Regionalism in Africa

Daniel Bach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317557203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Africa, which was not long ago discarded as a hopeless and irrelevant region, has become a new 'frontier' for global trade, investment and the conduct of international relations.

This book surveys the socio-economic, intellectual and security related dimensions of African regionalisms since the turn of the 20th century. It argues that the continent deserves to be considered as a crucible for conceptualizing and contextualizing the ongoing influence of colonial policies, the emergence of specific integration and security cultures, the spread of cross-border regionalisation processes at the expense of region-building, the interplay between territory, space and trans-state networks, and the intrinsic ambivalence of global frontier narratives. This is emphasized through the identification of distinctive 'threads' of regionalism which, by focusing on genealogies, trajectories and ideals, transcend the binary divide between old and new regionalisms. In doing so, the book opens new perspectives not only on Africa in international relations, but also Africa's own international relations.

This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of African politics, African history, regionalism, comparative regionalism, and more broadly to international political economy, international relations and global and regional governance.

1 Introduction

A world of regionalisms

The revival of regionalism in the late 1980s was a global and largely unanticipated phenomenon. The de facto crystallisation of trade and investment flows around the three core regions of the ‘triad’ owed much to the dynamism of non-state players. And when states were a driving force, this went along with significant policy-shifts in the mandates and agendas of established regional inter-governmental organisations (Bach, 1999a; Fawcett, 1995).

Waves of regionalism: moment and momentum

The movement known as the first wave of regionalism had surged in the aftermath of the Second World War, shaped by the Cold War and the quest for developmental policy templates in the developing world. The process of European (re)construction, in conjunction with the US Marshall Plan and the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) had reached a decisive step with the adoption of the three Rome Treaties in 1958. The European Economic Community (EEC) and the stated ambition of the ‘fathers’ of Europe to evolve towards a federal state set the tenets for what was presented by the neo-functionalists as a universal and teleological template (Haas, 1961).

In Latin America, the EEC was a particular source of inspiration at a time when US policy remained firmly committed to free trade and multilateralism (Dabène, 2009: 18). The newly appointed Director of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC or CEPAL in Spanish), Raúl Prebisch, had published in 1949 an advocacy of the unification of markets and the planned increase of industrial productivity behind tariff walls (Dabène, 2009: 16–17). The deterioration of commodity prices in the second half of the 1950s had then given a decisive impulse to the elaboration and dissemination of the CEPAL doctrine (Cepalismo). Cepalismo’s aspiration to combine regional integration with Import-Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) was, by then adopted by a whole generation of new Latin American leaders and bureaucrats. The structuralist approach that was being advocated carried a strong social component, but dissociated itself from the delinking strategies prescribed by the dependency school and experimented, between 1949 and 1991, by the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA or Comecon).

The resurgence of regionalism (Fawcett and Hurrell, 1995; Gamble and Payne, 1996) in the late 1980s followed nearly two decades of growing disillusions towards European construction and integration theory as a whole (Duffy and Feld, 1980; Haas, 1975). The most tangible sign of this revival was the sudden proliferation of Regional Trade Agreements (World Bank, 2005: 28–9) underpinned by trade liberalisation policies (Mansfield and Milner, 1999: 589–627). In Latin America, the days of Celpalismo’s emphasis on ISI behind tariff walls were over. The revitalisation of regionalisation was part of an overall shift towards market-oriented programmes and neo-liberal reforms (Phillips and Prieto, 2010: 116; Malamud and Gardini, 2012: 118). ECLAC was also committed to the idea that integration agreements should not operate ‘as alternatives to a more dynamic role in the international economy, [but] … as processes that complement the effort towards that goal.’ (ECLAC, 1994: 11). Regional integration was expected to promote the emergence of building-blocks for an international economy that would be ‘free of protectionism and barriers to the exchange of goods and services’.

ECLAC explicitly drew its inspiration from the achievements of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum that, since its establishment in 1989, had developed its brand of trade liberalisation. Known as ‘open regionalism’, it involved the extension of Most Favoured Nation (MFN) treatment to both members and non-members of APEC (Ravenhill, 2001: 2). By the early 1990s, APEC included key world economies and was celebrated as one of the world’s most successful regional economic grouping. Its intra-regional trade represented over a third of the global trade of its member-states who also accounted for over 45 per cent of global trade (ibid.).

