Foreign Policy in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Security, Diplomacy and Trade

Adekeye Adebajo, Kudrat Virk, Adekeye Adebajo, Kudrat Virk

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781788310826
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786723321
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Economics

South Africa is the most industrialized power in Africa. It was rated the continent's largest economy in 2016 and is the only African member of the G20. It is also the only strategic partner of the EU in Africa. Yet despite being so strategically and economically significant, there is little scholarship that focuses on South Africa as a regional hegemon.
This book provides the first comprehensive assessment of South Africa's post-Apartheid foreign policy. Over its 23 chapters - -and with contributions from established Africa, Western, Asian and American scholars, as well as diplomats and analysts - the book examines the current pattern of the country's foreign relations in impressive detail. The geographic and thematic coverage is extensive, including chapters on: the domestic imperatives of South Africa's foreign policy; peace-making; defence and security; bilateral relations in Southern, Central, West, Eastern and North Africa; bilateral relations with the US, China, Britain, France and Japan; the country's key external multilateral relations with the UN; the BRICS economic grouping; the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group (ACP); as well as the EU and the World Trade Organization (WTO).
An essential resource for researchers, the book will be relevant to the fields of area studies, foreign policy, history, international relations, international law, security studies, political economy and development studies.

PART I

KEY THEMES IN SOUTH AFRICA’S
FOREIGN POLICY

CHAPTER 1

THE DOMESTIC IMPERATIVES OF SOUTH AFRICA’S FOREIGN POLICY

Chris Landsberg

While an extensive body of work on post-apartheid South Africa’s diplomacy has emerged since 1994, the domestic imperatives of foreign policy and diplomacy have received relatively little attention. What we have seen instead are works about domestic “actors” in South Africa’s foreign policy, and actors and agents are typically – and wrongly – conflated and confused as “domestic sources”, or drivers and imperatives of foreign policy. From a source-based and textual analysis perspective, there is little doubt that, during the course of the past two decades, policymakers in Tshwane (Pretoria) have implicitly and explicitly operated on the assumption that there was a clear link between domestic politics and foreign policy as they sought to consolidate constitutional democracy and to address the scourges of poverty and inequality at home, while transforming South Africa from a global pariah into a responsible global citizen and seeking to address inequalities both at home and globally between the global South and the industrialised North.

From the presidency of Nelson Mandela in 1994 to the one of Jacob Zuma since 2009, successive governments in Tshwane have worked on the assumption that foreign and domestic policies are inextricably intertwined, with the former driven by the latter. Primary sources on South Africa’s foreign policy are littered with statements and verbal commitments underscoring the fact that South Africa’s foreign policy is driven by domestic goals. As such, the stated and articulated domestic agenda of South Africa’s foreign policy has contained political and socio-economic dimensions from the outset. In 2005, for example, the then Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) in Tshwane – now the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) – explicitly argued that the domestic goal of foreign policy was to “help overcome the challenges of the second economy”.¹ It was Thabo Mbeki who in May 1998 invoked the idea that South Africa was a country of “two economies” and of “two nations” – a poor and underdeveloped one, typically belonging to the majority population, and a wealthy and “First World” one in which the participants typically come from apartheid’s privileged sectors.² In a speech in 2003, Mbeki opined:

Our country is characterised by two parallel economies … The First Economy is modern, produces the bulk of our country’s wealth, and is integrated within the global economy. The Second Economy (or the Marginalised economy) is characterised by underdevelopment, contributes little to GDP [gross domestic product], contains a big percentage of our population, incorporates the poorest of our rural and urban poor, is structurally disconnected from both the first and global economy, and is incapable of self-generated growth and development.³

This is the “second economy” that Mbeki referred to and the one that the country’s foreign policy was forced to seek to redress and overcome.

