Africa
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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781134705252

ADELPHI PAPERS

NUMBER ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-NINE

South Africa’s Narrowing
Security Options

by Robert S. Jaster
THE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES
23 TAVISTOCK STREET LONDON WC2E 7NQ

ADELPHI PAPER NO. 159

Robert S. Jaster, a free-lance political economist specializing in African affairs, was a Research Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in 1978-79. The views expressed in this Paper are the author’s own and should not be taken to represent the views of the Institute or its members.
First published Spring 1980
ISBN 0 86079 038 X
ISSN 0567-932X
© The International Institute for Strategic Studies 1980 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-copying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies was founded in 1958 as a centre for the provision of information on and research into the problems of international security, defence and arms control in the nuclear age. It is international in its Council and staff, and its membership is drawn from over fifty countries. It is independent of governments and is not the advocate of any particular interest.
The Institute is concerned with strategic questions – not just with the military aspects of security but with the social and economic sources and political and moral implications of the use and existence of armed force: in other words with the basic problems of peace.
The Institute’s publications are intended for a much wider audience than its own membership and are available to the general public on subscription or singly.
Printed in Great Britain by The Eastern Press Ltd, London and Reading.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
I. THE CORE STRATEGY
II. THE FIRST DECADE: THE SEARCH FOR SECURITY
Seeking the Levers of Power
Military Alliance with the West
Promotion of the Status Quo
The African Role
Response to the External Threat
III. FROM SHARPEVILLE TO LISBON
The Immediate Danger
Shifting Threat Perceptions
The New Defence Programme
A New Aggressiveness in Foreign Relations
IV. TOWARDS ‘FORTRESS SOUTHERN AFRICA
The Shrinking White Redoubt
Detente
The Angolan Venture
The Legacy of Soweto
Towards a Garrison State
Deteriorating Relations with the West
Implications of ‘Fortress Southern Africa’
V. OPTIONS FOR THE EIGHTIES
South Africa’s Security Strategy
Options
NOTES

