The foreign policy of the Zuma government: pursuing the ‘national interest’?

It was after much anticipation that members of the new Jacob Zuma foreign policy executive announced that, for the duration of their term, South Africa's foreign policy would be based on the doctrine of advancing ‘the national interest’, conceptualised simply as the ‘most vital needs’ of the country. However, almost two years since taking control of the levers of policy and political power, the South African government has yet to spell out in detail what constituted the national interest or how such interest would be pursued. In spite of this lacuna, senior members of the new foreign policy inner-elite continue to proclaim the national interest, and proceed to spell out grander foreign policy goals that they would pursue under the banner of a ‘new’ developmental agenda. These include consolidating the African agenda; deepening South–South cooperation; expanding South–North relations; strengthening foreign political and economic ties generally; and participating in a global system of governance. To date, this proclamation that the national interest will be the beam that will guide foreign policy has remained little more than a statement of intent and much conjecture. The challenge is to move beyond rhetoric and intentions and to define the national interest and to articulate a coherent foreign policy going forward. This will require concrete proposals on the basis of thorough-going domestic–foreign policy linkages.     

Eurosceptic yet pro-enlargement: the paradoxes of Hungary’s EU policy

Abstract

The present article seeks to explore the main aspects of Hungary’s EU enlargement policy. It reveals a tension between the government’s committed support for EU enlargement and its critical stance towards the EU on several other fronts. However, on the basis of liberal intergovernmentalist theory, this article argues that this is not a real contradiction since enlargement to the Western Balkans serves Hungary’s national interests in spite of its government’s Euroscepticism. At the same time, Hungary’s questioning of the basic values of the EU as a community of liberal democracies has weakened the legitimacy of Hungarian interventions in favour of speeding up EU enlargement. While Hungary has become ever more isolated from the ‘old’ EU member states, more recently, its government managed to increase its leverage in the Western Balkans and central Europe in the context of the migration crisis.     

South Africa’s foreign policy aspirations and the National Development Plan (NDP 2030): the role of soft power

Chapter 7 of the NDP 2030 articulates a foreign policy vision for South Africa over two decades. While the NDP acknowledges the place of ‘soft power’ in realising this vision, it remains doubtful whether South Africa will indeed take advantage of the enormous gains offered by soft power as a foreign policy lever. This paper examines the role of soft power in achieving the foreign policy mandates prescribed in the Plan. It argues that, like other regional powers such as China, South Africa needs to pay more attention to its soft power attributes if it is to fast-track the successful implementation of its foreign policy ambitions for 2030. We conclude that sustaining South Africa’s rising position and influence in the international system and in Africa, will largely depend on its ability to consciously adjust its foreign policy trajectories – in the long term – in tandem with its soft power resources and competences.     

Unrecognized states as a means of coercive diplomacy? Assessing the role of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Russia’s foreign policy in the South Caucasus

The scholarship on unrecognized or de facto states has been booming in the recent decades exploring this phenomenon from a variety of perspectives. Yet, as this article illustrates, a crucial accent on the instrumentalization of unrecognized states by regional actors – or, to put it differently, on unrecognized states as a source of coercive diplomacy – has been neglected. This article seeks to fill that gap by offering an empirical analysis of Russia’s instrumentalization of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as unrecognized states as a means of putting effective pressure on the Government in Tbilisi – usually with respect to issues unrelated to the unrecognized states themselves. More specifically, this article shows that Moscow has used three instruments (military deployment, passportization of residents of the unrecognized states and responsibility to protect).     

Disciplined and undisciplined repression: illicit economies and state violence in Central Asia’s autocracies

What explains the use of disciplined repression in some autocratic regimes and undisciplined repression in others? Despite its relevance to these broader debates on authoritarianism, this question remains inadequately explained in conventional approaches to repression. This article proposes that autocrats’ discipline over the use of state repression is a consequence of their differential control over illicit commercial networks. Autocratic regimes that consolidate their control over rents become dependent on security apparatuses to deepen and maintain that control. These regimes invest in and support the development of coercive capabilities, which leads to more disciplined state repression. Where autocratic regimes do not control illicit networks and rents, their dependence on security offices is low. Consequently, their investment in coercive capacity suffers, giving rise to patterns of undisciplined repression. This article explores the empirical implications of these regime trajectories through a controlled comparison of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, two drug transit states in post-Soviet Eurasia whose coercive institutions and patterns of state violence have developed in markedly different ways.     

