“Our response to poverty will show whether we understand the implications of interdependence, or whether
we prefer to delude ourselves that the poverty and deprivation of the great majority of mankind can be
ignored without tragic consequences for all.”
—Lester Pearson, Partners in Development, 1969
Pearson’s warning sounds unusually contemporary. Aid budgets are being cut across Europe and beyond,
while development cooperation is increasingly recast as “partnership.” The language appears new; this
paper asks whether it is and what the history of EU development policy reveals about partnership and
unequal power.
It follows that question in three steps. First, it traces the setting in which development cooperation emerged
in the early construction of European external action. It then examines the relationship between
development and partnership under unequal power. Finally, it returns to EU experience to see how that
relationship has worked in practice.
From colonial extraction to development cooperation?
Aid has always been part of foreign policy. Realists understood it as statecraft: a way to secure allies,
markets, resources and influence. Liberal thinkers saw enlightened self-interest: cooperation could manage
interdependence and produce stability from which donors would also benefit. Critical and dependency
traditions showed how development cooperation could reproduce unequal relations between North and
South. No serious account of aid treats it as separate from power. EU history makes that clear. When the
Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957, European integration was not imagined only within Europe’s
continental borders. Algeria, under French colonial rule but legally treated as part of France, and the
Belgian Congo were built into the early economic architecture of the European project. The European
Development Fund was created within that colonial association framework; the Yaoundé Conventions then
carried key features of the relationship into the era of formal independence.
The language was development cooperation. The political bargain drew on the concept of Eurafrica: African
resources, markets and geopolitical weight were seen as assets for Europe’s recovery and global ambition,
while associated states were offered development finance and preferential access to European markets.
Aid financed real public needs. But it also helped stabilise a post-colonial relationship without transforming
the inherited terms of trade, production and power. Development cooperation addressed needs within a
wider foreign-policy bargain that continued to preserve the conditions of dependency and extraction that
generated many of those needs.
That is where the gap first appears. Development was embedded in a relationship whose wider terms
undermined the development it claimed to support. The European Development Fund captured this
ambiguity. It was formally co-managed with recipient countries, but co-management did not mean equal
power. As one researcher has shown, the Commission’s authority relied less on neutral expertise than on
clientelist practices, opacity, permanent exceptions to formal rules and privileged relationships with African
elites. The issue is that development policy, from its origin, helped make a deeply unequal post-colonial
bargain politically workable.
Partners in development?
By 1969, after what Pearson called a “lost decade for development”, the limits of aid had become clear.
Development cooperation could finance real needs, but it could not deliver development if the wider
relationship continued to reproduce dependency, weak productive capacity and unequal power. He argued
that that aid could not deliver development on its own if the wider economic relationship continued to work
against it. The Overseas Development Institute made the same point in its response to his report, insisting
that aid be seen in the context of the “whole economic relationship” between rich and poor countries. What
the EU now presents as a new language of “partnership” was already, then, a recommended answer to a
familiar contradiction: development had to shape the whole relationship—trade, debt, investment,
technology and international rules—not merely the aid provided within it. In the EU context, this ambition is
made particularly difficult because external action is organised through a complex institutional architecture,
with different policies, actors and competences shaping the relationship. But that complexity does not
remove the political question. It makes it more important: can the EU’s wider external action support, rather
than undo, its own development objectives?
Pearson’s answer began with power. In an unequal relationship, donor interests prevail unless they are
actively constrained. That is why development cooperation had to be accountable to partner priorities;
otherwise, as Hans Morgenthau warned, aid could become “bribery” dressed as development. Ownership,
alignment and accountability were the institutional conditions under which mutual interest could be
possible. They were institutional mechanisms designed to give partners’ interests weight in a relationship
where Europe controlled more finance, markets and institutional power. Their purpose was to make mutual
interest real and accountable, rather than a claim made by the stronger party. This was neither charity nor a
moral add-on. It was enlightened self-interest: a relationship that weakened livelihoods, fiscal space and
productive capacity—and weakened partner states—would return to Europe as instability, mistrust and
displacement.
