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Paper short abstract:

Regionalism (regional integration between nation-states) in East Africa today – often seen as a product of the contemporary neo-liberal global system – should be understood as emerging historically from longer term market and statist logics that have overlapped as much as they have competed.

Paper long abstract:

Accounts of regionalism have often emphasised a sharp break between what is often termed ‘old regionalism’ of the mid twentieth century – emphasising the role of states and co-ordinated planning to achieve development – and ‘new regionalism’ – which is seen to emerge from the dominant neo-liberal framework of the late twentieth and twenty-first century. Yet on closer examination of particular cases, while obvious differences between these two phases do exist, there are also equally striking continuities that can be observed. Through an examination of regionalism in East Africa, this paper reveals deep continuities in the rhetoric that surrounds the notion of regionalism, and in many of the dilemmas and tensions in regionalist politics that exist, often dating back to the colonial period. Regionalism in both its old and new phases has been imagined as a form of protection against a predatory world economy, rather than a simple tool of integration into a global economy. Yet, the logic of regionalism articulated during both these phases has also been premised upon a vision of ‘market integration’ that created inherent tensions that led to the collapse of the first East African Community (EAC) in 1977 and continue to challenge its current iteration. This paper explores these continuities and tensions in ‘regionalist rationality’ in East Africa across the twentieth century to the present.