Between Scylla and Charybdis: The Foreign Economic Relations of Sub-Saharan African States

Abstract

Over the last decade the foreign economic relations of sub-Saharan African states have focused increasingly on their severe debt and economic crises. These relations have involved wrestling with debt service burdens and the rigors of rescheduling with the Paris and London Clubs; conducting difficult negotiations with bilateral and private creditors; bargaining over conditionality packages with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank or fending them off; distributing the painful costs of adjustment; coping with import strangulation; and devising new development policies and strategies. The sub-Saharan states were already highly dependent on the outside world; the intensity, stakes, and levels of conditionality of these states' foreign economic relations have increased substantially since the middle of the 1970s. They are certainly political, as they impinge on very central issues—sovereignty, political order, development, and mass welfare. In this sense, they are foreign economic relations with very powerful domestic roots and consequences. African states and external actors are going to have to work together to ameliorate Africa's crises.