Working Paper nº 24
From Hegemony to Champion: South Africa and Strategic Balance
21 | 02 | 2007
Kurt Shillinger
South African Institute of International Affairs

Folheto

Folheto

During the 30 years leading up to the end of the Cold War and shortly thereafter the dismantling of the apartheid state in South Africa, southern Africa had been characterised by a tense balance between an aggressive hegemon and its restless neighbours. The region was simultaneously engaged in forging cooperation and pulling itself apart. South Africa’s economy not only dwarfed all others but also anchored, shaped and/or distorted them. Men from across the region were sucked into the migrant labour system feeding South Africa’s mining industry. Railways, ports and power grids were developed to serve South Africa’s needs. As Chester Crocker notes,

the weight and influence of South Africa could be felt throughout the region, parts of which functioned as dependent offshoots of the South African mining, transport, and communications systems. Banks, corporations, managers, and technicians were often South African-based. South African-style Roman-Dutch law and common commercials standards spread to a number of neighbouring lands. South African import-export traffic, electricity demand and tourism shaped the economy of southern Mozambique.[i]

No national army or guerrilla force could seriously threaten the apartheid state at home, and only Angola’s military, with the strong backing of Cuban troops, mounted a viable opposition to the South African Defence Forces deployed north of the Limpopo River. In its rolling campaign to thwart advancing liberation movements, some of which were Marxist and all of which were hostile to Pretoria, and stem the retreat of white minority dominance in the region, South Africa waged dirty tricks campaigns and wars of destabilisation in almost all of its immediate neighbouring states. It fuelled prolonged and vicious civil wars in Angola and Mozambique, launched raids against states that harboured exiled South African struggle movements, and fought alongside Rhodesian forces against Zimbabwean guerrillas.

Three main regional blocs emerged in response to South Africa’s economic and military dominance. The region’s three smallest states, Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, were joined with South Africa and South African-controlled South West Africa in a customs union. In 1975 six regional states – Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe – grouped together as the Frontline States to provide assistance and safe haven to the liberation movements of South Africa and South West Africa. Four years later, in May 1979, those states joined together with three others – Lesotho, Malawi and Swaziland – to form the South African Development Co-ordination Conference. The SADCC had four main objectives: to reduce economic dependence on South Africa; identify, design and implement a regional development strategy; pool resources and build self-reliance; and garner international support against apartheid and for the emerging post-colonial states. As P J Liebenow observed in the early 1980s, the SADCC, which at the time of its inception created at least the idea of a combined market of 60 million people, reflected an attempt to solve two regional conditions: first, ‘the independent states acting separately have been no match for South Africa’; and second, ‘the acquiescence of independent African states in forging economic links with South Africa has impeded the liberation efforts of Africans in Namibia and the Republic of South Africa.’[ii]

In Africa the rains bring change. The two great political developments that transformed the region – Namibia’s independence in 1990 and the unbanning of South African liberation movements and release of political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela the same year – did not result in an immediate shift in the prevailing regional strategic balance. It took a change in the weather to unlock the potential for new dynamics based on integrating rather than opposing the regional hegemon. A severe drought gripped southern Africa in 1992, and SADCC became the instrument for a coordinated regional response. In August that year, SADCC was formally reconfigured as the South African Development Community, which espoused the principles of economic integration, sovereign equality of member states, common peace and security, and democracy. Importantly, the newly transformed SADC embraced South Africa’s participation and ultimate membership.

In the 15 years since, the SADC has developed an impressive edifice of common protocols, agreed best practices, and committees on peace and security, elections and so on. These have had little tangible influence, however, on the behaviour of and between member states, and among the nine regional economic communities in Africa the SADC is one of the least effective. The former regional strategic balance between apartheid South Africa and its neighbours has been replaced by a muddle of agreed ideals and conflicting national self-interests. SADC member states have engaged in intra-regional wars and resource pillaging. They have shown a disinclination to hold each other accountable to accepted standards and pledges. The organ on peace and security has been disrupted repeatedly by power rivalries. Importantly, the implosion of Zimbabwe has made the shared goal of economic integration unrealisable. And while the strategic seam between South Africa and the rest of the region has been stitched together, the same essential imbalances and attending suspicions abide. South Africa remains the greatest economic and military power in Africa, a reluctant hegemon still eyed cautiously by neighbouring states despite its vigorous pursuit of pan-African interests on and off the continent. The old economic and military rivalries have gone, but an odour of distrust lingers.

