Total strategy in Southern Africa: an analysis of South African regional policy since 1978

Abstract

On 16 March 1984 the Republic of South Africa and the Peoples' Republic of Mozambique signed an 'Agreement on Non-Aggression and Good Neighbourliness', known as the Nkomati Accord. This event dramatically focussed attention on South Africa's regional policy objectives and strategy. It is now generally recognised by all but its apologists that the apartheid state has in recent years engaged in an intense struggle both to assert its hegemony over the states of the region and to become the internationally recognised 'regional power' in Southern Africa. This can now also be seen as having implications in the wider international as well as the regional arena. Prime Minister P. W. Botha's controversial June 1984 visit to Western Europe made it clear that the regime sees the consolidation of its regional domination through formalised linkages with neighbouring states as the via media through which to break out of South Africa's longstanding international isolation. The post Nkomati period has now also finally brought to public attention the fact that the South African state has long had at its disposal a wide range of regional policy instruments or tactics. These go beyond the mere crude 'destabilisation' measures widely discussed in much recent writing on the region. At least since the accession to the Premiership of P. W. Botha in September 1979, under the rubric of the 'Total National Strategy' these tactics have included a sophisticated matrix of economic and other 'incentives' applied together with military and other 'disincentives'. Moreover, the Botha regime has also developed a more refined understanding than its predecessors of the specific socio-political conditions of each of the states in the region, and employed a different combination of 'incentive/disincentive' tactics towards each of them. This paper analyses the regional strategy of the South African state under the Botha regime and its effects in its different phases since 1978. It attempts to assess the results and prospects, as well as the limits and possibilities of this strategy. It does so from a perspective different from much of the existing literature. The highly active regional policy stance of the apartheid regime in the past five years, and