Constitutive Act of the African Union

Context

The African Union, which was formally launched on July 9, 2002, represents the culmination of efforts to unite the nations of Africa. These efforts have dated back at least to the eighteenth century and have involved people who were part of the African diaspora—the spread of Africans throughout much of the world because of the slave trade—who collaborated in a unified resistance to the injustice of slavery. Such organizations as the Sons of Africa, formed in London in the 1790s, joined with abolitionists to pressure prime ministers and the British monarchy to end slavery. These antislavery campaigns were the first instances in modern history in which Africans and people of African descent attempted to speak with one voice.

One of the earliest organizations that promoted political unity on the African continent was the Fante (also spelled Fanti) Confederacy, which was formed in 1868 and created its own constitution in 1871. The confederacy attempted to link the numerous Fante clans and states along the Gold Coast of western Africa and thereby achieve self-determination. Although the organization dissolved in 1873, it served as a model for future efforts to break down Africa's tribal and national barriers and resist colonialism. Around 1897, Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams formed the African Association, later called the Pan-African Association, which was active in the very early 1900s. In the decades that followed, numerous key figures—including the prominent American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey (founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League), and the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie—called for greater unity among African nations.

In the second half of the twentieth century, as the nations of Africa were gaining their independence from European colonial powers, serious efforts were begun to promote African unity. Among the first organizations dedicated to that end was the Union of African States, formed on November 23, 1958. Initially, the union consisted of just two members, Guinea and Ghana; Mali joined the union in April 1961. It was led by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Sékou Touré of Guinea, both of whom were revolutionary Marxist heads of state. After Guinea had tried to forge a closer relationship with the United States rather than the Communist Soviet Union, the union dissolved in 1962.

An organization that had more clout and lasted much longer was the AU's predecessor, the Organization of African Unity. This organization was created on May 25, 1963, but only after divisions on the continent had been overcome. Nevertheless, two blocs emerged within the OAU, each espousing a different view of African unity. One, called the Casablanca bloc, was led by Nkrumah and backed by Algeria, Guinea, Morocco, Egypt, Mali, and Libya. This bloc called for an immediate confederation of all African countries. The other, called the Monrovian bloc, was led by Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and included Ethiopia, Liberia, Nigeria, and many of France's former African colonies. The Monrovian bloc wanted to take a more gradual approach to economic cooperation and resisted any kind of broader political union. Eventually, Ethiopia's Haile Selassie invited the two groups to a conference in Addis Ababa, which later became the headquarters of the OAU, where he brokered an agreement between the two camps and thirty-two nations signed the OAU's charter. Eventually, membership in the OAU grew to fifty-three nations; Morocco had been a member but withdrew in 1984, making it the only nation on the continent that does not belong to the OAU.

The OAU suffered from limitations that sometimes bedevil international confederations. For example, it had no armed forces and was unable to intervene in conflicts such as protracted civil wars in Nigeria and Angola. It also had no power to prevent or stop human rights violations in countries such as Uganda, which had been under the tyrannical rule of strongman Idi Amin in the 1970s. Critics derided the OAU as powerless, and it often came to be referred to as the “Dictators' Club” and the “Dictators' Trade Union.” Further, the organization remained divided, particularly because several nations in the Monrovian bloc remained dependent on France for economic aid. Another source of division emerged between those nations that supported the capitalist model of the West and the United States, such as the Ivory Coast under President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, and those that were drawn to Soviet Communism, such as Ghana under Nkrumah. Rarely were the two camps able to agree on a united course of action.

The OAU's supporters, on the other hand, pointed to its successes. In the United Nations, OAU member states joined together to promote African interests. The OAU worked tirelessly to eliminate colonialism and minority rule, aiding organizations that fought apartheid in South Africa and that strove for an independent Southern Rhodesia. Through the efforts of the OAU, ports and airspace throughout Africa were closed to South Africa, and the World Health Organization expelled that nation. The OAU provided aid for refugees and created the African Development Bank, which enabled former colonies to become less dependent on their former colonial rulers for development loans and markets for their goods.

One other organization bears mention: the African Economic Community (AEC), which was created on June 3, 1991, by the Abuja Treaty signed in Abuja, Nigeria, and is still in operation. Modeled after the European Economic Community, the goal of the AEC has been to establish a monetary and economic union through the creation of a single African market, free trade areas, a common currency, and a central bank. The AEC consists of several overlapping trade and economic-cooperation blocs called Regional Economic Communities, which include the Community of Sahel-Saharan States, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, the East African Community, the Economic Community of Central African States, the Economic Community of West African States, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the Southern African Development Community, and the Arab Maghreb Union. The ultimate goals of the AEC, which have been projected as far into the future as 2028, are to turn the continent into a free-trade zone with a common currency and to establish a common market for African-made goods.

The perceived inadequacies of the OAU, however, led to its dissolution and replacement with the African Union. The position of Africa in world affairs had changed since the OAU's formation in the early 1960s. During the early decades of the cold war—the state of hostility between the West, led by the United States, and the Communist Soviet Union and its allies—the nations of Africa had acquired some importance, as both the United States and Soviet Union courted support and wanted to expand their spheres of influence. With the end of the cold war in the early 1990s, though, Africa became less strategically important, and many observers came to believe that the only way African nations could survive was by uniting. Further, other regions of the world were forming trading blocs; chief among them was the European Union and NAFTA, or the North American Free Trade Agreement, which brought Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a mutual free-trade zone, in which Chile was later included.

Calls for a new, more competitive African organization began in the mid-1990s under the leadership of Libya's Muammar al-Gaddafi, who has urged the formation of a “United States of Africa.” On September 9, 1999, the OAU issued the Sirte Declaration, named for Sirte, Libya, the site of the OAU's Fourth Extraordinary Session of the Assembly of African Heads of State and Government. The intent of the declaration was to create the African Union and to speed implementation of the Abuja Treaty provisions for establishing the AEC in order to foster economic development as well as to create a central bank, a monetary union, the Court of Justice, and the Pan-African Parliament. A chief goal, too, was to call for the writing of the Constitutive Act of the African Union, which was signed in 2000.

From July 9 to July 11, 2001, the OAU's heads of state met at Lusaka, Zambia, to adopt a plan for implementing the AU, which began formal operation on July 9, 2002. Also at the Lusaka conference, the New Partnership for Africa's Development was adopted. This organization merged two previous African economic-development organizations: the OMEGA Plan for Africa and the Millennium Partnership for the African Recovery Programme. The new organization was an outgrowth of a report issued by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa titled Compact for Africa's Recovery. This document, which was combined with resolutions adopted by the United Nation's Millennium Summit in 2000 and backed by the European Union, China, and the G8 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), was adopted as the New African Initiative. Thus, the African Union was part of a broader set of initiatives for the development of Africa.