The African Union and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development: Strong Institutions for Weak States? KEITH GOTTSCHALK/ SIEGMAR SCHMIDT I n future, May 25(officially celebrated on the continent as»Africa Day«), 2004, may be considered a historic date, since it was on that day that the African Union( au ) launched its Peace and Security Council( psc ). The current Chairman of the au , Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano, declared at the inauguration of the psc in Addis Ababa, Ethi­opia, that the au »has made unprecedented progress in setting up our organization’s structure« 1 in the three years since the au was founded. Ac­cording to its main promoter, South African President Thabo Mbeki, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development( nepad ) has also made con­siderable progress. While African leaders congratulate themselves on what has been achieved in recent years, a look into the past reveals a much more check­ered history, made up of numerous attempts to solve the continent’s problems through regional cooperation and integration(Mistry, 2000). Few nowadays recall that President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana advo­cated a United States of Africa as early as 1963. However, as the history of the Organization of African Unity( oau ) – which would have cele­brated its 41st birthday on the very day the psc came into existence – shows, the institutional frameworks of African integration attempted over the last four decades or so were chronically underresourced and po­litically marginalized. Therefore, we need to ask whether the foundation of nepad and the au improves the chances of a new era dawning for the continent, or whether the well-known gap in Africa between great expec­tations and high-flown rhetoric on the one hand, and low capabilities and inertia on the other, can be narrowed. The main purpose of this article is to assess the progress nepad and the au have made since their foundation(in 2001 and 2002, respectively). Since a complete assessment of the many facets of both the au and nepad will not be possible, we shall focus on the process of institution- and 1. Quoted in Cape Times (May 26, 2004). 138 Gottschalk/Schmidt, Strong Institutions for Weak States? ipg 4/2004