JORGE HEINE: SA foreign policy and active non-alignment

In a recent speech at an SA Institute of International Affairs symposium international relations & co-operation minister Ronald Lamola had this to say after identifying the serious challenges facing the world, the instability they have generated, and the urgency for collective action to address them:

“The evolving international world order necessitates the strengthening of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). SA, with its unique policy of active non-alignment, is not reactive but proactive in its pursuit of peace. This approach is not about being neutral or abstaining from world affairs, but about leading a unifying agenda through dialogue to achieve peace for developing countries that do not wish to take sides in great power rivalry”. 

We all know what the NAM stands for, but what did Lamola mean by his reference to “active non-alignment”, a term that was also used by his predecessor and in other international relations & co-operation department documents to describe SA’s foreign policy approach in a troubled world?

The term, coined by my colleagues Carlos Fortin and Carlos Ominami and I, and developed in a book, Latin American Foreign Policies in the New World Order: The Active Non-Alignment Option, reflects the stance of developing nations as they cope with a world order in transition and the perils of great power competition. Though originally crafted in the Latin American context, its use expanded to the rest of the Global South. It defines the foreign policy approach of many countries in Africa and Asia. 

Active non-alignment came up at first in 2019-20 as Latin America was hit by a triple whammy: the Covid-19 pandemic, the worst economic downturn in a century and strong pressures from Washington and Beijing to bend policies to the whims of the US and China. Our response, expressed in a variety of publications, including a book with contributions by six former Latin American foreign ministers from leading countries in the region, was that the last thing Latin American countries needed was to align themselves with one or the other of these great powers. That would be the road to perdition.

Russia’s invasion

On the contrary, the way forward lay in putting our own countries’ national interest front and centre, not letting foreign policy choices be swayed by untoward pressures designed to make us, in Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous phrase, “the plaything of others”. Active non-alignment takes a page from the honourable tradition of the NAM, draws on Latin America’s long quest for autonomy in international affairs, and adapts these traditions to the realities of the new century and the rise of a New South. 

Though the notion of active non-alignment resonated throughout the Americas, triggering a vigorous debate, it was not until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 that non-alignment erupted across the Global South as a whole. Thus, over the past two-and-a-half years non-alignment has once again taken the world by storm.

In this SA has played a key role. Not since the 1990s, the days of the Rainbow Nation and the presidency of Nelson Mandela (years in which, not coincidentally, SA hosted the 1998 NAM summit in Durban), has SA exercised the sort of international leadership it has in 2022-24.

Starting with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, SA refused to toe the Nato line, took an independent stance, and worked with other African countries to carve out a broader African position on the war. Later, it spearheaded (albeit unsuccessfully) an African peace initiative, aimed at ending this tragic conflict, going against the grain of the Western position, which was to continue the war “for as long as it takes”.

In these efforts SA became Exhibit A of an approach described by The Economist as “How to survive a superpower split” — that is, how to manage the delicate balancing act needed to prevail in an era of great power competition. 

Financial heft

SA also hosted perhaps the most significant Brics summit in the 15-year existence of the bloc, the one held in Johannesburg in August 2023. With the group’s expansion on the agenda, about 20 applicants eager to join and six new members accepted, no Brics summit received as much media coverage as this one. And though one of the six (Argentina) ultimately declined the invitation after a change of government in Buenos Aires, the Brics-Plus group should be seen now, more than before, as a force to be reckoned with in world affairs.

Its bank, the Shanghai-based New Development Bank (NDB), which has a branch in Johannesburg, provides it with considerable financial heft. The NDB, as well as the Asian Investment & Infrastructure Bank, and China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI), are part of the “collective financial statecraft” that marks South-South relations in the new century, making them so different from the “diplomatie des cahiers des doleances” (“victimhood diplomacy”) of those of the previous one. 

Perhaps most courageously, SA has taken the lead in the swift reaction across the Global South against the indiscriminate killing of civilians in the war in Gaza, where more children (about 15,000) have died in nine months than in all wars in the world in the past five years. SA’s case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, supported formally by 10 other developing nations and informally by 40 more, accusing Israel of violating the Convention Against Genocide, embodies the unrelenting attempt of the South, against all odds, to use the mechanisms of the international order to protect Palestinians’ human rights — albeit to no avail as Western hypocrisy and the vacuity of its references to a supposed defence of the so-called rules-based-order are once again exposed in full regalia. 

The rise of the Global South and the stark division between North and South is a key hallmark of our era. With the rise of the Global South (or Global Majority, as some refer to it), goes that of active non-alignment, a foreign policy doctrine for our time. 

• Heine, a former Chilean ambassador to SA, is a research professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University.