‘Our identity is our currency’: South Africa, the responsibility to protect and the logic of African intervention

Abstract

Heavyweights of South Africa's ruling African National Congress claim that the responsibility to protect citizens in the case of an unwilling or unable government is an African concept, owned by the continent: rooted in the security–development crisis of the past few decades, Pretoria stresses that there is an intellectual and political history of intervention, separate from Western conceptions of R2P. While the conception of an African responsibility to protect has come to constitute a major pillar of South African foreign policy, this is not without its critics—domestic or abroad—and, as the Libya case exemplifies, often presents decision-makers in Pretoria with tough real world dilemmas. South Africa shares the intense scepticism of China and Russia about Western claims of value-based foreign policies. But much as anti-imperialist ideology and growth-centred relations with other emerging powers inform South African foreign policy, it would be a mistake to see Pretoria's scepticism about Western interpretations as a sign of profound normative convergence with Russian and Chinese critiques of liberal peace-building: the South African critique of the responsibility to protect is more procedural than substantive.

Introduction

No discussion about South Africa and what kind of role it might play in a rapidly changing world provokes more heated reactions than the question of legitimate intervention in Africa. Is South Africa the continent's hegemon, asserting its voice in international society and keeping its conscience at a time when the agenda of protecting civilians seems to be stalling? Should South Africa aspire to be a normal state on the global stage, a middle power pursuing its interests without remorse? Or ought Pretoria to attempt to overhaul the unjust international system which locks in the hegemony of the powerful, who bend international law and intervene in Africa under the pretext of saving lives and ‘stability’? All three radically different viewpoints have considerable degrees of traction among elites and the public and inform how South Africa thinks about what to do when sovereign states fail, or are unwilling, to uphold the fundamental rights of their citizens.

This article argues that the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) sits at the heart of internal and external debates about South African foreign policy and as such provides an invaluable lens to understand change and continuity in the country's role in Africa and the wider international system since the end of white minority-rule in 1994. Post-Apartheid Pretoria has formally anchored its external relations in the Pan-Africanist ideology of the African Renaissance which posits ‘African solutions to African conflicts’: the mutually reinforcing scourges of underdevelopment, bad governance and war are seen as the chief causes for Africa's perennial crises and for its global marginalisation. In the view of many in the African National Congress (ANC) of Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, this has allowed Great Powers, during the Cold War but also after 1989, to exploit Africa's natural resources and to intervene on the continent when their interests are threatened, abandoning it—most notoriously during the Rwandan genocide—when no direct political or economic gain is evident. The West upholding or suspending sovereignty, then, in their eyes, is still organised hypocrisy.1

For these and other reasons, the ANC leadership was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the African Union (AU) in 2001–2002, including the adoption of the AU Constitutive Act which sets out the most far-reaching interpretation of humanitarian intervention by any multilateral organisation. Virulent criticisms of the inequitable international system and Western power politics should thus not be understood as a sovereignist rejection of the duty to protect civilians and arrest genocide or crimes against humanity, but rather as a desire to strengthen the notion of an African responsibility to solve the continent's problems and shield its citizens from war and oppressive rulers. The South African argument is that R2P is not a Western concept, but a universal concern that in recent years has been abused as well as applied too selectively. For Pretoria, instrumentalisation of and experimentation with the principle of R2P is a dangerous trend which undermines a fundamentally sound idea that Africa needs to confront its myriad crises.

Put differently, the South African critique of the evolution of the R2P norm is more procedural than substantive—ANC heavyweights like Mbeki claim that humanitarian intervention is an African concept, owned by the continent—and reflects a wider challenge to Western dominated imaginaries and practices of international order, even if South African diplomats like Nye's suggested merger of values and interests that should underpin legitimate and effective intervention.2 South Africa operates not in a vanishing Westphalian world, but in an international society where solidarist conceptions of order coexist, often unhappily, with many aspects of the old pluralism; shared values do not necessarily imply shared interests, just as discourse coalitions should not obscure deeper-lying disagreements on norms and rules.3

South Africa thus concurs with China's and Russia's emphasis on international law and shares their scepticism about American and European claims of value-based foreign policies; joining the BRICS club (the ‘S’ officially refers to South Africa since 2011) further deepens the ANC's belief in a multipolar world and a balancing of Western power. However, much as anti-imperialist ideology and growth-centred relations with other emerging powers inform foreign policy, it would be a mistake to see Pretoria's disagreement with Western interpretations as a sign of profound normative convergence with Russian and Chinese critiques of R2P and liberal peace-building.

This article begins by sketching the politico-historical context against which contemporary policy must be analysed. Despite the momentous changes of the 1990s, the trajectory under white minority-rule remains an influential legacy in South Africa's international relations today. Since the creation of the Union of South Africa, Pretoria has maintained a complex, stormy relationship with the international system, advocating reforms and feeling deeply misunderstood, particularly by Western powers that appeared to let it down and to misread African on-the-ground realities. As part of the Commonwealth, under Apartheid and under the ANC, South Africa has claimed a special calling—a task to explain Africa to the world, to represent it at global level and to take the lead in reordering politics on the continent as part of a vision of enlightened self-interest.

Secondly, we discuss the African Renaissance project of President Mbeki (1999–2008) which postulates the overarching principles and preferred instruments in South African foreign policy under ANC stewardship. Mbeki's Pan-Africanism is key to understanding Pretoria's thinking about international order, security and intervention, as it demonstrates that the R2P debate is not merely one in which emerging powers support or reject a ‘Western’ norm of suspending sovereignty to protect civilians. This article takes African imaginations of intervention seriously, analysing how Pretoria's interpretations, attitudes and practices regarding R2P differ in subtle but important ways from those of other major players in a multipolar world.

In this paper's third section, we focus on the politics surrounding the 2011 NATO military intervention in Libya. We argue that the latter is especially insightful to understand how values, interests and perceptions relate to each other in the thinking of important constituencies in South Africa. As in many other countries, while Pretoria stresses its commitment to R2P pillars one and two and highlights that guaranteeing the security of Africans requires a comprehensive political, economic and military approach, R2P is almost invariably understood as intervention in South African public debates, a tendency reinforced by the controversy over the Libyan civil war. Pretoria supported the notion of a no-fly zone to protect the populations of Benghazi and other cities against the troops of Muammar Qaddafi; at the UN Security Council it voted in favour of Resolution 1973. Yet following NATO's bombardments, a backlash among the ANC rank-and-file and a growing emphasis by France, Britain and America that R2P really meant regime change, South Africa became one of the intervention's fiercest critics.

