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Description
Abstract: While the relationship between the United Nations and Africa's various regional and sub-regional organisations has already been the subject of much debate, hardly any attention has been paid to the relationships these African organisations maintain with each other and the way they impact on the continent's emerging security architecture. Consequently, this article aims to shed some light on both the evolution of competing regionalisms in Africa as well as their impact on the prospects and chances of today's security institutions. It thereby argues that the ongoing proliferation of intergovernmental organisations and the resultant competition for national and international resources, political influence and institutional relevance threatens the viability of a continental approach to peace and security by duplicating efforts and fragmenting support. It further contends that the often uneasy coexistence of these organisations is symptomatic of the deep divisions, nationalist tendencies and regional imbalances underlying the multiple processes of regionalisation in Africa. More optimistically, however, the article concludes that, even though some of these divisive factors seem here to stay, the African Union has taken a number of noteworthy steps to harmonise the continent's numerous security initiatives. Both, the creation of regionally based multinational brigades as part of an African Standby Force as well as the decision to limit official cooperation to seven organisations are meant to prevent needless duplication of effort and to ensure that the continent's limited resources are applied to areas of real need. By basing its security architecture on regional pillars and incorporating existing initiatives as building blocs and implementation agencies into its continental policy, the AU has made important steps towards establishing a common front and reversing what Ghana's first president Kwame Nkrumah had so fearfully termed the "balkanisation of Africa".
INTRODUCTION
The inflationary increase in African undertakings to establish peace and security raises a number of important questions about the interrelationships between the various organisations, their place in and contribution to Africa's security architecture, as well as their comparative institutional chances and prospects. Foremost among these questions is whether, and if so how, the continent's current plethora of intergovernmental organisations and institutions can evade the self-destructive rivalries which have characterised Africa's institutional landscape for so long and which have hindered effective sub-regional and regional cooperation ever since the beginning of decolonisation. In order to answer these questions, this article is structured into four parts. The first part traces the historical evolution of Africa's competing regionalisms, that is, the occurrences of competition between intergovernmental institutions with virtually the same official raison d'etre but different underlying motives and/or conceptions of cooperation, from decolonisation to the establishment of the African Union in 2002. This retrospective journey is followed by an attempt to distil the commonalities of that period into a theoretical framework and identify the root causes of Africa's proneness for inter-institutional competition. Drawing occasionally on theories such as Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT) as formulated by Barry Buzan and Ole Waever, the third part then discusses the status quo in light of the identified root causes. The remaining part of this article assesses the prospects for further rationalisation and harmonisation of Africa's various peace and security initiatives and briefly elaborates on the challenges ahead. The article concludes by arguing that even though many of the identified root causes have lost relevance in the continent's emerging institutional landscape, not all of the structural, political, and cultural tensions underlying inter-institutional cooperation in Africa have yet been convincingly resolved. Africa's leaders must thus continue to promote and institutionalise deeper coordination and collaboration among themselves, the continent's sub-regional and regional organisations, as well as civil society actors. They must strive to consolidate past gains whilst not loosing momentum in continuing to rationalise the multitude of existing organisations and to establish a clear division of labour among them. If they fail, so may their dream of African unity.
The History of Competing Regionalisms in Africa
Africa has experienced at least two great waves of regionalisation. [1] While the first one is associated with colonisation, de-colonisation, and Pan-Africanism, the second was released in the late 1980s with the loosening of the shackles which the Cold War had imposed on the continent. The phenomenon of competing regionalisms is certainly not confined to the later wave. On the contrary, it has been a defining feature of Africa's regionalisations ever since the decolonisation process started and the newly independent states made their first attempts at regional, cooperation and integration. As today, the interactions of the resultant groupings, whether on a local, sub-regional or continental level, were soon to be characterised by thinly veiled competition for the benefits of political prominence and institutional relevance. The following section aims to trace the evolution and effects of this competition through the various waves of regionalisation and subsequently distil the commonalities into a theoretical framework. In doing so, it hopes to set the stage for a fruitful discussion of the current status quo and the prospects for effective continental security cooperation.
