarity could actually contribute to the building of a truly universal international human rights system, according to Nguema.
Nguema’s argument was strongly supported by the president of the ACP Council of Ministers, Carl Greenidge, who was also Finance Minister of Guyana. Greenidge spoke of how Lomé III had tried to reflect the concern for humankind in projects and programmes, and highlighted the fact
that there was a basic rethinking of the ACP–EEC relationship after twenty years of interdependence and cooperation … Our perception of human rights was no longer restricted to concern with freedom in a political sense, but now consciously encompassed the improvement in the quality of life of the ACP people and thereby the enhancement of their dignity. In doing so we sought to make the ACP–EEC Convention an instrument for the development of our people in terms of their own objectives, values, culture and priorities.Footnote 35
The European side argued for adopting a notion of human rights that was based on political and economic democracy, as well as prioritising individual civil and political rights over collective rights. During the conference, French professor of international relations Pierre Weiss insisted on the superiority of the European system of parliamentary democracy, which he presented as the political system most conducive to the respect of human rights.Footnote 36 In a similar vein, Belgian financial advisor Bernard Snoy argued that the adoption of a free market economy was inseparable from respect for human rights and democracy.Footnote 37 The position of European scholars was aptly summarised by Dieter Frisch, whose speech pointed to the role that human dignity had to play in the new Convention. Development had to be ‘based on the individual’, and the whole range of human rights had to be respected by both parties and prioritise ‘the most fundamental of individual rights: the right to life and liberty, to freedom from torture and humiliation’.Footnote 38 Frisch’s position reveals the Commission’s endeavour to reach a minimum number of human rights principles whose protection and promotion in the Convention could be deemed acceptable by both the Community and the ACP states. More generally, as noted during the negotiations by the EEC Co-Chairman of the Central Negotiating Group for Lomé IV, the Foundation’s seminar made an important contribution to the human rights debate in the Convention.Footnote 39
The disagreement between African and European scholars stemmed from the fear that Lomé could be used to impose what they saw as a European sociopolitical model onto ACP countries. This concern had characterised debates about Lomé from the outset in the late 1970s. At the same time as the Lomé IV debate took place, many ACP intellectuals advanced their criticism of what they saw as a Western conception of human rights. The Ugandan political scientist John-Jean Barya accused the EEC countries and other Western donors of enacting a form of ‘moral colonialism’ on developing countries.Footnote 40 The Tanzanian political scientist Issa Shivji and the Egyptian political economist Samir Amin also considered human rights discourse to be an imperialistic tool whose true objective was the eradication of socialism and the imposition of neoliberal economic policies.Footnote 41 Ake, in the same vein as Nguema, insisted on paying attention to African specificities and called for the creation of an African concept of democracy.Footnote 42
The Political Debate on Human Rights: The Lomé IV Negotiations
Human rights were finally included in the main text of the Convention in December 1989, at the end of the negotiations for Lomé IV. The international context in which the negotiations unfolded was particularly unfavourable for ACP countries: many developing countries faced a huge debt crisis, and their development efforts had not achieved any economic growth. Indeed, the difficult economic situation had forced many governments of ACP countries to adopt structural adjustment programmes that had been designed by the Bretton Woods Institutions in the 1980s, which required them to undertake structural political reform, adopt free market economies and enact de-regulation, with heavy human and social costs.Footnote 43 As a matter of fact, the ACP and the Community would have negotiated the insertion of structural adjustment programmes in the Fourth Convention, albeit with an approach that took into account the human dimension of adjustment.Footnote 44 The fact that ACP states were willing to accept the introduction of economic conditionality into the Convention was a clear sign of their weakened position vis-à-vis the Community.
The European Commission was convinced that the changing context would have favoured a strengthening of the human rights provisions in Lomé IV, and thus they included this objective in its negotiating mandate.Footnote 45 The ACP showed a different attitude towards human rights: in 1987, the ACP Group had issued a Declaration on Human Dignity, and in the conclusions of the November 1988 ACP–EEC Syndicates Conference of Dakar, both ACP and EEC organisations had requested the consolidation of Lomé III human rights provisions.Footnote 46
At the beginning of the negotiations, the ACP Group surprised the Community by demanding the strengthening of the Lomé III human rights provisions. They insisted upon the inclusion of the right to development, more effective measures against apartheid and better treatment of ACP nationals in EEC countries. The right to development was considered by the ACP to be ‘an integral part of fundamental human rights’, and ‘the right to survival through the satisfaction of basic needs’ was considered crucial for the attainment of the Convention’s objectives. The ACP countries considered the human rights provisions of the future Convention as a good opportunity to ‘contribute to universal civilization … [and] the recognition of their history and specific qualities’.Footnote 47 The ACP’s requests reveal the growing activism of the group, as well as and their efforts to promote a ‘Southern’ understanding of the connections between human rights and development in order to base their requests for more financial aid from the Community on a moral imperative grounded in human rights philosophy.
