The idea of an integrated West Africa is an awkward one. For the purposes of this paper, the region is considered to be fully contained in the following sixteen countries: Cabo Verde, Mauritania, Mali, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, and Niger. These countries share little in common. There are ones as big in area as Niger (the 22nd biggest country in the world) and ones as small in area as Cabo Verde (the 174th biggest country in the world).[1] There’s one extremely populous country, Nigeria, with almost 220 million people, and many extremely small countries (Cabo Verde at around half a million people, The Gambia at 2.2 million, Liberia at 5.2 million, etc).[2] There is no common language. Two of the countries are Lusophone (Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau); four are Anglophone (Ghana, Nigeria, The Gambia, Sierra Leone); and the remaining ten are Francophone. Yet, despite all these differences, an economic community emerged in 1975 that included every single independent West African country at the time, an extremely impressive feat.[3] Forming the community was challenging, both as an intellectual act of formulation and persuasion, but also as a practical act of forming a community that would last more than a few years and outlast each leader who agreed to it after most of them had been couped. Sustaining the community and achieving measurable economic goals like internal free trade or economic development proved even tougher, and over the course of two or three decades, the community became increasingly political and interventionist, demonstrated most recently in 2017 with their mobilization of 7,000 troops to topple a Gambian strongman that refused to leave.[4] The success of the community is debatable, but what is not is its remarkable development and change.
Foundations
Forming such a community wasn’t easy, and it took a great deal of political will, charismatic and convincing leaders, good timing, and an extremely long list of failures as both a guide and a motivation.
The idea of West African regionalism or nationalism—as opposed to a localized nationalism or a continent-wide pan-Africanism—is not a young idea, but it also hasn’t been a consistently expressed one. One of the earliest mentions of a West African regional-nationalism was by Africanus Horton, a British-educated surgeon from Sierra Leone in 1867, who wrote in support of “self-government of Western Africa,” at least as an endgame to British imperialism in the region.[5] The most important early theorist was Edward Wilmot Blyden, who was born in the Danish West Indies in 1832 and immigrated to Liberia at age 18.[6] Next was J.E. Casely Hayford, a Ghanaian pan-Africanist who in 1920 founded the first West African nationalist organization, the National Congress of British West Africa. The pre-independence era for West African regional-nationalism also included thinkers like Sierra Leonean I.T.A. Wallace Johnson, who founded the West African Youth League, and Ghanaians J.B. Danquah, Kwame Nkrumah (who would become the first leader of independent Ghana), and Kobina Sekyi, the last of whom was an early advocate for the British West African colonies to include French West Africa in their newly created regionalist organizations. Following Sekyi’s lead, Nkrumah willed the region towards some cooperation, initially culminating in the 1945 Pan-African Congress meeting in Manchester. There, the creation of a West African Economic Union was recommended.[7] Little more progress was made until the independence era. Most of these preliminary visions would bear little resemblance to what the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) became—they were rarely imagined to cross linguistic boundaries even in theory, and in practice, the idea of peacekeeping forces acting out the politics of military dictators’ hegemonic wishes would have never crossed the minds of these early theorists.
Pre-ECOWAS Efforts
The independence era was characterized by a large amount of meetings and conferences with varying numbers of West African countries attending, and varying levels of progress achieved towards integration, on a spectrum between completely failed and successful but limited in scope or in participation. One obvious reason for this is that the countries of West Africa did not all become independent at the same time, and the nations they became independent from dictated their natural potential partners. Below is a table of West African independence to assist the reader in keeping the history straight.
| Country | Independence Day[8] | Previous Ruling Power |
| Liberia | July 26th, 1847 | N/A |
| Ghana | March 6th, 1957 | Britain |
| Guinea | October 2nd, 1958 | France |
| Senegal | April 4th, 1960 | France |
| Togo | April 27th, 1960 | France |
| Mali | September 22nd, 1960 | France |
| Benin | August 1st, 1960 | France |
| Niger | August 3rd, 1960 | France |
| Burkina Faso | August 5th, 1960 | France |
| Côte d'Ivoire | August 7th, 1960 | France |
| Nigeria | October 1st, 1960 | Britain |
| Mauritania | November 28th, 1960 | France |
| Sierra Leone | April 27th, 1961 | Britain |
| The Gambia | February 18th, 1965 | Britain |
| Guinea-Bissau | September 24th, 1973[9] | Portugal |
| Cape Verde | July 5th, 1975 | Portugal |
Francophone West Africa was first to cooperate in the independence era, having been a contiguous centrally controlled set of colonies prior to the second half of the 1950s. In 1956, at the urging of Gaston Defferre, the Minister of Overseas France,[10] the French parliament passed a law known as “loi cadre,” a decentralizing act applying to overseas colonies, endowing territorial assemblies with numerous governmental powers they had not previously had, in an effort to appease indigenous independence movements without fully acceding to their demands.[11] This law broke with decades of French precedent having always centralized colonial power at the federal level, not the individual colonies’ level.[12] Though this act seemed to give West African colonies more rights, many West African leaders presciently feared the sort of balkanization that would soon greet them. One of the first to oppose the act was Léopold Senghor (who would become Senegal’s first president), who argued that the territorial emphasis without a strong federalist system would create small and weak states.[13] In 1958, French President Charles de Gaulle offered to France’s colonies a kind of federal community as part of the new Constitution of the Fifth Republic, but future-first-president of Guinea Sekou Touré and his party led a campaign to vote against such membership in the community. Their side won in a landslide among Guinea’s electorate. They were the only country to reject de Gaulle’s proposal and choose to be independent.[14] Famously and presciently, Touré said about the referendum, “Guinea prefers poverty in freedom to riches in slavery.”[15] De Gaulle, furious, dissolved the community rather than have all but Guinea in it.[16]
Reactions to this were mixed. Having always felt like the federation was better for the poorer, smaller countries, Côte d'Ivoire was not upset about de Gaulle’s move, but many other countries were. Senegal and French Sudan (now Mali) formed a federation in 1959, which at first included Dahomey (now Benin) and Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso). The federation would quickly die after independence.[17] A customs and economic union was quickly formed by most of the French West African territories, with the strong encouragement of France, desperate to retain a connection to its slipping-away colonies. This union was first known as the West African Customs Union (Union Douaniere de l’Afrique de l’Ouest, UDAO), but it would be replaced in 1966 and then again in 1974 by the UDEAO and then the CEAO (both French acronyms for roughly the same organizations).[18] UDAO was largely ineffective due to some of the usual reasons that have inhibited West African economic collaboration: the difficulties of redistributing gains and the vast differential development.[19] The basic mechanism here is that the point of these integrations is to allow countries to specialize and not compete with each other, but what actually happens in the weeds? Do richer countries get to specialize in industry and get richer while the poorer countries specialize in raw materials and stagnate? Further, it is difficult to divvy up tariff money in such a way that is “fair” to poorer countries that export and import far less. These issues have plagued West African customs union and similar unions from the beginning.
