African Union to be born at summit this week.

July 9, 2001 10:31 AM

African Union to be born at summit this week. Modelled on the European Union, the new organization's charter will include plans for an African central bank, a court of justice, a single currency and a parliament. Is this what Africa really needs?
posted by tranquileye (18 comments total)

Ghadaffi is the "mastermind" behind this? I am quite skeptical of the outcome. Bully to African leaders for working to improve their lot, but it's going to a challenge. I wonder if they will have free-marketers/democratic leaders at the helm, or simply install totalitarian thugs? That will be the key, naturally.
posted by davidmsc at 11:18 AM on July 9, 2001

What Africa needs is less cronies and dictators.
posted by Witold at 11:39 AM on July 9, 2001

Ghadaffi's idea or not, its a good one. They will get far more as a group as they would get as individual nations. Obviously Ghadaffi wants to be seen as a 'statesman' Hopefully, he won't be a real player in the Union.
posted by brucec at 1:21 PM on July 9, 2001

Africa,

Best of luck on the unity thing, those crazy europeans might be having a spot of trouble with the currency thing, but a "United States of Africa" might be a good thing for everyone. (You might want to call it something else though...)

Let us know if there's anything we can do.

-The Rest of the World
posted by bshort at 3:36 PM on July 9, 2001

So if people are calling the European Union "Euroland", are we supposed to call the African Union "Afroland"?
posted by bshort at 3:37 PM on July 9, 2001

Obviously Ghadaffi wants to be seen as a 'statesman' Hopefully, he won't be a real player in the Union.

He's actually the centre-forward.

It's the culmination of a major shift in policy: Qaddafi abandoned pan-Arabism in the late 90s, recognising the final collapse of any notion of common interest across Arab states. and reinvented himself as a pan-Africanist.

Qaddafi has always been an erratic leader, ruling with an idiosyncratic mixture of dodgy ideology and pragmatism: his sponsorship of terrorism was a classic example of wrong-footed bandwagoneering, hoping to harness the fundamentalism and anti-Americanism seen in places like Iran. Even now, his grand African project is offset by racial tensions in his own country. That's why he's essentially the Castro of Africa.
posted by holgate at 4:14 PM on July 9, 2001

Is it what Africa really needs?

Gawd, the last thing Africa needs is more paternalism!

This is something they're doing on their own. With South Africa coming into its own as an economic power, with OAU military interventions (with only incidental support from the West, one might add, putting paid to the notion that the US shoulders this entire burden), and fighting AIDS, there's less and less dependence on what the West (or the North) can do for Africa, and more on how the West and North can best assist Africa in doing for itself.

Pan-Africanism, after all, is not a brand new idea (dating from early 19thC). With the success of the EU to date (rocky, to be sure, but gaining momentum), such efforts are hardly to be seen as original ideas. Gadhafi (the name with seventeen spellings) may have officially tabled the motion, but it took the ratification of 36 countries -- two thirds of OAU members -- to make the AU official.

Clearly they have a long way to go before reaching even Europe's tentative steps toward eliminating borders and creating a true federal union; nationalism on the African continent is going to continue to be a major problem. But they're taking steps to create institutions that can, in time, allow them to manage themselves, rather than be managed, and to act in concert, rather than undercutting each other's efforts. This is just the first step from a consultative body (the OAU) to a governing body.

I'm trying to find out which states haven't ratified, and which African states may not have been in the OAU in the first place. Hmm.
posted by dhartung at 4:38 PM on July 9, 2001

It's the culmination of a major shift in policy: Qaddafi abandoned pan-Arabism in the late 90s, recognising the final collapse of any notion of common interest across Arab states. and reinvented himself as a pan-Africanist.

Cuz there's just TONS of common interest among Africans...

Oy.
posted by fooljay at 7:25 PM on July 9, 2001

This will not work, for two reasons:

1. Khaddafi's last unifying attempt, the United Arab Republic (Egypt, Libya and I think Syria and Jordan) failed misserably. The only unification attempt that ever worked was the original 13 states in USA. Even that had eight years of teething problems.

