The European Union destroyed the legacy of the tribal paradigms of the Peace of Westphalia, the forceful methods of the post-Vienna dictate of powers, and the hegemonic policies of the Yalta division of Europe. And as if that were not enough, the Union was elevated to the pedestal of the model of a cardinally new, better, indeed, postmodern model of international relations. Its functioning is undoubtedly a project perceived in terms of success. No wonder that it has become a tempting formula for transposing its model into the plane of world governance, in which the role of stabilizers would be played by large blocs of states and regions. The success of the European Union inspired politicians on other continents the search for solutions based on its integration model.
After the end of the Cold War, hopes for making regional institutions a pillar of subsidiarity in conflict prevention and crisis management, assisting an overburdened UN when needed, were revived. The success was only partial. In Africa, local involvement lacked material support (i.e. money). In Asia, the external factor is often of key importance (the role of the US in stabilizing the situation on the Korean Peninsula or in mitigating Beijing’s behaviour towards Taiwan, or in disputes over the Paracel Islands or Spratly).
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In Africa, regional cooperation was driven more by a sense of shared identity than by external stimuli. The background of the initiatives was, above all, pan-Africanism.
Pan-Africanism was born at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and not in the colonized continent itself, but among African Americans. Pan-Africanism then gained momentum among the independence activists in French Africa.
In the decolonization impulse, the Organization of African Unity was established in 1963. In 2002, it was replaced by the African Union.
Attempts were made to resolve disputes between its members through the regional organization. But the organization itself was paralyzed e.g. by the conflict over Western Sahara. Morocco left OAU in 1984 (it came back to the AU in 2017). Economic integration plans have failed. Even its first level, that is, a kind of integration pons asinorum, i.e. the creation of a free trade zone, turned out to be an overwhelming task. The African Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights was adopted in 1981, but violations of it, in a habitual and outrageous manner by many member states, have had no consequences. It was supposed to make governments accountable to the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights, which began operating in 2004, but the Court is far from the authority and power of influence of its European elder relative.
At the end of the last century, the weakness of the OAU was so unquestionable that when Muammar Gaddafi announced that the organization had exhausted its potential and that a better version of it, the African Union, should be brought to life, no one objected. The Peace and Security Council has already been established within the AU. In 2018, an agreement on a free trade zone was signed. It was announced that it would be transformed over time into the Customs Union. And an ordinary African citizen should be pleased with the African passport and visa-free travel. It is, however, true that the borders in Africa are still very porous, and they are crossed completely differently than in Europe.
I found out about it quite soon after I started my work at the diplomatic post in Nairobi in 1999. I was supposed to go on an official trip to Uganda in early 2000. I took the car with the driver. We arrived smoothly after a few hours to the border crossing in Malaba. Quickly processed by the Kenyans, we headed towards the Ugandan control. We stood there for a dozen or so minutes, counting that, just like in Europe, someone had to come to us. As no one approached and there were no barriers in front of us, we moved on. Nobody bothered us. After a week, when we were returning to Kenya, we noticed an official in uniform at the border this time. He quickly realized that we lacked the Ugandan entry stamps. So we were in Uganda illegally. Fortunately, on diplomatic passports. The guard (for our own good) did not stamp the exit stamps for the sake of consistency. He explained that in Africa it is the traveller who should look for a border guard, not the other way around. The Kenyans on the border were gracious to cancel their stamps from a week ago. Thus, my official trip to Uganda found no confirmation in my diplomatic passport. It’s good that I didn’t have to show my stamps to settle the travel claims. I also didn’t have any souvenirs in my passport from my visits to Zambia and Malawi, because I didn’t have my passport checked there at all.
As part of regional cooperation, African stabilization forces were deployed at various stages in the history of the OAU, including in Uganda, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. But it is the stabilization forces of the European Union that have become indispensable, for example in Mali, Niger and the Central African Republic. On the other hand, the ambitions of the African Union reach even space, and the African Space Agency operates under its aegis.
Is it possible to integrate poor countries? Every now and then, Africans ask themselves this question. It is said that the secret of the success of European integration is that it started with the richest countries.
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The idea of integrating American states goes back to the time when the Latin American colonies won independence. San Martin and Bolivar are believed to be its fathers.
The Panama Conference, held in 1826 at the initiative of Bolivar, prepared a treaty establishing the confederal league of American states, but was only ratified by the then Great Colombia.
Later, the initiative passed into the hands of the United States, and the cooperation of American states was squeezed into the implementation of the Monroe doctrine. In 1890, the International Union of American States (with physical headquarters in the US State Department) was established, transformed in 1910 into the Union of American Republics with a secretariat called the Pan-American Union, and this Union was revamped in 1948 in the form of the Organization of American States. It has its Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights (in force since 1978). It organizes the monitoring of elections in the Member States under its auspices.
