Foreign policy ideas vacuum
UNDERSTANDING South Africa’s foreign policy has proved elusive these 20-odd years past. The brilliant cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro (Zapiro) once drew a cartoon likening the country’s foreign policy to “great unresolved mysteries”.
In retrospect, Zapiro’s was a harsh judgment. Over the past two decades, it has not been easy for any country – let alone a newly freed one, like post-apartheid South Africa – to understand the rapidly changing world. Why has this been so? to big conversions like these, as well as immediate ideas from within the liberation movement and elsewhere in the country.
Navigating these choppy ideational waters was not easy especially in the first five years when Nelson Mandela’s global standing – and his rockstar fame – raised expectations that South Africa could be all things to people the world over.
The notion was that Mandela’s triumphant story represented the success of human rights as a normative force in global affairs – an idea that had been a feature of international relations in the postWorld War 2 era. Such hopes were fanned by an article published in the world’s most influential foreign policy journal penned by the soon-to-be president. The article advanced ideas on the country’s future foreign policy.
But the real conceptual shape, not to mention policy substance, had to wait for the presidency of Thabo Mbeki. He fully took the country into an historical tryst with the African continent.
Mbeki’s evocative oratory and sharp analysis drew on the idea of African Renaissance, which enjoyed currency in PanAfricanist circles. In practice it would reshape continental institutions. So the Organisation of African Union became the African Union. It would also secure Nepad, a self-policing mechanism for the affairs of the continent.
But Mbeki’s foreign policy ideas and his ambitious African agenda were slowly obstructed by the factionalism that gave way in Polokwane, the ANC gathering that saw Mbeki lose power to Zuma. in June’s perfect storm over the visit by the Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir.
The country’s early commitment to the protection of human rights by joining International Criminal Court clashed with its commitment to Africa. And, to add anguish to agony, simple-minded experts, particularly among security analysts, could only see al-Bashir through the clash of civilisations optic.
Most recently it has become clear the central idea in the making of South Africa’s foreign policy has shifted again – towards the notion of the “national interest”.
The idea of putting “interest” at the centre of foreign policy making is not new. Its most famous enunciation was made in 1848 by the then-British foreign secretary and later prime minister, Lord Palmerson. As he put it: “We have no external allies, and we have no perpetual interests. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
The idea that national interest – and national interest alone – should determine a country’s foreign policy is much criticised, notwithstanding that many countries nowadays use it to chart their respective foreign policies.
Critics believe the idea of the national interest is devoid of any real content. As a result, it can be easily appropriated (or simply manipulated) by sectional interests either within a ruling party, or within the country itself.
In the South African context this idea is worrying because there has been no clear definition of what constitutes the national interest – even though, as rumour has it, Cabinet has adopted a paper on this topic.
The rumour is worrying enough. What is more troubling is a supporting rumour that the unreleased draft of South Africa’s ideas on national interest was prepared by experts close to national intelligence.
New and interesting ideas matter most for policy when they are openly debated. But introducing national interest into this debate in South Africa seems to have got off to a bad start.
Professor Peter Vale is director of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg. This article and cartoon are from The Conversation