Assessing public opinion’s influence on foreign policy: the case of China’s assertive maritime behavior

ABSTRACT

English-language analysis of Chinese foreign policy has often cited nationalist public opinion as a key driver of Beijing’s recent assertive maritime conduct. Yet these important conjectures have not been systematically tested. How can we know whether public opinion has been driving an authoritarian state’s foreign policy? What are some cases in which concern about popular nationalism may have influenced Beijing’s behavior in disputed maritime spaces? To answer these questions, this article constructs a methodological framework for assessing the likely impact of public opinion on particular instances of state action. Applying this to five cases typical of China’s on-water policy in the South and East China Seas since 2007 indicates that popular nationalism has had little to do with China’s assertive turn on its maritime periphery.     

‘Unsatisfactory national identity’: School inspectors,education and national identity in interwar Latvia

Abstract

The trajectory of the school system in inter-war independent Latvia was a microcosm of the larger experiences of the state. The devastation of World War I and the battles that followed undermined seriously the capacity of the new state. The first post-war years were spent laboriously rebuilding from near abject ruin. After initial reonstruction passed, however, the dominant concerns became what was to be taught and how in Latvia's schools. The process of this debate and the at times conflicting, at times complimentary, demands of schoolteachers, school inspectors, local government officials, teachers, and students built a modern, effective school system. This school system reflected an inreasingly sophisticated pedagogy, a professionalism of schoolteachers, and impressive construction of schools.

The content of schools, however, was also severely contested. With the Depression of the early 1930s the opinions of some quarters of society became more emphatic in identifying a great crisis in society, a crisis that demanded more authoritarian action, a return to traditionalism, and increased importance on nationalist content. This trend supported and was supported by the Ulmanis regime, which considerably restructured the school system, the state, and society at large in the last half of the 1930s.

This article relies primarily on archival sources drawn most from school inspectors' reports and other officials within and around the Ministry of Education.     

Beijing’s Quest for Stability in its Neighborhood: China’s Relations with Russia in Central Asia

Using the English school arguments that inter-state regulation ameliorates the consequences of the power politics of international anarchy, I analyze to what extent China pursues a strategic partnership with Russia in Central Asia. I investigate if China has compatible policies with Russia on the use of force, on international legitimacy, and on institutional frameworks for security management. As China is increasingly asserting its security, economic, and institutional interests in Central Asia, similarities and differences have become apparent in relations with Russia. Increased mutual concern for continued regional stability has encouraged Beijing and Moscow to coordinate their policies across a wide range of issue areas. Stability allows them to focus attention and resources on each of their different geostrategic priorities.     

Undermining Western democracy promotion in Central Asia: China’s countervailing influences,powers and impact

This article examines whether and to what extent China’s involvement in Central Asian countries undermines the democracy promotion efforts of the European Union and the United States. Findings confirm that China does indeed challenge Western efforts, but in an indirect way. First, Chinese provision of substantial and unconditional financial assistance makes Western politically conditioned aid appear both ungenerous and an infringement of sovereignty. Second, the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, inclusive of China’s leadership role, creates an institutional means through which the (semi-)authoritarianism of member states is legitimized and challenges Western emphasis on democracy and human rights. Finally, by the power of its own example, China demonstrates that democracy is not a prerequisite for prosperity, the rule of law and social well-being.     

Asia’s Conservative Moment: Understanding the Rise of the Right

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship has identified a new era of post-democracy or democratic crisis in the West, characterised by the increasing resort to authoritarian measures and the erosion of mechanisms such as representative parties and unions that link citizens and social forces with the political process. Conservative political movements, right-wing governments and populism have also emerged in the democratic states of the Asia-Pacific. The existing literature, with its focus on the crisis of social democratic institutions and forms of representative politics, provides inadequate frameworks for explaining these trends in the region. This article suggests that a better way of understanding the emergence of these new forms of political regime in Asia is to locate the origins of democratic crises in processes of global capitalist transformation and political incorporation and disincorporation. The articles in this special issue show that previously dominant modes of incorporation are fracturing under the conditions of neo-liberal capitalist transformation. In the wake of this fracturing, political elites have struggled to created new forms of political incorporation. This has inadvertently resulted in the sharpening of the conditions that give rise to political crisis. The political responses to crises have predominantly been conservative and have led to attempts to restructure the state to limit dissent and electoral competition.     

