Pan West Africanism and Political Instability in West Africa: Perspectives and Reflections

Five years of within the 21 century, and observation of the social and political landscape of West Africa imposes deep reflection because recurring instability has infested the subregion. For the past ten years, political transformations gave Africa in general and West Africa in particular, two contrasting features. There is the improvement of political institutions and the spread of democratic principles and discourses which resulted from the desire for freedom, liberty, free choice, and good governance that the African masses expressed intensely in the early 1990’s coupled with external factors, such as the influence and policies of international donors, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the France –Africa Summit of La Baule in 1990 (Bourgault 1995:207), and the new US and Russian foreign policies towards Africa (Bratton 1997:162; Faes, 1995, Chazan, 1992) triggering new social and political orders with democracy as the common denominator embedded in the notion of globalization and its neo-liberal drive.