There is no doubt that the OAS has a strong US domination, even if Americans have used their powerometry rather discreetly over time. And the debates conducted at the OAS forum, could sometimes irritate the USA, and even resolutions were adopted there quite unpleasant for Washington, for example, condemning the US intervention in Panama in 1989. The
Treaty of Rio of 1947 introduced in the Western hemisphere a substitute for a system of collective security, and even collective security defense. It treated an attack on one side as an attack on all. As part of the global strategy to contain communism, the American protectorate over South America took the form of the Treaty of Rio in the face of external intervention. But the American hegemony was a bothersome ailment for a variety of reasons. Mexico and Bolivia withdrew from the collective defense system, not to mention Cuba, which, contrary to the spirit of the Treaty, fell victim to the CIA-mastered invasion of the Bay of Pigs in 1961. An attempt was made to modify the Treaty, but without success. In addition, in 1982, the United States supported the United Kingdom in the Falklands War against Argentina. Nevertheless, when Washington needed pan-American solidarity, it invoked the treaty, asking e.g. for the participation of American states in the war on terrorism.
The Caribbean region and South America have developed a multitude of formats for regional cooperation.
Under the 1991 agreement, Mercosur includes Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and the currently suspended Venezuela (and Bolivia is in the process of accession) as well as associate members (other South American countries). It is an extensive free trade organization, with common market and customs union. The Andean Community has been a free trade zone since 1969 and aims to establish a customs union in the western tip of South America, but currently only four states (Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Colombia) seem to show interest.
UNASUR is the Union of South American States. It has been operating in its present form since 2007 and covered twelve countries in its best days. Its aim is political coordination, moving towards a common free trade zone, energy and communication integration. However, it quickly disintegrated under the pressure of internal tensions. In 2019, Ecuador asked the organization to leave the building in Quito. Attempts were made to save the project in the form of the PROSUR initiative to boycott Maduro in Venezuela, but without major consequences.
CAFTA is a free trade zone of the USA with six Central American countries, operating since 2004.
ALBA is the Castro, Chavez and Morales pact of 2006 (Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America).
CARICOM has been a Caribbean community and a sub-regional free market since 1973. Other countries in the region have joined the original founders of Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago – a total of 15 full members.
In December 1992, an agreement on a free trade zone with the participation of the USA, Canada and Mexico (NAFTA) was signed. It was renegotiated under pressure from President Trump, and from July 2020, free trade between these countries is known as the USMCA. However, it was not possible to merge the Americas into a free-trade zone, despite intense attempts at the beginning of the millennium.
Existing since 1975, the Latin American Economic System includes 27 countries (excluding the US), but it does not pursue more ambitious goals. The Latin American Integration Association, founded in 1980 on the ruins of the Latin American Free Trade Association, consists of 12 countries aiming for the common market.
The Regional Defense System is an agreement of 7 small Caribbean countries (in operation since 1982), but without much political weight.
On the whole, however, America (as the Western Hemisphere, and as the Latin or Caribbean segment of it) integrated poorly. It can be explicated in many ways. Because the external threat or pressure was weak, either in the form of the former colony conquistadors or in the form of the Soviet threat (because no major offensive on the continent went from the Cuban bridgehead, despite the successes of the populist regimes in Venezuela or Bolivia). There are also no persistent animosities between nations or states on the continent, and there is no legacy of a spiral of endless conflicts and retaliation. And there is also the “big brother” factor, the overwhelming US power, which turns the discussions on pan-Americanism into a political paragraph 22. Integrating against the US does not make sense, and integrating under the dictation of the US would wash away all sovereignty and transform regional forums into a ritual potlatch.
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Asia has integrated the most anemically. Maybe because the continent is too big, too populous, with a too broken identity. Asia as a regional term is often regarded there as a product of the Western imagination. Asians themselves prefer to use more restrained geographical frames in looking for levels of neighbourly cooperation. To be true, there have been pan-Asian platforms similar to the European CSCE process, for example in the form of the Conference on Cooperation and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA). In 1992, the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, proposed its convening. He was probably thinking of a platform similar to the CSCE, which could become the seed for building a collective security system in Asia. In 1999, a Declaration of Principles was adopted as part of the Conference (quite intentionally inspired by the Helsinki Decalogue), and in 2002 a Conference Charter was agreed. CICA grew into bodies and institutions. It is made up of 27 countries of the continent (covering almost 90% of the territory of Asia). It is true that several important Asian players are content only with observer status, such as Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Regular summits are held as part of it (the sixth one was held in October 2022), and rich documents are adopted. More than a dozen countries have declared their readiness to use the catalog of confidence-building measures developed as part of the cooperation.
The influence of the CICA turned out to be rather weak. Not surprisingly, the Americans would rather push the OSCE towards certain parts of Asia than hand them over to the CICA. Mongolia followed the Central Asian states that joined the OSCE in 1992, and the organization developed a support program for Afghanistan.