South Africa’s Narrowing Security Options

INTRODUCTION
From the standpoint of Western security interests, South Africa is rapidly becoming a major problem. The white minority government is under mounting world pressure to make fundamental changes in its social and political system. The industrial democracies, which are the only countries with substantial economic leverage over South Africa, have also come under increasing pressure, both from Afro-Asian states and from limited but growing constituencies at home, to start exercising that leverage, even though it would have adverse effects on Western business, trade and investment.
As pressures on South Africa have grown and the West has distanced itself from the government in Pretoria, South Africa’s leaders have been turning to hard-line, often dangerously belligerent, responses. Both the elusive peace in Namibia and South Africa’s gradual slide towards domestic tragedy seem likely to involve the West in some increasingly messy and hazardous situations. Hence a study of South Africa’s security strategy – her changing threat perceptions, her responses and her likely moves during the coming decade – is of direct relevance to international security.
The ultimate goal of national security policy is national survival: the perpetuation of a people with its cultural institutions and national identity intact. To the Afrikaner people (the authentic white tribe of Africa) the issue of national survivial has dominated national life for almost 150 years. Indeed, national survival, as described in 1942 by a future Prime Minister, has come to be imbued with a divine mission:
It is through the will of God that the Afrikaner People exists at all. In His wisdom He determined that on the southern point of Africa … a People should be born who would be the bearer of Christian culture and civilization. He surrounded this People by great dangers …. God also willed that the Afrikaans People should be continually threatened by other Peoples. There was the ferocious barbarian who resisted the intruding Christian civilization and caused the Afrikaner’s blood to flow in streams. There were times when as a result of this the Afrikaner was deeply despairing, but God at the same time prevented the swamping of the young Afrikaner People in the sea of barbarianism.1
The over-riding and ever-present threat perceived by the Afrikaner people has, of course, been precisely this swartgevaar: the fear of being overwhelmed by the black majority. Hence the essential mandate of successive South African governments has been to demonstrate the will and capacity to meet this threat effectively and to maintain white supremacy. But in the years since World War II, and particularly since the official advent of apartheid, South Africa’s leaders have faced the new and growing threat of outside interference in their domestic race policies.2 This threat, which government spokesmen have attributed to radical black nationalism and Western liberalism in the unwitting service of world Communism, has intensified fears of an internal black uprising supported by an external power.
With the National Party (NP) electoral victory in 1948, the fears of the Afrikaner community began to be translated into the domestic and foreign policy initiatives which their leaders thought necessary to ensure national survival. Since then the Government has had virtually a free hand in the area of security policy.
In part this reflects the safe and growing parliamentary majority which the Party has enjoyed since 1958. At a deeper level it is a function of the Afrikaner community’s interlocking leadership. Members of the numerically small Afrikaner elite are well known to one another through former student contacts and membership of the National Party, the Dutch Reformed Church, Afrikaans cultural and business organizations and, of course, the Broederbond.3 The corporate character of Afrikaner leadership ‘has facilitated the formulation of collective goals for Afrikaner organizations and introduced a unity of purpose into corporate Afrikaner action (e.g., “the church” supports the government, “the universities” support “the church” and vice versa)’.4
Through this corporate network the Government has been able to build up a consensus among the Afrikaner élite on the nature of the security threat and the appropriate policies for dealing with it. There is thus a close congruence between rhetoric and action, perceived threat and response. Moreover, this informal system of consensus-building among the élite is reassuring to the Afrikaner public, which sees that its ministers, educators, editors and Members of Parliament (MPS) are supportive of government policy. This, together with the Afrikaner’s general lack of interest in politics, has led to far more public trust in Government and a less critical electorate than in the Western democracies. It remains to be seen, of course, how far this almost blind faith may have been shaken by the ‘Muldergate’ scandal, which exposed a substantial degree of corruption among the ruling élite.
A second notable feature of the South African system has to do with the notion of ‘strategy’. Although South Africa is a remote, third-ranking country in terms of the influence she can bring to bear on great-power politics, her leaders have consistently viewed South Africa as having significant military, economic and political roles to play in global, as well as regional, affairs. This may reflect simply the Afrikaner élite’s sense of a God-given purpose and design to all events, or it may be due to some deep-seated psychological need to link South Africa to the European mainstream. Whatever the cause, the result has been the formulation of security policies to accord with the leadership’s current perspective on global trends and their implications for South Africa. This is not to say that the assessments have necessarily been correct; indeed, as argued in this Paper, defective security policies have resulted from distorted perceptions of threat and misreadings of the motives and likely behaviour of foreign actors. The point here is that South Africa’s policies, domestic and foreign, have generally been formulated as part of the leadership’s comprehensive strategy at the time, rather than as isolated, ad hoc responses to particular events.5
This Paper will analyse South Africa’s security strategies under National Party rule. The factors informing the leadership’s changing perception of internal and external threats will be identified, and the strategy and policies adopted in response will be discussed. Particular attention will be given to the marked shift in threat perception after 1975 and its impact on policy. The concluding section will assess South Africa’s security options in the 1980s and their implications for the West.

I. THE CORE STRATEGY

In 1948 the National Party, the major party of the Afrikaners, came to power on its platform of apartheid: racial separateness. This was understood to mean much more than mere ‘park bench’ segregation or white job preference, both of which have been features of South African society for over a century. It meant the social, political and territorial separation of the races. Its most radical aspect, of course, was the proposal to create tribal ‘homelands’ or Bantustans, for each of South Africa’s major tribal groups. Blacks would be allowed political expression and permanent residence rights only within their assigned tribal areas.
This concept of separate development, often called ‘grand apartheid’, provided National Party leaders with a long-sought ideology for unifying the Afrikaner nation.1 On the ideological level it offered a solution to ‘the native problem’, which the Afrikaner people could accept as being ordained by God and resonant with their own national experienc...

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