The exercise of every country’s sovereignty — the right and ability to determine own policies — requires a careful balance between idealism and pragmatism. This is most pronounced in how each country manages its relations with other nations, especially the ones it does not share the same ideals with but depends on for its economic sustenance.
There are plenty of examples where other countries are managing this, and more distantly how Afrikaner nationalists learnt to tame their hatred of Britain because they needed access to British markets (both financial and goods).
Two recent examples are India and Singapore. India is the more interesting case because it has made common cause with China through Brics despite the two countries having a long history of tension.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is visiting the US where, according to The Wall Street Journal, he will ink several deals, including the manufacture of fighter-jet engines for light combat aircraft as well as buying high-altitude Predator drones. The drones will help Indian surveillance of the Indian Ocean and Himalayas border with China, the source of tension between the two countries.
“Unlike the vision of nonalignment advanced by Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru in the early years of the Cold War, Modi’s foreign policy is one of multiple alignments, seeking to advance India’s interests in partnerships with a range of global powers, including those in conflict with each other,” the Journal reported.
According to the US Council on Foreign Relations, Singapore, America’s close strategic partner, has also maintained a close relationship with China, pursuing “a balanced foreign policy, seeking to avoid getting caught up in the geopolitical competition between the two countries”.
One may not like Modi’s politics, or Singapore’s brand of democracy, but this isn’t commentary about those issues. The point is how they have deftly struck a balance between their ideals and pragmatism.
The Afrikaners did it too, swallowing their nationalistic pride for more than three decades so SA could continue to suckle from British financial markets and keep benefiting from supplying British homes with food.
SA’s relationship with Britain was one of the thorny issues for Afrikaners, with the nationalists among them accusing generals Louis Botha and Jan Smuts — the proponents of co-operation with Britain — of subverting the country’s economic and political interests to those of the British. This disagreement was the cause of Barry Hertzog’s split from Botha and Smuts in 1914 to form the National Party.
But, as historians such as Peter Henshaw have documented, economic realities mugged the nationalists when they came into power. First when Hertzog ran the country from 1924 to 1933 and thereafter in coalition with Smuts until 1939, and again when the nationalists came into power in 1948.
Henshaw has described SA’s long and loyal membership of the sterling area as one of the most remarkable features of its relations with Britain in the 20th century. This even though the Afrikaner nationalists had “no higher ambition than to free their country from subordination to Britain” — the ideal.
After Britain left the gold standard during the Great Depression, Hertzog clung to it stubbornly, “partly as a matter of economic principle, though above all as a demonstration of independence from Britain”. But, as Henshaw explains, he was eventually forced by rising economic and political crises to abandon the gold standard, devalue and tie the SA pound to the British pound sterling, where it remained for 34 years “in defiance of Afrikaner nationalist attacks on almost every facet of the British connection”.
The reasons had to do with economic realities. SA needed capital, which came via the London financial markets to fund the growth and development of the mining industry, a major source of government revenue and foreign exchange earnings. It also needed access to the Commonwealth market, primarily Britain, to sell its agricultural produce, something that mattered for farmers, the Afrikaner nationalists’ key political constituency.
There’s a lesson in all of this for those who govern SA today: they should find a balance between their ideals and economic realities. The world, as Singapore, India and the Afrikaner nationalists’ cases show, is what it is. The real — not ideal — world is complex, and it is a world where the only success for countries lies in making hard choices and painful trade-offs, but choices that are carefully considered.
Those who don’t appreciate this are destined to be mugged by economic reality.
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
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