Review Article the Movement, Modernity and New International Relations Writing in South Africa

Review article The Movement, modernity and new International Relations writing in South Africa

PETER VALE

Globalization and emerging trends in African states’ foreign policy- making processes: a comparative perspective of Southern Africa. Edited by Korwa Gombe Adar and Rok Ajulu. London: Ashgate. 2002. Against global apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and international finance. By Patrick Bond. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. 2001. The wired world: South Africa, foreign policy and globalization. By Greg Mills. Cape Town: Tafelberg for the South African Institute for International Affairs. 2000. ¼ South Africa’s multilateral diplomacy and global change: the limits of reformism. Edited by Philip Nel, Ian Taylor and Janis van der Westhuizen. London: Ashgate. 2001. Stuck in middle GEAR: South Africa’s post-apartheid foreign relations. By Ian Taylor. London: Praeger. 2001.

Much writing on international relations in South Africa remains caught in antiquity. As Dan O’Meara has pointed out, ‘beyond the rampant empiricism and theoretical unselfconsciousness, a great deal of this literature is seemingly blissfully unaware of the existence, let alone the implications, of the raging debates in IR theory over the past two decades.’1 Although many had hoped that the ending of apartheid would generate a new script, for almost a decade now bad practice has persisted: turf battles and ideological predispositions have survived apartheid’s formal end. Add to this the emigration of talented individuals (which continues as this is being written) and the enthusiasm with which many, this reviewer included, engaged with the world of policy during the transition,

1 Dan O’Meara, ‘Reinventing a regional superpower? Theoretical issues in the analysis of South African foreign policy after apartheid’, paper delivered to the 41st Convention of the International Studies Association. Los Angeles, 14–18 March 2000, p. 1.

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instead of embarking on new theoretical debates, and it is easy to understand why the past persists in many places. The books reviewed here suggest how difficult it has been to move beyond the simplistic notion that South Africa’s international relations should always be defined against a centre represented by empire or Cold War. They also suggest how devilish it is to pursue critique in a time of national celebration; but mostly they illustrate how the force of a single homogenizing idea can set the limits of scholarly imagination. This idea is globalization—the central organizing template within which all notions, nations and policy proposals can be readily classified and all social con- flict explained. Empire, dominion and apartheid once played this role; today, globalization is South Africa’s political equivalent of the proverbial one-size- fits-all, as this short but illustrative digression will show. Some years ago I participated in a management development programme for South Africa’s universities. One staffer from the foreign-funded agency that had organized the event came from a well-connected South African political family. She and her siblings had spent years abroad where they were, if not directly within the folds of the ANC, the party that now governs the country, certainly close to what is still euphemistically known as ‘The Movement’. During one heated session, she hectored senior university administrators on the necessity to tailor academic offerings to the needs of a globalizing world—there was, she frequently said (mimicking Thatcher), no alternative! As I marvelled at the force of her conviction it occurred to me that she had migrated from Karl Marx to Milton Friedman without a momentary pause to reflect on the journey she (and The Movement) had taken with such rapidity and passion. Elsewhere, as we all know, there is nothing new in the use of globalization as an organizing template, or even as a guide to policy-making. But the problem with the idea in South Africa—a point highlighted, in different ways, by all these books—is that there has been very little sustained effort to theorize it. Small wonder, then, that as the academic community engages the world of policy, confusion abounds. Is globalization a political process, a legal procedure, or to do with money markets? Is it great interconnectivity between the London and Johannesburg stock markets? Or is it the immigration of unskilled Nigerians to the country and the emigration of the young and the skilled to Britain? Is it muti-medicine on the streets of Johannesburg offering cultural remedies for HIV/AIDS, or a well-heeled German fighting extradition under the liberal new constitution? Is it to be explained by Marx, Mannheim or Shills, or Fukuyama, or Fanon? The truth is that the policy community believes that it is all of these—and, as policy-making continues apace, it doesn’t worry to explain. So it is that globalization has provided the country’s new elites and the state-makers who serve them with a simple matrix within which to understand and to argue for the country’s place in post-Cold-War modernity while they pursue their traditional interests.

