The conceptual toolbox for understanding regional integration is replete with a wide range of notions and analytical instruments; each capturing the different nuances of the process and thereby raising some of the most nagging questions such as:  as nation states, in their prototypic characterisation, continue to experience a strategic deficit in the capacity to effectively engage the forces of corporate-led globalisation are they, at the same time, being called upon to "pool sovereignty" or are they being required to expand their jurisdictional limits in order to accommodate and possibly neutralise the adverse effects of globalisation?  It is important to interrogate the social forces driving either of the tendencies. Is regionalism supplanting, supplementing or substituting multilateralism?

One may proceed to ask: on what levels or for what reasons are regionalist impulses stimulated - at intrastate or extra-state levels? Are they at national, sub-national or at international levels? Are they a response to external challenges or driven by domestic demands? Are they in pursuit of Regionalism or an act of regionalisation and for regional coherence or regional identity? Are they for purposes of international cooperation or in pursuit of regional integration? Are they instruments of state strategy or driven by market forces?

It is crucial, at this stage, to distinguish processes underlying regionalism from those associated with regionalisation. The distinction, though obscurely tenuous and cautious in its descriptive capacity, is important in several ways, the most imperative being that of explicating the captivating and complex dynamics of contemporary variety of regional groups and the political-economic topography of the geographical spaces they occupy. 

Regionalism is a state-driven project tendentiously designed to reorganise a particular regional space along agreed-upon economic and political interests. It refers to a body of values and objectives that are aimed at initiating, sustaining or modifying the commonwealth of a people occupying a particular regional space. It embodies the urge by any set of actors to reorganise their political-economic lives around the geopolitical demands of a given regional space.  It is thus a product of instrumental state policies geared towards a strategic enlargement of national sovereignty in favour of broader and collective interests of the collaborating nation states and in the image of the ruling interests.

Regionalization on the other hand implies the explicit act of convergence and integration of non-state interests in the areas of culture, market and cross-borderer civic interactions into the regional project. It stands for a broader concentration and release of national and sub-national energies around regional political economic interests, ranging from environmental governance, social relations, cultural cross-fertilisation, to human resource development, to trade.

Historical factors endow East Africa with a high level of integration in several areas and in a pattern decisively influenced by the colonial interests of western capitalist expansion. Initially - and particularly in the pre-colonial era - the region was relatively symmetrical in economic terms. Colonialism, neo-colonialism and now neo-liberalism have subjected the region to unequal economic underdevelopment - concentrating powerful economic institutions and production and distribution activities in such sectors as agriculture, manufacturing, trade, transport and communication. The region is rich in cross-border cultural/ethnic commonalties that pre-dispose it towards a natural gravitation towards closer integration of the most vital spheres of life. The use and exploitation of Lake Victoria promises potential benefits of cooperation among the riparian regional communities but also portends conflicts around the international use of the attendant resources.

The first phase of East African Community was a colonial project. Whereas it was constructed on a terra firma of linguistic, ethnic and sub-ethnic cross-boarder relationships and singularity of colonial agenda, it leaned, at the same time and with a precarious weight, on a hollow reed marked by the underlying pre-colonial social formations around proto-nationalist tendencies. The post-1st World War dispensation that ushered in and provided for a unified British control of the regional (colonial, territorial and mandatory) entities gave the region a foretaste of an externally driven experimentation with regional integration. A host of common services provided the relatively solid ground on which the regional body built its fledgling political and economic institutions.

Built on unequal sovereignty and subjected to unequal colonial-capitalist under-development, the regional economy gravitated around Kenya’s one-up-manship in the institutional consolidation of market forces and substitutive industrial development. If colonial interests had been the political-economic site for the institutional organisation of EAC I, the same interests, though purposefully morphed into a new imperialist instrument would, later on, turn into a prime site for the reorganisation of the balance of social forces required to sustain and, if possible, outlast the historical limitations of the colonial project...

The post-colonial efforts aimed at deepening of the East African community agenda became a strategic victim of social class-formation manoeuvres by the sub-national elites, cutting their milk teeth in primitive accumulation of resources. Wrestling with the unique character of the challenges of national ruling class formation necessitated the need to operate within the narrow framework of a sheltered home turf under the sovereignty of a nation state. In Kenya where a powerful ruling class was fledgling, consolidating tribal hegemony around Kenyatta’s imperial presidency, the threat of a deeper regionalisation gained in reality and imminence.

