Tuesday 4 May 2010

Europe and Africa arguing

For all the single ladies (read: trade wonks), my article on the EU-East African Community economic partnership agreement - these deals [to replace the now illegal preferential trade agreements between the EU and its former colonies] are going very slowly, only the Caribbean has signed one.

I find the EU's institutional partnerships with its former colonies weird. Seems to be this rhetoric of intimacy which doesn't square too well with the realities. I'm ignoring Niall Ferguson's hideous revisionism, which even Channel 4 saw fit to air, that the West simply 'brought medicine' to Africa.