Foreign Aid to SADCC: An Analysis of the Reagan Administration's Foreign Policy

Abstract

During the past decade, American foreign policy interests in Southern Africa have steadily increased. In 1974, the collapse of the Portuguese government led to independence for Mozambique and Angola. More recently the Zimbabwean and Namibian liberation struggles have occupied center stage. International attention to South African events has also increased while Western concerns about Soviet influence in the region have intensified. Policy-makers in the United States have not remained immune to these changes. In fact, while American interests in the region have not really changed, they have increased because of the foregoing events and the way they are perceived by American policy makers.1 In April 1980, all the majority-ruled states of Southern Africa gathered in Lusaka, Zambia, and formed the Southern African Development Coordination Conference. Their purpose was to create a regional organization fundamentally opposed to the South African regime while designed to coordinate development activities which individual members could not undertake. At SADCC's first major international donors' conference in November 1980, the outgoing Carter administration pledged $25 million for regional projects during the coming fiscal year (FY 1982). The Reagan administration's policy has been muted. Although it participated actively at the Zimbabwe donor conference (Zimcord) in March 1981, most aid to the region is still channeled on a bilateral basis. And while Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker has insisted on not "choosing between black and white,"2 the very essence of SADCC is to insist that such a choice must be made. The choice to be made, however, is not between black and white as Crocker has asserted, but between South African repression and liberation as represented by SADCC. In the administration's major policy statements on Africa, SADCC is barely alluded to. Only in the context of private sector support is SADCC referred to-not public aid for large regional projects, which is SADCC's major purpose.3 It is this apparent lack of understanding and interest in SADCC by the administration which is the focus of this essay. Before turning to an analysis of the administration's foreign aid policy toward the region, I describe SADCC as a regional organization with concrete motives and place its views within the context of currently accepted practice in international development. In the last section I compare the administration's foreign aid policy toward the region with its announced policy. Finding the administration's aid policy