“Chapter 17: Ronald Reagan's Constructive Engagement and the Making of a Political Order in Southern Africa, 1981-1989” in “Full Text”
CHAPTER 17
Ronald Reagan’s Constructive Engagement and the Making of a Political Order in Southern Africa, 1981-1989
Christophe Dongmo
Political Science Fellow of the Johns Hopkins University
INTRODUCTION
Constructive engagement as a concept has largely informed the conduct of American foreign policy, thereby gaining a special forcefulness and stridency during the Ronald Reagan administration. Constructive engagement holds that American interests are better served by developing stronger economic and cultural ties with Southern Africa’s apartheid and White minority rule regimes. Its goals were threefold: weaken the links between the Soviet Union and radical communist regimes; undermine the stability of these developing governments; and support or even execute their removal from power by all means. The policy called for an active American regional presence, intensive aid programs, a simultaneous Namibian resolution leading to independence, and the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola.
Using analytical research methods, this chapter evaluates the application of constructive engagement in the context of Southern Africa’s movement toward equality, social justice, democracy, and political order. It considers both the confrontational and friendly persuasion approaches adopted by Ronald Reagan, which culminated in the defense of the national interest. There were compelling economic and strategic interests for American policy toward Southern Africa during the Reagan years: the acquisition of mineral resources, rolling down Communism, and establishing a market economy. Such interests were considered “vital” on two grounds: first, they were of such real importance that no prudent policy maker could neglect to take them into account; second, they were of such real importance either to the electorate at large or to the political class that, without them, the continuity of the administration or its ability to carry out a coherent foreign policy could have been jeopardised. The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 effectively ended American foreign policy toward apartheid with a dramatic reversal of the Reagan veto by Congress. The U.S. domestic political opposition to constructive engagement drove much of the legislative agenda through the 1980s on Southern and South Africa. It transpires, therefore, that if South Africa were to remain the economic locomotive of the sub-region, its strong and developed economy should not have been weakened. Therefore, international stakeholders, under Reagan leadership, were to resist emotional calls for punitive sanctions. In the end, the Reagan administration tried to support South Africa without appearing to endorse apartheid. Constructive engagement was a failure because Cold War concerns overrode the explicit goal of ending apartheid in South Africa. By radically departing from earlier trends of America’s vision of world affairs, Reagan’s doctrine of reinvigorated global containment ushered in a new agenda for American foreign policy and rested on a particular set of intellectual constructs derived from a general system of foreign policy ideas.
The concept of engagement represents an indispensable tool in a foreign policy practitioner’s armory. Constructive engagement has largely informed the conduct of American foreign policy, thereby gaining a special forcefulness and stridency during the Reagan administration.[1] The term was popularized in the early 1980s amid controversy about the Reagan administration’s policy of constructive engagement toward South Africa.[2] Although Reagan never outlined a comprehensive set of policies that he personally qualified as “Reagan Doctrine,” his commitment amounted to a clear willingness to elaborate on a winning strategy to assist anti-Communist movements in the developing world.[3] Crafted by Chester A. Crocker, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, constructive engagement represented one of the most significant innovations of American diplomacy in the 1980s. Crocker maintained that unvarying hostile rhetoric leveled at the apartheid regime in South Africa served only to increase Pretoria’s mistrust and dislike of Washington and hardened Pretoria’s intransigence. He asserted that an open dialogue, together with a reduction of punitive measures, such as export restrictions, would gain the confidence of Pretoria, enabling Washington to influence South Africa toward a gradual change away from apartheid.[4]
The policy goals were threefold: weaken the links between the Soviet Union and radical Communist regimes; undermine the stability of these developing governments; and support or even execute their removal from power.[5] Policy makers historically viewed Africa as marginal to American national interests. However, as Reagan’s constructive engagement shows, the proliferation of anti-apartheid activism demonstrated how citizen initiatives could significantly alter the placement of issues on the U.S. foreign policy agenda.[6]
Referring to American diplomacy in Southern Africa, some emerging questions flow from the above analysis. Did Reagan support White minority rule? What were the economic returns of collaboration with the apartheid regime? What about the differences and similarities between constructive engagement and other foreign policy doctrines? Did constructive engagement have any impact on the democratic revolutions that shook Southern Africa to its upheavals in the early 1990s? In answering these questions, this chapter evaluates the application of constructive engagement in the context of Southern Africa’s movement toward full independence, equality, social justice, democracy, and political order. The analysis considers both the confrontational and friendly persuasion approaches adopted by the Reagan administration, which culminated in the defense of national interest. There is no doubt that constructive engagement was one of the strongholds of Reagan’s policy in Southern Africa, probably the most elaborate policy design ever assembled by an American statesman. Reagan’s policy, otherwise stated, to borrow from John De St Jorre, possessed a “conceptual base, a style (and tone), a coherency that goes beyond its predecessors.”[7]
There were strong economic and strategic interests for American policy toward Southern Africa during the Reagan years: ensuring acquisition of mineral resources, gaining access to the seas, rolling down Communism, and establishing a market economy in the sub-region. Such interests were considered “vital” on two grounds: first, they were of such real importance that no prudent policy maker could neglect to take them into account; second, they were of such real importance either to the electorate at large or to the political class that, without them, the continuity of the administration or its ability to carry out a coherent foreign policy could have been jeopardized.
