African Crisis Areas and U.S. Foreign Policy (review)

240 SAIS REVIEW African Crisis Areas and U.S. Foreign Policy. Gerald J. Bender, James S. Coleman, Richard L. Sklar, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. 373 pp. $40.00/cloth, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by Eric Stromayer, M.A. candidate, SAIS. African Crisis Areas and U.S. Foreign Policy is an excellent compilation of contemporary wisdom on African issues. The twenty-one authors brought together in this volume demonstrate an impressive knowledge on the continent's political flash points. This is bound together with a stimulating and insightful analysis of the role of U.S. foreign policy in recent years. Most of the papers in the volume were presented at a conference sponsored by the African Studies Center and the Center for International and Strategic Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. As the editors state, "This volume attempts to bridge the gap between scholarship and policy which occasions so much distress today." As such it is an insightful if imperfect effort. The editors define a crisis as "a situation of acute tension and/or armed conflict generated and precipitated by local indigenous factors, interacting with external influences, which threaten to engage or actively have engaged the involvement of the United States or the Soviet Union either directly or indirectly through their surrogates." The papers are divided into four groups: "Southern Africa," "The Horn of Africa," "Zaire and Saharan Africa," and "Regionalism versus Globalism." Those presented in the first three sections provide the historical basis for the more theoretical articles in the fourth. The work proffers the views of such noted scholars as Crawford Young on Zaire, René Lemarchand on Chad, Alfred F. Isaacman on Mozambique, Gerald J. Bender on Angola, Bereket H. Selassie on Somalia, and numerous others. In all of these pieces the tension between a regional focus and a global focus in U.S. foreign policy is an important theme. The editors maintain that the collection gives a balanced presentation of this issue. While the authors in the fourth section, Peter Duignan of the Hoover Institution at Stanford and Democratic Congressman Howard Wolpe, cogently present the two sides of the argument, the outlook reflected in the rest of the work is predominantly regionalist. Indeed, if the papers presented in the first three sections of the book can be said to have an overall theme, it is that U.S. foreign policy toward Africa has been predicated on a globalist view of world affairs. Such an outlook places everything in the context of the East-West conflict and has led to less than optimal results. The authors suggest that the globalist emphasis among policymakers has increased during the Reagan administration. The book's regionalist bias is reflected in the repeated occasions in the first three sections where the authors directly contradict Duignan's presentation of the globalist case. The most striking example of this is the contrast between Duignan's description of the Polisario as a "Marxist group supported by Algeria and Libya and armed through them by the Soviet Union," and Tony Hodges' statement that the "Polisario has never espoused Marxist principles, even verbally, and, as a BOOK REVIEWS 241 proudly nationalist movement, it would be most unlikely to end up beholden to any foreign power." Two of the papers seem out of place, given the tenor of the rest of the book. Nzongola-Ntalaja's piece, "United States Policy toward Zaire," while persuasive, stands alone in its wholesale condemnation of U.S. policy toward Zaire since independence . For different reasons Edmond Jouve's piece, "France and Crisis Areas in Africa," while informative, does not really belong in this collection. It is appropriate only to the extent that its discussion of France's handling of the regionalist/globalist problem in the formulation of its policy toward Africa provides a foil to the U.S. approach. African Crisis Areas and U. S. Foreign Policy is an excellent summary of current U.S. policy toward Africa, together with its rationale, strengths and weaknesses, and evolution over the last decade. However, as David B. Abernethy notes in the concluding piece, "Reflections on a Continent in Crisis," the work skips over socioeconomic problems that are inextricably linked to...