“Is Lomé Policy Political?” Human “Is Lomé Policy Political?” Human Rights and Development Cooperation in the Lomé Convention (1975-1995)

This dissertation offers a new analysis of the human rights debate between the European Community and the group of African, Caribbean and Pacific countries (ACP) through the evolution of the Lomé Convention, a development cooperation agreement between the EC and the ACP, from its signature in 1975 (Lomé I) to Lomé IV’s mid-term review in 1995. Lomé I was characterized by the assumption of equality among the partners and political neutrality, which implied the absence of any form of conditionality. However, between 1975 and 1995 EC and ACP intellectuals, officials and politicians were involved in a heated debate concerning the possibility of including human rights in the Convention. This debate culminated with the inclusion of an official mechanism sanctioning human rights violations by the ACP States with the suspension of Lomé funding, thus altering the nature of the agreement, turning it into an asymmetrical pact characterized by significant political conditionalities. This dissertation is based on an extensive analysis of primary sources coming from the National Archives of the United Kingdom and France, the Archives Diplomatiques Françaises of La Courneuve, the Historical Archives of the European Union of Fiesole, the United Nations Digital Library, the Organization of the African Unity Common Repository and several African, European and Caribbean periodicals, including the official periodical of ACP-EC cooperation, the Courier. The dissertation has benefitted from the recent disclosure of archival materials regarding Lomé in the aforementioned archives. Drawing on these sources, the dissertation aims at analyzing both the intellectual and political debates concerning the definition of human rights and their relationship with the concept of development, which influenced the political evolution and actual implementation of Lomé between 1975 and 1995, taking into account the contribution made by ACP politicians and intellectuals to the inclusion of a shared concept of human rights in the Convention. As such, Lomé represents an understudied instance of the North/South international debate over the definition of human rights, democracy and development, where the ACP could bring forward their own understanding of these concepts and directly influence the evolution of development policies. The dissertation analyses this experience with a methodology built upon two main axes, political history and intellectual history, giving an original contribution to the literature concerning Lomé, the evolution of the international human rights debate and the external policy of the Community. By doing so, the dissertation fills a gap in the literature, offering a systematic account of the evolution of the ACP/EC human rights debate, putting it into the wider international context and revealing how much it influenced the transformation of the Convention in a different kind of agreement, characterized by significant political conditionalities. At the same time the Convention was a unique framework where the North/South debate over human rights produced interesting compromises on their definition in relation with democracy and development. These negotiated concepts, which were the result of a complex interrelationship between the intellectual and the political ACP/EC debate on human rights, had an impact over the implementation of Lomé, with aid suspensions being operated towards ACP States violating human rights, and its study represents the main addition of my dissertation to the literature on the ACP/EC relationship