HE Ghulam Hoosein Asmal
South Africa’s foreign policy trajectory can be viewed in the context of historical global political cultures. As a nation we have navigated a complex global environment, having emerged from being a global pariah to one of the more prominent actors on the global stage.
Recently, the icon of “realism”, Henry Kissinger, passed away. He had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the 1970s for helping to negotiate a ceasefire in Vietnam — a war he both helped to escalate and then bring to a messy end. Kissinger’s approach was in keeping with the dominant global political culture which still prevails. The “realism” which Kissinger championed is a fancy diplomatic word for explaining why we need to accept war and injustice as part of the management of relations between countries.
Kissinger, and those who thought like him, supported the idea that the powerful in the world had to use force to shape the world according to their interests. He supported wars, irrespective of whether they were lawful, as long as they achieved some political objective.
Kissinger was a leading advocate for the US not to be a party to the Rome Statute — which established the International Criminal Court (ICC) — on the grounds that the US did not need to be accountable for its actions in the international arena. Kissinger was an eloquent proponent of a centuries-old culture that celebrates violence and warfare.
Sadly, as we are witnessing in Palestine, the tradition that sanctions and glorifies violence, plunder and exploitation is dominant and has subdued the tradition discouraging violence. We need to refocus the locus of international relations on values that prioritise the dignity and equality of people.
Jonathan Schell, in his seminal book The Unconquerable World, writes about two competing impulses in humanity. The impulse for war and plunder, and the opposing impulse for peace and serenity. He cites the poetry of Virgil, who glorified the wars of the Roman Empire through his words “Arms and the man I sing”.
This edified a martial tradition and indeed a martial system where, at best, people and societies stood up for principles using force, but where generally it exemplified plunders, exploitation and massacres.
Humanity has not learnt lessons from the past. By now we should have learnt over the centuries that the use of force lays the basis for hatred that will only ensure “forever wars”. It is indeed an indictment of humanity that the last three decades have been described as the most peaceful in human history.
Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was warmly welcomed on Capitol Hill in the US. This is despite a request by the chief prosecutor of the ICC for arrest warrants for him and his minister of defence for crimes against humanity. Netanyahu’s welcome by American public representatives and other so-called responsible states that profess to respect international law and human rights law has created a significant crisis in international governance. Is this disregard of norms and laws because Palestinians are the victims and Israel the perpetrator?
These are the same norms and laws that were supposed to frame the discussions at the recent Summit on Peace in Ukraine. South Africa helped shape those agreements since the so-called
Ukraine Peace Formula talks began in Copenhagen. These values that are centred on human rights and international legal norms were negotiated and agreed to at the G20 in New Delhi, India, in September 2023. They included explicit prohibitions on the annexation and acquisition of land through the use of force. Western countries supported this at the time as they largely negotiated in the context of the Russia/Ukraine war.
Not surprisingly, after the events in Palestine following October 7, the default Western diplomatic position was restored. That is, that these laws and norms do not apply to Israel or any actors that are deemed to be part of the West’s sphere of influence. Diplomats from countries of the South have long pushed back against the double standards in the implementation of international norms and laws. The most recent differential approach taken by the West, in which they have been outraged by the military onslaught on Ukraine but far less so about the genocide in Palestine, has been so crude that it has the potential to dismantle international legal order.
At the root of this differential approach to international legal norms is the global martial culture that is in lockstep with the political traditions of former colonial powers. This was discussed by the South African legal team at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearings in The Hague.
In May, Vaughan Lowe KC, acting on behalf of the South African government at the ICJ, said: “We have heard expressions of outrage that anyone could accuse Israel of acting in this way. We have heard sober assurances that Israel was doing and would do everything in its power to avoid civilian deaths as it exercised its claimed right of selfdefence. We have heard boasts that Israel’s army is the most moral army in history. We have heard flat denials that there is famine in Gaza. For months people, particularly in the West, have appeared unwilling to accept that the accusations are true. How could people who look like us and sound like us possibly engage in anything like genocide?”
This institutionalised impunity for the powerful is steeped in the history of colonialism and indicates that the martial culture referred to by Schell is not only persistent, but also is condoned when the victims are “non-Western” people and countries.
This martial culture poses a danger to all of humanity. Contestation for power, influence, resources and territory through the use of force has the potential to destroy all of humankind and the planet that sustains us. The potential use of nuclear weapons in the current wars in Europe and the Middle East cannot be ignored. There is also an increase in localised violence fuelled by the growth of narrow nationalism and ultranationalist politics. This, together with the resurgence of the global war system, heightens the risk of regional war and even a type of world war which will be existential in nature.
We need a reset towards a global political culture that is based on co-operation, peace and justice, wherein diplomatic actions seek to build global wellbeing. That is, a world where the use of force is replaced by dialogue and negotiation, and where force is prohibited. This will require changes to the UN Charter. The same UN and its related institutions must be reconfigured so that it is transformed from protecting previous empires to a system that regards all people and countries equally — and is geared towards being the engine for inclusive development. This will assist in dealing with the root causes of conflicts.
This vision is not new. It formed part of the foreign policy vision of the very first post-apartheid administration in South Africa. In 1994, our international relations strategic stance was centred on “progressive internationalism”. This was underpinned by a commitment to South-South co-operation and approaches to peace, security and disarmament that were guided by a commitment to human rights.
We sought to be a country that would act in solidarity with all peoples who face oppression and discrimination. At some point, this idealism in our foreign policy stance was supplanted by an unstated “constructivist” approach — which was code for “realism ”— that weakened our normative human rights framework and led to inconsistent actions in the international arena.
Over the last five years we have recalibrated and have reset the normative stance. This has led to some referring to South Africa as the moral superpower. Whether this label is accurate or not, the expectation to fulfil this vision is one that we need to aspire to over the next five years. Perhaps with other middle-power countries we can work to transform the global political landscape to be peace-centred and rights-driven. For South Africa, this will require us to increase our consistency in diplomatic practice to reflect this normative stance.
The values embedded in the South African constitution place a duty on us to aspire to become moral global citizens. The value-based foreign policy stance that we are mandated to execute, given our history, can help us move away from simplistic definitions of being constructivist, realist or idealist.
A diplomatic stance centred on moral global citizenship should also create some momentum towards realising initiatives to create a more inclusive global economic system. This requires that those working in multinational corporations and private businesses become active moral global citizens.
This should ideally lead to the development of national and global investment norms that would reward countries that adhere to international legal norms and promote a culture of human rights and peace.
