Colin Howard
In the formulation of foreign policy, argues Professor Howard, a nation's own interests should have primacy. Australia has ignored this maxim by basing its South Africa policy on moral indignation at the expense of Australia's own interests.
The Australian Government has chosen to play a part in the domestic Government of South Africa. What I mean by that, of course, is that it is joining others in attempting to force the South African Government to change its many laws relating to what is normally summarised as apartheid, or perhaps separate development. The fault with this policy, to my mind, is that it appears to have no purpose in view which serves Australia's interests in any significant way and makes no attempt to evaluate its consequences for Australia on the alternative hypotheses that it either succeeds or fails.
According to Mr. Hayden, the purpose of Australia's policy is to signify our continuing disapproval of apartheid. That proposition, taken at face value, lacks a certain something in impact. One can understand the South African Government not exactly putting the item at the top of its next cabinet agenda. Neither does such a policy become particularly awe-inspiring by being associated with so-called economic sanctions which have necessarily had to be designed in such a way as to avoid anyone in this country being able to attribute his unemployment to the Government's disapproval of apartheid. The economic sanctions were delayed as long as possible and have to operate, not only within the framework of strictly domestic Australian employment factors, but also within the scope, as I understand it, of a relatively modest volume of trade at the best of times. They are in fact no more than a feeble attempt to add emphasis to our disapproval of apartheid, just in case the point did not get across before.
Now, accepting that such a wishy-washy approach is unlikely to make the slightest impact on a government which has far more serious things to think about than an Australian crisis of conscience, let us pause for a moment to consider whether any kind of benefit can be claimed for Australia from adopting what is in substance no more than a bit of attitudinising upon the world stage.
INTERNATIONAL MORALITY
There is first the argument that, although the much we are saying and the little that we are doing may make no difference to events inside South Africa, to criticise Australian policy on that ground is to take it too literally. The real point of the policy, it may be said, is to take advantage of South Africa's internal difficulties in order to enhance our moral stature in international affairs, and thus increase our influence in the international community. This increased influence can be turned to good effect in other directions, so it is said, particularly those, like nuclear energy and the protection of ecosystems, which also have a tendency to wrap themselves in moral rectitude.
I quite agree that if one can acquire moral rectitude without paying for it, or at least without paying too much for it, it can be minimally useful for propaganda purposes. But there is no substance in seeking to acquire a warm inner glow of morality in international affairs. I know of no case in which it has brought significant material rewards or improvements in the standard of living of the people; in which it has succeeded in significantly ameliorating any of the world's major problems; or in which the effort has in fact survived for long or been worth the paying of any substantial price.
Secondly, it has been urged that over a number of years Australia's anti-South Africa policy, even if largely rhetorical, has built up a body of goodwill in the Third World. As I understand it, the claimed goodwill is to be found at its most intense in black Africa but is likely to be manifested at almost any gathering of nations which either identify themselves clearly as non-white, or failing that, as part of that imprecise body, the Third World. Although perhaps slightly more tangible than international morality, international goodwill seems to me again to be a fragile asset, unlikely to be worth buying at any significant price. I have not noticed that there is any great market for it in the Third World itself, from which I suppose one can infer that that is why those countries are so anxious to export it to the First and Second Worlds. And, for all 1 know, the Fourth and Fifth as well.
There may of course be economic benefits to be gained from Third World contacts, whatever Third World contacts may be thought to mean, but these do not seem to me to be relevant to the present point. Economic benefits are gained by international trade in goods, services or investments. These seem to me to be at their most reliable if approached as business propositions and not confused, as they too often are, by the introduction of irrelevancies like goodwill in international affairs, as opposed to goodwill in the commercial sense. Japan must surely rank as one of the all time international commercial successes, but I have not heard that anyone who has ever done business with Japan has confused it with political goodwill.
Moreover Australia is a country which should be particularly careful about placing reliance on such elusive imponderables as international morality and goodwill. Jealousy and envy are far more potent forces. Most of the members of the United Nations undoubtedly regard themselves as Third World countries. Equally, most of them can regard Australia only with jealousy or envy. We are a small and homogeneous population, with at the most only a few very minor problems of race relations, occupying a vast country of still almost incalculable mineral wealth and economic potential. Whilst doing remarkably little to earn it, we enjoy a very high standard of living and a political climate which, to that vast majority of countries who have real problems, must seem reassuring in its triviality. We also happen to be highly vulnerable to interference if powerful enemies take it seriously into their heads to make economic or military trouble for us.
