The changing context for regional integration in southern Africa: how adaptive are its regional institutions?

Abstract

This commentary examines the performance of southern Africa's regional institutions against the backdrop of the changing regional context since the late 1990s. The first section reflects on the relationship between successive geopolitical changes and efforts to keep the Southern African Customs Union, Southern African Development Coordination Conference and Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa relevant over time, as well as the frequent mismatch between the ambitions for regional integration institutions and the evolving realities. Thereafter, I consider how far the optimism that post-apartheid South Africa would transform itself from regional pariah to leading partner in reaping collective peace dividends has been borne out, using the examples of recent trends in conflict and instability, in nationalism and nation building and in infrastructure and communications. Finally, the fitness of current institutions to address new challenges in the form of global environmental/climate change, the ongoing urbanisation and the increasing engagements by China and India in the region is assessed.

Keywords:

• regional integration
• regional institutions
• refugees
• climate change
• southern Africa

Introduction

This volume of the SAGJ comprises a series of complementary conceptually, sectorally and institutionally focused assessments of contemporary regional integration and regionalism in (southern) Africa. This year's centenary of the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), the oldest regional economic institution in Africa and perhaps the world, certainly represents an opportune moment for reflection on what has been achieved in terms of regional integration and where such efforts have fallen short of expectations. On the other hand, any such snapshot is necessarily arbitrary, since it does not have any inherent salience in terms of the trajectory of regional initiatives and institution building, let alone the broader geopolitical and geoeconomic processes which both shape and influence such institutions.

Particularly in southern Africa, critical regional institution watching has been a popular pastime, on account of the region's extreme polarisations and conflictual history. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the literature on SACU, the Southern African Development Coordination Conference/Development Community (SADC(C)) and Preferential Trade Area/Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (PTA/COMESA) is considerable. The same is true of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), although this is a pan-African initiative and a rather different kind of institution. Each geopolitical watershed1 or deliberate refocusing of one or more regional institutions has generated another set of assessments and prognoses. Indeed, geopolitical shifts and regional institutional reorientations are mutually constitutive to varying degrees.

Hence, for instance, the SACU formula and treaty required renegotiation during the 1970s, once the recently independent Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland countries found that the inherited colonial apparatus was inappropriate to their needs. The highly asymmetrical mechanism had been conceived at the time of the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, when the then High Commission Territories lacked any significant administrative capacity and were widely expected to merge with South Africa within a relatively short time. Namibia's independence in 1990 and membership as a sovereign state, coupled with South Africa's own political transition, created pressure for another adjustment of the revenue allocation formula and a rethink of the entire institution's purpose and scope. This culminated in the 2002 treaty (Gibb 2006) but the rumblings have continued, as the EU's insistence on signing bilateral Economic Partnership Agreements with individual countries, rather than with SACU as a whole, has created new tensions within southern Africa as the SACU's centenary approached.

Similarly, SADCC and the PTA were established out of perceived needs for regional cooperation against apartheid South Africa and in an effort to promote mutual trade and collective strength against foreign trading partners. Post-cold war realignments and South Africa's transition away from apartheid forced a rapid and profound reassessment of both their aims and agendas. Their transformations into SADC and COMESA, respectively, did not necessarily absorb all the salient lessons of their track records hitherto nor did they lack ambition in seeking to evolve into more complex integrative institutions. How successful they have been in harnessing processes of economic globalisation and changing geopolitical realities and in addressing the challenges of poverty, environmental change, intra- and interstate conflicts and increasingly porous national borders, is the subject of several of the assessments in this issue.

More generally, however, one abiding feature of regional (integration) institutions worldwide has been an often very substantial mismatch between the ambitions giving rise to them and the subsequent institutional achievements. As any survey of the literature will reveal, this is unsurprising since most of the dreams and aspirations, as translated into institutional agendas, have been exaggerated in relation to geopolitical realities, the inevitable trade-offs required between the narrow nationalism and the broader common good, often wide divergences between member states on many development variables, tightly constrained institutional resources and capacities which render the realisable goals much more modest and/or restrictions imposed by global governance regimes such as the World Trade Organisation. To the extent that such institutions are seen by their founders as symbolic of the creation of substantive regional communities (of convergent interest, identity and ultimately citizenship), they generally remain more imagined than real (Sidaway 2002, Gibb 2009, Tsheola 2010).

