African Foreign Policies

Selecting Signifiers to Explain Agency

Paul-Henri Bischoff, Paul-Henri Bischoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000048377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Droit public

This book explores, at a time when several powers have become serious players on the continent, aspects of African agency, past and present, by African writers on foreign policy, representative of geography, language and state size.

In the past, African foreign policy has largely been considered within the context of reactions to the international or global "external factor". This groundbreaking book, however, looks at how foreign policy has been crafted and used in response not just to external, but also, mainly, domestic imperatives or (theoretical) signifiers. As such, it narrates individual and changing foreign policy orientations over time—and as far back as independence—with mainly African-based scholars who present their own constructs of what is a useful theoretical narrative regarding foreign policy on the continent—how theory is adapted to local circumstance or substituted for continentally based ontologies. The book therefore contends that the African experience carries valuable import for expanding general understandings of foreign policy in general.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of Foreign Policy Analysis, Foreign Policy Studies, African International Relations/Politics/Studies, Diplomacy and more broadly to International Relations.

1 Introduction

African foreign policy studies—selecting signifiers to explain agency

Paul-Henri Bischoff

Introduction

The study of foreign policy is about individual and collective agency, where agency is “directed, meaningful, intentional and self-reflective social action” or the faculty or state of acting or exerting power (Chabal, 2009: 7; Buzan, Jones & Little, 1993: 103) in a particular context. Of necessity, it looks at official or officially enabled leaders, decision-makers and role players with their profiles and identities uniquely responding to changing domestic, regional and international contexts. Foreign policy is a “set of ideas or actions designed to solve a problem or promote some change in the policies, attitudes or actions of other states, in non-state actors … in the international economy or the physical environment of the world” (Holsti, 1995: 83).

At first blush, the study of agency in African foreign policy is the search for a broad aggregation of interests and a foreign policy strategy both at an individual and collective level with the aim of achieving sustainable security, welfare and development to mitigate the structural impediments of a hierarchical world order and world economy. Often though, scholarship has plotted the local response to impulses crowding in from the outside. The “external factor” envelops foreign policy description. The post-colonial state’s architecture, descriptions of its elite as authoritarian and comprador or neo-colonial in character has helped drive this type of analysis. A limited political and constitutional base for the conduct of any meaningful state-society relations, compounded by a rigid North-South divide and growing encroachments by the forces of globalisation, ever further driving the capitalist integration of the continent with that of the world market, enfeebled African sovereignty, economic self-determination and African agency.

When considered, agency most often described presidential acts and personalities driving an elite foreign policy disposition. In addition, explanations were sought for the type of agency, which had states engage in paradoxical behaviour—where, for purposes of legitimacy and recognition, international norms and institutions were signed onto, only, in practice, to decry them. Found to be seemingly irrational or schizophrenic is explained in terms of the dilemma faced by marginalised states caught in a position of structural inequality (Sabrow, 2019: 1–2).

To arrive at a comprehensive understanding, foreign policy agency needs to be studied on its own and within context. This is because we are aware that “Africans were never the passive and apathetic actors they are typically made to be in discourses of marginalisation”.¹ There is also the observation that African agency can be said to have helped to materially change our contemporary world. Amy Niang suggests that Africa’s anti-colonialism and de-colonialism, for instance, helped shape today’s global commons. African struggles contributed to present day global notions of freedom, human rights and solidarity amidst the ethical collapse of a dying imperial world (2016: 458).

Foreign policy agency, traceable in the period from independence, however broad or limited, we suggest, should be studied as consequential, self-reflective action encompassing the domestic.

After the initial euphoria around nation building faded, African regimes sought to buy social peace and stability. A foreign policy objective of obtaining international support from big powers became key. In the context of a rentier state, established social strata continue to have an interest in the upkeep of an inherited economic structure dependent on the near to exclusive extraction of raw materials and commodities owned by Multinational Corporations (MNC) from Western economies and that of a neo-colonial relationship with Western powers. Foreign policy change to these elites could and can only mean, “with different degrees of urgency” to make these relations “more beneficial to themselves” (Nolutshungu, 1982: 401). It encouraged a foreign policy of staff (free) riding and extraversion or the soliciting of external support to stabilise domestic security.

