ISSN:
0022-278X
Source:
Cambridge Journals Digital Archives
Topics:
Ethnic Sciences
,
History
,
Political Science
,
Economics
Notes:
If the study of the foreign policies of underdeveloped countries is underdeveloped, the systematic analysis of their foreign policy decisions is not. It is simply nonexistent. – Bahgat Korany, 1984 1The first half of the 1980s has posed new challenges for African foreign policy in practice and analysis, symbolised by the Ethiopian drought and the conflict in Southern Africa, but generalised in the continental crisis of negative growth. The halcyon days of the 1960s – the innocence and optimism of early African nationalism – have long since disappeared, obliterated by the global and regional shocks of the 1970s. The first independence decade coincided with a period of gradual economic expansion – as it turned out, the continent's last. The years since the mid-1970s – the end of the post-war Bretton Woods era – have been characterised by slow growth at best, for a minority of states, and by none for the majority of countries and peoples. Thus the African agenda has shifted dramatically from nation-building to -salvaging, and from import-substitution to de-industrialisation. Somewhat fanciful notions of regional and continental integration have been replaced by pragmatic imperatives of food aid and debt relief.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0022278X00007138
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