Taiwan has lost all its friends in Africa – except eSwatini

First published by ISS Today

You have to feel for Taiwan. Last week the tiny island state lost yet another African ally, Burkina Faso, to its very big brother Beijing. This leaves it with only one nation on the continent that formally recognises it, the even tinier eSwatini (formerly Swaziland).

Burkina Faso broke formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan on 24 May and two days later re-established formal ties with China. This was in observance of Beijing’s very strictly enforced One China policy, which allows no state to recognise both the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China (aka Taiwan).

But when President Tsai Ing-wen came to power in Taiwan in 2016 that changed, because her Democratic Progressive Party leans more towards independence than the previous Kuomintang ruling party, says Cobus van Staden, senior researcher on China-Africa relations at the South African Institute of International Affairs.

Elsewhere across the globe, Taiwan’s diplomacy has also been in retreat and only 18 countries now recognise it. Most are minute Pacific island states like Kiribati, Nauru, Palau and Tuvalu – which Beijing evidently has its sights on too as part of its strategy to expand its maritime footprint.

Taiwan’s allies also still include a few larger, yet authoritarian, nations like Nicaragua and Guatemala. Plus the Vatican, interestingly.

Clearly, Taiwan hasn’t been able to afford to be too picky in this diplomatic contest with its big and much more highly favoured neighbour, the second largest economy in the world, with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

That lack of real choice also shows clearly in its last ally in Africa, eSwatini, the sole remaining absolute monarchy in Africa. Tsai was the only foreign head of state to attend the country’s 50-50 celebrations last month – 50 years of independence plus King Mswati III’s 50th birthday.

According to Swazi media, Taipei contributed $1.3-million towards the cost of the birthday bash. It also substantially subsidised the latest royal jet at a cost of $30-million.

Does it matter that Taiwan is being forced to retreat from Africa? Most analysts think it’s inevitable and therefore irrelevant. China’s One Policy is seen as so clearly non-negotiable that African states have simply given in to China’s increasingly muscular diplomacy.

Davies believes the so-called Taipei Liaison Offices that Taiwan maintains in many countries with which it doesn’t have formal diplomatic relations (such as South Africa) are good things because through them Taiwan maintains often vibrant economic relations with these countries.

But for Taiwan to go further by pursuing a formal foreign policy and trying to maintain or increase diplomatic ties made no sense, Davies said – it contradicted Taiwan’s policy of not formally declaring independence from China. How could a country that did not formally exist have formal diplomatic relations, he asked.

Davies said he was sure that neither the Taiwanese nor the Swazi people cared whether their governments maintained formal diplomatic relations, and he was sure the Taiwanese people did not appreciate their government funding King Mswati. Much of this is no doubt true and certainly the African friends Taipei has had to make have often not been very savoury.

Despite that, it is also true that even though many Africans aspire to be like the autocratic People’s Republic of China, Taiwan presents in some ways a better model for Africa than its big neighbour. It was a dictatorship that evolved steadily into what is now a fully functioning democracy running a dynamic economy.

And surely it is also unfair to blame Taiwan for the contradiction between being unwilling to declare independence and trying to pursue a foreign policy. The only reason it doesn’t formally declare independence is that that might invite oblivion, visited upon it from across the straits.

A Taiwanese diplomat was once asked why his country persisted in its dogged quest for diplomatic recognition since it seemed to be functioning very well without it. Was this just pointless symbolism? His answer was poignant: “If we don’t continually remind the world of our existence, we might disappear one day and no one would notice.”

So pursuing international recognition is a rather desperate declaration of its existence, not so much an anomaly as yet another manifestation of the profound ambiguity under which Taiwan is forced to live, as ade facto independent state that dare not speak its name. DM