This seems to me to add up to a situation in which our foreign policy should at the very least be directed towards the preservation and strengthening, not to mention acquisition, of links based upon clearly identifiable mutual interests. Even therefore if we make the charitable assumption that what passes for an Australian policy towards South Africa is not merely a confused attempt to run someone else's country, but a cynical exercise in self-glorification designed to store up international credit, it still seems to suffer from a lack of any acceptably precise aim which could work to Australia's material advantage. Let us therefore now turn to the hypothesis that, notwithstanding Mr. Hayden's bland words about merely signifying disapproval, the Australian Government actually has something far more tangible in mind.
POLICY OF COERCION
Let us consider the Government's intention as actually being what I suspect most people believe it to be, that is, by means short of war, to coerce the South African Government into conducting a major part of its internal affairs in a manner of which the Australian Government approves. For public consumption this is put by the Government in the form that we are joining in international pressure in order to compel the South African Government to start dismantling apartheid pretty well at once. So far as 1 know, no one has as yet sought to put a precise completion date on the process, although Archbishop Tutu has mentioned a period of one year, within which substantial progress will have to be made. Nevertheless it is surely obvious that no sooner will one step in that direction be made than intense pressure will be applied to the South African Government to take the next step, and so on, so that time limits become irrelevant. One can reasonably understand Australian policy therefore as being directed towards a swift repeal of all the apartheid laws and, on the positive side, enacting some form of direct and substantial participation in the South African political process for blacks.
Precisely which blacks necessarily presents difficulties of definition owing to the, if I may be permitted to say so, geographically and demographically naive homelands concept and its consequences, and to illegal immigration into South Africa from its black neighbours. Australia has not thought it necessary to enter into such complications. The standard demand, certainly the demand made by the African National Congress and related organisations, is for a more or less immediate move to one man one vote, or in other words, to a large voting majority of blacks who, owing to their depressing history, necessarily include only a tiny minority who are at home with the complexities of the Western democratic process. I am not for a moment suggesting that there is anything inherently irremediable about that. I am suggesting only that at the moment, no matter whose fault, it is a relevant fact.
FIRST CRITERION OF SUCCESS
Let us now test this version of Australian policy by asking some simple, indeed obvious, but not, I think, simple-minded questions. I return to the two initial hypotheses that I mentioned earlier: that our policy, whatever it is, either succeeds or fails. Let us take success first. How do we know if our policy has in fact succeeded? I take it that we can claim a degree of success, even in the absence of any demonstrable cause and effect relationship, if the South African Government repeals some of its apartheid laws, or perhaps if Mr. P.W. Botha merely enters into a negotiation with black leaders or, in spite of his recent refusal, makes the declaration of intent which has been suggested as a way forward. If we stop the action at that point we can certainly claim success by way of idle self-congratulation but it is a little hard to identify any tangible benefit for Australia.
THE PRICE
On the contrary, there is a highly tangible disadvantage, which has materialised already, that part of the price of this empty triumph has been the emergence in Australia, not in South Africa mark you, but in Australia, of a small but unpleasant change in the way we conduct our own internal affairs. The Fraser Government's, to my mind altogether objectionable, attempt to coerce athletes into not attending the Olympic Games held in the Soviet Union, as a means of signifying disapproval at the invasion of Afghanistan, has been taken by the present Government to justify a much nastier effort to publicly bully a tiny minority of its own citizens into refraining from exercising a perfectly legal right to earn their living.
The cricketers who have stood out against the carrots and sticks resorted to by the Government in this context have been forced through the dismaying experience of being labelled racists on no evidence whatever. The basis of the charge has been an asserted cause and effect relation between their going to South Africa and the promotion of apartheid which has not only not been proved, or anything like it, but utterly misconceives both the utility and the limits of any sporting policy in such a context. The cricketers have in addition, and in principle even worse, found themselves unshielded, even in their own country, never mind in South Africa, from scarcely disguised threats of personal harm by the African National Congress. For those who appreciate these things there is grim humour in the African National Congress couching its threats in the form of concern for the cricketers' safety from violence for which it is itself claiming responsibility.
I note in passing, incidentally, that although that organisation, as I understand it, is allowed to maintain a representation in Australia on the basis that it does not use this country as a place from which to preach the doctrines of armed revolution, it is not expected by the present Government to actually abide by that condition. I note further that when the same condition was sought to be imposed recently upon a senior representative of the South West Africa Peoples Organisation, and he took it literally, and objected, our own acting Foreign Minister, Senator Evans, became positively apologetic at the event.
These developments, although in themselves minor, seem to me nevertheless to be a positive loss to Australia in terms of weighing up the consequences of seeking to interfere in South African affairs. In this country, as in others, one of the most immediate results has been to start turning our own people against each other for no constructive reason, and to do so in a peculiarly nasty way. This is a distinct demerit in my eyes and one which I should like to see corrected immediately. One way of correcting it would be for the present and all future governments to become a lot more thoughtful than they are at the moment about the possible domestic consequences of ill-advised attempts to profit by other people's misfortunes.
