Toward a Developmental Foreign Policy?: Challenges for South Africa’s Diplomacy in the Second Decade of Liberation

Chris Landsberg Toward a Developmental Foreign Policy? Challenges for South Africa’s Diplomacy in the Second Decade of Liberation SOUTH AFRICA IS NOT A “ CHOICELESS DEMOCRACY” (MKANDAWIRE, 1999: 2); it is not a donor-driven democracy. It is a middle-ranked power in Africa, imbued with a vibrant political democracy, and it has been able for more than a decade now to punch above its weight, suggesting that it has been able to influence world affairs in a way few countries with its relative strength and size have been able to. But South Africa is never­ theless a democracy under severe socioeconomic stress. The republic faces significant development challenges—poverty, inequality, jobless­ ness, and unemployment. Many of these challenges continue to run along race lines. South Africa has over the past decade asserted itself as an African state, an African power, which makes African renewal and African development as the key priority of its foreign policy. The broader African condition depicts much of the same charac­ teristics of poverty and inequality as that of South Africa; it includes considerable conflict and wars in many parts of the continent. South Africa’s domestic and foreign policies continue to be under severe pressure to address the country’s and Africa’s vast development chal­ lenges, caused in the main by centuries of white supremacy and social research Vol 72 : No 3 : Fall 2005 723 racism. Because of its precarious domestic situation, South Africa’s policy makers need to engage the international community—we include the industrialized North and the developing South as part of the international community—in a way that deliberately tries to help address its national condition, and the African condition. We argue here that a developmental foreign policy is pro-engagement; it is not isolationist. Because it is fundamentally concerned with addressing domestic, continental, and global disparities and inequalities, such a foreign policy seeks massive amounts of resources and resource transfers to engage in redistribution to help address inequalities. It is argued here that such resource transfers can come about only through engaging the outside world, not by becoming isolationist. Because of these national and continental backdrops, the republic needs a devel­ opmental foreign policy. What has not been sufficiently appreciated to date is that South Africa has plenty of scope to revive a genuine devel­ opmental foreign policy; it is a developing country with significant international influence but it has often underutilized this authority by acting guardedly and warily—even at times when it could have pushed the diplomatic envelope more insistently. Over the last decade there has been a growing assumption, both in the South and the North, that because of tumultuous political and economic changes in the world 15 years ago and the dominance of Western political and economic orthodoxies, developing countries have little choice but to pursue alien policy scripts not suited to their condi­ tion. It has long been argued that the so-called Washington consensus has placed severe constraints on freedom of choice and maneuverabil­ ity, imposing restrictions on developing countries to pursue develop­ mental agendas to suite their circumstances. But while it is true that many Western governments and multilateral institutions such as the Bretton Woods institutions have imposed alien agendas on the South, and that there are real constraints faced by the developing world, it is also true that many Southern states have far more latitude than is appreciated. A number of Southern states, including South Africa, have engaged in self-imposed structural adjustment regimes, through which 724 social research they interpreted world political and economic order in conservative terms. During the 1990s, for example, South Africa’s macroeconomic policy was based on the premise that the world economy is “an inte­ grated capitalist system where market forces reign supreme, punishing countries which did not obey the unwritten code of sound fiscal, mone­ tary and labor-market policies” (Landsberg, 2004: 204). A developmen­ tal foreign policy challenges these assumptions, whether self-imposed or externally enforced. A developmental foreign policy works on the assumption that, when acting in unison, South Africa and other Southern partners have much more latitude and freedom of maneuverability to influence the international policy and development debates. What...