The debate on African integration needs to be reframed. For too long, the continent’s integration process has been judged against the Balassian model of economic integration, which conceives regional integration as a linear process evolving from free trade areas to customs unions, common markets, monetary unions and, ultimately, economic and political union. Despite its elegance, this sequence emerged from a political, economic and social context fundamentally different from that of post-colonial Africa. The conditions that made the model work in post-war Western Europe cannot simply be transplanted onto a continent of 55 states, uneven institutional capacities, fragmented infrastructure, vast geographical distances and highly diverse legal, economic and policy environments. Yet as Africa has encountered delays in progressing along this prescribed path, the simplistic conclusion has too often been that African regional integration is failing. In a recent paper published by the Horn Economic and Social Policy Institute (HESPI), we ask a more fundamental question: what if the problem is not that Africa has failed to climb the integration ladder, but that we have mistaken the ladder for the destination? Read the entire article on the Eurasia Review here.

Africa’s integration story has historically been written through geography. Countries first integrated with those closest to them, building regional economic communities (RECs) around shared borders, established trade routes and common interests. The EAC, ECOWAS, SADC and COMESA have created important institutional and economic spaces, and their role remains indispensable. Proximity is, after all, where most integration initiative begin: neighbours trade first with neighbours, infrastructure develops along the shortest routes, and political cooperation is easier to build where economic relationships already exist. But proximity is a beginning, not an endpoint. The difficulty is that Africa’s regional blocs have not yet been sufficiently integrated with one another. The continent has progressively built economic neighbourhoods, but it has struggled to connect those neighbourhoods into a functioning continental system.

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