Abstract
What defines an economic region and distinguishes it from other spatial concepts? This fundamental question is addressed based on the dimensions of space, borders, action and time. An overview of the landscape of African Regional Economic Communities (RECs) follows. RECs are briefly portrayed, and the bewildering multitude of RECs is demystified to create a better understanding of the pattern of economic integration in Africa. The exercise is guided by a matrix of general-purpose versus functional/sectoral as well as effectual versus ineffectual/dormant economic unions. This analysis forms the basis for a critical discussion of the African Union’s practice of only granting official recognition to a subset of RECs. The ‘spaghetti bowl’ of African RECs is disentangled, and an orderly range of the economic unions relevant for general-purpose integration is established. The chapter concludes with a depiction of the factual landscape of economic integration in Africa, which is characterized by a great vertical rift and the challenge to achieve effective trade integration between Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Notes
- 1.
For some classic examples, see the writings of Söderbaum and Taylor (2008).
- 2.
This is confirmed by the Africa Investor Report 2011 (UNIDO 2012): Regional market-seekers with a substantial proportion of their sales exported to Sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa) accounted for just five per cent of domestic and 11.5 per cent of foreign firms.
- 3.
For West Africa, the most comprehensive and systematic analysis of both formal and informal cross-border cooperations is presented by the OECD jointly with the Sahel and West Africa Club (OECD/SWAC 2017), only that some of the milestones for cooperation have almost literally been overrun, increasingly since 2019, by cross-border violence and transnational extremist groups. The violent spatial turn is just briefly mentioned in the study although arguably not exogenous to the cross-border activities researched.
- 4.
‘In Chile, for example, it has been found that a modern rolling mill, which is standard equipment in any industrial country, can produce in three hours a sufficient supply of a certain type of iron shapes to last the country for a year’ (Nurkse 1953: 7). Further to this development, we observe today that a steel-rolling mill is by no means profitable anymore in every bigger industrialized country.
- 5.
See Yusuf (2003: Chap. 3, Regional Cooperation in East Asia), one example of older WB/IMF publications that carefully avoided any mention of the term ‘regional integration’, while subscribing to open regionalism (p. 99).
- 6.
Probably, the most noteworthy political moment in the lifetime of the Conseil de l’Entente was in the villas which the CdE had built in Ouagadougou (as in other capital cities), presumably for regional meetings. As they remained unused, subsequent Burkinabè governments had occupied them. On 15 October 1987, Burkina Faso’s Visionary President Thomas Sankara was murdered there.
- 7.
Part of the G5 Sahel mandate with its five regional member states Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Tchad is peace building and conflict resolution. This overlaps with the respective mandate of ECOWAS and the work of its military arm ECOMOG.
- 8.
As CEN-SAD (or CENSAD) was founded in 1998 at the initiative of ‘Brother Colonel Muammar Al Kaddafi, Leader of the Great Al Fateh Revolution’ (AU website until about 2016), it will be interesting to observe how the AU will proceed with the heritage. The official website www.censad.org was maintained after Gaddafi’s death in 2011, but meetings were no longer reported on the site from 2014 onwards. The website is currently offline.
- 9.
Recently, AMU was reported to do relatively well on ‘open reciprocity’ for travel visa (AfDB 2020).
- 10.
For advice on how to escape the mineral resource curse and arrive at a meaningful division of labour, the CEMAC commission and member states have to be referred to the modern structural policy literature as reviewed in Asche (2018a) and now to be applied to a region instead of a single country, as rolled out in Part II. The same applies to the larger ECCAS, which is comprised—with Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo—of still more resource-dependent economies with identical problems.
- 11.
See also chapter on export orientation and the Herfindahl measure of export diversification.
- 12.
See Bach (2016: 21 sqq.). While rightly pointing to the (post-)colonial legacy, the linking of regional integration to hysteresis needs qualification. Hysteresis in physics, economics, etc., refers to effects that persist after the initial cause that gave rise to these effects is removed. Formal colonial ties have certainly been severed in Africa, and in this respect, there is hysteresis. However, critics will strongly argue that the cause of economic dependence on the former colonial powers is still present. In the two FCFA schemes, the institutional ties to the French treasury are not even formally severed, so UEMOA and CEMAC are better termed path-dependent schemes in a wider sense. With the intended FCFA reform, this will only partly change.
- 13.
The whole FCFA zone and the CMA are not counted separately.
- 14.
Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory has similar diagrammatic representations of different and overlapping social belongings.
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Asche, H. (2021). The State of the Unions. In: Regional Integration, Trade and Industry in Africa. Advances in African Economic, Social and Political Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75366-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75366-5_1
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