Cold War to Cold Peace: Explaining U.S.-French Competition in Francophone Africa
Three watershed events dramatically influenced the evolution of African international relations during the twentieth century. First, the extended global conflict of World War 11 (1935-1945) heralded the decline of Europe as the most powerful region of the world and the emergence of African nationalist movements intent on achieving independence from colonial rule. The outbreak and intensification of the cold war (1947-1989) subsequently transformed the newly independent African countries into proxy battlefields between the United States and the former Soviet Union, the two unparalleled superpowers of the post-World War II era. African conflicts often having little, if anything, to do with the ideological concerns of communism or capitalism threatened to become East-West flashpoints in the face of U.S.-Soviet involvement. The third watershed event-the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989-signaled the end of the cold war but not the end of international rivalry in Africa. As deftly noted by Jeffrey E. Garten, former under secretary of commerce for international trade in the Clinton administration, the ideologically-based cold war between the United States and the former Soviet Union has been replaced by a cold peace in which the Great Powers struggle for economic supremacy in the highly competitive economic environment of the new millennium.1 This article explores the origins and evolution of this cold peace by focusing on rising