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Greg Mills uses a dated conceptual register to locate South Africa in Western modernity that globalization has come to represent. His book was issued by the business-supported South African Institute of International Affairs, which Mills directs, and is sponsored by South African mining interests. The paratextual apparatus—blurb, cover and cover puffs—plainly aim the book at a particular market: the airport bookstore, where it has happily stood alongside books on management and scenario-building, the depoliticizing technique for negotiating social change, popularized during the transition.2 For all the confidence that this pro-globalization position enjoys among South Africa’s state nobility (to use a term from the late Pierre Bourdieu), there is a Pentecostal edge to this particular book. This is not surprising because Dr Mills’s prolific contributions to the unfolding debates on South Africa’s international and diplomatic relations over the past decade have been, quite frankly, shrill rather than solicitous. In the local press he has delivered commentary, increasingly based on the idea of globalization, across a spectrum of international relations themes: diplomatic practice, foreign policy, international political economy, defence reform (especially maritime) and Southern African security. This book is in many respects little more that an updating of this early polemic.3 Unfortunately, however, for all its energy, his work reveals a narrow conceptual range and an uncritical acceptance of the managerial buzz-words which have crept into contemporary social science—‘accountability’, ‘good governance’, ‘economic miracles’ and the like. Like other airport literature that celebrates globalization, Mills’s position is determined—even predetermined—by his approach. Much taken by the wisdom of the great and the good in international relations, he proceeds from the heroic voice of state authority and political certainty. Robin Cook, Christopher Patten, Douglas Hurd, Richard Holbrooke, Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer are just a few of those who make grand pronouncements in the text. These ideas, predictably perhaps, are reinforced by the thoughts of Francis Fukayama, Samuel Huntington, Henry Kissinger and the sensationalist writer Robert Kaplan. Hovering over all these sages, of course, is the spirit of American pragmatic philosophy, according to which deep thought is not the point of intellectual work; the test of the truth of a proposition is its practical utility; the purpose of thought is to guide action; and the effect of an idea is more important than its origin. Patrick Bond has been as prolific as Greg Mills, although he occupies the opposite position in the debate on globalization. Cast within another main- stream, his Against global apartheid continues the other tradition of South African writing in international relations: forceful (though not always reflective)

2 On this see Ian Taylor and Peter Vale, ‘South Africa’s transition revisited: globalization as vision and virtue’, Global Society 14: 3, 2000, pp. 399–414. 3 The South African Institute of International Affairs’ annual publication, South African Yearbook of International Affairs, has carried much of this work. The 2000–1 edition is published by the South African Institute of of International Affairs with the assistance of the Anglo-American Chairman’s Fund.

