It’s time for South Africans to move beyond the furore over Allan Boesak’s Geneva posting, writes Peter Vale. This week’s report by the Commission for Global Governance highlights the real international challenges facing the country
OUR Global Neighbourhood, the report released in Cape Town this week by Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson and Sonny Ramphal, former secretary general of the Commonwealth, highlights the importance of multilateral diplomacy in the changing world. At its heart is a call to rethink the nature of the international society and to make the United Nations more people-friendly, more reflective of the new world. This will not be easy.
The changing tempo of international relations — the increase in global communications, faster financial flows, the collapse of countries — has left the world all but rudderless. As the 1991 Gulf War demonstrated, the United States has the capacity to use the United Nations to inflict great damage on states which overstep accepted international rules. But as Somalia suggested, US military strength — again, in the name of the UN — can be rendered impotent by African clansmen.
Our Global Neighbourhood suggests that security — so long linked to the narrow world of the military — has a wider and deeply tragic face. Military security offers no lasting solutions to problems of housing, health conditions, lack of water, poor education and the like.
A failure to focus on these socio-economic issues can generate deep conflict, as the ructions in Lenasia are signalling the Gauteng government. This highlights a central challenge of the times: the need to change the minds of men (the gender designation is deliberate) who equate security with destructive weapons.
The report reflects efforts to view the world in ways other than in crude power terms. The fragility of the planet’s ecology, the unpredictability of the international economy, the continuing overhang of dangerous weapons: these pose real threats to all of humankind, not just individual states. As the 21st century approaches, they challenge all governments, civic organisations and individuals.
The Commission for Global Governance has reduced the debates around these issues into accessible language. At the same time, it gently nudges the UN to meet the challenge of the times by opening up political space for actors other than states. This highlights an uncomfortable truth: all states — including South Africa — are discovering that they no longer have the monopoly of action in international affairs. The likes of trade unions, Mercedes Benz, Chase Manhattan Bank, Greenpeace and Amnesty International often have a stronger influence on international outcomes than do countries.
For South Africans, this report is a timely reminder that with greater international membership comes more responsibility. How the country responds to the challenge which the commission has issued will test both the style and goals of a foreign policy which, it seems, continues to resist new ideas.
There are serious hurdles to be overcome if South Africa is to shift its international role. One is the deficiency in understanding and managing multilateral diplomacy. South Africa’s old foreign policy — with its deep paranoia and isolationist mindset — had little need for the UN, in particular, and multilateral relations in general. This accounts, incidentally, for why there was such a hostile image of the UN in both the establishment press and in the school system.
The country’s other international tradition — the diplomatic relations of the exiled movements — was one removed from multilateral diplomacy which, particularly the 1980s, became the norm rather than the exception. The Foreign Ministry is discovering that we need a great deal of catch-up.
The work of the Commission for Global Governance also suggests how important South Africa’s mission to Geneva is poised to become. In the old days, it was a listening post: the country was excluded from the most important UN agencies and the multilateral section was not regarded as a smart career move for any ambitious South African diplomat.
Things are very different now. The international organisations which carefully avoided apartheid South Africa — the International Labour Organisation, the UN Disarmament Conference, World Trade Organisation, to mention three of literally hundreds — are based in Geneva. Together they are framing the international agenda of the new century.
It would be logical to pause here, to express regret that Allan Boesak — one of those responsible for the visionary analysis in this report — will not represent South Africa in Geneva. But the time has come to move beyond this unhappy affair; to let the law take its course.
However, South Africans dare not let the public debate over Geneva slip because it is no longer linked to the fortunes of a controversial politician. Geneva remains a very important posting. The moral space South Africa occupies in global affairs and the role it will play in rebuilding Africa demands that this country offer the insights from its own transition at the table which is being laid for the new millennium.
Peter Vale, professor of Southern African Studies, University of the Western Cape, writes on South Africa’s international relations for the WM&G