 Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. I'm Alicia Inarejos, and this is our weekly seminar at the Center for European Legal Studies here in Cambridge. I'm very happy to welcome you all, and I'm delighted to welcome the speaker, Professor Diamond Ashakbor. Diamond is Professor of Law at the University of Kent, previously at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. He teaches and has done a great deal of research on labour law, trade and development, regional integration, human rights, equality and multiculturalism. And today she's going to talk to us about provincializing Europe, the European Union and the African Union as reactions against or an integral part of globalization. Professor Ashakbor will talk for about half an hour or so, and hopefully at the end there'll be time for questions. Can I just remind everybody that if you have a question for our speaker that you write it in the Q&A box, and then I'll read them out later on. So, Professor Ashakbor Diamond, we're very grateful that you have taken the time to speak to us, and we're really looking forward to it. Over to you. Thank you. So thank you very much to Dr Hina-Rosia for hosting this seminar today and thanks to the Centre for the Invitation to speak. So I'm delighted to have this opportunity to test some of these arguments and ideas that I've been developing in this project. So this paper today is part of a wider project which seeks to reconceptualize regions through a study of the European Union and the African Union and to assess the role of regions as a response to a form of economic globalization, which can be described as neoliberal. So as Dr Hina-Rosia has Alithia pointed out, my research is in EU law, but also in the law of the African Union. And for me, what initially brought me to that interest was the EU lawyer looking at the external trade relations with economic development. So the starting point of this paper is to look again at Europe in its role as a market of modernity and as an exemplar of economic development. And as a model for what regionalism should look like. This is certainly not a straightforward comparative exercise. I'm not comparing the EU with the EU. What I think is helpful is to draw on Kenneth Pomerance's principle of reciprocal comparison. So according to Pomerance, this method allows historians to view both sides of the comparison as deviations when seen through the expectations of the other rather than leaving one side of the comparison always as the norm. So instead of viewing the European in modernity and European form of regionalism as the norm against which other regions and institutions are measured, my approach is that we need to historicize and contextualize our observations, metrics and theories. The question I wish to explore is the extent to which regionalism or regionalization can be seen as a reaction against globalization or as an integral part of globalization of this process. First, through a study of the European Union undertaking a critical reading of orthodox conceptualization and regionalism, for example, that it's integrationist that it's market led that it's formal. And to understand how this regionalism project engages with markets through the lens of social regionalism. And second, deploying different discursive frameworks I interrogate the meaning of regionalism in the context of the African Union to explore how that regionalism project demands a different register of analysis. In order to understand what it might mean to pursue a fully decolonized rather than merely neocolonial regionalism. In both regionalism projects, I'm interested in how the market may be constrained by or embedded within institutions. What scope is there for this embeddedness to occur at the level of the region as well as the level of the state. And what are the technical means by which law, including labor law, can respond to the increasingly trans territorial nature of economic interaction. So, the analysis here is regionalism as a potential response to globalization. This is the language of social regionalism. And, and that offers a means to combine insights from sociology of law, which emphasizes embeddedness of markets with insights from with a trans national lens to explore and explain the ability of regionalism in the EU and the European Union to ameliorate the societal consequences of open borders and trade liberalization. So I want to say something about development, modernity and regionalism. So elsewhere another research I've explored in detail the orthodox economic approaches to development, which are in large part inspired by Max Weber's account of the necessary preconditions from our economy. So I'm interested in how Weber's observations on the central role of rational legal systems in the versions of one capitalism and on economic development more generally have been implicitly explicitly co-opted by the World Bank and other international financial institutions as the model for the role of law in development. So in brief I'm concerned with two related areas of inquiry, uncovering assumptions which underlie the orthodox thinking about the correct route to economic development and exploring what these assumptions mean for the role of law in general and social in particular in the economic development process in market creation and in market governance. So examining the related issue of the extent to which and the terms on which states and regions in particular states and regions and the global south are integrated into global trade and the narratives within orthodox economics about how trade functions and the role of law in this. So in exploring development as a field. To understand in the world, I