Some EEC member states considered these requests to be dangerous, especially requests related to the right to development, because they suggested that fundamental civil and political rights were being neglected in ACP countries.Footnote 48 The United Kingdom, France, Belgium and the Netherlands believed that it was better to maintain the Lomé III wording on human rights, while West Germany, Denmark, Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Spain all argued for strengthening provisions, to which the Commission agreed.Footnote 49 Only the United Kingdom continued to express reservations about the Commission proposals in subsequent meetings, noting that the human rights provisions of Lomé III were a ‘delicate compromise’, and did not want commitments regarding ACP migrants and apartheid to be included in the main body of the Convention.Footnote 50 Despite this, the Community resolved to strengthen the human rights provisions in Lomé IV.Footnote 51 At the same time, however, the way in which human rights had to be framed in Lomé IV still generated problems. The ACP countries insisted on the right to development and the need to include the wording ‘rights of peoples’, a request that was considered by West Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium as unacceptable, since ‘rights could only be held by individuals’.Footnote 52 Once again, there were fundamental intellectual and cultural differences on the definition of human rights. The reference to the ‘rights of peoples’ underlined one of the principal formulations on human rights made by representatives of developing countries in general and African countries in particular. So-called peoples’ rights were among those third-generation rights that the Organization of African Unity had wished to emphasise in its 1981 Charter.Footnote 53 At the same time as Lomé IV was being negotiated, the Tanzanian political scientist Issa Shivji had considered not only the individual as a legitimate rights-holder but also ‘a collective: a people, a nation, a nationality, a national group, an interest/social group, a Cultural/oppressed minority’.Footnote 54
The EEC was not ready to accept a wording that hinted at the subordination of civil and political rights to economic development.Footnote 55 The ACP states insisted on including declarations concerning apartheid and the protection of the rights of ACP migrant workers and students in the main text.Footnote 56 Raymond Chasle, who was a member of the ACP delegation, insisted on a broad conception of human rights that included the right to development. If this was to be inserted in the Convention, industrialised countries would be morally obliged to provide ACP with aid to address their debt crises. Chasle’s propositions were considered to be particularly dangerous by the Commission. Their emphasis on the right to development and basic needs risked reframing human rights as collective entitlements of the state, which overshadowed the individual dimension that was considered to be ‘central’ by the Community.Footnote 57
In June 1989, the EEC and ACP returned to the issue at the third negotiating Conference in Brussels. Despite finding some points of convergence, the same disagreements remained on the right to development and the rights of ACP migrant workers and students. The Community still hoped for the adoption of a traditional hierarchy of human rights, in which civil and political rights were prioritised.Footnote 58 In September 1989, at the fourth negotiating Conference, the Central Negotiating Group finally reached an important compromise on the inclusion of human rights in Lomé IV. They agreed that development had to be centred on mankind, and respect for human rights was considered a prerequisite for reaching a form of development that took into account broader social factors. For the Community a significant success was represented by the recognition that development and respect for fundamental human rights were deeply connected, while the ACP states obtained an explicit reference to the rights of peoples and secured EDF funding for the promotion of human rights in Lomé IV.Footnote 59 West Germany objected to the definition of human rights that was included in the article, considering it to be incompatible with their understanding of human rights, but eventually set aside their misgivings in order to avoid blocking the negotiations.Footnote 60