Some 12 years ago, I pondered how the unfolding post-apartheid order in southern Africa would affect regionalism:

Now that the dust of the momentous political metamorphoses in the region has settled, it is opportune to evaluate the situation and the ongoing processes of (re)negotiation and transition … President Mandela and his cabinet ministers are acutely aware of the need for peaceful co-operation for mutual benefit if the region's future is to be secure. This implies that relations will have to be pursued on a very different basis from in the past, with unilateral chauvinism in the name of nationalism replaced by multilateral consultation, accommodation and collaboration. … The difficulty, even at the level of intergovernmental relations, is how to ensure mutual benefit through enhanced interaction without suffering the strong polarisation of investment and migration which undermined earlier efforts at formal regional co-operation elsewhere in Africa and beyond. (Simon 1998a, pp. 3–5)

Already then, however, xenophobia was rising among impoverished black South Africans, their previous gratitude and inspiration for solidarity from north of the Limpopo River having rapidly been replaced by fears of competition for employment with the increasing numbers of Africans migrating to South Africa from across the continent. As that book (Simon 1998b) demonstrated, concerns by most states in the region with obtaining peace dividends from the end of cold war and apartheid conflicts were great, while diverse transboundary initiatives were underway in efforts to realise this potential. Some, such as the reintegration of Walvis Bay into Namibia and the establishment and progress of the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP), were unambiguously positive while others, such as transfrontier conservation in the guise of Peace Parks, and South Africa's strict policies on refugees and migration, had rather more mixed characteristics.

Overall, despite some worrying signs like these and warnings about future uncertainties, the mood at the time was predominantly optimistic. However, already then, I posed the question as to whether it was

… appropriate to envision the region's future in singular terms (i.e. ‘the future’), as this implies a coherence or uniformity of approach and dynamic… does it not behove us to consider more diverse, pluralistic development processes which permit divergent as well as convergent futures. (Simon 1998a, p. 6)

So, what have the last 12 years taught us in this regard?

Post-apartheid southern African trajectories

Conflict and instability

Perhaps the principal lesson of this period is that the hopes of many in the region for a brighter, conflict-free future remain unmet. While most of the region is now certainly peaceful, this is still not universally true. The pervasive Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) conflict continues despite numerous mediation efforts and peace agreements, with civilians in the east of that country, in particular, bearing a heavy burden of brutality, intimidation, deprivation, poverty and even death. Whole swathes of the country remain beyond the government's control, while various armed groups (domestic and foreign) and members of the elite participate in the looting of the country's mineral and other natural resources at the barrel of a gun, through theft or via corrupt practices.

While the worst of the violence and destruction of property in Zimbabwe may have abated since the Global Political Agreement of 2008 that underpins the coalition government between President Mugabe's ZANU-PF and Prime Minister Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change, considerable harassment and insecurity continue amid the gradual progress towards economic stabilisation. However, even that stability comes at a heavy price, via the de facto supplanting of the Zimbabwean dollar as currency by the US dollar and the South African rand; anyone without access to one of those is becoming ever worse off, thus increasing and deepening the extent of poverty, which itself could easily become destabilising once again.

Both these crises have had considerable transboundary implications for parts of the region. In the DRC's case, the conflict continues to traverse the country's national borders with Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi in ways that pose sharp questions about the sanctity and practical salience of such lines on a map and, by extension, the viability and relevance of the Westphalian nation state model2 (and which none of the current proposals to reform the UN system seeks to address). In another context, recent attempts by Zimbabwe to have the ‘blood diamond’ export sanctions against it under the Kimberley Process lifted failed. Meanwhile, alleged unapproved exports and smuggling of produce from the Chiadzwa fields, which has been mined under exploitative and oppressive conditions supervised by elements of the military, raise controversies about the enforceability of such sanctions in the face of connivance by various internal and external interests (AllAfrica.com 2010a).

