Avant Lomé: la France,l’Afrique anglophone et la CEE (1961–1972)

Before the Lomé Convention (1975) was signed between the European Economic Community (EEC) and 46 African Caribbean and Pacific States, the EEC member states had to deal with the African members of the Commonwealth. Among the Six France was in a peculiar position, wishing to maintain a special relationship between the EEC and the French-speaking African states and to enlarge its relations with other regions of the Third World. This article, based on an examination of the French Foreign Ministry Archives and the Papiers Foccart, aims to investigate the prehistory of the relations between the EEC and the English-speaking African states. It analyses the French role in the debate, outcomes and consequences of the first agreements signed by the European Community with Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. To this aim it will focus on the negotiations between the EEC and the African states, but also on the debate which took place in some international organisations on the Yaoundé Convention, in order to understand to what extent these discussions paved the way for the evolution of the EEC Development Policy during the 1970s.     

Tourism destination zoning in mountain regions: a consumer-based approach

This paper puts into question the conventional way of delineating tourism destination borders in terms of taken-for-granted administrative boundaries. Despite the fact that the literature on destination boundaries advocates for conceptual frameworks where customers’ consumption patterns play a more fundamental role, instances of actual attempts of structuring tourism geographies into ‘new tourism areas’ are scant, and instances of zoning on the basis of visitors’ consumption patterns are absent. A method for identifying alternative and more effective consumption-based tourism zones that combines geographical information system and hierarchical cluster analysis techniques, and that relies on time distances between attractions, is thus proposed, and implemented in the case of the Pyrenees mountain region. As a result the region is restructured into nine new tourism zones, which, compared to the original destinations, are more uniform in size and have a higher correlation index between attractiveness and accommodation intensity; they also have different levels of cross-border intensity and are very similar to historical regions; and the more they differ from the original destinations the higher their attractiveness, which supports the effectiveness of the new zoning technique. Four types of tourism zones ranging from higher to lower tourism intensity are also identified.