Globalisation and Regionalisation Contradictory Tendencies, Counteractive Tactics, or Strategic Possibilities?

Analyses of the contemporary world can conceive of 'the global economy' in four basic ways:

1. as a fully integrated entity or international economic system within which national economies have been, or are very rapidly being, absorbed and disappearing - characterised, at least, by increasingly open and porous borders and limited policy options, and at most losing viability/relevance; or
2. as still fundamentally constituted by the sum of complex interactions between national economies/entities - within, across and upon which there now operate international institutions and regulations, and transnational economic agencies which, themselves, still have specific national bases; or
3. as a complex combination of national economies/entities, in and of themselves and/or within regional economic arrangements/entities - within, across and upon which there now operate international institutions and regulations, and transnational economic agencies which, themselves, also have both national and regional bases; or
4. as a dynamic combination of a distinctive supra-national global economy, expressed through the increasingly/totally independent operations of a range of transnational economic agencies/actors, acting within/upon national/regional economies and interacting with national/regional agencies but, themselves, unattached, or at least uncommitted to any specific national economy.

Despite these different possible interpretations of the relation between national, regional and global economic entities and agencies, the basic question is

• whether 'the global economy' is already, or will very soon be, a single integrated, and fairly/totally uniform, economy; or
• whether it is a complex combination of regional, national, sub-national and even very local economies in different degrees and forms of interaction and interdependence with one another, and varying degrees or modes of integration with, or participation in the larger whole.

Defenders of economic diversity, of social and cultural pluralism, or of different regional, national or local development options1 would argue and seek to promote the latter, in theory and in practice. Proponents of globalisation would argue, and seek to promote the former.

The concept and usages of 'globalisation' have similarly to be subject to rigorous scrutiny. The term is utilised simultaneously (and often inter-changeably by the same source) to denote the necessary modalities or processes promoting the integration of all economic functions and entities, as well as the end product or consummation of that process. Furthermore, much of the discussion of globalisation is characterised by confused (and confusing) conflations of analytical delineations of the phenomenon with prescriptive injunctions (or partisan promotions) of the paradigm. When Renato Ruggiero, the Director General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is quoted as stating that anyone who believes that globalisation can be stopped

has to tell us how he (sic!) would envisage stopping economic and technological progress; this is tantamount to trying to stop the rotation of the earth.2

this is repeating and reinforcing a common representation of globalisation. It is projected either as a consummated process and established global phenomenon that must simply be accepted or accommodated to, or as an inexorably advancing process that it is impossible to resist, or even modify.

Such depictions of globalisation - and caricatures of the critics of globalisation - are designed to forestall probing analysis of the phenomenon, critical examination of its underlying interests and driving forces, their modus operandii, policies and institutions, and their effects. To suggest that interrogating the policies and processes, the economic philosophy and the currently dominant paradigm of this system is tantamount to trying to stop or reverse inexorable cosmic laws is a crude political device that should find no acceptance amongst serious analysts.

Proponents of globalisation depict it as a process driven by irrefutable economic laws or logic, irrepressible market forces, and irresistible technological developments. Such economic and technological determinism is designed to intimidate and prevent critical analysis, and is neither politically acceptable nor intellectually tenable. Translated into less abstract terms and more tangible forms, what such notions refer to, of course, are the corporate production and investment strategies of giant transnational companies (TNCs) and other enterprises; the world-wide investment strategies - and speculative financial transactions - of powerful banking, insurance, stockbroking and other financial organisations; and a host of other business operations. The world-wide expansion and global operations of these economic actors have been enormously aided by - and have, in turn, furthered - the technological revolution that is sweeping the world, especially in information, communications, and transport.

However, the global expansion and operations of such economic and technological agencies have required - and have been actively promoted by - political processes, particularly the actions of governments to create national and international conditions conducive to their needs. The opening up of all countries and all economic sectors to the global operations of such industrial, financial and technological agencies has demanded the removal of impediments, above all unacceptable regulatory terms and conditions, identified as 'barriers' to business or 'distortions' in the functioning of market forces. This requires and is producing the increasing deregulation or 'liberalisation' of trade and investment operations, financial and labour markets, service sectors and other national and international economic functions. Governments according to their respective strengths, exert direct political and economic (and where necessary, and possible, military) pressures to further this. National political/technical representatives also exercise international rights and powers formally and directly commensurate with the size and power of their national economies. This is most explicit with respect to the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWI) - the IMF, World Bank and related institutions. These may, indeed, be banks that have to 'pay their way' and 'prove their value', but what their value is and what their roles are/should be, are determined by their biggest financial underwriters. These are their statutorily-determined main funders and decision-makers, the G7, starting with the USA. The BWI, in turn, play the role of providing some of the financial 'oils', and most of the policy prescriptions, programme supervision, performance surveillance and theoretical frameworks of the new liberalised global order.

Thus, what most defines the emerging global order is not merely that it is driven and characterised by vast economic growth and worldwide expansion and penetration, designated as globalisation; but that it is facilitated and promoted by liberalisation. The two are integrally interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Globalisation is the substantive process of economic and technological expansion driving towards the opening up and integration of the entire world into and under one economic system. Liberalisation provides the policy lubricants, and neo-liberalism the theoretical formulations, to smooth the implementation of the process.

Analyses of the respective roles of economic and political agencies, or 'markets and states' on the national as on the international plane [Boyer & Drache, 1996], are being extended into predictions of the terminal decline or immanent 'demise' of the nation state. Such analyses tend to obscure the very different international roles and impact of powerful, less powerful, weak and weakest states, and the very different weight of their respective national economic and general strategic interests in the emerging global economic order. The respective roles and relations, and the relative resources and powers of entrepreneurial forces and the state have certainly shifted under the currently dominant global paradigm (as will be discussed). Governments are no longer the only policy shapers on the international stage, nor even in the national arena and it is, indeed, important to note, and necessary to analyse, the significant role of non-state actors in the contemporary world.

In this regard, although powerful entrepreneurial agencies receive most analytical attention and political/ideological promotion, the emerging non-state actors also include national and international non-governmental organisations and other popular civil society forces (CSOs). These include independent policy research institutes, education/training community based organisations (CBOs), development agencies, environmental organisations, consumer associations, peasant/ farmers organisations, trade unions and other labour bodies, womens organisations, human rights bodies, indigenous peoples groups and a host of others. Separately and together these organise, reflect and even formally represent many millions of people. These CSOs are rapidly becoming more active players on the global stage - formally within international institutions (such as the UN socio-economic agencies) when/if they are admitted, and informally 'around' such international bodies (such as the IMF/WB and the WTO) where/when they are excluded. More generally, such organised forces of civil society are forming international networks in their respective fields, and trans-national social/political coalitions, and they are proving to be highly informed and important influences in international policy debates. There is considerable significance and potential in such organisations and their activities - including their creative use of new information / communications systems - for the emergence of new democratic forces/processes on the national and the global planes.

However, neither such popular transnational political/civil society forces, nor transnational economic/entrepreneurial forces, nor global technocrats/managers have (yet) displaced or ended the role of national governments and inter-governmental processes and institutions. The roles and the relations between governmental agencies continue to be crucial factors in the running and (re)shaping of the emerging global order. Despite the trans-national nature of many economic, political, social and cultural trends, the emerging global system is (still) also characterised by national differences and distinctiveness, divergences and defensiveness; and therefore by inter-national relations and processes. It is not (and certainly not yet) simply a supra-national phenomenon.

