The Making of EU-Africa Trade Regionalism: The Law and Governance of the Yaoundé and Lomé Conventions (1963-1974)

Abstract

How was ‘international trade’ between former European empires and their former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific governed after decolonisation? As is commonly known, the vast majority of African countries became independent in the 1960s, and so new regional trade agreements (RTAs) were regarded as necessary to govern their economic relations with Europa. The Yaounde and Lome Conventions were then concluded between the European Union (EU) and the bloc of newly independent African countries. Mainstream scholarship provides comprehensive and useful accounts of these post-colonial Conventions. However, little is known about the role of law and lawyers in their making and governance. Part of this history is about the political and intellectual struggles in the legal profession to determine which projects, ideas, and norms could be validly and legitimately applied to EU-Africa RTAs. The other part is about the efforts of lawyers to organise and employ this emerging conceptual framework to structure their negotiations and production while securing the influence of international law in and over the EU-Africa trade governance. This paper combines historical and social-legal approaches to show that a distinct legal concept – which I call the development framework – was pivotal in designing, interpreting and applying the Yaounde and Lome Conventions. This legal concept was particularly developed and persuasively used by a contextualised group of European and African lawyers from 1947 through 1985. This finding contrasts with the common-sense view in the legal profession that concrete RTAs are varieties of a single legal concept. I conclude that the legal governance of EU-Africa regionalism was a singular ideational, institutional and jurisprudential experiment due significantly to the unique features of lawyers’ legal concept of EU-Africa RTAs.