SECOND CRITERION OF SUCCESS
Returning to the main theme, it seems to me obvious that success or failure cannot be sensibly measured in the short term way of stopping the action for our purposes at the point where the South African Government takes the first step, if it does, towards apparent compliance with our demands. As noted already, as a practical matter each such step under present circumstances, will produce only intensified pressure for the next step to be taken. The inherent momentum of events will carry everyone inexorably closer to consequences of much greater long term significance than anything I have mentioned so far. Hence, if our policy is to be taken seriously at all, it must entail changes in South African society so sweeping that, if pursued with the speed which is unavoidably implied, even if not expressly contemplated, they can only have a severely destabilising effect on that country. This is a factor which seems to have been simply ignored by Australian policy makers, obvious though it seems to me to be.
I use the expression "destabilising" to refer in general terms to a serious impairment of public order, although not one which amounts to anything which could reasonably be classified as civil war, or which results in a complete disintegration of South Africa as a socio-political unit. Along this line of thought I cannot myself escape the conclusion that if present Australian policy is to be taken seriously, it must imply that destabilisation of South African society in this sense is acceptable as part of the price for breaking down the legalised apartheid system. It is to be noted that implicit in such a policy is the assumption that the price will be paid by South Africans and not by Australians. I do not criticise that assumption on the basis of its moral repugnance, for I have already made clear my view that the sort of argument which simply sets different people's moral repugnancies in conflict with each other is highly unlikely to produce a practical foreign, or any other, policy. I criticise it on the ground that it seems to me that the advantages to be derived by Australia from helping to produce such a situation in South Africa are simply not worth it in terms of our own national self-interest.
POSSIBLE GAINS
Let us consider what we might gain by such a development. I have dealt already with the Third World approval argument. Let us turn to more substantial points. There are sufficient similarities between the South African and the Australian economies for it to be reasonably certain that at least part of the trade which other countries now conduct with South Africa would be diverted to Australia if South Africa were no longer, or were no longer believed to be, which in practice is the same thing, a reliable trading partner. A particularly obvious instance is gold, which no doubt accounts for the appearance among our so-called sanctions of a prohibition on the purchase of krugerands. More generally, I understand that the current wave of internal unrest has damaged South Africa's standing as a stable place in which to invest and do business to an extent which has indeed already produced small but noticeable trade benefits for Australia.
Furthermore, the serious destabilisation of South African society would almost certainly see the departure from that country of a proportion of its most talented and able people, the proportion growing with the degree of destabilisation. These refugees would be only too glad to resettle here. Since under the circumstances Australia is likely to rank highly as a preferred new home, we ought to find ourselves in an even better position than usual to pick and choose whom we took. Moreover refugee South Africans would probably receive an exceptionally warm welcome. This would be because by then it must surely have at last dawned on us that we bore a heavy responsibility for our share in encouraging the vengeful and faction-ridden chaos from which they would be fleeing. Television would have ensured that we missed none of the ghastliness of the civil unrest, or war, if things went that far, that the African National Congress and many moralists, at a safe distance of course, are currently so anxious to promote.
There would be compensations for our remorse. Our test cricket team would have a fair chance of becoming the best in the world for the foreseeable future. Our various codes of football would similarly be likely to benefit all round, as would many other sporting activities. No doubt, there being many similarities of climate and attitude between the two countries, there would also be a more general shot in the arm of imported talent, to the enrichment of the whole of Australian society. And to cap it off, all this would have been achieved by governments which were at the same time being helped into, or back into, office by the votes of those who believe that if the military and economic power of the South African whites can be broken, everything will, in some as yet unexplained way, work out for the best for everyone.
Mind you, should things go even beyond destabilisation and amount to a complete collapse of South African society, we should have to recognise it as unlikely that we should thereafter be able quite so easily to reap another such profit from helping in the destruction of a natural ally. Nevertheless, once Australian governments really got the hang of how to interfere in other people's affairs, opportunities would be bound to come along. You never know, former anti-apartheid activists seeking a new outlet for their reforming energies might be able to make something out of New Zealand's treatment of its Maoris and Pacific islanders. We could finish up with the multiracial All Blacks as well as the multiracial Springboks. They should adapt well to the notoriously multiracial Australians.
DISADVANTAGES
In spite of these enticing possibilities however, it is a serious question whether quite such minor gains as a few temporary economic windfalls, and a passing adjustment of the migrant intake, amount to a significant advancement of the national interest, even when combined with moral indignation at a safe distance. One only has to look at a map to see that in global terms, the only country anywhere near, apart from New Zealand, which has recognisable cultural, historical, governmental and linguistic ties with us is South Africa. Differences of attitude between Australians and white South Africans are sometimes obvious and sometimes not, but compared with the extent to which we differ from our other more or less immediate neighbours, the most conspicuous being that model non-discriminatory democracy Indonesia, they are insignificant.