Finally, we tie these different threads together and argue that South Africa's self-identification as a moderately revisionist power and a leader of the African continent is key to understanding how it sees international order. South Africa's position on intervention and international security more broadly is a function of its stated interests—South Africa cannot thrive unless Africa flourishes; the values it proudly defends—African self-reliance, multilateralism and international solidarity; and its self-professed identity as a country with a mission to lead in dismantling the nexus of conflict and underdevelopment on the continent, given its own unique domestic experience of peaceful reconciliation, its relative economic prowess and its role as Africa's unofficial representative in global forums, from the G20 to BRICS.

Yet while the ANC claims that, in the words of one of its top diplomats, ‘our identity is our currency’4—meaning that because of its turbulent history and its physical location on the globe, South Africa is uniquely placed to advocate a fairer, more inclusive international system and a more consensual approach to R2P/intervention—we argue that this self-perception in its current form might undermine the stated foreign policy objectives of Pretoria. Alternative conceptions of the responsibility to protect—including important procedural considerations—would arguably be more likely to gain support in the international community if South Africa's combination of ideological rigidity, relatively weak diplomatic capacity and limited material power did not blind it to how its moralising revisionism is regularly perceived as hypocritical, naïve and unworkable.

The long shadow of history: South Africa, domestic politics and intervention

Since the independence of the Union of South Africa in 1910, foreign policy has been vitally important in protecting the domestic order and resolving internal tensions, as well as projecting South African ideas about the world—and Africa in particular—outwards. Pretoria has always seen itself as uniquely positioned to take the lead on the continent, to fulfil the role of intermediary between the West and Africa and to intervene in zones of instability as a benign regional hegemon. At the same time, mutual disappointment between South Africa and the West has been a central theme, as Pretoria has often clashed with Americans and Europeans through the pursuit of normative and security agendas on the continent which rhetorically overlap with Western tropes of order, but in practice often diverge substantially. While the values of today's ANC very much differ from those of the Apartheid regime, major continuities between the foreign policies of successive South African governments, particularly regarding attitudes towards intervention, deserve to be highlighted too.

The creation of the Union following the 1899–1902 Anglo-Boer War turned South Africa into a self-governing dominion within the Commonwealth, its foreign policy loyal to London. Its British politico-legal system incorporated laws demanded by the weary Afrikaner population, including a system of increasingly institutionalised segregation. The founding fathers understood the frail nature of the compromise between Anglophone business and Afrikaner conservativism on which their country was founded. Jan Smuts in particular sought to solve the tensions inherent to the Union: consolidating white control of the economy; promoting South Africa as the dominant player on the continent; and allying with London on global issues like the gold standard and geopolitical rivalry with France and Germany.5

However, a consensus on what South Africa was—and what foreign policy should support this vision—remained elusive. Conservatives opposed Prime Minister Smuts' decision to side with Britain against Nazism. They sought to protect the Afrikaner nation economically and culturally against the outside world, criticising Smuts' call to lead the process of civilising Africa and help build the League of Nations/United Nations.6 Pretoria joined the Allies and fought for a liberal world order—Smuts even wrote swathes of the UN Charter—but the unionists were defeated in the 1948 elections. The rise of the Apartheid state transformed foreign policy; not for the last time, domestic concerns shaped South Africa's international relations.

Daniel Malan and Hendrik Verwoerd vowed to solve the ‘racial problem’ by rejecting assimilation and prioritising separate development. Afrikaner chauvinism empowered descendants of Dutch settlers who rose to the commanding heights of a state-dominated economy and occupied the Union's political, legal and military institutions. In order to protect Apartheid, foreign policy was put at the service of white domination.7 South Africa's Nationalists showed little interest in the United Nations. Yet as demands emerged to implement the UN charter—including equality of all people and the right to self-determination—the anti-colonial agenda gained momentum. While the Nationalists were isolationists—believing Westerners had little idea of ‘African realities’ and the explosive nature of racial difference—South Africa reluctantly engaged the US and Western Europe to protect its institutionalised system of discrimination.8

Pretoria shifted its discourse from South Africa's civilising mission on the continent to another form of sacrifice for humanity: the struggle against communism. Both domestic repression against the ANC and extensive military intervention in Rhodesia's brutal guerrilla war and the Lusophone former colonies caught up in wars of independence/civil wars were organised under the anti-communist banner. Pretoria argued that the West might not like Apartheid but had few options other than supporting a government that was doing its dirty work in confronting Soviet proxies in Africa.9 Apartheid diplomats echoed the title of this article: their clever positioning—an international identity of a bulwark against the Red Menace, rather than a racist colonial state—was South Africa's currency until the late 1980s. Identity and intervention were, not for the last time, closely linked.

Despite successfully selling the anti-communist narrative, relations with Washington, London and Paris were constantly prone to mutual embarrassment. Pretoria's disappointment in the West's limited empathy grew during the 1970s and 1980s,10 when opposition against Apartheid reached a crescendo internally. Simultaneously, the regional outlook worsened as nationalist-leftist regimes captured power in Angola, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, offering military aid to the ANC. The sense of an existential menace from within and from without—‘Total Onslaught’—explains the ruthless response by an expanding security state.11 A clandestine nuclear programme began in the 1970s with Israeli support.12 The South African Defence Forces and its proxies fought 20 years of pitched battles, intervening incessantly across Southern Africa.

While overwhelming militarisation crushed internal challenges and forced African governments to decrease support for the ANC, it did not solve the domestic contradictions of Apartheid and increasingly isolated South Africa internationally—including a painful embargo—as its economy was grinding to a halt.13 The Nationalists won the war but lost politically: no other country recognised the Bantustans; the expenditure on the security state was unsustainable; and rapprochement with the West foundered on failure to reform the political system.14 Apartheid ideologues distrusted diplomacy, but foreign policy was vital in securing domestic order; the failure to effectively manage external relations contributed substantially to the demise of white minority-rule.

Apartheid's unravelling was a triumph for the African National Congress: decades of armed and non-armed resistance wore down the racist system and turned it into a pariah. World leaders hailed the ANC's vision of a new South Africa; the decision not to take revenge on the oppressors and to respect private property (thereby accepting white dominance of the economy for the foreseeable future) commanded admiration. However, international enthusiasm for the movement after 1990 was not always reciprocated. Years of clandestine struggle instilled a profound sense of suspicion and chronic distrust of outsiders into ANC thinking. Many cadres felt the outside world had done too little in confronting Apartheid.15 American and European leaders, which now hailed Mandela, were seen to have adopted double standards and not to have (South) Africa's interests at heart. This legacy of troubled relations with the West—and the conviction that the ANC owes little to the international community and cannot count on it to keep its lofty promises—has proved a crucial subtext in post-1994 diplomacy and therefore also in the thinking about a responsibility to protect in Africa.