Much later, the post-colonial dynamics of regionalisation in East Africa would later be determined by a host of factors. They range from institutional crystallisation of the hegemonic authority of the neo-colonial agents as an emerging social class mandated to re-organize the post-colonial political economy in favour of continued dependency on metropolitan interests, domestication of ideological reflexes of the cold war, to the emergence of neo-patrimonial states in the region as internal cleavages began to threaten the status quo.

Together, these factors produced the historical conditions under which EAC II found its provenance. Over-politicization of the regionalization agenda and unrealistic reliance on Westphalian anachronism pre-disposed individual state elites towards an obsession with the politics of absolute sovereignty which detracted from a strategic appreciation of synergy that would drive the regional economy under its own flag of interdependence.  The left-leaning governments of Tanzania and Uganda under Julius Nyerere and Milton Obote respectively provided a convenient handle for the Kenyan based rightwing cabal to scuttle the project before it could claim local-community ownership. 

For Kenya to play its strategic role for Western monopoly capital, it was strategic to isolate it from the ideologically unwieldy, if not potentially hostile, East African community by dismantling the cooperation and having an easy time controlling member states individually, using Kenya as a base.  The upshot was that the East African Community was condemned to die in the hands Kenya's rightwing elements so that the first Republican rule under Kenyatta would leave an indelible hegemonic mark on the Kenyan polity.

The return of regionalisation in East Africa (EAC III) has been materialising under a completely different international dispensation. It hit the ground with deliberate pace that, for all practical purposes, reflected a powerful unity around a widely shared commitment to and justifiable nostalgia for a worthwhile project, previously undermined in its infancy by imperialist machinations and now pressing for a third round of historical legitimation. Yet, deep in the recess of popular memory of the East African people, EAC II had bequeathed member countries a seriously anaemic legacy: mistrust, asymmetric development, a new configuration of strategic interests of a unipolar world around US hegemony. 

Tanzania's role as a frontline state, in the interim, had already drawn it away from its erstwhile neighbours and, as a result, launched it on the orbit of South Africa as an emerging political-economic centre of gravity in Africa.  As a SADC member, Tanzania is negotiating its return to EAC wearing a tentative phase and with an understandable schizophrenic bearing: on the one hand it seems to relish the prospects of benefiting from updated historical ties with the neighbouring states; yet the legacy of a frontline state role, born of heroic engagement with decolonisation behind its southern boarders, beguilingly draws it into the SADC arrangement.
 
It is important note that during both EAC I and II the level of integration was unevenly high in a limited number of areas - particularly in transport, migrant labour, trade, education etc.  In these and other areas critical to the regional political economy, Kenyan actors in most of the above areas were dominant and therefore the region could best be analysed along center-periphy lines. 

The fundamental principles and objectives driving the new process of regionalisation are as sound as they are aimed at addressing some of the problems which caused the demise of East African Common Services Organisation (1961-1966) and the East African Community phase II (1967-1977). The areas include trade liberalisation; investment and industrial development; Standardisation, Quality Assurance; Metrology and Testing; Monetary and Financial cooperation; Infrastructure and Services; Development of Human Resources, Science and Technology; Agriculture and Food Security; Environment and Natural resources Management; Tourism and wildlife Management; The Private Sector and Civil Society; Legal and Judicial Affairs; Enhancing the role of Women in Socio-economic Activities; Free Movement of Persons, labour, Services, Right of Establishment and Residence; and Regional customs union.

These lend themselves to easy implementation provided that the organisation of the Community and the functional distribution of its organs are brought to proper alignment with the historic challenges facing the peoples of the region. For instance, the proposed Sectoral Councils, as the main vehicles for the implementation and monitoring of the regional development programmes, need not mimic the SADC arrangement, particularly given the unique history of the East African regionalisation effort. More innovative thinking needs to inform their composition and functioning in order for them to facilitate effective multi-jurisdictional regional processes.

To be continued

By Oduor Ong’wen
Country Director, SEATINI Kenya.