I here want to advocate for the need of a transcontinental infrastructure plan between Europe and Africa, seen primarily from a European perspective. Europe relatively recently released its infrastructure plan targeting its own continent, where there were fewer "massive" projects but very many medium and small projects (relative to Europe's size) attempting to improve the future transportation efficiency and ease the current pressure on already existing routes and on the environment in urban areas. In 2011 the "White Paper" was released (http://ec.europa.eu/transport/themes/st ... per_en.htm) setting goals for 2050. This plan of course is more of an ideological paper than any concrete plan of action. To exemplify this here is one of the 50-points of action:
More close to our own time there was also recently released the new 10-year developmental target plan of action, with many more concrete measures (Norway also did this, one independent of Europe, not that anybody cares of little Norway). The TEN-T is a transportation plan (which has existed and been discussed for a long while) by the European Union (in some cooperation with other nations, like Norway) which seeks to expand on already existing lines of transport, ensuring a more integrated network, introducing several such-called "Motorways of the sea" (which was new to me, and if new to you as well it's not undersea rail or roads, but a fancy name for ferries) among things, focusing on maximizing the usefulness of existing roads and rail-roads by connecting ends.5. Oil will become scarcer in future decades, sourced increasingly from uncertain supplies. As the IEA has recently pointed out, the less successful the world is in decarbonising, the greater will be the oil price increase. In 2010, the oil import bill was around € 210 billion for the EU. If we do not address this oil dependence, people’s ability to travel – and our economic security – could be severely impacted with dire consequences on inflation, trade balance and the overall competitiveness of the EU economy.
To get the facts out of the bag first, an idea for a railway crossing at the Strait of Gibraltar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_ ... r_crossing) has long been considered and planned for, while it yet to take the step of deciding on a follow through plan of action, but enough of the European state of transport...
My first arguments for the Afrophile approach is that 1) Africa is the foreign continent closest to central Europe where Europe's economic and political interests rests, 2) geopolitically Africa is historically unstable but also no direct external threat to Europe, therefore the power of Africa to abuse tighter interdependency for personal (ideological) gain is heavily reduced as opposed to the power-struggling and competing larger nations of Asia (Russian sphere of influence, Indian sphere of influence, Pakistani sphere of influence, and authoritarian China coupled with nationalist Indochina and far-away Japan, South-Korea and Indonesia and castrated Taiwan) or the more culturally opposing Middle-East (which is also unstable and delicate, with the Israeli-Palestinian questions, the Iranian question and the socio-political radicalism and authoritarianism characterising the Arab Peninsula and Mesopotamia in general), 3) despite strong conservatism (compared to Europe) and religiousness in Africa it's a continent where Europe is looked up to in terms of societal progress and some countries, South Africa being a beacon example, shares many ideas on society with Europe, and for this sake Europe as a word is an export brand, and historical ties remain strong with shared languages and an elite trained and educated in European universities not to mention shared research which has been a development strategy for the EU in the recent past, 4) the African population, like India, is young and eager but unable to find somewhere to live their out their eagerness, urbanization is helping with increasing social mobility; a crucial element in taking advantage of available workforce, not to mention that literacy and expertise is ever increasing and will continue to increase in the decades ahead with a question of who is to grab the geniuses when they turn up, and 5) transport in Africa is already extremely low, indicating that the potential behind development could unleash a lot of production energy that has as of yet been suppressed by the lack of means to deliver production.
The concrete argument lays in a three primary layered development approach and then a secondary set of complementary development approaches to expand on the initial development. There are already ideas for a Trans-African railway network (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transconti ... oad#Africa), unfortunately, as is not unexpected, the power of African countries to carry out on their own is limited by poor governance, financial restraints and lack of own expertise communities. The problem with the result is also that it sounds better than it would be, because of the lack of the right means the trains would be much slower, maybe even bought used, likely it would be single-tracked, only with a bit of luck there would be some short parallel passings (so you could have more than one train travelling the distance at the time and avoid collision). Because of these problems, there seems to be a need for more intensive development approaches, more targeted towards getting the goods to those who has money, and who has money? Europe. The means of goods-travel between Europe and Africa today are severely limited. Poor and small port facilities give slow and inefficient boat travel, the lack of highway connectivity and extensiveness results in problems in reaching targets efficiently and quickly, and African rail is practically a joke in the, to Europe, most useful geographic areas (by my limited knowledge of course, though it's unlikely anyone besides perhaps South Africa or Botswana can afford a proper rail).
I start with a map of Africa:
In this map I'd like to drawn the three primary lines of connectivity. The first one should be built from Spain to Morocco, down through Mali going through important hub cities like Timbuktu before forming a "belly" circumventing curve route snapping up Western-most Africa before entering the extremely populous Nigeria and exploiting the vast access to a workforce that is represented there, from then on the route briefly enters Central African Republic, as a hope of giving the country the opportunity to alleviate its dependence on other countries for export routes as well as offering the extremely undeveloped country an opportunity to develop in the area close to the rail-road, further on it enters western Congo where it stays shortly out of Eastern Congo as to offer Congolese access but try to stay within the more stable and developed parts of the country big and populous country, the journey continues on in a quest to offer inland countries a fast an easy access to the European market travelling through Zambia before it enters the more developed and rich country of Botswana and finally finishing through a headway onto Johannesburg which is the most populous city in South Africa and a place of more access to cheap work force in a developed society. Remember that the drawing is crude and many adjustment should likely be done, especially to centre it more hub-wards in terms of big cities and populated or productive areas and include possibly countries like Liberia and maybe Angola and Mauritania as well.
