What Role for the EU in the Southern African Customs Union (SACU): Advocate, Cajoler, or Bully?

Abstract

Kathleen J. Hancock, PhD Colorado School of Mines Golden, CO, USA ABSTRACT Marking its 100-year anniversary this year, the SACU is the oldest surviving customs union today. This paper lays out the history of the SACU and its governance structures, details of the new agreement, the EU’s economic activities in the southern African region, and current issues facing the SACU. Since no major articles have been written on the role of the EU in the renegotiation of the SACU and my own research is in the beginning stages, I cannot yet fully answer posed in the paper’s title. To answer the question, much more research needs to occur both with EU officials and with officials of the SACU member states and the SACU itself. However, my preliminary findings suggest that the EU, through its negotiations for Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) with southern African states has created fissures in the SACU that could eventually be a significant contributing factor to breaking apart the customs union. INTRODUCTION Marking its 100-year anniversary this year, the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) is the oldest surviving regional integration agreement of its kind. The SACU today includes South Africa and the so-called BLNS (Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland). Behind the SACU are fascinating historical figures–like Cecil Rhodes, the controversial imperialist Joseph Chamberlain, and the craggy, resilient Boer nationalist Paul Kruger–failed coups, an ugly war, political intrigue in London, and gold and diamonds. The racist apartheid regime, struggling black African nations supported by Britain, and South Africa’s drive to development mark the next 50 years of the accord, bringing the states at last to an exceedingly equitable governance structure in 2002. INTEGRATION AGREEMENTS AS MODELS OF DELEGATION Customs unions are one of the deeper forms of regional economic integration, requiring members to create common external tariffs for non-members and to remove internal barriers to trade. Unlike preferential or even free trade agreements (PTA and FTA), they require significant on-going coordination and policymaking to be effective. Regional integration agreements can be usefully analyzed as models of delegation, in which member states delegate policy-making or administrative responsibilities to a newly