Politics and Pan-Africanism

Diplomacy, Regional Economies and Peace-Building in Contemporary Africa

Dawn Nagar

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786726391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Relazioni internazionali

Offering an examination of the diplomatic and economic regional power structures in Africa and their relationships with each other, Dawn Nagar discusses the potential and future of pan-Africanism. The three primary regional economic communities (RECs) that are recognised by the African Union as the key building blocks of a united Africa are examined - these are the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the East African Community (EAC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC). These RECS include Africa's major economies – Egypt, South Africa, and Kenya but are also home to Africa's most conflict prone and volatile states – the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Burundi, South Sudan, Somalia and Lesotho.
Providing a detailed overview of the current relationship between these power blocs, this book provides insight into the current state of diplomatic and economic relations within Africa and shows how far there is to go for a future of Pan-Africanism.

1

Introduction: Pan-African integration

The first and primary aim of the book is to reach a better understanding of Africa’s efforts at promoting Pan-Africanism, its relevance to the continent, and to achieving socio-economic growth, political stability and continental security. This book makes two main arguments focused on divergence and convergence of regional economic integration and regional security by incorporating two new theories – Pan-African economic integration; and Pan-African security convergence – that have been first coined and developed for, and are applied in, this book. These theories are updated and premised on theories deployed in a doctoral thesis as well as several research outputs and critical analyses conducted on Africa’s political economy, international relations, and security issues in the period 2000–19. The second purpose of this book is to provide a historical critical analyses of the regional experiments in Africa and thus, the book expands on the divergence and convergence debates, as imperative analyses in understanding the coming together of the key African regions as stepping stones in Africa’s integration process, namely, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the East African Community (EAC), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and their initial signing of the Tripartite Free Trade Agreement (TFTA) in 2008. These three regional communities have also signed the African Free Trade Agreement in March 2018 and the extent of this convergence towards Pan-African economic integration is thus assessed.

An assessment of Africa’s historical regionalism, further allows a critical debate on the extent of the evolutions of divergences and convergences – providing different periods of time in which a momentum towards both divergence and convergence is demonstrated within these regional groupings. The third purpose is to assess the convergence of the African security mechanisms and to analyse the actors and factors of such roles in understanding the divergence and convergence debates within the continent’s security apparatuses used to achieve continental security.

Numerous books have been written over the decades on Africa’s attempts at regional integration, with various concepts developed, but no theory to date has been developed or produced by African scholars, for Africa that is premised on a Pan-African regional integration trajectory. This book thus, proffers two new theories: Pan-African economic integration theory, which is premised on the relationship between divergence and convergence of regional economic integration policies and initial implementation towards a continental convergence, that is premised on COMESA, the EAC and SADC in their attempts to achieve economic convergence through conducting trade, while also putting in place regional security mechanisms, in paving the way for trade. A decade later, after the signing of the FTA in 2008, in March 2018, the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (ACFTA)’s (also referred to in this book as the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA)) legal instruments were formally signed by twenty-one out of fifty-five African countries – with Gambia signalling its ratification to the ACFTA in April 2019 – which brought the total tally to twenty-two out of fifty-five African states for the trade agreement to take effect on 30 May 2019.¹ Africa is thus envisaging exponential annual continental trade growth of 53 per cent, with its African FTA as the largest in the world in terms of the number of countries, and a market of 1.2 billion people.² However, the reality is that during the October 2008 COMESA-EAC-SADC trade partnership comprised of about twenty-six countries, total intracontinental trade remained at a paltry 16 per cent in 2019, with the majority of trade being conducted with mega international partners such as the United States, China and Europe, working against the modalities of boosting trade of the ACFTA. Hence, it will be underdevelopment and poverty that will be experienced, and not economic growth.

The theory of Pan-African economic integration, therefore, advocates that global economic inequality warrants that Africa’s governments and regional communities adopt stronger partnerships and specifically have trade relations with those economies that are on a more equal socio-economic footing, such as countries from the Caribbean and Pacific and that are developmental orientated, namely, the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of states.³

With economic stability feeding off security – and within a neorealist framework, the second theory coined in this book is the Pan-African security convergence, which assesses the progress, problems and prospects of achieving the objectives of a continental – African Standby Force (ASF), which has been conceived as Africa’s rapid deployment force composed of troop contributions of regional standby brigades – from South, West, Eastern, Central and North Africa.⁴ The divergence and convergence of the ASF are assessed under a political economy lens in order to gauge the realist debates within this theory.