Even on the most detached calculation of Realpolitik, we ought perhaps to think twice about rushing with the mob to destroy a community which in geographical location, cultural affinity and sheer muscle, both economic and military, has a great deal to offer this distant, often desolate and overlarge island. We are not exactly overburdened with allies who could be of any real help in trouble. If it be argued that the destruction of the present South Africa and its replacement by a new one which arose by sheer force of black numbers out of the chaos would be an ally worth having, my answer is that that is fantasy. Even as things are now, the routine inter-tribal genocide which disfigures most of the African continent makes South Africa look like an oasis of peace and contentment.
FAILURE
The foregoing seem to me to be some of the factors more obviously relevant to our pursuing a policy which depends for anything worth calling success on what I have termed destabilisation which would undoubtedly be violent and would pay no particular attention to colour lines, age, sex or any other disability. If these are the consequences of success, let us now contemplate the consequences of failure, by which I mean a continuing refusal of the South African Government to pay the slightest attention to Australia's version of how it should govern its own country.
The first and most obvious consequence, although relatively unimportant, is that yet another defect in our policy would in this event become embarrassingly obvious. It is that we have adopted a stance in which our own Government's credibility depends entirely upon the South African Government. All the latter has to do is precisely what it is doing now, pay no attention because it has more important things to think about, and both our Government and its policy lose whatever standing in the matter they ever had. An attitude of prescriptive self-righteousness in international affairs inevitably puts one's own credibility into the hands of whoever it is to whom one is giving orders. This seems to me to be a remarkable error for a government which is widely regarded as pragmatic to a fault.
CIVIL WAR
Perhaps in some awareness of this, the Australian Government, again neither alone nor with any noticeable originality, has added to its denunciations of apartheid on moral grounds the assertion that, unless its views are acted upon by the South African Government, South Africa will unavoidably decline into civil war. This is an endorsement of the official views of the African National Congress, of the propaganda of the anti-apartheid movement across the world, and of the official apprehensions of clerics of all shapes, sizes, colours and ranks.
Assertions of this kind are intended to support the argument that such policies as our own are selflessly well-intentioned and are being insisted upon only for the greater good of South Africa. This leads easily then to the accusation that it is only the peculiar obstinacy of the South African Government which prevents it from seeing the obvious. In yet another grim irony (South Africa must be the best stocked warehouse of political irony in the Western world) this obstinacy is then explained in impeccably racial terms as a characteristic of an elusive phenomenon called Afrikaner nationalism. I suspect that what is far more obvious to the South African Government is that a number of countries, including Australia, have decided, for reasons which it is not easy to explain, to do everything they can to promote civil disorder in South Africa, leading, if possible, to civil war.
Having lived as a child and teenager through times when people were deeply marked by the Hitler and Spanish Civil War experiences, not to mention Stalin's unspeakable career, and having in consequence done some reading over the years in an effort to understand, I have a strong suspicion that most of the people who confidently, and apparently cheerfully, predict civil war in South Africa have no idea what they are talking about. I also have the greatest difficulty in understanding how they can seriously believe that Australians, or indeed almost anyone else, including the vast majority of South Africans of any description, can possibly benefit from such a catastrophe. Nevertheless it has to be taken into account as a factor relevant to the formulation of foreign policy, if only because so many people, however inadequate their grounds, seem to believe in it as a means of solving racial problems.
Indeed, sad continuing evidence of the fact that there are things the human race never learns is the apparent enthusiasm with which some people seem to be actually looking forward to it. This they justify on the ground that the great majority of black South Africans are looking forward to it too. This is no doubt yet another instance of the wearisome propaganda whereby urban terrorists become converted into freedom fighters, even though they rarely make the mistake of actually fighting anyone. Hence I tend to doubt that many South Africans of any description are looking forward to anything of the kind. If what blacks in particular have already experienced at the hands of blacks, never mind whites, both in and out of South Africa, lead them to welcome a civil war, they must be very strange people indeed, especially the more than half of them who are women.
But on the civil war front the most extraordinary thing is not the increasingly widespread assumption that it is bound to come, or even the assumption that if it does come all will thereafter be well, but the absolutely extraordinary assumption that it is a war the whites will lose. I see nothing in Australian policy which even for the briefest moment contemplates the possibility that if there is civil war in South Africa, the whites might win. Or the related possibility, which seems to me to be a certainty, that the whites would not fight alone. Non-white South African society seems to me to be quite sufficiently fissured to ensure that plenty of coloureds, Indians and even blacks, the Zulu being the most interesting possibility, would choose in such a showdown to realise their political aspirations by joining the whites as the preferable and likely winners.