While a characterisation of foreign policy dependent on the external factor in part still holds true—albeit with the caveat that China in places may have replaced the West as the most hoped for source of benefice—African scholars cognisant of history, culture and the opening up of democratic spaces with new voices, have begun to take a broader view. Domestic rather than external sources are the key explanandum on continuities, and change for the conduct and effectiveness of foreign policy elites over time. The domestic now includes the degree of democratic organisation and plurality of expressed interests influencing foreign policy issues, when relating with outside powers such as China (Chipaike & Bischoff, 2018). Moreover, at a time when liberal global governance and world order is disrupted by the illiberalism in the leadership of big and regional powers or the politics of the environment, the accompanying fluidity allows all other states, regions and civil society actors to appear on scene. A rapidly changing domestic, regional and international environment means expressions of (economic) power, such as the North-South divide, are being debated, renegotiated and re-configured (Acharya, 2018: 17). Here, Africa seeks participation alongside others; to be part of constructing narratives and formulating policy agendas. Such participation assists in structuring relations and creating new realities to reshape existing structures, or create new ones.

Against this background, the African state and society face choices for which agency and its study is called for. The African foreign policy agency of the past can throw light on explanations for the present. It is also opportune to ask what needs to inform the choice of strategic, independent and diverse foreign policy goals on the African continent.

It is to enquire what foreign policy has gone before and to what extent it ever took a deep, holistic look at domestic factors informing (the rediscovery of) agency. Overall, scholarship is to identify the signifiers that in consistent and fresh ways represent the character and ideas that emerge from the domestic. This, in order to prompt full descriptions, ideally of a credible foreign policy that has integrity and carries legitimacy. It is to bring to the surface ordinary African voices and the plurality of meanings, agents of African foreign policy, portray or signify over time into our present.

Signifiers

The signifiers to represent African foreign policy agency emerge from the following issue areas:

One, where the analytical focus has shifted from one of the study of external dependence and asymmetries with the West to either a more dedicated adaptation of existing knowledge or the radical epistemological decolonisation of knowledge. Firstly, this can mean the eclectic selection and application of existing theoretical knowledge to relate African choices or, secondly, with a new theoretical focus in mind, to make endogenous African voices central to analysis in what is an evolving context of glocal and transnational realities. Both approaches serve the need for new ways of explaining African events for International Relations (IR). In the context of a Westphalian framework, the referent in the first approach invariably is the nation-state or the Intergovernmental Organisation (IGO) as foreign policy actor. While the referent remains unchanged, the description of setting and emphasis do change. This is to allow for new or added ways of explaining domestic and regional sources of policy. The second approach talks to referent points other than the imported Euro-centric nation-state model and its representatives, to find the previously marginalised moving to the centre of international life.² As such, the contribution of African women, communities or indigenous society actors as voices and actors demanding dignity and recognition as agents, contribute to national, regional and international understandings of history, development and governance. They, as referents, are seen to make up the fabric of international events and need to stand at the source and centre of descriptions of the international (Magadla, 2013).

The overall concern generally, however, is to broadly begin to also look at the lived experiences of the (African) majority, how it conceives of political community (Bischoff et al., 2016: 15) and the way this, by extension, for our purposes here normatively shapes (elite) foreign policy decision-making. Invariably, African scholarship wants to highlight foreign policy as seen through the prism of alternate accounts of history and culture. In other words, how the majority lives, believes and sensitises its leaders, or how leaders anticipate reactions by the opinion of a significant majority, needs to inform our understanding of foreign policy agency. As such, “thinking foreign policy” is social and cultural, as much as it is political, economic or strategic.

Two, where a collective regional societal awareness, in this case, a Pan-Africanist mindfulness, informs the study of foreign policy. Even though states highly prize the norm of sovereignty, they also heavily rely on the multilateral support given by Pan-African institutions at sub-regional and regional levels on a continent that regionally and inter-governmentally is well networked and integrated. As such, the study of individual foreign policy wants to pay heed to shared (Pan-African) norms espoused by evolving regional organisation and its modus operandi. This, at a time when a body such as the African Union (AU) has real powers (Tieku, 2004: 250) to help pattern regional organisational norms and processes, yet finds itself in a setting where Africa lacks continental sovereignty (Kornegay & Landsberg, 2009). Where individual states exploit this cleavage to depart from collective norms, this additionally forms the basis for signifying new avenues of foreign policy explanation.