Similarly, globalisation is not a supra-human process created by abstract and unchallengeable market forces, or by intangible and uncontrollable technological forces. The emerging global system is a societal construct, driven and shaped, as required, by national, inter-national and transnational players and processes. And these are economic, technocratic and political. As such, the new global order is characterised, in the economic sphere, by unrelenting competition between enterprises, utilising diverse economic and political strategies - and not only 'market place' struggles - for pre-eminence. In the political sphere, it is characterised by intensive pressures, lobbying and financial 'aid' or inducements to governments by powerful corporations. And it is also characterised by the determined defence of such business interests - most usually in the name of 'national economic interests' - by governmental representatives. This is carried out increasingly, although not solely, through active championing of national/sectoral/corporate advantage in inter-governmental negotiations and multilateral institutions. And this is why such institutions are sites of complex tactical manoeuvres and alliances, and continuous political battles, overt and covert.

The WTO, as one of the key instruments for the worldwide consolidation and regulation of the new global order is an arena for such battles, as well as a necessary forum for the negotiation and accommodation of converging or common interests. Despite representations to the contrary, the WTO is not some disinterested and impartial supra-national legal institution for the supervision of international trade relations and the resolution of international trade disputes. Its legal forms and quasi-judicial dispute resolution role should not obscure its fundamental function and character. The WTO is a political construct. Its terms and modus operandii are

• the product of self-serving and highly tendentious political processes;
• based upon and reflecting a particular economic model or paradigm favouring the strong; and
• created on the basis of a specific balance of power in a specific historical conjuncture.

The international agreements and procedures that currently regulate - and continue to evolve from - the extremely tendentious and contentious processes within the WTO are replete with compromises and trade-offs, inconsistencies and internal contradictions, inequalities and inequities. Above all, because these negotiations are important means, and the multilateral institutions significant instruments to defend national advantage and to promote sectoral/entrepreneurial interests - in the guise of 'objective' economic laws, and 'impartial' regulations' for a 'common' global system, to the 'eventual benefit of all' - there are major contradictions between the declared aims and purposes of such policies/institutions, on the one hand, and their actual functioning and effects on the other.

Policy Contradictions, Institutional Inconsistencies and Systemic Instabilities

Although the global neo-liberal paradigm has been increasingly dominant in ideology and economic practice over the past two decades, and although more and more setting the parameters for what is possible and permissable for governments on their own economic terrains, the neo-liberal paradigm, and related policies and institutions have long been the subject of probing interrogation and critical analysis by government policy-makers in the developing countries and, even more so, by independent analysts and CSOs [Das,1998]. What is now important is that, as the world financial system trembles and vulnerable national economies stumble under the impact of globalisation/liberalisation - effects that have long been predicted by critical analysts - new questioning voices are now, albeit belatedly, being raised. Even a mainstream Post-Washington Consensus is being posed [Stiglitz, 1998], although still very far from being a global consensus in itself, and still not providing a real alternative to the free market paradigm. Nor does the mainstream debate yet take on board the full range of qualitatively different alternatives being debated within non-governmental organisations world-wide, and by critical independent researchers, including in the sphere of this present analysis of 'regionalisation' responses to globalisation [Hout, 1996; Wade, 1996].

Searching analyses and fundamental debates are at last gaining ground after two decades of imposition of intellectually stifling neo-liberal dogmas, and in the aftermath of socially, environmentally, economically and politically damaging liberalisation programmes - especially in the countries of the South. For such debates, the most important of the wide range of conflicting tendencies, inconsistencies and contradictory features in the contemporary global system and institutions, and in the theories on which they are based, may be summarised, as follows.

Liberalisation .... and Orotectionism

Free trade has always been the ideological banner and demand of the strongest economies in so far as and while they are in positions of dominance [Clairmont, 1996], and these stand to gain most from such policies3. Yet, while the most developed countries and the international institutions they control/influence are imposing rapid and radical liberalisation of trade and investment terms upon the rest of the world, the most powerful industrialised countries are careful to qualify/modify such terms for themselves. Throughout the seven-year long Uruguay Round of GATT, the US, Europe and Japan fought for and entrenched special terms and time frames for their own economically vulnerable (eg textiles) or politically influential (eg agricultural) domestic sectors in the new global agreements now under the WTO. And, since then, as the dangers to these and other weaker domestic sectors posed by free(r) global trade begin to emerge, these governments resort to a range of tariff and non-tariff barriers (NTBs). Such barriers have long included escalating tariffs against the manufactured or even processed commodity exports of developing countries. The NTBs include quotas and so-called voluntary export restrictions (VERs) on the part of developing countries, especially in areas where their exports are competitive. In the case of South Africa's actual/potential exports to the EU, such barriers are being directly imposed through the EU's exclusion, from its proposed 'free trade' agreement with SA, of some 46% of this country's agricultural products because they might offer competition to European producers. Developed countries are also now imposing burdensome sanitary and phyto-sanitary standards (SPSS) and other technical/production standards. These may indeed protect their 'national standards' but they are manipulated by Northern producer representatives and trade authorities as disguised protectionist devices. Above all, many industrialised country exports are still benefitting from a range of past supports and even continuing government subsidies; such that their agricultural exports, for example, amount to a form of 'dumping' and certainly constitute unfair trade. Yet the EU and even more so the USA are very quick and aggressive in imposing complex 'anti-dumping' actions and countervailing charges against unfair (read: competitive) developing country exports into their markets [OAU, 1998].

'Open, Free Trade' ...... and Privately Managed/controlled Trade

At the same time as the global imperatives of free trade are targeted at strategic regional groupings (such as ASEAN, MERCOSUR, and even SADC - see here), and even more so at protective emergent economies, especially in East and South-East Asia, the largest proportion of global trade is managed outside of the 'open' competitive free trade parameters that ostensibly guide and characterise the global economy. It has been calculated that fully two thirds of international movements in goods and services actually take place as intra-firm and inter-firm transactions [UNCTAD, 1995] without effective public scrutiny or even the 'disciplines' of open global competition. This might be concealing inter-firm price-fixing, and transfer-pricing, taxation and tariff evasions and other abuses. The TNCs insistence on the independent management and unfettered promotion of their global operations finds political expression in the resistance in the WTO, and in UNCTAD, by their home governments to the investigation of these and other possible restrictive business practices (RBPs) [UNCTAD, 1996a]. There is a glaring inconsistency in the current global system between the virtual laissez faire latitude given to oligopolistic TNCs in their 'internal' but global operations, on the one hand. Yet, on the other hand, there is probing intrusion by international institutions into the fiscal, monetary, investment, production, services, trade and other economic - and even social - policies of formally sovereign governments of supposedly independent countries. The added irony is that many such TNCs have larger annual turn-overs - and greater public and global impact - than the GDPs of all LLDCs, of most developing countries, and even some of the richer industrialised countries of Europe.

