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Africa Today 48.2 (2001) 151-154



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Anda, Michael O. 2000. International Relations In Contemporary Africa. Lanham: University Press of America. 299 pp.

This study focuses on a cross-sectional analysis of intra-West African international relations, using the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) member states as a point of reference. As for the many concrete cases and events analyzed in this work, they represent matters of fact, are generally robust, and in most cases are not likely to be disputed. One is therefore challenged to see how these concrete events cohere and advance the author's argument as well as lend credibility and evidence to the conclusion and knowledge that this work embodies.

To the extent that some generalizations have to be made with respect to continental-wide interactions, Michael Anda's approach is as unique as it is encouraging. While most other approaches to international relations in Africa tend to view it from a holistic premise, they quickly fall into the temptation of explaining different subnational issues with very broad strokes. To his credit, Anda's work has attempted to avoid this epistemological anomaly. International relations as an institutional phenomenon is carried out by state actors acting on the basis of a presumed national interest based on a de jure or de facto claim to "constitutional" legitimacy. Hence, to acquire a fuller understanding of the nature and contours of international relations in Africa, especially in the postcolonial and post-Cold War eras, one must have a working understanding of the "state" in Africa, as well as the role of extracontinental actors in shaping African attitudes to each other and the global community.

Anda's work articulates how variations in the foreign policies of West African states and the perceptual differences of their leaders can aid in understanding any design for mutual cooperation in the subregion. The methodology emphasizes the use of both aggregate economic data and event-interpretive analysis for the purpose of theory building. To develop his framework, Anda combines both unit (state level) and systemic (regional level) data that build on original insights from the system-theoretic, power, and decision-making approaches to the analysis of international relations. One of the strongest accounts presented in this study can be found in Chapter Five which deals with elite ideology and power politics in West Africa. It traces the origin and growth of ideological conflict between the Casablanca (radicalism) and the Monrovia (conservatism) groups, between the policy of gradualism and an alternative revolutionary approach in response to French-West African relations. The roles of regional actors such [End Page 151] as Felix Houphet-Boigny (Ivory Coast), Leopold Senghor (Senegal), Milton Stevens (Sierra Leone), William Tubman (Liberia), Modibo Keita (Mali), and Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) in shaping regional responses to French political patrimony in West Africa are delineated.

The study concludes that in West Africa, the high volume of interstate relations created by the relative affluence of the 1970s has been replaced by the passivity of the 1980s and 1990s, a period characterized by relative economic deprivation. It points out that as criteria for political interactions in the region, events such as diplomatic representations, presidential visits, bilateral agreements, and mutual memberships of regional organizations, provide greater promise for enhanced intra-West African cooperation. Finally, it concludes that geographical contiguity between states, common colonial heritage, size-power distance, economic development, military and diplomatic capabilities are positively related to increased interactions among West African countries and that most of these interactions are either political or economic, rather than sociocultural.

While some of these might raise issues that reasonable men and women can agree to disagree on, it is important to exercise some caution in the last conclusion for the simple fact that the sociocultural dimension may have been diffused or filtered through the more overt political and economic dimensions, thus having an indirect effect on regional interactions. Furthermore, in developing his conceptual/analytical scheme (p.50), Anda includes "systemic/global factors" as part of national attributes. Though "systemic/global factors" might influence state behaviors, they are hardly internal attributes of the nation-state...

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