Can last week’s EU-South Africa summit reset the relationship in a fundamental way, one that is fit for the turbulent geopolitical times?
Watching the drama of the Trump-Vance-Zelensky fracas in the Oval Office two weeks ago felt like a monumental moment in history, with the unsettling noise of the prevailing world order fracturing in real time as the soundtrack.
But it also provoked the idea that this geopolitical crisis represents a unique opportunity to reset the relationship between the Global North and the Global South.
The premeditated and devious ambush of the Ukrainian leader yielded an immediate European epiphany: the United States is no longer a reliable ally. Yet, weak and divided, and with its American security blanket imperilled by Trump’s quixotic worldview, Europe cannot go it alone: it will need to find new friends and allies, but based on a fundamentally new paradigm.
As former UN Economic Commission for Africa executive secretary, Professor Carlos Lopes, argues in his new book, The Self Deception Trap: Exploring the Economic Dimensions of Charity Dependency within Africa-Europe Relations, Africa and the European Union (EU) need to escape the delusional precepts of their relationship.
Now is the time to define a new common strategic agenda – on the most pressing issues of the age: peace and security, defence of the international rule of law and the maintenance of multilateralism, climate action, migration, pandemic preparation and global public health policy, and the governance of big tech.
Timely delegation
This is why last week’s high-level EU delegation to South Africa was timely. Opening the eighth EU-SA summit, EU President António Costa said: “The European Union and South Africa are not just partners, we are strategic allies, bound by shared values of democracy, human rights, rule of law and multilateralism. Our partnership delivers real benefits to our citizens, our economies and the world.”
This is an apt sentiment; with agreement for further work to be done together (as important as any additional transition finance that may be forthcoming): “In response to a deteriorating global and regional security landscape, leaders decided to launch a dedicated peace, security and defence dialogue. This will facilitate a shared understanding of the emerging threats and allow for regular cooperation on related issues.”
The devil will be in the detail, but this moves towards the kind of new era for the Africa-EU relationship that Lopes forcibly argues for, especially given the changed geopolitical landscape, which has added even greater urgency to the task at hand.
Middle powers’ need to get out of the way of the elephants that threaten to trample everything around them as they compete for supremacy – Trump’s America, Putin’s Russia, and in a substantively different way, Xi’s China – and find safe common ground.
Unique opportunity
How, when and where can this new strategic alliance be forged? The answer lies not only bilaterally, such as the SA-EU deal, but in multilateral processes such as the G20, which brings together G7 countries with most of those of the emergent new Global South structure, BRICS (now nine strong, since the addition of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, Ethiopia, Iran and Indonesia to the original members, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
Since this year’s G20 presidency is held by South Africa – the first time on African soil – a unique opportunity lies at South Africa’s door: to not only be the adult in the room, rising above the singularly undiplomatic insults and threats that have been passed its way by the Trump administration and its hangers-on, but also to orchestrate this strategic realignment between like-minded Global North and Global South Actors.
This will not be easy. The G20 is an innately complex and labyrinthine process, with innumerable working groups and myriad ministerial meetings that will stretch the government’s capacity leading up to the leaders’ summit in November. An already challenging task has been further complicated not just by the intensity of the geopolitical moment, but by the G20 custom whereby the host president shares the burden of leadership with the previous host – in this case, Brazil – and the incoming one for 2026, the United States.
It is not yet entirely clear how Washington will play its G20 cards. The early signs suggest that life within the troika will not be comfortable: US Secretary of State Mario Rubio not only declined to travel for the opening G20 meeting of foreign ministers last month in Johannesburg, but chose to announce his absence with an inflammatory tweet in which he denounced South Africa’s three overarching G20 themes – solidarity, sustainability and equality – as “DEI and climate change”.
Culture warfare has entered the multilateral room. Hence, the stakes have risen sharply; it is not hyperbolic to suggest that the future of multilateral engagement may lie in the hands of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, a masterful tactician and an able diplomat himself.
A Western rethink
Western powers – the UK, France and Germany – as well as middle powers such as G20 invitees Spain, Ireland and Sweden, have an important role to play. However, to seize this opportunity, European nations will need to rethink and reposition their stance on issues that are of critical importance to Global South actors – such as debt and the cost of capital, and the quality as well as quantum of climate finance to support just economic transitions.