'Free Movement of All Factors of Oroduction' ... Excluding Science/technology and Labour

The full neo-liberal paradigm prescribes not only the free global movement of goods (trade) but of all factors of production. This includes investment capital and other financial resources/services, capital equipment and related technical services, material and management inputs to production processes, labour and so on. The policy provisions for such 'optimally competitive' and 'cost effective' global sourcing, and the unfettered (re)allocation, as necessary, of any/all factors of production, are being secured at the national level through IMF/World Bank Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) in weaker/indebted countries that come under their sway. At the international level such terms are being secured by agreements under the WTO, particularly the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMs) and Trade-Related Intellectual Property Systems (TRIPS). There is a telling difference, however, between WTO agreements, such as TRIPs, on the one hand, which protect and control access to and utilisation of technology and scientific/technical process invariably owned by companies in/from the most industrialised countries. Yet, on the other hand, there is active opposition to other types of protection within and for weaker economies - and companies - in areas and ways that are important for them. For example, TRIMs and other WTO agreements oppose production/investment measures, and broader foreign investment (FDI) terms and conditions in host countries that are considered by international companies to be prejudicial to their own international competitiveness. There is an even greater inconsistency between such free movement of financial/technical/management factors of production largely originating in the more industrialised countries, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, the tightly controlled movement of labour, largely from the lesser/least developed countries (LLDCs). In so far as business needs to have labour movement controlled - in combination with other political, social, cultural and ideological (xenophobic and racist) national considerations - theories about the 'single'... 'integrated' ...'global' 'free market' system are conveniently adjusted, or ignored.

'Self-correcting Rational Markets' .... and Functionally Unstable Markets

Market theorists posit the higher efficiency of free enterprise and the built-in, eventual, self-corrections in 'the market'. The notion of perfect markets has always been an unsustainable abstraction, and in the contemporary highly liberalised global economy the imperfections and failures of market forces are commensurately greater. The vast scale and geographical extension of global corporations are argued to spread positive management and technological influences. But their sheer size and global preponderance also amplify the negative effects of deleterious company practices or failures. Furthermore, the very uneven functioning across the world of countervailing/corrective market mechanisms, combine with the enhanced mobility of business across an increasingly open (and hi-tech) global economy. The result is that business can, if need be, literally escape effective 'market disciplines', even where they exist. The paradox is whether, in a radically deregulated global economy, free markets encourage 'the best' or (also) allow the worst of business practices to flourish. Above all, in a global economy characterised by a high degree of inter-linkages and mutual influences of different market segments, the potential for market imbalances - and not only the purported counter-balances - is increasingly marked. Where global financial markets are overwhelmingly the dominant, and most highly integrated, most volatile and least rational4 of global markets, the basis for systemic instability is laid. Governments and longer-term investors engaged in production ventures demand guarantees of stability and predictability. However, currency speculators, and stock market or commodity exchange operators play (or gamble) upon - and thus actually require - currency and price fluctuations in order to carry out their operations. Such market instabilities, whether spontaneous or manipulated - but certainly accentuated by new computer technology - have rapid wider repercussions and become a source of operational insecurity for both corporate and governmental planners and decision-makers. In the increasingly liberalised global economy there is a clear and growing tension between the theoretical re/stabilising propensities of abstract market forces, and the de-stabilising functioning and effects of actual market forces; particularly, although not only, the financial markets.

'Free and Independent Market Forces' ... and Politically Supported Markets

Market theory argues that the necessary condition and guarantee of the effective functioning of market forces is that they be free of impediments or 'distortions' created by governmental regulations and interventions; and, by extension, that the size and role of government be severely pared down. However, in the face of economic difficulties and at critical periods when confronted with serious threats of loss or collapse, 'free' and 'independent' entrepreneurial players - and the intellectual and institutional promoters of 'self-regulating' markets - are not averse to governmental and/or public institutional interventions to support them in their failures or compensate them for their losses5. This is currently being justified on the ground that, 'in the highly integrated and interdependent global economy', such business collapses or banking failures have immediate wider repercussions and carry 'systemic threats'. However, such governmental interventions to support business and protect 'the national (or global) economy' is consistent with the long-established role of the state in relation to capital. Capital, in turn, is not fundamentally opposed to governmental actions and interventions .... but only as and when they require them. The contemporary paradox is that under the radical neoliberal reduction of the role and resources of the state, governments - even in the most highly developed countries - are now hard-pressed financially (and, in countries such as the USA, institutionally/ideologically) to play that role; let alone their broader social management/stabilisation roles. This is even more marked in the developing countries [Graaf, 1995] - and especially in those under IMF/WB SAPs. As a result of radical privatisations, and the deliberate reduction of the economic, social and even security functions of the state, SAPs have severely undermined the resources, capacities, utility - and the very legitimacy - of the state per se. This carries dire social and political, as well as economic consequences, which are evident in the catastrophic decline of social services provision and human development indicators in these countries; in infrastructural decline and collapse, in environmental neglect and degradation, in the overall ineffective functioning of weak and vulnerable economies, and in the erosion of the very cohesion and survival of fragile nations.

'Multilateral Rules-based Global Governance' ... and Unilateralism

Some more radical global theorists predict the inevitable substitution of the nation state by new forms and institutions of 'global governance' [Knight, 1995]. The WTO is held up as one of the new institutions of 'multilateral rules-based regulation', in this case of trade and trade-related dimensions, of the emerging global economy. It can certainly be argued that multilateralism provides a sounder basis for international relations. In fact, one of the fundamental motivations of many of the developing countries that participated in the Uruguay Round which set up the WTO and consolidated the new 'rules based' system, was that it would put an end to the unilateral measures and pressures by strongest governments against weaker that have long figured prominently in international economic relations. However, the most powerful country in the world, the USA - while being a major proponent of the central WTO agreements that favour and protect its TNCs - has given equivocal, and certainly qualified and conditional support to the totality of WTO processes and rules. Furthermore, the US has continued to have recourse to unilateral actions and pressures - utilising its notorious Super-301 trade legislation - and even the extra-territorial imposition of US legislation on other countries. Least it be assumed that the US is the only country to flout the new 'global multilateralism', it should be noted that the more industrialised countries grouped in the OECD have been attempting, through their own less-than-global 'multilateral' negotiations, to create a new Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) for the full and free operation of foreign investors and TNCs throughout the world. Had this strategy not been effectively exposed and energetically opposed6 it would have been presented - in form 'multilaterally' but in essence unilaterally - to all the other countries of the world seeking foreign investment. However, neither the OECD governments nor the investor interests motivating them, have given up on their determination to promote their free global investment programme . They are now having recourse to their fall-back strategy. The aim will be to proceed through a WTO preparatory 'working group' on trade and investment, towards a Multilateral Investment Agreement (MIA, sic!) to be achieved through the 'more inclusive' and so-called 'bottom-up' processes of the WTO.

'Inclusive International Decision-making Institutions' .... and Exclusive Clubs

The continued recourse by the more powerful countries to various forms of cooperation and collusion amongst themselves is evident also in their creation/utilisation of new international institutions and/or the reshaping of established international institutions to fit the new order. This applies particularly to various bodies of the UN - such as UNCTAD, which is being subject to enormous political and financial pressures to conform to and serve the new global paradigm, or give way to the WTO entirely [UNCTAD, 1996]. Other UN agencies such as UNICEF, WHO and the UNDP are constantly being encroached upon by the World Bank and IMF, which are the preferred instruments of the dominant powers because they control them more directly and effectively. It must also be noted that unlike the UN system, membership of the new key global economic policy body - the WTO - is not universal and by right7, but conditional upon prior and proven commitment to internal free market and international free trade policies. Furthermore, although the UN decision-making system is subject to limiting vetoes, manipulations, and many other shortcomings; the WTO operates on a highly un-transparent, non-inclusive and contrived 'consensus' system that consistently reflects the mutual support, back-room collusion, and the interests, of the strongest members. Their domination is so marked that they are referred to 'The Majors' or 'The Quad' (the US, Canada, the EU and Japan). The dubious claim that the new global order is based on open and inclusive decision-making is contradicted further by the practice of the industrialised countries in meeting together for global strategising and decision-making - most publicly and unabashedly in the super-exclusive G7 club, or the slightly larger OECD.

