euro|topics - The EU and Africa meet in Lisbon

05/07/2009

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Main focus of Thursday, December 6, 2007

The EU and Africa meet in Lisbon

The summit of European Union and African Union heads of state will be taking place on December 8th and 9th in Lisbon. Will this summit enable the reinforcement of cooperation and relations between the two continents ?

Diário de Notícias - Portugal

The Lisbon daily considers that the EU-Africa summit will not fundamentally change relations between the two continents. "To imagine that the summit will entail any big surprises is as realistic as believing that the dozens of heads of state are going to be able to discuss anything in depth over the three nine hour sessions intended for this. As it is always the case in this type of event, the fundamental documents have already been approved. Let us not consider that this meeting in Lisbon represents a Big Bang in multilateral relations between the two continents. The EU launched a Strategy for Africa in 2005. Now there is talk of a partnership. ... The challenge of this summit is not to invent new partners. ... It is rather a question of putting things into practice, actually taking action." (06/12/2007)

The Independent - United Kingdom

The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will be boycotting the summit in protest against the presence of Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe. The daily comments: "While Britain will not be represented in Lisbon at head of government level, it will be represented. Baroness Amos, a former cabinet minister and senior Labour figure, will be attending. ... Baroness Amos has said that she will use her presence to make Mr Mugabe aware in no uncertain terms of Britain's views about his leadership – and we hope she does. The risk, however, is that the continuing war of attrition between London and Harare will divert attention from the much larger project: the growth of a mutually beneficial and highly productive relationship between the EU and the African Union. One of the EU's longstanding defects is that it underestimates the international influence it can exert when it acts cohesively. That the OAU renamed itself the African Union was a tribute to the EU as a model for regional organisations." (06/12/2007)

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - Germany

Lorenz Jäger considers it notable that on the occasion of the EU-Africa summit European and African writers and intellectuals have come together to pen an open letter criticising the "political cowardliness" of statesmen for not talking about the humanitarian crises in Zimbabwe and Darfur. Jäger writes: "Even the fact that this letter addresses these two conflicts at the same time is a novelty. What we see in Zimbabwe is the failed experiment of a national and initially left-leaning freedom movement in which the expropriation and expulsion of white landowners has created massive food shortages, so that the country is now dependent on international aid. The fact that leftist intellectuals like Günter Grass, Jürgen Habermas, Dario Fo and Nadine Gordimer have signed the letter along with the more conservative British playwright Tom Stoppard and novelist John M. Coetzee, and that African writers like Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri also signed gives the open letter greater authority." (06/12/2007)

» To the complete press review of Thursday, December 6, 2007

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