In the monetary sphere, the Francophone countries other than Mali and Guinea put themselves in the franc zone through the West African Monetary Union (UMAO) in 1962.[20] Most francophone countries’ associations in monetary unions with the same currency has been one of the few enduring regional relationships that originate from the independence era.
British decolonization brought even fewer fruits of cooperation. The independence of the four formerly-British states was staggered (see chart), which was one major reason cooperation was so difficult. Independent Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, a pan-Africanist, did not want Ghana to retain too many of its colonial vestiges, even if these colonial vestiges kept Ghana in contact with Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and The Gambia. This included the common Anglophone West African currency, which was disbanded in favor of four local currencies run by four central banks. West African Airways was also disbanded, along with British-created research institutions for the region, all to be replaced by local ones.[21]
Efforts were made to cooperate between Anglophone countries and Francophone countries, but before ECOWAS, the organizations were short-lived when they came to fruition at all. In 1961, cooperative agreements were made in the region including one between Ghana and Upper Volta, and another one between Ghana, Guinea, and Mali. A similar effort was made to integrate Senegal and The Gambia’s economies in 1963, and an effort was made in 1964 to create a West African free trade area in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire.[22] All these plans failed to materialize in an actual agreement or fell through shortly after they were agreed upon. Scholarly research on why these all failed is a bit scant, but a theory that seems likely is that these countries were simply too new, underdeveloped, and lacking the state capacity necessary to integrate economies across national borders and linguistic lines.
The UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), established in 1958, was also involved in fostering economic integration in West Africa. At the first ECA meeting in December 1962, the ECA’s Standing Committee on Industry, Natural Resources and Transport promised to provide aid to governments in economically cooperating within their subregions. ECA’s efforts finally bore some fruit at the 1966 Conference on Economic Cooperation in West Africa, in Niamey, attended by eleven countries, where some recommendations were adopted focusing on establishing economic cooperation in the region. The articles agreed upon there were brought to Accra for the 1967 West African Conference on Economic Cooperation, where all independent West African states except for Guinea and The Gambia agreed to the establishment of an economic community. A year later, an agreement was made between Mali, Guinea, Senegal, and Mauritania to send the leader of Mauritania to all fourteen (this is before Portuguese decolonization) independent states where he successfully convinced nine of them, this time including Guinea and The Gambia, to establish the West African Regional Group, which itself mandated Liberia and Senegal to create a draft treaty. Despite this push, the draft treaty was never reviewed, and enthusiasm for the project briefly died.[23] Part of this is due to the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War in 1967, lasting until 1970.
Coming to a sweeping takeaway about the 1960s attempts at integration is difficult. The vast majority of these attempts were short-lived, and not a great deal is discoverable about them at this scope of research because each one is considered to be historically unsubstantial and thus not often studied. The collection of them lends itself to an unsatisfying conclusion: many West African leaders came and went from independence to 1975, and most of them knew that integration of such a splintered, balkanized region was wise, regardless of their particular personal political or economic ideology. They attempted integration in accordance with this knowledge, but their high hopes were unmet by the realities of the region’s very early stages of maturation. How could any of these unions last, with such high goals as a customs unions (for example) between a few countries that had been around six or seven years, whose governments would soon be couped, and whose economies were massively underdeveloped and almost entirely agricultural? These efforts were fantastical, which is both inspirational and depressing depending on how one looks at it, and in many ways, the failures of these efforts to produce any actual economic integration would foreshadow ECOWAS, whose own failures at economic integration were hedged by the political development of what quickly became more of a mini-UN than a mini-EU.
