The relationship between the African Union (AU) and the European Union (EU) is not short of ambition. At every AU–EU summit, a familiar ritual unfolds. In joint declarations, leaders speak of a partnership built on mutual respect, shared prosperity, and common values. The most recent one, issued at the 7th AU–EU Summit in Luanda in November 2025, opens by celebrating “a unique and strategic partnership that has steadily deepened in scope, ambition, and political significance.”

Table 1: Mention of Core Values in AU–EU Summit Declarations 2000 to 2025

Declaration	Citation for “Core Values”
Cairo, 2000	“…shared values of strengthening representative and participatory democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, the rule of law, good governance, pluralism, international peace and security, political stability and confidence among nations.”
Lisbon, 2007	“...building on common values and goals in our pursuit of peace and stability, democracy and rule of law, progress and development”. The partnership also aims for the “promotion of good governance and human rights.”
Tripoli, 2010	“Our cooperation will continue to build on our common values and goals in pursuit of good governance, democracy and the rule of law. ... We are united in the fight against impunity at national and international level and the protection of human rights on both continents.”
Brussels, 2014	The partnership is “firmly rooted in our shared values of democracy, the respect for human rights, rule of law and good governance as well as the right to development.”
Abidjan, 2017	“We welcome progress in the respect for democratic principles, human rights, rule of law and good governance. ... We recognize the need to increase confidence in democratic processes and will pursue our cooperation on effective, inclusive and accountable governance.”
Brussels, 2022	This partnership includes “the protection of human rights for all, gender equality and women’s empowerment in all spheres of life, respect for democratic principles, good governance and the rule of law.”
Luanda, 2025	“We renew our commitment to democracy, inclusive governance, rule of law, good neighbourliness... human rights, including fundamental freedoms, gender equality, civil and political rights, economic social and cultural rights.”

The ritualistic nature of summits and their declarations is not without value. They bring actors with diverging perspectives and interests around the same table and create a shared language for cooperation. As David Mosse put it, “perhaps good policy is not implementable” – alluding to the way policy documents carefully gloss over seemingly irreconcilable differences. In fact, all policies need to be deconstructed and contextualized before being implemented.

The gap between a partnership as proclaimed and as practised has become one of the most enduring features of AU–EU relations. Between summits, structural asymmetries tend to reassert themselves: in migration bargaining, in trade relations, in who sets the terms of investment and in who accepts them. Even though coordination has improved over the years, implementation has lagged behind. Ahead of the 2025 Luanda Summit, the AU and the EU published a joint monitoring report assessing progress towards the Joint Vision for 2030, but the exercise provided neither a clear target framework nor a comprehensive assessment of implementation, and focused only on selected projects across priority areas.

Hence, what the AU–EU partnership lacks is a structured process that translates its proclaimed unity into focused, manageable alliances among actors with shared interests, enabling differentiated pragmatic implementation partnerships. This requires acknowledging plurality, communicating interests transparently, and demonstrating a willingness to focus, prioritise, and commit.

Acknowledging Plurality

The tendency to underestimate the plurality between the two groupings, and to treat the EU or AU as a unified actor, produces unrealistic expectations and obscures the diverse interests, priorities, and constraints that shape decision-making on both sides.

EU member states diverge significantly in their individual policies toward African countries. For example, the response of member states to the recent wave of military coups in the Sahel varied in terms of diplomatic engagement, humanitarian assistance, regional stabilization, and disengagement. Differences in geography and legacies of empire, colonialism, and external domination shape positions on migration, security, diplomacy, and development cooperation. Trade remains a notable exception, given the EU’s exclusive competence in this domain.

In a similar way, while the African Union provides an important continental framework, it does not eliminate a diversity of interests, capacities, and strategic outlooks among its member states. Indeed, its institutions have been deliberately kept relatively weak because member states have been reluctant to transfer meaningful powers to it, leaving the organization dependent on the political will of national governments. Some governments favour a stronger continent-to-continent partnership with the EU, while others remain primarily concerned with reshaping a relationship they continue to view through the lens of colonial legacies. Countries also engage the EU from very different economic and political positions and can draw on an increasingly diverse range of external partners, including China and the Gulf states. This diversity is reflected in African countries’ foreign policy choices.

A pragmatic AU–EU partnership requires a shift in mind-set that takes into account the internal plurality of both regions, while recognizing the varying degrees of integration, authority, and institutional capacity of their respective supranational organizations. While deeper regional integration is still necessary and desirable, collaboration should not be made dependent on its progress.

Making Interests Transparent

A second shift is needed toward greater transparency about interests. Values remain an important basis for defining what counts as legitimate and for shaping how political goals are pursued, but interests themselves need to be named more openly, and cooperation built accordingly.

