Both continuity and change capture the evolving role of the Clinton White House in the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. Elements of continuity are reflected in a familiar pattern of relationships between the White House and the principal foreign policy bureaucracies, most notably the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense (Pentagon), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and more recently the U.S. Department of Commerce. As cogently argued in Peter J. Schraeder’s analysis of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa during the Cold War era, the White House has tended to take charge of U.S. African policies only in those relatively rare situations perceived as crises by the president and his closest advisors. In other, more routine situations—the hallmark of the myriad of U.S. African relations—the main foreign policy bureaucracies have been at the forefront of policy formulation, and “bureaucratic dominance” of the policymaking process has prevailed. Much the same pattern is visible in the Clinton administration, with the exception of President Clinton’s trip to Africa in 1998. Until that time, events in Somalia in 1993 served as the only true African crisis of the administration that was capable of focusing the ongoing attention of President Clinton and his closest advisors. Given that the United States is now disengaged from most African crises, Africa has remained a “backwater” for the White House and the wider foreign policymaking establishment.

Studies of U.S. government relations with Africa have generally focused on the role of the executive branch, specifically by examining and analyzing the views and activities of administration officials and the members of executive branch bureaucracies. This is only natural, given the predominant role that the executive branch has historically played in the development and implementation of U.S. policy toward the continent. However, the U.S. Congress has always played an important role in determining U.S. policy toward Africa due to its constitutional authority over the appropriation and authorization of funding for all foreign operations conducted by the executive branch. Furthermore, Congress enacted legislation on several occasions during the Cold War period that directly affected U.S. policy. For example, Congress approved the Clark Amendment prohibiting U.S. intervention in Angola (although it later voted to repeal the amendment) and also passed the 1986 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which imposed sanctions on South Africa over the veto of the Reagan administration.

Surprising to some, African American leaders have expressed a relatively high level of dissatisfaction with the Clinton administration’s policies toward Africa both before and after President Clinton’s historic journey to the African continent in 1998. Well-publicized protests against the administration’s Nigerian policy were supported by Trans-Africa, many members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), and other organizations with large numbers of African American supporters, such as the Washington Office on Africa (WOA). Likewise, both TransAfrica and many members of the CBC were sufficiently unhappy with Clinton’s approach that they boycotted the 1994 White House Conference on Africa. More recently, the CBC refused to take an official stance on the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, and over 30 percent of its members voted against the act in the House of Representatives. Given the contrast between an African policy perceived popularly as innovative and supportive of Africa, and the fairly high level of dissension and disapproval among African American leaders toward that policy, it is particularly worth exploring African American perspectives about Clinton’s African policies.

Prior to the start of the colonial era in Africa in the late 19th century, European states conducted relations with African rulers through a variety of means. Formal diplomatic exchanges characterized relations with polities that Europeans recognized as states, between European diplomats and officials of the Congo Kingdom of present-day Angola, Ethiopia, and Liberia, for example. Other African authorities occupied intermediate positions in Europeans’ views of international relations, either because these authorities ruled very small territories, defended no fixed borders, or appeared to outside eyes to be more akin to commercial entrepreneurs than rulers of states. Relations between Europe and these authorities left much more room for proxies and ancillary groups. Missionaries, explorers, and chartered companies commonly became proxies through which strong states in Europe pursued their relations with these African authorities. So too now, stronger states in global society increasingly contract out to private actors their relations toward Africa’s weakest states. Especially in the United States, but also in Great Britain and South Africa, officials show a growing propensity to use foreign firms, including military service companies, as proxies to exercise influence in small, very poor countries where strategic and economic interests are limited. This privatized foreign policy affects the worst-off parts of Africa—states like Angola, the Central African Republic, Liberia, Mozambique, and Sierra Leone—where formal state institutions have collapsed, often amidst long-term warfare and disorder.

Eighteen U.S. soldiers were killed and dozens were wounded in a fierce battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, on October 3–4, 1993. Their deaths were a direct outgrowth of the Clinton administration’s handling of a series of United Nations (UN)-sanctioned military interventions in Somalia, which are popularly referred to as Operation Restore Hope. With the Cable News Network (CNN) providing almost instantaneous transmission to audiences in the United States and abroad, the victorious Somali forces not only paraded a captured U.S. helicopter pilot, Corporal William Durant, through the streets of Mogadishu, but also dragged the naked corpse of a U.S. soldier past mobs of Somali citizens who vented their anger by spitting on, stoning, and kicking the body.

Since the end of the Cold War, support for democratization has become a central focus of U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, something bordering on a presumption of democracy’s and capitalism’s inevitable global reach swept up senior Clinton administration policymakers and stimulated a major rebirth of interest in democracy and democratization within the academy. In this context, fundamentally important questions about the interface between external support and domestic demand for democratization have continued to go largely unaddressed: (1) who should set the agenda; and (2) what role should external assistance play in African democratization processes. A key dimension of the thesis of this article is that failure of policymakers and academics alike to pay more attention to these questions has impeded the formation of viable processes of democratic transition and consolidation in Africa, and will continue to do so as long as they remain underaddressed. In fact, one of the crucial roles and responsibilities of those who would provide external assistance for democratization, in Africa and elsewhere, should be to encourage countries to consider seriously these agenda-setting issues in their democratization processes.