The Creation of ECOWAS
At the end of the 1960s, the environment began to be much more conducive to West African economic integration. De Gaulle departed the French presidency in 1969, making France and the allegiances of its former colonies to it weaker.[24] Nigeria emerged from its civil war, and quickly got richer from oil, making them more attractive to Francophone countries who are not their natural allies.[25] The global recession of the early 70s also highlighted the dire need to develop in a more serious way than had been obvious in the slightly more prosperous 1960s.[26]
But this is not just a story about amorphous trends. The protagonist of ECOWAS was a young, Nigerian, Western-educated economist named Adebayo Adedeji. Knowing about his expertise in African regionalism and his Harvard degree in public administration,[27] an Inter-African Public Administration seminar for bureaucrats in Monrovia in 1969 asked the then-39-year-old full professor to present a paper on West African integration. There, Adedeji expressed his frustration with the incontrovertibility of West African currencies, the low level of intra-West African trade, and the difficulty of integrating a region with so many languages, cultures, and ethnicities. He advocated pragmatism and the prioritization of a few key areas, namely infrastructure, free movement of people, goods, and services, and a clearing and payments union. He impressed upon the crowd a need for a real political commitment to overcoming linguistic divisions and outside forces.[28] The paper presented would later be published as “Prospects of Regional Economic Co-Operation in West Africa” in The Journal of Modern African Studies in 1970.[29] In this paper, a key exposition on the ideas that would become ECOWAS, Adedeji shows an awareness of ambitious African ideologies towards regionalism and how they’ve manifested in West African attempts at regional integration, but his ultimate takeaway is not to side with one ideology like pan-Africanism or socialism or neoliberalism, but rather to demonstrate that the overzealous organizations designed to meet these ideologies have failed miserably. His conclusion is then that less is more, that West Africa needs minimal integration to stave off disaster, not maximum integration to bring pan-African socialism or some other sweeping ideology of that sort.[30]
Adedeji would be hired by the leader of Nigeria, Yakubu Gowon, in 1972, to serve as the Minister of Economic Development and Reconstruction. In this position, he would help will the eventual creation of ECOWAS. Later that year, Nigeria and Togo would launch an initiative together to create an economically integrated community. Adedeji and his Togolese counterpart, Henri Dogo, were tasked with the job of establishing this community.[31] Having the initiative co-led by Nigeria and Togo was key, as Nigeria was huge, richer, and Anglophone and Togo was tiny, poorer, and Francophone. The Nigeria-Togo joint ministerial delegation traveled around West Africa in 1973[32] using the 1970 paper as the principles of the new Community.[33] The delegation was well-received, though they had to convince leaders like Senegal’s Léopold Senghor that linguistic wishes (everyone learning French) and worries about Nigeria’s power could not delay the creation of a finally integrated West African economic community.[34] The fifteen independent states (now including Guinea-Bissau) of the region meant in Lome, Togo in December 1973,[35] where the need for an economic community was unanimously agreed upon.[36] Nigeria and Togo were mandated to draw up a treaty to be sent around before a final review meeting in Monrovia, Liberia in 1974, which was set to precede an official signing of the treaty in May 1975. The treaty was signed on May 28th, 1975 in Lagos.
The Founding Ideology of ECOWAS
The Preamble of the May 1975 Treaty of the Economic Community of West African States contains in it an eight-point reasoning for why an economic community is so important, and how it must be done. It can be boiled down to the following three:
- West Africa must develop its states as to improve the living standards of its people
- To do so successfully, cooperation must be cultivated and economic policies must be harmonized.
- Cooperation requires a deliberate and honest assessment of those involved, and a commitment to fairly distributing the benefits of co-operation.
The treaty spells out how it will accomplish this, although many of these actions are given years before they must actually be completed. The treaty forces the countries to eliminate customs duties and trade restrictions between member states, create a common tariff and commercial policy towards non-member states, abolish any obstacles towards free movement of capital, services, and people, establish a development fund, and promote of agricultural and industrial projects.[37]
I argue that the ideology behind this kind of agreement is what I will call “co-operative developmentalism.” ECOWAS is a trade bloc, but not in a kind of quasi-libertarian open-borders way. There are specific industrial projects to be undertaken, a set-aside development fund, and an explicit aim of the Community listed in the Treaty is “the elimination of disparities in the level of development of Member States.”[38] It is also a fundamentally developmentalist community; arguably, the most economically notable clause of the Treaty is that which declares there will be a tariff on all goods originating from non-Member States. There is no wonder that “the Father of ECOWAS,”[39] Adebayo Adedeji, is referred to by one political economist as “the Nigerian counterpart of Raul Prebisch.”[40] This is not obvious in most of his writings, mostly because his writings have the opposite audience and seek intellectual movement in the opposite direction (towards the center). While Prebisch was trying to stake out a space for developmentalist thought in a neoliberal economic landscape, Adedeji was actually trying to temper African leaders’ expectations and shift their efforts away from such dreamy developmentalism and into the world of pragmatic, incrementalist economic integration. Adedeji was developmentalist, sure, but he was not considered to be especially strident in this regard; he was hired to be the cautious academic utilized by the much more committed anti-neocolonial military coup-ers who led the region.