Three, the need for anticipating and responding to the growing density of relations with the outside world is an additional signifier for agency. In this new century, there is the new or increasing post-Western engagement with a diverse host of resourceful non-Western foreign policy actors in search of mineral, energy, agricultural and other resources on the African continent (China, India, Turkey, Brazil, Iran, Israel, Russia, United Arab Emirates, South Korea for instance). The states involved generally pay heed to a conventional script mindful of state sovereignty and the principle of non-interference. These openly pursue their respective national interest in competition with others, and African states and the AU are often at a strategic comparative disadvantage with the bigger of these actors. The engagement with states in a geo-political and geo-economic taut environment of different bidders—including those Western players willing to engage with the newcomers—demands, more than ever before, for Africans to take advantage of ascendant alliances to formulate their own distinctly informed, strategic national and collective foreign policy responses.

Four, in a world of emerging geo-political regions, the African foreign policy response is of global relevance and signifies a demand for agency. Existing individual polities and regional societies of states in both countries of the North and those of the Global South face sideways and bottom-up pressures from push-and-pull factors to do with transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, identity politics, culture, populism, migration and nationalism. In the post-2008 period of economic crisis radiating out from the West, nationalism, ethnicity and religion have mobilised communities within and across borders. “When the politics of exclusive collective identity … seek a facetious regeneration of Gemeinschaft in an increasingly remote Gesellschaft” (Hobsbawm, 2008: 93), domestic and transnational challenges from this, call for foreign policy understanding on the responses taken. There is the long-standing African experience of dealing with the ability of a weak Westphalian state to cope with transnational and bottom-up pressures. Here, Africa’s deep primordial experiences, the construction of primordial attachments and the relationship between politics and culture is of interest to global scholarship. The late Ali Mazrui (2000: 37, 49) pointed to ethnicity and religion as the two primordial forces operating in Africa and how as transnational forces, these come to be internationalised. Ethnicity and religion are powerful mobilisers of political sentiment. These phenomena affect international relations worldwide and calls for the study of a compendium of foreign policy initiatives and foreign policy responses.

Where transnational and domestic forces, as never before since 1945, challenge the core of the Westphalian state system and regional organisation, long-standing African experience and Africa’s often tolerant response bears lessons. For instance, mass migration and displacement on the continent itself advances normative lessons on how the International Community (IC) and individual states and their societies ought to promote responses based on principles of empathy, tolerance and solidarity practised in Africa itself. At the same time, African reactions to long-standing transnational security threats are a source of understanding of now similar, more recent threats elsewhere in the world.

In sum, as political, economic and social forces encroach in new ways, the long historical African experience of being open to the world (Davidson, 1974; Buettner, 1979) is instructive for states and societies in general. The entire post-colonial African foreign relations experience opens itself up to general enquiry.

The contributors to this volume talk to ontological, epistemological, social, sociological, ideological and cultural signifiers of foreign policy, to accompany, complement or substitute political, economic or strategic analyses. This, while acknowledging that overall, agency remains conditioned by asymmetry and the constraints of a (post-) Westphalian structure. Generally, however, the concern expressed is that foreign policy description needs to aim at more holistic accounts of (African) foreign policy. Domestic sources of foreign policy need preeminent consideration.

To unearth African-centred foreign policy actorness, Chapter 2 by Paul-Henri Bischoff sketches the continuities and discontinuities in descriptions up to the present. Where African foreign policy was once largely perceived in terms of the dependence on a predominant West that inhibited African foreign policy agency, the analytical focus has shifted. Where actors have multiplied and regional organisation has grown, there is greater political and ideological space for different expressions of (African) actorness. South Africa and the African Union (AU) serve as illustrations for this. The study of African foreign policy also ought, more than ever, to inform the general study of foreign policy. African specificities test and expand on the validity of general mainstream claims and bear lessons for the world in a Western-led academy largely still extrapolating from Western experience.

Foreign policy agency: Individual and collective

Individual foreign policy agency is about self-reflective action involving identity, norms, coordination and developing organisation. Kabelo Mahupela contends that constructivism allows for an analysis of the social space for agency, one expansive and unrestricted by hierarchy or structure, inclusive of small states and their ability to manipulate their external environment. Throughout its history since independence, Botswana has been able to succeed as a small African state in an international arena dominated by Western ideals. As such, it has lived and visibly espoused liberal democratic values for most of the period since independence. This, in opposition to the general trends in the region and where other states were less successful than Botswana in proj...