Browsing by Author "Farage, Fawzi Hassan"

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    Imperialism and regional integration in the third world; East African association with EEC: a case study
    (University of Dar es Salaam, 1977) Farage, Fawzi Hassan
    There have been numerous definitions of economic unions and diverse classifications of the different forms of such integration in the available literature on the subject, each carrying a different area of stress depending primarily on whether the writer is an economist, a politician or a lecturer. In this paper, the author has attempted to look at economic unions from a cross section of this group. Regional integration has in recent times come to be increasingly regarded as the possible answer to the Third Worlds' development problems and a potential instrument for narrowing the widening gap between the industrialized nations and underdeveloped countries. The attention of Western writers on the subject has been focused on Customs Unions. This is so because a complete political union is considered unacceptable to the Third World countries sense of sovereignty and independence, and especially so, following, as it does, the traumatic experience of colonialism. At the other end of the pendulum are the looser forms of union such as a free trade area, where a wider spectrum of decisions is left to the individual member states. This type of union has been discredited for being incapable of rectifying the imbalances among the member states, and at times, in fact, intensifying such imbalances. The necessity for integration, however, has never been the question and the move towards it has been gaining momentum in the Third World in general and the African continent in particular. The reasons for such enthusiasm in the less developed countries are numerous:- scarcity of capital; the need avoid duplication of industries; better bargaining powers vis-as-vis the developed countries; protection of infant industries, etc. The customs Union seems to be the acceptable and practical machine in the achievement of these goals. The central thesis of this paper is that such a view is untenable on a closer examination of the facts. It is argued that the continuing link with finance capital would neutralize any attempt to assert any form of control by the underdeveloped countries over their development. It is therefore urged that even where a customs union succeeds in the bourgeois sense it will be so only in the sense that it makes the exploitation of the LDC members more efficient. This situation, needless to say can have no worthwhile degree of permanence or stability. Finally, therefore, the paper urges a re-assessment of the concepts of development, and concludes that the move towards a break with finance capital can be the only permanent solution. Regional arrangements should merely be tools toward this end.