Human rights were finally included in the main text of the Convention. Article 5 established that development had to be centred on ‘man’, which necessarily entailed ‘respect for and promotion of all human rights’.Footnote 61 Human rights were considered indivisible and interrelated, equal importance was recognised to individual and collective rights and, for the first time, the right to development was explicitly mentioned as a priority for the ACP states. The Article also included a condemnation of apartheid and a reference to the situation of the ACP migrant workers and students, although both references were significantly shorter than the original texts proposed at the beginning of the negotiations by the ACP.Footnote 62 Despite this, their inclusion in the main text represented a success for the ACP countries, along with the absence of any reference to democracy in Lomé IV, which they would have perceived as an attempt to ‘westernise’ their political systems.Footnote 63 As a result, many ACP intellectuals welcomed Article 5 as a viable compromise between the priorities of the EEC and the ACP countries. The Senegalese jurist Keba M’Baye believed that Lomé IV provisions regarding human rights represented a qualitative evolution of the Convention because they brought together ‘individual’ and ‘peoples’ rights’.Footnote 64 Lomé certified the need for human rights to be respected in order for development to occur, an element that had always been lacking in the previous Conventions. Notwithstanding the fact that these enlarged human rights provisions were mainly the result of the ACP Group’s pressure, Lomé IV represented a significant shift in the ACP–EEC relationship because it provided the Community with a juridical reference that could justify a further evolution of the Convention towards the adoption of political conditionality.Footnote 65
The Political and Intellectual Evolution of Human Rights in Lomé: 1989–91
Ironically, the Lomé IV debate over human rights opened the path for a progressive erosion of the ACP’s negotiating power within the Lomé context. Despite the fact that Article 5 did not establish any mechanism for sanctioning human rights violations committed by the ACP states, aid to some ACP countries was unilaterally suspended by the European Commission as early as 1990.Footnote 66 These measures partially spurred from the activism of the new commissioner for development, Manuel Marìn, who wanted to link development aid with ‘human rights performance and sound economic policies’, but were also the consequence of the new international situation following the end of the Cold War.Footnote 67 The stance of the major donor countries also shifted towards the introduction of stronger political conditionalities with France, the United Kingdom and West Germany all declaring the necessity of including human rights among the criteria for granting bilateral aid to developing countries.Footnote 68
At the same time, the Community began to include human rights in its external policy, despite many contradictions in the management of human rights violations committed by China.Footnote 69 The Community incorporated human rights, democracy and the rule of law into foreign policy towards Eastern Europe and the developing countries.Footnote 70 In March 1991, the European Commission prepared a document in which the link between human rights, development and democracy was analysed. The new international situation and the pressure of public opinion forced the Community to make human rights and democracy more prominent in the guidelines for its cooperation policy. Priority had to be given to ‘fundamental human rights’, since they were considered to be ‘universal and … completely independent of any particular type of society’. The Commission considered civil liberties and political rights to be part of these ‘fundamental’ rights, in keeping with the traditional Western understanding of human rights that had been criticised by many intellectuals and politicians of the ACP in previous years. The Commission considered Article 5 of Lomé to be a good basis for introducing political conditionality into the Convention, despite the lack of actual provisions establishing sanctions. The fact that human rights were now an essential element of Lomé seemed to provide justification for the suspension of aid following significant human rights violations. This document reveals the Community’s desire to alter the fundamental principle of Lomé – its political neutrality – which hints at a dramatic renegotiation of the ACP–EEC relationship. This renegotiation seriously damaged the principle of equal partnership and disregarded the ACP’s contributions to the development of a shared concept of human rights by foregrounding traditional Western understandings of human rights as individual political and civil entitlements.