In line with Mbeki’s “two economies/two nations” analogy, the African National Congress’s (ANC) Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) of 1994 also noted: “Our history has been a bitter one dominated by colonialism, racism, apartheid, sexism and repressive labour policies. The result is that poverty and degradation exist side by side with modern cities and a developed mining, industrial and commercial infrastructure. Our income distribution is racially distorted and ranks as one of the most unequal in the world – lavish wealth and poverty characterise our society.”⁴ Like the “two nations”⁵ theory, the RDP raised the notion of a schizophrenic society, deeply divided, and facing high levels of trauma, brought about by decades of white minority domination and repression. It is these features that the country’s foreign policy was also expected to help overcome.

In terms of President Jacob Zuma’s government, since 2009 this administration has consistently declared South Africa to be “open for business”, thus again highlighting the need for the country to engage in business and commercial activities that would help it to address the huge poverty and inequality gaps left by apartheid.⁶ In 2010, during state visits to India, Russia, China and Brazil, President Zuma repeatedly vowed that South Africa is “open for business, in a big way”,⁷ highlighting issues of investment, trade and economic diplomacy so as to build “a developmental economy that is able to serve the needs of the people of our country and be an engine of economic development for our region and the continent and beyond”.⁸ For Zuma too, therefore, we see a centrality of domestic economic considerations in the country’s foreign policymaking, with the search for market and economic opportunities abroad, almost in “cargo-cult” fashion, supposed to translate into major dividends at home.

Tshwane’s rhetoric has clearly placed domestic imperatives at the heart of South Africa’s foreign policy agenda over the past two decades, begging the following questions: What are the particular domestic objectives to which South African diplomacy has sought to contribute since the transition to democracy in 1994? How have successive South African governments sought to ensure that their regional, continental and international strategies have a concrete impact on the domestic agenda? To what extent has South Africa’s foreign policy been successful in this endeavour, and what are the challenges that it has faced?

The central argument of this chapter is that research investigating the link between external affairs and nation-building, democracy consolidation and economic growth in the conduct of South Africa’s foreign policy has been almost totally neglected. Even less attention has been paid to the socio-economic domestic drivers of the country’s foreign policy. There is thus a need to fill an important gap here, and this chapter hopes to make a contribution in this regard by unpacking the domestic socio-economic imperatives of South Africa’s foreign policy.

On the Concept of Domestic Imperatives

“All politics is local”, goes the aphorism coined by former Speaker of the United States (US) House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill. There is thus a symbiotic relationship between domestic and foreign policy. States pursue foreign policy strategies that are in large measure driven by domestic considerations and fundamentals. Domestic considerations are indeed the lifeblood of foreign policy. In American scholar Robert Putnam’s metaphor of politics as a “two-level game”, policymakers are seen as “playing politics on two boards, the domestic and international”, with governments constantly under pressure to address domestic concerns.⁹ As British scholar Christopher Hill further argues, foreign policy elites “must address their own constituents – the ‘inside’ of their own community … They must face the fact that policy outcomes are vulnerable to events which are primarily ‘domestic’ and, conversely, that foreign policy impacts upon domestic politics”.¹⁰ For Hill, the domestic dimensions of foreign policy include constitutional and regime issues, as well as constraints imposed by society, intra-elite disputes and shortage of resources.¹¹

Writing in 1969, American scholar-diplomat Henry Kissinger – a bastion of twentieth-century realism – observed that, in traditional approaches to international relations, “the domestic structure is taken as a given; foreign policy begins where domestic policy ends”.¹² For him, this implies that the stability and legitimacy of domestic structures provide the basis for predictability in a country’s diplomacy, and that they are key to minimising the “temptations to use an adventurous foreign policy to achieve domestic cohesion”.¹³ With respect to the domestic context, American scholar Kal Holsti argued that “the standard purposes of security, welfare, autonomy and prestige derive from a host of historical developments, ideologies, and assumptions about the good life”, for which governments are responsible, and which are based upon trade.¹⁴ What is significant about the two preceding views by Kissinger and Holsti respectively is the inference that stability and cohesion at home allow a country to project itself more successfully abroad and to place security and welfare at the apex of the concerns of states in the international system. So, even in international dealings, domestic cohesion, security and welfare or development rank as key aims of all states.