Democratisation and 'Good Governance' ... and Anti-democratic Power

The governments of the industrialised countries and the donor or lending agencies they control or influence are increasingly linking formally 'free and fair' elections to free trade and free markets, and are requiring evidence of 'good governance' by the recipients of their financial/technical assistance and trade concessions [ECDPM, 1997]. In this, there is a clear bias towards the assumption that it is free market governments with 'sound macro-economic policies' which are 'more reliable'. However, it is in the deregulated free-for-all of the newly created market economies, and the wholesale privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), that new forms and levels of governmental corruption and public-private collusion are being generated. There is also a clear inclination to emphasise, or even equate good governance with the technical qualities of efficient management and the main accountability of client governments to funders/creditors and other external agencies. What is, in fact, needed is not only improved technical competence/reliability but the political qualities of transparency, accountability, inclusivity and the real democratic responsibility of such governments to their domestic constituencies. Furthermore, the profound irony of the didactic postures and belated conversion by the most powerful governments in the world to democracy and human rights in their client states is quite evident to citizens of such states. These have long had to endure - and protest in vain against - autocratic, brutal and corrupt regimes supported and sustained by, and in the strategic interests of, the most powerful countries and their companies8. Nor have such official political commitments put an end to selectivity and inconsistencies between the formal principles espoused by powerful governments and the actual practices of such governments and their international companies. There is an equally significant contradiction between such democratic aims/claims and the profoundly undemocratic and anti-democratic concentration of economic - and associated political - power that is a fundamental characteristic of the increasingly oligarchic new globalising system9.

Integration/inclusion .... and Marginalisation/exclusion

Globalisation is depicted as a process that is integrating all economic sectors and economies into one vast global economy that is open to all entrepreneurial contenders and inclusive of all countries - if they but follow the right policies. As with other claims or predictions about the new global system, the reality is rather more complex and contradictory. The integration of the global economy is markedly uneven - even if viewed as the early phase of an ongoing process. More significantly, it is actually characterised by growing imbalances between sectors (especially between the financial and other economic sectors), between and within countries, and between geo-economic regions. The latter is most clearly evident in the so-called marginalisation of Africa which, with almost 10% of global population, now has less than 1% of global trade, 0.3% of global manufacturing [UNIDO, 1996], and 2.4% of global GDP in 1996 - of which 40% was accounted for by just South Africa and Nigeria [IMF,1997]. This situation is widely attributed to Africa's own failings. Without doubt there are internal structural distortions and sectoral/geographical disarticulations in most African economies [Mhone, 1997]. There are political problems in many, as well as infrastructural inadequacies, and scientific/technical and management deficiencies. Whether and how these were inherited from the colonial past, and/or aggravated/created since by Africa's political/governing elites, and/or exacerbated by IMF/WB policies and programmes is a significant debate [Onimode, 1992]. But, whatever the causes or aggravants, Africa's structural weaknesses and weakening position in the liberalised global order are a graphic exemplification of the most fundamental flaw in the functioning of radical free market economics. While enabling and encouraging the already strong, the well-endowed, the well-placed, favoured, fortunate - or ruthless - to prosper, radical deregulation and unfettered competition simultaneously play upon and intensify the disadvantages of the weak. The 'survival of the fittest' and 'devil take the hindmost' are two sides of the same coin of free market economics. Subordination and marginalisation of the weak is not an incidental side-effect of free market economics. It is inherent in a system that requires the small or weak to compete 'on an equal footing' with the large and strong, and with each other for the attentions of the large and strong; and which actively encourages the latter to take advantage of such competition to maximise their own already considerable advantages.

'Benefits to All' ... and Growing Polarisation and Impoverishment

Despite predictions of growing benefits 'trickling down' to all, the facts are that after ten to 15 years of SAPs and two decades and more of globalisation, the world is characterised not by a spreading out of wealth and well-being but by a growing concentration of wealth and power for a minority; and a growing polarisation between rich and poor countries, between people within countries, and within the global human family as a whole. The UNDP's latest Human Development Report confirms trends becoming more and more evident over the past decade. By 1996, 1.6 billion people in 100 countries had lower living standards than they had had in the early 1980s - that is before the full impact of SAP liberalisation and general globalisation. The extent of this impoverishment is evident in the fifty poorest countries, which together have 20% of the world's population and yet only 2% of world income [UNDP, 1997]. But impoverishment and growing income, educational, health, life-expectancy, and other socio-economic disparities are not confined to poor countries. They cut across the globalised world. Although heavily concentrated in the countries of the South, and the LLDCs in particular, there is a widening gulf even in the richest countries of the North between an increasingly affluent minority and huge numbers of low-waged, semi/unemployed and homeless, subsistent poor and marginalised people, vulnerable social groups and communities10. Conversely, there are well-positioned, minute but highly affluent elites in the countries of the South, as in the North. In the 1960s, this richest 20% of the world's population were 30 times better off than the poorest 20%, but by 1996 the richest 20% were 61 times better off than the poorest 20%. According to the UNDP, 3.9 billion of the world's population live on less than the equivalent of $2.00 per day - and 70% of those are female - while the richest 20% of the world's population own or absorb 83% of the world's income, and consume 73% of the world's fossil fuels. Such growing inequalities between and within nations have - until recently - been the largely hidden face and facts of the triumphant market paradigm and the burgeoning global economy. But it is gradually being publicly recognised, even by some of the system's main beneficiaries but more self-enlightened strategists [Soros, 1997], that with its vast expansion of production and consumption for a small minority of the global population, growing environmental pressures and stresses, and the creation and concentration of unprecedented technological resources and power, the global free market system is also characterised by dangerous imbalances, inequities and tensions.

Some Fundamental Implications and Challenges

Mainstream analysts are at last beginning to recognise and respond, however inadequately, to the instabilities being created by the volatile operations of the deregulated financial markets, and they are beginning to propose various forms of closer supervision and even some mechanisms for a degree of (re)regulation of the financial markets [Sachs, 1998]. These are very limited proposals merely to stabilise not transform the system. Moreover, they focus on only one dimension of the neo-liberal global system - the financial - because that is what carries the most immediate dangers to key global players .... and the system. However, a more fundamental reappraisal of all the other dimensions and implications of the liberalised global economy also has to be under-taken. From the more specific point of view of developing countries, this would have to review, and replace, the sweeping free trade and liberalised capital markets and FDI regimes being imposed upon them, ideologically and in practice. More generally, a comprehensive and dispassionate analysis is urgently required on the fallacies and contradictory effects of the crude and extremely dangerous economic model being imposed upon the whole world. Alternative policies and programmes are required that acknowledge the different levels of development in different parts of the world, and allow for and support diverse and distinctive forms of development to the currently dominant economic system. It is in this context that the options of both varying regional, as well as national, models and strategies are to be considered.