Africa's right to intervene: Mandela, Mbeki and the African Renaissance

The ANC's rise to power was approached cautiously in international society. Would the movement replace its revolutionary principles with pragmatism? And what role would it play on the African continent? Yet doubts about South Africa as a respectable player quickly morphed into expectations of Pretoria as the West's central interlocutor in Africa, even the main ‘local’ advocate of the liberal agenda that appeared to have triumphed over all other possible alternatives after 1989. Reassured by Nelson Mandela's soaring words,16 Western capitals expected Pretoria to take the lead in addressing Africa's intractable crises. This sentiment was captured by the Head of the United Nations Observer Mission in South Africa: ‘this country will soon become a catalyst for the rapid development of not only the southern African region but the rest of the continent’.17 Domestic liberal voices too demanded a proactive, value-driven agenda.18

The hopes which Mandela incarnated, can, with the benefit of hindsight, be called naively optimistic; they could never all be achieved given structural problems inside South Africa and the nature of international politics. The ANC consolidated the termination of the military nuclear programme and steered global non-proliferation discussions;19 Mandela sought a peaceful solution to war in Zaire/Congo in 1997; and Pretoria signalled its commitment to becoming a force for stability in its own sub-region, through regional integration and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).20 However, Mandela's reconciliation magic did not travel far outside South Africa's borders.

Diplomatic intervention could neither delay the Congo Wars, nor affect their course as SADC members rushed to rescue beleaguered Congolese President Laurent Kabila. Mandela's attempt to slap sanctions on Sani Abacha's Nigeria—where human rights activists were executed and billions of petrodollars stolen by the regime—ended in a humiliating isolation of South Africa on the continental stage. And Pretoria's intervention in Lesotho in 1998, which hoped to arrest its slide into anarchy and restore constitutional government, was criticised as Apartheid-style bullying. Nigeria, Congo and Lesotho, as well as the failure to get the Great Powers to make concessions on nuclear disarmament, were traumatic reality checks to the euphoria of the first Post-Apartheid years.21

Despite these debacles, South Africa did not abandon international activism nor strong views about intervention. Thabo Mbeki prioritised foreign policy throughout his presidency, propagating the ‘African Renaissance’ which he shared with his illustrious predecessor.22 As a Pan-Africanist, Mbeki sought to meet the disillusionments of the first four decades of post-colonial rule by reconnecting with the optimism of Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere; he tried to overcome the criticism that the ANC's idealist internationalism and the neo-realist culture of the Department of Foreign Affairs confused foreign policy.23 Mbeki proposed a twin strategy to tackle the inter-related crises of underdevelopment, African marginalisation on the global stage and the bad governance–conflict nexus: in similar fashion to ANC-led South Africa, individual African states would have to put their house in order through democratisation, rule of law and pro-growth policies;24 simultaneously, they had to come together to reform the Organisation of African Unity—widely seen as an ineffective club of autocrats—into an African Union which could amplify the continent's international voice, solve intractable wars and punish unconstitutional takeovers of power.

The Mbeki Government invested heavily in ‘African solutions to African problems’, taking the lead in organising the continent around the AU and getting member states to sign its Constitutive Act,25 which embraced a humanitarian interventionist logic following the principle of ‘non-indifference’, as the first AU Commission Chair, Alpha Oumar Konaré, put it.26 The AU outlawed coups and gave its Peace and Security Council the power to authorise any action needed, including military operations, to stop genocide, crimes against humanity or other large-scale human rights violations.27 While sovereignty of individual states remained important, the transformation of the OAU, possibly the world's least interventionist regional organisation, into the AU, was a remarkable success for liberal advocates of the universality of basic rights and associated responsibilities and duties upon all to uphold them. Together with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan28 and heads of states such as Olusegun Obasanjo (Nigeria), Abdoulaye Wade (Senegal) and Joaquim Chissano (Mozambique), Mbeki built a coalition that aimed at institutionalising the African Renaissance.

The notion of a Pan-African ‘right to intervene’, shaped by Mbeki's determination to tackle the conflict–underdevelopment–misrule nexus, must be situated in the context of the 1990s and the ‘Out of Africa’ pessimism of the international community, exemplified by The Economist's headliner ‘The Hopeless Continent’.29 Mbeki, who has long railed against portrayals of black Africans as incapable of managing their own destinies, urged fellow African leaders to adopt an agenda for security, development and intervention as a matter of African agency and dignity: no longer depending on an outside world which persistently fails the continent, but protecting Africa against external exploitation and addressing glaring violations of the most basic rights of citizens. At a time when Western countries question South Africa's contemporary record on human rights and R2P, it is worth recalling that the commitment to the ‘non-indifference’ agenda emerged in large part out of the disappointment in the dominant powers' reluctance to effectively deal with Africa's crisis of underdevelopment, war and authoritarianism. In the words of South Africa's Ambassador to the UN between 1999 and 2009:

Africa has found itself the subject of most of the Council's recent activities […] Today more than 60% of the items on the agenda of the Security Council are devoted to addressing conflict situations in Africa. Consequently, Africans have a disproportionately large stake in a strong, effective and legitimate Security Council.

 At the same time, it is clear that because Africa is not represented in the permanent category of the Council, it is left to the discretion of foreign powers to decide if, when and how the Council should intervene in African affairs. Apathy or indifference from the Council has brought terrible consequences…in Rwanda, the DRC and Sudan that are of little or no strategic interest to the current Permanent Members of the Council.30

From the start, the African Renaissance was locked in an ambivalent relationship with the Western-dominated world order. On the one hand, the AU needed outside political and financial support to realise the Millennium Development Goals, build the organisation and help pay for African peacekeeping missions on the continent. But on the other, South Africa's objectives were revisionist, in that it identified the inequitably structured international system as perpetuating Africa's marginalisation and conflicts. The ANC government tried at once to be a bridge-builder (by serving on the UN Security Council, frequenting G8/G20 summits and seeking to attract aid and investment) and a raucous reformer. It refused to bite its tongue when confronted with what it saw as Western double standards—glaring abuse of the emerging principle of making sovereignty conditional on a state's willingness and ability to protect its citizens—in Iraq and Palestine.31

