With several African countries abandoning the CFA franc and a wave of coups sweeping across the continent since 2021—notably in Burkina Faso and Mali, where the uprisings had a marked anti-French character—Africa may be said to have entered a phase of economic self-assertion. This comes with moves towards regional integration, with several states pooling their reserves in the Central Bank of West African States as far back as 2020 and the Congo joining the East African Community in 2022.
This is the background for increasing Chinese investment in Africa. It is not merely the changing of imperial guards. We might say that the rise of economic nationalism and regional integration in Africa coincides with a new international balance of power, benefitting from investors who are incentivized to offer African leaders a better deal than their Western competitors did.
We may also point to the recent reopening of the Russian embassy in Burkina Faso, after decades of broken diplomatic relations, as symbolic of the new tide of African nationalism’s general BRICS-alignment.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni seems to have seen this coming, as evidenced by her Italy-Africa summit this week and her ongoing “Mattei Plan” intended to to invest in African economies as a way to also limit human trafficking and migration across the Mediterranean Sea.
As part of her project to spearhead a new diplomatic architecture predicated on stronger relations with African states, she visited Ethiopia on April 15, 2023.
A few months later, on July 20th, the head of the Ethiopian government, Abiy Ahmed, said that his land-locked country was seeking a port and access to the Red Sea. Indeed, PM Ahmed recently achieved this goal, reaching a deal with Somaliland to use its port. Somaliland, of course, is part of Somalia so far as most of the world is concerned, but Ethiopia now recognizes it as an independent state.
This is significant.
Among the recent entries into the BRICS, which include Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, the only one that cannot be accounted for in terms of economic clout—having quite a small economy—is Ethiopia.
We may understand Ethiopian membership, however, if the recent Near Eastern realignment and local BRICS actors are thinking in terms of permanent Red Sea control.
The Yemeni Houthi blockade on the Red Sea, apart from its potential impact on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and on the economy of Israel, would represent a larger shift and a lasting feature of a currently emerging world order.
The falling cost of warfare means that cheap drones can disrupt international supply chains and basically produce new toll authorities at key points along cargo-ship routes. However, this is not a mere rise in piracy or descent into global anarchy. It is occurring within a wider alliance context. Economist Philip Pilkington, on whose analysis I am drawing here, made this point recently on his podcast.
But what does this have to do with Meloni and her one-time visit to Ethiopia? It provides an example of a (quite poor) country that Europe tried to woo and which has chosen to go in another direction. It also shows that even poor actors are geopolitically significant if they are geographically well-positioned and strategically embedded in an alliance network. These are not realities Europe can ignore, as Meloni knows.
Apart from her so-far languishing policy to reduce mass migration and pass effective pro-natalist measures, one of the great promises of Meloni’s rise to power is the ‘Mattei Plan,’ which, as of January 11th, 2024, consists of a specific governance structure, now approved by the Italian Chamber of Deputies and Senate.
The Mattei Plan is the only European vision for how we might benefit from partnering with a changing Africa. But it would be difficult for this, or any Europe-African economic partnership, to thrive without fluid relations with the de facto arbiters of the Suez Canal’s operability, or, indeed, without making peace with a largely BRICS-aligned Africa.
The point of the Mattei Pan is to develop Europe’s African neighbours by supporting economic nationalists and pushing the French CFA out, creating employment south of the Mediterranean (partly through Keynesian-style work programmes) that could absorb would-be migrants, and diversifying Europe’s energy supply, capitalising on the Russian invasion of Ukraine to get the EU to pivot away from Russia and bring in more fossil fuels from Africa, enriching Italy through transit revenue, and increasing its strategic importance.
This would require state companies or joint, private-public initiatives as well as getting political allies, like VOX, to integrate the plan into their own proposals “to stabilise [the Mediterranean] and [harmonise] Spanish national interests … with its European sister nations (especially Italy with respect to North Africa).”
Meloni was able to get the European Commission to go along with her plan, striking the Tunisia deal. However,
If Europe is to do more than buy off transit countries that host migration routes, and if the promise of the Mattei Plan to produce prosperity in the country of origin—thereby reducing migration pressure in the long term—is to be fulfilled, such initiatives cannot limit themselves to countries with a Mediterranean coast, like Tunisia, but must extend south.
Of course, there is an irreducible clash between von der Leyen’s and Meloni’s vision for migration and Europe-Africa relations; however much the Commission may want to avoid populist backlash on account of mass migration in the short term.
It is unlikely Meloni’s plans for African economic partnership would ever really go forward in cooperation with the current Western political elite, any more than her initiative to stem the flow of migration across the Mediterranean has.
In fact, Algeria and Ethiopia, two of Meloni’s main partners in a hypothetical Mattei Plan, are both sympathetic to the Near Eastern realignment, and they are both more BRICS- than U.S.-aligned.
The Italian PM’s staunchly anti-Russian stance made sense, both as a general condemnation of wars of aggression and, strategically, in order to keep the pressure on the EU to follow through on its pivot away from Russian energy, increasing energy flows from Africa and, with them, Italian importance. Her opposition to peace negotiations and de-escalation in Ukraine, apart from being ethically dubious, was not terribly practical.
We might suggest that the ambiguity with respect to Atlanticist vs. BRICS alignment one finds in Forza Italia or Lega should, by now, have endeared itself to Meloni.
Instead, she has been emphasising differences of opinion with fellow European patriots (like the AfD) over Russia, speaking of “irreconcilable differences”—and this precisely at a time when a negotiated peace in Ukraine seems to be the only way forward.
To summarise: Africa is in flux, as is the Near East, and Europe needs a rational geopolitical strategy in order to guarantee supply chain stability and energy availability. The U.S. cannot be depended upon as the guarantor of world order; African and Near Eastern states are ascendant in terms of regional assertiveness; and investment in Africa has to compete with the hands-off approach of China. From a realist, rational lens, Europe needs to pursue something like the Mattei Plan and stake out its own geopolitically sensible position.