During the decolonisation period, Africa experienced the establishment of a whole range of regional schemes for political and economic cooperation. This wave of regionalisation occurred for several reasons, some practical, others ideological. Firstly, independence and the concomitant break-up of the colonial federations such as the Afrique Occidentale Francaise (AOF), the Afrique Equatoriale Francaise (AEF), and the Central African Federation had suddenly highlighted the negative consequences of the extreme segmentation and the intrinsically problematic viability of the political divisions and economic circuits inherited from the colonial period. [2] Without the binding structures of the colonial administrations, Africa's newly independent states were quickly confronted by economic and political disunity as the colonial powers had concentrated on forging vertical links between their metropoles and their dependencies rather than horizontal links among the colonies. [3] In fact, they had not only consistently discouraged the latter (unless it served an imperial purpose), but also amplified the resultant difficulties through what Nkrumah called "by far the greatest wrong which the departing colonialists had ever inflicted on Africa, namely, to leave us divided into economically unviable states which bear no possibility of real development."[4] Quite naturally, the desire to mitigate this wrong, to combat the ongoing exploitation of the continent's resources and to achieve some sort of economic and political viability was one of the main motivations for the African states to begin regional cooperation.
Secondly, any such practical considerations were deeply embedded in the ideological framework of Pan-Africanism which, ever since the first Pan-African Congress in 1900, advocated African integration and unity as the only means of bringing about true self-rule and self-determination on the continent. [5] With the "long, long night of colonial rule" finally coming to an end in the late 1950s, this framework thus held the promise of mutual support and assistance in the face of obvious vulnerability and the fear of (neo)colonial interference. [6] Although not all governments (and resistance movements) of the continent necessarily subscribed to the underlying idea of African oneness, the ideologically charged rhetoric of Pan-Africanism served well to carry the anti-colonial message and finally create a feeling of self-assertion and thus the political basis for inter-African cooperation.
Given the aforementioned incentives for such cooperation, it is hardly surprising that Africa's decolonisation was accompanied by a proliferation of intergovernmental organisations, federations, unions, and communities some of which were virtually moribund from the beginning while others quickly gained membership and political influence. In fact, regional initiatives sprung up in such numbers that this article will have to concentrate on a select few in order to demonstrate that the competing regionalisms of the present found their beginning in the way the organisations, states, and leaders of the past came to interact with one another. For the period before 1963, the conflict and competition between the so-called Monrovia and Casablanca groups of states, as well as Nkrumah's controversial Union of African States (UAS), can serve as illuminating examples. The uneasy relationship between the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the continent's sub-regional organisations, as well as the ongoing rivalry between the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and its various francophone shadows such as the Communaute Economique de l'Afrique de l'Ouest (CEAO) or the Union Economique et Monetaire Ouest Africaine (UEMOA), are equally instructive for the period thereafter.
The road to the Organisation of African Unity (1958 to 1963)
Undoubtedly the most visible aspect of regionalisation after decolonisation was the attempt to create an African supra-national institution which was officially launched by the First Conference of Independent African States (CIAS) in 1958. [7] As more African states achieved independence, further interpretations of Pan-Africanism emerged, including the Pan-African Freedom Movement of Eastern, Central and Southern Africa (1958), the Conseil de l'Entente (1959), the Union of African States (1960), the African States of the Casablanca Charter (1961), the African and Malagasy Union (1961), and the Organization of Inter-African and Malagasy States (1962).
Although unity may have been their aim, these various institutional constructs soon began to clash as Africa's new states tried to exalt national independence and continental unity at the same time. The most fundamental point of disagreement concerned the questions of why unity should be sought in the first place, which objectives and interests inter-African-cooperation should serve, and how it should be institutionalised. [8] Moreover, the type of relationship Africa should maintain with its former colonial masters divided the continent's states and movements. Some wanted to retain collaborative structures and thus the flow of assistance, others strove passionately for total independence and African autarky. Given the already thick walls between the Francophone, Anglophone, Lusophone, and Arabic blocs of states, these differences in political outlook did not exactly help the continent on its march to unity. [9] On the contrary, as the first crisis in inter-African relations erupted in form of the Congolese civil war in 1960, the underlying rifts threatened to pull Africa apart.