However, we should not merely see the ACP countries as a monolithic bloc in their rejection of a Western understanding of human rights and political democracy in the form of multi-party politics. In fact, many ACP opposition parties and movements, and in some cases even official governments, regarded the reconsideration of the role of human rights and democracy in development cooperation as necessary. Indeed, in the Commission document of March 1991, the internal situation of many developing countries seemed to justify the Community’s linkage of human rights and democracy:
The people of these countries [developing countries] are seeing the shortcomings of authoritarian government and the one-party model more and more clearly… In Africa, where there has hitherto been an almost total lack of any structure between the State and the individual, there has been a blossoming of spontaneous collective and individual initiatives. In particular, there has been strong pressure for the right to act thus, outside the control of a centralized authoritarian State.Footnote 71
This internal pressure is evident when we look at a colloquium entitled Democracy and Development in Africa: The Experience of the African ACP Countries, held in Dakar on 25–26 March 1991, during which the problem of democracy was discussed for the first time in connection with the Convention, despite its absence in Lomé IV. During the conference, Miguel Angel Martinez, Vice-President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, emphasised the fact that democracy required a parliament and a multi-party system. The European parliamentarian, Franz Ludwig Graf von Stauffenberg, noted that ‘without respect for the rights of man, the rights of individual, there can be no democracy’. Even Senegalese President Abdou Diouf recognised the fact that Africans themselves ‘wanted democracy in the forms found […] in Western Europe and North America’. In contrast, Raymond Chasle underlined the fact that the provisions of Article 5 of Lomé IV had already been subject to fundamental disagreements between the ACP and the EEC, while Nguema continued to emphasise the specificities of African democracy, which he regarded as radically different from the Western model:
In Western societies, it is above all the notion of democracy of exclusion which prevails: an elected majority excludes and necessarily ignores the minority, even when that majority is by just one point. In this Western way of thinking, the notion of majority is seen in a mechanical or numerical way, whereas the notion of equality is experienced in Africa in a dynamic way … It could be said therefore that African democracy is a democracy of inclusion where the opposing poles are condemned to union, whereas democracy in Western societies is a democracy of exclusion where the rich exclude the poor and where the old are resented as being a burden on the backs of their children. The second characteristic concerns the importance of solutions adopted in the interests of the community and not in the interests of the individual. In Africa there is no primacy of society over the individual, nor primacy of the individual over the group; no opposition is seen between the two.Footnote 72
In the ensuing discussion, some Senegalese parliamentarians criticised Nguema’s position on the basis that the Western model was indeed a viable possibility for developing states, although they insisted that adoption ought to remain a free choice for developing countries. This position was shared by Alidou Ouedrago, a representative of Burkina Faso, but representatives from Uganda and the Central African Republic noted that a blending of traditional and new elements of democracy was needed and that the global north had no right to impose its own vision of democracy on the global south. Lamine Diack, another Senegalese parliamentarian, thought that ‘the reduction of the world to a global village demanded the universalisation of the Western democratic model’ was embodied by the multi-party system of democracy.Footnote 73
The vast majority of ACP speakers seemed to accept the necessity of introducing more democratic structures within their governments, but they retained differing interpretations of democracy and regarded the linking of aid to human rights records as a form of neocolonialism. Yet, some speakers from the ACP countries were highly critical of this attitude and continued to advance the idea that the specificities of the African context had to be respected. A representative from Mali’s opposition parties, Mountaga Tall, clearly expressed this criticism by stressing the importance of international support for the development of democratic movements in Africa:
Arrest, torture and murder were the lot of anyone reproached for not respecting African specificity and wishing to import Western style democracy. International support was indispensable for opposing those unacceptable restrictions to fundamental rights and freedoms! It should be based on the recognition of a joint pool of universal values necessary in speaking of democracy; the right to intervene should include economic, political and diplomatic sanctions.Footnote 74
At the end of the Conference, the Co-President of the ACP/EEC Joint Assembly, Mamadou Diop, summarised the conclusions of the meeting, concluding that ‘Western-style democracy has universal elements which are applicable in Africa’, even though it was important to avoid ‘mimicry by referring to the African traditions of democracy’.Footnote 75
These conclusions reveal divergent attitudes towards democracy within representatives of the ACP, along with a growing understanding that political reform was indeed necessary and that many aspects of the Western understanding of political democracy were in fact universally applicable. However, in an attempt to maintain some sort of negotiating strength, the need to account for the African cultural tradition was not abandoned and the inclusion of political conditionality within the Convention was criticised.