found some similar patterns of thought to the ways in which regions have traditionally been conceived and how the regionalism project of the EU is compared with others in particular that of the EU. The narrative of development centered around growth and progress as a certain hegemonic force and his premise on models emerging from the dominant countries own experiences. So the idea is drawing on conception of the nation state and enlightenment notions of progress. And this view is at the root of a modernization theory and approached adopts a perspective predicting the movement of countries from a state of under development by means of a narrative process in which less developed countries gradually assume the qualities of industrialized nations. So such a stagest or linear view of history, where in modernity, capitalism, development, and regionalism occur. The first in Europe and then elsewhere is at the heart of what I'm interested in, in particular to come back to the title of my talk today, my interest is in the need to provincialize the epistemic and cultural premises of knowledge which is centered around the European model. I want to examine understandings of European regionalism and regional integration and responses of this regionalism project to external pressures in particular globalization. I want to point out that European models rightly warn of undue focus on what they call Eurocentric or formal regionalism. So that requires a bit of unpacking. Basically, it means a focus that your centrism assumes European Union path is generalizable is a generalizable benchmark for measuring failure or success of regionalism. So comparing the formal rather than informal cooperation or coordination at regional level. So comparing regions requires an understanding that the EU path that regionalism by means of market integration is not necessarily a blueprint blueprint for other regions that informal regionalism may coexist alongside the formal and perhaps be more significant and also that non state actors play an important role at regional and sub regional level. And finally, that soft institutionalism of the sort that one finds, for instance, in the context of African and Asian regionalism may well be consciously chosen. In other words, the need, it needs to be alerts the danger of theorizing regionalism per se by abstracting from the dominant example of the EU. So sort of alimony does that integration theories were developed for and from the European experience, and then more or less reapplied or exported around the world. So such theories based on a sole case study tend to be partial. They can't always generally generate generalizable insights for understanding all regionalisms or all social regionalisms. The scope of regionalism studies has been broadened significantly since the 1980s beyond the classical approaches of new functionalism neo functionalism liberal into governmentalism governance approaches, and new institutionalism approaches in particular, which I'm known as new regionalism is is relevant for my my point here, but what these approaches do share is a common set of assumptions in particular about formalism in institutions about market integration about sovereignty transfer and about diversification. So whether we rationalize regionalism through a neo functionalist lens by taking the long run economic trends towards interdependence, or we rationalize it through a liberal intergovernmental lens, for example, Alan Millboard contention that any transfer of sovereignty over certain policy areas is undertaken to ensure the survival of the post formation state. There is a similar focus on an assumption of integration that there's an inexorable logic, operation to explain incremental linear process of deepening deepening degrees of economic integration. If we trade area to customers union to common market and ultimately to compete economic integration. So this focus on reduction or elimination of trade barriers amongst participating countries emphasize emphasize welfare and efficiency gains of deep integration so this market led linear model, the excessive stages of deepening economic integration, and the anticipated advantage of such market integration, which are at the core of the appeal of the EU paradigm have also deeply influence regional integration efforts in on the continent of Africa. The EU fits neatly into this integrationist market led mode of understanding regions, because it's the dominant analytical frame for thinking about regions which, which emerged from the empirical study of the EU itself. So predictions as the form which further European cooperation would take follow that form, but language is significant here. The term regional integration which is just a commonly used term in relation to study the EU assumes a great deal assumes the creation of international institutions, which are conferred to international decision made from power which seek, which enables states to cooperate in market led project. It assumes regional economic integration. My preference is to use the term regionalism rather than regional integration, or regionalization in order to encompass a broader range of processes a broader range of interactions and goals. Indeed, I think it's helpful to think look back at earlier traditions of regionalism, which predate the European coal and still community and the European economic community, and which perhaps suggest a more global heritage emerging from countries and movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as pan Africanism pan Arabism and pan Asianism. So, the scholar and it had a career draws on the work of the Indian scholar diplomat panic are said our panic are to present