African Foreign Policy Thought and Classical Political Doctrines: The Commonality of Ethical and Axiological Grounds

Afrocentrism which emerged as a response to Eurocentrism challenged several political theories of the twentieth century which are used to define the problem field of international studies. This phenomenon as well as the West–East opposition that emerged in European countries many years ago gave birth to a whole trend in the sphere of human knowledge which intentionally opposed the original African foreign policy thought to classical ideas. Using the method of axiological reductionism based on Husserlian εποχη principle and Quine's ontological relativism the authors explore the ethical features of the original African foreign policy concepts. Having established that the ethical component of African political thought has no fundamental differences from similar components of other regions of the world, the authors show the axiological commonality of African and world theories and introduce into accepted typological classifications them through axiological reductionism. As a result, the authors conclude that, despite the prominent specificity of the concepts themselves (for example, racial—negritude, afrocentric—concentric ring system, regional—Pan-Africanism, state—Ujamaa) and the foreign policy doctrines (African Renaissance) and phenomena (OAU, AU) generated by them, African political thought not only does not fall out of the global mainstream of political studies but also complements it as one of the significant components of global political development. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.