Search

In attempting to explicate why leaders of sovereign states promote inter-state integration (ISI), most literature emphasizes the economic benefits involved. But economic explanations are sometimes insufficient because regional unions not only involve economic losses; they are also eminently political constructs. Where political motivations are identified, the focus is on the distribution of power and the relative gains among states. Thus, these power theories cannot explicate why leaders of states that incur relative losses, and those that are less powerful, would promote ISI. In much of this literature, domestic conflict is largely ignored despite its usefulness in understanding the factors that shape policy preferences. Even in the analyses that point to domestic political processes, the focus is on economic and geopolitical interests. Therefore, certain crucial intrastate tensions that impact government decision-making are usually not identified. This thesis identifies one such tension – ethnic sub-nationalism – and attempts to establish its relationship to the promotion of ISI in Africa. Realizing the threat posed to state sovereignty when ethnicity is expressed in the form of sub-nationalism, I demonstrate how a threatened state’s leadership is more likely to promote ISI. My argument is that the need to discourage and replace a threatening subnational identity with a supranational identity causes the leadership to promote ISI. This allusion to the construction of social identities implies that the causal process is best contextualized within the constructivist theory. For evidence, I focus on Uganda and link Buganda’s ethnic identity to Museveni’s promotion of ISI in East Africa through congruence & content analyses of his speeches. By presenting Uganda’s ISI policy as an externalization of the country’s internal weaknesses, my research underscores the importance of examining threats to a state’s sovereignty from within in order to comprehend why that sovereign