In contrast with this converging endorsement of neo-liberal and multilateral principles, the goals and visions of the regional institutions involved in the second wave of regionalism were highly diversified. They were also closely articulated with intimations that a ‘world of regions’ (Katzenstein, 2005) or a ‘global world order of strong regions’ (Buzan and Waever, 2003: 20) were emerging within world politics (Acharya, 2007: 629–52).

In North America, it was the lack of progress in multilateral trade negotiations under the Uruguay round that initially prompted, in 1985, the conversion of US trade policy to regionalism. The first RTA, a bilateral agreement signed with Israel in 1985, was followed by negotiations towards the Canada–United States Agreement (CUSA) and, following its enlargement to Mexico, the conclusion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992 (Payne, 1996: 104–7). The agreement was institutionally modest (it merely established a free trade area) but ambitious – it straddled across the north-south divide and went along with the Enterprise for the America Initiative towards a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

In Europe, it was the Single European Act, initiated in 1986, that resulted in a highly successful (but largely unanticipated) revival of European construction. Initially triggered by European concern at the rise of Japan, the completion of the Single European Market (SEM) programme was achieved by 1992. By then, the dissolution of the communist bloc in East and Central Europe was conferring a new geopolitical dimension to the project of European construction. In the process, debates on federalism and the constitutionalisation of integration were revived (Weiler, 1998).

Within ASEAN, doubts about the progress of multilateral negotiations within the Uruguay round had triggered fears that the completion of the Single European Market (SEM) might transform the EU, already a powerful trade bloc, into a ‘fortress’. One of the outcomes was the adoption, in 1992, of the Asian Free Trade Agreement (AFTA) towards the establishment of an ASEAN Free Trade Area. This reorientation, however, did not signal any endorsement of the European Union as a model. ASEAN cooperation kept being associated with a unique set of norms and practices (the ‘ASEAN-Way’) that emphasised informality and non-intervention in the internal affairs of member-states (Acharya, 2001: 27–8).

The European model of integration through transfers of sovereignty and ASEAN’s emphasis on non-interference were the expression of two broad prototypes of regionalism: sovereignty pooling and sovereignty enhancement:

APEC and other regional interstate co-operation bodies such as ASEAN, and its ancillaries such as AFTA and the ARF [Asian Regional Forum] in the security domain, are statist and are used to enhance legitimacy. In contrast to the EU, Asian regional organisations are geared to sovereignty enhancement not sovereignty pooling … . Consequently, regionalism becomes a tool for the consolidation of state power.’

(Higgot, 1998: 52–3)

The ASEAN-Way model also challenged the widespread assumption that regional groupings could only prosper in ‘a quintessential liberal-democratic milieu featuring significant economic interdependence and political pluralism’ (Acharya, 2001: 31; Aris, 2009: 452–3).

The second wave of regionalisms was stimulated by the globalisation of the world economy and widely assimilated to the triumph of neo-liberalism and its values. Two decades later, regionalism is associated with new agendas and debates. In Latin America, the lack of clarity of the goals and purposes of ‘new regionalism’ is contrasted with the dynamism of regionalisation as a structural force (Phillips and Prieto, 2010: 118–19). Theories of (new) regionalism, the same authors argue, are less attuned to what regionalisation ‘does look like’, than to ‘what it should look like’ (ibid.: 117). Should one therefore consider that regionalism has already peaked? This is the general question asked by Andrés Malamud and Gian Luca Gardini since the association of comprehensive economic integration with macro-regions has been losing ground to regionalism understood as ‘a set of diverse cooperation projects’ disseminated in several sub-regions (Malamud and Gardini, 2012: 11). The notion of post-hegemonic regionalism(s) also stresses the loss of centrality of ‘open regionalism’ and ‘US-led neo-liberal governance’ since the 1990s (Riggirozzi and Tussie, 2012a: 12). Post-hegemonic regionalism also brings attention back to the plurality of models and patterns of cooperation or integration that ‘coexist and overlap’ (Briceño-Ruiz and Ribeiro Hoffmann, 2015: 48). Regionalism has become associated with ambitious transformative regionalist agendas, especially in the case of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA). Created by Hugo Chavez in 2001, ALBA seeks to promote alternatives to existing orders and institutions through non-capitalist practices, alternative development principles based on welfare cooperation and solidarity, civil society participation and direct opposition to neo-liberalism (Riggirozzi, 2012a: 26–9).

