Holdouts overshadow EU’s new partnership with Africa, Caribbean, Pacific

The European Union finally inked a new partnership agreement with the 79-member Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific states on Wednesday, but the win was muted by the fact that only 44 of those 79 countries came ready to sign the deal into provisional application during a two-day meeting in the Samoan capital, Apia. The remaining 35, including heavyweights such as Nigeria, Rwanda, and Senegal, have until the end of the year to sign or risk losing access to loans from the European Investment Bank, which relies on the agreement for its legal operating mandate outside the EU. Officials from the EU institutions and the OACPS secretariat were confident, however, that the remaining states would sign in the coming weeks. Georges Chikoti, the OACPS secretary-general, told reporters Tuesday that some members of his organization needed more time to debate and approve the agreement in their national parliaments. That may seem incongruous given that the text — which covers topics ranging from climate change to human rights to migration — has been settled since April 2021. But Chikoti said that some ACP countries only began discussing the agreement in earnest once EU states finally gave their final blessing on the text in July this year. The delay on the European side had little to do with the content of the agreement. Rather, Hungary for two years and then briefly Poland early this year used the need for unanimity among the 27 EU states to try and extract concessions from the European Commission on unrelated issues. Still, there was a tinge of absurdity this week that both sides had painstakingly negotiated a text for two years, then endured more than two more years of EU diplomatic smoke and mirrors over when to agree it, only to arrive in Samoa where just 56% of ACP states signed on, while, the Europeans affirmed an “exclusion list” of topics — many, such as anti-money laundering, are dear to their ACP counterparts — that will only apply to EU states as each ratifies the deal at home. A historic, historical agreement Unlike its predecessor, the 2000 Cotonou Agreement, the Samoa Agreement consists of three separate regional protocols with an overarching introduction and includes an annex which the EU hopes will better facilitate the return of undocumented migrants to their country of origin. Another crucial difference is that whereas in the past the OACPS in theory had some say over how EU development money was doled out, the bloc’s 2021-2027 budget brought this solely under the control of the EU institutions. The Samoa Agreement for the most part contains vague, aspirational language, such as committing both sides to pursue “people-centered and rights-based societies.” Its main function is to prolong an institutional setup whereby the commission almost entirely funds the roughly 60 staff at the OACPS secretariat, mostly based in Brussels, who then organize various nonbinding, and often poorly attended, dialogues on various development topics. Officials from both sides admit privately that the EU-OACPS dynamic is at a low ebb, with seemingly little top-level political buy-in. But Europe appears to have decided that its funding to the OACPS secretariat — €46.7 million planned for 2021-2027, compared to €36.5 million disbursed between 2013 and 2023 — is a small price to pay for the possibility of keeping open a channel of communication, no matter how weak, with the group of mostly low-income countries, at a time when Russia and China are also seen to be expanding their influence abroad. This month’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai will be an important early test of whether the two bodies can use their partnership to forge common positions.