Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Politics - Region: Africa, grade: 1,0, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, language: English, abstract: As history tells us, economic development is typically identified as the driver of regional integration. Efforts to bring countries in one region together have been going on for several decades and both, experience and theory, encourage the potential of economic development for regional cooperation. The European Union is the prime example: the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952 was the basis for a common market for these resources and this idea of free movement was transferred to all goods, services, capital and labour in the subsequent decades. Parallel to that, the development of global regimes, such as the World Trade Organizations’ legal framework, stimulated developing countries to form their own regional organizations in order to keep up with trade liberalization.