This chapter attempts to assess regional strategic rebalancing in contemporary southern Africa. Three points of departure must be indicated at the outset. First, in the context of the brief history given above, regional strategic rebalancing suggests a process through which two or more intra-regional rivals – whether individual states or blocs – seek to correct new economic or military imbalances resulting from the region’s significant political transformation. It is the position of this paper that no such process is indicated or underway. Second, this is not an assessment of regional economic integration or peace and security-building. That work is left to the many fine studies that have and will be done on the effectiveness and evolution of the SADC. Third, while it can rightly be argued that strategic rebalancing in southern African involves an Eastward shift in economic relations, the burden of assessing that trend has fallen to other chapters in this volume.

The opportunity thus arises to move in a different direction. The single most formative development in Africa since the Berlin Conference of 1878 was the demise the apartheid in 1994. The advent of majority rule in South Africa initiated the final integration of a continent of free and independent states, a process that would include the total transformation of Africa’s diplomatic norms and architecture. Pretoria has become the continent’s chief builder of peace and catalyst for change. Almost from the outset of its democratic rule, however, South Africa has set its sights on grander ambitions. Under President Thabo Mbeki, particularly, South Africa has increasingly tied the transformation of its region and continent to the rebalancing of the global economic and power equation – a project it is pursuing as much in the UN Security Council and World Trade Organisation as in the polling stations of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Based on statements and positions taken by South African officials in international fora, this paper argues that understanding regional strategic rebalancing requires a shift in the definition of the region involved from southern Africa to, in its broadest terms, the entire non-Western world. The hegemon of southern Africa has become the self-appointed champion of an emergent South, a development that is already reshaping international dynamics in critical global issues.

Indicators and Technicalities

A 1996 government ‘white paper’ on South African foreign policy observed: ‘South Africa, as a small to medium-sized economic power with an open economy which is dependent on international trade, will have to play a role in the constructive advancement of the new “economic” world order towards a more equitable set of practices.’[iii] Two actions by South Africa in different arenas of the United Nations during the past year give substance to that aspiration.

On February 4, 2006, the International Atomic Energy Agency voted 27-3-1 to refer Iran to the UN Security Council, paving the way for possible punitive actions against Tehran for failing to halt its nuclear activity (limited sanctions were imposed in December of that year). South Africa cast the lone abstention. In explaining his country’s position, Amb. Abdul Samad Minty, South Africa’s representative on the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said:

This resolution seeks to initiate a process whereby the Security Council will become more substantially involved in the Agency’s verification activities in the Islamic Republic of Iran, with a diminishing and possibly subservient and even marginal role for the Board. … South Africa places a great importance on the role, authority, impartiality and integrity of the Agency and we would not wish to do anything that would reduce or undermine its solemn responsibilities.[iv]

That motivation – a technicality, in essence, of forum and jurisdiction – would reappear almost exactly one year later in another controversial vote. In one of its first actions after assuming a nonpermanent seat in the UN Security Council in January 2007, South Africa voted against a resolution calling on Myanmar’s government to cease military attacks against civilians in ethnic minority regions and begin earnest political negotiations with opposition parties on a transition to democracy. Explaining South Africa’s vote against the resolution, for which the government sustained domestic and international criticism, Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad stated that ‘this resolution deals with issues that would be best left to the Human Rights Council. The Non-Aligned Countries and the G77 and China consistently voiced concern at the tendency of the Security Council to encroach on the mandate of other United Nations entities.’[v]

In one sense, the Iran and Myanmar votes appear to be thoroughly inconsistent with two abiding principles of South African foreign policy: non-proliferation and protection of human rights. As the only country to unilaterally disarm its nuclear weapons, South Africa enjoys broadly recognised moral authority as an opponent of such programmes. In 1998 South Africa joined a host of other nations in signing a joint declaration entitled ‘Towards a Nuclear Weapons Free World – The Need for a New Agenda’ pursuing ‘the goal of a world free from nuclear weapons.’[vi] The Declaration recalled the statement by the commissioners of the Canberra Commission that ‘the proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used – accidentally or by decision – defies credibility.’[vii] Seven years later, in a statement at the 2005 Review Conference of the States Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Ambassador Minty reiterated South Africa’s position that ‘the only real guarantee against the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is their complete elimination and the assurance that they will never be produced again.’[viii]