From a global perspective, current evolutions point to an interplay between regionalism and the concept of ‘region’ that has become increasingly diffuse and unmanageable, an issue already foreseen by Andrew Hurrell (1995b: 38) in the hey days of the ‘new’ wave. The regional label, as applied to Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs), conventionally refers to arrangements that are apposite to a multilateral agreement. Accordingly, a RTA encompasses free trade or customs arrangements that may be bilateral or quasi multilateral – that is ‘multicountry’ or ‘plurilateral in WTO parlance (Sindzingre, 2014b: 4; World Bank, 2005: 28).

The regional component of the ‘plurilateral’ arrangements is particularly elusive as their span is less than multilateral but more than bilateral or regional (Schwab and Bhatia, 2014: 18). The issue has also gained renewed acuity with current plans towards the formation of ‘mega-regional’ RTAs tying together individual countries situated in different parts of the world. The mega-agreements share little more in common than the inclusion of countries or regions that account for a major share of world trade and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). These RTAs have earned their mega-regional status because two or more of the parties are in a ‘paramount driver position, or serve as hubs in global value chains’ (GVC), as in the case of the USA, the EU Japan or China (Meléndez-Ortiz, 2014: 13). The RTA’s extensive packages are meant to go well beyond World Trade Organisation (WTO) obligations and cover services, competition policy, investment, technical barriers and regulatory compatibility, intellectual property protection. It is expected that the combination of production-sharing RTAs with regulatory convergence provisions will iron out differences in investment and business climates (Meléndez-Ortiz, 2014: 13).

Another issue, the loss of congruence between regionalism and multilateralism, is at the centre of what Richard Baldwin (2011) describes as twenty-first century regionalism. While the meso-regional organisations of the late 1980s and 1990s were conceived as ‘stepping stones’ towards better integration within the multilateral system, the mega-agreements aspire to become norm-makers against the backstage of a stalled multilateral system. The quasi-multilateral or mega-RTAs are instruments to pursue bloc building strategies in areas such as intellectual property and investment that were not covered by the Doha round of negotiations.

Unlike ‘new’ regionalism, which was WTO compatible, twenty-first century regionalism is stimulated by the disillusions generated by multilateral trade negotiations. The negotiations have become entangled with geopolitical considerations due to the nature of the players involved, and their ambition to become global norms makers (Draper and Ismail, 2014; Baldwin, 2014; Capling and Ravenhill, 2013: 553–75). Such a dimension was exacerbated when, in November 2014, APEC countries – all of them party to the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations – cautiously agreed to endorse China’s proposal to undertake a feasibility study towards the establishment of another mega-regional agreement, the Free Trade Area of Asia Pacific (FTAAP). The move, described as reluctant, was immediately interpreted in Washington as a US diplomatic success (Mitchell, 2014). Such success was not replicated when, a few months later, another regional project with a global reach, the Asia Infrastructure Development Bank (AIDB) was launched. Like the FTAAP project, it had been initially conceived as a default option, an expression of the impossibility of achieving global multilateralism (Wildau, 2015; Camroux, 2012: 109).

The regionalism–regionalisation nexus

Andrew Axline observed in the late 1970s that even though regionalism kept expanding in the Third World, research in the field was dominated by theoretical language drawn from the European experience (Axline, 1977: 83). Along with the second wave of regionalism, the rise of the new regionalism studies has contributed to give a decisive impulse to the comparative study of regionalisms. The shift away from the more restrictive notion of comparative regional integration has challenged the projection of particular readings of European integration on regionalism (and what it should stand for) in the rest of the world (Söderbaum, 2005: 231; Acharya, 2012: 12).

The substitution of the regionalism/regionalisation dyad to the previous focus on integration/cooperation has been path-breaking in several respects. It is today generally established that regionalism refers to cognitive and/or state-centric projects, while regionalisation points to processes and/or de facto outcomes. The gist of this analytical distinction was already present in Bjorn Hettne’s liminary introduction to the UNU/WIDER ‘new regionalism’ project that subsequently led to the publication of five volumes (Hettne, 1994: 1–11, also 1999: xv–xxix).