regionalism as a universal aspiration rather than as a European formula, or as an American doctrine. Most alternative understandings of regionalism, open up the possibility to think about alternative means and mechanisms by which beyond formal institutionalism described by European integration theory. So panic are writing in the 1940s, I argued against what what one might call hegemonic regionalism, where in regional blocks were under the sphere of influence of a great power. So he envisaged groupings of states, further away from Europe and Africa, choosing regionalism as a means of addressing pressing social economic and political, including human rights challenges to this understanding of regionalism as having a developmental purpose is an important prefiguring of what we later on see in post independence post colonial efforts at regionalism, which focus on regionalism as a major underpinning to the newly industrializing states. Further, Latin American states have made significant contributions to these posts or understandings of regionalism in visiting a regionalism, regionalism which is more of an egalitarian ordering and a means of managing conflict and achieving peace. What this goes to illustrate is that, as Ernst has put it as far back as 1961, there can be no universal law of integration, deduced from the European example. Theoretical shifts in the study of regions and regionalism associated with new regionalism scholarship have come to recognize the importance of non state actors. So the idea that regionalism regions are constructed rather than given. So this final observation I want to focus on concerns extent to which recent regions, rather than emerging as a result of rationalist or materialist forces are constructed. This is an overlap between regionalism and constructivist approaches, which bring a sort of normative element or ideational element into the study of regionalism. So in other words, it's locating identity and into subjective forces, such as, for example, the aspiration to a European identity, which we see which we saw on the part of former Soviet states. Identity and subjective forces are being located here as being at the core of regionalism, so eschewing the previous focus on material indicators are just retrained, which characterize earlier approaches to regionalism and integration. Plus, these constructivist, the constructivist attention to ideas and norms and identity are central drivers of regionalism. Allow one allows one to recognize as regionalism, cooperative efforts of Southeast Asian, Latin American, Arab and African regionalisms, where culture and identity can be defining issues. And whose contributions are mainly in the normative domain, while their formal regional institutions are perhaps not as integrative as the neo-functionalist sense, for example, would expect. So this lens can also help explain the shift it to new regionalist approaches in the use of conceptual frameworks, which derived from comparative politics, more so than those which derive from international relations scholarship. Okay, so I want to move to thinking about the African Union and this idea of decolonizing regionalism. A study of alternative forms which regionalism can take, for example in the African context, can reveal divergent ways in which, in contrast to the EU, the state market and non-state actors interact to create informal as well as formal processes of regionalism. So this one says something about informality. With regards to regionalism and economic integration, arguably having acquired political autonomy and statehood relatively recently, and facing constraints on policy action from outside their borders, individual states and the content of Africa are reluctant to exceed the existing power to central or supranational body. Integration arrangements within the regional economic communities across Africa are thus normatively loose. It's arguable that a better view of this looseness of these institutional arrangements is that they are precisely designed to be flexible regimes of cooperation, particularly in order to suit better suit the multiple policy objectives of the African context and to allow for equality. So this emphasis on intergovernmentalism together with the existence of a multiplicity of regional economic communities with overlapping memberships influences the structure of regional governance and regional support for emergent national institutions of social development. So what I mean by that is the African Union integration project is premised on the prior development of a number of our nine continental regional economic communities. Echo was the economic community of West African states, the East African and Southern African regional economic communities, which once they've reached a certain stage of integration can that can be built on for African Union. But the fact that these regional economic communities have overlapping memberships, thus does dilute the extent to which they're able to construct binding institutions because one state could be a member of more than one regional economic community. So traditional approaches to regionalism which focus on identifying features, such as that the process is state led that it's market led sort of the process is state centered, and it's market led. And that involves sovereignty transfer and political unification. Those traditional approaches have to be slightly set to one side in the African Union context. The perception or self perception of the EU as the natural point of reference for regionalism means that it becomes a dominant model but also an anti model, because it can limit the development of analytical and theoretical comparative studies of