Regionalisation - Contradictions, Counteractions and Strategic Possibilities

Globalisation theory promotes, and the process is driven by, outward expansion (for developed countries/companies) and 'export-led growth' (for developing/emergent countries)11. According to the theory, these are all encouraged by an integrated global economy characterised by free and open competition between countries and companies. It has been illustrated above that this is a relative freedom, for some, and a qualified/selective 'openness'. The 'integrated global economy' is also characterised by a proliferation of less than open and, in some cases, quite protectionist regional economic groupings of limited, although frequently overlapping, memberships [UNCTAD 1996a].

The WTO estimates that there are some 80 more or less functional regional trade agreements (RTAs) amongst its 133 members. The WTO Director General's report to the First Ministerial Conference of the WTO, in December 1996, expressed concern about the expansion in number and scope of such RTAs, and whether they are "compatible with the multilateral trading system" [WTO, 1996]. The significance of the WTO's position is, in the first instance, that its point of departure and concern is the multilateral trading system rather than the particular needs and diverse motivations of countries entering into regional trade arrangements. The WTO and like-minded globalists [VanDijk & Sideri, 1996] are also insufficiently attuned to

• the wider range of purposes, than only trade, in most regional arrangements12,
• the differing internal configurations and policies within such regional groupings,
• their different positioning in, or strategic approaches towards the global economy.

There is an expanding literature on the nature and implications of contemporary 'regionalisation' trends [Hout, 1996]. This paper seeks to contribute to that debate by delineating the different motivations in various regionalisation strategies, and the changing and even conflicting tendencies evident within them. In this, the purpose is not to attempt to make a detailed analysis of the internal configurations and policies within the many different regional arrangements in the world today, nor to create a typology of regions; but rather

• to draw out the differing strategic approaches to the emerging global economy - and to other regional groupings - illustrated by various of these regionalisation processes/programmes; and
• to analyse the differing aims and implications, and draw clear distinctions between regionalisation strategies between or emanating from developed countries, on the one hand, and those between developing and lesser/least developed countries, on the other.

Such analysis and such distinctions have a direct bearing on the prospects and options for regional integration and development in Southern/Africa, and for the strategic possibilities, within and through such regional programmes, in relation to the emerging global economy. This is important in the light of differing regionalisation strategies being pursued elsewhere in the world; in the context of national and 'regional' liberalisation programmes being promoted by the IMF and the World Bank; and in relation to the recent initiatives on RTAs within the WTO.

Internally Generated and Multi-dimensional Regional Integration

One of the oldest and certainly the largest and most far advanced regional integration project is, of course, the European Union. This process started well before the era of the liberalised global economy and was, in fact, initially motivated largely by intra-European security, political stability and economic reconstruction concerns after the Second World War. It was both "policy-directed and market-driven" [OECD, 1995] within the then-dominant social-democratic system and Keynesian economic paradigm. This has significance for alternative internal policies being considered with respect to the Southern African Development Community (SADC), which will be discussed. In the more recent period, as the neo-liberal paradigm began to gain hold internationally and within Europe, individual European governments, and the European integration project, adjusted accordingly13. From internally generated and oriented, multi-faceted and multi-directional concerns with more balanced economic development across Europe, and greater social and political cooperation and convergence within Europe, an increasing strategic concern of the EU project became dealing with the global economy. Thus, Greater Europe is now (also) a geo-economic and geo-political power base from which European companies can operate more effectively in the highly competitive global economy, and the European states can engage more forcefully in international institutions. Authoritative analysts and defenders of the EU project [OECD, 1995], note that there are "synergies" although also "divergences" between regional arrangements and the multilateral trading system. There are, indeed, conflicting tendencies and potentials within Europe in relation to the global economy and the rest of the world, and these are reflected also in other regionalisation options/strategies evident in the world today.

Intermediate Regional Basis to Relate/deal with the Global

The regional economic, and to some extent political, power-base that the United States has constructed for itself through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was, from the outset, a more direct response, and instrument to influence and engage with the global economy; although there are also contradictory potentials in this project as well. Even as the Uruguay Round ground on, during the later 1980s, the US was actively securing its free trade area with Canada and planning the extension and consolidation of its regional base into the Americas, starting with Mexico. At the time, this regional strategy may have been something of an insurance policy, in case the UR did not yield global terms conducive to US economic and general strategic interests. In the event, the central WTO agreements have - largely through determined US interventions in the UR - turned out to be very favourable to US needs/aims. Nonetheless, NAFTA is still proving to be a useful complement, and support, to the US national economy. It provides a larger, intermediate, regional base from which US TNCs can engage with the global economy. And it provides an important backyard learning and neighbourhood growth base for 'proto-global' US companies. At the same time, it is a useful framework - as is now also the case with the EU - within which to achieve common positions between key economic partners/neighbours on trade terms, investment norms, production standards, environmental and other issues. These are easier to agree upon within a more limited, more cohesive regional grouping than in full multilateral global negotiations, which are more complex and potentially more contentious. At the same time, however, such regional agreements/standards can set useful precedents and can be used to exert influences/pressures upon the broader multilateral processes. In this way, states and other interests within such economic power blocks are positioned to obtain the best of both worlds.

Defensive Regional Redoubts Against - Some Aspects of - the Global

Both the EU and NAFTA are now important ground bases for their TNCs to engage with/in the global economy. Most TNCs continue to maintain the core of their activities, and their most strategic operations, in their countries of origin. Fully 87% of all TNCs are head-quartered in the EU, the US and Japan and, in 1996, 88% of their 'foreign assets' were actually located in each other's economies [UNCTAD, 1997]. Similarly, 84% of all foreign direct investment (FDI) originates within, and 60% of global FDI moves between, the most industrialised countries of Europe and North America. Although rates of profit abroad are generally higher and the actual/potential markets in Asia and Latin America, and resources in these regions - and Africa - very important, mainstream global analysts [Bhagwati, 1993] are concerned that the high degree of self-sufficiency of such huge economic blocks as NAFTA and the EU could run counter to the aims and principles of full global interdependence and integration. Add to that the re-actionary (in the precise meaning of the word) neo-isolationist tendencies within some sectors of their economies and sections of their societies.... and the US could retreat into a hemispheric laager against the rest of the world, while Europe could become a closed fortress against 'threatening' influences/trends (human poverty and migrations) from the rest of the world. Within such scenarios, regional economic agreements and regional integration become "stumbling blocks" in the way of full global integration, and the 1930s spectre would arise of a deeply divided conflictual world being (re)created. The broader paradox, however, is that the notion of stumbling blocks is employed sweepingly by such analysts to embrace the small, defensive regional groupings of developing and least developed countries (which will be discussed) indiscriminately together with giant, expanding and offensive blocks of the most developed countries, described next.

