European integration exposes the fragility of the African unity dream

While Africa seethes in an explosive brew of poverty, war, oppression and disease that threatens to drag it ever downwards, the dream of African unity – even humble monetary unity – being touted by several of the continent’s leaders seems a distant and dim prospect.

While some 12 European governments grapple with the complex logistics of getting billions of the new euro banknotes into people’s pockets and millions of baffled citizens across the EU struggle to decipher the value and authenticity of the new currency before it lands in their hands in January, many of their African counterparts are wrestling with the more existential issues of survival – the economic, social and physical survival of their people, as well as the less altruistic survival of their regimes, many of which were long ago declared bankrupt.

Europe, despite years of bickering and amid on-going scepticism among some in its ranks, seems to be set on an irreversible path, for better or worse, towards unity.

I come from Egypt, which straddles two regions that have long dreamt of an elusive and unconsummated coming together. Having recently moved to the capital of Europe, the million euro question of why the process of unification has progressed so far in Europe but not in Africa and the Middle East has dogged me.

Some optimists still suggest that time is the great resolver and that no force can resist the march of progress, especially in this globalised world we live in, where the mantra is unite or perish. In my native Arab World, for instance, there are those who say that with a common language and centuries of cultural exchange and cross fertilisation, that unity is an inevitable, no a natural, outcome. That, despite the reigning chaos, a powerful, unified Arab entity is tantalisingly at hand, all we have to do is wait for the right mix of conditions and everything will click into place.

However, there are those who take a more cynical view. The great pan-Arab endeavour to forge unity is older than its European counterpart. The Arab League was set up in the 1940s and its membership grew as more and more countries gained their nominal independence, whereas the European Community, the predecessor to the EU, emerged in the 1950s.

Nevertheless, the Arabs look only marginally closer today to fulfilling the vision than they did at the outset. In fact, the closest we’ve come to unity was during the firey era of the struggle for independence in the late 1950s and 1960s, with its attendant utopian aspirations, embodied in the charisma and empassioned rhetoric of the undisputed helsman of Pan-Arabism, then Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser. Undisputed, that is, in the Arab street. Arab leaders, keen on keeping their monopolies, viewed him with decidedly more distaste and agitation, and power-sharing was definitely not Nasser’s most prominent virtue.

How did Europe, which marched into the 20th Century on a war footing that cost untold millions of lives, then manage to stroll into the 21st with an economic union pretty much sealed and a political one seeming ever-more plausible, bestowing unprecedented prosperity upon its people?

Why does it seem that, for all their efforts, African leaders, independent and rid of the shackles of colonialism, seem incapable of plucking their countries out of the quagmire of poverty, war, ethnic conflict, underdevelopment, corruption, disease… (the list goes on), let alone forging a union?

If it is a matter of popular will, the will would seem to be there in good measure. The debate on unity has raged in Africa for as long as it has in Europe. For the decades that have ensued since they rested independence from their former European colonial masters, Africans across the continent have been talking of union and the benefits that collective strength can yield. Their leaders formed the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which quickly became known as the talking shop of dictators.

Perhaps the colonial legacy plus the two most endemic plagues – corruption and lack of political legitimacy – afflicting great tracts of the continent are to blame. What we need is an Afrodisiac to bring about the first spark of unity.