In the end, the democratic settlements that occurred across the board in Namibia and in South Africa in the early 1990s were achieved despite, not because of the Reagan’s doctrine. Rather, international diplomatic efforts, political order in neighboring countries, and changes in Soviet “new thinking” established the preconditions for negotiations, while changes in the military balance in Southern Africa precipitated a commitment from all belligerents to seek a peaceful solution. On the same footing, conflicting objectives and strategies produced an inconsistent and at times contradictory application of American policy in Southern Africa.[8] These tactics ranged from covert military assistance, non-recognition, and open economic cooperation with South Africa’s minority White regime.
The first part of this chapter analyzes constructive engagement and the making of Reagan’s foreign policy. At this point, the analysis raises the general question of how the policy fitted within American diplomatic policy discourse by trying to discern if other alternatives were open in the context of Cold War ideology. The second part discusses America’s socio-political opposition through the 1986 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act and the Anti-Apartheid movement. To comprehend its more general manifestations in Southern Africa, the chapter reviews the legacy of constructive engagement on political order and democratic participation of the early 1990s. It asserts that if post-apartheid South Africa were to remain the economic locomotive of the sub-region, its strong and developed economy should not have been crippled.
CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT AND THE MAKING OF RONALD REAGAN’S FOREIGN POLICY IDEOLOGY
By the late 20th century, American foreign relations had coalesced into a powerful, mutually reinforcing body of ideas that had gone far toward dominating political thought. In Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (1987), Michael Hunt traces the origins of American foreign policy ideology, showing how it gained in coherence and appeal in the 18th and 19th centuries. Hunt argues that “ideology has figured prominently in virtually all attempts to account in broad, interpretive terms for American entry into the thicket of international politics and to explain the conduct of policymakers as they followed the path deeper and deeper into the underbrush.”[9] Hunt’s broader argument is that the fundamental propositions of American foreign policy are threefold: active quest for national greatness linked to the promotion of liberty in foreign countries; classification of other nations in a racial hierarchy; and a suspicion of foreign revolutions that failed to copy the American model.
A set of major elements formed the stronghold of constructive engagement. For Robert Fatton’s Black Consciousness in South Africa (1986), it first rested on a new Cold War attitude based on the belief that any radical disruption of the international status quo was masterminded by the Soviet Union and that any revolutionary movement of national liberation constituted a Soviet surrogate.[10] As Reagan’s foreign policy ideology, constructive engagement holds that American interests are better served by developing stronger economic and cultural ties with the South African apartheid regime.[11] The conviction is that such links will contribute to the gradual liberalization and the ultimate demise of apartheid. These ties will support and encourage the political ascendancy of a modernizing autocracy of enlightened White elites. The latter’s commitment to social and democratic change, so the argument goes, will transform Southern Africa into a multiracial democracy and a reliable partner in the overall American defense strategy.
Constructive engagement assumed that social transformations in the developing world were benefiting the Soviet Union. The new political order instilled by a realist foreign policy played to the United States’ advantage because it blocked the ascendancy of Communist regimes and fostered liberal democracy instead, since the development of liberal democracies required American support for authoritarian regimes.[12]
As a foreign policy ideology, constructive engagement was grounded on the theoretical and political distinction between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” systems. Its implications for U.S. foreign relations were twofold. On the one hand, it led to either a benign opposition to, or an open embrace of authoritarian regimes, since these regimes were allegedly capable of democratic transformations. On the other hand, it led to an unbending antagonism toward totalitarian regimes because they were supposedly tyrannies destroyable only through war or military interventions.[13]
There were economic elements enshrined in constructive engagement. During the Cold War, South Africa was strategically relevant to the U.S.[14] With its extremely market-driven economy, the country unlikely possessed key minerals that were increasingly critical to the economies of the industrial world. Assuring this continued access was critical to the success of U.S. foreign policy in Africa. Thus, it could be easily embraced as part of a global war on centralized models of economic development. It is clear that the U.S. had to support South African divisive politics in order to substantiate the constitutional validity of the so-called “separate but equal” doctrine, that the U.S. Supreme Court first propounded in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) in litigation attacking racial segregation in railroad cars, schools, voting rights, entertainment facilities, and drinking fountains.[15]
The United States and South Africa shared some similarities about domestic racial politics. South Africa’s apartheid and White rule mirrored to a greater extent America’s slave politics and civil rights movements. From the earliest days of the inception of apartheid as a political ideology by its architects Prime Minister Daniel F. Malan (1948-1954) and his successor Johannes G. Strijdom (1954-1958), the West remained largely silent, as most failed to appreciate to recognize the extent of the transformation until it was too late. If South Africa’s racial laws offended international morality, natural law, and liberal ideology, few liberals appreciated the implications of the National Party rule until the 1950s. Throughout the early 1990s, South Africa’s National Party defended itself against internal and external enemies by creating a formidable security apparatus and subordinating the legal system to the goal of maintaining “color democracy.”
In 1969, President Richard Nixon requested from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger a comprehensive U.S. foreign policy toward Southern Africa by the National Security Council Interdepartmental Group for Africa. The National Security Study Memorandum 39 (NSSM 39) simply confirmed old strategies.[16] Chosen in its general outlines, Option 2 built on a new acquiescence in the fundamental permanence and even desirability of South African power. Its key premise is that South Africa is and should be the dominant power in the area and that White rule there (and in the Portuguese colonies) is “here to stay.”[17]
For many years, American behavior vis-à-vis Southern Africa was ambiguous and controversial. The greatest differences in the policies of American postwar administrations came at the periphery of their Southern African strategies. For most of the time, it refused to choose between its economic interests and moral responsibilities. During the first major debate on apartheid at the United Nations in 1952, the United States, through its ambassador, declared its lack of competence, as apartheid was described as a matter of internal politics. In other words, it was argued that the UN had “no power to impose standards, but only to proclaim them.”[18] It was not until the early 1960s that the U.S., through Adlai Stevenson, its UN ambassador (1961-1965), recognized the centrality of race as a social, political, and human rights determinant.
