tag:theconversation.com,2011:/columns/peter-vale-189558Diary of a Don – The Conversation2016-02-21T13:45:10Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/550752016-02-21T13:45:10Z2016-02-21T13:45:10ZSouthern Africa is hobbled by the language and legacy of its histories<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/112245/original/image-20160221-25894-1jb4zpq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Cattle drink water from an almost dry dam in South Africa. The drought in the region is one of a number of troubling issues that remain largely hidden from public sight.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Rogan Ward</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>One of the many intriguing ideas of the Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, was this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the limits of my language means the limits of my world.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Does this explain the failure to see the gathering gloom across southern Africa?</p>
<p>Consider three issues that should be troubling about the region but which remain largely hidden from public sight.</p>
<p>First, agriculture production is in crisis. As the UN World Food Programme recently reported, 49 million people in southern Africa will be affected by the worst and most severe drought in <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-africa-drought-idUSKCN0VO1DG">35 years</a>.</p>
<p>Secondly, a torrent of migration continues: much, but not all, is drawn to South Africa where, as the New York Times recently claimed, there may be <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2015-05-06-do-5-million-immigrants-live-in-sa">5 million migrants</a>.</p>
<p>Thirdly, political instability is pervasive. Less obvious instances of this are Swaziland where domestic politics, for all the claims to Swazi exceptionalism, remains feudal. In nearby Lesotho the struggle for scarce resources has brought murder to the very streets of the capital.</p>
<p>Diplomatically, these places are called “trouble spots”, but it is more difficult to choose a euphemism when talking about Zimbabwe. On any political (let alone, actuarial) chart that country’s president – now in the 92nd year of his life – should be discussed in the past tense. And, if this opinion is judged to be too hard on a man who was once regarded as a liberation hero, it needs to be pointed out that diplomats in Harare openly speak nowadays of the “post-Mugabe era”.</p>
<h2>Three inter-linked languages</h2>
<p>Invariably these, and other, challenges to regional order are addressed by three inter-linked languages – each has differing priorities while each relies on the same analytical categories.</p>
<p>These have their origins in the late-19th Century capture of the region’s politics by a language which aimed to secure the primacy of sovereign-centered states. Its primary goal was not to promote nationalism - this was to come later - but to advance the cause of British imperialism.</p>
<p>The fact that sovereign-centered borders remain the primary categories in ordering the region is testimony to the power of this language. And this points to one of history’s many ironies: the intense nationalism of the liberation movement, if anything, reinforced the hold of colonial mapping.</p>
<p>As the call for liberation deepened, southern Africa (and much the rest of the world) was seized by the language of the Cold War. Here, a simple binary thinking – encouraged by irrational fear of global destruction – turned the region into a mirror of the global divide. The east/west divide became a code for the politics between black-ruled states and the residue of colonial thinking.</p>
<p>At the Century’s end, a new language arose. This promoted the market: it argued that the purpose of the sovereign state was to service global capital in the belief that economic growth will trickle down to the benefit of all.</p>
<p>Here, too, historical irony was at work – the region’s sovereign states mattered, but only because markets matter more!</p>
<p>Carried by nice-sounding words – accountability, governance, rights-based regimes and the like – the force of market-centered language trumped an idea that, perhaps, was ripe to rethink the analytical categories that had organised the region for a century and more.</p>
<p>But this language effectively paralysed regional multilateralism that had promised growth, protection of rights and security.</p>
<p>There is no better example of this paralysis than the 2011 decision by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) heads of state to disband the SADC Tribunal – effectively a regional court. This happened after the judges, drawn from the region, held that Mugabe’s land seizures violated the rule of law.</p>
<p>As was pointed out at the time, its disbandment reflected SADC’s priorities – the subordination of new understandings of regional order and multilateralism to the sovereign interests of <a href="http://repository.up.ac.za/bitstream/handle/2263/42461/Nathan_Disbanding_2013.pdf?sequence=1">individual states</a>.</p>
<h2>The need to move beyond sovereign-centered grammar</h2>
<p>This example shows that changing the sovereign-centered grammar of southern Africa – and the resulting politics – will not be an easy task.</p>
<p>But can we speak about the region in a different way? Will this make a difference?</p>