regionalism. According to Zagian and lay license, in addition to overlooking crucial dynamics within state society complexes, such approaches which assume regionalism must be state centered and market led ignore entire realms of regional activity, such as for instance, informal economic economies cooperating. But there's an increase in recognition amongst academic literature that regionalism amongst developing states is more difficult to achieve than between industrializing regional difficult to achieve in the way that looks like formal state centered regionalism. So standard view in the literature and policy of performing which regionalism should take on the content of Africa drawing on the EU model sees it in terms of formality of institutions and the necessity to accept constraints on sovereignty. So for example, Le Porte and Mackie argue like minded African countries need to be prepared to pull their sovereignty and to entrust their collective sovereignty to common institutions that are given appropriate powers of action. So that sounds very familiar to those of us who are used to supernational decision making the EU context. But is it necessarily the case that political sovereignty is a prerequisite for regionalism. As a career and Johnson explain, recognizing the distinction between all the coexistence of formal and informal regionalism enables one to observe divergence from the EU model as more than just imperfect or failed examples of regionalism. In their comparison study of different forms of regionalism or the institutionalization of regionalism, a carrier and Johnson distinguished between what they call formal informality and formal formality within institution building essentially they contrast as the association Southeast Asian nations whose institutions they argue have been deliberately and carefully designed to be informal with other regions where the formality of the institutions has been a cover for the informality or the weekly legalized way in which they have actually functioned in practice. So, whilst there's no real soft transfer of national sovereignty to a supernational authority within asian. That regional integration project is nevertheless considered to be successful. The asian experience suggests it makes sense to distinguish between formal and informal regionalism as an informal or soft institutionalism entails non legally binding informal modes of decision making known as the asian way. New regionalism approaches adopt an analytical lens, which tends to be less state centered, which studies the role of non state actors rather than focusing and not focus solely on the intensity of economic interdependence. So ultimately what I'm pointing out here is a need to be beyond the emphasis just on the formal or the policy led regionalism to appreciate that regions like states are to some extent socially constructed. With regards to sovereignty transfer, many individual African states are fragile and bivalent towards integration, understandable given that weak states tend to place greater emphasis on formal and absolute sovereignty. So as I said earlier the existence of a multiplicity of subcontinental regional economic communities with overlapping memberships is a dominant feature of regionalism on the continent of Africa and determines the structure of regional governance. The aspiration within the AU outlined in the Treaty of Abusia to implement a continental free trade agreement and ultimately a continental common market by 2020 by 2028 assumes a linear path to build on the integration expects to be achieved via the regional economic communities. These overlapping regional economic communities may militate against the form of economic integration with binding centrally determined norms that have been characteristic of European regional integration. But they may in fact better reflect the desire on the part of the individual nation states to retain national sovereignty rather than to be enveloped within an inexorable move towards closer more supranational forms of integration. What's been described as shadow regionalism or regime boosting regionalism refers to the continued support by political elites and national leaders on the continent of Africa for regional organizations. Not in spite of the inability of these organizations to implement. Formal integration, but because these types of regional corporations serve other goals, raising the profile of physical elites whilst leaving formal state sovereignty unchallenged. I want to move on to the forms in which African Union regionalism has taken earlier early conceptions of regionalism on the continent of Africa were in common with regionalists similar to regional regionalist thinking in Latin America, Asia and amongst Arab countries. Closely founded aspirations for political unity and a common project of decolonization. A career highlights the constitutive role played in constructions of regionalism by ideas of for example panic Americanism as well as pan Africanism from the 19th and 20th centuries. So the organization for African unity which predates the AU took his inspiration from actually the organization of American states. As such the emphasis was on providing a multinational forum, the pan african where the pan African ideals of sovereignty pruning, ultimately with sideline in favor of more immediate concerns related to sovereignty enhancement, and non interference and domestic affairs, and mutual respect for pre colonial boundaries. It's unclear to us to which model of integration and content of governance, the AU is ultimately aspiring toward because it remains an open question, whether African leaders will ultimately make a clear choice for a super