Other cross-border implications of these two crises include the informalisation of trade, with barter, smuggling, reciprocal exchange and other mechanisms responsible for perhaps even a majority of commodity movements in valuable natural resources and basic necessities alike. People also constitute a major outward transboundary flow, through both formal and informal/illegal channels. Recent statistics have revealed that at the end of 2009, some 456,000, 141,000 and 22,500 formally registered refugees from the DRC, Angola and Zimbabwe, respectively, were living outside those countries (UNHCR 2010) (Table 1). These figures exclude people leaving on other pretexts, e.g. as economic migrants or tourists, but who fail to return, as well as those crossing borders autonomously and finding refuge ‘informally’ with relatives or local communities. In Angola's case, the refugee total has been falling as a result of organised and autonomous repatriation since the civil war ended in 2002 but some may never wish to return.

Table 1 Refugees by country of origin and asylum, December 2009.

	Country of origin	Country of asylum
Angola	141,021	14734
Botswana	30	3022
DRC	455,852	185,809
Lesotho	10	–
Malawi	130	5443
Mozambique	136	3547
Namibia	921	7163
South Africa	384	47,974
Swaziland	32	759
Zambia	206	56,785
Zimbabwe	22,449	3995
Total	621,171	329,231
Source: UNHCR (2010) 2009 Global trends – refugees, asylum seekers, returnees, internally displaced and stateless persons. Available from: http://www.unhcr.org/4c11f0be9.html [Accessed 22 June 2010].

As the DRC data illustrate, the geographies of asylum are complex: despite major outflows from the country to escape the devastating conflict and continued instability in some regions, approximately 186,000 refugees from neighbouring states have sought sanctuary there. South Africa, Botswana and Mozambique – along with the UK – have been the principal destinations for Zimbabweans, and South Africa also for Congolese. These flows have been often unjustifiably implicated in xenophobic and unemployment-related violence in South Africa, the worst of which erupted in 2008. Indeed, threats and rumours abounded during the 2010 World Cup that foreign Africans working in the country would again be attacked as soon as the global spotlight moved away. Isolated incidents did occur, but this time the government and police responded proactively and appear to have contained the situation in the short term (e.g. Cape Argus 2010, AllAfrica.com 2010b). However, since the benefits of unprecedented international tourist flows and associated revenues largely bypassed poorer South Africans, underlying disparities and tensions over the distribution of employment, incomes, infrastructure and services will inevitably rise to the surface again as part of South Africa's post-World Cup hangover.

Importantly, for present purposes, none of the regional institutions has engaged meaningfully with these issues, even at the rhetorical level. Indeed, the SADC was split by the decision of the leaders of Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe to intervene militarily in the DRC in 1998 to defend the beleaguered President Laurent Kabila (and, following his murder, his son Joseph, who succeeded him) without a formal SADC decision in this regard. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to assert that this emasculated a regional institution that was gaining positive momentum, a blow from which it has yet really to recover.

Moreover, the SADC body designed to deal with military and security issues, the semi-autonomous Organ for Politics, Defence and Security, was led by Robert Mugabe, one of the leading protagonists in the DRC intervention. He resolutely clung to this position, initially given to him to assuage his feelings after Nelson Mandela had displaced him as leading elder statesman in the region. Even the subsequent changes to the Organ's constitution and mandate, and the eventual removal of Mugabe, have failed to revitalise it (Nathan 2006, 2009). These failures both reflect and have added to the widely perceived limitations and ineffectiveness of Southern Africa's regional institutions in relation to non-trade challenges.

Nationalism and nation building

A second lesson is that, despite much rhetoric about common African heritage and the importance of forging supranational continental and regional identities and negotiating positions in relation to global trade regimes and the like, and some profound weaknesses identified above, most of the region's nation states remain very much alive. Indeed, it could be argued that forms of resurgent nationalism – both inclusive and relatively democratic (e.g. Botswana, South Africa) and exclusive and relatively authoritarian (e.g. Angola, Zimbabwe) – have been exerted. This phenomenon represents the converse of progressive regionalism and accounts for much of the weakness of regional institutions. Even NEPAD has seemingly lost momentum as well as slipping from news headlines since its principal champions, former Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo of South Africa and Nigeria, respectively, left office.