What burst upon Africa and the world as the "Congo crisis" did so for many reasons, among them the attempted secessions of various break-away regions (Katanga and Luba-Kasai), an army mutiny seeking the Africanisation of the officer cadre, and a political power clash between Prime Minister Lumumba and President Kasavubu. The ensuing conflict, along with the continuing Algerian war of independence, was to reveal and intensify the fissures beneath the apparent solidarity of Africa's independent states. As the latter's divergent positions on the Congo's legitimate government, the deployment of a UN mission (ONUC) to the crisis zone, as well as the level of support that should be accorded to Algeria's rebel Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), clashed, deeper differences in perspective and objective became painfully obvious and eventually led to a crystallisation of Africa's states into several opposing groups.
While the so-called Casablanca group (the "revolutionaries") consisted of countries who proposed the immediate creation of a political union for Africa in which economic, cultural, and military activities would be coordinated centrally, the states in the rival Brazzaville group (the "moderates") considered themselves more conservative and gradualist. [10] Far from condemning regionalism as a distraction from, or even an obstacle to, African unity, these initially exclusively Francophone states saw themselves as a counterweight to Nkrumah's aggressive Pan-Africanism and its omnipresent advocacy of immediate and absolute integration. Instead of a close organic identification within a constitutionally unified Africa, the moderates thus argued for a unity that was not "political integration of sovereign states, but unity of aspirations and of action considered from the point of view of African social solidarity and political identity."[11]
Contrary to the Casablanca group, which was never really able to institutionalise its cooperation, the Brazzaville group, which by May 1961 had merged into the larger Monrovia group of states, went on to create various institutions and adopt a charter in order to assert its claim to speak for the continent. [12] It founded the Organisation Africaine et Malgache de Cooperation Economique (OAMCE), the Union Africaine et Malgache (UAM), as well as a defence organisation, the Union Africaine et Malgache de Defense (UAMD). The two latter were eventually amalgamated into the Union Africaine et Malgache de Cooperation Economique (UAMCE).
As the conflict in and for Congo raged on, the rift between the two opposing groups and their leaders continued to grow. In fact, each group, by considering the establishment of an institutionalised continental cooperation to be a zero-sum game and itself to be the only legitimate beginning thereof, did its part to turn the initially stable coexistence into a state of competition and rivalry. [13] A characterisation of the latter was the constant struggle of the two groups to increase their individual memberships, preferably by converting members of the opposing group. This led to situations where the UAM would appeal to all states to cooperate with it "sur la base des principes definis a Brazzaville," while, at the same time, the Casablanca powers, emphasising their "responsibilities towards the African Continent," would be asking all countries to associate themselves with their common action instead. [14]
Naturally, such competition neither enhanced the continent's perception of security nor lessened the chaos on the organisational scene which had prevailed since the eve of independence. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that Africa's states formed even more sub-regional bodies in response. One such body that was created in the heat and rivalry of those days was Nkrumah's Ghana-Guinea-Mali Union, later to be named the Union of African States (UAS). Although it claimed to be a nucleus for broader unity, it was in practice as parochial as any and hardly a worthy implementation of Nkrumah's vision of a United States of Africa. Based on the union Ghana and Guinea had announced on 1 May 1959 (with a common national flag and anthem, common citizenship and an open invitation to other African states to join), the UAS failed to draw its members together or have any practical activities besides the issuing of several declarations and charters. As Jon Woronoff so rightly observed, its main purpose, so it would seem, was as a battering ram against the neighbouring members of the Brazzaville/Monrovia groups first, and then also against the Pan-African Freedom Movement of Eastern, Central and Southern Africa (PAFMESCA) which it saw as yet another rival in the quest for continental unity. [15] Considering itself a "higher and healthier conception of African unity," the UAS condemned other attempts at regional association (or as it is sometimes called functional cooperation) as "just another form of balkanisation" and encouraged all African states to follow its example instead. [16]
Originally meant as a means to undermine and destroy regionalism in order to attain continental unity, the creation of the UAS and its subsequent conduct in inter-African politics had exactly the opposite effect. By heightening tensions and thereby seemingly convincing the less radical states that they themselves would need similar bodies for their protection, the Casablanca group, and within it the UAS, contributed to the further fragmentation of Africa's institutional sphere rather than to its consolidation.
While many other instances of rivalling regionalisms existed in the period between 1958 and 1963, the open clash between the statist Monrovia and unionist Casablanca groups, as well as the competition for... |
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