Regional Hegemon or Regional Bystander: South Africa's Zimbabwe Policy 2000–2005

Abstract

South Africa's ‘quiet diplomacy’ has been often used to reject the notion of South African leadership or regional hegemony in Southern Africa. This article finds that this evaluation is founded on a misguided understanding of regional hegemony, which is based on conventional hegemony theories that are mostly derived from the experiences of the global role of the United States after World War II. Instead, this article uses a concept of hegemony that, for example, takes into account the ‘regionality’ of South Africa's hegemony, which allows both external actors to impact on regional relations and South Africa to pursue its foreign policy goals on the global level of international politics. This procedure helps to systemically analyse South Africa's foreign policy in the Zimbabwean crisis and to integrate it better into the broader framework of its regional and global ambitions.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Louise Fawcett, Dr Christopher Alden and Prof. Yuen Foong Khong for their helpful comments on this research project.

Notes

For more details on the developments in Zimbabwe during the reviewed time period, see, among many, Ajulu (2001) and Freeman (2005).

A discussion about the geographical extents of South Africa's region can be found in Bauer and Taylor (2005, p. 5).

While, for instance, Angola, in 2005, spent 5.8% of its GDP on its military, South Africa dedicated only 1.5% to this sector. In absolute numbers, however, this means US$1.16bn in Angola and $3.6bn in South Africa. Overall, this is certainly a very brief and simplified outline of the material ‘balance of power’ in Southern Africa. Yet, as a general assumption, South Africa's status as regional superpower is unchallenged.

The complexity of the land issue in Zimbabwe (and elsewhere in Southern Africa) does not allow for sufficient treatment within this article. More information is provided, for instance, on the website of the Electoral Institute of South Africa (EISA), http://www.eisa.org.za/WEP/zimland.htm (accessed on 10 January 2008). Among the core findings of the EISA is that all sides, from the government, ‘to war veterans, commercial farmers, peasants, civil society, donors and even the British government agree that there should be a redistribution of land’ and the ‘problem appears to be on how this is to be done’.

At first, the term quiet/silent diplomacy was embraced by the South African government: ‘The President engages the President of Zimbabwe in silent diplomacy and any public pronouncements on the detail of discussions might be counterproductive’ (South African National Assembly, 2000). Yet, after 2001, this changed: ‘SA has never pursued either so-called “silent” or “quiet” diplomacy … [it] is a creation of the media’ (South African National Assembly, 2001).

For a more extensive summary of alternative explanations of quiet diplomacy, see, Freeman (2005) or Mhanda (2002).

Myers (1991, p. 3) defines regional hegemons as ‘states, which possess sufficient power to dominate subordinate state systems’. His approach, like many others, is vested in a realist perspective, which neglects both the internal workings of such a regional order and aspects of acceptance, followership and the role of ideas, which are central to most other understandings of hegemony. Elman (2004) and Mearsheimer (2001) define regional hegemony similarly as ‘dominance of the area in which the great power is located’. For an overview of different views on South Africa's role in Southern Africa, see Oden (2000) or Barber (2004).

Nevertheless, the different notions of hegemony are not as incommensurable as often thought. While the most ‘radical’, such as post-structural, approaches do not find recognition here, the more conventional understandings have these key propositions in common, in particular with regard to the necessary material power underpinning of hegemony as well as the either entire or partial absence of ‘brute force’ from the strategies of the hegemonic state.

This distinction has been discussed elsewhere (Prys 2008a). It builds on an analysis of some of the central strands of hegemony theory, from which the common denominators and indicators for each of the constitutive elements of regional hegemony have been derived.

Anonymity has been agreed with all interviewees. As references, ‘N’ signifies an interview with a scholar, journalist or another non-governmental source; ‘G’ signifies an interview with a government official. They are numbered according to their appearance in the article. Other resources such as government documents and statements, newspaper articles, as well as secondary literature on both states and the regions, have also been analysed. For methodological guidance, see Larson (1988). To infer the interviewees' or speakers' actual beliefs and perceptions, Larson suggests combining more spontaneous, less influenced speeches, and statements, such as interviews and parliamentary debates, with speeches for which the context, audience and goals of the given situation has to be considered. Also see Young and Schafer (1998). The analysis has been assisted by the QSR N6 software for qualitative data analysis (Kelle, 2000).

United Nations: 23%; United States: 21% (Pew Global Attitudes Project, 2007).

Maxi van Aardt (1996, p. 115) describes this norm as ‘unwritten law … that African states do not turn on each other in international fora, such as the UN, but close ranks when attacks are made against them’.

It has become clear that, while the demeanour of SADC as a whole has been characterized by an emphasis of unity and consensus, debates behind closed doors have been more controversial. Some countries, in particular Botswana, have expressed their dissatisfaction (Alden and Schoeman, 2003) and at times, openly put pressure on President Mugabe to either open up Zimbabwe to reform or to resign.

Following Ikenberry and Kupchan, values are norm-based attitudes toward specific policy issue and preferences are the interest-based orderings of alternative courses of actions (Ikenberry and Kupchan, 1990, p. 285).

There can also be ‘impure’ public goods that only partly meet the criteria of non-exclusiveness and non-rivalry. This conception of public goods is widely accepted (Stalgren, 2000).

Understood in this way, the conceptual boundary between the dimensions of provision and projection could be blurred. Yet, a clear differentiation can in fact be made. Projection is about the changing of preferences of the secondary state, in order to bring them to a path of actions that suits the fulfilment of the regional hegemon's preferences. Provision is about collective goods for the region as a whole from which, ideally, no one can be excluded and the consumption of which is non-rival. It is, hence, more about the realisation of needs that would otherwise remain unsatisfied.

Letter from South African Foreign Minister Dlamini-Zuma to her Zimbabwean counterpart, 5 July 2000; archives of the Department of Foreign Affairs.

The term ‘embeddedness’ is borrowed from systems theory and refers to the status of an actor or a sub-system nested within another system. It is sometimes discussed with respect to the EU's embeddedness into the international system (Knodt, 2004).

Other external actors with potential influence in the Zimbabwean crisis are China and Libya. Both have provided economic aid to Zimbabwe that has constrained South Africa in exercising its economic leverage. However, Dowden concludes that ‘while this helps Mugabe it does not provide him with the sort of aid that he needs, let alone a saviour’. This saviour can, as agreed in the literature, only be South Africa (Eisenman 2005; Dowden, 2006).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Miriam Prys

∗Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich, Centre for Comparative and International Studies, WEC C 18, Weinbergstrasse 11, CH-8092 Zurich. Email: [email protected]