Lessons from Five Decades of African Regionalism
By E. K. Bensah Jr.
The current crisis surrounding the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has understandably generated questions about the future of regional integration in West Africa. The withdrawal of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, continuing security challenges, questions over democratic governance, and concerns about the organisation’s political credibility have all intensified scrutiny of ECOWAS.
But there is another question worth asking:
What should we remember about ECOWAS before deciding what should come next?
That was the point underlying my intervention during a recent discussion on ECOWAS, the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), regional security and Ghana’s role.
The argument was not that ECOWAS has no problems. It plainly does. Nor was it an argument for returning nostalgically to an earlier era. Rather, it was a reminder that 51 years of African regionalism have produced institutional experience that should not be discarded simply because the institution is currently under pressure.
ECOWAS was never simply an economic organisation
The evolution of ECOWAS demonstrates that its history cannot be reduced to trade and economic integration.
The organisation’s institutional development was shaped significantly by the political and security crises of the region. The experience of the Liberian civil war and the deployment of ECOMOG were particularly important.
The 1993 revision of the ECOWAS Treaty reflected lessons from the difficulties encountered during the Liberian crisis. Among other changes, decisions of the Authority of Heads of State were given binding force on member states, strengthening the organisation’s supranational character.
That development matters.
It demonstrates that African regional institutions have not merely responded passively to crises. They have also learned from crises and modified their institutional architecture in response.
This is an important perspective when considering ECOWAS today.
The question should therefore not simply be whether ECOWAS has failed.
A more useful question is:
What has ECOWAS learned from five decades of crises, interventions and institutional experimentation—and how can those lessons be applied to its next phase?
From Secretariat to Commission: an African institutional experiment
Another important aspect of the ECOWAS story is its institutional evolution.
ECOWAS moved from a Secretariat model towards a Commission structure, with Commissioners responsible for different areas of the organisation’s work.
This institutional development is significant beyond West Africa.
When the Organisation of African Unity was transformed into the African Union in 2002, the AU also adopted a Commission structure.
The point is not to claim that one institution simply copied another in every respect. Rather, it is to recognise that African regional organisations have been part of a broader process of institutional experimentation.
West Africa has therefore contributed to the evolution of African continental governance.
That institutional memory deserves greater attention.
ECOMOG and the history of African peacekeeping
The same applies to ECOMOG.
During the discussion, I drew a comparison between the development of modern international peacekeeping and ECOWAS’s own experience in Liberia.
Following the 1956 Suez Crisis, the United Nations established what became a landmark model of modern peacekeeping under Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld.
Three decades later, West Africa confronted its own profound security challenge.
ECOWAS responded through ECOMOG.
The Liberian intervention was neither simple nor flawless. Nigeria played a particularly important role, and the operation faced considerable political and operational difficulties.
Nevertheless, ECOMOG represented something historically important:
an African regional organisation attempting to take responsibility for a major African security crisis.
That legacy should not disappear from public memory.
Indeed, one of the challenges facing African integration is that younger generations can encounter continental and regional institutions without knowing how those institutions came into existence or what earlier generations attempted to accomplish through them.
Institutional memory is therefore not nostalgia.
It is an asset for institutional reform.
ECOWAS has produced examples of cooperation worth remembering
The history is also more complicated than a simple narrative of institutional decline.
The 2011 joint ECOWAS–UEMOA sanctions against Côte d’Ivoire provide an example of Francophone–Anglophone cooperation within the West African regional system.
During the intervention, I also referred to a 2023 APRM report on unconstitutional changes of government, which referenced ECOWAS’s sanctions regime positively on numerous occasions and assessed aspects of it as effective in comparison with the United Nations’ approach.
These examples do not eliminate the criticisms currently directed at ECOWAS.
They do, however, complicate the idea that the organisation has never been capable of collective action.
That distinction is important.
An institution can have serious weaknesses while still possessing valuable institutional capabilities.
The appropriate response may therefore be reform and renewal rather than institutional amnesia.
The Mediation and Security Council matters
Another institution that deserves greater public understanding is the ECOWAS Mediation and Security Council.
Its existence illustrates that ECOWAS has developed mechanisms for dealing with political and security crises rather than simply reacting through ad hoc diplomacy.
Again, the existence of an institution does not guarantee that it will always perform effectively.
Institutions depend upon political will, resources, legitimacy and the commitment of member states.
But the architecture itself represents accumulated experience.
The challenge is therefore partly about how to restore credibility and effectiveness to mechanisms that already exist, while adapting them to contemporary realities.
ECOWAS at 51: a moment for institutional reflection
There is a useful comparison to make with the United Nations.
The UN faced intense criticism around its 50th anniversary in 1995, including criticism arising from its experiences in Somalia and Rwanda.
Yet the existence of profound institutional failure did not automatically mean that the UN had become irrelevant.
The comparison should not be pushed too far: ECOWAS and the UN are fundamentally different organisations with different mandates, resources and geopolitical environments.
But the comparison raises an important institutional question.
Should an organisation’s difficult present erase the significance of its accumulated past?
Perhaps ECOWAS at 51 should be approached as a moment for similar reflection.
The organisation needs reform. It needs to confront questions of legitimacy, implementation, political consistency, financing and relations with states that have left or become estranged from it.
But reform requires institutional memory.
Beyond the numbers
The withdrawal of three Sahelian states is undeniably significant.
But the size of an organisation is not the only measure of its value.
An institution’s effectiveness also depends on the quality of its relationships, the legitimacy of its decisions, its ability to deliver tangible benefits, and the confidence of the citizens it serves.
The future of ECOWAS should therefore not be reduced to a numerical contest over how many states remain members.
The deeper question is whether the organisation can demonstrate that regional cooperation continues to produce value for West Africans.
That requires reconnecting institutional history with contemporary citizens.
Educating the next generation
Perhaps one of the most overlooked dimensions of this debate is public education.
Many young Africans know ECOMOG primarily as an acronym, if they know it at all.
They may know that ECOWAS exists without knowing why its security architecture developed in the first place.
They may encounter contemporary arguments about coups, sanctions and sovereignty without understanding the institutional history that produced today’s mechanisms.
This creates a dangerous disconnect.
Regional integration cannot survive indefinitely as an elite project discussed only in diplomatic and policy circles.
Its history must become part of public knowledge.
Young West Africans should understand that regional integration is not an abstract Brussels-style experiment imported from elsewhere. It is also an African story—one involving negotiations, crises, wars, compromises, institutional innovations and attempts at collective action.
Reform, not erasure
The present ECOWAS crisis should therefore be taken seriously.
But taking the crisis seriously does not require erasing the institution’s history.
The record of the past 51 years contains failures and achievements, contradictions and innovations, institutional weaknesses and important precedents.
The lesson of ECOMOG is that African regional organisations can develop security mechanisms in response to crises.
The lesson of the 1993 Treaty revision is that institutional architecture can evolve through experience.
The transition towards the Commission model demonstrates that West African institutional experimentation has implications beyond ECOWAS itself.
The experience of collective sanctions demonstrates that regional political action is possible, even across historical linguistic and political divides.
And the continuing existence of mechanisms such as the Mediation and Security Council demonstrates that the organisation possesses institutional capital on which reform can build.
The task, therefore, is not to romanticise ECOWAS.
Nor is it to write its history as though its present difficulties invalidate its past.
It is to ask a more constructive question:
How can West Africa use 51 years of accumulated institutional experience to build the next generation of regional integration?
That may be the more important debate.
Because institutions can be reformed.
Institutional memory, once lost, is much harder to recover.
E. K. Bensah Jr.
Pan-African Integration Analyst & Strategic Communications Expert