national or central type of institution, but a very particular form, an understanding of regionalism, which has emerged on the continent, owes a great deal to its emergence from and co evolution pan Africanism. So I said, although some of the sovereignty pruning elements of pan Africanism have been sideline. Other really crucial elements of pan Africanism have been retained, and that's to do with decolonization and independence. Another account of the drive to regionalize on the content of Africa can be framed in neutral terms, but emphasizing the primacy of the EU as the model to be followed that in an increasingly globalized world, countries need to participate in international organizations to protect political economic military viability stability security, as well as to to maximize state capacity and state autonomy by shielding themselves behind a regional body. That's one view, but what emerges the more dominant view I will argue is in a post colonial Africa, regionalism and integration have arisen from a different historical context, namely the amount of patriot movement against economic and racial domination and the desire to integrate primarily as a means to counter neocolonial legacies. The constitutive constitutive act of the African Union reflects the complexity of combining or balancing these different aspirations towards on the one hand national independence, and on the other hand regional integration. Article three of the constitutive act articulates the objective of the new Union as to defend the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of its member states, but also to accelerate the political and socio economic integration of the continent. In contrast to the preamble to the Treaty of Rome which expresses the determination to lay the foundations of an ever closer Union amongst the peoples of Europe, and it visages that unity primarily in economic terms, referring to improving to living working conditions, abolition restrictions on international trade. The central aspirations underpinning the preamble to the AU constitutive acts are ideals of pan Africanism, unity solidarity, but also the heroic struggles waged by our peoples and our countries for political independence, human dignity and economic and emancipation. So it's arguable that many African leaders did not want to give up any of their national sovereignty and the constitutive act therefore represents a compromise between partisans of a federal Union, which will be endowed as the national competencies and those who resisted this ambition and didn't want to give up national sovereignty. And that's where the argument comes from that heads of state often resort to what's referred to as regime boosting regionalism in their approaches to cooperation. I want to turn to the final part of this talk by drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi and taking Polanyi first to Brussels and then to Addis the seat of the African Union Commission. And the question I want to ask in this final part is, is regionalization an integral part of globalization or is it a political reaction against it or can it be both. So, the work of Karl Polanyi the tradition of economic sociology challenges the idea that markets exist in a separate realm, arguing instead that they're embedded in social relations. Polanyi's primary intuition is that economies aren't meshed or embedded in non economic institutions. So for John Ruggie, the essence of the embedded liberal compromise is a formulation of a type of multilateralism, one which is predicated on domestic intervention, and one which is compatible with the requirements of domestic stability. My argument is that that Polanian idea of embeddedness embedding the market in state institutions such as instituted social citizenship that Polanian embeddedness can occur at the regional level as well as the national level. And I'm going to social reasons in the European Union context can be understood as entailing a counter movement, a regulatory response to protect vulnerable regions, sectors and workers from the full impacts of trade liberalization. But it's writ large beyond the single nation state. So it's integration which is both solid or is solid or a stick and redistributive, and it conceives the adjustment costs of trade as more than as a matter for domestic policy. So it's a formulation of the EU project as one which, although initially understood through the lens such as order liberalism, which is that the market economy is a self organizing system. And with order liberal thinkers perceived in the original Treaty of Rome as intentioning a particular version of a free market economic constitution. In the EU context, unimpeded self coordination economic chapters through market transactions is the idea or competition. With the creation of a legal framework necessary to eliminate restrictions on free movement that Treaty of Rome, that idea was idealized by order liberals as a paradigm economic constitution in that appeared to concern exclusively economic rights. The most elements of the treaty is subsequently amended, which go beyond pure market integration are considered to be imperfections, but it's precisely those imperfections, which enable EU regionalism project to operate to embed capitalism. And with Flores de Vitter notes, contrary to the order liberal paradigm, the aim of integration the form of completion of the internal market wasn't to free the economy from political constraints, but rather to support and insulate the capacity to constrain the economy at national level where sufficiently strong political structures existed. The EU market integration was never designed or intended to replace institution of social