Outwardly Oriented and Expansionist Regional Strategies

The same global analysts who warn against the dangers of self-sufficiency and potential defensiveness in the giant industrialised economy blocks, are somewhat reassured by the simultaneous need for such economies to look outward towards global markets, resources and investment fields; to extend their regional free trade areas to embrace more and more countries; and to be moving, albeit gradually, towards the increasing openness of their own markets. In this scenario, such expanding and open free trade areas would eventually coalesce and merge. Using another metaphor, they could constitute "building blocks" towards the consolidation of a single global economy [Bhagwati, 1993, Gamble & Payne, 1996]. In so far as the ideology of free trade and an open global economy are most advantageous to the most developed economies, there is a uniformity of language between their governments and neo-liberal theorists, and a general unity of purpose at a global level. However in practice there are, yet again, conflicting motivations - and tensions - in the expansion of the giant economic blocks. The US is driving towards the extension of its NAFTA base into a vast Free Trade Area of the America's (FTAA), while the EU is consolidating its influence over, and gradually moving towards the integration of the whole of Europe. At the same time, however, there is intense competition between the EU and US both in 'each other's' respective immediate zones and in other regions of the world, such as APEC (the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation zone). Because Europe is not a member of APEC, it is urgently promoting its ASEM (Asia-Europe Movement) to create its own region-to-region agreements between the EU and as many Asian countries as it can. It is important for Europe to advance this strategy as APEC moves towards becoming a free trade area where Japanese and North American companies (and Australian), as 'part of Asia-Pacific countries', will enjoy prior penetration and more favourable positioning, and thus predominant influence against European countries/companies. Such offensive/defensive strategies towards each other reflect the possibility of escalating neo-mercantilist rivalries between such giant economic 'empires', each striving to pre-empt the other(s) by carving out - if not formal territorial 'colonies', as in the past - then at least de facto spheres of preponderant economic influence. This has characterised Japan's 'regional' strategy in most of East and South-East Asia since the Second World War - although without formal free trade or regionalisation agreements14.

Predatory and Pre-emptive Regional Free Trade Strategies

The other areas of EU-US competition and other motivations for the expansion of their respective FTAs are clearly discernible in their strategies towards other putative regional economic groupings, particularly of 'emerging' economies, or regions with future potential. The aim is to incorporate such emergent regional groupings into broader FTAs in order to open them up to the dominant economies/companies therein. This is adding to the rivalry between the US and the EU as they each strive to secure their own special relations with highly promising regional groupings of developing countries, such as the Common Market of the Southern Cone (MERCOSUR) in South America, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), and even the Southern African Development Community (SADC). This latter is certainly a broader consideration and part of the motivation of the EU in pressing a free trade agreement upon South Africa. Such an EU-SA FTA will, in itself, be beneficial to EU economic interests, but it will also inevitably influence regional policies and the direction of future relations between the entire Southern/African region and the EU. And the US is already hard on the heels of the EU, promoting its own free trade proposals to SA/SADC - and the whole of Africa. With respect to the two larger developing country regional groupings (which are economically more advanced and have greater immediate potential than SADC), the motivation of the EU and the US is two-fold. On the one hand, any possibility of groupings such as MERCOSUR and ASEAN becoming protective bases for their own emerging companies or, in worst case scenarios, 'closed blocks' against US and EU TNCs, has to be prevented. To some extent, WTO rules on RTAs are already designed to do this [Thomas, 1996]. But, as these rules now stand [GATT Article XXIV], they do allow a certain leeway, or interval, within which such developing country regional groupings can maintain preferences for their own companies and towards each other ... as long as the overall orientation and trajectory is towards a lowering of external 'barriers'. The current review of RTAs within the WTO may be designed to narrow or close even this gap. The second motivation, more particularly on the part of the US towards MERCOSUR, is that this grouping of countries including the two largest economies in South America, Brazil and Argentina, may - in seeking agreements with other fellow South American countries - constitute an impediment to the US strategy to integrate the entire hemisphere into an FTAA dominated by itself.

Prescriptive Promotion of 'Reciprocal' Free Trade Regional Agreements

In an apparently contradictory manner, the EU is simultaneously engaged in actively prescribing regionalisation processes between various sub-groupings of its 70+ ACP (African, Caribbean and Pacific) partners within the Lome Convention [European Commission, 1998]. This approach certainly makes sense in the light of the limited viability, small scale and general weakness of most of these LLDC economies, and the general rationalisation gains and economic advantages to be made through the grouping together of such countries. In (theoretical) recognition of this, there are already a number of such (partly functioning or embryonic) groupings in Africa (such as ECOWAS) and the Caribbean (such as CARICOM), although carrying out different forms of cooperation and pursuing different degrees/levels of regionalisation. However, EU support for regional integration amongst ACP countries is directly premised upon the simultaneous proviso that such groupings be rapidly translated into free trade regions, and that they enter into Reciprocal Regional Free Trade Agreements (RRFTAs) with the EU, in the 'post-Lome' era looming after 2000. This apparently contrary approach to the more clearly 'predatory and pre-emptive' strategy outlined above, arises in the first instance from the non-competitive and non-threatening nature of the ACP economies, and the many advantages to be gained - not least of all by the EU itself - from their integration into larger economic units. However, the conformity with the predatory and pre-emptive approach is manifest in the 'reciprocal' nature of the free trade relations to be established. Even if implemented gradually and with elements of asymetricality in timing and coverage, the process and the outcome of reciprocal free trade will inevitably be that the maximum gains will accrue to the stronger 'partners' (European companies/economies), and the potential for such regions to achieve their full - and, in the case of SADC, possibly even competitive - potential effectively reduced. In this approach, the EU is drawing on its long-standing support to regional cooperation and integration in Southern Africa; and, it must be said, to some degree responding to the SADC member states' own formal position that they be recognised and dealt with as a regional entity. However, the reciprocal free trade relations that the EU is insisting upon with SA/SADC also reflect the long-standing self-interested nature of European support to regional processes in Southern Africa, and are a portend of what other relatively weaker ACP 'regions' can expect.

Pragmatic Regional Tactics by or Between Developing or 'Emerging' Economies

The relatively stronger economies of South East Asia - and some other Asian countries/regions, to a lesser or less overt extent15 - have developed their own forms of pragmatic regional cooperation in response to actual or potential domination by the most developed countries and their companies. On the one hand, this entails particular trade and investment arrangements amongst themselves and between their companies to improve their competitive position against larger Northern TNCs. Although there do not appear to be wider non-economic aims, and no ambitious plans for actual regional economic and political integration (unlike SADC - which will be discussed), ASEAN has been used as a specifically Asian regional instrument in tactical engagements and challenges to other members of APEC over the character and direction of development of this vast regional grouping [Higgott, 1996]. ASEAN, largely led by Malaysia, even tried to mobilise Japan through the East Asian Economic Caucus (EAEC) to counter US/NAFTA domination in APEC16. And it would seem that, while trying to reap maximum benefit from their own modes and pace of intra-regional trade liberalisation and investment promotion, the ASEAN states are resistant to pressures from the US for a rapid translation of APEC into a full Asia-Pacific free trade area. The ASEAN states are not, however, fully united on this, and the effectiveness of this grouping, even as a tactical regional cooperation project to respond to pressures and dangers in/from the liberalised global economy, has yet to be proven. Furthermore, the pragmatic ASEAN approach will be crucially tested by whether it can achieve a more effective collective strategy to deal with their respective manifestations or experiences of the unfolding global economic crisis; rather than each country resorting to its own, less propitious and very risky 'national solution'. The broader significance of this limited 'pragmatic cooperation' approach, lies in the manifest tendency - already evident in SADC17 - for interim, piecemeal or ad hoc approaches to intra-regional relations and to the global economy, to become the dominant modus operandi and the de facto regional raison d'etre, indefinitely postponing or displacing the more strategic economic integration approach.

