Although all African states suffer the same peripheral status in world politics, they display variation in their foreign policies. How can we account for these different strategies and approaches to engaging with the rest of the world? My new edited volume, Political Identity and African Foreign Policies was inspired by this question, and bythe general paucity of books on African foreign policies. There are surely ten books on democratization, ethnic and party politics, political economy, civil-military relations and other comparative politics topics in Africa for every one on foreign policy; and the few books on Africa’s international relations rarely consider African states’ foreign policies.
Further, nearly all the existing studies are African foreign policies are under-theorized. They either tackle the foreign policy of one of the important regional powers, like Ethiopia, Nigeria, or South Africa; or they study some specialized topics, such as African states in international organizations – like Jason Warner and Timothy Shaw’s co-edited study, African Foreign Policies in International Institutions.
At their worst, some studies of African foreign policies devolve into aspiration and wishful thinking. These blueprints tell us what African states will do, could do, or should do. How much study of the African Standby Force do we really need until African leaders take concrete steps to actually bring it into being? And, how much attention does the African 2063 agenda deserve before something actually happens?
Fortunately, there are rare exceptions. Michael Nelson’s superb African Coalitions and Global Economic Governance, for example, makes an ambitious theoretical effort to explain the success and failure of African coalition-building. The study acknowledges the structural challenges to African agency but seeks to understand when and how these have been overcome.
Similarly, my own edited book attempts both to stay grounded and to provide theoretical contextualization for the behavior of African states. The chapter authors all recognize that the states they study have some degree of agency; and they also know that antagonisms among African states are as common as the solidarity among Africans vis à vis the Global North.
The title notwithstanding, the volume is organized not according to a typology of identities, but rather by regime types. It includes a total of nine case studies, covering the foreign policies of three personalist regimes, three party-dominant regimes, and three competitive multiparty regimes. Regime types provide the fundamental logic for the foreign policies of African states; these policies serve either to (1) reinforce the rule of an autocrat; (2) bolster the domestic status of a long-ruling party; or (3) help a governing administration of a nascent democracy perform well in the next election.
Within regime types, the political identities of the ruling elites are the key to domestic politics, and to foreign policy, as well. In personalist regimes, political identities are usually defined by ethnic or racial connections in society: Sassou-Nguesso’s Congo is ruled by an Mbochi mafia; Kagame’s Rwanda by a crypto-Tutsi warrior caste; and Beshir’s Sudan by an Arabized set of northern Sudanese military elites. The foreign policy orientations of these states reflect(ed) these elite identities.
For personalist regimes, foreign policy can also become, well, personal. The long-standing animosity between Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame is a case in point; the relationship has all the hallmarks of a classic sibling rivalry, with attendant foreign policy effects. By contrast, the amicable relations between Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon from 1990 to 1997, and from 1997 to 2009, surely reflected the fact that Congolese president Sassou-Nguesso had married the daughter of Gabonese president Omar Bongo in 1990.
In party-dominant states, political identities emerge in the intra-party struggles to forge ideologies and determine party programs. The founders of Ethiopia’s EPRDF party embraced ideologies of federalism, development, and above all, state-building; this reinforced Ethiopia’s role as a sub-regional kingpin and (conveniently) an advocate for federalism in Somalia.
The traditionalist founders of Botswana’s long-ruling BDP created party cadres who embraced probity and social solidarity, permitted by the tightly controlled allocation of diamond revenues into society; this meant collaboration with DeBeers and South Africa.
South Africa’s ANC defeated apartheid and won power by emphasizing its commitments to racial justice; but it has kept power by positioning itself as the vanguard of a “Rainbow nation.” The complications of the ANC’s domestic ideology are fully reflected in the country’s ambiguous, wavering foreign policy; ANC cadres, steeped in the anti-apartheid struggle, naturally harbor suspicion toward the West. Their identity has also made them nostalgic for the years of solidarity with Russia, and the other party-dominant states of southern Africa. Accordingly, ANC-ruled South Africa finds it hard to support African democracy (as in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe) or to condemn Russia’s crude imperialism.
For the elites of both personalist and party-dominant regimes, pathways to power are crucial in creating elite identities. For personalist regimes, these pathways include coups d’état, insurgency, the subversion of democratic institutions (as in the Central African Republic), or the inheritance of power (as in Gabon and Togo). Party-dominant regimes, by contrast, arise from the insurgency that defeat colonialists, white minorities (as in South Africa), or dictators (in Ethiopia). Each pathway to power imprints the new regime with identities from which foreign policy orientations follow.
In Africa’s “competitive multiparty” states—that is, unconsolidated democracies—non-Africanists would expect political identities to cohere around inter-party politics. Yet this is less true than in Europe or Latin America. In countries with strong center-left and center-right parties, one could expect foreign policies shifts to follow the outcomes of free elections that put one or the other in power. We can see this in Brazil, for instance.
But the competing parties in Africa’s “experimental democracies” are generally not defined by politico-economic ideologies. Some campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, one cannot really distinguish ideologically among the parties that have competed for power in Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria, the three competitive multiparty states studied in this volume.
This reality likely explains the relative continuity of the foreign policies of these three African regimes. One does not witness rapidly foreign policy re-orientations following the installation of new regimes of a different party in these three countries.
Moreover, there are some common patterns in the foreign policies of these three states: all three are generally non-interventionist toward their neighbors, unless provoked (in Kenya’s case); all have respected most international law and continental norms, as codified in various AU resolutions; and all have “correct,” if not overly warm, relations with European democracies and the United States.
These patterns raise the question of whether there are national identities among the elites of these states. Intriguingly, the authors of the Ghana and Kenya case studies (Michael Nelson and Ubba Kodero) believe there is a nascent sense of national identity in these countries, whereas Efem Ubi finds no such parallel national identity among Nigeria’s political class. These findings are worthy of more debate.
Likewise, unexpected developments in African foreign policies are also under-studied. The advent of the Alliance of Sahelian States in 2023 is only one of the more remarkable examples. I therefore don’t see the publication of the Political Identity and African Foreign Policy as a conclusion to these conversations, but rather as a jumping off point for more theoretically-based discussion of continuity and change in African foreign policies.
John F. Clark is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University (Miami, FL).
