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Bach, Daniel, ed. 1999. REGIONALISATION IN AFRICA: INTEGRATION AND DISINTEGRATION. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 235 pp.
The former director of the Centre d'etude d'Afrique noire (CEAN) in Bordeaux and a recognized authority on African regionalism, Daniel Bach offers us the proceedings of a conference on "Integration and regionalisation in sub-Saharan Africa" (CEAN, Bordeaux, May 1994), which earlier appeared in French under the title Regionalisation, Mondialisation et Fragmentation en Afrique Subsaharienne (Paris: Karthala, 1998).
This comprehensive edited volume of two hundred dense pages and nineteen chapters is divided into four parts covering a broad range of issues. Part One ("Regionalism and Globalisation") situates Africa in the context of the world economy. Part Two ("States and Territories") focuses on the impact of boundaries, democratization, civil society and regional entities on African states. Part Three examines the problems and prospects of various African regional organizations, while Part Four looks at the impact of "informal" and "illicit" commercial processes and networks on African economic integration.
Starting from the (mistaken) view that there is practically no regionalization in Africa, Daniel Bach argues that quite the opposite is, in fact, the case. He notes, however, that Africa's regionalization processes are closely intertwined with changing patterns of globalization that are leading to the progressive, economic marginalization of the continent (p. xvii). In a cogent, concise, and thoughtful introductory chapter, Bach then discusses the crisis of territorial and governmental legitimacy, and its impact on African regional organizations. He argues with some justification that "far from contributing to an adjustment of the state to the pressure of globalization, regionalization in Africa is primarily the expression of microstrategies which... seek to take advantage of the resources of globalization, with the effect of a further erosion of the states' territorial and governmental legitimacy" (p. 2). The point is aptly illustrated by Walter Kennes, who argues that the European Union supports regional integration in Africa "as a step toward wider liberalization and integration into the world economy" (pp. 38-9), even if the positive bias of donors toward...