Asia’s Security Triangles: Maritime Minilateralism in the Indo-Pacific

Since the early years of the twenty-first century, a number of key regional governments have consciously chosen to alter the way they talk about the region, and have now largely shifted from using the ‘Asia-Pacific’ to the ‘Indo-Pacific’ construct. But after three decades of utilising the ‘Asia-Pacific’ concept, why has this been the case and how might this shift in geographical conceptualisation alter the strategic framework of the region? This paper argues that the ‘Indo-Pacific’ is a regional reconceptualisation utilised by Japan, Australia, India and the USA to address deficiencies in Asia’s maritime security and institutional architecture, which are being simultaneously influenced by a more assertive Chinese posture and waning U.S. influence. Additionally, the Indo-Pacific concept has developed in tandem with a transformation in the regional security architecture. The utilisation of maritime minilateralism between Japan, India, Australia and the USA supplements Asia’s bilateral American alliances, with an array of trilateral security dialogues or ‘security triangles’. The Asia-Pacific to Indo-Pacific shift is really an instance of an emerging minilateral security regionalism, rather than the predominant forms of bilateral and multilateral security and economic regionalism that have dominated Asia in recent decades.     

From the Achaemenids to Somoni: national identity and iconicity in the landscape of Dushanbe’s capitol complex

This article focuses on the iconicity of contemporary Dushanbe’s capitol complex, with its state-sponsored architecture and memorial culture, part of the government of Tajikistan’s national identity construction. Dushanbe’s architecture post-independence is actant, a mnemonic and iconographical bridge between the present and favoured historical periods in a quest for national origins. A bricolage of historical symbols, including those of Achaemenid Iran and the early Islamic Samanids, is displayed here in a city with Soviet foundations. Together with pan-Iranian iconography is a desire by the government of Tajikistan for monumentality for its own sake. The capitol complex evokes the natural world, connected to a Central Asian conception of sacred space, suggesting an interlacing of power and religious authority. These monumental building projects are taking place against the backdrop of the destruction of Dushanbe’s ‘authentic’ Soviet architecture and built heritage in the capitol complex, itself a container for collective memory.     

Implementing Brussels Agreements: the EU’s facilitating strategy and contrasting local perceptions of peace in Kosovo

ABSTRACT

This article examines the conditions that influence the implementation process of the Brussels Agreements. The implementation process is analyzed along three dimensions: (1) the role of EU involvement, including conditionality pressure, (2) the capacity of the domestic actors to fulfil their commitments and (3) the content and clarity of the agreed provisions to guide the implementation process. Specifically, we analyze the interaction of each of these factors and how they play out and gain importance in explaining the intricacies of implementation at different points in time. The empirical analysis suggests that implementation, or the lack of it, arises from the dissonance between the hybrid negotiation strategy of the EU and the adversaries’ doubts with regard to the goals and benefits of negotiation. The negotiation tactic is expected to institutionalize cooperation between local actors and solve the conflict at large, but de facto, it is steering further resistance and allowing relevant local actors’ creativity to block the process.     

Authoritarian Statism and the New Right in Asia’s Conservative Democracies

ABSTRACT

Across Asia there has been a shift to the right in important democratic polities. This article argues that this conservative or authoritarian shift reflects the emergence of a new form of political regime that Nicos Poulantzas characterised as authoritarian statism. This article presents a theoretical framework – with illustrative case studies of Japan and Korea – to understand the emergence of a distinctive brand of Asian authoritarian statism. These new trajectories of political regimes reflect interconnected political and economic crises of conservative capitalist democracies. These crises are the result of the fracturing of modes and mechanisms of political incorporation due to the transnationalisation of capital. It is argued that the inability of current modes of state intervention or political incorporation to manage these economic and political crises or secure political legitimacy for political projects to deepen market reform has led to a “crisis of crisis management” and the further weakening of the Japanese and Korean states.     

Italy and EU enlargement to the Western Balkans: the Europeanization of national interests?

Abstract

Italy is a vocal supporter of EU enlargement to the Western Balkans. Relying on primary and secondary sources and semi-structured interviews, this article analyses Italy’s position, including the ‘what?’ (the traditional views of the country on EU enlargement), the ‘how?’ (formal processes and actual practices of decision-making) and the ‘why?’ (the main factors influencing its position). The expected economic and security benefits for Rome largely compensate for the perceived costs of EU enlargement towards the region. Nevertheless, Italy’s influence capacity is hampered by lack of resources and a traditional focus on mere diplomatic presence, as it emerges from the recent examples of the Berlin Process, the refugee crisis, and the EUSAIR.