South Africa’s recent embarrassment in Warsaw, which saw a planeload of South African security officials, journalists and crates of weapons grounded on the tarmac, was a big news story before fading into the miasma that characterises reporting on South Africa’s baleful governance.
There was a depressing familiarity to it. Allegations of chaotic unpreparedness, a breakdown of the mission, the squandering of money, and accusations of racism and sabotage, then both an airy dismissal of any view that this was a serious setback, and a pledge to investigate and take appropriate action.
We’ve been here before. South Africa is, after all, the land of perpetual ‘challenges.’ (Far too many of these, let it be understood, are self-created.)
But I think that something important happened. South Africa tried to insert itself into one of the biggest geopolitical crises of the day; its efforts were overshadowed by the farce that surrounded the aircraft. It’s worth looking at this in more detail.
One of the most obvious explanations for the mess is simply that the permissions and paperwork were not in order. This is the position of the Polish government. Given the disordered state of governance in South Africa, it’s hard to contest that. One could do worse than quote Rebecca Davis of the Daily Maverick: ‘As a journalist who has previously travelled internationally with the Presidency, I can confirm the sense of absolute logistical chaos that swirls around these missions, seemingly regardless of context.’
Yet, echoing the impromptu official explanation made by General Wally Rhoode, Davis goes on to highlight the ‘missing element of the analysis on the grounded plane fiasco: Polish racism’. To dismiss this out of hand, she scolds, is to suggest that ‘white Europeans should only ever be imputed pure motives for their actions.’
Well, if anyone thinks that ‘white Europeans’ are without blemish, they are wrong.
And maybe Polish racism is a real and pressing issue, though none of the other African delegations seem to have had comparable difficulties (though none had such extensive entourages, nor holds laden with weapons…). Besides, the existence of racism – or any phenomenon, for that matter – does not mean that it is determinative to the matter at hand. There is certainly a great deal of racism and prejudice towards black people in China and Russia, but the Chinese and Russian governments have invested a great deal of effort into wooing the continent.
Davis’s article and Rhoode’s denunciation probably say more about South Africa than about Poland. Apartheid was South Africa’s great national trauma, and racism a painful signifier. Its invocation, while often opportunistic, does reference a real experience and a real grievance for the country.
But this is South Africa’s trauma, and the sentiments that arise from it will not be seen in quite the same terms elsewhere.
Poland has its own traumas: foreign occupation, Communism and Russia, with a great deal of overlap among them. This goes back to medieval times. By the end of the 18th century, Polish sovereignty had been erased, and its constituent territories parceled out to Russia, Austria and Prussia.
The Russian connection is a particularly sour memory. This relates to the attempted Russification of Polish life in the 19th century, and also to its relationship with the Soviet Union. Between 1918, when the Second Polish Republic was established, and 1940, Poland was invaded twice by the Soviet Union. The first invasion began shortly after the establishment of the Republic (questions of which party was the initial aggressor is debated), and very nearly destroyed the young state: the climactic battles were fought outside Warsaw in August 1920, termed the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’ in Polish historical memory. The Soviet side was led by Vladimir Lenin, a figure still revered by many in South Africa’s political class (to my mind, shamefully so). The second invasion was launched by the Soviet Union in 1939, shortly after Germany had invaded from the West. Soviet agents proceeded to ‘liquidate’ Polish leadership figures in a manner reminiscent of their then Nazi allies.
After the Second World War, Poland endured over four decades of Communist dictatorship imposed and underwritten by the Soviets.
Hence, the stances that post-Communist Poland has taken. Integration into the European Union for its economic prosperity, and into NATO, for its security. For Poland, the conflict in Ukraine is existential. A victorious and emboldened Russia would be Poland’s geopolitical nightmare. For some in our political elite, NATO is an expression of US imperialism and the driving force behind the war. But for Poland, it is its ultimate guarantor of sovereignty.
This might be useful in understanding what went down in Warsaw. Did ‘Polish racism’ play a role? Davis rather undercuts her own case by conceding that the South African authorities ‘probably screwed up the paperwork’. In other words, purely on administrative grounds, South Africa had created a problem for itself and its mission that would not easily be resolved. And Davis also notes that Poland was ‘pissed off’ at South Africa’s positioning on the conflict.
This I imagine is the crux. South Africa’s apparent sympathy with Russia – not to mention the recent allegations that South Africa supplied the latter with war materiel at a naval base – would strike at the heart of Poland’s geopolitical interests. To call this being ‘pissed off’ is to fail to recognise the gravity of what this means to Poland. It might better be understood as comparable to the reaction from South Africa if the Dutch ambassador announced that a multi-billion Euro fund was being capitalised to finance the takeover of the Western Cape by a Dutch State-Owned Company and that the Dutch navy was assembling off Table Bay to get this started. We’re talking about something that presses particular emotional and political sore points.
So, when an improperly-authorised consignment of arms touched down in a country which sees its interests uniquely threatened by what is in effect a South African ally, I can imagine that Polish officials felt no sympathy, nor any incentive to resolve the impasse. Quite the contrary.