I do not for a moment claim to know whether they would win. I merely record the opinion that any realistic assessment has to take into account that there are strong grounds for thinking they might win, or at the very best not lose. Hence, in addition to every other fault which can be detected without difficulty in Australia's South African policy, we appear not even to have taken the elementary precaution of making sure, to the best of our ability, that if there is a major military confrontation, we shall be on the side of the winners. In addition to this, I have recorded already my view that, should the South African whites lose such a war, the resulting regime would be a very unpredictable quantity from Australia's point of view.
COMMUNIST THREAT
Having now given as briefly as I can the main reasons why I think Australia's present South African policy is, with luck, merely incoherent, but if we are really unfortunate, may prove to be disastrous, I take up what I think the basics of Australia's policy towards South Africa ought to be. First the argument that the present situation is preparing the ground for communism. This is one of those propositions with which, in itself, many people along a spectrum of opinion are able to agree. The differences appear when one inquires more precisely into what they mean by it.
As I understand the matter, Mr. Fraser means that unless the Western world strongly and effectively gives its support to black political opinion, by which I presume he means in the main the opinions expressed by the African National Congress outside South Africa and the United Democratic Front inside, the blacks will in desperation turn to the Communist bloc for aid. The argument appears to assume that this will lead to a successful black African revolution followed by the emergence of a black African government, or governments, within the Communist orbit. In association with this argument it is urged, I believe, that not only would this be a severe net loss for the West, but is also a result not desired by any significant South African protest movement or by the vast mass of the people themselves.
The most opposed point of view asserts that, on the contrary, to support any policy which leads to the severe destabilisation of South African society or the overthrow of the present Government, whether the overthrow comes from the extreme Left or the extreme Right, ultimately arrives, give or take a detail or two, at exactly the same result, so that we really have no sensible choice but to support the present Government. This point of view tends to stress that the important part of such a result is not the debatable question whether a violent change to black rule in South Africa would necessarily take the country into the Communist sphere of influence, but that it would remove from the Western world one of its most powerful and strategically most important bastions against the spread of Soviet power.
It seems to me that in a slightly modified form the second of these contentions is the more cogent as a criterion for the shaping of Australian foreign policy. On the general issue of the Communist threat I think that three points need to be borne in mind. The first is that a powerful military autocracy like the Soviet Union will undoubtedly stimulate unrest in other countries by any available means if it believes that by so doing it can advance its own national interests. Secondly however, it by no means follows that the inevitable result of serious upheaval in South Africa will be a black government reliably within the Communist sphere of influence. Soviet Russia does not have a particularly successful record anywhere outside eastern Europe of installing reliable puppet governments. I should have thought that its chances of doing so at the furthest end of Africa were fairly slight if it is unable to do so even on its own non-European borders.
And thirdly, it is surely obvious that, although a person like Archbishop Tutu is no doubt genuinely concerned about the prospect of a Communist takeover of his country, this argument in the mouths of organisations like the ANC and the UDF has the status only of self-serving propaganda. I should not myself have thought that they would be any more anxious than anyone else to be subservient to Soviet Russia, although of course, again in accordance with the normal rules of aspirants to power by violence, they will be happy to accept any help they can get from any quarter; but the idea that the ANC/UDF set-up is offering us an enlightened and tolerant alternative to Communist repression seems to me too speculative to be taken into account for any purpose at all.
DEFENCE
There are really only two things that the Communist threat argument draws to our attention. One is that if South Africa's political orientation in world affairs changes significantly, the already menacing Soviet naval presence in the southern hemisphere will be greatly strengthened and the West's correspondingly weakened. One has only to contemplate what the mere loss of the Simonstown naval base would mean to the West, let alone its positive availability to Soviet Russia, to see what is involved. Australia's military isolation would be intensified at the very time when the U.S. bases in the opposite direction, in the Philippines, are also coming under threat. Add to that the eccentric defence attitudes of the present New Zealand Government, and Australia's persistent refusal to acknowledge the strategic significance of good relations with France, and you have a defence situation looming which, one might have thought, should inspire a certain amount of dismay.
The second, related, factor of which the Communist threat should remind us is that at the moment we do still have a reliably anti-Communist government in control in South Africa, which, whatever its domestic defects, and I do not seek to justify them, is a well-placed and powerful natural economic and military ally of the West in general and of Australia in particular. It is a government which, given a chance, would undoubtedly entertain co-operative feelings towards Australia for highly understandable reasons of self-interest. To seek to undermine the stability of this Government by trying to compel it to undertake a rate of domestic social change far more rapid than it deems wise, in return only for a speculative and probably non-existent alternative check to Communism, seems to me to be the height of folly. It also seems to me to strengthen the hand of extremists of all kinds, for the one thing above all that will encourage them to redouble their efforts is the perception that the Government is weakening and has no allies. I think that this universal rule of the politics of violence applies as much to the extreme conservative whites, who, by the way, are by no means wholly Afrikaans speaking, as to any other simple slogan group.
