South Africa's national interest and BRICS

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Page 2February 2012Policy Brief No. 4of South Africa’s national interest” (RSA, 2011) withthe region of southern Africa and the continent.The Ten-Year Review of the South African governmentstates that “adeptness at identifying the nationalinterest and pursuing it in a creative way is part ofthe challenge of governance and state leadershipin the current global arena” (RSA, 2003). The majorchallenge, however, is how to develop a discourse onSouth Africa’s national interest that views issues suchas foreign policy, economic diplomacy, public interest,national security and others as subsets of the whole,namely the country’s overarching national interest.This overarching statement of South Africa’s nationalinterest should include the country’s missionand vision that are derived from all sectors ofsociety regarding what and how best its vital interestscan be served. Zakaria (1998) puts the challenge thisway: “Foreign policy is made not by the nation as awhole but by its government. Consequently, whatgovernment can extract for its purposes refl ects theease with which central decision-makers can achievetheir ends.” Foreign policy, therefore, ceases to bethe basis on which national interest is theorised, andrather becomes one of the subsets of the overallnational interest.In the same way that public interest and nationalinterest are differentiated elsewhere (Netshitenzhe,2002), an all-embracing statement of a country’snational interest cannot be derived from just one ofits subsets. While this research brief acknowledgesthat all the elements or subsets of a comprehensivestatement of South Africa’s national interest areevident, the conceptualisation of national interest inpublic discourse and government documents is bothmethodologically fl awed and conceptually narrow inits explanation.For instance, the government’s foreign policy providesan essential yet limited scope for the statement of thecountry’s national interest. The government’s policieson trade, security, energy and immigration, as well asbusiness engagements, civil society engagementsand other institutional and societal networks, areimportant subsets of the overall statement of nationalinterest. Inversely, the sub-narrative here is whetherforeign policy, public interest and national securityso constructed can actually work against a country’snational interest.In an extremely useful discussion, Netshitenzhe(2002) states that “national interest as a concept ismeant to define the aggregate of things that guaranteethe survival and flourishing of nation-state and nation.Usually the national interest is counter-posed to thatof other states”. While he is of the view that nationalinterest “is not decreed … it’s a sixth sense and itevolves with a nation’s history”, his defi nition providesa good framework for constructing an overarchingstatement of South Africa’s strategic interest. Indeed,the relationship between national interest and publicinterest needs to be nurtured through civic dialogueand discourse that rests on the premise that publicinterest “is meant to represent the interests of theaggregate collective of citizens – independent of stateinstitutions. It’s a kind of collective civil interest”.However, Van Nieuwkerk (2004) is critical of thederivative view of national interest and cites theexample of Botswana:Central to our country’s foreign policy are the interestsof Botswana which embrace the preservation ofthe democratic form of government, its institutionsand values, its sovereignty and territorial integrity,brooking no interference in its national affairs, itsrespect for self-determination and independenceof peoples, its non-racialism, its non-alignment, thenon-use of its territory as launching pad for attacksagainst neighbouring states, the non-use of force inthe settlement of disputes and the development andsecurity of its foreign markets.Van Nieuwkerk also posits that an “inverse relationship”exists, with global political economic factors shapingand infl uencing local and domestic state action.The global infl uence is taken as a given and there isno systematic explanation of its causality. However,he does concede invoking a constructivist notionthat “the world is not simply given and/or natural butone of artifi ce – it is constructed through the actions ofother actors themselves” (Van Nieuwkerk, 2004).Hopf (1998) concurs with the above in his elaboratestatement concerning national interest being derivedfrom all the subsystems of a nation:Although any understanding of world politics requiresa theorisation of the domestic and the analysis of thesystemic, there would be no systemic theory of worldpolitics because the world system has no predominant
Policy Brief No. 4 Page 3February 2012system; it has subcultures, each of which can beunderstood only by examining how states constitutethemselves in their societies. The answer to thequestion of who are enemies and friends begins athome. Finding out precisely how a state’s identityaffects the construction of its interests vis-à-visanother state demands that the social context in whichthe state’s collection of identities is being discursivelyconstructed be investigated as deeply and broadlyas possible. This means exploring not only how thestate’s identities are produced in interactions withother states, but also how its identities are beingproduced in interactions with its own society and themany identities and discourses that constitute thatsociety.It is the latter point with which this policy brief isconcerned. South Africa’s national interest is bestconceptualised and derived from how its identitiesare being produced in interactions with its own societyand the many identities that constitute that society.With regard to the proper conceptualisation of SouthAfrica’s national interest, Van Nieuwkerk (2004) iscorrect in proposing the following questions: “What isSouth Africa’s national interest? Who determines it?Can South Africa afford competing interpretations ofthe national interest? Or is contestation inevitable;in fact a normal feature of democratic intellectualdialogue? Most of all, can the concept realisticallyguide South Africa’s foreign policy?”The debate on South Africa’s national interest andforeign policy has been ongoing. This policy briefcontends that the way in which the debate hasdeveloped has tended to place foreign policy abovenational interest, and not vice versa. The dilemma isthat the media has foisted the false, if essentialist,notion of foreign policy in relation to national intereston the debate. For instance, an article in The Starmade the following assertion: “How seriously do theZuma people take foreign policy? This is the questionstill preoccupying the diplomats in Pretoria as well aspolicy experts … as the whole of this administrationare too focused on the vicious quarrels within thetripartite alliance” (Fabricius, 2010). The nationaldebate in the tripartite alliance is important if it ismeant to assist in defi ning national interest, in thesame way that a debate in Afri-Forum on the Afrikaanslanguage is important it terms of how it serves thecountry’s national interest.South Africa therefore needs to conceptualise anddefi ne its national interest better. A country’s nationalinterest is the collective – and, indeed, an aggregation –of all the other interests in all the political, economicand social dimensions of state activity. To defi nethe national interest of a state based on one of itssubsystems is not only incorrect, but also narrowsthe scope of state-society interaction that is requiredto construct an overarching statement of nationalinterest. A great deal of work has been undertakenin each of the subsystems of national interest in SouthAfrica, but what seems to be lacking is a systematic,coordinative discourse towards establishing anoverarching framework.3. Institutions and state collaborationThe debate on state collaboration and internationalcooperation in the global economy has clearlyhighlighted the complex problem that role players face.There is concern about whether global problems canbe addressed without the involvement of institutions,or through loose triangular forums such as BRICS.The complexity of the tension in internationalcooperation is compounded by the need for playersto coordinate their choices through bindinginstitutional arrangements if they are to achievetheir collective goals.For instance, a formal institutional framework couldhelp create a more useful platform where countriescan also compete with each other to assume positionsof infl uence in international policy forums. Indeed,both India and Brazil have called for the expansionof the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), andtheir inclusion in it, although China has objected tothis (Nye, 2011). These differences need to bemediated through an institutional arrangement withinBRICS in order to prevent them from leading tomistrust and suspicion.Clearly, the assumption that international playerscan share the same interests and agendas on aglobal scale outside of an institutional frameworkis tenuous. BRICS collaboration is being defi nedand crafted – although in state-centric and bilateralways – outside of institutionally binding obligations,norms and goals. In the absence of an institutionalstrategic framework, BRICS relations with Africa canonly be conceived through collaboration at the levelDevelopment Planning Division
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