Well written and insightful essay!!! In my personal opinion, an important thing to consider here is how full regulatory and legal harmonization, the prohibition of local protectionism, and the allowance of unlimited capital flows, pushed on us by our centralized information ecosystems as tools of integration, can lead to underdevelopment and ironically far less integration and eventually even disintegration. When every region and big-locality is denied the right to tailor rules to its own evolving institutional, scientific, industrial, and cultural capacities, it is effectively denied the ability to incubate its own ecosystems of productive capacity, financial intermediation, and knowledge expansion; and its also denied the ability to fully access its community's talents and creativities. Integration that suppresses regional differentiation leads to “passive” economic landscapes, where only the already-capable centers (usually ex-colonial capitals or financial enclaves) accumulate the power, people, and productive infrastructure needed to form meaningful internal and external linkages. This doesnt just diminish regional initiative, it hollows out the very ability of a people centered polity to emerge in the first place
The USA, during its most democratic and participatory eras, roughly from the 1830s through the late 1960s, avoided these pathologies by following an entirely different architecture than what it has today. Through internal capital flow inhibitors, regionally varied banking laws, fragmented regulatory regimes, and selective tariffs, it allowed regions to mature on their own terms. Small cities could a limited but still substantial share of their area capital and direct it, train labor, and generate local industrial, commercial, scientific, and cultural ecosystems without being cannibalized by far away power centers. From these structures emerged a multiplicity of political and economic centers, which in turn created dense networks of institutions, civic life, and interregional cooperation.
This decentralized but deeply integrated system facilitated more durable linkages, between people, firms, and governments, than any imposed harmonization ever could. In my personal opinion, if communities in the USA, or Africa, or anywhere else, want to truly have governance architectures "of the people", they consider resisting the pull of technocratic uniformity and instead empower its regions to develop the capacities needed to be equal participants in integration while still maintaining an integrating system super architecture
Well written and insightful essay!!! In my personal opinion, an important thing to consider here is how full regulatory and legal harmonization, the prohibition of local protectionism, and the allowance of unlimited capital flows, pushed on us by our centralized information ecosystems as tools of integration, can lead to underdevelopment and ironically far less integration and eventually even disintegration. When every region and big-locality is denied the right to tailor rules to its own evolving institutional, scientific, industrial, and cultural capacities, it is effectively denied the ability to incubate its own ecosystems of productive capacity, financial intermediation, and knowledge expansion; and its also denied the ability to fully access its community's talents and creativities. Integration that suppresses regional differentiation leads to “passive” economic landscapes, where only the already-capable centers (usually ex-colonial capitals or financial enclaves) accumulate the power, people, and productive infrastructure needed to form meaningful internal and external linkages. This doesnt just diminish regional initiative, it hollows out the very ability of a people centered polity to emerge in the first place
The USA, during its most democratic and participatory eras, roughly from the 1830s through the late 1960s, avoided these pathologies by following an entirely different architecture than what it has today. Through internal capital flow inhibitors, regionally varied banking laws, fragmented regulatory regimes, and selective tariffs, it allowed regions to mature on their own terms. Small cities could a limited but still substantial share of their area capital and direct it, train labor, and generate local industrial, commercial, scientific, and cultural ecosystems without being cannibalized by far away power centers. From these structures emerged a multiplicity of political and economic centers, which in turn created dense networks of institutions, civic life, and interregional cooperation.
This decentralized but deeply integrated system facilitated more durable linkages, between people, firms, and governments, than any imposed harmonization ever could. In my personal opinion, if communities in the USA, or Africa, or anywhere else, want to truly have governance architectures "of the people", they consider resisting the pull of technocratic uniformity and instead empower its regions to develop the capacities needed to be equal participants in integration while still maintaining an integrating system super architecture
Thank you for your comment.
ECOWAS must adapt to fast-changing realities.
Happy celebration,proudly African
Thank you for the feedback, Sunday.