At the outset, Apartheid threatened America’s vital interests in South Africa because it was drawing neighboring states into the vortex of political violence. Following a transcript of President Reagan's speech on July 23, 1986, on South Africa, the Head of State contended that:
The root cause of South Africa's disorder is apartheid, that rigid system of racial segregation wherein Black people have been treated as third-class citizens in a nation they helped to build. America's view of apartheid has been, and remains, clear: apartheid is morally wrong and politically unacceptable. The United States cannot maintain cordial relations with a government whose power rests upon the denial of rights to a majority of its people, based on race. If South Africa wishes to belong to the family of Western nations, an end to apartheid is a precondition. Americans, I believe, are united in this conviction. Second, apartheid must be dismantled. Time is running out for the moderates of all races in South Africa.[19]The climate of unrest and insecurity that followed several months in the apartheid state paralyzed South Africa’s economy, public service, industry, and private sector, producing a serious run on the stock exchange. It was the advent of the June 16, 1976, Sharpeville massacre during which several dozens of Black people were killed that haunted the specter of revolution in Washington’s mind. Thereafter, the United States, though haphazardly, came out in support of a transfer of power. From there, the United States expressed particular concern about the fact that Black nationalist leaders in exile were prone to assimilation and conversion to Communist ideology to save their race. Some believe that the United States intensified its presence in South Africa to contain violence rather than to quell it completely.[20] It was no longer possible to argue, as Joseph Satterthwaite, U.S. ambassador to South Africa from 1961 through 1965, had contended at the onset of hostilities, that the most America could do was to set an example by pursuing civil rights legislation at home, in the hope of proving conclusively that a pluralistic society could exist once racial discrimination has been rolled back from the statute books.[21]
Most proponents of the Reagan’s constructive engagement policy disagreed about its practical application in Angola as support for the freedom fighters.” The conservative wing of the Republican Party both in the administration and in Congress wanted to completely overthrow the ruling Angolan government. More moderate Reagan supporters saw assistance to the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) as a means to pressure the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) to accept the rebel group into a coalition government. Likewise, a substantial segment of Reagan supporters favored assistance to Jonas Savimbi to be covert and supplemented by negotiations with the ruling MPLA. As a minimum and primary objective, all constructive engagement supporters wanted to pressure the Cuban troops to leave Angola. By exacerbating the conflict, U.S. officials hoped to increase the military and political costs of a continued Cuban presence in Angola.[22]
The two-way approach to America’s covert aid in Southern Africa was not always appropriate. Like many other conservatives, Constantine Menges, former National Security Council officer, has argued that George P. Shultz, 60th Secretary of State (1982-1989), was formally against military assistance to Angola.[23] In a letter to the House minority leader Robert Michel, Shultz expressed opposition to a Congressional resolution calling for $27 million in humanitarian assistance for UNITA:
George Shultz reportedly supported the repeal of the Clark Amendment but wanted to assist Jonas Savimbi covertly, as a means of enhancing the American bargaining position and of not overthrowing Angola’s ruling MPLA regime.[25] When Shultz met Black nationalist leader Oliver Tambo in Washington, D.C., on January 24, 1987, the State Department described the African National Congress (ANC) as having a “legitimate voice” in South Africa. Indeed, after the alleged encounter, the U.S. continued to implement an anti-ANC policy. In this vein, the 1987 Foreign Assistance Supplementary Appropriation Bill, passed on July 11, offered more than $40 million projects among members of the Southern African Development Coordination (SADCC).
Beyond withholding recognition, the Reagan administration sought to damage the Angolan economy by prohibiting U.S. exports purported to have a military use. In this respect, Charles Redman, the State Department deputy spokesperson, has noted that the purpose was to constrain “Angola’s ability to earn foreign currency and thus fund its war against UNITA.”[26]
Reagan’s foreign policy in Southern Africa proved, at times, to be questionable. These tactics ranged from covert military assistance, non-recognition, and diplomatic isolation. In his first year as president, Reagan publicly endorsed UNITA and urged Congress to repeal the Clark Amendment, the 5-year ban on secret cash and arms aid to rebel groups in Angola. [27] In the years since its passage in 1976, critics charged that the CIA and other American agencies had sent arms to the mercenary gangs by way of South Africa.
Applied to Southern Africa, constructive engagement called for an active American regional presence, intensive aid program, a simultaneous Namibian resolution, and the subordination of Namibian independence to the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola. In spite of his reticence on the direct use of military force, Reagan launched a vigorous program to support nationalist movements. [28] He explained the rationale:
During Reagan’s first year of presidency, the United States resumed covert assistance to Angola through the UNITA-rebel group, thereby once again establishing a de facto alliance with South Africa.[30] Along with similar plans in Nicaragua and Afghanistan, this was part of a global strategy aimed at shaping the resources of the Communist bloc fueling insurgencies against Soviet Union’s “client states” in developing countries.[31] As a result, the threats to the ruling MPLA from UNITA, South Africa, and indirectly the U.S. led to large Soviet arms transfers to Angola in the second half of the 1980s, while also prompting Cuba, with Soviet support, to keep up to 50,000 troops in the country.[32]
From 1981 onward, constructive engagement went public and was no longer purely dealt with as a matter of secret bureaucracy. Chester Crocker had four meetings with Brand Fourie, the director general of the South African Ministry of Foreign Affairs, before his appointment to Washington. Likewise, Reagan met Pieter Botha within months of his own inauguration. Based on these principles, Crocker proceeded and signaled that the United States had no intention of allowing constructive engagement to degenerate into accommodation or unquestioned blessing.