Mbeki's African Renaissance and his discourse of Pan-African intervention as responsibility troubled many across the political spectrum.32 Some criticised the AU, NEPAD and the right to intervene as a neo-liberal master plan in disguise,33 an internationalisation of the macro-economic conservatism of the ‘Growth, Employment and Redistribution’ strategy the ANC ‘imposed’ on South Africa and a tacit alliance between South African capital and Western powers to protect their interests on the continent, if necessary through military force.34 The most stinging criticism was that Pretoria's rhetoric positioned it on the moral high ground, but that its unwillingness to solve the political crisis in neighbouring Zimbabwe revealed that the emperor wore no clothes.35 Western commentators denounced Mbeki's ‘Quiet Diplomacy’ and his refusal to publicly condemn Robert Mugabe's human rights record.36 What good use was it to argue that the continent was turning a corner, if neither the AU nor South Africa were able or willing to broker—if necessary impose—a durable political settlement in Zimbabwe? The image of Mbeki and Mugabe shaking hands damaged Pretoria's claims of a value-driven, visionary policy.37

Pretoria's 2007–2008 debut on the Security Council was a test of how much global traction South African ideas around R2P, human rights and international security more broadly had. The Mbeki Government had promoted its candidacy by presenting itself as a natural intermediary between the West, emerging powers and the Global South, rooted in its unique position as a country with strong links to all three: ‘our identity is our currency’. It argued that it had accumulated a credible track record as reformer and accommodator at forums as diverse as the Non-Aligned Movement, the G20 and the AU. Yet its Security Council term was marred by controversy. Western critics alleged that South Africa merely paid lip service to liberal values and R2P; ANC cadres felt that Pretoria did too little to end ‘global apartheid’.38

Thabo Mbeki was nowhere to be seen during the 2007–2008 post-election violence in Kenya, his authority was gravely diminished in the wake of the turbulent December 2007 Polokwane conference of the ANC which saw Zuma oust Mbeki as party president and Pretoria's diplomats remained conspicuously quiet on the issue of international prosecution of Kenyan politicians for their role in fanning the flames. Furthermore, South Africa's ambassador to the United Nations opposed draft resolutions condemning the Burmese junta's human rights record in 2007 and proposing sanctions against Zimbabwe in 2008, declaring that where his government was concerned, these situations did not constitute threats to international security and should therefore be discussed in a more appropriate UN forum, the Human Rights Council.

Such behaviour seemed to reveal that, despite South Africa's embrace of Konaré's principle of non-difference and its insistence that human rights were integral to all security debates, Pretoria's interpretation of R2P was either hypocritical or differed substantially from views held in the human rights community. One of Britain's leading diplomats, working in New York when South Africa served on the Security Council, noted the irony of rejecting the very instrument that had helped the ANC overthrow Apartheid: ‘[i]t was one of the most incredulous moments in my diplomatic career: hearing the South African ambassador claim in the Zimbabwe debate that sanctions never work in international politics’.39 Simultaneously though, it should be observed that South Africa's voting behaviour during its two years on the Security Council was anything but revisionist or anti-Western; its support of 120 out of 121 approved resolutions, a considerable number of which dealt with thorny African security issues, can hardly count as evidence of being a ‘spoiler’.40

Perhaps the most important Security Council dossier for South Africa has been Sudan— the Darfur crisis, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (which gave Southern Sudanese the right of self-determination) and (counter-)insurgency in South Kordofan and Blue Nile. South African actions came under scrutiny from international lobby groups41 and domestic liberals42 who have accused the ANC government of going soft on Khartoum's military-Islamist ‘Al-Ingaz’ (Salvation) regime which has sustained its hegemony through dreadful crimes against its own population, resulting in the first arrest warrant ever issued by the International Criminal Court against an incumbent head of state, Field Marshal Omar Al-Bashir. Particularly when South Africa served on the Security Council, Thabo Mbeki's attempts at another round of quiet diplomacy—supporting the weakening of UN resolutions profoundly critical of the Sudanese Government, inviting Bashir to Cape Town and faulting Darfurian rebels for egregious war crimes in Western Sudan, in the hope that ‘appeasement’ would make the regime more amenable to a peace agreement and AU-UN peacekeeping missions—caused a stir. One commentator lambasted Pretoria's approach to Sudan, seeing it as exemplary of how what Mbeki described as ‘constructive engagement’ with the intention of protecting civilians produced the diametrically opposite result:

This strategy did nothing to alter the inequities of the international system and yielded no benefits to South Africa or the South. The only winners were the dictators and the clear losers were their victims […] This outcome was not emancipatory or in any way transformative. In so far as it helped to retain repressive governments in power, the strategy was reactionary.43

Rather than seeing its positions on Sudan, Burma and other controversial dossiers as a divergence between South Africa and liberal principles of protecting human rights, the ANC stresses that critics are misunderstanding South Africa's interpretation of what R2P means and how it can be implemented in practice. The tendency of Western actors to see their values and interests as representing the only possible incarnation of R2P underpin their misrepresentation of and misguided attacks on South Africa's positions in the past 15 years. Both ANC heavyweights and career diplomats stress their commitment to the ‘norm’—despite what they see as flagrant abuse and damaging selective invocation since its adoption by the UN General Assembly in 2005—and remind critics that they played an essential role in rallying developing countries behind the outcome document.

Pretoria's representatives claim that they ultimately helped pull reluctant Latin America, India and other African nations over the finish line by insisting that ‘Africa desperately needs the document’ and that the procedural elements around R2P should act as a restraint on manipulation of the principle by the P5.44 They underscore that a proactive role in the Kenyan crisis—with President Mbeki rather than Archbishop Desmond Tutu (who went to Nairobi to attempt to avert a meltdown in January 2008) as the leading actor—would have been counterproductive, given that high profile intervention by a regional rival of Kenya would jeopardise Kofi Annan's mediation instead of providing better protection for civilians. Finally, they also point out that South Africa has risked the lives of thousands of its soldiers in operations in Burundi, Congo and Sudan, while the P5's involvement in peacekeeping in Africa is virtually non-existent.

The ANC leadership believes that the African Renaissance will be stillborn if Africans, within the framework of the AU Peace and Security Council, do not involve themselves in the internal affairs of African ‘sister countries’ unable/unwilling to address violent political crises. But rather than conceiving intervention as solely a question of military operations, South African diplomats insist that it is a comprehensive concept that prioritises dialogue, capacity-building and national reconciliation. Ideas about protecting civilians can only legitimately be operationalised through cumbersome but necessary deliberations.

