Anthony Holiday
a second look
The Hainan Island spy-plane incident may be over but in foreign ministries, embassies and policy think-tanks the whole world over its full implications are only beginning to unravel.
When the Chinese fighter pilot Wang Wei lost his life and became a national hero by colliding with a United States EP-3 surveillance aircraft, he transformed a climate of latent mistrust between this planet’s most powerful and its most populous nation into a confrontational scenario that some fear and others hope will inaugurate a new Cold War.
In Paris (from which I have just returned), as in every other European capital, foreign policy analysts waited with bated breath to see how George W Bush would deal with the first foreign relations crisis he has faced since entering the Oval Office a marked contrast, I understand, with Cape Town and Pretoria, where people, who ought to know better, seemed at least as interested in alleged high jinks in our president’s bed chamber as in the threat of a new geopolitical ice age.
Such parochialism is as dangerous as it is intellectually depraved. Not only is it true that hostility of the sort that once prevailed between the capitalist West and the socialist East would dramatically affect this country culturally, politically and economically, it is also the case that there are politicians here as there are in Beijing and Washington and in almost every other polity worth mentioning who have never entirely broken the shackles of Cold War thinking. I do not say that such people would positively welcome the emergence of a new balance of terror between China and the US. I do say that they would feel more at home in such an atmosphere than they do in the present international ambience of free trade in goods and ideas.
By burying our noses in trivia about the proclivities of the presidential penis we give these potential cold warriors room to manoeuvre unnoticed. We become forgetful of the Cold War past and the habits of thought of some who now hold high office in Parliament and in the presidency while they remain alert to the possibilities the Hainan affair may have opened up.
We would do well, therefore, to remind ourselves that, in a previous political incarnation, President Thabo Mbeki was a member of the South African Communist Party, as now is the Minister in the Office of the President, Essop Pahad. Minister of Water Affairs Ronnie Kasrils is an SACP member, as is Minister of Trade and Industry Alec Irwin. Ditto the African National Congress’s Chief Whip in Parliament, Tony Yengeni (he of the well-cut suit and Mercedes 4×4).
The list of those with such a background is lengthy. But more important than adding to it is the recollection that during the Cold War era, the SACP was a highly orthodox, Moscow-aligned entity, which later went to great lengths to rebuild bridges with its Chinese counterpart and, in the interests of preserving those ties, refused point blank to issue a public protest after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
This was an era in which, for communists, political thinking on international issues was relatively simple. There was a satanic empire, led by the capitalist US, and a “kingdom of the just”, led by the former Soviet Union in competition with socialist China. The former was largely, if not wholly, responsible for racism, war and poverty. The latter led the struggle against these evils and was friend to all the wretched of the Earth.
The Cold War thus provided its warriors with the sense of security that comes with the certainty of being right oneself and comforted by being in the company of right-thinking people. It conferred on true believers on both sides of the icy divide a sense of dignified and disciplined purpose that would come to their aid, even when they hesitated briefly to obey commands to do evil that good might come.
My own experience as a philosophy teacher has taught me how reluctant people often are to so much as entertain the possibility of renouncing certainties of this order. It is a historical fact that they will often prefer great material sacrifices to such renunciations. Add to this the circumstance that many politicians in the ANC camp are less than comfortable with the neo-liberal macroeconomic policy they are forced to defend in public and you will see why the prospect of a full-blown ideological contest between a nominally communist China and a belligerently capitalist US might become a preferred option.
Nonetheless, it is an alternative that must be vigorously resisted. An unchecked revival of Cold War adversariality would polarise the economically weak South of the global hamlet against the economically powerful North, with China appointing itself the champion of the former and the US doing the same for the latter.
Every regional conflict would become a site of contestation. Proxy wars would become as familiar as they once were. Conventional and nuclear arsenals would grow at a terrifying rate. Truly international conferences on such vital issues as the ecology would become a thing of the past.
In South Africa, which is home to both highly developed and underdeveloped sectors of society, the polarisation would be especially intense. The process of national reconstruction would be replaced by the “two nations” perspective. Civil unrest and the revival of old racial animosities would become very real possibilities.
These are prospects that no amount of nostalgia for long-lost certainties should be permitted to actualise.
Dr Anthony Holiday teaches philosophy at the University of the Western Cape’s school of government and at the Institute for Political Sciences in Paris