But perhaps even more importantly, they will need to acknowledge the double standards in the application of international law that has undermined their credibility in the eyes of most of the Global South.
This means that if Europe is to continue to expect a country such as South Africa, for instance, to fully support its position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, so, too, Europe must rethink its attitude to Israeli transgressions and recognise that international law must be applied consistently and not selectively.
All of this will require new agility from European leaders. At last November’s Berlin Foreign Policy Forum – a very valuable annual exploration of trends in international relations – the panel on Gaza inadvertently presented a compelling metaphor: two panelists – who happened to be relatively young women from the Middle East and South East Asia – seemed nimble and forward-looking compared with the third, a German male academic of a certain age, whose arguments seemed in comparison sclerotic and trapped by the past.
Tectonic shifts
Tectonic geopolitical plates have shifted in recent years. Instead of seeing BRICS+ as a threat, Western leaders must overcome their distaste for some of its members, put aside old enmities and recognise that these are now necessary partners, with growing economies as well as global reach and influence. While on the other side, Global South actors should put aside any festering resentment from the colonial era so as to escape a victim mentality that is out of step with youthful African and Asian optimism.
Pragmatism as well as principle must underpin these new alliances.
With the dark clouds of world war forming, global warming threatening planetary tipping points, and the rise of populism fuelled by systemic inequality and social injustice, the G20’s pursuit of collective action that cements international solidarity, drives sustainability and climate action and pursues substantive equality, is an existentially essential, not “woke” agenda.
It must be defended in the face of the autocratic and transactional bellicosity that threatens to not only upend the ostensible certainties of the past 80 years, but also unravel any real prospect of protecting the world from catastrophic climate change and irreparable harm to the ecological infrastructure on which economic prosperity depends.
Thus, peace and security are now inextricably linked to the sustainability agenda; a global conflagration will likely extinguish the remaining hopes of meeting, for example, the targets of the Paris Treaty – already undermined by Trump’s withdrawal from it and his “drill, baby, drill” climate change denialism.
Moreover, Trump’s attempt to bring peace to Ukraine through a cynical critical minerals grab underscores the relationship between peace and security on the one hand, and sustainability, which requires a just as well astute deployment of critical minerals to serve the transition to a ‘green’ economy, on the other.
Last week, EU and South African leaders committed to striking a grand strategic bargain (my words). The summit declaration stated that: “Leaders recognised the need to harness critical minerals for sustainable and inclusive growth and development and supported the development of a framework towards clean industrialisation and investments. They also supported the opening of negotiations between the EU and South Africa with a view to establishing a memorandum of understanding on raw materials between both partners.”
G20 must raise its game
The G20 came of age when it summoned a strong collective response to the instability caused by the 2008 global financial crisis. Now, it must raise its game to support diplomatic efforts to negotiate peace and security. And if Trump disrupts or even destroys the G20, then the 18 other countries, with the EU and African Union, who are also G20 members, may have to reach agreement without him.
Perhaps the US will be banished from the G20, like Russia was from the then G8. It may come to that. Anything is possible now.
If, however, Western powers want to defend liberal democracy and human rights in the face of Trump’s egregious assault on international institutions and processes, then they must fully commit to the normative content of South Africa’s G20 call for solidarity, sustainability and equality.
Working together, meaningful action must add meat to the bones of these three principles, based on a grand strategic bargain. Europe has the finance and the tech, for example, while Africa has the critical minerals, the carbon sinks and an abundance of innovative and resilient young people.
European power, weakened by Brexit, threatens to wither on the vine. This is the way to halt the decline – through an alliance with partners from across the Global South. India, Brazil and South Africa have an a la carte approach to international relations, in sync with the reality of a multipolar world. Similarly, European leaders must recognise that Europe’s future is not transatlantic; now it is with Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Last week’s visit and positive outcomes are encouraging. But one swallow does not make a summer. A deeper, more fundamental and structural reset is required. To seize this opportunity in the face of a dystopian future, will require persistently far-sighted visionary and agile leadership, as well as optimism – the “radical option” as the Mexican filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro has put it. And there is no time to waste. DM