Regional co‐operation in Southern Africa: the Southern African development co‐ordination conference

Abstract

This article deals with attempts during the last three years to build up regional co‐operation between nine independent states in southern Africa. It details the ambitious plans, especially in the field of transport, that have been put forward by this Southern African Development Co‐ordination Conference (SADCC), and explores the problems involved in bringing them to fruition. These issues are examined against a background of the extreme dependence of the SADCC countries on South Africa. Finally, the political problems of SADCC — the differing ideological and policy stances of the nine states, especially vis‐à‐vis South Africa, and the role of imperialist interests — are raised, together with the need for more adequate theoretical understanding of regionalism and ‘sub‐imperialism’.

Regionalism

“…Following the trends indicated in 'The regionalism of the Global South', the discipline of regionalism in the 1980s followed two new consistent patterns -on the one hand, works on non-European regions such as South Asia (Muni, 1985;Tiwari, 1985), the Pacific (Boyd, 1984) and Africa kept growing, while on the other hand domains other than economic integration were kept being explored. Leys and Tostensen (1982), for example, analyse regionalism in South Africa focusing on the role of regional hegemonic power and how its presence can hinder or promote regionalist dynamics, thus anticipating on the abovementioned lines of Bond (1978) the research program on regional security complexes (Buzan, 1983;Buzan & Waever, 2003;Väyrynen, 1984).…”

Namibia in Southern Africa: The Regional Implications of Independence

“…Symbolically, the organization's first annual conference thereafter was held in Windhoek in February 1991 (African Business 1991). Established in 1979/ 80, SADCC is devoted to mutual co-operation for development, and the reduction of members' collective dependence on South Africa (Leys & Tostensen 1982;Anglin 1983 ;Hill 1983;Hardy 1987). In other words, this represents the most explicit and sustained initiative to counteract the profound structural inequalities, polarization, dominancedependence relationships and pervasive underdevelopment in the region.…”

Another Crisis? Another Development?

“…While valuable, timely information is provided on the progress of co-operation among the nine SADCC states, for instance (pp. 278-89), there is no mention of the political heterogeneity of these states, a factor that puts a major constraint on the development of common development strategies (Leys and Tostensen, 1982). To take another example, 'aid' modalities and limitations are very well covered in a pair of contributions that by chance or design present complementary views: from the top down and from the bottom up (pp.…”