dan, there's a fourth hypotheses -- south african leaders, like the leaders of a lot of former colonies are hyper-sensitive about interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states. this is a norm that states with these kinds of historical experiences and memories are particularly prone to support. this could be pretty easy to test in both large N and small N fashion.

minor aside...IR theory does itself a disservice to assume that realpolitik practice is not rooted in ideas. there's no logical reason to assume that there are things called 'interests' that are ontologically distinct from things called 'ideas'. do you think that the process by which south africa leaders try to figure out whether it is better to support or oppose zimbabwe while cultivating ties with china is somehow 'idea-less'?.... but this is a whole other topic....

test

May be too late for this; feels a bit like selecting on the dependent variable at this point.

It's an interesting version of realpolitik that accepts the collapse of a neighboring state's economy, and a steady flow of refugees from that state, to help preserve the neighbor's regime.

The best one can say of Robert Mugabe's administration in Zimbabwe from the standpoint of South African interests is that it's been a nuisance. More realistically it's been a substantial inconvenience to South Africa's people and economy -- just not to Mbeki and the ANC, to whom Mugabe represents a fellow African big man. There are ways in which the relationship resembles the one Ian Smith and the white minority government of Rhodesia had with the apartheid government up until 1980, a key difference being that the Afrikaners used the Rhodesians as much as Smith's government relied on the South Africans. Mbeki by contrast appears not to get much more from his steadfast support of the Zimbabwean strongman than a personal warm feeling of solidarity.

I wonder that neither Wines nor Dan seem to have considered the ways in which the international position of the old apartheid government may have influenced Mbeki's outlook. Like the apartheid regime, the South African government now supports maintenance of the political status quo in the region -- especially in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe -- seeing critics of neighboring regimes as essentially hostile to itself. For the apartheid government this policy reflected reality; the replacement of friendly colonial and (in Rhodesia's case) white minority governments represented steps toward the complete isolation of South Africa.

Regional realities have changed, but Mbeki and the people working for him may just not know how to change with them. So far from being hostile the West is almost desperate for South Africa to succeed; so far from needing to support neighboring regimes to fend off isolation, South Africa is now left to help foot the bill for the Zimbabwean government's failures -- from which it derives no benefit at all. Realpolitik would point South Africa toward acting like what it is, a regional superpower. Mugabe should be looking south as a supplicant, not a comrade. But inertia and sentiment appear to be greater influences on the Mbeki government's regional policy than calculation.

Incidentally, if this view is correct, it follows that South Africa's government probably does not have well-developed views as to how sympathetic it should be toward international issues outside the region -- say, toward Iran's nuclear program. South African officials may incline toward irritating the American and European governments, but that doesn't mean South Africa has good reason to commit itself to supporting Iran, or Sudan or even China just because the government of one of these countries chooses to quarrel with the West for some reason. Logically a South African government might well choose to steer an independent course if that reflects its own interests -- but wanting to do that and knowing how are not the same thing.

I've been at conferences where political scientists write on precisely this topic, usually with an argument about identity in southern Africa. So not as novel as Dan thinks. Sorry :-).

Mbeki has domestic problems to worry about. A substantial proportion of SA's lower classes still view Mugabe as a revolutionary hero and in recent years pressure has been building to have SA implement measures, especially expropriation, similar to those instituted by Mugabe in Zim. Add to this the fact that Mugabe's removal is not likely to improve the situation in Zim. Many of the old man's associates in ZANU-PF are likely to be just as bad as he is. And, any unilateral action by Mbeki's regime would be opposed by other leaders in the region. There are thus a lot of reasons for inaction, and little other than moral protestations weighing in favor of action.

I suggest that reading Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and/or VS Naipaul's A Bend in the River would get everybody here much much further in understanding this 'paradox'.

D B Light suggests another possible interpretation, one that I have resisted. This is that Mbeki and the ANC have supported Mugabe because they, or at least some of them, are considering emulating his internal policies in South Africa.

The inmplications of this scenario are not pleasant to contemplate, but I suppose one must allow for the possibility that South Africa's foreign policy is stronly influenced by its domestic politics (it would hardly be the only country of which this is true). I would have thought that Mugabe's conversion of Zimbabwe from a country that exported food to one that sends refugees to South Africa would have made Mbeki's support for the regime in Harare unpopular. However, this view may assume too much, in terms of the ANC's own confidence in its hold on power. To the extent the ANC is dependent on the support of people who only grudgingly accepted the replacement of the white minority government with a black-dominated, but democratic regime, its leaders might feel compelled to avoid steps that might risk inflaming passions.

The immediate result is that South Africa's policy toward Zimbabwe looks as if it is being made in Harare. But governments preoccupied with domestic politics tend not to be so concerned with how their actions look abroad (not that I have any others in mind or anything). Dan speaks of South Africa as a "normal country" by way of contrasting it to the moral exemplar seen by some in the West, and I've suggested that its leaders may not have had enough experience to design a foreign policy motivated by their country's clearly identified interests rather than driven by inertia and sentiment. But Light's suggestion implies that Mbeki's government, for domestic reasons, may simply not feel it has much room to maneuver with respect to Zimbabwe. Or it could imply something much worse, for South Africa's own future.

Did not the ANC have the support of various communist countries and an alliance with the SACP? Weren't there also racialist African ideas floating about at the time? Wasn't it also the case that Thabo Mbeki's father was a member of both the ANC and the SACP and Mbeki himself received military training in the USSR? Perhaps Mbeki and many in the ANC consider Zimbabwe and Myanmar genuinely progressive regimes: they are, after all, revolutionary and left.

I think the left connection by itself is enough to explain things. Hardly anything is as predictable as the left supporting tyranny and tolerating widespread death and misery. The idea that SA would be "liberal" just because they were the beneficiaries of liberal societies is silly, quite as silly as the idea that blacks can't be racist because they were the victims of racism. People just aren't like that.

Why not all being a part of the truth. I think the main reason is that "Human Rights" is a Western idea conception, and it was only a tool for ANC and many in SA Anti-apartheid movement. There are a lot of abuse reports inside ANC and other groups.