As the crow flies the village of Anttola, on the shores of sprawling Lake Saimaa in southeast Finland, is 80km from the Finno-Russian border. That border is 1,300km long, running from the frigid reaches of Lapland down to the Gulf of Finland, not too far from St Petersburg.
That 1,300km will shortly become a vast new stretch of Nato-Russian border. Finnish politicians and voters have rapidly shifted from scepticism about Nato membership to overwhelming positivity due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
Looking east over Lake Saimaa it is difficult not to feel that storm clouds are brewing. SA citizens can be forgiven for feeling this distant part of the world is detached from their daily lives and problems. The same can be said for the tension resulting from Nancy Pelosi’s recent trip to Taiwan. The trip enraged the People’s Republic of China and resulted in unprecedented live fire drills by the People’s Liberation Army around Taiwan.
The disputes and crises of other parts of the world pale into insignificance when you are struggling to feed your family or facing the constant threat of murder and rape. How SA positions itself relative to the rest of the world thus falls right down the priority list for voters. This then trickles down to political parties.
Taking a stance on matters of foreign policy is unlikely to win votes. For opposition parties only familiar with the benches facing the ANC it has been a tangential concern at best. Foreign policy does not matter, until it does. It only matters when you are in national power and are mandated by the country to take an outward stance.
This is why political parties that are serious about power and believe they face a reasonable chance of being in power through the ballot box develop foreign policy. It may not win you votes, but when confronted with the mandate to position SA to the outside world you better have something in place to ground you. Finding yourself heading the department of international relations & co-operation with no sound basis to work from in the form of policy is unacceptable.
Foreign policy does not matter, until it does. It only matters when you are in national power and are mandated by the country to take an outward stance
Given the geopolitical shifts we are seeing in 2022 this has become an awesome responsibility. But it is clear looking at past practice that opposition parties have yet to put that policy groundwork in place. Given the reasonable prospect of a new governing coalition taking the reins in 2024, they had better get to work on formulating a policy stance towards the rest of the world.
The DA is an excellent case in point. The party has not had a solid foreign policy document since 2009. That 11-page document, “Global opportunity: The DA’s proposal for a rational, rules-based and ethical foreign policy”, puts forward a foreign policy that is in alignment with the country’s liberal democratic constitutional order. It was designed for a period in which US geopolitical supremacy was still in place. As I argued in a previous article in Business Day, that ordering of the world is shifting, and any policy SA puts in place needs to take that into account (“No free pass for SA’s jaded delusions of grandeur any more”, June 23.
When one presses the relevant DA people on foreign policy stances you can get cogent answers, but it is unclear whether these are individual positions or those that have been collectively agreed upon.
A case in point is the stance on SA’s membership of the Brics bloc. The DA’s international relations spokesperson, Darren Bergman, is presumably their candidate to take over the department. It would be Bergman who would need to front up to the likes of Antony Blinken, Wang Yi and Sergey Lavrov in pursuit of SA’s interests.
When asked about the DA’s policy stance towards maintaining Brics membership, Bergman responded: “I have always been concerned about the fact that we are not equal partners of Brics and therefore wondered how we would fit in. I feared it would be exploitable in nature. All these years down the line I have been proven correct. We have had to contribute to the Brics Bank, and yet we are also beneficiaries of the bank. When it comes to decisions taken by Brics it seems SA is told rather than consulted.”
Formidable anchor
Brics clearly has become a strong instrument of geopolitical influence, particularly for Beijing and Moscow. But should we infer from this that the DA would look to review SA’s Brics membership? That remains unclear, though there is something incoherent about shouting for liberal democracy while shacking up with China and Russia in Brics.
One ray of hope for the DA is the presence of Gwen Ngwenya as its policy head. Whether you agree ideologically with Ngwenya or not, she is a formidable intellectual anchor in the DA. After speaking to Ngwenya it is clear that the DA intends to put together solid, well-researched foreign policy in time for 2024. We’ll wait to see if that is done timeously.
What of some of the other parties that may form a new governing coalition at the national level? ACDP MP Steven Swart indicated that the party does have a general foreign affairs policy position and that it is being reviewed in time to be made available for the 2024 elections. When pressed on SA’s Brics membership Swart replied that it will be an issue considered during the review.
ActionSA’s Michael Beaumont made it clear that the party will start a policy process focused on international relations. When asked about Brics membership Beaumont said it is “something that ActionSA would review as part of a broader review of all ANC foreign policy that has been forced upon SA. SA foreign policy in 2022 should be shaped on international ties that offer value to SA in the future, and not on the international relations of the past”.
The FF+ was non-responsive.
After decades of opposition parties facing no serious prospect of being in control of national government, thinking about how to orientate SA to the rest of the world has fallen on the back burner. But with growing prospects for a coalition at the national level in 2024 they will need to send this part of policy formulation up the priority list.
If they don’t they may suddenly find themselves mandated with enormous responsibility but little idea of how to orientate SA in an increasingly unstable and complex world. Foreign policy may not have mattered in the past, but if these opposition parties are serious about power, it should now.
• Dr Jubber is associate lecturer in the philosophy of science at University College London.
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