It seems to me that all of this highlights a suite of failings in the management of South Africa’s foreign relations, a neglected stepchild of our governance system for most of us, with the collapse of municipalities and the failure to keep the lights on being rightly more immediate concerns. But foreign relations are an important feature of a modern state. If South Africa is to get back on track, it will need to get its diplomatic house in order.
According to the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO), as of mid-2022 South Africa has 98 embassies and high commissions, 14 consuls general and consulates, and two representative offices across the globe. (These figures represent the diplomatic presence after 10 missions were closed in 2021.) According to the Lowy Global Diplomatic Index (for 2021, its latest release), South Africa has the 26th most extensive diplomatic network in the world. This is impressive for a developing country and a so-called ‘middle power’.
Yet whether this represents a good investment is questionable. The National Development Plan noted candidly that South Africa’s international clout was in decline and remarked that the country was ‘overstretching itself diplomatically’. Among many other things, it called for the country to develop a clear view of its national interest.
That last point is critical. If foreign representatives are to have a purpose, they need to know what it is. Whether this is the case for South Africa is far from clear. A document put out by DIRCO last year proposed this definition: ‘The protection and promotion of its national sovereignty and constitutional order, the well-being, safety and prosperity of its citizens, and a better Africa and world.’
I discussed this at the time. I’d submit that the points I made back then – drawing extensively on the NDP’s analysis – are still valid. South Africa has a declining global stature, a shopworn international image, and a foreign affairs bureaucracy that is inadequately capacitated for its supposed role. Absent the skills or diplomatic finesse to pursue, say, trade and investment promotion, foreign policy defaults to ideology as its primary driver.
South Africa’s diplomatic shortcomings arguably extend beyond its ham-fisted operations to a failure to understand its interlocutors. The Warsaw debacle and the response to it (even outside officialdom, as Davis’s commentary illustrates) exposes a strain of parochialism in South Africa’s interactions with the world: that its own perspectives are in some way valid elsewhere, that its errors and incompetence should be overlooked. The South African state, after all, has a high internal level of tolerance for ineptitude.
It should have been anticipated from the outset that a South African mission in Poland could well be received frostily; to mitigate that, South Africa should have ensured that its technical and administrative preparations were impeccable. If it ‘screwed up the paperwork’ it provided whatever justification an unsympathetic reception would have needed.
Perhaps a more fruitful avenue to explain what happened would be South Africa’s own diplomacy in Poland over the past year or so. Did its representatives understand the Polish position on Ukraine in its historical complex? And how that might make for a difficult interaction with South Africa? Were South African diplomats pounding the pavements of Warsaw to explain their government’s position and to win the understanding of Polish opinion leaders (are any South African diplomats conversant in Polish to undertake this)? Had they communicated this clearly to their superiors back home – and had their superiors taken note? My own sense is that the likely answers to these questions go a long way to explaining what took place at Warsaw airport.
DIRCO Minister Dr Naledi Pandor recently baldly stated that South Africa would not sacrifice its foreign policy for trade. Well, that ignores the point of diplomacy, which would be to maintain both.
The reality is that South Africa is just not up to this, neither by inclination, nor by capacity. It seems ever ready to countenance positions that have little benefit for a stressed society. There is an especial disregard for the grubby business of the economy – where after all, more than four in ten South Africans lack employment – and instead a fulsome embrace of declarations of ‘solidarity’ for causes over which South Africa has little influence.
Seats at the tables of global fora, when still available – as in Paris two weeks ago – are squandered by cringeworthy hectoring, not the sort of intelligent ‘engagement’ that the newly democratised state at least aspired to in its first decade. See President Ramaphosa’s performance at the New Global Financing Pact Summit in Paris a week or so ago, for a flavour of where we are now. (South Africa’s Chinese and Indian friends, by the way, get this, adapting their approaches and their alliances to each issue at hand. If only South Africa could actually learn something from participation in the BRICS group, rather than just hanging its membership around itself like a nouveau-riche status symbol.)
Whether South Africa’s position vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine is justifiable is less the issue than whether the country is able to manage the tensions, challenges and potential consequences that would always inevitably have arisen from it.
I’d say that the debacle in Warsaw is pretty clear evidence that it has failed to do so. So is the growing crisis around South Africa’s relationship with the United States. No matter how much the US may be loathed by some in our political class – as ANC documents make plain – there is a great deal at stake for millions of livelihoods. Diplomacy is as much about getting on with countries where profound differences exist as it is about celebrating friendship.
What we’ve ended up with is foreign policy in theory and practice that is orphaned – left to sometimes clueless ‘specialists’ – and captured by the incompetent and rigidly ideological. Starkly missing is tangible benefit, even in terms of reputation and prestige for South Africa and its people.
But when an inability to think and act in multifaceted terms exists, and where an ideological worldview dominates, choices can quickly become binary and zero-sum – and foreign policy remains as grounded and directionless as that plane on the tarmac of Warsaw airport.