John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” remains one of the clearest tests of justice. If people did not know whether they would be born rich or poor, powerful or vulnerable, they would design rules that offered some protection against bad luck. The point is practical, not sentimental. Fair systems are built not because people are virtuous, but because vulnerability is never safely confined to others. The same logic applies, in harsher form, to international politics. States may speak grandly of sovereignty, but most cannot rely on power alone. They need rules because they cannot assume power will always be on their side.

That prudence underpinned the post-war order. The United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions and the broader machinery of international co-operation were built after an age in which unconstrained power politics ended in catastrophe. Their purpose was modest but vital: not to abolish rivalry, but to restrain it; not to make states equal, but to make behaviour more predictable. For weaker countries, that predictability was not abstract. It meant access to law, forums and norms that, however imperfectly applied, could still be invoked against arbitrariness.

That order was never especially just. It carried hierarchy, hypocrisy and selective enforcement in its foundations. Great powers routinely exempted themselves when the rules became inconvenient. Even so, it gave weaker countries something worth defending: a language of law, forums in which to argue, and at least some chance—sometimes slight, but not trivial—of constraining the preferences of the strong. In international affairs, predictability is not a luxury. It is shelter.

That is why the present erosion should worry Africa. In Davos this year, Mark Carney argued that the rules-based order is fading and that the world is reverting to an older logic in which “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” António Guterres has been blunter, warning that “the law of power is prevailing over the power of law.” The drift is already visible: principle gives way to transaction, restraint to leverage, and institutions to the arithmetic of money, force and technology.

Rules do not abolish inequality. They prevent it from hardening into something close to absolute. Without them, global politics becomes a marketplace in which might settles arguments and smaller states are left to adjust. That may suit the powerful. It is a dangerous bargain for countries weakened by fragmentation, debt distress, poor logistics, narrow export bases and dependence on external markets.

If multilateralism no longer offers meaningful protection to those with the least leverage, it ceases to be an order in any serious sense. It becomes a venue in which the strong bargain among themselves and everyone else is told to adapt. For Africa, the implication is stark: a harsher international system will not wait for states that remain economically fragmented, strategically dispensable and slow to act at scale.

The consequences are plain. No African country, however well endowed with minerals, markets or diplomatic ambition, is likely to prosper for long in a world of naked transactionalism. Fragmented states bargain badly. They are easier to pressure on resource access, security partnerships, migration control and strategic location. They are also more likely to compete against one another for external favour, offering concessions that may look tactical today but prove expensive tomorrow. Sovereignty without scale offers only thin protection.

The answer is integration—but not the ceremonial variety, rich in communiqués and poor in consequence. Africa needs the practical kind: regional value chains, more intra-African trade, co-ordinated industrial policy, connected energy systems and transport corridors that link African economies to one another rather than merely to ports. The continent has produced no shortage of declarations. What it needs now is more customs clearance and less choreography.

That means making the African Continental Free Trade Area real rather than rhetorical. Intra-African trade rose to about $220.3bn in 2024, up 12.4 per cent from roughly $196bn in 2023, but it still represents only a modest share of the continent’s total commerce—far below the levels seen in Europe or Asia. The remedies are familiar, which is precisely why delay is harder to excuse: cut non-tariff barriers, improve logistics, invest in energy and digital infrastructure, expand trade finance, and connect economies that still trade too easily with the outside world and too little with one another. Early AfCFTA implementation is beginning to show results, but only at a scale that underlines how much remains to be done. The AfCFTA is not merely a trade agreement. It is a hedge against irrelevance.

The agenda is not mysterious. Africa needs borders that work, ports that move, electricity that holds, payment systems that reduce friction, and industrial policies that turn raw materials into higher-value products before they leave the continent. It also needs the political discipline to treat neighbours less as rivals and more as markets, partners and co-investors. Integration is not charity, ideology or nostalgia. It is self-interest.

The choice is therefore clear. Africa can remain a collection of medium-sized and small economies, exposed in a harsher world and reacting to other people’s strategies. Or it can turn integration from aspiration into policy, and policy into bargaining power. If power is again becoming the main currency of international affairs, the continent will need more of it. In a less rule-bound world, Africa’s best defence will not be another declaration. It will be the steady construction of enough collective economic weight to make its interests harder to ignore.

Anthony Ohemeng-Boamah is an international development and socio-economic transformation specialist. He writes in his personal capacity.