EUROPEAN NEO-COLONIALISM IN AFRICA

Europe has a peculiar relationship with Sub-Saharan Africa where the Europeans could historically extol and justify their colonial project most loudly and skilfully. This colonial history of the individual European states has had profound implications on Europe's contemporary relations with Africa. Since the emergence of the European Union as a supra-national entity, the relations with those states have regularly been negotiated referring to its claims of being a major development actor in Africa. Development policy is a hybrid policy of the EU conducted both bilaterally through the European Commission and multilaterally through the individual efforts of the member states. This article focuses on the bilateral conduct of the development policy by the EU as a collectivity and argues that in the long run the EU has transformed from a development actor into a neo-colonial power in Africa.