Pan African Union

Organization of African Unity

In 1963, when the OAU was founded (on May 25), the institutional setup and the basic rules of engagement with each other reflected a series of compromises among different models of interaction (the respective proposals came from the so-called Casablanca, Monrovia, and Brazzaville groups of states). The competing positions were based on different visions of Pan-Africanist ideology as it has been developed in the diaspora since the beginning of the 20th century. Depending on whether they favored an integration model based on the juridical sovereignty of member-states or one that was based on a supranational union government for the whole continent with wideranging executive powers, including an African High Command, these positions have been described as moderate or radical. Cooperation among OAU member-states was based on the principles of equality, respect for national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and noninterference in each other's domestic affairs.

The OAU's core function was to organize the interests of African states, protect the recently won independence from colonial rule, and support the liberation movements that fought for independence of the European settler colonies (basically this affected the Portuguese colonies Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique as well as South West Africa/Namibia, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, and South Africa). In this area, the OAU has been successful: The foreign policies of the member-states were harmonized, and the organization served as a vehicle for transmitting unified policy positions to other levels of the international systems, most importantly the Commonwealth, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and the United Nations (UN). However, until the 1990s, the OAU had lost some of its credentials. Because of inactivity in cases of gross human rights violations—including Idi Amin's Uganda in the 1970s and Sani Abacha's Nigeria in the 1990s, to name but a few—the OAU was increasingly considered a club of dictators with little interest in practicing what the heads of states and government preached in declarations adopted at annual summits. The OAU also failed to protect member-states effectively from becoming a battleground for the proxy wars of the [Page 1288]United States and the Soviet Union, respectively, during the Cold War, particularly in southern Africa and at the Horn of Africa.

The end of the Cold War brought a brief moment of UN-led peacekeeping interventions in some of the new intrastate wars (e.g., in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Somalia). However, after the debacle for the United States in Somalia in 1992–1993 and the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, there was a general disengagement by Western nations from Africa. Instead, the United States, France, and Britain and other Western nations called for “African solutions for African problems.” This was partly echoed in Africa. In 1993, the OAU established a Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution, with mixed results in practice: In some small-scale conflicts—like the Comoros—the Mechanism intervened successfully; yet most of the major conflicts were left unaddressed. However, with the wave of democratization (the so-called second wind of change) that swept across Africa in the 1990s, the precondition for the development of a new set of norms to govern continental relations was given. The old principle of regime security was slowly replaced by a greater emphasis on human security; among others, the OAU adopted resolutions against unconstitutional changes of government (1999 and 2000).

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