Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Why Europe
should focus on its
growing
interdependence
with Africa

IT IS a peculiarly modern habit to
think of the Mediterranean Sea as
a boundary. For over two
millennia, civilisations bled across
it and intermingled. Roman,
Carthaginian, Moorish and
Venetian empires expanded
primarily along maritime routes.
It took four days to get from
imperial Rome to today s Tunisia,
but 11 days to reach Milan. The
Sahara restricted contact between
this Mediterranean Eurafrica and
the regions to the south, but not
entirely. A study of 22 skulls from
Roman London found that four
were African, for example. The
medieval wealth of desert trading
cities like Timbuktu and Agadez
spoke of extensive north-south
commerce. Later European
colonialists penetrated, pillaged
and parcelled up the continent;
African troops fought in the
trenches of the first world war;
Europeans fought in Africa in the
second.
Three subsequent events curbed
this trans-Mediterraneanism.
European powers left Africa with
decolonisation; many African
states sought to be neutral during
the cold war; Europeans turned
towards Asia s booming markets
as globalisation took hold.
Tellingly, the geopolitical
buzzword of the moment is
 Eurasia . Europe and Asia are
integrating along old Silk Road
routes, especially under China s
Belt and Road infrastructure
splurge, yet  Eurafrica  remains
relatively little discussed. Europe
is too busy rushing into Asia s
arms to embrace a continent on
its doorstep which may be even
more significant in the long term. 
 
https://www.economist.com/europe/2018/09/20/why-europe-should-focus-on-
 
its-growing-interdependence-with-africa?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/whyeuropes
houldfocusonitsgrowinginterdependencewithafricacharlemagne

Today s waves of African
migration are merely a prelude.
Of the 2.2bn citizens added to the
global population by 2050, 1.3bn
will be Africans about the size of
China s population today. And
more of them will have the means
to travel. Those Africans risking
the trip north across the
Mediterranean today are not the
poorest, but those with a mobile
phone to organise the trip and
money to pay smugglers. Few of
the Nigerians who attempt the
crossing are from their country s
poor north, for example; almost
all are from its wealthier south.
As African countries gradually
prosper, migration will surely
increase, not decrease. Emmanuel
Macron raised these points in a
recent interview. The French
president was recommending a
new book,  The Rush to Europe ,
published in French by Stephen
Smith of Duke University, which
models past international
migrations like that of Mexicans
into America to show that the
number of Afro-Europeans
(Europeans with African roots)
could rise from 9m at present to
between 150m and 200m by 2050,
perhaps a quarter of Europe s
total population.
The interdependence is growing in
other areas, too. While Europe s
old Atlantic harbours stagnate,
four of its five fastest-growing
ports are on the Mediterranean
(led by Piraeus in Greece). Much
of this is driven by Asian trade,
but the African share is rising too,
and will mushroom as the
continent continues to grow.
Europe is increasingly reliant on
Nigerian and Liberian minerals,
and German environmentalists
dream of giant Saharan solar
plants feeding clean energy to
Europe. The security situation on
one shore of the Mediterranean
increasingly affects the other. The
chaos that emerged from the Arab
spring in countries like Libya
prompted a surge in drug- and
weapon-smuggling to Europe,
while terrorist attacks in Paris and
Brussels in 2015 and 2016 were
mostly committed by young men
of north African origin. Chatham
House, a British think-tank,
predicts that the security of the
Strait of Gibraltar, which divides
Spain from Morocco, will become
increasingly fraught.
EU leaders met in Salzburg on
September 19th and 20th to
discuss new border controls and
north African  disembarkation
platforms  where migrants from
the south could be processed and
sent back. The summit epitomised
a strategy that Mr Smith dubs
 Fortress Europe , which involves
reducing migration from north
Africa at almost any human cost,
letting in merely a trickle of
approved African migrants,
bickering over who should
accommodate them and then, as
recompense, funnelling modest
aid into Africa. Angela Merkel
promotes a  Marshall Plan for
Africa , as a means of reducing
migration. That reckons without
the fact that economic
development will raise migration
numbers.
The scramble for Europe
There is an alternative  Eurafrica 
strategy, writes Mr Smith. This is
to accept the integration of Africa
and Europe. Alex de Waal, an
Africa expert at Tufts University,
agrees that is the only realistic
course.  The logic of history is a
European-Mediterranean market
that will cross the Sahara, too,  he
says.  The challenge is to
recognise that reality and make it
a mutually beneficial and
regulated one. Building walls will
not work.  This, so he contends,
means increasing Europe s role as
a supporter of, and model for, a
multilateral Africa: backing blocs,
based on the EU, which are either
continental (such as the African
Union) or regional (like the East
African Community and the
Economic Community of West
African States).
It also means creating regulated
routes for migrants travelling in
both directions. Over the century,
European districts that today have
a Eurafrican character parts of
Barcelona, Marseille, Brussels and
London, say will become more
the norm than the exception.
 African migrants will provide a
significant part of the European
workforce, so we need to ask
what part of the workforce and
what sort of training we need to
provide,  says Mr de Waal.
African music and food will
become more prominent in
European cultural and culinary
diets. Meanwhile Lagos,
Casablanca, Nairobi and Kinshasa
would receive their own influxes
of European businesses,
politicians and fortune-seekers.
The two options, Fortress Europe
versus Eurafrica, may one day
end up as a choice between denial
and reality. Europe cannot
insulate itself from the dramatic
long-term shifts in its continental
neighbour. Like it or not,
Eurafrica is part of Europe s
demographic and cultural destiny.
It is better, surely, not to ignore
or reject this but to work out how
to make it a success.