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The Rome Treaty, which established the EEC in 1957, was nothing short of a resurrection of the Berlin Conference's General Act, which 73 years earlier had sought to create an internationalised regime of free trade stretching across the middle of Africa. In Rome, six European countries, without the involvement of any Africans, promised each other equal access to trading and investment opportunities in what is today the territory of 21 African countries: Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Benin, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso, the Republic of the Congo (Congo Brazzaville), the Central Africa Republic, Chad, Gabon, the Comoros, Madagascar, Djibouti, Togo, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Burundi and Somalia. In fact, as noted by Hansen and Jonsson, three-quarters of the territory covered by the EEC actually lay outside continental Europe.

Senghor personified the contradictions of independence. A formidable intellect, he led his nation into the Yaounde agreement, was the foremost proponent of negritude and ruled for two decades before retiring on New Year's Eve 1980, the first African president to leave office voluntarily. He then promptly left for France, where he had been a citizen since 1932.

Although Europe was "the home of nationalism" according to Macmillan, Africans were encouraged to think of it as genuine indigenous expression. Even though the African nations espousing it were born out of the 1884 Berlin Conference and African nationalist leaders were the products of colonial schools and European universities, African nationalism was still cast as the antidote to colonialism rather than an outgrowth of it.

By 1962, an American observer in Paris, Schofield Coryell, declared that African countries remained "essentially what they were: agricultural appendages to Europe". If this sounds familiar, it is because African elites are, to borrow from Wole Soyinka, still heading to foreign capitals to loudly proclaim their tigritude, while consigning their countrymen into debt and bondage.

It was into this context that the countries of Africa were born. Congenitally misshapen, they were easy prey for Europe. The Eurafrica project was simply given a makeover as the 1963 Yaounde Convention signed between the EEC and 18 former French and Belgian colonies. Under the agreement, the Europeans allowed free access to their domestic markets to products from the African members, while the latter were, at least initially, permitted to impose restrictions on the entry of European goods into their territories in order to protect their own infant industries. Three years earlier, however, the UN Economic Commission for Africa had warned, as related by Hansen and Jonsson, that the arrangements were likely to lead to economic dependency by tempting the Africans "to prefer the short-run advantage of tariff concessions [in EEC markets] to the long-run gains of industrial development".

True decolonisation requires more than just the physical absence of the coloniser. It means deconstructing the frameworks that have been used to define the African's place for him. That is the work that remains to be done.

Patrick Gathara is a communications consultant, writer, and award-winning political cartoonist based in Nairobi.

since the intergovernmental panel issued its last major report in 2007, far more countries, states and cities have adopted climate plans, a measure of the growing political interest in tackling the problem. They include China and the United States, which are doing more domestically than they have been willing to commit to in international treaty negotiations

the emissions problem is still outrunning the determination to tackle it, with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rising almost twice as fast in the first decade of this century as they did in the last decades of the 20th century. That reflects a huge rush to use coal-fired power plants in developing countries that are climbing up the income scale, especially China, while rich countries are making only slow progress in cutting their high emissions

It is increasingly clear that measures like tougher building codes and efficiency standards for cars and trucks can save energy and reduce emissions without harming people’s quality of life, the panel found. And the costs of renewable energy like wind and solar power are falling so fast that its deployment on a large scale is becoming practical

if greater efforts to cut emissions are not implemented soon, future generations seeking to limit or reverse climate damage will have to depend on technologies that permanently remove greenhouse gases from the air; in effect, they will be trying to undo the damage caused by the people of today

these technologies do not exist on any appreciable scale, the report said, and there is no guarantee that they will be available in the future, much less that they will be affordable

The new report, dealing with ways to limit the growth of the emissions that are causing climate change, is the third in recent months. A report released in Stockholm in September found a certainty of 95 percent or greater that humans were the main cause of global warming, and a report released in Yokohama, Japan, two weeks ago said profound effects were already being felt around the world, and were likely to get much worse.

the committee described money spent fighting climate change as a form of insurance against the most severe potential consequences

pointed observations to the Nato 2030 conference: “The challenges that we face over the next decade are greater than any of us can tackle alone. Neither Europe alone. Nor America alone. So we must resist the temptation of national solutions.”

Tom Tugendhat, the Conservative chair of the foreign affairs committee, said Trump’s surprising decision would encourage European nations “to listen less to the US” while he remained in power.

The move has been widely interpreted as a personal rebuff to Angela Merkel following what was reportedly a frosty phone call between the two at the end of May, when the German chancellor torpedoed Trump’s hopes to hold a G7 summit in the US in June.

US troops have been deployed in Germany since the end of the second world war, and although the numbers are sharply down from the 400,000 at the height of the cold war, their presence is partly designed to deter Russian aggression

troop numbers “were always an exercise in political psychology” but one that mattered given that, with troops stationed in all three Baltic states, Nato faces as many as 500,000 Russian troops in its western military district.

Experts say the US cannot operate in the Middle East or Afghanistan without the vast Ramstein air base in western Germany, which acts as a logistics staging post, while Stuttgart is also the headquarters of the US Africa Command as well as its European operations.

Chinese and Russian aggression against the democracies is likely to grow, the United States might critically weaken, and the EU seems firmly set on pursuing a middle path. Instead of worrying about looking back to the past, leaders in Ottawa, Canberra, and London should embrace the idea and propose a significant deepening of their foreign-policy coordination. This is most definitely not about “getting the band back together,” as one British Conservative member of Parliament greeted a trade talk announcement, but three middle powers building an anti-authoritarian group to resist great-power bullying in the 21st century.

A mini C-3 format would offer the best approach: a summit with follow-up that is both flexible and lightweight enough to get off the ground but with a permanent working group in foreign ministries advancing dossiers and initiatives. As the C-3 are all Commonwealth countries, summits could be timed to coincide with the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, where the leaders of Canada, Australia, and Britain regularly meet anyway.

Drawing both on Britain’s joint initiative with Canada to block Putin attending the G-7 and on Canada’s humiliating experience at the U.N., among this C-3’s first tasks should be to coordinate joint positions inside the U.N., G-7 and G-20. As far as major goals are concerned, this could include supporting any future attempts of Canada to win a seat on the U.N. Security Council and for Australia to formally join the G-7.

This is not about replacing working with the EU or the United States but creating a group for Canada, Australia, and Britain to jointly present tougher anti-authoritarian packages to big powers than had they tried to individually present them alone. The C-3, like the E-3 to the EU, would be complementary to existing Euro-Atlantic bodies.

deeper cooperation between Britain, Canada, and Australia has an image problem

imperial nostalgia or conservative culture politics

too anchored on ethnic fraternity

the idea needs to be decolonized

what about other middle powers? Why not include, say, Japan? This is where two critical principles of international politics come into play: Does your grouping have enough like-mindedness to be able to function and enough load-bearing capacity to get anything done? What Canada, Australia, and Britain are after is mutual geopolitical support; adding members that aren’t willing to offer that risks creating another talking shop like the Franco-German Alliance for Multilateralism. That group, which stretches from Chile to Kazakhstan, lacks the ability to agree on anything of substance—and the power to act on it.

there are simply not a lot of like-minded democracies to go around

Ottawa, Canberra, and London didn’t need each other in a U.S.-led world order or in a relatively benign world without authoritarian superpowers. But that system has decayed. Deep divisions, not just between the Europeans and Donald Trump, but with much of the U.S. national security establishment, are breaking up the old Washington-led ideological West. The common anti-authoritarian frame that once glued together Western foreign policy has come unstuck

In this world, the C-3 is a liberal international, not a nationalist, cause