Rights, region and identity: exploring the ambiguities of South Africa's regional human rights role

Abstract

The ANC government's regional human rights role has often been portrayed as confused, contradictory, and marked by failure, in light of South Africa's commitment to make human rights a central ‘pillar’ of its post‐apartheid foreign policy, and its position of relative power in the region. We argue that the government's choices of ‘quiet diplomacy’, its preference for multilateralism, and its sensitivity to considerations of ‘African solidarity’ become more intelligible when interpreted through the prism of the identity imperatives bearing on the ‘new’ South Africa. Without discounting the explanatory power of interest‐based analyses, we seek to broaden the debate and highlight the multi‐dimensionality of South Africa's rights‐based foreign policy. In particular, the government finds itself torn between contradictory commitments to both African solidarity and global integration, implying distinct developmental models and rights emphases (social and economic versus civil and political) respectively. We illustrate the interpretive purchase of the complex yet powerful concept of identity for explaining these dynamics through case studies of South Africa's response to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zimbabwe.

Notes

David Black and Zoe Wilson are members of the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University, Canada.

This article is part of a larger project on human rights challenges in middle power foreign policies, focusing on the cases of Canada and South Africa. The authors thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its support of this research.

The middle power idea, and the roles associated with it, is contentious and problematic; yet it arguably captures important international orientations and activities of states like South Africa (Cooper, 1997;Cox, 1989;Hamill and Lee, 2001). Some more recent work has rightly emphasised the distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘emerging’ middle powers, with Canada and South Africa as exemplars (Nel, Taylor and van der Westhuizen, 2000;Schoeman, 2000).

SADC now consists of Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

A pivotal experience in this regard was South Africa's almost‐complete inability to obtain support from its African neighbours in calling for punitive measures against General Sani Abacha's Nigerian regime after the latter executed Ken Saro‐Wiwa and the Ogoni Nine in 1995 (Black, 2003;Van Aardt, 1996).

Mills (1999), for example, noted that at the end of the 1990s South Africa's GDP was four times that of all of the other 13 Southern African Development Community (SADC) states combined, and that the value of its trade with Africa had increased a staggering seven times between 1988 and 1997, with South Africa enjoying a huge surplus.

While constitutions do not always serve as ‘the mirror of the national soul’, South Africa's constitution serves as a particularly good guide to the country's identity aspirations given its recent provenance and the open and highly publicised process by which it was negotiated.

See for example ‘SACP, Cosatu gear up for a fight’,Mail and Guardian, 27 July–2 August.

Mbeki's reformist project, now embodied in the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), represents in part a major effort to accommodate and transcend these tensions (Nel, 2001;Nel, Taylor and van der Westhuizen, 2000).

The conflation of human rights with democracy, ‘good governance’, and free market relations echoes liberal theory where human rights define the range within which democratic decision‐making is allowed to operate. Without the guarantees that human rights provide to the individual, democracy holds the danger of becoming a tyranny of the majority. Further, in its essentially liberal and individualistic form, human rights protects the right of economic man to go forth and prosper by entrenching the norms of individualism upon which the logic of the free market is dependent (Donnelly, 1998b). In neoliberal constructions the key emphasis, however, is on market relations, not human rights.

For example, South Africa hosted the Inter‐Congolese (all party) Dialogue, launched at Sun City in February 2002, and provided crucial logistical, research, and diplomatic support to the regional Facilitation Team headed through this phase of the Dialogue by former Botswana President Ketumile Masire.

In addition, South Africa's efforts to broker a durable peace in the DRC could have been seriously hampered, in the medium term at least, if the Zimbabwean government were unwilling to cooperate. We are indebted to Chris Landsberg for this point.

The suspension imposed few tangible costs on the Mugabe regime, but wounded his pride and the government's international legitimacy, notwithstanding his assertion (as reported on CNN) that ‘the former British colonial power can go to hell’ (‘Mbeki endorses election’, 2002). Mugabe's angry decision to pull Zimbabwe out of the Commonwealth in the face of the continuation of his government's suspension at the Abuja Heads of Government meeting in December, 2003 arguably indicates how deep the wound to his pride has been.

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Notes on contributors

Zoë Wilson ∗

David Black and Zoe Wilson are members of the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University, Canada.