The EU’s own legal settlement later adopted this lesson. Development cooperation and poverty eradication
became objectives of Union external action: core interests in the Union’s external mandate. Development
effectiveness gave the same logic operational tools through ownership, alignment and mutual
accountability. The Union’s constituent framework went further through policy coherence for development,
requiring the EU to consider whether its other policies undermined those objectives. The logic was clear:
Europe’s long-term interest required partners to be able to develop, govern and choose their own
pathways. Yet the difficulty of operationalising policy coherence crystallises the EU’s core contradiction. It
has the Treaty commitment, the instruments and the partnership narrative that give credibility to its
multilateral claim. But these have repeatedly collided with the reality of partnerships that perpetuate
unequal power. This creates a political gap between the EU’s stated ambition and the material reality of its
power.
Aid, trade and migration: a partnership?
Trade makes the problem concrete. As an exclusive EU competence, it offers a clear indication of how the
Union’s broader partnership outcomes interact with its development objectives. Before the Yaoundé
Conventions, African economists and the UN Economic Commission for Africa warned that privileged
access to European markets could preserve commodity dependence and weaken regional integration
rather than support industrial transformation. Yaoundé still provided preferential trade access, and more
than fifty years later the pattern remained visible: between 2013 and 2020, 47 per cent of EU net foreign
direct investment in Africa went to mining, compared with 7 per cent of EU outward investment globally. Aid
financed real needs as part of the cooperation, but it could not alter the wider trade and investment patterns
that limited productive transformation and perpetuated the development challenges it claimed to address.
Ghana shows that aid did not merely sit beside this wider bargain; it could be used to secure it. Economic
Partnership Agreements shifted parts of the African, Caribbean and Pacific relationship from preferential
access towards reciprocal liberalisation with the EU. Ghana faced tariff pressure on key exports if it refused
to conclude an EPA. Local stakeholders saw EU budget support—the EU modality most closely associated
with ownership and alignment—as part of the leverage used to secure the contested interim agreement,
which later entered into force. The contradiction is not that aid delivered no benefits. It is that aid also
helped secure a trade deal that threatened the productive sectors and livelihoods on which those
development outcomes depended.
Ghana’s poultry and tomato sectors then struggled against cheap imports, including from Europe. Rural
livelihoods weakened, displacement followed, first internally and then across borders, and some displaced
Ghanaian tomato workers later moved to Europe and ended up … in Italian tomato fields. Aid then returned
at the end of the same chain through EU migration-containment and “root causes” policies. This is how
migration reveals the political contradiction at its sharpest: development resources are mobilised first to
help secure a wider unequal partnership and later to manage its consequences, while the trade and
productive inequalities at the source remain largely untouched. Development policy provided moral credit,
practical leverage and real benefits for a relationship that undermined the very development it claimed to
advance. This is the historical and political contradiction of the EU’s partnership offer.
The fault line of partnership
The lesson is not that development policy should stand outside Europe’s wider interests. It cannot. In fact, it
is the opposite: development depends on whether the wider terms of partnership—trade, investment,
finance, technology and the rules governing interdependence—are made compatible with partners’
interests. Instead, development budgets financed real needs and delivered real benefits, yet sat
within—and helped secure—a wider partnership whose terms reproduced the unequal power, weak
productive capacity and constrained development choices that it was meant to address.
This is the historical contradiction of the EU’s partnership offer. Europe has claimed development and
cooperation, but its broader exercise of power has repeatedly undermined the conditions those claims
require. The result is not merely inconsistency. It is a gap between Europe’s political and multilateral
ambition and the material reality of its partnerships—a gap experienced by partners as paternalism,
contradiction and the continuation of historical inequalities under new language. Unless development policy
can make partner interests politically consequential across the wider relationship, partnership remains a
claim Europe makes rather than a bargain both sides can own.
Interestingly, Global Gateway appears to respond to this history. It recognises that development cannot be
reduced to aid and brings infrastructure, energy, investment, trade and geopolitical cooperation into a single
partnership offer. But whether it gives development and partner priorities greater force across that wider
relationship is the question the next piece examines.
Leave a Reply