The development of ACP attitudes was also the consequence of the new geopolitical environment of 1989–91. Indeed, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War greatly diminished the bargaining power of developing countries and influenced the European Commission’s attitude towards ACP authoritarian leaders.Footnote 76 Furthermore, the difficult economic situation of ACP countries made them more vulnerable to the Community’s decisions concerning Lomé, which remained a secure source of financial and technical aid. In those years, the UN was also approaching the issue of human rights with greater interest. In a 1990 global consultation on the realisation of the right to development, the necessity of including the ‘universal human rights standards’, which were comprised of ‘self-determination, democratization, and popular participation’, was emphasised. The document enhanced the importance of political pluralism and democracy as necessary preconditions for development, despite not defining a universal model for democracy. Furthermore, the global consultation centred the individual in order to avoid an over-emphasis of collective rights that could justify the violation of individual rights: the individual had to be considered as ‘the central subject rather than merely an object of the right to development’.Footnote 77 In the same year, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for a World Conference on Human Rights, which would be hosted in Vienna in 1993. At the conference, a heated debate between developed and developing countries unfolded, in which many of the issues raised in the Lomé framework were discussed, including the universal nature of human rights, individual rights as opposed to collective rights and the relationship between human rights, democracy and development.Footnote 78
The changing attitude of the ACP Group towards human rights is also evident in the different reactions to human rights violations committed in Sudan and Haiti in 1990 and 1991. Following significant human rights violations committed by the Sudanese government, the European Commission suspended its aid operations under Lomé. This prompted a strong response by the ACP Group, who issued a November 1990 Resolution condemning the Community’s action.Footnote 79 Yet, when Haitian President Jean-Baptiste Aristide was ousted from power during a military coup in October 1991, the ACP Group reacted with the following resolution, in which it requested
to all States signatory to the Lomé Convention, the suspension of all military, economic, financial and commercial ties with Haiti, as well as the suppression of all aid and technical cooperation under Lomé Convention except that intended for strictly humanitarian purposes and distributed through non-Governmental organizations.Footnote 80
The different reaction was likely justified by the fact that Haiti had only recently acceded to the Convention, as well as the broader lack of solidarity towards Haiti by the ACP Caribbean states. Jamaica and St. Kitts and Nevis had opposed Haiti’s entry in Lomé IV on human rights grounds in 1989.Footnote 81 However, many differences remained between the various ACP representatives on human rights, which can be seen in a dedicated intervention of ACP officials in September 1991 in the newspaper Global Affairs. Erskine Simmons, the representative of Barbados, showed some appreciation of this new aspect of Lomé, since he believed that ‘Lomé is unique. It is the only organization in the world where nations talk to each other on equal footing. Where everyone can criticize anyone.’Footnote 82 But other ACP representatives were not so forthcoming: the importance of development was reaffirmed, as was the idea that democracy should not be ‘confused’ with the ‘free market’. Criticism came also from Caribbean ACP delegates who insisted on the fact that ‘there is a stick and not a carrot’ and, in the words of the Haitian senator Guy Baudoy, ‘the European hope of democracy is something dreamed up in a European mind. They don’t know what misery is.’ The Zambian diplomat Patrick Sinynza summarised the ACP critique by noting that there were more important issues than democracy and that ‘Africans need to be assured of food and other basic necessities, before they can think of democracy’.Footnote 83
Furthermore, the ACP Secretary-General Gebray Berhane recognised the fact that it was no longer possible to invoke poverty as an excuse for not observing human rights and not adopting democracy, and he criticised the Community for the introduction of conditionality in the Convention.Footnote 84 However, the fact that Berhane felt that underdevelopment was not a justification for a poor record of human rights reveals how far the position of the ACP Group had changed. Berhane had been the only ACP representative to vote against the 1983 Assembly’s resolution on human rights. He justified his vote by referring to the fact that the ACP countries had their own ‘distinctive understanding’ of the concept that prioritised ‘the banishment of the effects of underdevelopment – poverty, ignorance, hunger and disease’.Footnote 85 As we can see, ACP representatives now struggled to retain this position in the new international climate of the early 1990s. The vast array of opinions advanced by the various ACP representatives reveals the growing internal fragmentation of the ACP Group, who were no longer capable of jointly opposing the introduction of political commitments in Lomé. Moreover, these political and intellectual meetings between the EEC and ACP influenced the European Commission’s will to push for the inclusion of human rights’ conditionality in the Convention.