We define regionalism as the ideas or ideologies, programmes, policies and goals that seek to transform an identified social space into a regional project (Bach, 2013, 2008c, 1999b). Since regionalism postulates the implementation of a program and the definition of a strategy, it is often associated with institution-building and the conclusion of formal agreements. Regionalism also refers, under the influence of the constructivist literature, to cognitive and ideational projects associated with the ‘invention’ of regions and construction of identities (Adler, 1997) and delineation of mental maps.

The definition of regionalism as a social phenomenon challenges essentialist conceptions of the region as ‘a limited number of states linked together by a geographic relationship and by a degree of mutual interdependence’ (Nye, 1968: vii). Regions, in addition to geography and the flow of goods and people, refer to ‘social and cognitive constructs that are rooted in political practice’ (Katzenstein, 2002: 105). How political actors, state as well as non-state, ‘perceive and interpret the idea of a region’ has become an integral component in the definition and study of (new) regionalisms (Söderbaum, 2011: 54).

Regionalism can account for processes of regional integration through sovereignty pooling, but also for groupings that, as the track-record of ASEAN illustrates, conceive region-building as sovereignty enhancement. For the purpose of drawing cross-regional comparisons, the term is analytically more useful than the more restrictive notion of regional integration:

Integration by definition implies loss of sovereignty, voluntary or through pressure. Regionalism does not. This does not make regionalism less important, as some suggest, but it does call for different concepts and approaches to the study of the phenomena.

(Acharya, 2012: 12)

Unlike the notion of integration, regionalism, can be used to discuss policy-orientations, claims and identities within states. This was precisely the case when, in the 1970s and 1980s, the expression of new regionalism became associated with the idea of an emerging ‘Europe of regions’ (Le Galès, 1998: 265; Keating, 1998).

Regionalisation relates to the build up of interactions that are not necessarily associated with an explicitly asserted or acknowledged regionalist project. Regionalisation is a more encompassing notion than regionalism since it takes into account processes and configurations within which states are frequently not the key players. In addition to the role of diasporas and cross-border trade networks, regionalisation can be associated with the activity of large multinationals, seeking to enhance their competitive edge. More generally, definitions of the dynamics of regionalisation converge towards what was from the onset the rallying ground for all students of the second wave: the study of ‘undirected economic and social interactions between non-state actors, whether individuals, companies or non-governmental organisations …’ (Fawcett and Gandois, 2010: 619; Bøås, Marchand and Shaw, 1999). These representations of regionalisation processes were, at least initially, shaped by the experience, turned into a model, of Asia’s network-led integration and open-ended micro-regional processes. In the first case, what was earmarked was the remarkable ability of diasporas to side-step weak regional institutions and strong politico-bureaucratic constraints; while in the second case, it was the perceptions of what integration entailed that were radically challenged by the conversion of growth triangles, infrastructure corridors and other spatial development initiatives into global gateways (Mittelman, 1999; Breslin and Hook, 2002).

The African maze

A few years ago, two EU scholars, while discussing how to bridge the gap between EU studies and the ‘new regionalist literatures’, quizzically noted that ‘Africa poses challenges’ to the political study of regionalisation (Rosamond and Warleigh-Lack, 2009: 20). This acknowledgement was a significant departure from the days when the study of regionalism and regionalisation in Africa would be squarely ignored or declared irrelevant.

Africa may still be considered as a puzzle, but it is no longer a dead angle in the study of regionalisms and regional integration. The continent is becoming the crucible for conceptualising and contextualising cross-border regionalisation processes, the interplay between territory, space and networks, or global frontier narratives. The new relevance gained by these issues is also a symbol of the analytical limitations of the theories of regional ‘integration’.

The end of the systematic assimilation of regionalism to regional integration, the focus on non-state actors, the ideational dimension of regionalisms and the multiscalar and diverse nature of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: a world of regionalisms
• 2. Amalgamation and hysteresis
• 3. The politics of economic cooperation: regime consolidation, club diplomacy and patronage
• 4. The magnetic pull of frontiers
• 5. Mental maps and holistic agendas
• 6. Defragmentation and connectivity
• 7. The frontier as concept and metaphor: Africa in international relations
• Bibliography
• Index