@ConorGaffey
LIBYAN DICTATOR Muammar el-Qaddafi, killed by rebels in 2011, left behind a legacy of chaos and brutality. But he also left a surprisingly modern political vision of a Pan-African state. In 1999, he began to push for the creation of an African Union (AU), modeled loosely on its European counterpart, the EU. Over the next decade, he urged leaders to join his campaign to create a single government that would act as a counterpoint to the U.S. and the EU. At a 2008 meeting of more than 200 African kings and traditional rulers in Benghazi, he declared, “We want an African military to defend Africa, a single African currency, one African passport to travel within Africa.”
Eight years later, the AU—the 54-member body launched in 2002—is taking steps toward Qaddafi’s improbable dream. Business leaders and economists will press the case for uniting Africa’s economies at the World Economic Forum, which runs from May 11 to 13 in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. The intensified push comes as the open borders and free movement of its role model, the EU, are under tremendous strain because of extremists’ attacks, an influx of more than 1.2 million refugees and migrants in the past year, Greece’s economic crisis and rising hostility within the union. (In June, the U.K. will vote on whether to leave the EU.) The proponents of an EU-style AU know another key fact about the EU—European unity has brought immense prosperity and peace to what was for centuries a frequently war-torn continent.