2. The failior of Air Afrique is a valid example of an attempt at Pan-African cooperation. (If someone can hack out the NY Times article from June 20, it is a good read.) Too many cultural differences, too many different foreign influences that dates back to the colonial days and too much corruption will doom any African Union.

BTW, Nigeria was the first to pull out of Air Afrique. The interest of the Haves and the Have Nots in Africa is pretty similar to those of their European counterparts.
posted by tamim at 7:57 PM on July 9, 2001

Hm? Was there another United Arab Republic? The only one I know was Nasser's attempt to unite Egypt and Syria, well before Khaddafi was on the scene.
posted by rodii at 9:16 PM on July 9, 2001

The only unification attempt that ever worked was the original 13 states in USA.

Switzerland? The Netherlands? Newfoundland + Canada? Spain? Italy?
posted by rodii at 9:22 PM on July 9, 2001

African political union may be the perfect solution to tribalism, which is bedevils most African nations. The battle for primacy of one particular tribal or ethnic group makes perfect sense where it is feasible for a single ethnic group to rule a nation -- but becomes rather silly in a huge polity where that's not possible.

Making this work though would require the evacuation of power to a central entity, which would need to have some strong organizing principals.

It puts one in mind of China -- a vast, wildly diverse place ruled in some semblance of order only by means of a central government and organizing (the Communist Party) which appoints regional and local governments on a top-down basis.
posted by MattD at 9:25 PM on July 9, 2001

Tamim, you might want to study Bismarck's unification of Germany in the 19th century.

He took nations like Prussia, Hesse and Bavaria plus a whole lot of others and combined them into a single state ruled from Berlin.

Khaddafi's going to run into a few problems with this particular proposal, not least of which is that he already tried to unify with Chad by force, and got whipped. I think Chad is likely to take a dim view.

The Chaddeans tried something surprising; they took Toyota sports pickup trucks and mounted heavy machine guns and TOW missile launchers on the backs of them. Then they took squadrons of these babies off across the desert at night to places where Libyan army units were camped, and drove around them while firing into their camp. It was spectacularly successful, and cheap and the Libyans were routed. Afterwards, someone asked one of the Chad officers if those tactics would have worked against a first class army, and he replied "Probably not, but we weren't facing a first class army, were we?"

I have my doubts about this proposal on other grounds. In South Africa, the Zulus and Xhosa have been fighting each other for centuries. And then there are the Hutus and Tutsi in Central Africa who have been fighting each other in at least three nations in recent history, and numerous other cases like that. Most of the existing nations of Africa were created by having Europeans draw lines on maps (which is why the lines are so straight) without regard to who lived where, and this has lead to decades of deadly strife, and revolutions, and planned famines, and border wars, and lots of other horrors, not to mention a genocide or two just for seasoning.

So you're going to take all of that and drop all the borders and combine the lot into a single large (!) country? I just can't see it. You think Eritrea is going to consent to become part of a union with Ethiopia? They spent 30 years fighting to get independence from Ethiopia.

I also can't see petty tyrants like Mugabe in Zimbabwe ever giving up sovereignty.

The European Union became plausible because there had been fifty years of peace in Europe, not to mention a thriving military alliance and substantial cross investment. None of those things exist in Africa; there are wars going on there right now.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 10:19 PM on July 9, 2001

Nit to pick: "Euroland" are the 12 (?) members of the EU that will be using the Euro as their currency, not the entire Union. A.k.a. Eurozone, aka European Monetary Union.
posted by costas at 4:26 AM on July 10, 2001

Steven: I don't think the intention is to turn the OAU into the structural equivalent of the EU overnight. Instead, it's more likely to pootle along, with some relaxation of trading regulations and roll-out of transnational talking shops, like the EEC in the 1960s and 70s. That said, it'll be interesting to see whether the OAU peacekeeping missions in the west of the continent provide the foundation for the kind of military structures seen in NATO, which in turn guaranteed the economic growth of post-war Europe.

