Solidarity in ECOWAS, a sub-regional African organisation with relevant similarities to the EU

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is a sub-regional African organisation that has manifestly imitated the integration strategy of the European Union in order to achieve similar results. This contribution will examine whether such imitation has also led, within ECOWAS, to a development of the principle of solidarity similar to the one that can be observed in the EU. In this regard, it will be shown that, especially following the 1993 treaty revision, the Community made an effort towards what can be considered the social and solidary dimension of West African integration. As a consequence, it is now possible to find some examples of solidarity in ECOWAS law. The contribution will consider two of those: the General Convention on Social Security, an example of solidarity between Member States and non-nationals, and the ECOWAS response to the Ebola epidemic, an example of solidarity among Member States. In both cases, ECOWAS law has interesting similarities with forms of solidarity that can be found in EU law. However, despite such parallelisms, the results of the analysis will not allow to conclude that within ECOWAS there is a degree of solidarity close to the one that characterises the EU: indeed, due to various strictures, the solidarity which can be found “in books” often does not result in solidarity “in action”.