These ideas are informed by several key components that characterise South Africa's foreign policy identity: its long-standing scepticism regarding Western military interventions, which is connected to the ANC's passionate anti-imperialism and the importance attached to South–South solidarity and reform of the international system;45 its emphasis on development and security problems as two sides of the same coin, meaning that political rights and socioeconomic rights are equally important and should be pursued simultaneously through reformed international institutions partnering with responsible governments;46 and South Africa's own successful experience of a negotiated transition of power-sharing and inclusive government in the context of a society scarred by colonialism and regional conflict.47 The latter element especially explains why Mbeki and other advocates of the African Renaissance believed that ‘our identity is our currency’: South Africa, in their self-perception, is a well-placed, righteous norm entrepreneur.

R2P and its discontents: the Libya debacle

Through the African Renaissance, South Africa has offered a bold interpretation of R2P and of how to advance the security of one billion Africans; its foreign policy is defined by what it calls the ‘African Agenda’ and it has sent troops in harm's way to protect civilians in Darfur. Pan-Africanists underline that their thinking about the right to intervene has an intellectual history of its own, separate from Western traditions of humanitarianism and military intervention. However, South Africa's first stint on the Security Council did little to bridge the gaps in understanding with the US, France and Britain. The West has been disappointed by Pretoria's ‘support’ for rogue regimes48 and South Africa has found its broader argument with regards to intervention—that R2P must be part of comprehensive reform of the way the international community approaches security in general, including institutional mechanisms—poorly understood or ignored altogether. These disagreements have worsened in recent years.

After Zuma became President of the Republic in 2009, the foreign policy establishment tried to improve its difficult balancing act of a Realist defence of South African interests and the idealist transformation of Africa against the background of an accelerated shift in global economic power in the wake of the Great Recession in the Western world.49 Going beyond cynical accusations—the African Agenda as some form of neo-colonialism—or starry-eyed adoration of the Pan-Africanist discourse on human rights and development, it was observed that part of Pretoria's dilemma is structural.50

South Africa faces classic trade-offs associated with middle power status:51 a certain degree of leverage and influence in the international system, but also tangible constraints on the quality and quantity of its diplomatic interventions and real limitations in terms of material resources and soft power.52 Middle powers can shape the agenda and make a difference in a chosen issue area (‘niche diplomacy’53), but are destined to fail if their ambitions are too wide-ranging or diverge too much from the interests or values of the dominant players in the international system: Pretoria's brave new African security politics is still some way off. Moreover, like other regional hegemons aspiring to a weighty global voice, South Africa has found that its own backyard—often wrongly assumed to be a given source of strength—and its limited success in rallying domestic constituencies behind its foreign policy constrain its ability to shape global discussions.54

No recent crisis better illustrates South Africa's dilemmas—e.g. engaging the West on R2P or opposing its interpretation to further Pretoria's own vision—than the Security Council debate about how to deal with the murderous repression of the Libyan uprising and the subsequent NATO intervention which played a crucial role in Muammar Qaddafi's overthrow.55 The Arab Spring surprised the African continent. When after the fall of Zine Al-Abdin Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak the Libyan Government resorted to large-scale violence to quash the growing protests, the Arab League and the African Union scrambled to design a common position. An ad hoc AU High Level committee on Libya, including Jacob Zuma, proposed a negotiated settlement between Qaddafi and the increasingly armed opposition but genocidal threats against the regime's critics in Benghazi and elsewhere forced the dossier onto the Security Council's agenda. Amidst the rush to stop Qaddafi, South Africa (for the second time a non-permanent member of the Council) voted in favour of resolution 1973 and the creation of a no-fly zone over Libya: the murky circumstances in which this vote took place—and the subsequent chaotic communication by the administration—triggered a passionate debate about the country's national interests, the importance of values and its post-1994 alignments with the Great Powers and other African states.

For some, the Libya case revolved around South Africa's identity as a nation that should at all times stand up against violations of human rights and authoritarian regimes which deny citizens the most fundamental liberties.56 In this view, South Africa has been an international norm entrepreneur since Mandela, with the AU and its peace and security architecture as its proudest achievement so far, rooted in the principle of non-indifference: it is such value-driven behaviour that sets it apart from other countries and gives it leverage in international negotiations. Liberals remind their compatriots of the responsibility Pretoria has to protect endangered populations, especially on the African continent.57 Subscribing to R2P in Libya was a high-profile opportunity for South Africa to reconnect with its post-1994 identity as a solidarist nation in the international system.

Seen through a neo-realist lens of relative differences in power and the pursuit of national interests in an anarchic environment, Libya contained both uplifting and sobering messages. The disappearance of Qaddafi, the main challenger of Mbeki's vision for the AU and a funder of rebellions across the continent (including in Sudan and Congo where South Africa invested heavily in post-conflict peace-building), has reinforced Pretoria's position on the continental stage, at minimal cost. Simultaneously, Realist voices noted a worrying strategic inconsistency:58 while South Africa's BRIC friends all abstained on resolution 1973, Pretoria voted with America, Britain and France at a time when it was cultivating alternative alliances, thereby distancing itself from the all-important group it joined in 2011 to engage in crucial soft balancing.59

Moreover, the West's ability to instrumentalise a fungible norm like R2P to depose recalcitrant African heads of state once again re-emphasised the huge political and military power differential between Western countries and Africa.60 No degree of (South) African opposition could have stopped Washington, Paris and London from favouring a military solution, a lesson in realpolitik also learned in Côte d'Ivoire where ANC diplomacy failed to broker an agreement and a joint France–UN intervention in 2011 helped the ‘pro-Paris’ Alassane Ouattara win the power struggle against Laurent Gbabgo, who maintained strong relations with Thabo Mbeki and Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos.

In the radically leftist vision of South Africa and its international responsibilities too, Libya exemplifies unequal power relations, instrumentalisation of global norms and Africa's exclusion from debates on international security. This view, popular among young militants and veteran Pan-Africanist cadres with strong ties to Havana and Beijing like Deputy Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Ebrahim Ebrahim, posits that the ANC struggle against Apartheid was all about opposing colonialism and racism; South Africa should continue this emancipatory struggle, opposing hegemony and suspensions of sovereignty whenever it suits the powers that be. They advocate norm subsidiarity, the development of rules and norms to protect weaker members of international society against being trampled by the stronger ones.61 South Africa must challenge the existing world order through a coalition of the exploited which overhauls international institutions and exposes the hypocritical rhetoric of American-provided ‘global’ security.62 Such voices draw comparisons between the invasion of Iraq, Western support for Apartheid and the ousting of Qaddafi;63 the West, its institutions and its norms are fundamentally unreliable. This is an analysis captured perfectly by Thabo Mbeki (currently the AU envoy to Sudan–South Sudan after being recalled by his own ANC as President in 2008), who struck back at Zuma from the left:

