West African Nationalism and Regional Integration:The Role of Pre-Colonial Cooperation in the Formation of ECOWAS

Abstract

This article reinterprets the historical and ideological roots of West African regional integration, arguing that the formation of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) cannot be reduced to colonial institutions or European mimicry. Instead, it demonstrates that deep traditions of communalism, trade, and political cooperation in precolonial West Africa, later preserved and rearticulated by Pan-Africanism, Negritude, and nationalist movements, provided the conceptual and cultural foundations for ECOWAS. By weaving together archival sources, memoirs, colonial records, and postcolonial African writings, the study highlights both the disruptions wrought by the slave trade and colonialism and the resilience of indigenous frameworks of cooperation. While existing scholarship often traces West African integration to colonial infrastructure—railways, currency boards, administrative councils—this article shows that these were instruments of exploitation rather than genuine projects of community building. What endured, despite centuries of rupture, was a collective memory of integration, which surfaced in the nationalist ferment of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and ultimately shaped the acceptance of ECOWAS in 1975. Beyond historical reconstruction, the article also situates its argument within current debates in African humanities and integration theory. It engages recent scholarship on regionalism and globalization, postcolonial critiques of Eurocentric models, and African Union studies that emphasize African agency in shaping continental futures. The analysis suggests that West African integration is best understood as a layered process: precolonial traditions of interdependence, ideological movements that preserved and transmitted them, and postcolonial institutions that gave them political form. In making this case, the article challenges functionalist readings of ECOWAS as a derivative project, proposing instead that it represents a reassertion of West African intellectual and historical continuity.