citizenship at national level, but the European integration project recognizing importance of shoring up national and social institutions such as welfare systems. So my argument is the liberalized markets of the EU are embedded in varieties of institutional structures at member state level. And I think that a significant source of legitimacy for the EU action was precisely its ability to institutionalize markets which are no longer territorially bound to embed markets at the regional level, and thus enable democratic control over markets. Of course, an important footnote more than a footnote to the story is the EU has supported national level in bed liberalism but my night also be quite complicit in its unraveling. And particularly by taking our need to Brussels to Addis. What scope is there for a similar intervention or social regionalism within the sub-saharan within sub-saharan Africa. The continent's political leaders drawing on economic analyses of organizations such as United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. And the need to pursue constant wide trade liberalization to confer on African economies and a great power to engage meaningfully in global trade. But that wasn't always the case. Was there, was there scope or policy space to fall for the form of regionalism which emerged initially in the organization for African unity, where the common project was one of decolonization and to evolve a form of perhaps African social regionalism, which could serve as a counterweight to global trade. So, even though now the dominant model of regional integration on the continent is one aimed at liberalization, integrating African states into the world economy, reducing the role of the state in the economy. This contrast that current market orientation, the acceptance of the neoliberal paradigm of the current African regionalization project with an earlier emphasis from the organization for African unity on the developmental state, which was about state led industrialization as a way of countering global markets. And the argument here is that the clearest version of social regionalism for Sub-Saharan Africa is to be found in focus on development, rather than focus on market orientated integration. So for instance Kwame Nkrumah, the first post-independence leader of Ghana, writing in 1963 advocates explicitly for development and for full post-colonial independence via regionalism. Just as I was convinced that political freedom was the essential forerunner of our economic growth, and that it must come, so I'm equally convinced the African Union will come and provide that united integrated based upon which our fullest development can be secured. What I want to think about, what I want to think about what this means for Polanity, but in both Brussels and Addis, a Polanian critique of political economy which has facilitated understanding of markets as social and political constructs. Enables us to appreciate law's constitutive role in markets and other forms of economic activity. However, much Polanity influence work on political economy is usually invoked in a way that absence of colonial underpinnings. What's under what's missing is an analysis of the role of colonialism or capitalism based on racial difference or racial capitalism in the construction of the markets of the global north. So my argument here is that much of the embeddedness that was possible, the state embed in the market in individual states of the European Union and then at regional level, much of that was premised on economic rules of the game, which resulted from quite significant international continental resource flows, which fed the industrial revolution in Europe, leaving arguably the donor countries in the colonies systematically underdeveloped. So arguably, the reason the less developed countries, that capital to develop precisely because much of their surplus have been extracted in the process of the colonial building of the market in individual European states which then enabled social capitalism at the regional level of the EU. So such a drain on colonial post colonial countries is arguably exacerbated by the formation rules the game in the current global economic order. For Chantal Thomas puts it the legal rules of the international order, although informed by liberal ideas of egalitarianism perpetuate a northern economic hegemony by failing to address the entrenched economic inequality of the south, resulting from that colonial era to arguably therefore the embedded liberalism which underpin the redistributed capacities of individual states the global north and the capacities of the EU integration project was predicated on the transfer of value from the global south. So to conclude, I started this talk with a reference to the need to provincialize Europe and regionalism to this could be added to need to be attentive to the central place of colonial formation colonial legal form in the historic and ongoing construction of global economic order and liberal welfare states. The value of the region is that in the past, and in the context of the case of the EU, it was able to serve as a compliment and even a bolster to the social state at national level. However, the prerequisites which enable social regionalism in the EU, do not apply in the case of the EU, because the terms of global trade are less sympathetic towards government intervention. And also because the individual states of the African Union are less able to provide social stabilizers, developing states and the regions they create lack the policy space, institutional or in economic capacity to provide some of the detrimental domestic effects of trade liberalization and market exposure.