The Libya-South Africa relationship, I think, is an interesting one to follow. After all, it was the influence of Nelson Mandela that finally convinced Qaddafi to give up the two Lockerbie suspects for trial, even though the evidence against them was slender and circumstantial. But we're already seeing the end of the generation of "revolutionary" Arab leaders, with the deaths of Assad and King Hussain, and the growing pressure on other heads of state. The difficulty being that autocrats such as Qaddafi and Mubarak, like Assad, aren't particularly adept at guaranteeing their succession in a politically stable. If we get a transition that encourages the kind of fundamentalist insurgence that has affected other parts of North Africa, a very different notion of African unity may dominate the next few decades.
posted by holgate at 4:53 AM on July 10, 2001

Ack. "politically stable fashion".
posted by holgate at 4:55 AM on July 10, 2001

Steven, you're both behind the times, and ahead of them. First, this is not a proposal: the African Union became official with the 2/3 ratification, and the OAU is scheduled to sunset in 2002 (with some wiggle room). In other words, it was a proposal in 1999, it was a charter in 2000, and now it's a ratified treaty organization (Libya and Chad included). Second, you're assuming this is creating a federal Africa. At the moment, it isn't: it's simply moving from the consultative approach of the OAU to an institutional approach, centered on free trade and formalizing existing security arrangements. There will be an African Parliament, but its powers are pretty weak. There are already calls for an African Security Council, but we'll see how that goes. Right now everyone's excited about creating these institutions, and the various members are lobbying to host them.

This was dribbling along for awhile, with ratifications mostly by poor mid-African states, until this spring. The richer nations: South Africa; Nigeria; Kenya; and Egypt, mostly, were holding out to see what would happen. Nigeria went for ratification, and that brought the rest of them in. Egypt hasn't ratified yet, but that's mainly because they're still damned suspicious of their neighbor Ghadafi. Kenya was one of the last; they had their own East African Community with Tanzania and Uganda, moribund since the 70s, recently revived, and are feeling a bit bypassed. But all holdouts are expected to ratify; at least, none has explicitly rejected it so far.

I mapped out the entire continent based on ratification status that I could find. I was surprised to discover that the OAU does seem to represent every independent nation, with one glaring exception: Morocco. The OAU has been lobbying for years for independence for Western Sahara, which it was granted from Spain, only to see a Moroccan invasion. There's a government-in-waiting and an international agreement of sorts; that government, Sahrawi, is a recognized member of the OAU and AU. Otherwise the only remnants that will not be members (unless a few of the remainder reject the treaty) are the colonies: Réunion (France), Madeiras (Port.), Canarias (Spain). There are some interesting questions regarding legitimate governments in places like Sierra Leone and Somalia (I presume the representative is the prosperous and comparatively stable northern region, which has declared its independence and achieved some minor recognition, but for the West Somalia remains a lawless waste).

Gadhafi may have been the spark, but with vigorous governments such as South Africa in the mix, he isn't the leader by a long shot. He does seem to be continuing his goofy visionary ways: this spring, he spoke to the Arab League (with whom he's had his own fractious relationship), and suggested, among other things: The Arab League members should all consider joining the African Union (even if they're not in Africa); Lebanon specifically should join, because Christians and Muslims in Africa get along; and turning to the Middle East conflict, if Israel met three conditions, they should be admitted to the Arab League themselves!
posted by dhartung at 12:16 AM on July 11, 2001

That's a great bit of research you've done there, dhartung. I read about Nigeria's vacillation over ratification, and it's good to see that they finally went for it.

As I said, what comes to mind is the EEC in the early 70s, before the 1974 Paris Summits established the IGC structure and set in motion direct parliamentary elections. With time, and most of all with stability, we might see the transnational structures develop into effective ways to transcend internal corruption.
posted by holgate at 5:42 AM on July 11, 2001