While the ending of apartheid was heralded both as a “miracle”
and as a “new beginning”, these claims are more reflective of the hyperbole which drives everyday political analysis rather than a recognition that the true compass of international relations is to be gleaned by understanding [124] the long duree and the limitations of language. So, and on this we must be clear, continuity rather than change has marked South Africa’s strategic and foreign policy in the twenty and more years since the bright February day in 1990 when Nelson Mandela walked from his prison cell.
Well, perhaps a qualification is (or a series of them are) necessary around the idea of continuity. Of course, everything changed on all the country’s fronts. South Africa’s long isolation was formally ended but, alas, the country’s domestication into the ways and the whims of the globalisation regime that accompanied the end of the Cold War turned the one-time pariah into what British commentators breathlessly proclaimed was “just another country”. After four years of “Mandela Mania”, the country was returned to the international status quo, a place where national interest (measured in the technical language of markets) were to trump human rights every time.
Certainly, rhetorically, the latter were important for the post-apartheid state. In a powerful piece published in the blue ribbon American journal, Foreign Affairs, Mandela (then President of the ANC and not of the country) had written that “human rights will be the lights that guide our foreign policy” 186. This claim of exceptionalism, as Kai Holsti has recently pointed out 187, was a product both of the relatively peaceful ending of apartheid and the embrace that the post-apartheid state enjoyed internationally. However, a foreign policy based on
186 Nelson Mandela. “South Africa’s future foreign policy”, Foreign Affairs, November-December 1993, vol 72 no 5, p. 88.
187 Kai Holsti, “Exceptionalism in American foreign policy : Is it exceptional ?”
European Journal of International Relations, 2011, vol 17 no 3, p. 381-404.
human rights was called “radical” by a succession of commentators 188 whose intent was to reassert into the debate around the post-apartheid state the ideological end of mainstream international relations thinking. This too was a form of domestication which would end, alongside other pressures, with the new government’s decision to abandon a Keynesian-driven macro-economic policy called the Reconstruction and Development Program (the [125] RDP) and replace it with a home-grown form of neo-liberalism known by its acronym GEAR (Growth, Economic and Redistribution Programme).
Other things changed, too. And, of these, a few linked directly with the Atlantic. Caught off-guard (or quite simply, conned) by an international arms industry, post-apartheid South Africa purchased US$ 3 billion of new armaments. The deal included (almost) an entire new navy : corvettes, submarines and helicopters. The age of so-called strike-craft naval defence was over : the country now had a small (but in its region, not insignificant) deep-sea capacity. What has South Africa’s government made of this ? If truth be told, not very much – and we should add, mercifully. Periodically, the country’s ships have been used to stage peace-talks, as in the 1996/7 talks over the collapsing situation in the country once called Zaire (now the DRC) which were staged on the South African vessel, Outeniqua, which was moored in the Atlantic at the mouth of the Congo River.
A newly published book on South Africa’s foreign policy (roughly from 1910 to 2010) makes no mention of Atlantic issues, for example 189. And, James Barber’s review of “Mandela’s World”, as he called his 2004 book on the early days of post-apartheid foreign policy, is also devoid of any mention of the Atlantic 190. So, and using the language of mainstream international relations, what have been South Africa’s foreign policy and strategic interests these past twenty years ? Difficult to say, really. If anything, the country’s international
188 See for instance Merle Lipton, “Understanding South Africa’s foreign policy : the perplexing case of Zimbabwe” South African Journal of International Affairs, December 2009, vol. 16 no 3, p.341.
189 Chris Landsberg. The Diplomacy of Transformation. South African Foreign Policy and Statecraft, Johannesburg. Macmillan, 2010, 313 p.
190 James Barber. Mandela’s World. The International Dimension of South Africa’s Political Revolution 1990-99, Cape Town, James Currey, 2004, 224 p.
relations have seemed anathematic to the issue of change. To be fair, the need to change the culture of the ministry charged with running policy has been difficult and, given political rather than strategic imperative, this must be judged to be a success. But hopes that the policy could be owned by [126] the country’s people have not borne fruit, nor has much been yielded.
So, the high hopes of the immediate post-apartheid years – the Mandela years – have faded. Unsurprisingly, there are many reasons for this, but the five which follow help to open a wider arc of understanding. Of course, the glow of the early Mandela years could not be sustained. But beyond the banal observation that nothing lasts forever, a more instructive lesson is tapped from the idea of exceptionalism. Following Holsti’s lights 191, each country which has gone through a revolution considers itself the inheritor of a distinctive international responsibility : America, France, the Soviet Union, each adopted this position. So, it is that South Africa in the glow of overcoming the apartheid scourge understood it had an international destiny. The Mandela piece, which has already crossed our paths in this essay, was a manifestation of that calling.
More prosaically, and drawing from the change in the country’s macro-economic policy, South Africa was seduced by the easy logic of the Globalisation discourse with its ready lexicon of free and open markets and liberal democracy. The image of a borderless and peaceful world in which they would play a leading role was promoted both by intellectuals, like the Yale historian Paul Kennedy’s “Pivotal State Theory” 192, and by South African-based think tanks like the South African Institute of International Affairs. Borrowing an insight from Michel Foucault 193, the role played by the disciplining language of modernity was difficult – no, it was impossible – for South Africa to resist.