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engagement with the dominant political patterns and the resulting global economic arrangements, and a belief that the landless and the dispossessed are agents for lasting social change. In Southern African studies this work has become associated with the writing of John Saul, Colin Leys and Dot Keet. But it reaches even further back, through the work of the late Baruch Hirson and Gwyn A. Williams, to the Unitarians;4 and, on another branch, towards Frantz Fanon, who enjoys near cult status in some cultural and political circles in post- apartheid South Africa.5 Most of the words in the pages of Against global apartheid have also appeared elsewhere—not so much in the press, but in an astonishingly wide range of academic and activist outlets. The latter point us towards Bond’s ideological goals, which he proclaims in a voice as shrill as Greg Mills’s: ‘what is termed “Globalization” brazenly contradicts society’s strong motivation for more equitable development to redress the massive disparities of apartheid.’ And the purpose of his writing, stated immediately thereafter, is equally clear: ‘The detrimental influence of international economic integration is most strongly felt through new financial, trade and investment vulnerabilities, but also in social policy that follows international norms, and to a certain extent in political- cultural subordination to the global markets.’ This is the foreign policy perspective of South Africa’s dispossessed in the age of globalization. Bond knows the debates on political economy as well as he knows South Africa and its politics; and he is not shy of using macroeconomic analysis to make political points and to suggest policy options. He, too, has his heroes: Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Alexander Cockburn, Jomo KS, Susan George, Martin Khor, Noam Chomsky, Immanuel Wallerstein and many others; but he does not engage them theoretically. None the less, given these names, we understand why it is that Patrick Bond, more than any other writer, keeps alive those early hopes for a different script for South Africa’s foreign policy that were enunciated both before and during the country’s transition. In the introduction to their edited collection, Globalization and emerging trends in African states’ foreign policy-making processes, Korwa Gombe Adar and Rok Ajulu insist that globalization is at the heart of Africa’s current marginalization; this, they hold, has shifted the locus of African foreign policies and policy- making. As it sets their agenda, though, the statement marks a moment of retreat into the dated analytical register of bureaucratic politics, especially the Third World species that linked issues of political economy to decision-making theory. This was a popular approach in the 1960s, made famous through the early comparative work of Vernon McKay,6 to whom the editors turn a number of times.

4 See Baruch Hirson and Gwyn A. Williams, The delegate for Africa: David Ivon Jones 1883–1924 (London: Core Publications, 1995). 5 See Richard Pithouse, ‘The spectre of Frantz Fanon’, in The Mail and Guardian bedside book (Johannesburg: M&G Books, 2000), pp. 51–9. 6 Vernon McKay, African diplomacy: studies in the determinants of foreign policy (London: School for Advanced Studies, 1966).

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But that world was entirely devoid of the rich theoretical texture of post- structuralist writing on political economy from writers like the greatly missed Susan Strange, Jan Art Scholte, Henk Overbeek, Philip Cerny, Martin Shaw and others too numerous to mention. Moreover, the interesting and innovative work ignited by Kevin Dunne on Africa in international relations theory is entirely absent from the deliberations in this book.7 All this said, forceful theoretical insights are presented in an interesting chapter on Britain and Southern Africa by Paul Williams and Rita Abrahamsen, and although Peter Schraeder identifies trade as central to US policy towards Southern Africa, he fails to locate it within the broader text of contemporary IPE. However, this will be a potent text for obvious reasons. My fear is that it will catch the interest of South Africa’s flourishing (and mainly foreign-funded) schools of government as elucidating the only means to understand and manage the world. A recent text, which obviously aims at this market,8 uncritically relies on the public administration tradition which was codified by Afrikaner academics in the 1960s to explain successively public policy, ideology, foreign policy and, yes, globalization. Although its paratextual backdrop is post- apartheid South Africa, the country’s experience with democracy is ignored: this proving the old point, that administration continues in spite (some might say, because) of political change. To be fair, the avowed purpose of the Adar and Ajulu collection is not to offer a critique of political economy or to engage in contemporary theory but rather to locate foreign policy and its making in the region in the circumstances which globalization appears to offer African states. However, the country studies— Angola (by Assis Malaquias), Botswana (James J. Zaffiro), Lesotho (Rok Ajulu), Malawi (Jonathan Mayuyuka Kaunda), Mauritius (Rosabelle Laville), Mozam- bique (Oscar Gakuo Mwangi), Zambia (Korwa Adar), Namibia (Frank Khachina Matanga), Zimbabwe (Adar, Ajuku and Moses O. Onyango) and two chapters on South Africa (Philip Nel on foreign investment; Garth le Pere and Anthonie van Nieuwkerk on the making of South African foreign policy)—are uneven in both approach and quality. Nevertheless, they do open up a discussion of foreign policy-making in a number of countries that until now have been considered largely closed—Mauritius is a good example. But some obvious questions over the selection of cases arise. Why is there no discussion of Tanzania, a state that has played such a pivotal role in supporting the liberation struggle? Post-apartheid South Africa has stated that its foreign policy will focus on multilateralism; this is the point of entry in the collection of essays edited by Philip Nel et al., emanating from the only really new ‘school’ of writing on South Africa’s international relations, the one located at Stellenbosch. Creatively using Douglas Hurd’s metaphor of ‘punching above one’s weight’, they draw their

