Part One of a Four Part Article on Universal Africa

By Francis Mangeni

Introduction
In this first of a four-part article, I would like to elaborate on Africa’s economic integration efforts as a corollary to universalism and propose Universal Africa as an efficacious agency in addressing certain extinction-level threats that confront humankind and planet earth. Overall, I argue that although universal approaches are viable options to making progress, pragmatism validates localization in a continent as large, and as diverse as Africa is.

An Anecdotal Truism

Explanations of regional integration should, ideally, be holistic, elegant, and economical. Any elucidation should coherently get to the heart of the matter via fact, and discourse should scope out limitations. These anecdotal truisms ought to factor in data and suppositions about biodiversity. Together, all attributes should frame policy-orientation and agendas akin to regional integration.

Africa has an opportunity to build regional integration upon a principle of sublimity. In this case, I am talking about grandeur of thought, emotion moderated by appropriate application of metaphors, and the finesse to apply these attributes at public engagements. What’s best at the national level is harnessed and shared at the regional level by participating members, especially in terms of policy good practices and talent pools. This evolves into another idea. Alone, individual countries do not have the capabilities and grandeur of the totality of the organisation. The emergent properties of regional integration organisations should be akin to the observable biological processes when the whole is larger than the sum of the parts. Even if not fully understood, just as for instance brain parts produce consciousness, it’s demonstrable that regional integration can take on an autopoiesis that protects, affirms and defines the members with a new identity. Europeans or East Africans as such have an organic affinity to the European Union and the East African Community, which confers entitlements under the constitutive instruments and a certain prestige in the world.

Trade has been considered the motherboard and the face of regional integration. People must have a livelihood and earn an income, to survive in post-subsistence modern economies. Incomes are earned by trading goods, services and assets; or through inheritance, or theft and other illegality. Of these three means, trade is what public policy would approve of and build; with inheritance uncertain for the general public and theft strictly proscribed. Of course, countries must produce and ensure the movement of tradeable goods and services. Production should position investment and infrastructure as enablers to trade, income generation and better living standards. Essentially, trade continues to be the motherboard of regional integration, covering free movement of goods, services, persons, labour, capital and investment as well as the right of establishment.

In his seminal 1950 insights , Jacob Viner argued that if the common external tariffs erected around customs union were higher than pre-existing tariffs, then the common external tariffs can protect inefficient domestic industries. These tariffs have the propensity to divert trade away from efficiently produced foreign products vis-à-vis domestic products that may have been produced inefficiently. However, elimination of tariffs among territories that join a customs union can lead to trade creation. Hence, even if customs unions do not necessarily lead to efficiency, the policy implication is that because regional economic integration aims to achieve higher levels of trade liberalisation without imposing barriers to trade, common external tariffs should not, on the whole, be higher than prior tariff levels of participating territories. This tenet was codified in Article 24 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, 1947), and later in the 1994 GATT framework establishing the World Trade Organisation. Article 5 of the General Agreement on Trade in Services applies this same customs union theory to free trade areas and by replicates the theory in trade in services by requiring substantial sector coverage without apriori exclusions in liberalising trade in services in regional integration arrangements.

Additionally, the customs union theory focused on the effects of customs duties, and not internal trade taxes, which instead were regulated by general trade rules prohibiting discriminatory application on like imported products and requiring national treatment. A theory that applied to the entire suite of trade policy instruments would be apt. Trade rules took this up and prohibited other measures that would constitute barriers to trade with other territories.

In developing countries, the rousing preoccupation was with bringing idle resources to use, through building new industries and infrastructure for instance, rather than efficient use of deployed resources though this wasn’t irrelevant. Rather than frowning on trade diversion, economic integration in developing countries supported it as a development intervention that built domestic industries. A corpus of political economy and institutional literature rapidly became influential, encouraging regional integration among developing countries. Functionalism and sectoral integration argued for cooperation, coordination and harmonisation tracks in all relevant key sectors that enabled social economic transformation and improvement of living standards.

In practical terms, evidence-based decisions in regional integration are made with respect to particular proposed arrangements and agreements, using econometric modelling designed to evaluate the overall welfare impact to be expected. The computable general equilibrium model has been useful. Other tools too are available, such as stata, time series and e-views and more will be designed.

Decision-making may take evidence into account but be eventually determined by other considerations. As William Bruce Cameroon observed, not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted. All manner of considerations can come into play with significant weight, such as peace and security, freedom and self-determination, cultural-historical affiliations, nostalgia and past greatness presumed or actual, and cooperative natures of given leaders and communities perhaps rooted in the evolutionary lesson of survival through working together. The vagaries of negotiation processes, which rationality and maximization can enable a game theory of, can take a dynamic of their own especially if prolonged as illustrated by the Stockholm Syndrome. The challenges of implementation, dependent on will and capabilities, have finally decided the actual fate of the existence and efficacy of regional integration arrangements and agreements.

A wholistic account of regional integration in Africa, however, requires also an introspection on the economic and political history of the continent, its peripheral status over the centuries in the international economic order, and the development impetus across newly independent countries buoyed by the post-war optimism of the 1960s; with the upshot that regional integration was adopted as the overarching continental strategy for political emancipation and economic transformation, on the basis of collective self-help, self-preservation, self-expression, self-determination and freedom.

Continues in Part 2

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