South Africa in Southern Africa: The Intensifying Vortex of Violence, and: South Africa: Lost Opportunities, and: Southern Africa and Western Security (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Jeremy Preiss, editor South Africa in Southern Africa: The Intensifying Vortex of Violence. Thomas M. Callaghy, ed. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1983. 288 pp. $29.95. South Africa: Lost Opportunities. By Frank J. Parker. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1983. 290 pp. $28.00. Southern Africa and Western Security. By Robert J. Hanks. Cambridge, Mass.: Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, 1983. 75 pp. $7.50 (pbk.). Reviewed by Steven Metz, assistant professor ofpolitical science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. In some ways South African foreign policy is a throwback to an earlier diplomatic era. In an age when the dictates of national security, narrowly defined, have been joined on the menu of foreign policy goals by economic objectives, such as the acquisition and protection of markets and sources of raw materials, and by the propagation of one's ideology, South African foreign policy remains decidedly old-fashioned. South Africa's economic preponderance in the southern Africa region means that it is not necessary to use diplomacy to garner economic benefits—these seem to flow naturally. South Africa's ideology, like Nazism, is not exportable, so with the exception of the attempts to preserve the settler regimes in Rhodesia and Namibia (with the latter including a large number of Afrikaners), South African foreign policy does not seek to export ideology. Thus the overriding goal of South African foreign policy is the protection of the domestic social, political, and economic order from external enemies and from internal enemies supported by external forces. This takes place on three discrete levels. The first and most important level of South African foreign policy is the relationship with the republic's immediate neighbors, especially Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Lesotho, Namibia, and Angola. These are the nations that can pose the most direct threat to South Africa—primarily through support for the African National Congress (anc) and other black national liberation groups—they are also most amenable to control by an active South African foreign policy utilizing the preponderance of force which South Africa can bring to bear and on the economic dependence of 239 240 SAIS REVIEW the black states on South Africa. The second level is policy toward southern Africa as a whole, including states less likely to support national liberation groups such as Botswana, Zaire, and Malawi. Foreign policy at this level has a greater economic component, as South Africa has long dreamed of an economic "constellation" of all the states in southern Africa in which the technological expertise and guidance of the republic is married to the vast human and natural resources of the black states. The final level at which South African foreign policy operates is composed of policy toward the West. Like Argentina, South Africa has long felt that in terms of culture and tradition, it is as much a part of the West as of the region to which it belongs geographically; thus the desires of South Africa for closer links with the West—both economic and military—are strong. Within the past decade this desire has been given a new impetus: South Africa has become convinced that it is the target of a "total onslaught" inspired, supplied, and controlled by the Soviet Union. Because of this, South Africa has become certain that its national survival has become increasingly dependent on some degree of Western support. Thus, an improvement in relations with the West has been elevated, in the eyes of South African leaders, from the desirable to the essential. The fear of communism is the "intervening variable" that colors South African foreign policy at all three levels of operation. South Africa's own view of the world is Manichean, with all foreign policy troubles viewed as subplots to the epochal struggle between communism and capitalism. This particular view of the world so dominates the thinking of South Africans that it adds a definite element of irreality to South African foreign policy: to view foreign policy from the South African perspective is to pretend that race and racism are not important factors in its relations with other states. While South Africa's own foreign policy is, in fact, motivated primarily by the desire to protect its racial...