The country’s position on human rights is equally unequivocal. The South African Bill of Rights, referred to as the ‘cornerstone of democracy’ in a national constitution shaped by the memory of one of the more repressive systems the world has ever known, ‘enshrines the rights of all people in our country and affirms the democratic values of human dignity, equality and freedom.’ The 1996 White Paper on foreign policy, similarly states that ‘[t]he advancement of human rights and the promotion of democracy are pillars on which South African foreign policy rests.’ Finally, a statement by the National Executive Committee of the ruling African National Congress explaining South Africa’s approach to serving on the Security Council declared:

Our fortunes as a nation are intimately interconnected with the fortunes of our neighbours, our continent and indeed all of humanity. It is therefore on this basis both of moral responsibility and collective self-interest that we continue to be actively engaged in the effort to build a better Africa and world. SA needs to use this important position in the Security Council to advance the cause of Africa in international affairs, in particular, and confirm that Africans occupy the front ranks in the world struggle for peace, security and stability.[ix]

In both the Iran and Myanmar votes, South African officials were quick to point out their longstanding commitment to nuclear non-proliferation and human rights. Both votes, however, have drawn sustained criticism. On the specific issue of Iran’s nuclear programme, South Africa is certainly protecting its own interests. One senior foreign policy official, speaking in an interview in his office in Pretoria, defended the abstention in the IAEA vote on Iran this way: ‘It is them today and us tomorrow.’[x] South Africa maintains the position that as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran has the right to pursue peaceful nuclear technology. Pretoria, meanwhile, has publicly indicated the possibility of resuming enrichment of uranium as part of a revitalised domestic commercial nuclear sector. The ruling African National Congress remains wary of ‘bullying’ by Western governments against smaller, non-aligned states, and asserting the rights of the latter forms part of its own defence against the same. Another South African official also referred to the need to protect ‘economic relations between Iran and Africa.’[xi] South Africa obtains 40 % of its oil from Iran.

A survey of statements by key South African foreign policymakers and positions the country has taken on international issues since 1994, however, shows that both votes followed a consistent thread. Two points emerge: first, although still an emerging middle power, South Africa is engaging in international debates from increasingly influential offices and at the head of increasingly powerful groupings of non-aligned states; and second, that Pretoria, both on its own and through these blocs, is pursuing a rebalancing of global economic power and diplomatic influence.

In the ‘outcome document’ of the 60^th Session of the UN General Assembly in September 2005, the heads of state and government

‘reaffirm[ed] our commitment to work towards a security consensus based on the recognition that many threats are interlinked, that development, peace, security and human rights are mutually reinforcing, that no State can best protect itself by acting entirely alone and that all States need an effective and efficient collective security system, pursuant to the purposes and principles of the Charter.’[xii]

At the closing of that session, which failed amid strong US objections to achieve consensus on the broad-based reform agenda set forward by then Secretary-General Kofi Annan, South African President Thabo Mbeki used that passage as the basis of his strong critique against what he regarded as the prevailing ‘imbalance of power’ and its consequences. He stated:

‘We have not achieved that “security consensus” because of the widely disparate conditions of existence and interests among the Member States of the UN as well as the gross imbalance of power that define the relationship among these Member States. It is the poor of the world whose interests are best served by real and genuine respect for the fundamental proposition that we need the “security consensus” identified by the Outcome Document. The actions of the rich and powerful strongly suggest that these are not in the least convinced that this “security consensus” would serve their interests. Thus they use their power to perpetuate the power imbalance in the ordering of global affairs. As a consequence of this, we have not made the progress of the reform of the UN that we should have.’[xiii]

This is a familiar and well-established theme in South African foreign policy. As a strong proponent of UN reform and a staunch critic of the US-led war in Iraq, South Africa has consistently voiced is preference for the General Assembly over the Security Council as the most democratic forum in which to define and pursue the international security and development agenda. In his address to the 61^st Session of the UN General Assembly in September 2006, Mbeki, speaking as the current chair of the G77 and China, noted that

‘[i]f the wishes of the majority of the world could turn into reality, this would be a century free of wars, free of internecine conflicts, free of hunger, free of preventable disease, free of want, free of environmental degradation and free of greed and corruption. …[S]ome of the developed nations have consistently refused to implement the outcomes and agreements of this world body that would help to alleviate the wretchedness of the poor.[xiv]