I have developed these points at a little length because Mr. Fraser is an experienced Australian statesman who has long adhered to an analysis of Australia's policy interests towards South Africa which differs markedly from the one I am advancing now. Nevertheless my own conclusion is firm that the best way of protecting South Africa, and therefore indirectly Australia, against the further advance of Communism on the African continent is not to support and encourage the would-be revolutionaries of that country but, on the contrary, at the very least to maintain normal diplomatic, commercial and other free-world relations with it. Any other course, in my view, runs the risk of repeating the common Western error of inadvertently doing the Communists' work for them.
AUSTRALIAN INFLUENCE
I mention in passing that in arriving at this point of disagreement with Mr. Fraser I place no reliance on the argument, sometimes advanced by the South African Government itself, that if we give support to, or at least refrain from attacking, the South African Government, we can expect to exercise more influence over its internal racial policies. I very much doubt that this would be the case, unless perhaps in the commercial area. In this context domestic controversy in Australia might well arise if Australian enterprises were perceived to be making a morally illegitimate profit from depressed working conditions in South Africa. This is an issue which, although up to now it has been utilised only as yet another intermittent substitute for a foreign policy, could nevertheless become a serious domestic issue for Australia, and hence for that reason relevant to our South Africa policy. In such a case there would be a sensible basis for a negotiation incidentally relevant to the apartheid laws.
But apart from such a consideration arising in a particular context, I would myself hold out not the slightest hope of Australia's influencing South Africa's internal racial policies merely by getting on more friendly terms with its Government. We are, I believe, on perfectly friendly terms with the USA and the United Kingdom. I doubt that anyone thinks that this gives us a legitimate expectation of influencing the former's policies towards its blacks, hispanics or North American Indians or the latter's policies towards Pakistanis claiming British citizenship. It is nothing to the point that we in our wisdom may think they are doing a better racial job than South Africa. Unless our nationals were involved we simply would not have a hope of being listened to, and in my view, quite right too. Correspondingly I should not welcome South African intervention in our land rights difficulties, however friendly.
EFFECTIVENESS OF PRESSURE
I take, then, as my foundation for the adoption of what I would regard as a constructive policy towards South Africa, in the sense that it can be seen to promote recognisable and tangible Australian interests, the fact that we can start with the positive asset of a stable anti-communist and potentially friendly government there. The next step in my argument is that we immediately discontinue the unproductive and ineffective policies of phony economic sanctions and niggling inconveniences, like highly restrictive landing rights for South African Airways. These achieve nothing. On that point let me deal next however with an assertion which I think is highly likely to be made in view of the most recent developments. This is that, whatever else may be said about them, international pressure in general and sanctions in particular have after all proved to be effective.
Investor confidence in South Africa has sharply declined, the currency has suffered badly and the country's banking mechanisms and capacity to service its international debts have been sharply, if temporarily, embarrassed. I do not for one moment dispute the facts, but I do think that to attribute them to international pressure in general and economic sanctions in particular provides an excellent instance of a process of thought frequently met with in this context. This is that in the South African situation, if that Government is seen to run into any difficulty, the setback is immediately attributed to whatever anti-South African measures have most recently been put in train. I do not myself believe that the abrupt loss of investor confidence in South Africa is in the slightest degree attributable to economic sanctions in themselves or to the abundant international rhetoric on apartheid. It seems to me to have everything to do with the stepping up of civil unrest leading to violence.
This is hardly surprising. Except in the case of military invasion, what happens inside any country, including changes in governmental policy or political direction, is almost invariably decided by events and circumstances which are also inside that country, and not anywhere else. Certainly they can be facilitated and stimulated from the outside, as by infiltrating agitators, arms and suchlike, but they have to actually happen on the spot. The idea that a riot which starts in, shall we say, Soweto, has much causal connection with resolutions of the United Nations, indignant speeches on the far side of the world or economic sanctions is to my mind an exercise only in wishful thinking. It is the speeches made on the spot which spark the explosion. They are particularly inflammatory for young men, who, understandably, are exasperated and frustrated by the sheer boredom of life in the black townships, the lack of opportunity and the smouldering resentments of inferior status. These are the commonplaces which cause the riots.
The contribution made by such countries as Australia can only be by way of distant political encouragement, largely negative in character. What I mean by that is that such policies as that of Australia may well help in shaping the political judgement of the ANC, and any comparable organisation, that if they stimulate violence inside South Africa now, they may be able, with the assistance of nightly television film of unarmed black women and children being beaten up by armed black and white South African police, to create an international uproar which gives the impression that their cause must inevitably triumph. So long as the internal mood lasts, this is a pretty good way of adding to the troubles of the South African Government, but it really ought not to be a way which should succeed with any sensible external government. Apart from anything else it means that policies advocated by the well-meaning people sitting horrified before their television sets, if they have any effect on South Africa at all, are encouraging the very violence they find horrifying.