The idea of a bunch of tiny, undeveloped countries rallying together with a common tariff had an intellectual backing beyond Adedeji. Many classical economists like Richard Lipsey and Jacob Viner argued that integration would not aid developing countries because trade diversion would outweigh trade creation. The former is a term for when countries inside an economic bloc are forced to shift from low-cost sources outside the bloc to high-cost sources inside the bloc, losing money, whereas trade creation is a term for when countries inside the bloc shift from high-cost sources outside the bloc to low-cost sources inside the bloc that they become suddenly more aware of and connected to. Since very little of anything could be produced at low cost in developing countries, Viner and Lipsey were obviously right that the short-term effects would be far more in the direction of trade diversion than trade creation. Heterodox economists like Kahnert, Onitri, and Mikesell did not even disagree with this; what they added was that developing countries must go through a short period of economically negative trade policy because that period’s tariffs would spur development. Developing countries, they argued, are seeking massive structural changes to the economy, and short-term slightly-lower-growth is a small price to pay for the eventually giant growth numbers of moving up a rung on the production ladder. The goal is “development,” not “efficiency.”[41] Adedeji had read the literature on trade diversion and trade creation and agreed with its conclusions that it was obviously inefficient and at least initially costly to have a true customs union in West Africa, writing that the only possible argument for something of that ilk would be that it could spur new productive capacity. But he ruled this unlikely, as the nations were too young and lacked any tradition of co-operation. This is why he came to the conclusion that West Africa does not need an ambitious customs union, but rather subtle economic integration in a developmentalist way.[42]
In addition to theoretical arguments for integration, one of the more practical ideologies behind economic integration was a recognition of the difficulty of developing small nations. Adedeji frequently stressed the smallness of the countries as a primary reason to integrate economically, both before and after he helped establish ECOWAS.[43] Asante, one of Africa’s most accomplished political economists, agrees, writing that “the small size of African markets” was one of the major rationales behind economic integration.[44] Robert Gardiner, the executive secretary of the ECA, spoke at the 1967 West African Conference on Economic Cooperation in Accra, emphasizing that “Many branches of economic activity [presumably those with high fixed costs and with economies of scale, especially heavy industry] are closed to the majority of West African countries owing to their small economic size. In this situation the countries of the sub-region must find means to consolidate their economies into more viable units.”[45] Uka Ezenwe, a West African economist writing in the early 1980s, also cites West African states’ smallness as one of the main reasons for economic integration: “Many of the new African states, although nominally independent, were so small and weak both politically and economically that they had little prospect of rapid economic development on their own.”[46] The co-operative developmentalism of ECOWAS only became consensus in the region through a realist look inward to the causes of the lack of development in the 60s and early 70s, and the belief that a major reason for such failure was the smallness of the countries in the region.
The Transformation of an “Economic Community”
On December 1st, 2016, Gambians went to the polls. Gambians had been to the polls before, many times, but not once in 50 years of Gambia’s history had a transfer of power happened because of their votes. The incumbent president, Yahya Jammeh, was a repressive ruler who had come to power in a 1994 coup, and was subsequently elected in 1996 and then re-elected an additional three times, in 2001, 2006, and 2011; none of the elections were considered to be fair and free by international standards.[47] After his 2011 win, he declared “I will deliver to the Gambian people and if I have to rule this country for one billion years, I will, if Allah says so.”[48] 2016 should have been more of the same, with Jammeh’s administration refusing to register international election observers and a forced internet and text messaging blackout for the day of the election. But, Gambians had had enough of Jammeh by 2016, and miraculously, Jammeh’s regime was defeated at the polls, with Adama Barrow achieving victory instead. Even before the official results were released, Jammeh conceded, promising to return to his farm and live off the land. About a week later, Jammeh changed his mind, vowing to contest the official results. The next day, Jammeh deployed the army publicly for the purpose of instilling fear, and a few days later, they occupied the Electoral Commission’s office.[49] ECOWAS, an economic community originally spearheaded by a wonkish academic and originally including exactly zero democracies,[50] issued a statement condemning Jammeh’s actions. Next, they sent to Banjul the heads of states of several West African countries as mediators, and when mediations failed, ECOWAS conducted a naval blockade of The Gambia[51] and mobilized 7,000 mostly-Senegalese troops (more than 5 times larger than the standing army of The Gambia)[52] under the banner of the ECOWAS Military Intervention in The Gambia (ECOMIG) on the Gambian border.[53] As troops invaded but before blood was shed, Jammeh—fearful of a war his forces would certainly lose—agreed to step down and go into exile. ECOWAS had answered the call of the masses and toppled Jammeh.
This series of events seems strange given ECOWAS’ economic origins, but by 2017, such action actually was not strange at all. ECOWAS had been involved militarily in West African countries’ internal affairs several times since the late 1980s, and in 1999 and 2001, ECOWAS Member States had signed official protocols authorizing ECOWAS’ involvement in future vaguely defined circumstances of violated democracy and human rights. How did this non-economic politico-military wing of ECOWAS come to be and why? The answer is not entirely illuminated, but much of it comes down to Nigerian politics and the end of the Cold War.
