South Africa’s foreign policy: Is there method in the madness?

These are difficult times in which to defend South Africa’s foreign policy. In October 2016, Justice Minister Michael Masutha announced that South Africa had given notice of its intention to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC). After a high court ruling that the decision was “hasty, irrational and unconstitutional”, however, South Africa had to formally revoke its ICC withdrawal in March this year. The whole episode was an embarrassment for Pretoria, and served as confirmation for critics seeking evidence that South Africa’s foreign policy is in an idealistic and practical morass.

Perhaps it’s just as well, then, that Dr Oscar van Heerden’s new book, Consistent or Confused? The politics of Mbeki’s foreign policy 1995-2007, takes as its focus a previous era of South African foreign policy. Nonetheless, Van Heerden does occasionally broaden his ambit to take in more recent events.

He points out, for instance, that the 2015 furore over Omar al-Bashir was not the first time the South African government had to deal with the question of whether or not to host the Sudanese president in the country.

On the occasion of Kgalema Motlanthe’s inauguration as president in 2009, the government gave the issue “careful consideration”, Van Heerden writes, and ultimately decided that President al-Bashir should be invited – “but that his invitation should include a quiet, carefully crafted note discouraging him from accepting the invitation, lest the South African government be forced to fulfil its obligations as outlined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court”.

That detail suggests a level of intellectual engagement about such matters missing from the current administration’s foreign policy approach. But the fact that the government would, in 2015, choose to prioritise a misplaced sense of continental solidarity with the Sudanese leader above its commitments to international law instruments is actually largely in keeping with South Africa’s foreign policy principles since democracy.

To illustrate what those principles were in the Mbeki era, Van Heerden focuses on three aspects: South Africa’s voting record at the United Nations while a non-permanent member of the Security Council; Pretoria’s approach to the Zimbabwe crisis at the turn of the century, and its first bilateral trade agreement with the European Union in 2000.

South Africa was a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council (UNSC) from October 2006 to October 2008. During this time, South Africa voted four times (out of 152 resolutions) in a controversial manner: against sanctions against problematic regimes in Myanmar and Zimbabwe, against the classification of rape as a weapon of war, and against sanctions against Iran for its nuclear programme.

These choices raised many eyebrows, but through Van Heerden’s lens they make more sense. In most of these cases, he writes, South Africa argued that the matters did not belong on the UNSC agenda because they did not constitute a threat to international security and were better dealt with by what would become the UN’s Human Rights body.

But there was an ideological aspect to South Africa’s voting record as well: its opposition from the start to the domination of world affairs by the small cluster of powerful nations which constituted the UNSC’s permanent members. In the case of Iran, Van Heerden writes that South Africa objected to the double standards of an agenda which saw a blind eye turned to Israel’s nuclear capabilities.

When it came to Zimbabwe, moreover, South Africa voted against further sanctions imposed on the Mugabe regime with an eye firmly fixed on its regional relationships. The notion of “African solutions for African problems” has been one of the major drivers of South African foreign policy, together with a desire to avoid being seen to bow to Western powers.

Van Heerden suggests that Mbeki was adamant not to repeat one of Nelson Mandela’s experiences in the arena of foreign policy in the mid-1990s. At that time, Mandela’s pleas to Nigerian leader Sani Abacha not to execute political activists including Ken Saro-Wiwa fell on deaf ears.

“Mandela had pursued this line under tremendous pressure from the Commonwealth countries at the time,” Van Heerden writes. “This was viewed negatively by many SADC [Southern African Development Community] member states as an example of South Africa being the puppet of the Western member countries.”

Mbeki was determined to avoid this stigma, and brought this determination into South Africa’s position on Zimbabwe in the early 2000s. South Africa’s “quiet diplomacy” towards its northern neighbour – an approach characterised by Van Heerden as “a combination of measures that include behind-the-scene engagements, secret negotiations and subtle coaxing” – became the subject of frustration and mockery from critics.

The differences in how the Zimbabwean situation was perceived came down to a question of focus, Van Heerden proposes. “While external Western actors focused on human rights violations, electoral fraud and the breakdown of the rule of law in Zimbabwe, South Africa generally described the problem as one of unequal land distribution and the failure of Great Britain to meet its postcolonial responsibilities. In addition, South Africa focused on regional coherence and stability, and the avoidance of a spill-over of Zimbabwe’s crisis into the rest of the region.”

From the perspective of 2017, there is little doubt that the Zimbabwean crisis has spilled into the rest of the region anyway. But how much more devastating could a Western military intervention have proved, long-term? We have the evidence of Iraq to turn to. Van Heerden notes that erstwhile British Prime Minister Tony Blair has since admitted that he was only stopped from a military intervention to depose Mugabe by the resistance of Zimbabwe’s neighbours.

That resistance was not out of any personal love for Mugabe: Van Heerden cites sources close to the negotiations between South Africa and Zimbabwe who say that Mbeki viewed Mugabe as a disgrace to his beloved “African Renaissance” and wanted him gone. Mbeki was also aware, however, that parroting the West’s line on regime change in Zimbabwe gave strength to Mugabe’s self-positioning as the only steadfast anti-imperial leader on the continent.

South Africa’s relationship with its neighbours in the democratic era has been a complex one. “On the one hand, SADC members view South Africa with scepticism, and refer to it as the new imperialist power that wants to take over and dominate the region,” writes Van Heerden; “on the other hand, they neglect issues such as good governance and economic diversification, remaining ever more reliant on the South African economy”.

From an economic perspective, the Free Trade Agreement with the European Union in 2000 caused much regional tension, because “South Africa opted to negotiate with a major global economy without taking its SADC partners into consideration”. The EU offered rapid reintegration into the global economy in a way that South Africa’s regional partners did not, so Pretoria’s decision to negotiate individually with the EU made sense. This caused friction among other SADC nations, however, bringing to the fore long-simmering resentment over South Africa’s economic growth and opportunities and its exceptional status on the continent in the global view.

While South Africa paid lip service to SADC being the centrepiece of its economic foreign policy, this is not borne out by trade data, which shows how much more significant Europe has been as a trading partner.

The EU Free Trade Agreement case is an example of an instance where Van Heerden describes South Africa’s foreign policy as “sometimes confused”. In general, however, the scholar finds its approaches fairly consistent.

South Africa has not always acted in line with the expectation of its global allies, Van Heerden suggests, but it has acted in concert with its commitment to being a regional leader while not being seen as a “malevolent hegemon”, and being accepted as an arbitrator of regional challenges for the world. One of the problems has been that of PR, in Van Heerden’s view: that the government’s objectives and modus operandi have not always been communicated effectively.

“Its foreign policy behaviour has clearly not been in keeping with the expectations of the West and how it would have wanted to see progress on the continent. The most acute example of this is the case of Zimbabwe,” Van Heerden concludes. “Despite this, SA foreign policy is certainly not as confused, disparate and ill-conceived as many scholars and policy-makers imply.” DM