7 See Kevin C. Dunne and Timothy M. Shaw, eds, Africa’s challenge to international relations theory (London: Palgrave, 2001). 8 D. van Niekerk, G. van der Waldt and A. Jonker, Governance, politics, and policy in Southern Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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ideas towards middle power theory, offering some critique and displaying a distinct theoretical self-consciousness. The editors point out that South Africa has used its leadership position in UNCTAD, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Commonwealth to give its active support to, and sometimes to take the lead in, re-activating and re-directing these important multilateral institutions. They go on to claim that ‘South Africa has also deliberately used its high profile in multilateral institutions to act as a voice for vulnerable, small states in world affairs.’ Five case-studies make the point: Janis van der Westhuizen on the global campaign to ban landmines, and on debt relief; Ian Taylor on reform of international trade; David Black on human rights, and Cornis van der Lugt on environmental diplomacy. On the whole, the editors believe that while structure will triumph over agency, there is some evidence (which they offer in a brief but interesting periodization on page 113) that The Movement’s middle power foreign policy has, indeed, made a difference to the course of global events. Ian Taylor’s monograph, which is based on a Stellenbosch doctorate, explains why it is that the new South Africa has embraced globalization (and the market discourse which supports it). But his main interest lies in answering this question: Why have South Africa’s foreign policy-makers embraced multilateralism with such alacrity? At the heart of his answer is the confluence of several theoretical threads in contemporary international relations theory. The first, drawn from Antonio Gramsci, is hegemony—the power of ideas alone sets the limits of the possible. This has stabilized the notion within The Movement that there is no alternative economic system and silenced all other explanations through the power of the media, and the authority brought to public policy by economists and scenario builders. So globalization is no longer a ‘thing in itself’ but has become a ‘thing for itself’ (Bourdieu again). In this move, Taylor mirrors the position advanced by Patrick Bond by critiquing Greg Mills. A second thread is the now quite routine application of Gramsci to international relations and foreign policy, first made by Robert Cox. Simply put, transnational elites, not states, control the global system: factions in the ANC, the nascent black bourgeoisie and traditional business elites, all of whose interests are inter- nationally cast, have no interest in fundamentally changing this. The final thread draws Cox closer to South Africa’s diplomatic practice. By posing as a middle power, South Africa does bring technically directed reform to international institutions—the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO in particular—without really changing the way the world works. This allows The Movement to feign a concern with global inequity to its constituency that includes a Communist Party, while really leaving things as they are. Ian Taylor’s clear purpose is to demonstrate how it is that the past has, as it were, come to be the future in the conduct of South Africa’s foreign relations. He traces the powerful role played by the policy community—especially economists—in drawing the ANC towards the discourse of the market and neo-liberalism, and illustrates how The Movement’s neo-liberal policy called GEAR (for Growth and Economic Recovery Programme) emerged from the

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ruins of the neo-Keynesian Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP). As is to be expected in a book cast in the critical mode of Cox, Taylor asks whose interests are being served by these outcomes: who benefits from South Africa’s post-apartheid foreign policy? Ian Taylor brings a deft touch to negotiating his particular intellectual agenda, writing with great accessibility, even thrift. And yet, unlike most of what passes for international relations analysis in South Africa, this is not an exercise in journalese, but a piece of genuine contemporary scholarship. The second half turns to the theory–practice interface: how is theory applied to the conduct of South Africa’s multilateral relations? Here, Taylor traces post- apartheid foreign policy in five multilateral fora: the WTO, the Cairns Group, UNCTAD IX, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Commonwealth. This application,