<p>The drought, especially, suggests that the region’s lived reality is increasingly at some distance from the categories used to explain it. Moreover, as a flight to Maputo recently reminded me, places which are often thought to be at the edges of the region are only a heartbeat away from places that are said to be at region’s centre.</p>
<p>Very often this inter-connectedness and the region’s seeming vulnerability give rise to security fears. Often, too, these are constructed by the categories which are readily at hand.</p>
<p>These must, however, be recognised for what they are – burdens of a sagging language.</p>
<p>To meet southern Africa’s mounting challenges requires not more of the sovereign sameness, persistence with the old categories, but an imagining of a regional future that looks beyond the familiar, the routine, the everyday. In short, it requires a new language.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/55075/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
One of the many intriguing ideas of the Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, was this: the limits of my language means the limits of my world. Does this explain the failure to see the gathering gloom…Peter Vale, Professor of Humanities and the Director of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS), University of JohannesburgLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/536672016-01-25T15:19:22Z2016-01-25T15:19:22ZOur understanding of states, sovereignty and statelessness is being tested<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109155/original/image-20160125-19667-bbr0pc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Refugees walk through a frozen field after crossing the border from Macedonia, near the village of Miratovac, Serbia</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Marko Djurica</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>One leg of a complicated travel schedule over the holidays imprisoned me in an airport lounge for 12 hours: caught in this liminal space, I began to think about the state, its sovereignty, and the idea of statelessness.</p>
<p>It is not the first time these thoughts have come around.</p>
<p>When the glamour of globalisation was the rage a decade or so ago, it was tempting to believe that - to invoke Leon Trotsky’s famous 1917 phrase - the world was on the edge of condemning the state and sovereignty to the <a href="http://dinafainberg.com/about/">dustbin of history</a>.</p>
<p>But I was disbelieving that globalisation could herald some kind of new market-driven nirvana where states and sovereignty would no longer count for much.</p>
<p>The idea of making both peace and paradise through the power of the purse was never really on: too many messy corners remained to be tidied up, and it is to several of these that my holiday peregrinations took me.</p>
<p>In the late-1960s, however, I was attracted to an earlier strain of post-sovereign thinking, the idea of “the global village”. This has been largely associated with Canadian media theorist, <a href="http://www.mcluhanmedia.com/m_mcl_manmessage.html">Marshall McLuhan</a>. The idea was that greater connectivity would “shrink” the world, but leave state sovereignty intact.</p>
<p>This notion of shrinking the world was recently re-captured by the acclaimed Marxist theorist, David Harvey, in the phrase <a href="http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199874002/obo-9780199874002-0025.xml">“time-space compression”</a>. We live in a “24/7” world, while geographical boundaries have been rendered meaningless.</p>
<p>In one form or another the ideas – globalisation, the global village, time-space compression - were once easily illustrated by pointing to what was happening in Europe.</p>
<p>After centuries of promoting conflict, sovereignty within Europe was demonstrably losing its grip: states previously at war were willing to surrender their dominion in order to merge, mingle and mix. Surely, this was the pathway to modernisation.</p>
<p>But Europe’s value as the proverbial case-in-point has recently been drawn into question.</p>
<p>The promise of economic prosperity for all who live within its capacious borders has been hobbled by market-inspired thinking. The very idea of Europe has been eroded by the incessant bleating by the British that their sovereignty is exceptional – destined to command the world, not be sullied by European provincialism.</p>
<p>But importantly for present purposes, events in Europe suggest something new about states, sovereignty – and the stateless.</p>
<p>Notwithstanding solemn declarations by Brussels - and separate deals with neighbouring states - it is a sure bet that the inward <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34131911">migration to Europe</a> will continue unabated.</p>
<p>The reason for this is plain: those dislodged by conflict in the Middle East know that Europe – a place with no internal borders – is almost within walking distance.</p>
<p>It is true, of course, that around the wider EU borders are in place. These were once the edge of what, a decade and more ago, was called <a href="http://www.movingpeoplechangingplaces.org/migration-histories/fortress-europe.html">“Fortress Europe” </a> – a ring of legislation and international law which could protect prosperous Europe from the intrusion of outsiders.</p>
<p>But it is difficult today to see how – short of war, as in the Ukraine – Fortress Europe can reassert this outer boundary of its sovereignty.</p>
