At first glance, wars in Southern Africa and Yugoslavia have little in common. Barely a decade ago American and Soviet strategists might have linked them to their global rivalry and to the risk of nuclear war.
Today such conflicts are isolated, with external involvement responding to a new diplomatic drumbeat of regional solutions for regional problems.
Thus, in Southern Africa a well-conceived but under-resourced South African effort to secure a Southern African Development Community (SADC) brokered peace founders. And in the Balkans, the United States, stumbling in its attempt to get Nato-imposed peace, has had to send warplanes to Kosovo.
Because these conflicts do not threaten the immediate vital interests of any major powers, and are so different and distant, they are not perceived as part of a broader threat to global order. But their cumulative effects are likely to be pernicious and pervasive.
Wars in the Democractic Republic of Congo, Angola, Kosovo and a score of other troubled states from Sierra Leone to Sri Lanka are symptomatic of a disastrous tendency of political leaders to exploit rather than resolve problems of domestic diversity. More than 900-million people, one-sixth of the world’s population, are estimated to belong to more than 250 ethnic and other communal groups that are already sufficiently aggrieved to pose credible threats to national and regional peace.
Without political arrangements that tolerate cultural diversity, the late British philosopher Isaiah Berlin declared, “no decent societies can survive”. The choice is whether to fit states to people or people to states.
In the first option, states are defined according to “ethnic nationalism”. Accordingly, Kosovo becomes either an ethnically pure, independent Albanian state or a strictly Serbian province of Yugoslavia.
The alternative, based on the principle of “civic nationalism”, subsumes all groups within a territory into one state. And this is the goal of South African diplomacy toward the Congo and Angola.
Historically, the Balkans have only been stable when order has been imposed, in this century by the Ottoman Empire and later under the Yugoslav communist rule of Marshall Tito.
Had the US and Nato stood up to Tito’s successor, the Serbian demagogue Slobodan Milosevic, when he first sought to consolidate his rule by mobilising militant Serbian nationalism a decade ago, there is a good chance that Tito’s enforced pluralism might have been democratised. Today, the best that can be hoped for is a series of Nato- backed ethnic protectorates as already exists in Bosnia.
Ethnic nationalism in Africa has erupted into extremely vicious violence, with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda the worst case to date. But so far the troubled countries of Southern Africa lack the political structures to sustain the virulence of the Balkan ethnic conflict.
Many African leaders, including United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, also recognise the evils of ethnic politics, which were the basis of the divide-and-rule policies of the colonial powers. And a peculiar strain of ethnic nationalism, apartheid, has left deep scars. Preventing anything that resembles it elsewhere in Africa has become a hallmark of South African foreign policy.
When the Soviet Union was dissolving, the Western powers declared that territorial boundaries within and between states could be changed provided the process was in respect of several basic principles of civic nationalism. These included: specific guarantees for respect of human rights and equal treatment of minorities; any territorial changes had to be by peaceful consensual means; international law and obligations must be respected; and governments would be held to democratic values of transparency, accountability, including holding regular free and fair elections.
A group of prominent Africans unofficially endorsed these same principles in 1991 when they met in Kampala under the auspices of the African Leadership Forum, chaired by Olusegun Obasanjo, the recently elected president of Nigeria.
Regrettably, soon after the generally peaceful break-up of the Soviet bloc, the Western powers lost their nerve and failed to apply the principles of civic nationalism in Yugoslavia. A half-hearted effort by these same donor nations to apply these principles when allocating development assistance in Africa also foundered.
In Kosovo, the cancer of ethnic nationalism may no longer be curable.
The disease in Southern Africa is not so advanced. Warlords still predominate and long-suffering civilian populations, given a chance, could undoubtedly develop democratic structures and processes for civic nationalism to eventually flourish. This is the long-term goal of South African policy and, if successful, it could serve as a positive example to other conflict-ridden regions.
Progress depends, however, on more than deft diplomacy. In one sense, the warlords of Congo and Angola are little different than the Serbian dictator Milosevic. They only respond to real pressure, although fortunately Nato air strikes are not required in Africa. A joint campaign by South Africa/SADC and the Western powers to curtail the sale of oil, diamonds and other minerals that are financing the Angolan and Congo warlords might be sufficient.
This will not be easy, but as the US has demonstrated in Latin America, where it has successfully applied financial sanctions against drug lords and coup-makers, the technology for interdicting many financial transactions already exists.
What is missing thus far is a willingness to take decisive action in Southern Africa to promote civic nationalism for the good of the region and as part of a broader strategy to secure a more peaceful, prosperous and democratic global order.
John Stremlau is the Jan Smuts professor of international relations at the University of the Witwatersrand