Trade, Development, Cooperation: What Future for Africa? (review)

Trade, Development, Cooperation: What Future for Africa? is hardly a book, though this twenty-ninth edition of Nordiska's Africa seminar series is an equally relevant and enjoyable publication for the scholar and policy analyst interested in current issues in African development. The short edited booklet compiles three comprehensive and well-written article-essays, which examine the most topical issues of contemporary global development with a focus on the African continent.

The current review focuses on a critical analysis of the third and most relevant essay in this publication, not only because it is written by the series' editor himself, but because of this essay's identification, exploration, and dynamic analysis of one of the most important policy dilemmas facing African development in the millennium: exploring the competing strategies between globalization and the regionalization required to resuscitate the Continent's economic income growth and foster African citizens' socioeconomic well-being. The text's analysis of the regionalism–globalization relationship in Africa requires deeper deliberation and reflection in three interrelated areas. First is the vagueness of the conceptual boundaries of the article's main areas of discussion (regionalism and globalization). Next is the skewed and rather negative lenses through which African regionalization via the African Union (AU) is examined, an analysis that leads to reluctance to address the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD)normatively and positivistically in a similar historical-structural trajectory, through which Europe's Economic Community evolved into the European Union. Finally, for a text that proclaims as its objective a future global development plan for Africa, I will quibble with Henning Melber's conclusion to recommend a Swedish development plan for the continent's development prospects while minimizing the prospects of a self-defined African plan.

By arguing that the "globalization" forces of the NEPAD-type "international" organization thwarts concrete regional efforts sought by "regional" organizations such as Southern African Development Community (SADC), Melber blurs the conceptual boundaries in clearly defining the extent to which NEPAD is a regional organization (the way I see it) or an externally oriented global one (his perspective). Melber's negative assessment of NEPAD causes him to characterize this institution as a force of globalization, rather than a continental regional organization working with global governance institutions. He believes "The implementation of Nepad [sic] will most likely have an adverse effect by increasing outward orientation of a regional bloc at the expense of internal consolidation" (p. 36).

Elsewhere, I have challenged this perspective (Edozie 2004). While acknowledging NEPAD's difficulty in channeling the gains of economic globalization through global resource mobilization partnerships with the European Union, the United Nations, and the economic arrangement popularly called the G8, I conclude that indeed regionalization—"the organization's capacity to rationalize the institutional framework for Africa's economic integration" (Hayman 2003)—is NEPAD's greatest achievement. NEPAD is in effect striving to achieve a strategy that nurtures an institutional and instrumental framework that seeks to achieve continental ownership by way of partnering with African states, societies and markets (Edozie 2004)

I focus on the text's analysis of NEPAD because of its scholarly objective to nurture principled and globalized development cooperation for Africa (p. 16). I wholeheartedly concur with the authors' general critique of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United States' Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), and the European Union Economic Partnership Acts (EPAs), which the text describes as Western-dominated mercantilist agreements, rather than liberal international relations agreements. Looked at this way, these agreements are indeed reducing the economic policy space for African governments. Yet, in that context, it is unclear why Melber criticizes NEPAD for advocating an externalorientation (globalization) because the institution strives to represent the African region in negotiating equitable trade gains with these economic organs. In essence, what Melber misses in his analysis of NEPAD's role between regionalism and globalization is the organization's attempt to build for Africa, political will, clout and capital in the contemporary international political economy in an...