Strategic Developmental Regionalism towards Effective Global Engagement

There is another more comprehensive and ambitious approach to regional cooperation and integration amongst developing countries that also involves lesser/least developed countries (LLDCs18). The Southern African Development Community (SADC) and other similar African regional groupings fall into this category, although there are differing internal configurations and varying policy emphases amongst them, and divergent tendancies within them. In principle, they are all (officially) oriented towards both economic and political integration, and (officially) view the regional groupings as building blocks towards eventual continental (re)integration [Amin et al, 1987]. What also distinguishes this approach and these regional groupings in Africa are that they pre-date the 'global' era and originally emerged as a strategic response to problems and processes internal to the continent. In the first instance, the idea of re-grouping African countries and (re)integrating the continent was a fundamental reaction to the legacy of colonialism - to arbitrarily created, artificial, largely non-viable and distorted economies, characterised by pronounced underdevelopment and deep external dependence. Regional groupings in Africa were conceived in the 1960s and 1970s as more rational economic units [Green & Seidman, 1968], and formally endorsed by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in the Lagos Treaty of 1980. These putative regions would provide larger markets and economies of scale in investment and production, with combined/complementary resources, and would generally be more effective frameworks within which to correct disarticulated and ineffective economic structures [UN-ECA, 1988]. In the case of Southern Africa, regional cooperation was also seen to be an important framework within which to redress the gross imbalances created not only within but between the countries of the region - above all, between South Africa and the surrounding countries [Davies et al, 1994]. A further implication within this developmental and (re)balancing approach is that it would - like the EU - have to be both politically directed or 'policy driven' as well as underpinned by the operations of public and private investment. However, again like the EU19, SADC has more recently had to take on board the additional demand of relating its development needs and plans to the challenges of the emerging liberalised global economy [Saasa, 1992]. The fundamental strategic challenge in this respect is how to use the regional framework to create an interim, medium-term economic 'breathing space' within which to develop and diversify their economies, improve their production, productivity and export capacities preparatory to - and in order to be able to - participate more meaningfully in the highly competitive liberalised global economy [Keet, 1997]. At the same time, a united region can provide a stronger collective political base from which to engage in joint strategising for more effective engagement in the multilateral negotiating processes - especially in the WTO - that are increasingly shaping the terms within which countries are being compelled to operate [UN-ECA, 1996]. This is particularly important if African and similar developmental regional groupings are to defend, utilise, and where necessary expand, the 'special and differential terms' (SDTs) for developing and lesser/least developed countries within the WTO.

Strategic Regional Bases for Delinking or Disengaging from the Global Economy

In the face of such international free trade/liberalisation pressures, a more radical conceptualisation of regional integration amongst developing and least developed countries proposes this as a long-term basis for a degree of dis-engagement or even delinking (total or relative) from the liberalised global order. Tactical dis/engagement or strategic de-linking are counter-posed to simple 'integration into' the global economy which, in practice, actually amounts to a dangerous 'opening up to' highly competitive global forces and dominant economies. Rapid and uncontrolled foreign trade penetration is both financially unsustainable to forex-poor countries, and potentially damaging to their weak or emergent production sectors. The alternative is more qualified and variable international economic relations, and more carefully calibrated and conditional external trade and investment policies. Like the mainstream regional integration debates in Africa, 'regional cooperation for strategic dis-engagement' also predates the era of radical liberalisation/globalisation. Proposals for temporary/partial disengagement have long figured, implicitly and explicitly, in much of the debate on national development programmes as well as regional and continental integration in Africa [Amin, et al, 1987]. To some degree, this also informs the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa [UN-ECA, 1988] "African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes for Social and Economic Recovery and Transformation (AAF-SAP-SERT). This and other similar programmes envisage regional cooperation and integration in relation to the perceived need to tackle the extreme extroversion of African economies - by restructuring and reorienting economic interactions within and between African countries, and creating economies that are both more internally integrated within themselves (rural/urban, agricultural/industrial) as well as regionally integrated with their neighbours. The further aim in this approach is to (re)gain a greater degree of self-reliance in order to try to minimise Africa's exposure to external shocks from international economic processes over which it has little influence. The need is seen to be the reduction of Africa's extreme reliance upon external financing, its heavy commodity-export dependence, and its susceptibility to price fluctuations and deliberate commodity market manipulations in the international economy. Such considerations informed the earlier aims and programmes of the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), and much of the development debate in Africa during the 1980s.

Proactive Inter/regional Strategies to Re-shape the Global System

A more recent elaboration upon the disengagement approach, now located within the parameters of globalisation, proposes regionalisation as a form of, or means towards a degree of "de-globalisation" [Hettne, 1998]. The more proactive conceptualisation of the role of regional strategies between developing countries sees these as both economic and political means through which to challenge and effect changes in what is perceived to be a dangerously polarising and divisive global system. In Africa, this approach is promoted by the veteran African economist and strategic analyst Samir Amin [Amin, 1995], and is a development upon/from his earlier proposals for the relative de-linking of African and other Third World economies from the international capitalist system. This was envisaged as a means of partial/tactical withdrawal from a hostile international system, to enable weaker 'peripheral' economies to escape the effects of exploitative 'core' capitalism. In the era of a so-called 'single integrated global economy', the more recent development from the earlier approach has three important features. The first is that it is premised upon the need to change, not withdraw from, the global economy; and partly to effect that change through the experience and example of real alternative development models being created within such regional groupings. The second is that it sees such an engagement as involving joint strategies between regional groupings in Africa, the Middle East and Asia (and Latin America20). The third is that the object is not to achieve reforms within, and towards, a 'better' single global system, but to (re)create a "polycentric world" and a more pluralistic global economy. In this latter respect, the conceptualisation and implementation of more diverse and appropriate development models for developing and lesser/least developed countries is seen to entail also de-globalisation processes in the form of/through critical anti-globalisation forces in the most developed countries. From their own vantage points within the dominant system, such - largely civil society - forces in the most developed countries are seen to also be engaged in creating, in theory and in practice, innovative alternatives to over-producing/consuming capitalism, to the emerging 'single' global economic system and to the currently dominant neo-liberal paradigm. Thus, the strategic aims in this proactive approach, through regionalisation, to the current mode(s) of globalisation are: the defense of economic, social and cultural pluralism, the (re)creation of economic diversity and revived independence with/in fundamental inter-dependence, and South-South and South-North cooperation based on common interests in a fundamentally unitary world..... as distinct from a single uniform world economic system.

