ANC woolly and chaotic on foreign policy
As the ANC prepares for its policy conference this week, it is worth assessing the discussion document from its national executive committee’s international relations subcommittee, entitled The ANC in an Unpredictable and Uncertain World.
SA is Africa’s most industrialised country, the only African strategic partner of the EU, the only African country in the Brazil, Russia, India, China and SA (Brics) grouping and the Group of 20.
SA is also one of the world’s most unequal societies, and there was an expectation that this document would outline clear strategies on how to link the pursuit of foreign policy to alleviating poverty at home. However, it is not only the world that is unpredictable and uncertain, but this poorly crafted and analytically weak document that is devoid of a clear understanding of the world and SA’s place in it.
The introduction talks of the decline of “imperialism” and the “unjust nature of global capitalism”, without explaining these terms. It highlights emerging economies registering higher growth rates than the rich world without seeming to recognise the decline of these growth rates in Africa, built largely on Chinese purchase of commodities.
The document fails to acknowledge slowing growth in India and Brazil and does not engage with the fact that the Brics are more status quo powers seeking more influence in institutions of global governance — the World Bank, IMF, UN and the World Trade Organisation — rather than acting as revisionist powers seeking to overturn an unjust system.
It uses undefined terms like “national interest” and woolly phrases such as “ubuntu diplomacy” and “progressive internationalism”, as if phraseology can be a substitute for concrete strategy. It adopts a Manichean view of the world in which unnamed “progressive” forces are battling invisible “reactionary” global imperialists, patriarchy and neocolonialism. It calls quixotically for a “just, equitable, nonracial, nonpatriarchal, diverse, democratic and equal world system” without telling us how we might get there.
It sloganeers about a “new imperialism under the leadership of the US” as if the advent of President Donald Trump has suddenly changed six decades of US behaviour in the world. It condemns a “swing to the right in the global North” without recognising the recent defeat of extreme parties in France and the Netherlands.
In the section on SA’s role in Africa, there is euphoric talk of eradicating poverty in one generation, using institutions such as the Southern African Development Community and the AU, without assessing the performance of these donor-dependent organisations over the past two decades and proposing ways in which they might be strengthened.
The AU’s alchemic 50-year vision, Agenda 2063, is enthusiastically embraced without saying how it can be implemented in ways that complement the Sustainable Development Goals.
There are no reflections on the implications of SA withdrawing its 800 peacekeepers from Sudan’s Darfur region in 2016 or declining to play a prominent peacemaking role in Burundi. Nothing is said about the negative consequences of recurring xenophobic attacks on African citizens.
It is disappointing that one of the world’s most successful liberation movements — which relied enormously on international solidarity and a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the world under Oliver Tambo — could produce such an analytically shallow and intellectually weak document.
Surely, comrades deserve to debate a more thoughtful document given the importance of SA’s foreign policy to transforming its domestic economy.