<p>The lesson of this is clear: no longer bound by states, those who have become stateless seem to be seeking a place in the only space where sovereignty has little purchase on the lives of individuals.</p>
<p>There seems to be something else going on too: our understanding of states, sovereignty and statelessness is being tested.</p>
<p>Paradoxically, as the stateless seek out Europe, thousands are leaving it to join the <a href="http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/597254/ISIS-Map-Europe-Terror-Organisation-Andrew-Hosken-Caliphate-Abu-Musab-al-Zarqawi">ISIS caliphate</a>, a sovereign-free zone straddling two nominally sovereign countries – Syria and Iraq.</p>
<p>But here, law and politics clash. In effect the caliphate exercises political sovereignty, although legally it has none. So it occupies that liminal space between “what is” and “what should be”.</p>
<p>As a result, the idea of the caliphate is testing our lexicon, our grammar and our political imagination.</p>
<p>Many questions follow of which this may be the most important: short of war, how are we to deal with it if it is invariably seen as dystopian, or described a “threat”?</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.e-ir.info/2016/01/22/neglected-yarns-and-new-beginnings-a-delhi-diary/">small conference in Delhi</a>, which came at the end of a month-long perambulation, drew me towards the understanding that we can only read state, sovereignty and statelessness as a process of social negotiation. Seldom are these notions settled: instead, they are continuously mediated by circumstances.</p>
<p>In contrast to what we have been taught - or teach our students - we live in an increasingly hybrid world. </p>
<p>In this world outcomes are produced that are not stable and so generate only doubt, not certainty.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/53667/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
In contrast to what we have been taught - or teach our students - we are living in an increasingly hybrid world.Peter Vale, Professor of Humanities and the Director of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS), University of JohannesburgLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/515912015-12-01T07:52:06Z2015-12-01T07:52:06ZStates and gangs: the difficult search for new ways to run the world<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103842/original/image-20151201-26559-1ory8a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Presidents Hollande and Obama. Is it still possible for nation states to build a global alliance against organisations such as Daesh?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Jonathan Ernst</span></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>To save mankind from the scourge of <a href="http://www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations">war</a>…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These eight words drawn from the preamble to the Charter of the United Nations have been ringing in my head for the past week.</p>
<p>Most believe that they were penned by a British Field Marshall – South Africa’s Jan Smuts: a point affirmed by Richard Steyn in his new <a href="http://www.jonathanball.co.za/index.php/component/virtuemart/jan-smuts-unafraid-of-greatness-detail?Itemid=6">biography</a> of the man who several generations of Afrikaners disparagingly called “Slim Jannie”.</p>
<p>I picked it up at the airport and read it on the flight from Johannesburg to Brazil.</p>
<p>There is much in the book about how Smuts, a child of South Africa’s <a href="http://www.southafrica.net/za/en/articles/entry/article-southafrica.net-the-swartland">Swartland</a> in the Western Cape, helped to build world order after the First – and especially – the Second World War.</p>
<p>Steyn’s book was a good primer for my destination: a conference entitled “New configurations of international order: values, principles, alliances and alignments”. It was organized by the Brazilian think-tank, <a href="http://www.pandia.defesa.gov.br/en/">Pandiá</a> and <a href="https://www.wiltonpark.org.uk">Wilton Park</a>, a conference centre-cum-think tank associated with the British Foreign Office.</p>
<p>The backdrop to the get-together, held in a spectacular Polynesian-style resort in Mangaratiba, an hour or so south of Rio de Janiero, was to explore ways to strengthen a rules-based international order.</p>
<p>But if high thoughts hovered over my thinking as I read Steyn on Smuts, it was the disembarkation in Sāo Paulo that brought me face-to-face with the immediate press for ways to order the world.</p>
<p>Lined up at the front of the coach-class passengers, I found myself staring at Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, who was queuing opposite on the Business Class side of the gangway.</p>
<p>He was, literally, on whirlwind trip (so I was told by an unimpeachable source later) that was taking him to South Africa, Brazil and India in as many days.</p>
<p>The same informant said that Fabius’s business in these places was the United National Climate Change Conference in Paris.</p>
<p>This may certainly be so, but it seems unlikely that on visits to the three “emerging powers” who are grouped together in the IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) <a href="http://www.ibsa-trilateral.org">alliance</a>, he would say nothing about the recent events in Paris.</p>