To add insult to injury, all three African members of the AU ignored the decisions of the AU on Libya, and voted for the treacherous UN Security Council Resolution 1973 which the Western powers used to justify what was effectively the imposition of imperial diktat both on Libya and Africa as a whole, which we allowed to succeed […]. This made no impression on the agenda of the Western imperial powers, determined to pursue their strategic objective we have mentioned, which is to transform all other countries into their neo-colonies, wherever and whenever this is possible.64

The perspective of the ANC government on R2P, as exemplified by the Libya case, mixes elements of all three critiques/visions; the resulting (confusing) positions and logics illustrate multiple problems facing South African foreign policy more broadly. South African diplomats are at pains to underscore that they were right to vote in favour of resolution 1973 and that they harboured no illusions regarding the threat faced by the people of Benghazi; the international community had a duty to intervene to protect human lives, something President Obama and President Zuma agreed on in a telephone conversation right before the vote.65 Yet, as argued by National Security Advisor Welile Nhlapo,66 what exactly R2P would look like in practice became a source of major disagreement, a product of both power politics and perceptions at the time of the Libya crisis and diverging interpretations of R2P by Western powers and emerging powers.67

While Pretoria agreed to a no-fly zone, government spokesmen claim that they did not expect that NATO would assume responsibility for the military intervention—the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is not mentioned in the resolution—nor that the AU ad hoc High Level committee's efforts would immediately be terminated by French and British airstrikes, eliminating the option of a power-sharing government and a peaceful exit of Qaddafi from Libya. Even though diplomats privately admit that Zuma's mediation efforts were almost certainly doomed to fail in the absence of a willingness among the parties to seriously consider a peaceful solution,68 the ANC National Executive Committee was outraged when President Sarkozy and Prime Minister Cameron torpedoed any political process other than a total rebel victory; according to South Africa's Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe, ‘[the AU mediation effort was] flagrantly thwarted by the intervention’.69

Compounded by pressures from its rank and file and criticisms from Mbeki and firebrand youth leader, Julius Malema, the ANC leadership fumed when it became clear that the NATO intervention had special forces on the ground and was interpreting R2P as synonymous with regime change. According to Pretoria, this represented a betrayal of all three of the preconditions it set before endorsing resolution 1973: focus on a peaceful solution; no boots on the ground; and no externally-led regime change.70 South African anger particularly manifested itself vis-à-vis Paris, which the ANC has long criticised for its ‘neo-colonial’ Françafrique policies in West and Central Africa. Coming only months after France allegedly manipulated the Security Council into supporting the removal of Gbagbo as president of Côte d'Ivoire to protect Paris' economic interests there, the Anglo-French interpretation of R2P confirmed the worst fears of the anti-imperialist factions in the ANC. Clause four of the resolution, which ‘authorizes Member States […] to take all necessary measures […] to protect civilians and civilian populated’,71 in this interpretation facilitated the murder of an African head of state. For the ANC grassroots, this evoked echoes of other ‘neo-colonial assassinations’ against enemies of international stability—Lumumba, Soilih, Sankara.72

Three years on, South African decision-makers still denounce how France, Britain and America were willing to sacrifice a broad consensus around R2P to settle scores with Qaddafi and re-seize the initiative in North Africa after the Arab Spring caught them by surprise and left them embarrassed as the pro-Western Ben Ali and Mubarak fell. One of Pretoria's top ambassadors commented: ‘[o]n values we are clear: you can't kill civilians. But we have issues with the mechanisms and sequencing that the West prioritises’.73 While South Africa still subscribes to the principle of non-indifference and African-led humanitarian intervention, its hostility towards R2P has grown markedly (e.g. in UNSC discussions around the Assad regime and the Syrian civil war), particularly as the NATO intervention in Libya is blamed for the near takeover of Mali by radical Islamists in 2012–2013: ‘[t]he stalemate on Syria can be traced back to Libya and how trust was betrayed […] Instability in the Sahel and Mali is a direct consequence of the Libya intervention’.74 The legitimacy of the principle and of the institutions involved has been gravely tarnished in the eyes of ANC cadres.

The fallout over R2P in Libya has strengthened Pretoria's desire to align with other emerging powers, particularly since South Africa joined BRICS in 2011.75 This re-energised Realism is driven by the need for trade and investment to boost economic growth and by a desire to appease radical ANC militants, but part of this too is unmistakeably soft balancing of Western hegemony. Although South Africa's interpretation of the right to intervene differs from that of China and Russia (and while normative convergence more broadly among BRICS members is questionable), the combination of the relative decline in Western power and the apparent instrumentalisation of R2P in Libya provides fertile ground for deepening alignments and asserting BRICS as a potentially counter-hegemonic institution, with Pretoria as Africa's self-appointed representative. The creation of a BRICS Development Bank, discussions about common positions on Security Council dossiers and close co-ordination on climate change might represent cautious efforts to reform the traditionally Western-dominated world order.

The tendency to reassert South African interests directly was visible in the 2012 election of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Mbeki's long-serving Minister of Foreign Affairs, as Chairperson of the AU Commission with the mission of establishing greater financial and organisational independence vis-à-vis the AU's Western donors. The bruising Dlamini-Zuma victory over the pro-French Jean Ping, for which Pretoria pulled out all the stops, shows a South Africa more willing to flex its muscles and less willing, at least publicly, to play its role as a bridge-builder between the West and Africa. According to a senior ANC member, ‘the election was about this: when a crisis erupts in Africa, who will the Chairperson call first? Paris or an African sister-country?’.76 Even if the ties that bind South Africa and the West together remain deeper than the ANC publicly acknowledges, Libya exposed major differences in how to operationalise international order and intervention.

Conclusion: identity as currency or identity as inflexibility?

This article has argued that understanding South Africa's position on the responsibility to protect is not just a question of analysing national interests or professed values. It is the South African identity and, more particularly, the idea that this identity is South Africa's greatest asset on the global stage—an interesting if all too convenient convergence of what is in the country's best interest, what it believes about the world and how it is seen by others—that shapes its foreign policy and its conceptualisation of Africans assuming responsibility for the physical security of other Africans.