Overall, the Republic of South Africa received enough credit and attention in American diplomatic discourses. The Reagan administration described it as a country that was strategically essential to the Free World and mused over its friendship during the Korean and Second World Wars. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the outspoken ambassador to the UN from 1981 to 1985, complained that it had become “the victim of double standards,” and that the U.S. had no compunction about criticizing apartheid in unequivocal terms. In contrast, Kenneth Adelman, deputy U.S. ambassador to the UN, described South Africa as pursuing the only system in the world of “denying its natural citizens natural rights which is openly and legally based on racism, a fact which bestowed upon apartheid special distinction as the world’s most condemned system.”[33]
SOCIO-POLITICAL OPPOSITION TO APARTHEID AND CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT
During the 1980s social movements created new political space and provided fresh perspectives on American foreign as well as domestic issues. Scholars have long recognized the role that social movements play in organizing and mobilizing challenges to American political institutions. David S. Meyer’s The Politics of Protest (2014) offers both a historical overview and an analytical framework for understanding social movements and political protest in American politics. Opening with a short history of social movements in the United States, he argues that protest movements in America reflect and influence mainstream politics and that in order to understand the political system—and our social and political world—we need to pay attention to grassroots protest.[34] Donald R. Culverston examines the rise of American anti-apartheid activism as a result both of opportunities created by shifting power configurations in Southern Africa and of declining public confidence in U.S. government and corporate responses to political crises in South Africa. He explores how activists capitalized on structural changes in U.S. society to develop new resources for challenging U.S. connections to the apartheid system.[35]
Indeed, anti-apartheid activism began in the United States in 1969 when President Nixon sought to strengthen U.S. interests in Southern Africa by maintaining cooperation rather than confrontation with racist minority governments in the region.[36] America’s anti-apartheid activities reverberated around the world, leading other people to develop their own demonstration activities, and that was probably as critical to the overthrow of apartheid.[37] American internal political opposition to constructive engagement drove much of the legislative agenda through the 1980s on South and Southern Africa, arguing that only sanctions could dismantle apartheid.[38] The moral pressure exerted by American influential stakeholders, corporations, churches, and civil society organizations has been significant.
Constructive engagement and the Sullivan Principles were the guiding standards for United States conservatives and the business community regarding apartheid South Africa in the late 1970s through the 1980s. The Sullivan Principles aimed at restricting U.S. business activities in South Africa. Enunciated in 1977 by Reverend Leon Sullivan, the first African American appointed to the board of directors at General Motors, the principles called for a set of standards for American-based firms carrying out business in South Africa, including fair employment, fair pay, and non-segregation of employees in work facilities. Sullivan called for the withdrawal of American companies from South Africa.[39] Attacks on U.S. business interests became fashionable. The South African Institute for American Affairs maintained that U.S. firms adhering to the Sullivan Principles were violating the apartheid system and were following a pattern of direct confrontation with the South African government.[40]
Internal debates about what constructive engagement and the Sullivan Principles meant formed people’s perceptions about how the United States should interact with South Africa and apartheid. For conservatives, it meant conflating both ideas to ignore the violence that apartheid inflicted on Black Africans and excuse American businesses reaping the rewards of an oppressed labor force. For liberals and moderates, the debates created a more sustained push for divestment. [41] Whatever their limitations, the Sullivan Principles have contributed to genuine changes in laws and labor policies in South Africa, such as laws enabling the formation of independent Black labor unions.[42]
Community–based arguments against constructive engagement followed America’s national and state trends. In September and October 1985, the student senate at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas (Texas) sent a bill to the SMU Board of Trustees calling for university divestment from South Africa. Under the leadership of law student Arif Virji, proponents of university divestment produced a compromise bill that asked the institution to consider divestment.[43] Opponents of the bill fell back on the arguments that conflated the Sullivan Principles with constructive engagement. Heading the opposition group, Janet Watson believed that the Sullivan Principles and constructive engagement would undermine apartheid in due time, when South Africans were prepared for it. She claimed that divestment would further degrade Black South Africans’ standard of living and that the United States had no right to directly impose its values on another country. [44]
Civil society voices also emerged against constructive engagement. Increasing Black American interest in foreign affairs during this period led to the formation of several organizations. In 1953, Black and White civil rights activists chartered the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), the oldest anti-apartheid organization in the United States. During its early years ACOA played a major role in the international effort to encourage United Nations intervention in South Africa. In the 1960s, it expanded its range of activities to include education and information provision, demonstrations, lobbying, conferences, publishing, and fundraising for relief projects in South Africa. Likewise, Black employees at the Polaroid Corporation's headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers' Movement (PRWM) in 1970 in response to Polaroid’s production and processing of film for South Africa's passbook system. Another social group, the National African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC), grew out of the uneasy coalition between Black elected officials in the Congressional Black Caucus and community-based Black activist groups. ALSC coordinated African Liberation Day marches in Washington, D.C., in 1972 and in thirty cities around the nation in 1973.