Three dynamics intersected in ECOWAS’ first intervention in Liberia in 1990: Nigerian desires for hegemony, the end of the Cold War, and a rather typical West African civil war in Liberia. Nigeria is by far the most populous country in Africa, and it has been that way for the entirety of its short existence as a nation. Its leaders have also wanted hegemony since independence. During Nigeria’s First Republic (1960-1966), E.C. Akwiwu, the parliamentarian for one of Nigeria’s major parties, said that “It is necessary, that those whom we stand a chance of leading should be able to look up to Nigeria as a senior brother, an elder brother that is capable of looking after their affairs and is very interested in their well-being,” articulating what would become a continuous “big-brother syndrome” in Nigerian politics. According to this theory of regional politics, Nigeria must look after the much smaller West African countries, even when it cannot remain stable itself. The first president of Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe, spoke of “the historic and manifest destiny of Nigeria on the African continent.” This doctrine continued. Shehu Shagari, the president of Nigeria from 1979 to 1983, compared his desires for hegemony to the United States’: “Just as . . . President Monroe proclaimed the American hemisphere free from the military incursions of European empire builders and adventurers, so also do we . . . in Nigeria and in Africa insist that African affairs be left to Africa to settle.” [54] ECOWAS was considered to go along with this trend, placing all of West Africa in Nigeria’s sphere of influence, including the Francophone countries that had remained elusive and connected to France.[55] This was not merely an achievement by Nigerian standards; no other African regional organization had been able to include both Anglophone countries and Francophone countries until 1992.[56] These achievements and dreams of hegemony were not merely political messages; military leaders took these hubristic views about Nigeria to heart in the form of self-importance. A number of them had glowing biographies written about them, and other military leaders (many of whom ascended to head of state) have had compilations of their speeches published as books. The president and former military leader during the intervention in Liberia, Ibrahim Babangida, had a 7-volume book published on his 7-year rule.[57]
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War made Nigerian dreams of African hegemony much more possible to live out. Now, during a coup or civil war, one did not have to worry that another side was being supported or propped up by one of the two global powers. There was now room for regional powers and jockeying for influence without the threat of involving the two countries that controlled the world. African countries were also now in need of support, as many of them had been supported by the United States or the Soviet Union. Nigeria—whose economy had been doing better than most in West Africa thanks to their oil—hoped to act out that supportive role. Even beyond Nigeria, the end of the Cold War clearly played a role in the Liberian civil war that Nigeria and ECOWAS would be intervening in. The president of Liberia during the beginning of the conflict, Samuel Doe, begged to President George Bush for the United States’ assistance as his regime fell:
“Our capital is named after your President Monroe. Our flag is a replica of yours. Our laws are patterned after your laws. We in Liberia have always considered ourselves “stepchildren” of the United States. We implore you to come help your stepchildren who are in danger of losing their lives and freedom.”[58]
The plea fell on deaf ears, as the United States had no world power to compete with. Not only would the United States not assist Doe, they also did not assist Charles Taylor, whose nature as a lover of capitalism and Reaganomics would have made him a perfect candidate for the military or at least financial support of the United States.[59]
The war in Liberia had a rather typical beginning as African wars go, even if the timing allowed for new dynamics to be at play. Samuel Doe, Liberia’s first non-Americo-Liberian leader, had taken power in a 1980 coup, and had become an ally of the United States.[60] His government faced questions of legitimacy throughout the 80s, and in the latter half of the decade, Charles Taylor—a former government appointment under Doe who was ousted over embezzlement charges—assembled a rebel army in neighboring Côte d'Ivoire and invaded in December of 1989. The war was not just fought as a power struggle between individuals; it was fought partly over ethnic divisions, another staple of African war. Doe was a Krahn who was infamously brutal towards the Gio and Mano peoples of Liberia. His strategy to divide his country also backfired during the war, when the half-Americo-Liberian, half-Gola Taylor exploited the Gio and Mano hatred of Doe in order to gain recruits and popularity.[61] The war tangentially involved many other countries in West Africa. Côte d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso had been supporting Taylor’s army,[62] and the Doe regime was known to be quite close with Nigerian president Ibrahim Babangida.[63] Plus, the war had spillover effects across the region. 225,000 refugees had fled to Guinea,[64] making up about 3.5% of the country at the time.[65] Another 150,000 had feld to the Ivory Coast, and 69,000 fled to Sierra Leone.[66] Beyond Africa, multi-national corporations were upset that the instability had cost them customers, including Cadbury, the chocolate company¸ which, among other corporations, pressured Nigeria to stabilize Liberia to prevent further hits to their bottom line.[67] The official story then (and now)[68] was that these spillover effects and existing regional involvement justified intervention—mostly the refugees, but also the proliferation of weapons, the rebels assembling in other countries, and finally, a loss of life so great that it required intervention, or so it was argued.
But a problem emerged, even as Nigeria’s wannabe hegemons finally had their opportunity: there was no legal basis—nor any basis that the international community would take seriously—to intervene. Two non-economic treaties had been signed by the ECOWAS states since its founding: The Protocol on Non-Aggression adopted in 1978, and The Protocol Relating to Mutual Assistance on Defence, adopted in 1981. Neither protocol directed states to intervene in another state’s wars—the first is an explicit non-aggression pact and the second protocol specifically permitted intervention in other countries’ affairs only when there was an externally directed threat, a conflict between two ECOWAS states, or an internal conflict that was being sustained by countries outside ECOWAS[69] (presumably this is in reference to a potential Cold War proxy war). The only possible argument within these legal lines would have been that Libya, which was not a member state of ECOWAS, was supporting Taylor’s side, but even that seemed to run so against the spirit of the protocols that Nigeria instead went with the argument about spillover effects—namely the fleeing refugees.[70] In an effort to gain international support, they also invoked Chapter 8, Article 52 of the United Nations Charter,[71] which states that members of the UN who enter into
“regional arrangements or agencies for dealing with such matters relating to the maintenance of international peace and security… shall make every effort to achieve pacific settlement of local disputes through such regional arrangements or by such regional agencies before referring them to the Security Council.”[72]
Abass Bundu, the head of ECOWAS at the time, has since admitted that the use of these legal loopholes was misleading—the justification for intervention was clearly political, not legal.[73]
Yet the situation is more complicated than just Nigeria exerting its will, even though Nigeria did provide 75% of the troops and 90% of the funds.[74] For one, the intervention was not supported by all Nigerian elites. Many civil liberties organizations and journalists in the country were displeased, referring to Liberia as “Nigeria’s Vietnam.”[75] Much of the public considered the intervention a ruse, believing that Ibrahim Babangida was using intervention in Liberia to divert eyes from his own failings and potentially stay in power instead of “transition to democracy” as he, like most African coup-ers, had promised.[76] Having just put down an attempted military coup, it was also argued that Babangida wanted to send the military away in order to prevent them from once again attempting to oust him.[77] But Nigerian politics were not the only ones at hand; several other countries were supportive of the intervention. The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and even Francophone Guinea pushed for and supported the creation of ECOMOG, the “monitoring” force first sent into Liberia.[78] It is not entirely clear why this was, but I suppose the cynical theory is that the Anglophone countries wanted additional power and influence in the region over the Francophone countries, while Guinea just wanted any influence at all, after it had scorned France more so than any other Francophone nation in West Africa. The more altruistic theory is that these countries genuinely just wanted stability in the region both for their own sake and for Liberia’s—the war was already extremely deadly and looked to be increasingly so in 1990 when ECOMOG intervened. It remains unanswered what exact combination of these two theories is correct.
