GERRIT OLIVIER: Putin and Xi want to make the world safe for autocracy

As a promising postapartheid democracy, SA has never managed to play the normative role in world politics many of its well-wishers hoped it would. After former president Nelson Mandela left the scene, partisan ideology gained the upper hand, with human rights becoming the first casualty.

Selective anti-Westernism became a hallmark of our foreign policy, studiously uncritical of gross human rights aggravations in Russia and China and echoing Chinese President Xi Jinping’s comment that “certain international forces are arbitrarily interfering in the internal affairs of China and Russia, under the guise of democracy and human rights”.

Though the West has refrained from responding in kind to SA’s deliberate coolness, it has lost much of its erstwhile enthusiasm for dealing with the country, with the relationship remaining stuck well below its true potential.

With the West in decline and the East on the rise, Pretoria has seemed to argue it is on the right side of history. However, taking into account the kind of world order China and Russia seek to establish — an order dominated by authoritarian states — SA may well end up in an ominous Faustian pact.

After World War 1 then US president Woodrow Wilson sought to “make the world safe for democracy”. Today, Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin aim to make the world “safe for autocracy”. Both of these leaders are illegitimate in terms of universal democratic norms, hence their quest for an authoritarian comfort zone. 

Colour revolutions leading to pro-Western democracies in their own backyard are therefore also seen as a threat; for Putin a democratic Ukraine, for Xi in respect of Hong Kong. Hence, they want to keep and promote dictators in power wherever they can. Syria, Venezuela and Iran have become captive allies, while Kremlin support for right-wing factions in Europe has become regularised. The EU, Nato and the US are clandestinely and openly being threatened as Western democratic strongholds.

Both Russia and China reject the current Western-dominated liberal world order, which upholds democracy and human rights as essential parts of the foreign policy narrative. Still smarting from the ignominious fall of communist Russia, Putin declared in a 2019 Financial Times interview that liberalism is a spent ideological force, having “outlived its purpose”. Using Confucianism as a cradle for a cultural renaissance, China is similarly advancing a new universal Chinese identity. 

Like a modern-day colonial Leviathan, Putin regards Ukraine, Crimea and Georgia to be culturally and politically part of the Russian sphere of influence, forcefully usurping their sovereignty and nationhood — as China has done with Tibet and Hong Kong. Taiwan still awaits its fate.

Of course, a new world order is called for. The present system is no longer universal, based as it is on largely European/Western rules and norms. As US political scientist Samuel Huntington has pointed out: “There are ominous signs that the ‘monocivilisational’ paradigm on which international society has for many decades been based is losing legitimacy.”

However, the new order that Russia and China are calling for is simply an atavistic aberration. It would render them immune to foreign interference and legitimise separate spheres of dominance. Small states would simply lose their sovereignty and foreign policy independence. It would introduce a retrogressive order, a form of post-Westphalian neocolonialism based on ruthless autocracy. Power politics would replace international law, with human rights reduced to a trivial footnote. The relatively peaceful, albeit imperfect, post-Westphalian international society would be replaced by a Hobbesian state of “war of all against all”.

Russia’s brutal gunboat diplomacy to veto Nato’s expansion and force Ukraine to yield, and China’s relentless quest to gobble up Hong Kong and Taiwan, are all part of this pattern of redesigning the world order. Nato’s willy-nilly willingness to negotiate at all after Russia’s sweeping ultimatum, backed up by 200,000 Russian troops standing at the ready, was therefore a crucial zero-sum capitulation to Russian revisionistic diplomacy and territorial piracy. Amazingly, Nato and its partners scrambled to the negotiating table to bargain on principles that should be simply non-negotiable.

An apocryphal rendition of Soviet negotiation style was quaintly summed up by former Soviet era foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, who said “there are basically three rules of negotiating with the West: first, demand the maximum, do not meekly ask but demand. Second, present ultimatums, and third do not give one inch of ground, because there will always be someone in the West that will offer you something maybe half of what you did not previously have.”

So it is “déjà vu all over again” in the case of the Nato-Ukraine conundrum. The helter-skelter diplomacy followed by the Nato allies once again exemplifies the lack of Western diplomatic nous when dealing with Putin. Since his annexation of the Crimea and intervention in Donbas, he has shifted “red lines” at will, with the West in pathetic compliance. His main aim and mission are to resurrect the legacy of the Soviet Union and secure his place next to Tsar Peter the Great as a leader of consequence.

Putin’s policies are driven by the predictable “Putin Doctrine”, an interlocking set of foreign policy objectives, with the core element — as Angela Stent pointed out in a recent article in Foreign Affairs — “getting the West to treat Russia as if it were the Soviet Union, a power to be respected and feared, with special rights in its neighbourhood and a voice in every serious international matter”.

For Putin, this is a good time to act. The US is weak and divided; the EU has morphed into an innocuous foreign policy actor; Germany, in particular, sits on the fence; and China’s support is assured.

SA, like most small states, particularly in Africa, will be crucially affected should a Russian/Chinese nexus dominate global politics. Its silence on the Ukrainian conflict and the putative new world order in the making translate into a sign of impotence, even incompetence.

Or is it a sign of acquiescence, perhaps studied indifference ... a hope that the crocodile will eat us last? 

• Olivier is emeritus professor at University of Pretoria and former SA ambassador to Russia and Kazakhstan.