In a political sense, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, established in 2001, is attracting ever more attention. It grew out from a strictly Central Asian format, which was to legitimize China’s geopolitical entry into Central Asia in agreement with Russia. In 2017, the Shanghai Organization expanded to include India and Pakistan, making it a supra-regional instrument. Whether it is able to mitigate the existing rivalry and disputes between the four great partners in any way, there is no evidence of it.
Even trade and economic agreements are forged in Asia in pain. The Asia-Pacific Economic Community, comprising 21 countries, has been operating on the initiative of Australia since 1989. However, the project of the free trade zone in the region (with US participation) stalled. In 2020, after eight years of negotiations, an agreement on a free trade zone was signed with the participation of 15 countries, including China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, as well as 10 ASEAN member states. But still without India.
The framework for subregional cooperation operates in South Asia. The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was established in 1985. Its value lies in the fact that India and Pakistan sit at the same table of negotiations – both are nuclear powers remaining in a state of deep territorial dispute (also Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Bhutan, Nepal and Afghanistan are part of the Association).
The SAFTA agreement on a free trade area was signed in 2008, but the idea of its gradual transformation into an economic union did not take on any real prospects.
In 2021, Turkey put forward a proposal to establish a 3+3 format for the South Caucasus. Three countries in the region would meet with Russia, Turkey and Iran. In this way, Turkey undoubtedly wanted to confirm its role as a regional player. And these countries began to meet, but without Georgia (for obvious and understandable reasons). In particular, the region needs arrangements between its neighbors in the field of communication and energy infrastructure. But a large part of infrastructure projects is financed by European banks and financial institutions and supported by the European Union (modernization of border crossings between Georgia and Armenia, Armenia and Iran, the energy transmission bridge between Armenia and Georgia, etc.) which makes the European voice in any regional co-operation indispensable.
But in fact, the only Asian sub-regional initiative that has raised ambitious integration aspirations is ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The Association is a political and economic organization, but it also has a declared socio-cultural dimension. These are the so-called three pillars of the organization. ASEAN was founded in August 1967 in Bangkok. Its seat is in Jakarta, and members are: Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand as the so-called founding countries as well as Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia.
ASEAN is an extremely prolific organization in terms of the number and breadth of documents. But its critics are questioning their value. They do not notice the greater political consequences that would result from this diplomatic creativity. It’s not entirely fair. For example, the region became a nuclear-free zone in 2001. And since 1994, the ASEAN Regional Forum has served as the most important platform for discussion of East Asia, South Asia and the Pacific security with the participation of great powers, including the US, China, Russia and the European Union.
In 2015, ASEAN was to become an economic community similar to the European Union, which was reflected in the declaration of the ASEAN Community signed at that time, providing for the creation of a common market, monetary and banking union. Unfortunately, it has not yet materialized to this day.
Since 1981, the Gulf Cooperation Council has been in operation, bringing together Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman. It implements ambitious integration plans aimed at creating a single market, introducing a common currency, and joint infrastructure projects. It is politically perceived, especially in Riyadh, as a barrier against Iran’s expansion in the region. But as the dispute between Saudi Arabia (backed by some countries in the region) and Qatar in 2017 showed, the Council has little influence in extinguishing local political conflicts. Its Secretariat, however, has excellent working conditions.
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Work in international organizations has been attracting talented and ambitious diplomats for decades. Yes, international officials are well paid. With few exceptions, no national diplomatic service is competitive in this respect. And in special cases, the income gap is abysmal. For this reason, in the past, USSR diplomats were forced to transfer to the state budget a special tax equivalent to the surplus of their wages on the wages they would be entitled to in the national diplomatic service. Working for an international organization can provide with an opportunity for unprecedented professional development. And a sense of fulfilment, especially when someone feels comfortable in a bureaucratic role. However, it rarely offers such opportunities for diplomatic exhilaration as in the national service. Because diplomacy in its purest form is, however, work for the foreign policy of one’s own country. International officials practicing diplomatic activity will never find such a link when serving in international organizations, even if they act with a sense of a lofty and noble mission, such as to preserve world peace, defend human rights, and provide development aid.
International officials work under different conditions. In my diplomatic career, I have visited many headquarters of international organizations. I felt sorry for the staff of the UN Secretariat for the crampedness and inconvenience of their rooms in the East River compund in New York (even if compensated by the view from the windows), I envied the UN officials in Geneva or Nairobi the soothing external ambiance. I heard not once the complaints of the employees of the old seat of the NATO Headquarters, and the Polish representative office next to it, when they worked in cold and not soundproofed container blocks. On the other hand, the work rooms in the European External Action Service could impress.
I myself occupied more than spacious offices with excellent views from the windows when I worked in the OSCE Secretariat and the Secretariat of the Council of Europe. I visited the headquarters of the OAS, OAU and other organizations. However, I have never felt such comfort, serenity and prosperity as at the Gulf Co-operation Council in Riyadh, when I visited it at the beginning of this millennium. Nowhere have I felt such relaxation and lightness of the passing time in the office. Maybe also because I would never have had any chance to work for that organization.