We highlighted the conceptual work that has gone into the African Renaissance's comprehensive approach to security and its emphasis that R2P cannot just be about intervention; but we also underlined that history—South Africa's old notion of a mission in Africa and its long-standing willingness to deploy militarily across the continent; ideology—anti-imperialism and the continuation of the liberation struggle; and domestic politics—notably factionalism inside the ANC—are key inputs too into the theory and praxis of South African policies with regard to R2P. Those who dismiss the ANC's elaborate discourse on identity would do well to remember Skinner's astute observation:

Even if the agent is not in fact motivated by any of the principles he professes, he will nevertheless be obliged to behave in such a way that his actions remain compatible with the claim that these principles genuinely motivated him. To recognise these implications is to accept that the courses of action open to any rational agent must in part be determined by the range of principles that he can profess with plausibility.77

South African notions of intervention differ substantially from European or American interpretations, but also those of China and Russia.78 South Africa's vision flows directly from the unique foreign policy identity post-Apartheid leaders proudly proclaim. Yet while Pretoria complains vociferously about the inequitable world order and the manipulation of norms by the powerful, it undermines its own African Agenda in multiple ways that have little to do with outside actors. The central predicament is that South African foreign policy lacks critical questioning of how its identity might not always be an asset, but could actually blind it to key developments and outside perceptions. For a country that urges others to empathise by taking history, context and culture into account, South Africa does a poor job of taking some distance from its own decisions and trying to understand how its discourses and actions regarding responsibility, intervention and security are perceived elsewhere in Africa and in the Western-led international system.

Despite claiming to propagate an alternative interpretation of R2P from the perspective of Africa, a substantial gap exists between Pretoria's overall pro-intervention thinking and the attitudes of many developing countries, which may have been forced to accept R2P but are keen to reassert sovereignty and stymie the efforts of global and regional powers to intervene in domestic affairs.79 The ANC's moralising rhetoric, while perhaps sincere in its desire to change the system and reflective of South Africa's complex identity, is often perceived at best as self-righteous and outright hypocritical at worst.

Many African states are not enthusiastic about Pretoria's self-declared representation of the continent in global circles and find that South African politicians are shockingly misinformed about or disinterested in other African nations—one reason why anti-imperialist ideas proliferate within the ANC is that simplistic global narratives do not have to factor in inconvenient local complexities, multiple agendas and the often bizarre meandering of history. For all South Africa's accusations levelled at Western powers of ignoring the ‘regional principle’ and Chapter VIII of the UN Charter, Zuma had no qualms about sending hundreds of paratroopers to the Central African Republic in early 2013 without consulting any regional governments and without an AU mandate, as he tried to counter French influence and, according to many insiders, defend South African mining interests. Such unilateralism undermines Pretoria's credibility, particularly when compounded by deficient local knowledge, which in this case led to the deaths of scores of South African soldiers.

While some African actors complain of an overbearing, overly intrusive South Africa, others think that Pretoria simply fails to live up to its own muscular but multilateral interpretation of humanitarian intervention. For example, many ordinary Africans dislike the ANC's all too inflexible standard solution for political crises in Zimbabwe, Congo and Côte d'Ivoire. The recipe of national reconciliation and power-sharing, rooted in South Africa's own transition but all too often uncritically exported, has been exploited by various African governments to refuse more fundamental concessions of reform; only in Burundi has the ‘Kempton Park’ model more or less born fruit. Similarly, since 2006, several African countries, led by Ethiopia, have been deeply disappointed that Pretoria could not be persuaded to play a bigger role in confronting Somalia's Union of Islamic Courts and later Al-Shabab. Its lukewarm support for the African Union Mission in Somalia was criticised by Ethiopia, Uganda and other players as reneging on South Africa's own ‘African’ version of legitimate intervention.80

In this respect, South Africa's difficult relationship with the continent is further underlined by its contributions to peacekeeping in Africa. Pretoria's aid budget may be rising rapidly—according to some studies, outperforming most Western donors as a share of GDP81—and many feel that a country which talks so much about African responsibility should shoulder more of the burden in Somalia, Mali and South Sudan and pay a greater contribution into the AU to give it autonomy from external donors. Part of the problem is that South African National Defence Forces today are no longer Africa's outstanding fighting machine, as they were under Apartheid.82 With 30,000 fewer effectives, little political backing and poor organisational choices, this is severely limiting South Africa's ability to contribute to AU missions. The operation in Burundi was marked by logistical problems and disciplinary incidents with South African soldiers; the experience of peacekeepers in Congo and Darfur reveals a dismal picture of difficult relations with locals, faltering equipment and confusion over the mandate.83

The dysfunctionality of the armed forces is mirrored in a confusing foreign policy process under the aegis of Zuma whose decision-making style is ad hoc and whose focus is on domestic survival, not on grand international strategy. Key decisions like the resolution 1973 vote are taken by an extremely small circle, with the Department of International Relations and Cooperation often left in the dark about foreign policy manoeuvres by the Presidency, as was the case in Central African Republic and resolution 1973; in the words of one senior Ambassador's devastating auto-critique: ‘[t]he Libya case shows the danger of only worrying about foreign policy when someone calls you: we looked like idiots. We were fooled but have only ourselves to blame’.84 The limiting of the policy process to a tiny elite around the president and a handful of party leaders also partly explains the abysmal communication of South African diplomacy, both vis-à-vis the public—to whom, for example, it was never properly explained what R2P in the Libya case meant and how Pretoria would work with other Security Council members to protect the population—and vis-à-vis international partners.

In conclusion then, like other emerging powers, South Africa is a conflicted state with multiple identities which, depending on the dossier and the targeted audience, compete for it to adopt the role of supporter, spoiler or shirker.85 Since 1994, the ANC has helped to build the African Union and offered an interesting alternative vision of R2P in the form of African solutions to African problems, arguing that by virtue of South African economic and military strength and its unique identity, Pretoria should take the lead on the continent as well as advocate reform at the global level. Many engaging proposals have been shared with the international community, but the central challenge for the next decade—if South Africa is to be true to its professed core values—is twofold: to give more meaning to its Pan-Africanism by (paradoxically) becoming more interested and invested in Africa; and to find ways of making its criticism of the international system more effective and less adversarial,86 without losing its commitment to ethical principles, substantive as well as procedural. As the recent past shows, this is a tall order indeed given that South Africa's foreign policy identity not only liberates and inspires, but also blinds and paralyses.

Acknowledgements

This article is part of a collaborative research project on Global Norm Evolution and the Responsibility to Protect (www.globalnorms.net), generously funded by the Volkswagen Foundation through its Europe and Global Challenges programme.

Notes

^1.Krasner, Sovereignty. For background on the ‘responsibility to protect’ and its development, see Rotmann, Kurtz and Brockmeier, ‘Major Powers’, in this special issue.

^2.Nye, ‘Redefining the National Interest’.

