Hegemony, security and West African integration: Nigeria, Ghana, and the transformation of ECOWAS

In a sudden move that caught the attention of the international community, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) dispatched a peacekeeping force in mid-1990 to contain the outbreak of civil war in Liberia. Such sudden expansion of task from the traditional economic domain to the security sphere has unleashed a process of political and institutional adjustment within the community. This study is an attempt to understand and explain the transformation currently underway in the Community. For this task, I generated four hypotheses based on four causal variables: (a) the globalist-systemic hypothesis which postulates that the transformation of ECOWAS was due to post-Cold War international (systemic) pressures; (b) the Functionalist-Institutionalist hypothesis which holds that the transformation is the result of the cumulative efforts of ECOWAS institutions to steer the organization towards political ends; (c) the pluralist or actor preference-convergence hypothesis which posits that the transformation is due to society-wide pressures on political elites; and (d) the hegemony hypothesis which postulates that the transformation of ECOWAS is the outcome of the politics of state ascendancy or hegemony in West Africa. Following extensive empirical investigation, I argue in this study that the transformation of ECOWAS has been caused by the politics of regional hegemony in West Africa, in which the region's largest state, Nigeria, considers itself "duty-bound to influence and affect any event which threatens to jeopardize or compromise the stability, prosperity and security of the sub-region.".;This study is presented in four parts. The first lays out the theoretical and methodological issues in two chapters dealing with research questions and general literature review. The second part provides a description of the evolution and transformation of ECOWAS from economic to political integration. The third part, consisting of three chapters, evaluates each of the following hypotheses: institutionalist, pluralist and hegemony. The fourth part provides a conclusion to the study.