The Southern African unipolarity

ABSTRACT

Despite the tectonic changes that have taken place in Southern Africa since the demise of apartheid, South Africa is still widely considered a hegemonic regional power by scholars, practitioners and pundits. This article challenges this interpretation, asserting that both Pretoria’s foreign policy and that of its neighbours fit the concept of regional unipolarity with more precision. Since the early 1990s, South Africa has pursued leadership within binding regional institutions and invested resources in order to reinforce the sovereignty of second-tier states such as Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, which have in turn disputed its diplomatic and military primacy, achieving impressive results. This behaviour is characteristic of unipoles rather than hegemons. In this article I revisit the evolution of South African relations with its more proximate neighbours in a transition from hegemony (1961–1990) to unipolarity. I start by defining both concepts and clarifying the behaviours that regional powers and small states are expected to have under hegemonic and unipolar settings. Then, I examine inter-state relations in the region, showing that the concept of unipolarity best describes power distribution and best predicts foreign policy in Southern Africa since the 1990s. Finally, I show that this exercise in concept rectification illuminates comparisons with other regional unipoles, and provides a useful framework to forecast the consequences of an eventual Southern African bipolarity, if Angola continues to catch up.

KEYWORDS:

• Unipolarity
• hegemony
• Southern Africa
• South African foreign policy

Acknowledgements

This chapter benefitted from four months of fieldwork and some thirty in-depth interviews conducted in Southern Africa during 2015 on a trip funded by the European Union’s ERASMUS-Mundus programme. I would like to thank Universidade Eduardo Mondlane (Maputo, Mozambique) for providing logistic support, and my wife, Natália Bueno Schenoni (the real area specialist), for her support, assistance and criticism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Luis L. Schenoni is a PhD Student at the University of Notre Dame and a Doctoral Affiliate at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. He has published extensively on realist approaches to Latin American foreign policy in journals such as Foreign Policy Analysis and Latin American Politics and Society. More recently he has extended that framework to Southern Africa in articles published in Strategic Analysis and Revista CIDOB, among others. He can be contacted at: [email protected].

Notes

1 Since it is the purpose of this article to show that South Africa is no longer hegemonic in its more proximate periphery, Southern Africa is defined here as comprising of Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe – i.e. the narrower definition of the region.

2 This definition excludes some interesting theoretical endeavors that have proposed different understandings in a more neo-Gramscian tradition (see Burges 2008; cf. Cox 1983).

3 In the past some scholars have voiced some scepticism regarding the possibility of applying the structural framework to the regional level. This concern is often related to Kenneth Waltz’s assertion that ‘[a] general theory of international politics is necessarily based on the great powers.’ But Waltz also meant that, ‘[t]he theory, once written, also applies to lesser states that interact insofar as their interaction is insulated from the intervention of the great powers of a system’ (see Waltz 1979, 73). The latter has animated some scholarship that applies the polarity debate to regions (Lemke 2002; Schenoni 2017). Here I build upon such literature.

4 It was not until the early 1970s that the Chinese-sponsored TANZAM railway connecting the Copper Belt to Dar-es-Salaam allowed Lusaka a greater margin to maneuver.

5 South Africa’s population was 24 million people in 1974, being the most populated country in the region, followed by Mozambique (10.3 million), Rhodesia (6.8 million), Angola (6.4 million) and Zambia (4.8 million). Nowadays, only the population of Angola and Mozambique put together is roughly equivalent to that of South Africa (Singer, Bremer, and Stuckey 1972).

6 The CINC is based on six indicators of international power, which are considered relevant for a neorealist definition of the concept: energy consumption, iron and steel production, military expenditure, military personnel, total population and urban population (Singer, Bremer, and Stuckey 1972).

7 In 1975 South Africa expended 1.24 current billion dollars, against 0.14 of Angola, 0.06 of Zambia, 0.01 of Mozambique and 0.11 of Rhodesia. Military personnel amounted to 50 thousand in South Africa, 30 in Angola, 20 in Mozambique, 16 in Zambia and 15 in Rhodesia (Singer, Bremer, and Stuckey 1972).

8 ‘[…] Angola and Mozambique provided an invaluable collaboration to liberation movements in Rhodesia, South Africa, and Namibia, which were allowed to benefit from their military experience. It was the hospitality of the frontline countries – Angola, Mozambique, Botswana, Tanzania and Zambia – that allowed the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) to intensify their military activities’ (Chanaiwa 2010, 321).

9 To understand this concept of hegemonic crisis, a parallel could be drawn with the situation of the United States in Central America and the Caribbean during the cold war, where the last two dimensions were sometimes temporarily lost and restored, not without making use of coercion.

Even if the US were immensely superior in the four aforementioned dimensions, Cuba (1959), Nicaragua (1979) and Grenada (1979) defied the hegemony of Washington at some point. The American response was either to invade or to support counter-revolutionary guerillas against the new regimes, just like South Africa did in its own periphery. In the long term, the American hegemony prevailed because the opponents were few and, when they were too radical, Washington could secure the cooperation of every other country in the region in isolating them. South Africa tried for a long time (1975–1989) to resist its decay, but opponents multiplied, built alliances against the hegemon and finally overthrew it from such status.

10 Economic recession, and the apparent impossibility of overthrowing FRELIMO in the short-term, led Pretoria to the signing of the Nkomati Accord in March 1984 in order to end the support both countries were giving to rebel groups in each other’s territory. Yet, while Mozambique acted in good faith by taking action against the ANC, South Africa bluntly cheated.

11 It has already been noted that Pretoria maintains different relations with countries that are highly dependent – like Botswana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Namibia and Swaziland –, those of medium dependence – Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe – with one of relatively low dependence – Angola (Döpcke 1998, 136).

12 It is important to highlight that this pretended mandate ‘was never agreed upon in any of the SADC meetings prior to the intervention’ (Mahlakeng and Solomon 2013), giving rise to a series of controversies inside the institution and a fracture with other second-tier states – particularly Angola and Zimbabwe – that would become evident during the DRC crisis.

13 This threshold is a simple three-to-one relation between the first and the second regional powers. If the power of the former is more than three times that of the latter, then the system is said to be unipolar. If not, it is an indicator of bipolarity.

14 Interview with Aguiar Mazula, former Defence Minister of Mozambique.

15 Zambia has consistently exported around 10% of what it imported from South Africa, while Zimbabwe shows a different trend, as its economic relations evolved from one of relative interdependence (40%) in 2003 to a more hegemonic ideal type (8%) in 2014.