Several other Black organizations focused on American foreign policy on Southern Africa. These included the Congress of African People, the Africa Information Service, the African-American Scholars Council, the African Heritage Studies Association, and the Pan-African Liberation Committee. Alongside the formation of the African-American National Conference on Africa at Howard University on May 25-26, 1972, these community-led initiatives represented a major turning point in mobilizing a Black American constituency for Africa. However, as the coalitions that produced these organizations were short-lived, they failed to create a more substantial Black American grassroots base within the larger anti-apartheid movement.
On April 3, 1984, Richard Knight of the American Committee on Africa reported to the UN Special Committee against Apartheid on the effects of Reagan’s new policy:
Another important dimension of constructive engagement concerned the emergence of Black empowerment programs. Such initiatives paled into insignificance alongside the determination of Black people to forge a new society by their own actions, and on a timescale much shorter than either Pretoria or Washington envisaged. America’s development aid to South Africa was an average of $5 million per annum between 1981 and 1984 and could not have far-reaching consequences in the nation’s $80 billion economy.[46] Black empowerment initiatives also suffered through their association with other components of constructive engagement, a fact well illustrated by contacts with trade unions. The Reagan administration identified labor organizations as the most progressive and effective tool of the Black opposition. As such, labor movements began to challenge the authority of the White minority government, thus becoming an ideal partner of the political game. Moreover, the training of union leaders in collective bargaining and negotiation techniques was an important empowerment technique aimed at easing both post-apartheid grassroots political participation and community leadership transitions.[47]
The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA) of 1986 imposed sanctions against South Africa to end the apartheid system.[48] Representative William Gray III, Democratic Party Representative for Pennsylvania's 2nd Congressional District, introduced the legislation on May 21, 1986, which became Public Law No 99-440 on October 2, 1986.[49] The law was intended to express strong United States opposition to the apartheid regime of the White-controlled minority government of South Africa.
The CAAA undermined apartheid by prohibiting the imports from South Africa of key selected products, namely any gold coin minted in South Africa or sold by its government; arms, ammunition, or military vehicles or any manufacturing data for such articles; and any article grown, produced, or manufactured by a South African parastatal organization except for certain strategic minerals and articles to be imported pursuant to a contract entered into before August 15, 1986, provided no shipments may be received by a U.S. national under such contract after April 1, 1987. Likewise, the scheme called for the termination of the 1947 air services agreement between South Africa and the United States; the prohibition of any aircraft of a foreign air carrier owned by South Africa or by South African nationals from engaging in air transportation with respect to the United States; and the prohibition of the takeoff and landing in South Africa of any aircraft by an air carrier owned or controlled by a U.S. national corporation.
The CAAA prohibited nuclear energy, unless the Secretary certified to the Speaker of the House and the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that South Africa would maintain certain international nuclear safeguards. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission could not issue a license for the export to South Africa of certain nuclear facilities, material, technology, or components. Likewise, the Secretary of Commerce could not issue a license for the export to South Africa of certain goods or technology that may be of significance for nuclear explosive purposes. In the same vein, the Secretary of Energy could not authorize any person to engage in the production of special nuclear material in South Africa, and any executive branch agency or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) could not approve the retransfer of nuclear goods or technology to South Africa.
The 1986 CAAA passed over Reagan’s presidential veto on October 2. Both houses of Congress voted by significant majorities to override President Reagan’s veto and thereby enact the provision into a binding law (H.R. 4868). The president had been cautioned that exercise of the veto would cause great harm to America's role in Africa.[50] The Senate‘s roll-call vote of 84-14 demonstrated overwhelming bipartisan support for sanctions against South Africa.[51] Reagan believed the punitive sanctions were not the best course of action, since he believed they hurt the very people they were intended to help:
With the passage of the CAAA, constructive engagement was effectively dead, and Leon Sullivan was on his way to supporting full divestment from South Africa. Most sanctions against South Africa were dropped as of July 1991 after the country took steps toward meeting the preconditions of a democratic society. In the same vein, the final vestiges of the Act were repealed in late 1993. Though both programs failed to undermine apartheid, they marked important grounds for American debate over the best way to deal with the oppressive South African White-minority regime.[53]
THE LEGACY OF CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT ON SOUTHERN AFRICA’S POLITICAL ORDER AND DEMOCRATIC CHANGES
Back in South Africa, a series of important diplomatic talks took place between Pik Botha and Secretary of State Alexander Haig in May 1981. It transpired from such encounters that the Reagan administration was anxious about converting South Africa from an international outcast to a strategic ally in America’s struggle for Soviet containment. In a State Department Memorandum on May 14, 1981, Chester Crocker made clear that “although we may continue to differ on apartheid and cannot condone a system of institutionalized racial differentiation, we can cooperate with a society undergoing constructive change.”[54] The pacifying mission initiated by Reagan was not an easy one. In the very month of Reagan’s inauguration, South Africa’s forces conducted their first cross-border raid into Mozambique against the ANC bases. This was the beginning of an aggressive military presence in the sub-region, which reached its peak in 1983.