<p>Especially because his President is intent on building a global alliance against Daesh. This is the Wahhabi/Salafi militant group which has declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria. It claimed responsibility for the 124 deaths on the streets of the French capital.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, the events in the Middle East, or West Asia as many prefer to call it, engaged the attention of the conference far more than how world order was secured by Smuts and others at the San Francisco meeting that sealed the United Nations in 1945.</p>
<p>“States and Gangs” is how an informative and well-informed opening paper at the conference labelled the current international position. The search for international order is difficult – some say impossible - because dealing with gangs instead of sovereign states is eroding everyday diplomacy, especially multilateral form.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103740/original/image-20151130-10246-bgr0ug.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103740/original/image-20151130-10246-bgr0ug.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103740/original/image-20151130-10246-bgr0ug.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103740/original/image-20151130-10246-bgr0ug.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103740/original/image-20151130-10246-bgr0ug.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103740/original/image-20151130-10246-bgr0ug.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103740/original/image-20151130-10246-bgr0ug.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">First published in the Sowetan.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This claim set the deliberations off on an analysis of “liberal internationalism” – the idea that reasonable, if not quite rational, understandings between states were possible by accepting the rules of the road. These were set down by the UN system 70 years ago, and have been enforced by a number of peacekeeping missions in the past twenty-odd years.</p>
<p>However, and this was the cause of the current tension, the understanding that the US was the benign first among liberal equals – a unipolar power that enforced the rules – had been destroyed by the Bush and Blair wars.</p>
<p>The lesson of these was that war is easy to begin but devilishly difficult, often impossible, to end. On top of that the capriciousness, not to mention ruthlessness, of Daesh is part of the same Bush/Blair legacy.</p>
<p>Small wonder that it seems impossible for states to deliver security to their own, let alone others.</p>
<p>As I feared, this opened the conceptual door for the hard-noses and jingoists in the room. Called “realists” in the vocabulary of international relations, they soon dragged the talk to an old and dangerous precipice – might is always (and forever) right.</p>
<p>The result was talk, not of “states and gangs” but, rather, “states as gangs” – an exchange which predictably, perhaps, morphed into the old Cold War script of the “West versus the Rest”. As ever, claims on both sides of this particular divide were intellectually lazy – all too often bordering on the simple exchange of slogans.</p>
<p>This bellicosity moved up a notch or two on the second day after the news that Turkey had downed a Russian plane that, purportedly, was over Turkish airspace.</p>
<p>The acrid tone of a paper in the morning presentation left me decidedly gloomy and I stepped out to take a short walk. My mood only lifted when I saw teens at play.</p>
<p>Before leaving the hall, however, I heard a well timed, well argued, intervention by a Brazilian theorist that opened the way for a consideration of longer term issues. These included why the self-style liberal order or realism held out little hope for the majority of humankind.</p>
<p>His thoughts subsequently provided a comfortable segue to a panel on the theme - “(International) Norms, values, principles: how shared are they?”</p>
<p>Can these be “shared” in a wholly uneven world in which wealth gaps are so wide, when racial profiling is all too often often the basis for decisions of war and peace and in which life’s real chances are denied to the majority – as, indeed, is their voice - on these matters?</p>
<p>So, are we facing the scourge of war or, to put it as a nephew who is teaching in Egypt asked me when I told him why I was in Brazil: “What did they say about the Third World War?”</p>
<p>There certainly is war-talk and, unhappily, it is way beyond the two-finger gestures often used by play-ground gangs.</p>
<p>Avoiding it will not be easy, but as Smuts’s old chum Winston Churchill, who knew a thing or two about war, is said to have put it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>to Jaw, Jaw is better than War, War.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/51591/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>The Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) is a joint initiative of the University of Johannesburg and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.</span></em></p>To save mankind from the scourge of war… These eight words drawn from the preamble to the Charter of the United Nations have been ringing in my head for the past week. Most believe that they were penned…Peter Vale, Professor of Humanities and the Director of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS), University of JohannesburgLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.