The many politics of the time, global, regional, and national, intersected to spur ECOMOG’s military intervention in Liberia. In one way, the intervention was a success: ECOMOG did help end the war and hold elections. However, it took them about seven years to do so; they had to double their deployment from 3,000 to 6,000 troops; they needed the UN’s troops to assist them (so much for hegemony);[79] and the winner of the elections was Charles Taylor, the original leader of the rebel forces, who the people likely voted for because they saw any other action as working to prolong an already exhausting war.[80]
Liberia was just the beginning of ECOWAS intervention into its member states’ internal affairs. There was at least one intervention in Sierra Leone in 1991 and/or 1997, one in Guinea-Bissau in 1998, one in the Ivory Coast in 2002, and then another in Liberia in 2003. All but the first of these involved military force. ECOWAS also intervened non-militarily, with temporary suspensions from ECOWAS or mere threats of military force in Guinea-Bissau in 2003, Togo in 2005, Guinea in 2009, Guinea-Bissau again in 2009, Niger in 2009, and the Ivory Coast in 2011.[81] ECOWAS also involved itself in mediations in Mali in 2012, and in Burkina Faso in 2015.[82] Many of these interventions lasted years, and the success of these interventions ranged from none to considerable, the latter highlighted by Burkina Faso in 2015 and The Gambia in 2017, which both appear to be decently well-functioning democracies at the political level as of the due date of this paper. Just this year in May, ECOWAS suspended Mali until February 2022 for its two coups in less than a year.[83] A mere two days before this paper was submitted, Guinea’s government also fell to a coup, and as of September 7th, ECOWAS has condemned the coup[84] and scheduled a summit to discuss further action for September 9th.[85] ECOWAS-watchers await to see what the organization does next regarding Guinea, and whether ECOWAS can finally achieve stability in Mali.
With the interventions came treaties and protocols to justify them. Shortly after ECOMOG’s invasion in Liberia, the Declaration of Political Principles of the Economic Community of West African States was adopted in July of 1991. This document set out to declare that ECOWAS respects human rights and seeks to promote democratic systems of governance.[86] To the ECOMOG-supporting countries, namely Nigeria, this document may have been meaningful as a retroactive justification for invading Liberia, but to outsiders, the document is almost funnily meaningless—in 1990, almost every country in ECOWAS was in flagrant violation of their organization’s new “principles,” and ECOWAS was doing nothing about it. ECOWAS then came together to write a new revised treaty in 1993, this time with much broader aims, including “maintenance of regional peace, stability, and security,” a recognition of human rights, and “popular participation in development.”[87] More concretely, the Treaty does allow ECOWAS to provide assistance for “the observation of democratic elections” and to “establish a regional peace and security observation system and peacekeeping forces where appropriate.”[88] The Revised Treaty also allows for sanctioning, including temporary suspensions, which have become a quite common tactic as already discussed.[89] Next, in December of 1999, ECOWAS adopted the Protocol Relating to the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, Resolution, Peace-Keeping and Security. According to ECOWAS itself, this document “remains the most important legal and normative instrument for ECOWAS in all matters relating to peace and security.”[90] Its timing is apt, coming at the end of a decade of frequent ECOWAS military intervention, and on the eve of a new decade of ECOWAS intervention, this time less often military. The 1999 Protocol creates a Mediation and Security Council that can decide on interventions both in the case of a “massive violation of human rights and the rule of law” or “an overthrow or attempted overthrow of a democratically elected government.” The protocol not only authorizes military intervention, but it orders them when violations of the Member States’ duties to democracy and human rights are severe enough.[91] The Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance, adopted in 2001, establishes the standards which Member States’ governance violations will be measured against, including fair and free elections, civilian supremacy over military, civil liberties, the rule of law, the autonomy of the legislature and courts, and a strict “zero tolerance” for power obtained unconstitutionally.[92] Finally, the 2008 ECOWAS Conflict Prevention Framework adopted by the Mediation and Security Council collected ECOWAS standards for lawful governance into one neat document, only adding a few standards, like women’s and children’s rights, and a fair, not too centralized, distribution of power.[93] By the time ECOWAS toppled The Gambia’s strongman in 2017, they not only had experience intervening; they had experience justifying their interventions with lists of governance standards, and increasingly broad authorizations to act upon violations of them.