The United States designed a foreign policy with respect to ending apartheid and bringing about the establishment of a nonracial democracy in South Africa. America adjusted its actions toward South Africa to reflect the progress made by the country in establishing a nonracial democracy, set forth actions to encourage South Africa to release political prisoners, and establish a timetable for the elimination of apartheid laws. Likewise, the U.S. intensified mediation efforts toward the independence of Namibia. Upon assuming office, the Reagan administration subordinated its recognition of the MPLA to the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola.[55] In May 1988, Crocker headed a U.S. mediation team that brought negotiators from Angola, Cuba, and South Africa along with observers from the Soviet Union together in London. Intense diplomatic maneuvering characterized the next seven months so as to implement UN Security Council Resolution 435 adopted on September 27, 1978. This framework called for the withdrawal of South African forces from Namibia and for the transfer of power to the people of Namibia and established a UN Nations Transition Assistance Group for a period of up to 12 months to ensure the independence of Namibia through free elections under the supervision and control of the United Nations.
Immediate political reforms were the starting point for any fruitful collaboration between the U.S. and Southern Africa. The United States abstained from voting on a UN Security Council Resolution 556 on October 23, 1984, condemning South Africa's apartheid policies. Later that month, Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale charged the Reagan administration with disregarding human rights and allying itself to reactionary rather than reformist forces.
Subordinating Namibian independence to the withdrawal of Cuban forces in Angola was actually a new development in the negotiations. This question of the withdrawal of Cuban troops had been raised only once in the two-and-a-half years of negotiations over the implementation of Security Council resolution 435 prior to Reagan’s inauguration.[56] At the Reagan-Gorbachev summit on September 29, 1988, it was decided that Cuban troops would be withdrawn from Angola, and Soviet military aid would cease, as soon as South Africa withdrew from Southwest Africa. Further agreements to give effect to these decisions were drawn up for signature at UN headquarters in New York on December 22, 1988.[57] Crocker attended the signing ceremony but UN Commissioner for Namibia, Bernt Carlsson, who would have assumed control of the country until Namibia’s first universal democratic elections had been held, was one of the 259 passengers and crew killed when Pan American World Airways Flight 103 crashed at Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, causing 270 casualties.[58]
An interesting point is the impact of constructive engagement on Southern Africa’s political market of the early 1990s. The Republic of South Africa, for instance, was keen to cut its losses in Angola and find a solution to the Namibian problem. The first concrete step toward external disengagement came in December 1988, when Angola, Cuba, and South Africa signed the New York Accords, under which Cuba promised to remove all troops from Angola, in return for South Africa’s withdrawal from Southern Angola and UN-supervised elections in Namibia. The withdrawal of Cuban troops began in January 1989 and was completed by May 1991.
Namibia acceded to independence and organized the first-ever democratic and pluralistic elections won by the Southwest African People's Organization (SWAPO). During that period, the radical changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which brought about the collapse of Communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, all undermined Angola’s ruling MPLA strategic relations with its historical allies and encouraged the party to reassess its ideological commitments.
As for Angola, a series of talks took place in Portugal in 1990-1991 and culminated in the signing of the Bicesse Accords in Lisbon on May 31, 1991. This comprehensive instrument provided for a ceasefire, the quartering of UNITA troops, the formation of new unified armed forces, the demobilization of surplus troops, multiparty elections, and the restoration of government administration in the UNITA-controlled south. The Angolan government and UNITA formed the Joint Verification and Monitoring Commission and the Joint Commission on the Formation of the Angolan Armed Forces (JVMC) to oversee political reconciliation while the latter monitored military activity. The accords attempted to demobilize the 152,000 active fighters and integrate the remaining government troops and UNITA rebels into a 50,000-strong Angolan Armed Forces.
The Lusaka Protocol, signed in Zambia on October 31, 1994, reaffirmed previous truce initiatives. The protocol provided for a cease-fire between the Angolan government, led by the MPLA, and the rebel group, UNITA..[59] Under this truce, the Angolan government and UNITA would cease military fire and demobilize. Likewise, 5,500 UNITA members, including 180 militants, would join the Angolan National police; 1,200 UNITA members, including 40 militants, would join the rapid reaction police force; and UNITA generals would become officers in the Angolan Armed Forces. Foreign mercenaries would return to their home countries and all parties would stop acquiring foreign arms. The government promised to release all prisoners and give amnesty to all militants involved in the civil war.[60] To oversee its implementation, the agreement created a joint commission, consisting of officials from the Angolan government, UNITA, and the United Nations with the governments of Portugal, the United States, and Russia observing.
Political order evolved toward seven core components: transformative constitutional and human rights engineering in a racially divided society, a clear timetable for the repeal of apartheid laws, the release of political prisoners, full political participation for everyone, a lift of the ban on Black political movements, and a launch of inclusive dialogue about constructing a political system that rests on the consent of the governed, where the rights of majorities and minorities and individuals are protected by law.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
America’s post-Vietnam paralysis left open avenues for the growth of Communism in developing countries.[61] To reverse this trend, U.S. President Ronald Reagan vowed to extend support to anti-communist countries.[62] Vietnam changed the course of U.S. foreign policy and seriously damaged the domestic foreign policy that Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy so painstakingly constructed, thus largely discrediting America’s Cold War strategy of global containment.[63] Because of the divisive impact and remarkably long-term legacy of Vietnam, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush all believed that the reconstruction of a domestic consensus constituted a fundamental foreign policy challenge. [64]
Constructive engagement was a failure because Cold War concerns overrode the explicit goal of ending apartheid in South Africa. In the end, the Reagan administration tried to support South Africa without appearing to endorse apartheid. Davies reveals the failure of constructive engagement by pointing out how remarkable it was that Pretoria's admission that it was “not prepared to play the reciprocal role demanded by constructive engagement”—i.e., the reform of apartheid and the release of Namibia in exchange for “respectability” as a U.S. ally in the Cold War—had “no apparent impact” on Crocker's policy.[65] In Southern Africa, the hard-headed calculus of American interests was to dominate foreign policy.