After the now mentioned line has been drawn in red. The second line comes in blue:
To increase the access and efficiency into central Europe and especially capital rich countries like Switzerland, Austria and Germany and further into the Scandinavian countries a route connects through Italy down through Sicily and across the strait into Tunisia. Tunisia is like Morocco a stable and sufficiently developed country, the Arab Spring not being representative example (and even that went rather peaceful in Tunisia), marking a nice entrance and connection point between Europe and Africa. From there on, the Sahara desert to the south consists of vast areas of desert and low-population, therefore to increase efficiency (at the cost of longer route) the route leads eastwards first travelling through the populated areas of northern Libya before joining with Egypt and the Nile river southwards seeking population. Exiting Egypt it enters the vast expanse of Sudan, not exactly for Sudan's own sake but in search for Addis Ababa, the capital and biggest city of the vastly populous Ethiopia and also the political capital of Africa being the centre of the African Union headquarters among things. From there on a visit to Kenyas interior avoids highly populated areas in exchange for a temperate fertile inland, although I realize the line probably should've gone closer to the coast and went a little too far the west in Kenya, possibly also a little more to the east in southern Ethiopia. After this is seeks unification with the first line in order to connect transport from the south (South Africa and Botswana) to both Western and eastern Africa as well as granting two alternative routes to Europe and the possibility to choose the faster. It is possible to save speed to drop Egypt and cross instead in a rather straighter diagonal line from Libya through Sudan to Addis Ababa, and it might very well be preferable and then leave Egypt to its own job of connecting with the network, something it should be capable of doing if it wants to.
A third line in green unifies the inlands of Africa with the overall design goals of access, efficiency and speed:
The complementary developments will be smaller connectivity projects where gainful to give populous areas or missed productive areas access to the network. Last but not least comes the how-to-do part which is the most important perhaps. The idea is to create a company owned by all investing European countries, not for the sake of direct profit perhaps but rather as an organized alternative to grants. The company gains revenue initially by European countries buying series of annually issued stocks at fixed prices (planned budget). The goal is that 99% of the workforce of the company should be Africans, with grants for African students to top university attendance by proven strong candidates if there is a need for skilled labour not offered on the African continent or not offered sufficiently. One of the primary reasons for the Africans-only approach to the company's workforce is that 1) it should inspire African pride and a will to succeed not disfigured by Europe's own needs and patronage, 2) it should avoid cost-intensive labour if possible so that the company might live on as a cost-efficient alternative, and 3) once you have a skilled work force up and running it is capable of doing things on its own and thereby offer regional development that will nourish European trade opportunities beyond its initial goals.
The goal is to have fast-running green-technology trains designed and manufactured in Africa. In Europe this would provide extremely cost intensive, but when everything can be homebuilt given a guaranteed access to stable funding and expertise capable of developing independent methods, the result should be drastically lower production and installation costs. To allow for fast speed the trains and the tracks should be enclosed in (for instance transparent) plastic tunnels hindering physical objects slowing down its progress and in so doing also avoiding the rate of accidents and irregularity. To boost the target of opening up the markets between and possibilities for exploits between the continents a central idea is to offer grants for the building of industrial parks along the routes that house people, includes medical facilities, produce and load onto the trains from a train station on the industrial park using quick-load systems. A problem in Africa is often stable funding and reliability, therefore when one enters the continent one must be ready to offer guarantees of stability, including offering insurances on crucial infrastructure, so that the company wouldn't just go bankrupt and end a failure, that roads stretching to the industrial parks delivering raw materials are insured against natural disaster like floods, and that local police are ensured the finance to patrol and escort the roads in case there's danger of highway robberies or militant groups.
When finished, such an extensive system of infrastructure could revolutionize the geopolitics of the world, by making the much closer, much more Europe-friendly and much less threatening Africa (especially because of the division Africa is, it's far from a unified whole) the new big trade-partner of Europe, especially for industrial goods, one in particular which China today seems to have a near monopoly on in terms being a cost-effective alternative.
Two last point though would be that the line would have to be considered an international asset, so that individual countries couldn't just simply refuse other countries from travelling through their countries on the rails (though the host country doesn't have to allow their own citizens always to use it, that would be another matter). And the goal is that at time of operation the company would be running profit and be self-sufficient, with Europe not taking the profit but instead let the company use the profit for expansion and improvement and increased maintenance. Instead, European countries would offer each African country to buy a number of shares based upon their population (with a portion of the shares also being up for the grabs for the highest bidder) so that at any time they could buy it back at some suitable price (likely a fixed standard price increasing and decreasing based upon such things as inflation and deflation). In the end therefore Europe has in a way only "lent" Africa money, for when it can in some far-away future pay it back by buying the stocks of the company.
