Regionalism in Africa: Towards a New Direction

The new challenges to regionalism, coupled with the obstacles encountered in managing it as a viable development strategy for Africa and lessons derived from past experience, show that existing economic conditions are not particularly favourable to intra-African economic integration. Accordingly, African countries need to emphasize the establishment of an enabling environment for supporting regional and subregional economic cooperation and integration. This requires the removal of internal deficiencies facing groupings in the broad areas of institutional arrangements, and emphasizing objectives, policies and instruments. Thus, if the coming decades are to witness the evolution of a viable dynamic process of intra-African economic cooperation and integration, and if regionalism is to be the basic element of a long-term development strategy for Africa, the revival process needs to be set in the context of a realistic appraisal of past experience and the new regional and global realities.