A Subsystemic Analysis of the Southern African Development Coordination Conference

Abstract

The overriding structural and political characteristic of the Southern African subsystem has been the dominance of the Republic of South Africa.1 Indeed, South Africa's ties to the subordinate states of the region have given the subsystem form and substance. An economic Gulliver among Lilliputians, South Africa created a network of trade dependencies, investment flows, labor migration patterns, and infrastructural ties (railways, roads, etc.) which bound the countries of the area together and which secured South Africa's pivotal position within the region. Before the successful wars of national liberation in the 1970s, South Africa had close political connections with the white regimes in Angola, Mozambique, and Rhodesia as well as with a black-ruled state, H. K. Banda's Malawi. As a military force, South Africa was without parallel, and the other white-ruled states formed a buffer against the hostile black states to the north. Thus, it was South Africa which both held the subsystem together and benefited from its existence. Much has changed in Southern Africa since the early 1970s. Angola and Mozambique gained their independence from Portugal. Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. These political changes in turn destroyed the buffer zone which had once afforded South Africa protection from the independent African states. Emboldened by the success of such national liberation efforts, blacks within South Africa escalated the tempo of their agitation for change in the structures of apartheid. All of these changes notwithstanding, until recently little had happened to challenge seriously the predominant position of South Africa within the subsystem of Southern Africa. Most of the political and all of the economic ties which gave South Africa leverage over its black neighbors remained intact. However, as George Modelski (1961: 150) observed, regional subsystems are the result of power relationships and regional integration efforts and is nothing necessarily natural, inevitable, or permanent about them. When the southern nine black states formed the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC) in 1980, they were hoping that there was nothing inevitable about regional economic and political patterns and set about to create an alternate subsystem in Southern Africa. SADCC had its origin in the loose