Against this backdrop, the ‘technicality motivation’ in the South African votes on Iran and Myanmar – the argument that those issues were more appropriately handled in UN fora other than the UN Security Council – takes on new light. It is not merely a question of jurisdiction, but of the balance of influence. As Thenjiwe Mtintso, South African ambassador to Cuba, argued in an op-ed following the Myanmar vote: ‘The government is part of a fierce struggle for the transformation of the UN and its institutions in content, form, composition, rules, processes and procedures…. The Myanmar question is an example of the selectivity on the part some of the most powerful countries.’[xv] South Africa’s vote, she concluded, was part of her government’s desire to ‘reassert the centrality of the General Assembly’.[xvi]

This coincides with an Eastward or Southward strategic shift in South Africa’s economic and security alignment both inside the UN and in other international fora such as the World Trade Organisation to redress what South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma has called ‘the continued marginalisation of developing countries.’[xvii]. Importantly, in both the Myanmar and Iran votes, South Africa strongly positioned itself in the same camp as China and Russia – the two permanent Security Council members most inclined to use their veto against resolutions reflecting the positions of the Western powers.

New Constellations

During the Cold War the global balance of power was defined by a contest between two blocs with more or less fixed ideologically defined identities anchored by two superpowers. Almost two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new global bifurcation is emerging between ‘the West and the Rest’ or the North and the South. Those terms are hardly helpful, however, in large part because the new division is less defined by geography than they would suggest. Nor is the world settling into two new blocs to replace those of the previous era. Rather, while it remains possible to talk about the West as a more or less coherent entity, the ‘South’ has multiple new poles and sub-groupings. Put differently, the non-aligned world is coalescing into an ever expanding system of overlapping new constellations, none of them fixed or mutually exclusive and all of them anchored by more than one emerging power. The latter include China, India, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa, while others, including Venezuela, Pakistan and Iran, aspire to join the club.

Since emerging from isolation in 1994, South Africa has sought energetically to reinvigorate existing blocs such as the Non-Aligned Movement and has been a key architect in the building of new ones. Some of these, like the G22+, which brought the Cancun round of the WTO talks to a grinding halt in August 2004 in protest against farm subsidies in wealthy states, emerged almost spontaneously as the need arose. Others, such as IBSA (India-Brazil-South Africa), have formed slowly. In many cases there is notable overlap in the membership of these groupings. It is hard, however, to miss what all have in common: an aspiration to rebalance global power by spreading or democratising the control of global resources, trade and the security agenda.

This point is reflected in a joint communiqué between two emerging powers following a state visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao to South Africa in February 2007 stated:

The two sides observed that the world is undergoing profound and complicated changes. … The two sides decided to maintain communication and collaboration in the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation and other international organisations, and fully coordinate each other’s positions on major issues such as development and poverty reduction, regional conflicts, South-South cooperation and North-South dialogue and formulation of multilateral trade rules in an effort to uphold the common rights and interests of the developing world.[xviii]

What are the immediate effects of this ‘Southern’ push for rebalance?

One is a likely end to isolation as an effective punitive measure. For decades Western countries, and in particular Britain and the United States, have attempted to ring-fence ‘rogue’ states – states that allegedly sponsor terrorism or engage in actions deemed to be offensive or threatening to Western security interests – through sanctions regimes or other measures in an attempt to coerce those states into changing their behaviour. Libya, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria and, during the final years of apartheid, South Africa have all fallen into this category at one time or another. Isolation, however, requires consensus, and that has become increasingly elusive. The ANC, for one, refuses to go along. Having enjoyed support during its liberation struggle from countries shunned by the West, it has adamantly insisted on maintaining those friendships despite Western pressure to not do so. That stubbornness is further informed by South Africa’s cultural affinities, its instinct to share its own successful model of conflict resolution, and its resistance to Western external coercion against fellow non-aligned states. While the Bush Administration labelled Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil,’ South Africa has maintained relations with all three – not least due to its belief that its engagement can help to break longstanding impasses involving such states.

While China and Russia have consistently wielded their vetoes to cut against the Western grain in the UN Security Council, South Africa and other emerging middle powers now provide additional resistance – not only from the vantage point of non-permanent seats, but also, as has been noted, by attempting to shift sensitive issues out from under the Security Council altogether. This has and will undoubtedly make it more difficult to apply pressure on a state such as Iran to comply with international demands regarding its nuclear programme – note how difficult it was to reach a consensus on even limited sanctions in the Security Council – but it may also force open new space for creative new approaches to longstanding disputes. Notably, the US and Britain have moved – albeit grudgingly – toward dialogue-based solutions with both North Korea and Iran.