By radically departing from earlier trends of America’s vision of world affairs, Reagan’s doctrine of reinvigorated global containment ushered in a new agenda for American foreign policy and rested on a particular set of intellectual constructs derived from a general system of foreign policy ideas. American foreign policy and domestic politics played a major role to the diplomacy that produced the December 1988 New York treaties between Angola, Cuba, and South Africa; Namibia’s independence in March 1990; the withdrawal of foreign Communist troops from Angola; the liberation of political prisoners; multiracial democracy; and the official demise of apartheid policies in South Africa. By the early 1990s, these policies appeared to have achieved sweeping results in forcing Communism to retreat in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Rhodesia, and Ethiopia.
END NOTES
Gar Alperovitz, Cold War Essays (Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1970): 75 – 121. Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982): 216 - 229. ↑
Richard N. Haass and Meghan L. O’Sullivan, “Terms of Engagement: Alternatives to Punitive Policies,” Survival 42, no. 2 (2000): xx – xx. ↑
Ronald Reagan, Speech to the United Nations, 24 October 1985, American Foreign Policy: Current Documents. Washington, D.C. U.S. Government Printing Office. U.S. GPO (1986): 12 – 18. ↑
J. E. Davies, Constructive Engagement?: Chester Crocker & American Policy in South Africa, Namibia & Angola (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2007). ↑
Ronald Reagan, Department of State Bulletin. Washington D.C. April 1988: 27. ↑
Donald R. Culverston, "The Politics of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the United States, 1969-1986," Political Science Quarterly 111, no. 1 (1996): 127-49. ↑
John De St Jorre, “South Africa: Is Change Coming?” Foreign Affairs (Fall 1981): 106 - 122. ↑
Ibid. 105. ↑
Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 4–5. ↑
Robert Fatton, “Black Consciousness in South Africa: The Dialectics of Ideological Resistance to White Supremacy.” (PhD Dissertation, State University of New York at Albany, 1986). ↑
Robert Fatton, Jr., “The Reagan Policy toward South Africa: Ideology and the New Cold War,” African Studies Review 27 (1984): 57- 82. ↑
Ibid: 58. ↑
Ibid. ↑
R.E. Bissell, “How Strategic is South Africa?,” in South Africa into the 1980s, eds. Richard E. Bissell and Chester A Crocker (Boulder: Westview, 1980); Michael A. Samuels, Implications of Soviet and Cuban Activities in Africa for U.S. Policy (Washington D.C: Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, 1979); Larry W. Bowman, "The Strategic Importance of South Africa to the United States: An Appraisal and Policy Analysis" African Affairs 81, no. 323 (1982): 159-91; Christopher Coker, “South Africa’s Strategic Importance: A Reassessment,” RUSI Journal for Defence Studies 124 (1979): 22-26. ↑
163 U.S. 537 (1896). See also Roberts v. City of Boston, 59 Mass. 198, 206 (1849). Linda Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court Case (1954) overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal.” ↑
Edgard Lockwood, "National Security Study Memorandum 39 and the Future of United States Policy toward Southern Africa," Issue: A Journal of Opinion 4, no. 3 (1974): 63-72. ↑
United States of America, National Security Study Memorandum 9 (NSSM 39) Annex I, (Washington, DC: 1969). Susan A. Gitelson, “The Transformation of the Southern African State System,” Journal of African Studies, 4, 4 (1977): 367 – 91 at 369; Timothy M. Shaw, "International Organizations and the Politics of Southern Africa: Towards Regional Integration or Liberation?" Journal of Southern African Studies 3, no. 1 (1976): 1-19. ↑
Amry Vandenbosch, South Africa and the World: The Foreign Policy of Apartheid (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1970), 235. ↑
Ronald Reagan, “Speech in Washington D.C on South Africa,” The New York Times, July 23, 1986, 00012. ↑
Davies, Constructive Engagement. ↑
Ibid. ↑
Michael McFaul, “Rethinking the "Reagan Doctrine" in Angola,” International Security 14 (3) (1989): 99–135, at 104. ↑
Constantine C. Menges, Inside the National Security Council: The True Story of the Making of Reagan’s Foreign Policy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 232 – 249. ↑
George P. Shultz, Letter in “Angola: Intervention or Negotiation,” Hearings of U.S. House Committee on Foreign Relations, October 31 and November 12, 1985 (Washington D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1986), 3. ↑
See interview with Michael McFaul, cited in McFaul, “Rethinking the "Reagan Doctrine." During an interview to McFaul on April 18, 1989, Chester Crocker repeated this statement. ↑
U.S. State Department Deputy Spokesperson Charles Redman, quoted in Gun Gillian, “The Angolan Economy: A Status Report,” CSIS Africa Notes, 58 (May 1986): 4. ↑
Don Oberdorfer, “Reagan Urges to end Ban on Aid to Angolan rebels,” The Washington Post, March, 20, 1981. ↑
Raymond W. Copson and Richard P. Cronin, “The ‘Reagan Doctrine’ and its Prospects,” Survival 29 (1) (1987): 40 – 55, at 44. ↑
Ronald Reagan, Department of State Bulletin (April 1986), 8. ↑
William Minter, Apartheid’s Contras, An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994). ↑
Hodge T. Angola from Afro-Stalinism to Petro-Diamond Capitalism. 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 11. ↑
Ibid. ↑
