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Ecowas: The Ideals And Practice Of Regional Economic Integration
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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the Study
One of the most discussed themes over the past two decades in scholarly studies, political discourse, and international media is regional integration. The extent of the emergence of regional integration remains closely linked to the rise of globalization and the need for countries to negotiate agreements to facilitate all forms of exchanges and transactions. Regional integration has been an evolving process over many decades now and different regions have embraced it. Its evolution was very much in the form of integrating actors concern with economic and security issues to the inclusion of other concerns such as social, cultural, environmental, other developmental needs. It is however, the commitment and the achievement of set goals by the member states in the various regional integrating bodies that have determined how far they have gone with the process, and have distinguished very successful regional integration organisations from others.
It is worthy to note that the promises of regional integration since the publication of Viner (1950) and Balassa (1967) have had positive feedback for some groups of countries (Northern America Free Trade Agreement – NAFTA; MERCOSUR; Association of Southeast Asian Nations - ASEAN) and negative for others mostly African economies (Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa – COMESA; Economic Community of West African States – ECOWAS; Economic Community of Central African States - ECCAS) (Tinta, 2017). However, regional integration remains crucial for Africa to increase its competitiveness and diversify its economy, and especially for fragile economies such as ECOWAS.
The inauguration of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Lagos, Nigeria on 28 May 1975 was greeted as a critical breakthrough in efforts to institute a framework for economic co-operation and integration that embraced the entire sub-region. Forty-three (43) years down the line, two treaties in, and several reforms to the institutional structure of the organisation, question marks still hang over the relevance of the institution to the teeming population of the West African Sub-region. Most observers have raised doubts over the success of ECOWAS as an economic organisation due to the slow pace of integration, which is the primary goal of the organisation (Kufour, 2006).
Numerous problems plagued the first regime of the organization. Some of these problems include inadequacy of the legal framework, failure to meet objectives of the community such as the Trade Liberalization Scheme (TLS), non-ratification of community protocols and a general sense of distrust towards the intentions of the regional hegemony, Nigeria. In essence, ECOWAS under the first regime was nothing short of an agora, or a platform for discussion, ‘where things cannot just get done. The emergence of violent conflicts in the early 90s changed the trajectory of the community’s objectives culminating in the revision of its treaty and giving it a human rights overlay. The intervention of ECOWAS in troubled Member States notably Liberia and Sierra Leone triggered legal and political debates not just on the role of the ECOWAS in peace and security but also culminated in greater emphasis on protecting universal values such as human rights, democracy and the rule of law (Klabbers, 2005).
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