The Clinton administration and its predecessors have had a difficult time assessing the impact of ethnicity and nationalism on international conflict. They are inclined to focus on state power and individual rights considerations, downplaying the importance of the ties of communal identity and the emotive appeals of ethnic self-determination. Then, when ethnic groups do gain political significance, U.S. officials often give the communal concerns a prominence out of proportion with reality. The primary challenge for the Clinton administration is that U.S. liberalism classically has involved commitments that preclude flexibility on communally based demands for self-determination and group rights. Such perspectives can at times complicate the formulation of effective foreign policies for a region only partially integrated into the global capitalist economy, and therefore autonomous for some purposes from U.S. manipulation. What is needed is an involved but pragmatic liberalism that links U.S. conflict management objectives with what Thomas Friedman describes as a “coherent post–Cold War strategic framework.” Without that framework, he writes, “the Americans look like naive do-gooders trying to break up a street brawl.”

The Clinton administration’s foreign policy toward Africa arouses strong reactions in France, most notably within the French policymaking establishment. This sentiment is directly linked to the end of the Cold War and the redistribution of power on the African continent. French policymakers commonly believe that the United States seeks to dominate the African continent. Such a representation could be seen as laughable through its excessive character. It is nonetheless maintained by a disparate group of facts and events that, when combined, lead French policymakers to overestimate U.S. impulses. In fact, U.S. African policies are not immune to the uncertainties and contradictions that pervade overall U.S. foreign policy. As insightfully noted by French Minister of Foreign Affairs Hubert Védrine, U.S. foreign policy toward Africa conveys the aspirations of a “hyper-power” that, although lacking a worthy international opponent truly capable of challenging its power, remains incapable of implementing a viable African strategy—in essence conjuring up the much-acclaimed image in Gulliver’s Travels of the giant Gulliver finding himself hamstrung by hundreds of ropes tied by six-inch Lilliputians. An analysis of this policy also indirectly reveals the doubts inherent in France’s own African policy due to the inability of its leaders to accept the constraints of a transformed international system.

Africa occupies a special position in the foreign policies of the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. In spite of their limited capacities, lack of colonial ties with Africa, or any significant economic interests in Africa, the Nordic countries have attained a relatively high profile, especially in Southern Africa. After Finland and Sweden joined the European Union (EU) in 1995, Africa assumed an even greater level of foreign policy significance for the Nordic countries. Most notable in this regard is Finland’s assumption in 1999 of the EU presidency, a position that makes Finland responsible for the negotiations over the continuation of the EU’s Lomé Convention with 71 countries of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. It is in this context that this article assesses Nordic perceptions of the Clinton administration’s foreign policy toward Africa. It is important to note, however, that there is no one monolithic “Nordic perspective.” The opinions and approaches documented in policy papers or informal statements by individual civil servants following African affairs can widely vary. People working with development cooperation, for example, tend to be more recipient-oriented than those looking at Africa from a more general foreign policy point of view. The tradition of outspoken human rights policy still differentiates Norwegian and Swedish approaches from the cautious policy of Finland. Yet behind these different tones, one can distinguish common premises stemming from the many similarities of the Nordic countries and their conscious efforts to generate coherent, coordinated foreign policies toward Africa.

The Clinton administration’s new African policy thrust, combined with the changing contours of Canadian African policy, has brought the two governments’ approaches closer together than ever before. In most fundamental respects, their stated aims are closely congruent: They seek in general to promote stability and progress in Africa, conceived in broadly neo-liberal terms. Beyond these general objectives, however, Washington and Ottawa exhibit differences of emphasis and approach that are interesting given the especially close relationship that has long existed between the two countries. In important ways, Canada’s “kinder, gentler” approach to Africa serves to soften the face of U.S. policy priorities without fundamentally altering them, and in this respect serves as a valuable contributor to the fulfillment of U.S. hegemonic priorities on the continent and around the globe. Canada nonetheless has its own history, habits, and linkages in Africa that, although under strain, still allow it to periodically play a surprisingly prominent role on issues of concern to Africans at this historical moment of continental transformation.

With fanfare befitting the arrival of a god of the Western material world, U.S. President Bill Clinton toured Southern Africa imparting “words of wisdom” along the way. His aim, we were told, was to see that the United States becomes Africa’s “true partner.” The reason being, according to Clinton, “[a]s Africa grows strong, America grows stronger ... Yes, Africa needs the world, but more than ever it is equally true that the world needs Africa.” To this end, the United States would pursue a mix of political and economic policies that included the African Crisis Response Initiative and the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, both designed to foster “stability” and “prosperity” on the continent. Lofty goals, to be sure, but ends whose means are badly in need of interrogation. This article does just that: To wit, does Clinton, on behalf of U.S. policymakers, mean what he says? If so, in naming “peace” and “prosperity,” can he make them? Put differently, does the Clinton administration have the power to introduce order where there was chaos? Or will it only compound existing problems and visit new ones upon those who had few to begin with?

There is nothing more fundamental to Africans who are concerned with the future of the African continent than the issues of democracy, human rights, good governance, and the rule of law. These basic human liberties, among other concerns, constitute the central driving force behind what is often referred to as Africa’s “second liberation.” The primary purpose of this article is to assess the Clinton administration’s role in this second liberation, particularly in terms of its involvement in issues of democracy and human rights. This assessment is offered from the perspective of an individual who has been directly involved in the prodemocracy and human rights movement in Kenya. This article focuses on whether the Clinton administration’s policies are still heavily influenced by classic U.S. conceptions of realpolitik, or if enlightened leadership more in line with a neo-Wilsonian idealpolitik—as official rhetoric suggests—has permitted a fundamental departure in favor of a more coherent and tangible democracy and human rights foreign policy stance in the post-Cold War era.