Parallel Sessions II

D) Regional Cooperation in Sub-Saharan Africa: Between collective self-reliance and global trade regimes

Conveners and Chair:
Lennart Wohlgemuth, Nordic Africa Insitute, Uppsala, Sweden

Speakers:

Ian Taylor, University of St Andrews, Scotland, U.K.
Henning Melber, The Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden
Michael Brüntrup, German Development Institute (DIE), Bonn, Germany

Abstract:

It is sometimes suggested that African countries should choose between regional integration and globalisation. This dichotomy is misleading. The real question is whether, under the pressure of global market forces, regional strategies remain viable at all. Under the regime of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), local and regional policies are increasingly determined by global factors. One example is the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), which serves as the socio-economic development blueprint for the African Union (AU). While it stresses an earlier notion of African Renaissance, which includes the emphasis on collective self-reliance. At the same time seeks closer cooperation with the global trade system and its powerful international agencies. Bi- and multilateral trade relations between external actors and individual African states or regional blocs are becoming ever more decisive. The trade policies of both the USA and the EU are anything but helpful. This is true for the USA's African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), the EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with South Africa and more recently the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) negotiated in the Post-Cotonou era. All these initiatives have a potentially detrimental impact on regional integration. The latter remains however a priority in the developmental policy and strategy documents as formulated both by African agencies as well as the partners in development cooperation in the OECD countries. Hence the question of coherence between "trade as aid" and other areas of development strategy and cooperation remains to be answered. Presentations to this panel are invited to explore the underlying assumptions as well as inherent contradictions between the differing paradigms of "African development" based on the one hand on new blue prints claiming to be under African ownership (AU and NEPAD) in contrast to the recent trade initiatives seeking closer collaboration between African economies and the outside world under the WTO paradigm.

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10th General Conference