PROGRESS AND PROPAGANDA
We are confronting here nothing more remarkable than a well-organised propaganda manoeuvre which makes it appear that events inside the country are being dictated by events outside, whereas exactly the reverse is true. It is, and always has been, the foreign governments which have reacted to events inside South Africa, not the other way around. If we take the notorious Sharpeville incident of a generation ago, one can surely see without elaboration that the ensuing international uproar was simply everyone else reacting to an event in South Africa. The same still applies. What has recently happened has been a propaganda triumph, by the ANC in particular. Such things do not happen by themselves. The most effective propaganda is opportunistic, presenting facts in a particular way to give a particular impression. This is what has happened over the last two or three years with South Africa.
Although not all the apartheid laws have at the time of writing been repealed, and black South Africans have not yet been admitted to the formal political process, on a lesser scale much has changed in urban South Africa in the realm of petty apartheid. Although it does not amount to anything very significant in itself, this gradual development has had importance as part of a process. Painfully slow though the rate of progress seems to observers on the outside and to blacks on the inside, the gradual ebbing of the high tide of apartheid has reflected changes in the bulk of white voting opinion.
In South Africa, as elsewhere, such modifications of the political climate tend to be overlooked by all but the most astute politicians and observers until after the event. Even with the benefit of hindsight there is usually disagreement about when or what marks the beginning of a major change in public opinion. In the present case a date as good as any is June 1976, when serious black rioting broke out, centring on, but not confined to, Soweto, simultaneously with the appearance of the long-awaited report of the Theron Commission, which had been set up in 1973 to report on the situation of the coloureds. Both events, of course, had their origins in previous events, but on any view they made 1976 a watershed year.
The shock of the riots and the reformist character of the Theron Report put an emphasis on constitutional and social change which led, somewhat haltingly, owing to internal governmental differences of opinion, to the promulgation of a new constitution in 1983 and its coming into effect in 1984. There are several points about this development which are of particular significance in assessing the South African situation for Australian policy formulation purposes.
The first is that it is particularly associated with the leadership of Mr. P.W. Botha. In 1977 he was appointed chairman of a cabinet committee set up, as a direct consequence of the Theron report, to investigate the possibilities for constitutional change. In the following year he became Prime Minister and is now State President under the new constitution. The significance of this is that, whatever the perceptions of his critics may be, he is in South African terms a reformer, has been entirely consistent in responding to the need for change at what he sees as the appropriate rate and is still very much in charge.
Secondly, in accordance with the point made already about who influences whom in producing change in South Africa, developments since 1976 have been in response to wholly internal pressures, particularly the increasing white perception that the formal enactment of apartheid into law, and much of the wider theory of separate development of which it formed a part, were blunders of the first magnitude. It is noteworthy in this connection that the rigid legal structure into which Dr. Verwoerd, not himself in origin an Afrikaner, set the whole idea was at marked variance with the generally pragmatic character of Afrikaner history.
Thirdly, it is notorious that the most dangerous time in a process of reducing or removing oppression by peaceful reforms comes at the beginning. Particularly is this the case where the oppressed vastly outnumber the oppressors. It is partly for this reason that the latest outbreak of violence in South Africa has built up steadily from the introduction of the new constitution. Much of the violence has certainly been instigated by political opportunists, but the resentments arising from as yet unsatisfied hopes, stimulated in turn by the very fact of change, provide a ready-made climate of black opinion for exploitation.
Against this background it is not difficult to see that the new constitution is a genuine step in the direction of fundamental political change but at the same time one which is readily capable of being characterised as an entrenchment of apartheid. Its supporters see it as a first stage in the abandonment of the doctrine that political entitlement should depend on racial classification. Because most South African whites are understandably nervous at the unforeseeability of the consequences to themselves, it is an exceedingly cautious step. The incorporation of the other two minorities, coloured and Indians, into the Parliament has been done on a continued racial classification basis which ensures that, for the time being at least, no real power passes out of white hands.
This caution was probably unavoidable if Mr. Botha was to retain support in his electorate and party for further reform. Nevertheless it has been a propaganda gift to his black opponents. All they have had to do is present the new constitution as one which deliberately excludes blacks instead of one which deliberately includes non-whites. This is only a change of emphasis, but in the context an extremely telling one in its impact on popular world opinion. It has been and continues to be, brilliantly exploited by the ANC to the accompaniment of incessantly televised scenes of violence. None of this changes the basic fact that the message being transmitted is false. Continued unrest in South Africa is not intended to promote peaceful reform. It is intended to persuade moderate white opinion that there is no future in it. Once that happens, Mr. Botha loses his political credibility and the cause of peaceful progress is lost, perhaps only for generations, perhaps, in a sense, for ever. The importance to us is that Australian foreign policy should be founded on fact, not on propaganda.