Writing in their 2001 edited volume, African Foreign Policies: Power and Process, Kenya’s Gilbert Khadiagala and American Terrence Lyons noted that “foreign policy makers attempt to reconcile domestic interests with external circumstances, taking account of the available means, resources, and institutions for doing so”.¹⁵ They further argued that “important to understanding foreign policy are specific domestic and external contexts and interaction between these two environments”.¹⁶ For these scholars, the local and international contexts of foreign policy are thus equally important.

In unpacking the domestic imperatives that underpin the foreign policies of African states, Khadiagala and Lyons also observed that “African foreign policy at the beginning of the twenty-first century is still dominated by overarching constraints on the survival of weak states”.¹⁷ British scholar Christopher Clapham concurred with this point when he opined that, for African elites, foreign policy reflects the continual attempts by elites to manage threats to domestic security and insulate their decision-making from untoward external manipulation.¹⁸ African governing elites thus value their autonomy greatly.

In short, the domestic sources of foreign policy include a range of internal dynamics and drivers that shape the conduct of a country’s diplomacy. If we apply the points raised by Kissinger, Holsti and Khadiagala and Lyons to the South African context, it becomes clear that imperatives such as constitutional consolidation, socio-economic development and addressing poverty and inequality, alongside nation-building and social cohesion, rank as key domestic essentials of South Africa’s foreign policy.

Constitutional and Politico-Economic Imperatives of Diplomacy

The first imperative to consider is that of preserving the hard-won, two-and-a-half-decade domestic political democratic order in South Africa. The country’s peaceful, negotiated transition from apartheid to democracy yielded a national constitution in 1996 that has since become the cornerstone of Tshwane’s domestic policies and international diplomacy. In particular, the country’s central concern with the promotion and protection of human rights is seen by a number of commentators to derive directly from the national constitution (see Fritz in this volume). In the words of South African analyst David Monyae, for example:

South Africa today has one of the most liberal constitutions in the world, with human rights protected in terms of Chapter 2. The Constitution is the supreme law of the Republic and there is a duty on the government to follow its provisions … [D]omestic and foreign policy must both comply with the provisions of the Constitution and therefore it is partly in the context of the Constitution that South Africa’s militancy in international human rights issues since 1994 should be understood.¹⁹

Even before the country’s constitution was adopted in 1996 and before he was elected South Africa’s first post-apartheid president in 1994, Nelson Mandela declared – in a much cited article published in the influential American journal Foreign Affairs in 1993 – that Tshwane would pursue a foreign policy committed to human rights, democracy promotion, justice and international law and a belief in the peaceful settlement of disputes.²⁰ Given the disrespect shown by the disgraced and defeated apartheid system to liberal human rights values, this impulse espoused by one of the most notable victims of white minority rule in South Africa was understandable. Similarly, the ruling ANC stated in 1994 that “belief in and preoccupation with human rights” and “promotion of democracy worldwide” would be central to the country’s post-apartheid foreign policy.²¹ As British academic James Barber opined, this concern with human rights was “broadly interpreted to cover economic, social and environmental as well as political rights”.²² In light of these views, it is easy to discern how the pro-human rights values enshrined in South Africa’s constitution carried over into its post-apartheid diplomacy.

According to South African analyst Garth le Pere and Canadian scholar Chris Alden, Mandela’s foreign policy represented a “human rights crusade”,²³ while South African analyst Anthoni van Nieuwkerk similarly observed that South Africa’s foreign policy was “initially infused with notions of human rights activism”.²⁴ Indeed, at the level of rhetoric, human rights and democracy promotion have continued to feature prominently in the foreign policy narrative of successive post-apartheid governments (s...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Key Themes in South Africa’s Foreign Policy
• Part II: South Africa’s Key Bilateral Relations in Africa
• Part III: South Africa’s Key Multilateral Relations in Africa
• Part IV: South Africa’s Key External Bilateral Relations
• Part V: South Africa’s Key External Multilateral Relations
• Part VI: Concluding Reflections
• Back Cover