Emergent Africa

2. Visualizing regional integration 2.1 Political and economic pan-Africanism 2.2 Customs union theory and free trade 2.3 Origin of the African Economic Community Treaty 2.4 Framework and roadmap for integration 2.5 Conclusion As outlined in the previous chapter, the present carries the past, but pathways to the future are relatively open. This is even more accurate in countries whose general condition is far-from-equilibrium, which Africa experienced in the latter half of the last century. Building on that outlook, this chapter explains the emergence of regional integration as a self-organizing process that started with images of political utopia and led to the creation of institutions aimed at proving a framework of economic development. The complexity of the continent and the global context in which these creative ideas emerged are bewildering.

Remarkably, conditions existed that made it possible for a small handful of dedicated people to chart a vision of the most ambitious regional integration effort ever mounted. This is testimony to the creative possibilities that are inherent in systems operating far from equilibrium. As this chapter shows, the processes did not follow a predetermined path.

To the contrary, many of the landmarks that constitute the roadmap for integration were themselves a result of experiments or of economic pathdependency. Significantly, the experimental approach made it possible to build on the realities of sovereign identities while seeking to create wider regional trading systems through which nations could expand their development possibilities. This required negotiators to agree on common principles or standards of economic conduct that made interactions possible. The goal of the process was to turn discrete sovereign entities that emerged after independence into interconnected parts that exchanged resources, energy, products, services, and ideas. In effect, the process has been a transition from a Newtonian worldview to a self-organizing system that reflects the creative possibilities arising from moments of chaos.

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