A related likely effect is that controlling the development and spread of nuclear technology and materials will be increasingly difficult. South Africa and Brazil have acknowledged aspirations to enter the commercial nuclear sector both at home and abroad. That is certainly one factor explaining South Africa’s resistance to Iran’s referral to the Security Council. At issue is who will control the burgeoning commercial marketplace as demand for nuclear power accelerates in an age dominated by concerns about climate change and rising oil costs. South Africa’s pebble bed modular reactor marks an important technological innovation. Will it be allowed to develop and export this product? Will the West use security justifications to attempt to dominate the sector and prevent non-Western states from developing their own capacities and networks? Pretoria fears it will, but growing South-South linkages will also increasingly complicate such efforts.

The growing influence of non-aligned powers and blocs, in addition to creating new competition for natural resources, will also create new competition in the resolution of longstanding international disputes. As the United States struggles to maintain – or regain – its credibility in the Middle East in the wake of its invasion of Iraq, for example, states such as South Africa and Russia are providing alternative voices. That is partly motivated by self-interest – in their need for energy security, China and Russia have not burdened their relationships with Iran and Sudan with political or human rights concerns – but it is also driven by realism, altruism, ideological kinship, or some combination of these. South Africa, for example, finds compelling similarities between the plight of the Palestinians and its own struggle for liberation and continues to present itself as an uncompromised alternative voice in the pursuit of a resolution to the Israel-Palestine issue. However salutary that development might be, it also carries an implicit warning: The balance is shifting increasingly against US and Israeli exceptionalism. New actors and new approaches are needed. While the US remains an indispensable player, others are clamouring for the ball.

Back to the New World Order

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the first President George Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev could look ahead and envision a ‘New World Order’ in which the great powers cooperated with each other in realising a safer, more stable world. The 15 years that followed produced little evidence that such a paradigm was materialising. In what may go down as the single most important acknowledgment of Realpolitik so far in the new century, however, the second President George Bush in 2005 signed a historic agreement on civilian nuclear energy cooperation with India. While the deal binds India to closer compliance with the IAEA and obligates Delhi to work more vigorously to safeguard its nuclear arsenal and curb the spread of enrichment and related technologies, it lifts a longstanding US ban on nuclear trade with India and, most significantly, acknowledges India as a nuclear power.

In effect, President George W. Bush signalled through the India nuclear deal that the United States was entering an era when it would have to work with new powers rather than attempt only to contain them. That is precisely the turn that South Africa, particularly under Mbeki, seeks. Pretoria has engaged itself as a self-appointed champion of the emerging South. It is prepared to straddle divides – advocating the rights of Palestinians while at the same time forging relations with Israel, simultaneously creating bilateral commissions with India and Pakistan, trading vigorously with the West while joining new non-aligned blocs in a battle for fairer terms of trade. It seeks radical reform in the UN, but in the absence of that is prepared to use its positions and prestige within the organisation’s various fora to circumvent the West’s disproportionate diplomatic influence. It poses discomfiting questions on the behalf of others. Why India but not Pakistan? If Israel is allowed to have the bomb, why can’t Iran?

Fifteen years after South Africa’s integration into the old SADCC, integration has replaced strategic balancing as the region’s overarching project. Together, the 14 member states of SADC make up a market of 240 million.[xix] Southern Africa is richly endowed with natural resources, including oil, diamonds, platinum and titanium. But it is also characterised by a preponderance of poor socio-economic indicators. Eight of the countries fall in the World Bank’s bottom tier as ‘low-income,’ and five are listed as ‘heavily indebted poor countries.’ The regional average unemployment (among the seven countries for which statistics are available) is 17%, with Namibia and South Africa reaching official rates of 31.1% and 28.4% respectively. HIV/AIDS prevalence rates are the highest in the world, approaching 25% of the adult population in Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland. None of the countries is projected to achieve the targets of the 15 Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

South Africa’s critics might suggest that it seek the reasons for such failure closer to home – in the well-chronicled corruption of Mozambique and South Africa, for instance, or more urgently in the implosion of Zimbabwe under the ruinous rein of President Robert Mugabe. Pretoria, however, has found a larger villain. As Mbeki has argued, ‘the use of power is the reinforcement of the might of the powerful, and therefore the perpetuation of the disempowerment of the powerless.’[xx] The votes on Iran and Myanmar were shots across the bow, signalling South Africa’s intention to compel a rebalancing of the global control of economic resources, the discourse on security, and the terms of international diplomacy. As an emerging power, Pretoria seems to saying: What the West won’t yield, the rest are increasingly prepared to force.