Success or Failure?
Over the course of the last 46 years, ECOWAS has changed quite a bit. It started as a cooperative developmentalist project at least a decade in the making, not just at an intellectual level, but at the level of constant real-world trial and error. In most ways, ECOWAS has failed to live up to the cooperative developmentalist goals—yes there is an external tariff, but the cooperation is largely missing. Not only has harmonization of economic policies never been achieved, it has never even “seriously considered,” in the words of one scholar, outside of most of the Francophone countries’ having kept the same currency. Deadlines around creating a free trade zone are planned and rescheduled in a never-ending cycle, although free movement of people was achieved by the creation of the ECOWAS passport. Intra-West African trade as a percentage of the Member States’ total has continued to be below 10% as of 2013.[94] But if ECOWAS did not live up to its lofty economic goals in its original treaty, has it lived up to its pragmatic goals as articulated in Adedeji’s influential paper, of essentially any lasting economic integration at all? It seems so.
But rather than becoming a true economic force, ECOWAS has become a political force, intervening in West African internal conflict after internal conflict, often militarily, with extremely mixed results. In some cases, their actions have done nothing, and in others like The Gambia a few years ago, their actions have created or upheld democracy in places that have exactly no tradition of it. ECOWAS has molded into such a consistent and powerful regional watchdog and military threat that every article about the Guinean coup that occurred two days ago mentions ECOWAS’ responses. It is hard to know how to feel about the political development of ECOWAS, but it seems to me to be positive insofar as it has not crowded out better economic integration, which it seems unlikely to have done.
On the economic front, ECOWAS has mostly failed, but succeeded in limited respects. On the political front, similar results hold, with a few headline achievements and mostly a bunch of interventions that succeed very temporarily before the country being intervened upon falls once again into a state of chaos a few years later. But perhaps, given the circumstances, these two fronts of mostly-failures are actually successes, all things considered? After all, what little integration ECOWAS has achieved politically and economically has been far more than could be achieved without it. Yet, measurements of concrete economic development must also play a role here. Free movement of people is nice and convenient, and so is a Francophone currency, but all of that pales in comparison to the actual growth rates in the region, which are still far too low, especially compared to the catch-up development of several countries not just in East Asia, but in most of South and Southeast Asia. The jury is still out on ECOWAS, and the next fifty years will be telling as to whether the organization and the region can improve markedly on their limited success, or whether West Africa will remain the sight of much of the world’s extreme poverty and autocracy.
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[1] “Largest Countries in the World by Area - Worldometer,” accessed August 17, 2021, https://www.worldometers.info/geography/largest-countries-in-the-world/.
[2] “Population Clock: World,” United States Census Bureau, accessed August 17, 2021, https://www.census.gov/popclock/world.
[3] Cabo Verde was not yet independent and joined soon after it became independent. Mauritania would later leave ECOWAS in 2000; this is not addressed in the paper. In addition, I have narrowed the scope by defining West Africa as only being those sixteen countries—if you include Cameroon, for example, there is a story there about how the original leaders of ECOWAS were unable to court them into joining.
[4] Bryony Jones, Ben Westcott, and James Masters, “Gambia: Defeated Leader Jammeh Leaves Country after Election Loss,” CNN, accessed September 6, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/20/africa/gambia-janmeh-barrow-ecowas/index.html.
[5] Africanus Horton, West African Countries and Peoples (London: W.J. Johnson, 1868), iii.
[6] Samuel Kwadwo Boaten (S.K.B.) Asante, The Political Economy of Regionalism in Africa (New York, NY: Praeger Publishers, 1986), 45.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Alistair Boddy-Evans, “A Timeline of African Countries’ Independence,” ThoughtCo, accessed August 17, 2021, https://www.thoughtco.com/chronological-list-of-african-independence-4070467.
[9] Listed is the date of declared independence, which wasn’t recognized by Portugal until September 10th, 1974.
[10] Adedeji, Adebayo, “ECOWAS: A Retrospective Journey.” In Adekeye Adebajo and Ismail Rashid, eds., West Africa’s Security Challenges: Building Peace in a Troubled Region (Colorado, United States and London, UK: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004), 23-24.
[11] Frederick Cooper, “Reframing France: The Loi-Cadre and African Federalism, 1956–1957,” in Citizenship between Empire and Nation (Princeton University Press, 2014), https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691161310.003.0006.
[12] Adedeji, “ECOWAS,” 23-24.
[13] “Léopold Senghor | President of Senegal,” Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed August 17, 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leopold-Senghor.
[14] Adedeji, “ECOWAS,” 24; “Sékou Touré | President of Guinea,” Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed August 17, 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sekou-Toure.
[15] Eric Pace, “Ahmed Sékou Touré, a Radical Hero,” New York Times, March 28, 1984, sec. A.
[16] Adedeji, “ECOWAS,” 24.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Asante, The Political Economy, 47-48.
[19] Adebayo Adedeji, “Prospects of Regional Economic Co-Operation in West Africa,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 8, no. 2 (1970): 221.
[20] Ibid, 217, 222.
[21] Ibid, 222-223.
[22] Asante, The Political Economy, 48.
[23] Ibid, 50-52.
[24] Ibid, 53.