Kenneth Adelman, Official Statement by U.S. Ambassador during the Plenary Debate, 30 November 1981, UN General Assembly, Southern Africa Record, 25/26 (December, 1981), 59. ↑
David S. Meyer, The Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2014). Marco Giugni, Street Citizens: Protest Politics and Social Movement Activism in the Age of Globalization (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos, Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Post-War America (Oxford University Press, 2014); Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics 3rd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2014). ↑
Culverston, "A Great Cause.” ↑
Anthony Lake, “The ‘Tar Baby’ Option: American Foreign Policy toward Southern Rhodesia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). ↑
Chris Simkins, “US Anti-Apartheid Movement Helped Bring Change to South Africa,” Voice of America (VOA), April 24, 2014. ↑
David Malone and Robin W. Roberts. "An Analysis of Public Interest Reporting: The Case of General Motors in South Africa," Business & Professional Ethics Journal 13 (no. 3 (1994): 71-92. ↑
S. G. Marzullo, “South Africa: Sullivan Calls for a Pull Out,” The New York Times, June 7, 1987, Section 3, 2. ↑
Claiborne, “U.S. Firms Accused of Violating Apartheid,” Washington Post, May 13, 1987, at A30. ↑
North Texas Anti-Apartheid Movement, “Constructive Engagement and the Sullivan Principles,” https://blog.smu.edu/theanti-apartheidmovementinnorthtexas/history/constructive-engagement/ (accessed on August 21, 2020). ↑
Marzullo, “South Africa: Sullivan Calls for a Pull Out.” ↑
Ibid. ↑
Ibid. ↑
Richard Knight, “American Committee on Africa, Reagan’s Administration of ‘Constructive Engagement’ and the Arms Embargo against South Africa,” Statement before the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid, April 3, 1984, http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/embargo/rknight840403.htm (accessed on July 15, 2020). ↑
Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, “Address Prepared for the World Affairs Council,” Cleveland (Ohio), June 15, 1987, reprinted in Michael H. Armacost, “The U.S. and Southern Africa: A Current Appraisal,” Department of State Bulletin, 1987, 87 (2125), 49. ↑
Alex Thomson, Incomplete Engagement U.S. Foreign Policy Towards the Republic of South Africa, 1981-1988 (Making of Modern Africa) (Avebury, 1996), 167. ↑
U.S. Congress, H.R.4868 - Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986. 99th Congress (1985-1986). H.Rept 99-638 Part 1; H. Rept 99-638 Part 2. ↑
Ibid. ↑
Steven V. Roberts, “Reagan Plans to Reject Pretoria Sanctions Bill,” The New York Times, September 24, 1986, at Y8, col. 1; Steven V. Roberts, “ Senate, 78 to 21, Overrides Reagan’s Veto and Imposes Sanctions on South Africa,” The New York Times, October 3, 1986. ↑
Winston P. Nagan, “An Appraisal of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986,” Journal of Law and Religion, 5 (2) (1987): 327-365. ↑
Ronald Reagan, “Statement on the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986,” Reagan Presidential Library and Museum. ↑
North Texas Anti-Apartheid Movement, “Constructive Engagement.” ↑
U.S. State Department, Scope Paper: U.S.: - South Africa Relations: Memorandum from Chester Crocker to Secretary of State (Washington D.C: 14 May 1981).↑
Testimony of Secretary of State Alexander Haig before the Senate Subcommittee on African Affairs, January 1981, cited in Fred Bridgland, Jonas Savimbi: A Key to Africa (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1986). 303. ↑
Alex Thomson’s interview with Donald McHenry, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, 1979–1981, Washington D.C., October, 20, 1992, cited in Thomson, Incomplete Engagement, 181 (n. 70). ↑
United Nations, Agreement among the People’s Republic of Angola, the Republic of Cuba, and the Republic of South Africa, UN Doc, No. S/20346 (The United Institute of Peace 1988). ↑
United Kingdom Department of Transport, “Aircraft Accident Report 2/1990 – Report on the Accident to Boeing 747–121, N739PA, at Lockerbie, Dumfriesshire, Scotland on 21 December 1988," Air Accident Investigations Branch, Aircraft Accident Report 2/90https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5422f36ee5274a1317000489/2-1990_N739PA.pdf. ↑
United Nations, Peace Accords for Angola, Annex, UN Doc. S/22609, 1991, 3 Lusaka Protocol, Annex, UN Doc. S/1994/1441 (1994). ↑
Vines Alex, Angola Unravels: The Rise and Fall of the Lusaka Peace Process (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999); Donald S. Rothchild, Managing Ethnic Conflict in Africa: Pressures and Incentives for Cooperation (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), 137–38. ↑
Ronald Reagan, “Freedom, Security, and Global Peace: Message of the President to the Congress on 14 March 1986,” Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, 17 March 1986, 356 – 364. ↑
George Shultz, “Statement of the Secretary of State before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 15 June 1983,” U.S. Department of State Bulletin, July 1983, 67. ↑
Richard A. Melanson, American Foreign Policy Since the Vietnam War: The Search for Consensus from Nixon to Nixon, 3rd ed. (Routledge, 1999). George C. Herring, America’s Longest War The United States and Vietnam, 1950 – 1975. 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw – Hill Inc., 1986). ↑
Melanson, American Foreign Policy, xi. ↑
Davies, Constructive Engagement. ↑
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.