At the end of 1991, the Community decided to place the promotion of human rights and democracy at the centre of its development policy with the EC Council of Ministers’ resolution of 28 November 1991 on ‘Human Rights, Democracy and Development’.Footnote 86 The resolution acknowledged the universal nature of human rights and recognised both human rights and democracy as requirements to reach ‘sustainable and balanced development’. The resolution established a new basis for the Community’s development cooperation policy and defined the different approaches to be taken within the field of human rights:
While, in general, a positive and constructive approach should receive priority, in the event of grave and persistent human violations or the serious interruption of democratic processes, the Community and its Member States will consider appropriate responses … Such measures, which will be graduated according to the gravity of each case, could include confidential or public démarches as well as changes in the content or channels of cooperation programmes and the deferment of necessary signatures or decisions in the cooperation process or, when necessary, the suspension of cooperation with the States concerned.Footnote 87
The promotion of human rights and democracy became, in the words of Manuel Marìn, ‘the backbone of the EC’s development cooperation policy’.Footnote 88 Indeed, following the resolution, the Community began to finance and support electoral processes, information programmes on human rights and democracy, the development of civil society and other similar initiatives. During the first ten months of 1993, there were 143 such projects costing a total sum of 39.2 million ECU.Footnote 89
Conclusion
The political debate over human rights continued after the Council of Ministers’ 1991 resolution on ‘Human Rights, Democracy and Development’. In 1993, after a prolonged discussion, the ACP–EEC Joint Assembly produced a report and adopted a resolution on ‘Human Rights and Democracy in the ACP States’. Despite acknowledging the Lomé IV compromise on the definition of human rights, the resolution formally included the notion of a ‘multi-party democracy’ in ACP–EEC cooperation for the first time.Footnote 90 Furthermore, the resolution considered civil and political rights to be independent from a given state’s level of economic development, thus prioritising them over social and economic rights.Footnote 91 The resolution also included strong condemnations of the corruption of ACP leaders and considered the suspension of aid as a last resort after the failure of all possible dialogue.Footnote 92 The resolution was crucial: for the first time in an official Lomé institution it was possible to discuss concepts that had previously been considered taboo, such as democracy and multi-party politics.Footnote 93 These concepts were previously debated in meetings between parliamentarians and intellectuals of the two groups, but never in one of the key political institutions of the Convention. Furthermore, the final resolution also considered the possibility of suspending aid to ACP countries who violated human rights, something that had not been enshrined in Article 5 of Lomé IV. The inclusion of an official procedure for aid suspension was included in the forthcoming mid-term review of Lomé IV (1995).Footnote 94
As such, debates concerning human rights, democracy and development took place within the negotiations for Lomé IV. The ensuing meetings provided the basis for the evolution of the human rights issue in the Convention and finally laid the juridical groundwork for the practical implementation of human rights conditionality in the Convention as outlined in the 28 November 1991 Resolution. By analysing this debate, this article has shown how ACP and EEC intellectuals and politicians negotiated a compromise between two differing visions over human rights – focusing particularly on their supposed universalism and their connection with development cooperation – and how these two groups ultimately arrived at a mediated understanding of human rights with Article 5 of Lomé IV. The Article was the result of the ACP’s political pressure to bring together the right to development into a development cooperation agreement and the recognition of the importance of the collective dimension of human rights for developing countries. As such, Article 5 was a successful compromise between two contrasting views on human rights and development and a novel, creative conclusion that accommodated non-Western values and norms within a binding international agreement and created an exception to what African scholars in the early 1990s called European ethnocentrism.
After the requests of ACP states were partially accommodated, the practical implementation of Article 5 and the subsequent political evolution of the human rights issue resulted in a very different outcome. The unilateral aid suspensions enacted by the Community to some ACP states on the grounds of human rights violations enhanced the growing asymmetrical power balance between the ACP and the Community in the context of a development cooperation agreement that had previously been considered as innovative precisely because of the absence of conditionality for receiving aid. This political evolution resulted in the November 1991 Resolution, which finally made the promotion of human rights and democracy one of the central aims of the Community’s development cooperation policy. This political result was accompanied by a lively debate between ACP and EEC intellectuals, in which the concept of parliamentary democracy emerged. This signalled the strong divisions within the ACP on the question of the form that democracy ought to take within a developing context, as well as the emergence of strong oppositional voices calling for democracy and human rights from within the ACP states themselves.
Therefore, the period between 1988 and 1991 was marked by a lively debate between developed and developing countries regarding the chance of reaching a viable and practical understanding of human rights. The Lomé IV debate touched upon some of the most critical political issues of the late twentieth century. What began as a disagreement regarding the nature of human rights resulted in a cooperation and confrontation between intellectuals from developed and developing countries. As a result, studying Lomé provides crucial insights into our present understanding of core tenets of contemporary international politics, including human rights, democracy, development and conditionality.
Acknowledgements
Sincere thanks go to the staff of the Historical Archives of the European Union, the National Archives of the United Kingdom and the Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangers of France for supporting me during the archival research.
Funding statement
This research has been made possible by the funding received through the 2024 Postgraduate Vibeke Sørensen Grant of the EUI.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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