Both theories outlined above serve as principal indicators in the book for understanding Africa’s political economy and interpreting continental socio-economic and security convergences and divergences respectively.⁵

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the literature reviewed, in offering critical analysis that reflects degrees of divergence and convergence of regional integration efforts within major regional economic communities (RECs) that lead to the CFTA, namely COMESA, EAC and SADC, and their workings towards achieving Pan-Africanism, which were challenged by historical internal and external actors and factors that have filtered into existing regional practices. Such challenges have constituted uneven economic growth of the member states at the national, regional and continental levels. Stronger economies like those of South Africa attached to a Southern African Customs Union (SACU) and SADC, Angola in SADC, Egypt in COMESA and Kenya in EAC, are all linked to regional and international bilateral trade arrangements and customs unions (such as the EAC) that dominate the trade markets, leaving very little room for the smaller economies to manoeuvre. Such impact on the smaller economies destroys infant industries or threatened by becoming insolvent and leading to divergence and not Pan-African integration. Therefore, the concepts of divergence and convergence raised in the theories reviewed in Chapter 2 offer important analytical lenses for understanding and explaining the issues of a continent battling to achieving Pan-African economic integration and Pan-African security convergence.

The theory of Pan-African economic integration as developed further lays claim that, because open markets and trade are largely premised on neoclassical economics – as also outlined by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (now called the World Trade Organization (WTO)) principles – open markets cannot be simply wished away since they are part of the real world. This theory, therefore underscores that owing to individual regional integration policies such as COMESA, EAC and SADC, and their integration policies at regional level (of both institutions and member states) of free trade agreements, and customs unions which are largely premised on neoclassical economics linked to open markets and free trade, and due to the unequal nature of intraregional trade, regional trade policies will cause divergence in Africa’s attempts of achieving Pan-African economic integration. This divergence is inevitable, even though a CFTA is in place, with continental security and instability having been perpetual throughout the continent with several intra- and interstate conflicts transpiring since the 1970s.

The national interests of states have set the pace for the continental peace and security agenda, particularly those of the ASF, and not the African Union (AU) – as the architect of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). Such interests have derailed policy implementation and are misled by the state’s parochial domestic conditions, resulting in a nationalist approach to dealing with external affairs. Africa’s continental peacekeeping has also become squarely linked to the economic interests of the state, with security issues coming to be viewed by governments through the lens of realism and trumped by concerns of political economy over regional and human security. Furthermore, neorealists define a hegemonic state as a powerful, strong economy that sets the rules of the game, having a greater advantage over its partner states, and one which exerts power. The theory of ‘neorealist security convergence’⁶ goes further in proposing that a hegemon has the ability to converge the security apparatuses of other member states within a region or regional bloc, based on its own conception of interests. In other words, a regional hegemonic power – a state with immense political clout and authority within a regional bloc, but bound by the need to address its own domestic socio-economic concerns – will set the rules of the game for its own benefit. Moreover, such a state will have the political will to militarily intervene in support of other states in its region to achieve regional security, and, only do so when this is linked to its own national interests. This also means that national level challenges, particularly in the case of regionally powerful states, will tend to filter into the continental-level aim of achieving convergence of regional security mechanisms.⁷ Hence Chapter 6 applies the theory Pan-African security convergence, which assesses the ability of the ASF to converge given the protection warranted by powerful states in minimising conflicts and in securing an expanded CFTA.

Chapter 3 expands the divergence and convergence debates, as imperative analyses and also providing an understanding of the coming together and the historical experiments of the regions of COMESA, EAC and SADC. The assessment of the historical period critically focuses on the evolutions of divergences and convergences – providing different periods of time in which a momentum in both divergence and convergence is demonstrated within these regional groupings – and include a discussion of the Preferential Trade Area (PTA) for Eastern and Southern Africa and its formation, which subsequently evolved into COMESA. Also provided is a commentary on the historical period and an assessment of the Frontline States (FLS) that evolved into the security Organ of SADC. In order to facilitate an understanding and gauge the extent to which their existence filtered into the new COMESA, EAC and SADC, the discussion expands on how these institutions evolved during their rationalisation process. The book considers PTA’s initial ten states – Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Rwanda, Somalia, Tanzania and Zambia (in the 1990s Comoros (who also joined SADC in 2017), Djibouti, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland (now known as Eswatini) and Uganda joined, followed by Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe), and the Southern African Development Coordination Co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Key Abbreviations and Acronyms
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The evolution of Pan-Africanism
• 3 Pan-Africanism’s birth, burial – reincarnate
• 4 The era of convergence
• 5 Convergence and consolidation of multiple memberships: An attempted convergence
• 6 Pan-African economic integration
• 7 Pan-African security convergence: The evolution of collective security
• 8 Analysis and normative proposals
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page