1. The African Union is relatively new. The African Union was formed in 2002, replacing the Organization for African Unity, which had been in place since 1963. Its membership is composed of every African nation except Morocco, which withdrew from the OAU in 1984 because it took exception to the OAU's inclusion of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.  "The main overriding idea was to give more prominence to Africa, to make it an organization that had real teeth, that could push Africa on the international stage, that gave it a more unified voice to Africans," said Richard Downie, deputy director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  The diplomatic boost is just one of the reasons the African Union was created. Economic prosperity was another -- the African Union is working toward the formation of a central bank and its own currency similar to the euro -- and there was a desire for Africa to be able to respond to its own security crises with peacekeeping troops and humanitarian aid.  "The idea going forward is that the AU will take more of a lead in trying to come up with solutions to Africa's security problems rather than relying on the international community or the United Nations," Downie said.  2. The African Union has been more effective than its predecessor. The African Union seems to have taken a much more active role than the Organization for African Unity ever did, implementing policies to reduce poverty and corruption. And one of if its most visible actions in recent years has been sending peacekeeping troops to Somalia and Darfur.  The OAU had been criticized for sitting idly while humanitarian crises developed in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Hopes for a Libyan cease-fire were raised briefly this week when it was announced that longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi had agreed, in principle, to the African Union's "road map" proposal for