The AfCFTA in the Context of Africa-EU Relations: A Regulation Analysis of Some Stylized Facts

Abstract The inception of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) in 2018, an event which redefined the institutional dimensions of Africa-European relations, is at the centre of historic normative debates between two dominant contending schools on the imperatives of African unity. While Pan-Africanists advocate for African unity as a strategy to rupture trade relations between the two continents in question, Afro-European integrationists assert that the quest for African unity should not be divorced from deeper exchanges between Africa and Europe. The AfCFTA is embedded in an ensemble of Africa-EU free trade institutions and therefore is bound to be perceived by Pan-Africanists as Africa yielding to European domination and mobilized by Afro-European integrationists as a vindication of the validity of their assertions. With the aid of Bob Jessop’s regulation analysis, Radhika Desai’s concept of combined development, and my notion of syndic neo-corporatism as well as the method of sequence analysis, this paper makes a case beyond the normative perspectives of the two schools. It does so in order to demonstrate that while Pan-Africanists miss the point that African elites instrumentally value the AfCFTA as a rent extraction scheme, Afro-European integrationists fail to recognize that the AfCFTA fits the strategic quest of the EU to prevail over its global competitors.