Between Citizens and Survival: Legitimating the African Union

Since its establishment in 1963, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) has always been faced by a lack of legitimacy and support by its member states to turn the wide-ranging promises of continental unity into reality. The establishment of the African Union in 2002 has been hailed as fundamental rupture to its predecessor’s precarious politics of survival. This paper argues that the AU Commission has employed four different narratives whose meanings and addressees have, however, changed over the course of the past decades. Beyond these discursive struggles over the normative principles of the legitimation game, this paper detects three broad strategies by which the AU Commission has sought to react to the danger of hypocrisy. This has engendered an increasing concern for publicity, communication and the organization’s symbolism; a search for greater financial independence; as well as attempts to strengthen the power potentials and institutional capacity of the AU Commission.