African foreign policy practice—Then into now
Foreign policy has a state-actor devise a strategy to affirm or enhance its sovereignty. It implies the careful aggregation of interests across an individual polity. The vision accompanying the strategy and its execution carries import for other states. Whereas some states use foreign policy as a tool to accumulate and display power on the world stage, others simply use the credibility sought with it to achieve more modest domestic goals. Most African countries fall into the second category: “many African countries craft and execute their foreign policies as a critical instrument to secure external assistance to solve their domestic problems” (Malaquias, 2011: 5). "Omnibalancing” explained African or Third World alignments where leaders sought to counter internal and external threats to their rule (David, 1991: 233).
When, after independence, constitutionalism and parliamentary democracy largely gave way to one-party states, politics very much centred on the governing state party and its political elite. The elite and authoritarian character of the colonial state and its narrow base for state-society relations reproduced itself in the post-colonial state with its one-party state. When the initial euphoria around nation building after independence began to fade, African regimes sought to buy social peace and stability. A foreign policy objective to obtain international support from big powers became key. Foreign policies were oriented towards obtaining support from the West, many unable or fearful to break the connection with the West that had structurally deeply penetrated (Noluthshungu, 1982: 401) in neo-colonially or informally “captured” individual African states. It encouraged foreign policies of staff (free) riding, bandwagoning, extraversion or soliciting external support aimed at the stabilisation of the domestic situation.
Accompanying a pro-Western disposition was the rentier state. Established social strata had an entrenched interest in the upkeep of relations with the West and flow of a rentier income. To these elites, foreign policy change could only mean "with different degrees of urgency” to make these relations "more beneficial to themselves” (Nolutshungu, 1982: 401). Largely authoritarian states engaged in patron-client relations with the industrialised world. The head of the executive, president or individual leader as dealmaker often became the official agent in relating with the outside and the personification of patron-client relationships at home (Clapham, 1985: 125).
As a consequence, foreign policy, instead of being “a dynamic process of interaction between the changing domestic demands and supports and the changing external circumstances" (Frankel. 1975: 9), became personalised, exclusive and elitist or static. “The charismatic leader became the source, site and embodiment of foreign policy” (Khadiagala, 2001:5). This, at a time when in the West, mainstream studies assumed rational, bureaucratic or democratic foreign policy descriptions of leadership in foreign policy.
The Cold War between East and West drew African states into dependent relationships with one or the other side, with only some, say Egypt or Tanzania, able to extract benefit from dealing with both sides by omnibalancing. There were exceptions where individual African foreign policies made a real difference to the pattern of development and broke with the prevalent structure of relations. Sam Nolutshungu pointed out that since independence the African environment was one of ambiguity expressed in "the tension between the associative (and. generally, conservative) tendencies encouraged by underdevelopment, and the “dissociative” tendencies implicit in decolonisation” (1975: 24). Algeria, with its record of struggle against colonialism, for instance, had a foreign policy that succeeded in partially disengaging from the Western system (Mortimer, 1984: 1-22).
Despite general weakness at home during phases of the Cold War, there seemed to be no barrier to the conduct of African foreign policy since the times "favoured the ascription to African states of a prestige in excess of their physical capabilities”. Trade or economic factors aside and unable to enforce their will at a global level, they were, however, able to rely on pressure-group tactics to achieve their ends (Nolutshungu, 1975: 20-21). Ghana on the global stage aspired to play the role of an intermediary in ending the conflict in Vietnam and, to the disquiet of the West, on ending minority rale in settler Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, while Tanzania played a central role in promoting national liberation on many fronts (Pinkney, 2001: 24). Nigeria created a revulsion against apartheid in Nigerian society. Flush with oil money, the government gave material and financial support to national liberation movements in Southern Africa. Diplomatically, the country pushed for the establishment of an Eminent Person Group at the Commonwealth to facilitate talks for the dismantlement of the apartheid regime (Egedo, 1987: 31). Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Ethiopia, Siad Barre’s Somalia or, arguably, John Vorster’s apartheid South Africa, could, more or less, exploit the strategic rivalry between East and West to obtain from one or the other side political, ideological, economic and military benefits.
African foreign policy found global resonance with its mobilising and garnering of international and transnational support against colonial Portuguese, settler Rhodesian and apartheid South African rale. The Africa Group in 1969 promoted the UN General Assembly Resolution 2202a (XXI) declaring apartheid to be a crime against humanity (Chipaike & Knowledge, 2018: 5). This was a profound marker for the conduct of international affairs: as evidenced by the eventual adoption of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle by the UN much later in 2005, it helped breach the sanctity of the principle of sovereignty and opened the way for internationalising what had been ostensibly domestic human (in)-security issues. Similarly, the collective mass break-off in diplomatic relations by twenty-five African states with Israel in 1973 was a singular demonstration of collective global African resolve to which even a pro-Israeli Ethiopia had to submit to (see Chapter 5). Yet, with the West in the ascendant and colonialism and apartheid as political constructs in recession, African states became ever more caught in the economic, financial and political vice of North-South relations. This is when African states reverted to largely being respondents in international affairs. The international debt crisis of the 1970s-1980s exemplified this. It put paid to original African, Asian and Latin American demands for structural global reform as seen with the proposals for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), for a body of international development law or recognition for a “human right to development” in 1986, something that industrialised (Western) states simply did not want to see happen (Salomon. 2013: 46, 31).