STATUS OF WESTERN POLICY
I am of the opinion therefore that the muddled variety of measures which Western governments have in varying degree taken against South Africa in recent times have had little, if anything, to do with events in that country except by way of indirectly encouraging those bodies which, unlike Archbishop Tutu, have nothing to lose by civil violence, to resort to it. But even this is a far cry from the moral status claimed for these measures. The encouragement has been by way of convincing the instigators of violence that, yet again, the West will prove divided and irresolute in the face of real trouble. Their assessment has proved to a disquieting extent to be accurate.
Not wholly so, it is true. The unexpected French support for anti-apartheid measures was based on a hasty calculation of domestic political interests and has probably misfired. Western Europe in general is distinctly lukewarm, Mrs. Thatcher clearly has no illusions and President Reagan has consistently been more clearsighted and resolute than anyone else in seeking to counter the politics of brutally exploited pathos. Nevertheless the propaganda impact on Western popular opinion of black riots, albeit inspired by other blacks, has been enough to persuade a number of Western governments that there are votes in it. I believe this is a miscalculation, except possibly to some extent in the USA, where black versus white racial issues are more than usually interwoven with domestic history, and accordingly more politically explosive, than in other Western countries.
But however that may be, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that any Western election in the foreseeable future is going to turn on any South African question, even apartheid. In Australia in particular it can do so only if for some eccentric reason either side of politics insists on pushing it to centre stage. In that event I should think it would be a sure loser as an issue, for it would be wide open to the charge that it was being raised as a red herring designed to distract attention from old reliables like taxation, unemployment and trade unions. Hence I return to two central features of my argument: that no significant domestic political consideration prevents the Australian Government from formulating and resolutely implementing a South Africa policy rationally related to Australia's national self-interest; and that at present we do not have one.
NEW DEPARTURE
Returning in conclusion to what the policy should be, one has first to recognise that we have gone so far out on a rhetorical limb in the wrong direction that no sudden and obvious change of course is possible. Indeed, for the reason I mentioned earlier, that the present Australian Government has placed its credibility on the issue in the hands of the South African Government, in the sense that unless the latter does something that can be represented as a substantial concession on apartheid, the former has no room for public manoeuvre, it may well be that any change of policy will have to await a change of government. In saying that, I am not making any assumptions about Mr. Howard. I am saying only that a change of government would provide the most realistic opportunity for a substantial, as opposed to cosmetic, change of policy.
As to a new departure, on a small scale I should like to see all attempts to confuse sporting contacts with issues of high policy discontinued immediately. If that means a barrage of threats by the Third World to boycott sporting events in which we participate, so be it. Apart from anything else, I have little doubt that the sheer commercial pull of the Western world will dissipate that particular cloud of hot air very rapidly. So for goodness sake let us get this particular non-issue out of our hair. A decision to re-open sporting contact with South Africa would not only lift an unproductive, unfair and distasteful burden from a selection of Australians as a domestic matter: it would also be a small, but useful, gesture for the South African Government to utilise against its own right wing.
Also on the small scale, pettifogging impediments to normal grass roots contact between the two countries, like restricted landing rights here, forbidding Qantas to fly there, and whatever else is in that category, including arbitrarily refusing visas to South African politicians, should be discontinued at once as serving absolutely no sensible purpose. Particularly on the visa point they operate as a form of censorship in Australia itself. I for one strongly object to being told that I am not allowed to hear both sides of an argument, especially on a topic of such importance to Australia as relations with South Africa.
On the wider spectrum, I should like to see the progressive restoration of normal trading, scientific and cultural relations with South Africa and the establishment of military co-operation between the two countries on a substantial scale, particularly in the Indian Ocean. Maybe it exists already, but if so, I have not heard of it. If we can co-operate for peaceful purposes by formal treaty in Antarctica, I can see no reason why co-operation for defence purposes should be out of place nearer home.
If South Africa proves unable to resolve its very serious problems of race relations, in the sense that its international commercial credit-worthiness continues to be impaired by domestic violence, and its economy to be overstrained by a constant state of quasi-readiness for ground war, so be it. That would be South Africa's problem. If under these circumstances Australia were to benefit from South Africa's misfortunes, as by an intake of skilled migrants or diversion of trade and investment, without even trying, it could perhaps be seen as a reward, not for problematical virtue, but for common sense and not meddling.
We are faced, I think, in the present situation with a clear choice between working towards a South Africa policy which is in the best interests of Australia and continuing with one which, if it can be called a policy at all, certainly is not. I have been arguing the case that we should do the former, which is after all hardly a radical conclusion.
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