Locating Africa’s Regional Economic Communities (RECs) in IR Scholarship

This chapter sets the stage for consideration of African states, the foundation stones for Africa’s RECs. It outlines two major issues of concern, questioning whether the formulation of states and foreign policy making, particularly cooperation of the regional variety is properly structured and applied to African countries. To wit, the construction of African nations, and the level to which they conform to imagined structures of modern states, and the function of international relations theory broadly, and specifically, regional cooperation, can be understood from a Euro-Atlantic-derived foreign policy theory. This chapter contends that African states imagined communities that are barely constructed, or held together by those circumstances articulated by philosophers, such as Max Weber’s Staatsgewalt and Vergesellschaftung. While the states have bureaucratic structures such as foreign affairs apparatus, these are so personalized that it is individual (leaders) that are often the source of a country’s foreign policy, rather than such process being the result of deliberate bureaucratic planning process. Yet although regional, continental and global cooperation occurs among the members, African states’ cooperation can be best understood through worldviews that closely approximate, and reflect, the social, political and cultural realities of the member states, rather than from theories derived from conditions in Europe and the west.