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Few anglophone observers focused on central rulers’ on-going and
intensive use of national development policies to manage and manipulate
local, regional, and inter-regional politics, or on structural limits
to central control, national markets, and regional integration that
persisted into the open economy period. These processes set the stage
for the territorial disintegration of the country in 2002.
a. Competitive Regionalism. In Cote d’Ivoire, strategies of national
integration that were pursued during the Houphouet era
institutionalized competitive regionalism as a mode of regulating
access to national resources and accession to the national-level
political class.
Ivorian politics since the beginning (ie., the mid 1940s) have
revolved around axes of regional competition. Houphouet rose to power
by building the Syndicat Agricole Africain, which brought together
Baoulé and Northern commercial farmers. This alliance worked to
marginalize Côte d’Ivoire’s “original” planter bourgeoisie, Agni
planters in the southeast, and the colonial educated Ă©lite which was
also drawn from the Agni southeast. Populations of the south-center
and southwest were also peripheral in the alliance- and institution-
building strategies of the PDCI, and indeed they believe that the
postcolonial model of economic development and state-formation was
pursued largely at their expense. This Baoulé-Northern alliance
constituted the hard core of the PDCI regime under Houphouet. Both
groups profited as land pioneers (farmers) and merchants in the
westward expansion of the plantation economy.
With monopoly control over the central state, the Houphouet
regime carefully constructed a socio-economic elite and political class
on the basis of the principle of “proportional representation” of the
Convention