A week or so after the story broke there remains little else to say in the way of facts and day-to-day reportage about allegations that SA sold military hardware to the Russians. Some clarity and more facts may appear once there is a clearing in the dense fog of war.
Nonetheless, the commentary about SA picking a side in the Russia-Ukraine war have been fascinating, and unsurprisingly messy and predictable. It’s all over the media … From it all, it seems that SA has become collateral damage in a European civilisational conflict.
The war between Russia and Ukraine is about something bigger than simply defence of territory, infrastructure, landmarks and of human lives. The war is about the Ukrainian people’s right to establish themselves, and to once and for all dislodge a people stuck between “the Russian hammer” and the anvil of the Atlantic community.
Resistance to Russian invasion and warfare is about rejecting the inherited Slavic-Russian history and identity — a perennial Ukrainian battle — and refusing to be part of the 18th-century idea of a Russian empire, the Novorossiya (New Russia) brought back to life by Vladimir Putin in 2014.
The war is also about Russia, an ambitious civilisational state. Other examples of civilisational states are China and India. Russia draws on its imperial history to project its future and rebuild Moscow’s role and place in the world. To understand this “role” it is useful to recall a social media post by Donald Trump in 2017, in which he said “… the civilised world must change other people’s thinking”.
Civilisational states draw on their deep history and self-image to lift themselves above other states and societies. In this context Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are simply in the way of bigger things.
To legally establish Russia as a civilisational force and effect change is almost impossible. Putin’s chosen way has been through force, by way of a “special military operation”. In the same way that “America is a cause” and not a country, Moscow (much like China, and a little less than India) has adopted a somewhat similar global mission to transform the world, starting with Ukraine. China does not seem to have a clear mission to transform the world in its image. Not that we know of, anyway.
Where does SA fit into all of this? In some ways we are incidental to the war on Ukraine. Two things stand out to me. First, that SA really would prefer not to have to pick sides, which is the sovereign right of any country and should not be a problem. There is a contradiction, though; Pretoria has “picked a side” in other conflicts, notably in Palestine. Second, the Russian president seems to have a hold over SA’s political leaders. These two things may help us understand public responses to the allegation of arms sales to Russia.
Pretoria cannot possibly make a difference in Russia’s war on Ukraine.
One side draws emotive consolation and ideological satisfaction from blindly supporting Moscow, while another gets the same comfort from blindly supporting the Atlantic community. One quite insightful commentator recently harked back to the Cold War strategic interests that the US and UK had in Simon’s Town, the seaport where the arms shipment was allegedly loaded. It was presented as commonsensical.
A footnote is required. Every social class or group has its own understanding of what is “common sense”. This senso comune is the accumulation of taken-for-granted “knowledge” that is found in every human community. Never mind the lack of firm verifiable evidence; public opinion has, in general, taken sides.
The problem for SA internationally is that the country has declined in global significance and moral authority since about 2007. That SA was not invited to the Group of Seven meeting in Japan, reportedly because Pretoria is no longer seen to speak on behalf of Africa, was further erosion of a decline in moral authority that started during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki.
There was a time when SA leaders were welcomed at multilateral and international institutions, and to summits around the world. The reality is that the country has limited remaining influence, and almost no moral authority (as a resource of power) to make a difference in global political economic or geostrategic shifts.
Pretoria cannot possibly make a difference in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Yet there is circumstantial evidence that Moscow, notably Putin, can make a difference to the policies of SA’s governing alliance. We are thus a bystander or collateral damage of the war in which Ukraine continues to battle, probably as it has since the Cossacks started to assert themselves in the region in 1240CE.
In a peculiar way there are faint echoes between the way Ukraine is attempting to melt the history and identity inherited from the former Soviet Union and Tsarist Russia, and recast it, and the way SA is wrestling with its own legacies of apartheid and colonialism and defining its own history and identity.
In the meantime, Russia’s war in Ukraine will proceed with or without SA.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.