Ultimately, the imperatives of responding to domestic political constituencies and meeting immediate local development priorities continue to trump the restrictions on sovereignty that membership of more powerful and effective regional economic communities or other institutions requires, except when expediency or lesser priorities permit. At another level, quite proper concerns to avoid large, bureaucratic bodies like the European Commission, with all the costs and staffing requirements involved, have combined with nationalist sentiments to maintain regional institutions at a size and level of staffing that precludes effectiveness in dealing with many major regional issues. To wit, the SADC and COMESA Secretaries-General lack the status of even a president or premier of one of the smallest member states.

Infrastructure and communications

A third lesson is that – as during the apartheid era when the leitmotiv of regional cooperation was mutual opposition to apartheid and the need for concerted action against South Africa – progress has been most marked in relation to trade liberalisation and certain areas of ‘technical cooperation’ which are less politically sensitive. This continuity is somewhat ironic since the transitions of the 1990s heralded a major recasting of regional relations and infrastructural geometries to reflect South Africa's reintegration and new regional leadership role. However, it also bears out my earlier analysis (Simon 1998a) that progress had been, and was likely to continue to be, most marked in such areas controlled by commercialised non-state actors who were able to operate relatively unhindered by official policy constraints.

Transboundary spatial development initiatives (SDIs) and transport corridors have progressed considerably, nowhere more than along the Maputo Development Corridor and Trans-Kalahari Highway, which together link Maputo (Mozambique) to Walvis Bay (Namibia) via South Africa and Botswana. Here, considerable private investment has been locked in via build–operate–transfer and public–private schemes as well as the proven economic dynamism of the Maputo Corridor, in particular. Completion of the Trans Zambezi bridge at Kazungula has relieved a long-standing road bottleneck and enabled substantial increases in traffic from Zimbabwe and Zambia to Walvis Bay. Other transboundary links are being enhanced or rehabilitated, including the key Benguela railway linking the Zambian copperbelt and DRC's Katanga province to Angola's key port of Benguela, and the Tazara railway from Dar es Salaam to the copperbelt. Such developments are sometimes constitutive and/or reflections of, evolving (micro)region building projects and identities (Rogerson 2001, Grant and Söderbaum 2003, Simon and Samé Ekobo 2008, Söderbaum and Taylor 2008).

Considerable progress has also been made in the construction of missing links in the regional electricity grid under the auspices of the SAPP (cf. Horvei 1998) and with the Limpopo and Kgalagadi Transfrontier Parks in particular (cf. Koch 1998, Wolmer 2003, Ramutsindela 2004a, 2004b). South African-based mobile phone and television companies have also established powerful positions across and beyond the southern African region, providing greatly improved telecommunications but – along with South African retail penetration – renewing concerns about the extent of market penetration and the undermining of local commercial interests (Ahwireng-Obeng and McGowan 1998, Simon 2001). South Africa has increasingly been perceived regionally and elsewhere in Africa as more of a new hegemony than first partner among equals in the terms envisaged by Mandela as quoted above.

Contemporary challenges

Drawing on the foregoing, this final substantive section outlines several key current and future regional challenges in which the existing regional institutions should play important roles but where they have hitherto been largely inactive.

Chinese and Indian engagement

South Africa is facing increasing competition in the form of foreign direct investment in infrastructure and natural resource exploitation from China and latterly also India. A veritable research industry has sprung up to analyse these dramatic trends and their implications. China is often being preferred by autocratic African regimes because of its ‘no questions asked’ approach to commercial and political relations – a sharp contrast to the good governance conditionalities imposed by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development donors and partners. Despite protestations to the contrary, there is little evidence that such investment and technical assistance – which has brought some 1 million Chinese to Africa according to some recent press reports – is anymore altruistic in motive than by others (cf. Alden 2007, Carmody and Owusu 2007, Kragelund 2009, Michel and Beuret 2009, Melber 2010). India is following suit. Perhaps the scale and nature of such developments will help South Africa retain more of a ‘white knight’ partnership position. Regionally, however, despite the apparent importance of SADC's Trade Protocol to the deepening of interstate commerce, the regional institutions have remained silent on Chinese and Indian engagements, let alone attempting to forge a common regional position on such foreign direct investment and trade.