[25] Christof Hartmann, “Governance Transfer by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS),” SFB-Governance Working Paper Series, no. 47 (December 2013), https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/wps/sfb/0030745/f_0030745_24883.pdf, 8.
[26] Asante, The Political Economy, 40.
[27] “Mr. Adebayo Adedeji | United Nations Economic Commission for Africa,” accessed September 7, 2021, https://www.uneca.org/ess/mr-adebayo-adedeji.
[28] Adedeji, “ECOWAS,” 26-27.
[29] Adebayo Adedeji, “Prospects.”
[30] Ibid, 221.
[31] Ibid, 28.
[32] Asante, The Political Economy, 55.
[33] Adedeji, “ECOWAS,” 28.
[34] Ibid, 29.
[35] Asante, The Political Economy, 55.
[36] Adedeji, “ECOWAS,” 31.
[37] “Treaty of the Economic Community of West African States,” May 28, 1975, https://investmentpolicy.unctad.org/international-investment-agreements/treaty-files/5560/download.
[38] Ibid, 20.
[39] Adekeye Adebajo and Ismail Rashid, eds., West Africa’s Security Challenges: Building Peace in a Troubled Region (Colorado, United States and London, UK: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004).
[40] Asante, The Political Economy, 55.
[41] Asante, The Political Economy, 10-13.
[42] Adedeji, “Prospects,” 219-221.
[43] Adedeji, “Prospects;” Adedeji, “ECOWAS,” 27.
[44] Asante, The Political Economy, 5-6, 42.
[45] Ibid, 51.
[46] Uka Ezenwe, ECOWAS and the Economic Integration of West Africa (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 12.
[47] Christof Hartmann, “ECOWAS and the Restoration of Democracy in the Gambia,” Africa Spectrum 52, no. 1 (2017): 85–99, https://doi.org/10.1177/000203971705200104, 86.
[48] “Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh Ready for ‘billion-Year’ Rule,” BBC News, December 12, 2011, sec. Africa, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-16148458.
[49] Hartmann, “ECOWAS and the Restoration of Democracy,” 86-87.
[50] Christof Hartmann, “Governance Transfer,” 8.
[51] Hartmann, “ECOWAS and the Restoration of Democracy 88-89.
[52] Ibid, 93.
[53] Jones et al. “Gambia: Defeated Leader Jammeh Leaves Country after Election Loss,” CNN.
[54] Adekeye Adebajo, Liberia’s Civil War : Nigeria, ECOMOG, and Regional Security in West Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), 44.
[55] Adebajo, Liberia’s Civil War, 47.
[56] Hartmann, “Governance Transfer,” 10.
[57] Adebajo, Liberia’s Civil War, 45.
[58] Ibid, 43.
[59] Ibid, 58.
[60] Ibid, 41.
[61] Ibid, 42.
[62] Ibid, 41.
[63] E. Ike Udogu, “Economic Community of West African States: From an Economic Union to a Peacekeeping Mission,” Review of Black Political Economy 26, no. 4 (Spring 1999): 55–74, 68.
[64] Abdel-Fatau Musah, “ECOWAS and Regional Responses to Conflicts,” in ECOWAS and the Dynamics of Conflict and Peace-Building (Dakar, Senegal: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), 2011), 154.
[65] “Population, Total - Guinea | Data,” The World Bank Data, accessed September 6, 2021, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=GN.
[66] Musah, “ECOWAS,” 154.
[67] Udogu, “Economic Community,” 69-70.
[68] “ECOWAS Mediation Guidelines” (ECOWAS, February 2018), https://ecpf.ecowas.int/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/ECOWAS-ENGLISH-230518.pdf, 13.
[69] Adebajo, Liberia’s Civil War, 64.
[70] Udogu, “Economic Community,” 66.
[71] Ibid, 67.
[72] United Nations, “United Nations Charter (Full Text),” United Nations (United Nations), accessed September 7, 2021, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text.
[73] Adebajo, Liberia’s Civil War, 64.
[74] Ibid, 48.
[75] Ibid, 53.
[76] Udogu, “Economic Community,” 65.
[77] Ibid, 66.
[78] Ibid, 42.
[79] Hartmann, “Governance Transfer,” 29-30.
[80] Musah, “ECOWAS,” 154-155.
[81] Hartmann, “Governance Transfer.”
[82] “ECOWAS Mediation Guidelines,” 37-41.
[83] “ECOWAS Suspends Mali over Second Coup in Nine Months | Ghana News | Al Jazeera,” News, Aljazeera, May 31, 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/31/ecowas-suspends-mali-over-second-coup-in-nine-months.
[84] “Guinea Coup Leader to Form New Government in Weeks,” BBC News, September 6, 2021, sec. Africa, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-58461436.
[85] Reuters, “West Africa Bloc to Hold Extraordinary Summit on Guinea -Staff Memo,” Reuters, September 7, 2021, sec. Africa, https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/west-africa-bloc-hold-extraordinary-summit-guinea-staff-memo-2021-09-06/.
[86] Hartmann, “Governance Transfer,” 14.
[87] “Economic Community of West African States Revised Treaty,” July 1993, 6-7.
[88] “Economic Community of West African States Revised Treaty,” 36.
[89] “Economic Community of West African States Revised Treaty,” 43.
[90] “ECOWAS Mediation Guidelines,” 16.
[91] Hartmann, “Governance Transfer,” 18.
[92] Ibid.
[93] Ibid, 23-27.
[94] Ibid, 10-11.