Open Regionalism as a 'Stepping Stone' into the Global Economy

The previous three strategic approaches to the global economy by and for regional groupings of developing countries differ markedly from the 'open regionalism' approach that is being most energetically promoted in Eastern and Southern Africa, above all by the World Bank. Having long been focused, with the IMF, on 'structurally adjusting' each and every economy under their influence, the World Bank only began in the early 1990s to realise more fully the significance of regional strategies in Africa; alerted, above all, by the prospect of a fairly considerable economy such as South Africa joining SADC. The resultant World Bank strategy is deliberately designed and explicitly described as a "pragmatic" response to the fact of existing and putative regional projects/commitments in Africa [World Bank, 1991]. In a belated intervention to direct or redirect such projects, World Bank analysts argue that regional groupings should only entail short-term measures to create intermediate free trade areas as "stepping stones" for member countries to fit into the global economy. This approach differs fundamentally from the three previous approaches, above, in that Bank and Bank-related analysts [Melo & Panagariya, 1992; Mistry, 1996] conceive of regional integration as primarily serving to promote free trade and strengthen the global economy. A central concern in this strategy is that any regional trade preferences and other intra-regional development arrangements should not "raise barriers" or "discriminate against third parties" in the global economy [World Bank, 1991]. Similarly, this approach also conceives of regional relations as being driven by trade and investment liberalisation, with market forces being the prime movers, decision-makers and shapers of such regions. This is, of course, an extension of the long-established formulae informing IMF/World Bank structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), and the World Banks' regional strategy is, in fact, explicitly designed to extend national SAPs into regional structural adjustment programmes and, in the process, secure the former with and through the latter. In this scenario, intra-regional, inter-regional, and external/global relations should be guided by pre-set commitments to move consistently towards "generalised" (internal and external) liberalisation and rapid "open integration" into the global economy. This approach has been most clearly articulated - and implemented - in Southern Africa, since 1992, by the World Bank, the IMF, and the African Development Bank, together with the European Commission, in their joint Cross Border Initiative (CBI). Under the pressures of such externally conceived and accelerated programmes of unilateral/national internal and external liberalisation, the more democratically negotiated, multilaterally constructed - and carefully phased - processes of developmental regional cooperation and integration that need to inform the SADC strategy, are being severely complicated. Above all, the potential utilisation of regional cooperation and integration as a framework for a more strategic formulation and management of their separate and collective relations with/in the global economy is being pre-empted and possibly definitively imperilled [Keet, 1994].

Some Conclusions

Clearly there are very different motivations for and approaches towards regional cooperation and integration in the world today, and it is not the purpose of this paper to determine whether or which of these are 'complementary with' or 'contradictory towards' the emerging global economy. In fact, from the point of view of developing countries, that would be to pose the problematique incorrectly. The fundamental questions about regional integration and/or cooperation for developing countries, especially in Africa are:

• What are the most appropriate development strategies within such regional frameworks to respond effectively to profound national and intra-regional social, environmental and political problems and crises, as well as structural economic problems and challenges.
• What are the most effective intra-regional political modalities and economic programmes to accommodate different levels of development, differing policies, and divergent and frequently conflicting interests between member states, ruling elites, business classes and other social interests within such regional groupings.
• What are the optimal political and institutional arrangements, the governmental and non-governmental engagements and interactions that will ensure that it is the strategic need for a joint/common positioning vis-a-vis the hostile global economy and external forces that will prevail and that will take precedence over whatever intra-regional differences and divergences there might be.

In the final analysis, however - whatever may be the conceptualisations and the utilisation of regional cooperation and integration between African countries in order to respond to national, regional, continental and global challenges - fully effective strategies have also to include more concerted political engagements with external forces and more tactically skillful interventions in international institutions. In the WTO, in particular, it is essential that African and other developing country governments adopt more effective joint strategies and more proactive interventions.

The foregoing strategic options vis-a-vis global forces and processes, within and through regional cooperation/integration projects, and policy proposals and tactical engagements with/in global institutions [Keet, 1998] are all complex and challenging to the current global order and institutions. It will clearly not be an easy matter to persuade the more developed member states to review and revise WTO rules/regulations and specific agreements in ways that are more favourable to lesser/least developed countries, or even merely less prejudical to them. Nonetheless, the effort has to be made to identify those amongst the more developed states - or democratic and more enlightened forces within such states - that are more favourably inclined towards the developing world. Or at least to indentify and activate those that understand the importance of a more equitable and less imbalanced world system in the interest of the stability and survival of the planet. They must be convinced about the necessary restructuring of the global economic system including, inter alia, the importance of regional strategies for the regrouping of weaker and non-viable economies within the imbalanced world system.

At the same time, however, even some of the stronger developing countries, with their own concerns about the simultaneous protectionism and mercantilism of the powerful industrial economy blocks, do not always draw a clear enough distinction between such 'Northern' regional blocks, on the one hand, and the regional cooperation/integration programmes of the lesser developing and least developed countries, on the other hand21. They, too, will have to be persuaded to take on board the importance and legitimacy of regionalisation strategies by and for the lesser and least developed countries of the world.

Fortunately, such debates about the role of and rights to regional arrangements, and the wider tactical engagements within and around the WTO, will be taking place in the context of expanding and increasingly challenging worldwide debates on - and struggles against - the dominant neo-liberal paradigm underpinning the policies and programmes of global institutions and the corporate practices of global enterprises. The debates and processes within, and in relation to, the WTO will both contribute to and draw upon the wider paradigmatic debates unfolding. These debates are vitally important to the weaker 'developing' countries of the world. They, too, have much to gain and much to contribute to such processes. However, changes will not be brought about solely through the cogency of their arguments and the weight of empirical evidence, but through effective political interventions and actions - both from outside as well as within the portals of the WTO, and both by governmental and non-governmental actions and tactical combinations. But the engagement by African governmental and non-governmental forces - and those of other developing countries - are made particularly difficult within the WTO by the untransparent and non-inclusive modus operandii of the WTO and similar global institutions, and by the effective domination of such institutions by the demands and tactical manouvers by the most powerful countries. A more strategic intervention by African governments in the WTO is also extremely difficult in the context of the limited capacities/resources in most African countries for intensive monitoring, research, analysis and active participation in the many WTO processes, formal and 'informal', public and 'backstage'. Above all, a proactive and effective intervention by African countries is undermined by the lack of strategic vision, political will and consistent unity, or at the very least tactical alliances, amongst African member states of the WTO.

More broadly, if regionalisation programmes are to provide both economic and political frameworks within and through which African governments and others, governmental and non-governmental, can challenge and change the emerging global order, serious responsibilities rest upon member states of African regional groupings to get their own regional houses in order. There is an increasingly urgent need to

• analyse and rationalise their multiple memberships of over-lapping and differing types of trade agreements amongst themselves - if they are to achieve greater policy coherence and effectiveness;
• advance decisively with the formulation, negotiation and active implemention of regional cooperation and integration programmes within the regional groupings they belong to - if they are to be taken seriously by their own populations, domestic and foreign investors and the outside world;
• negotiate common positions along the lines outlined above, within and between such African regional groupings to avoid, as far as possible, divergent, diluted and sometimes conflicting positions in international fora such as the WTO - if they are to become an effective force and build up useful alliances within, around, and if necessary against, such institutions.
• accept that democratic inter-state and intra-regional relations, as well as fully democratic domestic regimes, are as essential a precondition to development, equity and stability within nations and regions as they are the basis to legitimacy in their international strategies and effectiveness in international institutions.

This article is based on the following presentations:

• "Integrating the World Community: Political Challenges and Opportunities for Developing Countries", made at a workshop for government policy makers and NGOs, under the auspices of the Foundation for Global Dialogue, Pretoria, October 1997;
• "Regional integration for strategic engagement with the liberalising global order and the WTO" at the 'Southern and Eastern African Trade, Information and Negotiations Initiative (SEATINI)' workshop for African trade officials/negotiators towards the Second WTO Ministerial meeting and future negotiations, Harare, Zimbabwe, 29 March - 4 April 1998;
• "Regionalisation - strategic solutions, complications or contradictions?" at Goteborg University, Sweden, November 1998.