Thirdly, and not insignificantly, the cause of liberal internationalism, which was deeply enmeshed in the [127] modernist
191 Holsti, supra note 12.
192 Robert S. Chase , Paul M. Kennedy and Emily Hill, dir, The Pivotal States : A New Framework for U.S. in the Developing World, New York, W W Norton & Co Inc, 1998, 445 p.
193 See Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, 275 p.
and celebratory impulse of Globalisation, was attractive to South African policy-makers. For one thing, South Africa’s role in the Southern African region, whatever form it was to take, was legitimised by the ending of apartheid 194. The slowly deterioration in neighbouring Zimbabwe and the uncertainty in the Lilliputian states around South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland in particular, created new responsibilities for South Africa. Together with these developments, much of the logic of apartheid which had focused on security was reworked as particular constructed imperative, pushed by new think-tanks, of what was called the “New” South Africa. This, a commanding idea, saw the country as facing a range of new threats : from threats to the personal, like crime or HIV/AIDS, to threats to the country’s political achievements, like migration, an issue tapped from the Fortress Europe notion. The resolution of this myriad of closely linked issues was seen in the country’s invasion of the micro-state of Lesotho, in 1998, in order to secure the country’s embattled prime minister –an event which was followed weeks later by the US invasion of Haiti to restore Jean Bertrand Aristide to power.
Then, and drawing on the security issue, South Africa’s Second President, Thabo Mbeki, almost single-handedly overturned the established routines of African security which were enshrined in the Charter of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) 195. The latter had been formed in 1963 paradoxically to encourage the desire of a united Africa and to guarantee the sovereignty of individual African states.
The OAU overcame the resulting schizophrenia by the ancillary interest in furthering the momentum of independence on the continent and, importantly, in opposing both minority rule and apartheid. By the mid-1990s, however, the continental [128] organisation was ready for a make-over : the thorny issue of minority-rule in the then Rhodesia
194 Christopher Saunders, “South Africa and ‘Southern Africa’ : What relationship in 2011” in John Daniel et al, eds, New South African Review 2 : New Paths, Old Compromises ? Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 2011, p.3.
195 On Mbeki’s handling of foreign policy, see Peter Vale, “Thabo Mbeki and the Great Foreign Policy Riddle” in Daryl Glaser, ed, Mbeki and After.
Reflections on the Legacy of Thabo Mbeki Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 2010, p. 242-62 ; Peter Vale and Georgina Barrett. “The Curious Career of an African Moderniser : South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki”
Contemporary Politics, 2010, vol. 15, no 4, pp. 445-60.
was resolved, the long-drawn out dispute over Namibia has been satisfactorily resolved and, of course, apartheid had ended. Almost as important, the Cold War had ended and the organisational language of international politics had changed gear. Africa’s make-over took the form of a commitment to union, loosely based on the refurbished European Union (indeed, the continent called its new program the African Union). The new organisation drew its grammar on security – and, indeed, from economics – the emerging discourse of the post-Cold War world. These were imbued with the surveillance routines and controlling values of neo-liberal economics and bent themselves towards neo-conservative thinking on security. In a formal way this neo-neo framing of the search for African integration in the late-20th Century were drawn together in the New Economic Program for Africain Development (NEPAD) which was the brain-child of South Africa’s then President, Thabo Mbeki.
In a real way, these wider commitments and the country’s embrace of neo-liberalism drew it away from its earlier undertakings to anchor and further build the sub-region. Its foreign policy documents were increasingly permeated with the 19th Century idea of ‘national interest’ – the all-embracing concept used so often to justify political preferences. Through this, the new South African government followed upon the country’s long simulation of Britain’s narrow approach to the idea of sovereignty. While this closed rhetoric may have satisfied markets, it caused some confusion in a region which in the aftermath of apartheid was more fluid than it previously had been.
As a result, while the South Africa state (following the idea of Fortress Europe) reinforced its borders, both formally and informally, more and more Southern [129] Africans were drawn to the region’s richest country, South Africa. Not a little of the sporadic and often very violent outbursts of xenophobia in South Africa are explained by this. Interesting too, while its borders formally hardened as did the region’s people towards the former apartheid state, South African business moved into the African hinterland to seek out new and profitable markets.
The resulting paradox only reinforced the centuries-long ambiguity between South Africa and its neighbours. So, while the country accounts for 60 per cent of the region’s GDP and, far and away, enjoys access to the region’s strongest military force, history and
politics offer different optics to understand options. The complex issue of Zimbabwe is a case in point. The two countries were torn asunder in 1926 in a fraught decision made by less than 2500 votes (this is just about the same number as the student count of undergraduates currently enrolled in a first year Economics class at one of South Africa’s larger universities). The Enlightenment debates around emancipation which would (a mere 15 years later) come to dominate the region’s politics were entirely absent in the debate on the Rhodesian Referendum. Instead, the decision of White Rhodesians to eschew the link with the Union of South Africa was almost the last gasp of the appeal of British Imperialism in Southern Africa. The formal closing of the border between the two states, which was only formalised on the ending of apartheid, took almost five decades.