African–European relations have always been shaped by interests, whether economic, political, or security-related. The problem, contrary to what some critical scholarship suggests, is not that interests exist, but that they have long gone unacknowledged. In a sense, transparency also functions as a necessary precondition for addressing structural disparities in wealth, power, and influence between the two. For years, European engagement was presented primarily in altruistic or normative terms, while African governments were expected to fit into this narrative, despite pursuing their own strategic objectives. Both sides perpetuated an imaginary that was increasingly at odds with the realities imposed by a changing international system. As Europe’s strategic interests became more evident in practice, recurring accusations of double standards, hypocrisy, and hidden agendas became increasingly difficult to dispel.

Greater transparency makes negotiations more equitable. A mutual recognition of Europe’s interest in securing supply chains, critical raw materials, or migration management allows African governments to negotiate from an informed position rather than responding to implicit expectations obscured by normative rhetoric. Since the launch of Global Gateway, the EU has become more explicit about its strategic interests. One can see it in projects like the Lobito Corridor, explicitly framed around securing critical raw materials for European industry rather than around development outcomes. This is a step in the right direction, but greater candour about interests also requires more thorough strategic coordination and priority-setting across the EU. Equally, as foreign powers compete to win influence in Africa, African governments increasingly articulate their own interests in industrialization, value addition, partner diversification, and economic sovereignty rather than aid dependency. Transparency, therefore, allows both sides to assess where interests converge, where they diverge, and where mutually beneficial compromises are possible. Ultimately, transparency strengthens rather than weakens the normative foundations of the AU–EU partnership.

Focusing and Committing

The partnership also needs to be more pragmatic about its focus. The AU–EU partnership has long been characterized by an ever-expanding agenda, with new initiatives regularly added without a corresponding effort to prioritise or consolidate existing ones. Former AU High Representative for Partnerships with Europe, Carlos Lopes, recorded no fewer than 52 initiatives aimed at strengthening relations with Africa launched by the European Commission alone between 1972 and 2020. The result has been a fragmented patchwork of overlapping frameworks with limited strategic direction and uneven implementation.

Global Gateway illustrates both the EU’s ambition to address this challenge and the difficulty of overcoming it. Designed as a more strategic and investment-oriented offer to partner countries, it has attracted concerns regarding transparency, governance, ownership, and the need for a more demand-driven approach. The broader lesson is straightforward: credibility depends less on announcing new partnerships than on consistently delivering existing ones.

The EU’s Team Europe approach, which brings together the Commission, member states and their development finance institutions, has helped coordinate this diverse set of actors. Yet coordination alone does not necessarily produce strategic coherence. As geopolitical competition intensifies, Team Europe could evolve into a more political framework for joint priority-setting and the exploitation of complementary European strengths.

One way forward would be to develop more focused cooperation around specific areas of mutual interest, potentially led by “thematic champions”. Rather than expecting every AU and EU member state to agree on every issue, pragmatic partnerships could bring together those actors willing and able to cooperate in a particular field. This would make it possible to maintain an overarching political relationship while concentrating political attention and resources where there is a realistic prospect of implementation. This also responds to concerns expressed by African officials, who question the value of an all-encompassing partnership that risks becoming too broad to deliver meaningful outcomes. 

Towards Pragmatic Partnerships

Wishing for a unified partnership largely driven by altruism and a commitment to abstract common goods is unrealistic. The AU–EU relationship must instead learn to function in a world in which strategic interests, geopolitical competition and, at times, zero-sum calculations are unavoidable. Yet, this does not preclude meaningful cooperation. The two regions continue to share significant areas of mutual interest from economic transformation and climate action to peace, security, and human development.

The challenge is therefore not to choose between idealism and transactionalism, but to develop a more pragmatic form of partnership: one that acknowledges plurality, makes interests transparent, focuses political attention where interests converge, and accepts that progress will be uneven across policy areas.

If neither the EU nor the AU is a unitary actor, then an effective interregional partnership should not require a comprehensive agreement among all actors as a condition for cooperation. Instead, it should permit differentiated coalitions of actors to cooperate where interests and capacities overlap.

The future of AU–EU relations may consequently depend less on achieving agreement on everything than on learning how to agree to disagree while cooperating where it matters. Pragmatic partnerships would not replace the broader AU–EU relationship. They would make it more credible by connecting its ambitious political language to areas where actors have both the interest and the capacity to deliver.

Opinions expressed reflect the views of authors, not necessarily those of the organisations partnering in the project, The Future of African-European Relations.

Dr Benedikt Erforth is senior researcher at IDOS and project director at Megatrends Afrika.

Dr Lena Gutheil is senior researcher at IDOS and project associate at Megatrends Afrika.

The Future of African-European Relations examines how the two regions can build stronger partnerships in an era of geopolitical fragmentation, economic competition and changing global power dynamics. It is a collaboration between the African Futures & Innovation Programme at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), the Federation of German Industries (BDI), the Hanns Seidel Foundation and the Megatrends Afrika consortium, comprising the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Drawing on the expertise, research and analytical frameworks of the participating institutions, the project explores how different global futures could shape trade, investment, development cooperation and shared prosperity between Africa and Europe - and it aims to develop policy recommendations for different stakeholders.