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THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION
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and exposed a major rift between Brussels and
Washington. Lastly, there is America’s gradual
withdrawal from Syria and Iraq. The retaliatory
bombing of military facilities of the Al-Assad re-
gime on 13 April 2018, in response to the chemical
weapons attack on the city of Douma and carried
out jointly by the United States, the United
Kingdom and France, initially created the illusion of
a possible return to multilateralism by Washington.
However, it is uncertain whether the joint action
will continue and lead to something solid beyond
the immediate media impact. The underlying real-
ity is that the United States has ceded space in the
region to other powers such as Russia, Iran or
Turkey. That could prompt the Europeans – once
again, with French leadership – to return to the
Geneva process for a political transition and con-
sider an increase in its civilian, military, financial,
political and diplomatic presence.
A commitment to Africa pending
realisation
With regard to Africa, we can talk of three prom-
inent events in the period. One was the G20
Summit in Hamburg in July 2017, which was
marked by the leadership and commitment of
Germany and of Chancellor Merkel to launch a
new approach to Africa. It was about putting the
European spotlight on the African continent by
the world’s major economies. The adoption of a
broad agenda in Hamburg, including commit-
ments regarding funding, marked a shift in the
way in which the EU is going to interact with
Africa – no longer “for Africa,” as in the old ways
of thinking of the past, of development aid.
A second moment, following on from the
G20, was the African Union-EU Summit in
Abidjan in November 2017, geared towards de-
fining a sustainable future for a region that the
Europeans are starting to see as an opportunity,
not a problem. The most spectacular result on
the financial plane was the agreement for a
44-billion euro foreign investment plan of a
public and private nature, which comes on top
of initiatives from the Multiannual Framework
or the Fund for Africa. The new approach pri-
oritises key sectors such as youth education and
training – in view of the African demographic
boom forecast for the coming decades – and
balanced and sustainable growth. The end of
the previous Joint Africa-EU Strategy (2007-
2017) in 2017 and of the Cotonou Agreement
in 2020 make a change of course essential. In
this area, we could also speak of a certain un-
derstanding in the Franco-German axis, with re-
newed interest from France and from other
countries such as Spain, which traditionally has
had a lesser presence but which has huge poten-
tial for reaching into the region. Lastly, in a third
moment, Macron made an extensive tour of sev-
eral African countries in January 2018. The tour,
while not without controversy, served to illus-
trate not only the need to change attitudes from
the past on both sides, Europe and Africa, but
also to see that the success of the new partner-
ship will largely depend on the capacity of the
European partners to leave old attitudes behind,
to “Europeanise” their policies and see Africa as
a player with which to cooperate and not as an
area to compete among one another.
Latin America: regionalism and
multilateralism in crisis
The attacks on the multilateral system from the
neighbour to the north, the United States, coin-
cided with a time of certain political decline of