European Union and Chinese engagement in Africa: African perceptions and the impact of infrastructure support

Since the start of the 21st century, China has emerged as an important partner for Africa, shaking up the continent’s existing international relations. Rather than aligning its approach to that of ‘traditional donors’, China stresses that its own experience as a developing country predisposes it to interact with African countries in a fundamentally different way. The Chinese emphasis on respect for sovereignty, non-conditional relations and mutual benefit has sparked concern within the European Union, which promotes a very different approach to African development.

Despite the rich literature that has developed on the growth of Sino-Africa ties and their implications for traditional donors, an important dimension has remained understudied. How do elites and citizens within African countries perceive these different partners for development? How do they evaluate the competing claims being made? And what can this tell us about the contested nature of development and cooperation? While such questions are frequently the subject of speculation among both European and Chinese commentators, empirical studies of African perspectives beyond the highest levels of government remain scarce. To address this gap, this dissertation focuses on the following research question: How do African publics perceive the EU and China as development partners?

Conceptually, the dissertation proposes a closer connection between perceptions research on the one hand and recent work on ‘strategic narratives’ on the other. By conceptualising the EU and China as the sources of two competing narratives towards the African continent, the broad notion of ‘perception’ is given concrete meaning and is more closely embedded within the study of international relations. Crucially, the strategic narrative concept is ‘actor-neutral’ and can be applied to widely different actors and sets of norms. This facilitates a comparative approach to perceptions research. This dissertation argues that such an approach is better aligned to the current situation in which many countries and regions are considered as meeting points for competing spheres of influence. Article 2 provides the starting point for such a narrative-based study of African perceptions, by presenting a detailed analysis of the EU and Chinese narratives.

Methodologically, the project uses a mixed methods design that combines two very different approaches to the study of public opinion. The first empirical component (Articles 3 and 4) analyses cross-country survey data, exploring the strengths and limits of such conventional R methodological research. The second component (Articles 5 and 6) applies the lesser-known Q methodology, examining how its unique approach can contribute to a more in-depth understanding of perceptions and narrative reception within international relations.

Article 3 presents a multilevel analysis of 2008 Afrobarometer data from 19 Sub-Saharan African countries. It sheds light on broad patterns in public evaluations of how much the EU and China contribute to the development of African countries. It finds that the Chinese contribution has quickly succeeded in becoming more well-known than that of the EU. In contrast to what much non-African commentary assumes, both actors enjoy broad-based support. Special attention is paid to what the article calls ‘multiple levels of explanation’, meaning that explanatory variables can be situated at both the individual and the national level. In this case, variance is found to be primarily situated at the within-country level, refuting earlier claims about the dominance of national-level factors in determining variation in African perceptions.

Article 4 moves from this broad, cross-country perspective to the specific case of South Africa, which is also the focus of the second component of the research. South Africa is of particular interest because of its political and economic leadership position on the continent, but also because it is currently experiencing a shift towards the global South in its foreign policy orientation. This article is based on the 2015 Afrobarometer, which included a new set of questions about China-Africa interactions. The results show that South Africans consider China to be a major influence on their country, that positive assessments of this influence are more prevalent than negative ones, and that economic considerations are central in shaping both positive and negative perceptions. Looking at variation within South Africa, age, race and political affiliation are found to be key structuring variables.

The main strength of survey research is that its standardised approach allows for generalisation from sample to population and for comparison across time and space. It is less suited, however, for uncovering the more complex ways in which audiences engage with (competing) narratives and construct their own understanding of international relations. For this reason, the second part of the dissertation uses Q methodology, which aims to identify the different outlooks that exist within a target audience rather than impose pre-determined categories. Article 5 provides a brief introduction to Q methodology’s unique approach and to the contributions it could make to opinion research in EU studies. It also details how Q’s procedures can be tailored to the study of narrative reception.

Article 6 applies Q methodology to investigate how young, highly-educated South Africans interact with the competing strategic narratives on development and cooperation of the EU and China. It presents novel data gathered through Q-based interviews with a purposive sample of 68 university students, which is analysed through factor analysis. The article finds four core outlooks, each of which is shared by several students. They can be summarised as follows: 1) ‘Cautious embrace of the EU, distrust of China’, 2) ‘Primacy of universal human rights – powerful actors exploit Africa’, 3) ‘Primacy of universal human rights – Africa should work with and learn from China’, 4) ‘West harms African development and sovereignty, turn to China’. Taken together, these four outlooks point to the complex and nuanced character of African views on different international partners, an aspects that tends to be downplayed in survey research. They also testify to the highly contested meaning of such core notions as ‘development’, ‘human rights’ and ‘cooperation’ in today’s international relations.