In the wake of the oil crisis of 1973, African state agency was on the decline. On the economic front, growing indebtedness meant regional African remedies at state-centred attempts to economically integrate the continent (whose origins are traceable to the Bandung Conference of 1955 where the Global South for the first time asserted its actorness by collectively meeting and addressing issues of neo-colonialism and underdevelopment), including the Lagos Plan of Action (LPA) or the Regional Food Plan for Africa (AFPLAN), faded away. Western opposition to redress issues of development outside the international capitalist system (Heidhues & Obareby, 2011: 56) was accompanied by African submission
Past into present African foreign policy agency 19 to the policy strait-jacket of neo-liberal International Financial Institution (IFI) rule under the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) after 1982.6 African (economic) foreign policy decision-making was constrained by this. Throughout the 1980s and beyond, the Washington Consensus complemented by a Western Group G7 states setting the agenda for the Global South spelt far reaching donor conditionality regimes. This global regime controlled and limited access to markets, finance, aid and any seemingly benevolent largesse.
Other than this, the African condition simply periodically intruded onto the international scene. Africa’s agency expressed itself in terms of victimhood, the taking of a socio-psychological stance as a victim of colonialism entitled to assistance (Ayoob, 1989) or, as that of an erstwhile sufferer and hapless bystander deserving redress and justice. France was accused of "forgetting" African combatants on the side of the Free French in the Second World War; Britain of ignoring atrocities committed against Kenyan civilians during the “Mau-Mau” resistance to colonial rule and Namibia demanded reparations for the German perpetration of genocide against Herero and Namaqua communities in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the West was held responsible for instituting a onesided, extractive world economic system accompanied by uneven development whose consequence was structural African poverty. The genesis for the African condition was said to lie with colonial repression and the one-sided development of the extractive sector amidst the balkanisation of the continent. To the rest of the world, the continent was also seen as the source of unfathomable real or unreal threats around epidemic diseases such as HIV/AIDS or Ebola.
Structural Adjustment, with its political and economic conditionality, faltered. Apart from the programme’s own ineffectuality in delivering growth or prosperity, the actions of recalcitrance, together with global civil society criticism (Fidler, 2000: 387), cumulatively eroded the mantle of the SAPs. It came to be seen as inappropriately "apolitical" and economistic, developmentally regressive, characterised by excessive conditionality, as well as by the absence of any genuine ownership by the countries concerned (Heidhues & Obareby, 2011: 59). Ultimately, it failed amidst calls for a more human face to capitalism on the continent and African incapacity/resistance. There “was incomplete, halfhearted, and ‘stop-and-go’ implementation” by African governments (Heidhues & Obareby, 2011: 60). On the realisation that “if the groups most affected by a reform process do not feel that they ‘own’ it, generally it will not succeed ... reform cannot be ‘bought’ through donor support alone” (World Bank, 2001).
Resistance from Africa and the South and a new plurality of forces engaging with the continent meant African collective action and individual choices helped erode the neo-liberal global policy framework and structure. The eventual reformulations of SAPs by the IFIs7 happened against a developing scenario where African states chose to embrace China’s major diplomatic and economic overtures after 2000. Ostensibly premised on principles of mutual sovereign respect, non-interference and state-led strategies for development, the idea of a "Beijing Consensus” eschewed the modalities of economic and political conditionality imposed by the “Washington Consensus.”
Moreover, issues of regional security helped trigger a revival of collective African state agency and new assertiveness. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the preoccupation of a unilateral world order intent on penetrating the former communist Second World, marginalised Africa emerging from its Third World status. The global neglect of African issues in the 1990s was marked by the growth in African conflict, poverty and discord, a crisis scenario symbolised by the momentous Rwandan genocide with its million victims and Africa’s own "First World War" over the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Without the ability to rely on a UN peacekeeping force as was the convention, this led to Africa’s own unilateral collective military foreign policy intervention in West Africa.
After the Western-led UN Security Council failed to attend to the Liberian crisis, an Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) force under the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) led by Nigeria intervened in the civil war conflicts of Liberia in 1990 (and later in Sierra Leone in 1997 and Guinea-Bissau in 1999). African actorness was in evidence in subsequent negotiations to find a modus operand! and partnership with the United Nations on joint peacekeeping and conflict resolution measures. Concerted African foreign policy moves at region-building accompanied initiatives to consolidate democracy and promote an African agenda in global politics. The high point of this was the constitution of the AU in 2002, “meant to be better equipped than the OAU to promote African unity” (Saxena, 2004: 164).
African foreign policy activism after the constitution of the AU in 2002, in the area of peace and security involving military and humanitarian interventions, continued apace with peacekeeping and peace-making interventions in the Comores, Somalia and Darfur (Aiming & Edu-Aiful, 2016: 121). States formally and politically recognised new actors at regional and continental levels, broadened the scope of regional organisations and were committed to adopting, adapting or creating norms to do with African integration, Pan-African unity and collective African responses to global forces.
The constitution of the AU with its broad institutional plan and architecture invigorated the erstwhile idea of Pan-African unity and actorness. Through constructing and planning for bodies such as the Peace and Security Council (PSC), Pan-African Parliament (PAP), the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECCOSOC) or the Regional Economic Communities (RECs), the scope for concerted efforts at security cooperation and social and economic integration increased substantially. With this institutional base, the AU Commission engaged in external relations, grew Africa’s international presence and demonstrated actorness.8 This took place in a context where, with the institution of democracy and of neo-liberal (economic) reforms, a plurality of actors became visible and increasingly heard. New actors in the shape of institutions (parliaments, political parties and interest groups), civil society (social movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs)) and individuals (in society and business) appeared.
