adminThaddeus CB Jahn Correspondent
Perhaps the least contested claim in discourse on African organisations is that of an institutionally weak Organisation of African Unity. Originating at the height of Cold War superpower tensions, a large proportion of member states quickly became entangled in alignment with either the United States and their capitalist system or the Soviet Union and its ideology of Communism. This, coupled with a lack of resources, a desire to preserve the status quo, and fundamental constitutional misgivings, meant that the OAU played at best a marginal, at worst a non-existent, role in the next few decades.
It may be argued that the failure to succeed resulted from the “fact that it was not designed to exploit effectively the dynamic tension between globalisation, security, and governance.”
However, following the end of the Cold War, there was a radical shift: States began to believe that to “break the cycle of violence, poverty and underdevelopment they had to co-operate with each other and together take charge of Africa’s destiny”.
Humanitarian catastrophes in Liberia, Somalia, and Rwanda increasingly made leaders ready to overcome hurdles of sovereignty that had prevented meaningful and effective co-operation in the past.
In terms of institutional features, the AU certainly remedied many of the weaknesses of the OAU.
The Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, and Resolution transformed into the Peace and Security Council (PSC) which led to the redefinition of the concepts of peace and security on the continent. The new role of the PSC prompted African leaders to rethink the previously rigid adherence to sovereignty and non-interference. Unlike the OAU’s sole focus on conflict solution, the AU now also incorporated conflict prevention focus.
In addition, in comparison to the powerless OAU Secretariat, the Chairperson of the Commission of the AU received powers through the Constitutive Act in numerous different ways.
Firstly, an Early Warning System (EWS) at the sub-regional level and Article 10 of the PSC Protocol that empowers the Chairperson to bring to attention any matter that might threaten peace, security and stability in Africa, allowed for greater and earlier detection of significant threats to peace.
Secondly, a pan-African Standby Force was created that could operate under the most revolutionary Articles: Article 13 (3) (a). Unique and unseen in any organisation on earth, this article allows for the “intervention in a Member State in respect of grave circumstances or at the request of a Member State in order to restore peace and security”. This provision provided the AU with the teeth that the OAU never had. Furthermore, the African Union established complementary organs such as the Military Staff Committee, Peace Fund, and the Panel of the Wise which no longer placed heads of state who had vested interests in conflicts in positions of decision, but individuals who are deemed independent.
The AU has also managed to increase accountability and transparency through measures such as the AU Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption (2003) and the African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance (2007).
The effect of institutional modification has been an increase in “transjudicial communication . . . (which established) a virtual human rights network between the African system and activist forces”.
A combination of international law and institutions such as the African Charter, the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights and the African Court of Human and People’s Rights have been fundamental in giving greater power to the people and thus the community as a whole.
The multitude of changes have led some observers of contemporary African politics to suggest that the creation of the AU marks the most significant political change in interstate relations in Africa in almost 40 years.
Overall, while the creation of these arrangements in itself “constitutes a major achievement in institutional reform, it is the AU’s underlying acceptance of the normative commitment to protect which distinguishes it from its feeble predecessor.”(16)
A familiar structural curse
Organisations are typically created in response to problems that are deeply entrenched in society.
In Africa, an exhaustive list of problems is long, featuring decades of underdevelopment, poverty and inequality, autocratic rule, corruption, and wasteful resource management, lack of transparency, undemocratic institutional arrangements, absence of tax bases, civil war and diseases, and exploitation by transnational corporations (TNCs).
In its establishment, the African Union has failed to overcome the structural deficiencies that both the OAU and many organisations in the past have faltered as a result of. Problems often limit the structure that organisations can take, which, in turn, limit the influence and impact of the organisation in combating the initial problem.
Turning to the OAU to begin with, foreign interventions/colonialism by Western powers and the height of the Cold War produced rigid alignment blocs within Africa.
The OAU did not seek to tackle this problem but instead built itself on the Casablanca/Monrovia conflict. Unsurprisingly, this affirmed divisions between states and resulted in an ineffective organisation that found it impossible to agree on a direction to take. The African Union has made the same mistake. Being an organisation based on combating widespread poverty in Africa, for example, has mistakenly been combined with structures that rely on funding by member states who have little money themselves. Thus, the AU lacks the funding to effectively institutionalise regional integration and developmental missions.
The (over-) reliance on aid from organisations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to keep the AU working have in fact harmed it significantly by reducing its lack of independence and reducing the AU’s importance in world politics. This is evidenced by NATO countries acting to “savage, dismiss and marginalise the AU” during the Arab Spring in Libya. — E-IR.
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