ABSTRACT
Since its inception in 1975, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has struggled along as a fairly unsuccessful regional economic organization. Its original goal, creating a regional trading bloc to compete with more developed economies, was all but abandoned, and the very future of the organization was often in question. Then in 1990, the organization took on the extremely difficult task of peacekeeping in the Liberian civil war. What prompted an already weak organization take on this challenge? Scholars have offered several potential explanations for this very complex empirical puzzle. Some contend that persuasion and encouragement from multilateral organizations and powerful states convinced ECOWAS leaders that the regional organization possessed advantages in the situation that would make it the most effective guarantor of regional stability. Others believe that Nigeria seized upon the Liberian crisis as an opportunity to further solidify itself as the regional hegemon, to enhance its status in international and regional affairs. A third possible explanation is suggested by the work of Ernst Haas and others,1 which articulates a neofunctionalist (proto)theory focusing on various process mechanisms including spontaneous and/or cultivated spillover to explain the expanding activities of regional organizations. While most neofunctionalist analyses have focused on processes in the European Union, these hypotheses may bring insights to ECOWAS behavior in this case.