Progressive urbanisation

Although spatially and chronologically uneven, urbanisation remains one of the dominant region-wide and continent-wide processes, despite brief interludes or even reversals during the depths of the neoliberal policy-induced recessions of the 1980s and 1990s. Linked, in part, to the development of SDIs and related axes, urban corridors are emerging in key economic zones, both intranational and transboundary (Parnell and Simon 2010, Simone 2010, Söderbaum and Taylor 2008, UN-HABITAT 2010). These attract diverse populations, both skilled and unskilled, generate disproportionately high proportions of gross national income, are hubs for human, commodity and financial flows and have become key contributors to, and sites experiencing the impacts of, global environmental/climate change.

Traditionally, urbanisation and urban policies have been the sole preserve of national governments. However, the transboundary nature of these new processes – most conspicuously along the Maputo Development Corridor but on a smaller, sometimes less formal, scale across other boundaries in the region – poses profound challenges for integrated urban management and planning and suggests the need for supranational metropolitan or corridor bodies, and a new generation of policies (Parnell and Simon 2010). Again, existing regional institutions could perhaps play a role, if only in stimulating and taking forward such initiatives, but to date they have remained silent.

Global environmental/climate change

This is one of the principal challenges facing not just southern Africa but the world. Like many other environmental issues, global environmental change/climate change is not confined within national borders and transnational initiatives are, therefore, essential complements to, and umbrellas for, national efforts. For reasons linked to resource and skills constraints, deference to local, national and global initiatives, as well as a low political priority attached to regional problems deemed to arise in the distant future when hunger and poverty require immediate attention, the SADC and COMESA have only very recently begun to address the phenomenon in terms other than a common negotiating position vis-à-vis the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change summits (Simon 2010). Norwegian donor funding has enabled the establishment or enhancement of small units in their respective secretariats to formulate and implement appropriate policies. Given the scale of the problems, which are already being manifested in different ways, this is a drop in the ocean, but the policy documents reflect contemporary international thinking and aspirations to the best practice. How these will be translated into practice remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that substantial upscaling of resources, effort and commitment is urgently required at the regional level, as well as in terms of maximising the complementarities between regional interventions and those at different scales (Simon 2010).

Conclusions

Most of the issues, challenges and hopes for regionalism identified in the immediate aftermath of the geopolitical transitions attending the transition away from apartheid remain unfulfilled. Achievements have generally been most marked in respect of trade-related issues and in terms of sectoral or technical areas, where the lead agencies are non-governmental. Intergovernmental regional institutions remain traditional in terms of their structure, implementing mechanisms and formalistic summit-led decision-making procedures. A lack of political cohesion continues to undermine their momentum, while the failure by member states to rationalise the overlapping and sometimes competing mandates of the SACU, SADC and COMESA remains a significant handicap and drain on resources. Coupled with their small size and limited mandates, these institutions are struggling to cope with their existing responsibilities, let alone to address the many new challenges that have emerged in recent years and will no doubt continue to do so. Nevertheless, they do make a difference in certain arenas.

Overall, if the ‘new regionalism’ – about which so much has been written since the late 1990s – was intended to herald a more responsive, accountable, inclusive and polyvocal era of regional community building rather than just a renewed spurt of interest in formalistic regional institutions (cf. MacLean 1999, Grant and Söderbaum 2003, Simon 2003, pp. 69–70, Söderbaum and Taylor 2008), it has certainly failed in southern Africa.

Notes

^1. Among the most dramatic are Namibian independence in 1990; the Mozambican peace agreement in 1991; the transition from apartheid in South Africa; foreign military intervention – including by three southern African states – in the DRC in 1998; the end of Angola's long civil war in 2002 and Zimbabwe's descent into pervasive state-driven crisis since the early 2000s.

^2. Similar situations exist elsewhere in the post-colonial world, perhaps most conspicuously at present in Afghanistan–Pakistan and various parts of central Asia.