Adrift in the wider world without a moral compass
News that SA has been overtaken economically by Egypt underlines the foreign policy failures -- in both practice and principle -- of the ANC government, writes Mills Soko
AREPORT claiming that South Africa has been eclipsed by Egypt as Africa’s second-largest economy has sparked fears and concerns about the country’s economic and moral decline. It has also highlighted the necessity for South Africa to recast its foreign policy and use it as a tool to advance national prosperity and restore its role in the global community.
At the dawn of democracy in 1994, the ANC government successfully developed sound normative foundations — based on the ideals of fairness, justice and human rights — from which to shape South Africa’s foreign policy approach.
South African foreign policy reflected a desire to integrate the country into the global system. In this context, South Africa became an active champion of multilateralism. At the same time, South Africa’s foreign policy mindset, sensitive to the country’s chequered history, sought to establish an image as an internationally responsible actor.
A strong supporter of the African Union and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, South Africa played a pivotal role in reshaping the security discourse in Africa. The South African government expended enormous financial and diplomatic capital on efforts to promote development and end conflicts in several countries on the continent.
The apartheid-era policy of regional destabilisation made way for a policy that emphasised dialogue and mediation as the key means of conflict resolution.
However, in spite of its strong normative underpinnings, South African foreign policy under the ANC government has experienced moral decline and failed to keep pace with the dynamic and rapidly evolving international environment.
A number of limitations are worth highlighting in this regard.
First, our country has lost the moral authority and international respect it enjoyed when it became a democracy. This has largely to do with our failure to understand the complexity of formulating foreign policy positions in a rapidly changing global context.
The most troubling facet of our foreign policy is the failure to consistently align our policies with the human rights principles of our constitution. We have taken positions in the multilateral arena — on vexed issues such as Zimbabwe, Darfur and Myanmar — that are at variance with our human rights principles.
Second, South Africa’s global standing has been diminished by the ceding of our country’s national sovereignty to appease foreign powers such as China, as the case of the Dalai Lama’s unsuccessful visa applications to visit South Africa showed.
Third, our foreign policy has failed to articulate a clear approach that is aligned to South Africa’s normative values, its developmental role and its commercial interests. With respect to the latter, South Africa’s existing foreign policy doctrine lacks a strategic intent to pursue commercial opportunities in Africa and across the world.
Fourth, the damage done to South Africa’s image during apartheid has continued to have a disproportionate influence on the country’s foreign policy agenda. In relation to Africa, this has manifested in a belief within the ANC that South Africa owes a historical debt to the continent.
As a result, the ANC government has been loath to publicly express its leadership intentions in Africa, while also shying away from criticising the actions of other African governments.
Fifth, the ANC government’s policy provides little evidence of any fundamental shift in South Africa’s foreign policy doctrine and does not even make reference to key policy frameworks such as the National Development Plan.
Last, foreign policy thinking and pronouncements have been dominated by radical views and populist rhetoric rather than real substance. There has been a tendency, for example, to articulate a foreign policy approach that is grounded in exclusive multilateralism, which itself is suggestive of opposition to the West.
This posits a foreign policy thinking that is framed in accordance with a narrow conceptualisation of the world as structured along traditional North and South divides. This neglects the fact that, in reality, the international political economy is more dispersed in nature, with many countries sharing interests that straddle the traditional North-South dichotomy.
Our foreign policy must reflect the human rights principles of our constitution, and promote international justice and law. Moreover, our foreign policy needs to outline a clear policy approach that is aligned to South Africa’s normative values, its developmental role, and its commercial interests.
We need to understand the rapidly changing global context and its consequences for our foreign policy. We must provide greater clarity on our foreign policy objectives and ensure that these are in tune with our economic diplomacy efforts.
The structural shifts in the global economy present our country with abundant opportunities to promote its national economic interests. But they also present our country with risks. We must exploit these op- portunities optimally while managing the risks.
We must use foreign policy as a mechanism to foster national prosperity. This means that there must be a clear link between our foreign policy and our economic development policies and strategies. Foreign policy must promote domestic socio-economic and developmental needs.
We must use our strong position as an African country to provide leadership, especially on regional integration processes, and to forge strong, mutually beneficial relationships on a continent that is undergoing major economic changes. We need to recognise the role that foreign policy can play in furthering our country’s economic interests, especially in Africa.
We must desist from defining foreign policy in terms of a parochial framing of the world as structured along traditional North and South divides. Cultivating strong relations with countries of the Global South is important and in our country’s interest, but this must not happen at the expense of our relations with established developed-country partners.
Our external engagements must not be guided by ideological whims, but by a strategic paradigm that is rooted in our country’s domestic needs and central interests.
Our foreign policy must present a priority list of countries with which we should deepen relations. It must also delineate a clear strategy for South Africa’s participation in multilateral processes.
We must develop a strategic approach to migration. Our failure to articulate policies that attract and retain skills for our competitiveness has left us in a situation where we have the worst of all sides of migration.
Our failure to protect our borders has created a huge burden of uncontrolled economic and political refugees. And the waves of xenophobic attacks and inadequate responses to public violence and abuses of human rights of foreign nationals have undermined our standing in Africa and internationally.
South Africa is now faced with serious political, economic and constitutional challenges. Yet it remains a dynamic country with significant potential. One of the key requirements of harnessing this potential is to alter our foreign policy thinking and approach in order to reclaim our place in the world community and meet contemporary political, economic, security and diplomatic challenges.
Soko is an associate professor at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business
Foreign policy thinking has been dominated by radical views and populist rhetoric rather than real substance
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