A New Approach to Sovereignty in Africa

The Clinton administration devoted extraordinary attention to sub-Saharan Africa. The unprecedented trip by President Clinton in March 1998 to six African countries, another presidential visit to Nigeria and Tanzania in 2000, and visits by several cabinet secretaries highlighted an effort to mobilize the U.S. government to become more involved in Africa. Secretary of State Madeline Albright and other leading foreign policy officials made a consistent public argument that it is in the U.S. national interest to become increasingly involved in African experiments in political and economic reform and in resolving difficult security issues. In more effusive moments, administration officials endorsed the idea that an African Renaissance is now under way, led by new leaders who have recently come to power in, among other places, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. However, the Clinton administration, when it was required to go beyond effusiveness, failed to develop innovative ways to address the profound problems affecting Africa. In particular, the Bush administration will find that it needs to develop a new approach to sovereignty in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

If the Clinton administration's goal was to signal a new U.S. attitude toward Africa, it succeeded. However, successor administrations face the much more difficult task of actually transforming its rhetoric into reality. Nowhere is the need for action so pressing as in taking new steps to resolve conflict in Africa. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is being torn apart by a war that involves troops from half a dozen nations, including those headed by some of the "new men" Clinton so recently hailed. In the last few years, civil wars have also destroyed large parts of Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Sudan. Other countries may face similarly devastating internal conflicts in the future. Further, in early 1999 a large-scale land war broke out between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Many of these wars are occurring in countries where the state itself has simply collapsed. For instance, governments in the DRC, Sierra Leone, and Liberia only have a formal governmental presence in relatively small portions of the country and cannot provide even basic standards of public order. Indeed, state collapse, which appeared novel in 1990 and largely limited to Somalia, has become depressingly common and may yet spread to at least half a dozen African countries. ¹

Unfortunately, while officials from President Clinton on down stressed a new desire to be involved in Africa, their commitment was largely rhetorical. The actual energy devoted to ending conflict in Africa to date does not compare well with the obsessive, and in the end successful, effort by the Reagan administration, led by Chester Crocker, to resolve the wars in Namibia and Angola in the 1980s. Even former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made southern Africa, especially resolving the war of liberation in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), one of his highest priorities toward the end of the Ford administration. Indeed, during President Clinton's second term--when rhetoric about U.S. engagement with Africa reached its high point--the administration was actually reducing the number of diplomatic personnel in Africa and drawing down other significant U.S. assets. For instance, the U.S. Department of Defense no longer stations a plane in Africa that is available for shuttle diplomacy. As a result, diplomats engaged in trying to end extraordinary conflicts like the wars in the Great Lakes have to go by African commercial carriers. Such behavior is hardly the diplomatic signature of a superpower significantly engaged in Africa. To some extent, the "hollowing out" of the U.S. official presence in Africa is just a reflection of the drawing down of U.S. diplomats worldwide, but Africa does seem to have come off comparatively badly.

Even more importantly, the Clinton administration was noticeably conservative in its policies toward Africa. While much energy was devoted to proclaiming the innovative nature of the visits by the president and various cabinet officials, Washington...