^3.Hurrell, On Global Order, 8–11.

^4. Interview with Ambassador Nozipo Mxakato-Dixeko, Pretoria, February 2013.

^5.Davenport and Saunders, South Africa.

^6.Smuts, The League of Nations; Anker, Imperial Ecology.

^7.Geldenhuys, ‘South Africa's Search for Security’.

^8.Shearar, Against the World.

^9.Barber and Barratt, South Africa's Foreign Policy.

^10.Saunders, ‘South Africa, Human Rights, and the United Nations’.

^11.Alden, Apartheid's Last Stand.

^12.Liberman, ‘The Rise and Fall’.

^13.Crawford, ‘The Domestic Sources and Consequences’.

^14.Lowenberg and Kaempfer, The Origins and Demise.

^15.Ellis, External Mission.

^16.Mandela, ‘South Africa's Future Foreign Policy’.

^17.King, ‘Keynote Address’, 3.

^18.Seymour, ‘Global Dialogue, Human Rights and Foreign Policy’.

^19.Leith and Pretorius, ‘Eroding the Middle Ground’.

^20.Alden and Soko, ‘South Africa's Economic Relations’.

^21.Bischoff, ‘External and Domestic Sources’.

^22.Ryall, ‘Caught Between Two Worlds’, 397.

^23.Vale and Maseko, ‘Thabo Mbeki, South Africa and the Idea’.

^24.Landsberg, The Quiet Diplomacy of Liberation.

^25.Landsberg, ‘South Africa and the Making’.

^26.Konaré, ‘Inaugural Speech’.

^27.AU, ‘Protocol Relating to the Establishment’.

^28.Annan, In Larger Freedom.

^29.The Economist, 13 May 2000. Available at: http://www.economist.com/printedition/2000-05-13 [Accessed May 2014].

^30.Kumalo, South Africa's Position, 23.

^31.Barber, Mandela's World.

^32.De Waal, ‘What's New in the New Partnership’.

^33.Taylor and Nel, ‘New Africa, Globalisation and the Confines’.

^34.Daniel et al., ‘The South Africans have Arrived’.

^35.Alden and Schoeman, ‘The Hegemon that Wasn't’.

^36.Herbst, ‘Mbeki's South Africa’.

^37.Freeman, ‘South Africa's Zimbabwe Policy’.

^38.Sidiropoulos, ‘South African Foreign Policy’.

^39. Interview, London, June 2013.

^40.CCR, ‘South Africa, Africa, and the United Nations’.

^41.Human Rights Watch, ‘South Africa's Troubling Foreign Policy’.

^42. Hans Pienaar, ‘Doomed To Be a Lost Cause Despite Good Intentions’. Sunday Independent, 6 January 2008.

^43.Nathan, ‘Interests, Ideas and Ideology’.

^44. Interview with Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo, Johannesburg, February 2013. Cp. Rotmann, Kurtz and Brockmeier in this special issue.

^45.Nathan, ‘South Africa: A Coherent Foreign Policy’.

^46. Statement during the Informal Consultations of the GA on the Report of the Secretary General ‘In Larger Freedom: Towards Security, Development and Human Rights for All’, 6 April 2005. See Kumalo, South Africa's Position, 71–75.

^47.Coady and Solomon, ‘Deconstructing Constructive Engagement’.

^48.The Economist, ‘South Africa's Foreign Policy’.

^49.Habib, ‘South Africa's Foreign Policy’.

^50.Burgess, ‘South Africa: Benign Hegemony and Resistance’.

^51.Serrão and Bischoff, ‘Foreign Policy Ambiguity’.

^52.Alden and Le Pere, ‘South Africa in Africa’.

^53.Cooper, ‘Niche Diplomacy’, 5–9.

^54.Flemes, ‘Regional Power South Africa’.

^55.Neethling, ‘Reflections on Norm Dynamics’.

^56. Adam Habib, ‘Fly or No-fly is the Question’. Sunday Times (Review), 27 March 2011; Lihle Mtshali, ‘Africans are Taking Quiet Diplomacy Too Far’. Sunday Times (Review), 27 March 2011; Mondli Makhanya, ‘We Don't Take Charge in Africa, but Get Very Prickly about Those Who Do’. Sunday Times (Review), 10 April 2011.

^57. Raenette Taljaard, ‘South Africa Lacks Human Rights based Foreign Policy’. The Times, 15 July 2008.

^58. Interviews with senior diplomats, Pretoria, January–February 2013.

^59.Institute for Security Studies, ‘Libya: UN Passes No Fly Zone Resolution’.

^60. Greg Mills and Terrence McNamee, ‘Hedging their Bets in the Libyan War’. Sunday Times (Review), 3 April 2011.

^61.Acharya, ‘Norm Subsidiarity and Regional Orders’.

^62.Moore, ‘A Decade of Disquieting Diplomacy’.

^63. Xolela Mangcu, ‘Fly or No-fly is the Question’. Sunday Times (Review), 27 March 2011.

^64.Mbeki, ‘The African Union at 10’.

^65. Interview with a senior American diplomat, February 2013.

^66. Interviews in Pretoria, February 2013.

^67.Bellamy and Williams, ‘The New Politics of Protection’.

^68. Interviews in Pretoria, January–February 2013.

^69. Personal interview in Pretoria, February 2013.

^70. Interview with several of South Africa's top diplomats, February 2013.

^71.UNSC, ‘Resolution 1973’. Emphasis added by the authors. For the full text: http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs//2011/sc10200.doc.htm#Resolution [Accessed September 2013].

^72. Interview with an ANC youth leader, February 2013.

^73. Interview with Graham Maitland, Khartoum, July 2013.

^74. Interview with Kgalema Motlanthe, Pretoria, February 2013.

^75.Alden and Schoeman, ‘South Africa in the Company of Giants’.

^76. Interview with one of the ‘NEC top six’, Pretoria, February 2013

^77.Skinner, ‘Some Problems in the Analysis’, 299.

^78. See, respectively, Brockmeier, Kurtz and Junk on Europe, Junk on the United States, Zhang and Liu on China and Kurowska on Russia, all in this special issue.

^79.Mayall and Soares de Oliveira, The New Protectorates, 17.

^80. Interviews with senior South African diplomats, September 2013.

^81.Vickers, ‘Towards a New Aid Paradigm’.

^82.Mills, ‘An Option of Difficulties?’.

^83.Heinecken and Ferreira, ‘Fighting for Peace’.

^84. Interview, Johannesburg, February 2013.

^85.Schweller, ‘Emerging Powers’.

^86.Narlikar, New Powers.