A danger exsists that the ‘national interest’ will be used as an excuse to silence the new government’s critics, argues Peter Vale
SHOW me the national interest and I’ll show you a politician’s trick. When Ronnie Kasrils evoked the national interest to defend the sheltered employment of Wouter Basson, I had a flashback to the 1980s when – with regular monotony -the use of the national interest aimed to silence all the government’s critics.
As used by Kasrils, the message was as clear as it might have been a decade ago – because Basson once protected the national interest, it was the duty of the national interest to protect the information he held.
This unhappy episode suggests how quickly those who serve in the Mandela government have turned to the clichd explanations of national security which have served executive power in South Africa so effectively.
True, the mindless rantings against the communists are long gone and, mercifully, the endless perforation of the country’s borders – to destabilise innocent people in the name of Western civilisation – has ended.
But carefully listen to security-speak, and you’ll hear more continuities than change.
Why is this so? Why is it that the ideas which make for the national interest have survived border wars, township violence, negotiation and transition better than most others in the country’s political lexicon?
For one thing South Africa’s ”miracle” masked innumerable continuities in public policy: while everything seemed up for grabs, many core areas of national life – especially in a delicate but deadly field like national security – were immutable. Dislodging this has proved devilishly difficult.
During the transition, for instance, the space to contest understandings around the old and the new was crowded out by the trade-off between white fears and black demands. Then as the country drew together in celebration, not too many dissenting voices were to be heard amongst the cheers.
At a deeper level, the discourse around national interest has been carried into the new South Africa by continuities within the policy community. With too few exceptions, those who are shaping the debate on national security issues are working from the same script which – a short decade ago – determined that South Africa’s national interest was best served by mounting a total war against the Soviet Union.
To write this is neither ungracious nor unkind; it is, rather, a warning against the numbing power of security pundits. Each time an ”expert” speaks, we need to recall that their most feverish warnings against Soviet power occurred at the very moment when that system was tottering towards total collapse.
While changes on the ground have shifted the interest of this community towards new security issues – drugs, small arms, international crime and regional migration – the logic which determines their opinions has not changed; neither has their language.
Listen to the most ”informed” opinions on Mozambican migrants, and you’ll hear the very clauses which were once reserved for the Marxists in Maputo. Or deconstruct the public discourse on international drugs, and you will find all the linkages which sustained the infamous total onslaught.
Given this, is it any wonder that Hannah Arendt wryly said of security experts: ”The trouble is not that they are paid to think the ‘unthinkable’, the trouble is that they don’t think!”
So how are we to think about the national interest? Or, put in another sense: what is the national interest? Can the public be freed from its blinding tyranny?
The overriding rule is this – where we sit on the idea of national interest depends not only on where we stand but who we are. This is because the idea of the national interest is not fixed in stone. There are no lasting ideas which might be shared by all South Africans until the end of time; no enduring concerns which might run deep into the next millennium.
Interests – including national ones – depend both on needs and wants; not surprisingly, calculating these depend on understandings about how the world works. And these understandings are unpinned by different sets of values so, if truth be told, there is probably a separate interest for each South African national!
The national interest is contingent on a myriad of factors, only one of which is identity – that thorny issue that few South Africans really want to think about wrapped, as they now are, in the comforting folds of the new flag.
Without locating these critical perspectives at its base, the term national interest has no analytical value at all.
To their great shame, South Africa’s security community, blinded now by the lights of international acceptance, have refused to see this.
In the hand of politicians, however, the national interest is a powerful tool which is why governments – and South Africa is no exception – evoke the idea to draw citizens to a central position. By minimising differences between antagonistic positions; by setting high-sounding goals which lie beyond the immediate political horizon, criticism can be silenced. Its purpose, as the Wouter Basson case suggests, is invariably to serve incumbent power.
There is no doubting its efficacy, which is what Kasrils calculated. After all, what full-blooded supporter of Bafana-Bafana would want to oppose – or even raise questions about — the national interest of the rainbow nation?
Peter Vale is professor of Southern African studies at the University of the Western Cape