Beyond Realism: How the Global South Can Shape a More Moral Internationalism

Henry Kissinger, the icon of “realism,” passed away in late 2023.

Kissinger had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the 1970s for helping to negotiate a ceasefire in Vietnam, a war he both helped escalate and then end. Kissinger’s approach was in keeping with the dominant global political culture which still prevails. The “realism” Kissinger championed is a fancy diplomatic word for explaining why we need to accept war and injustice as part of the management of relations between countries.

Kissinger and those who thought like him supported the idea that the powerful in the world had to use force to shape the world according to their interests. He supported wars, irrespective of whether they were lawful, as long as they achieved some political objective. Kissinger was a leading advocate for the United States not to be a party to the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, as he did not feel that the U.S. needed to be accountable for its actions in the international arena.

Kissinger was just a very eloquent proponent of a centuries old culture that celebrates violence and warfare. We need to refocus the locus of international relations on values that prioritize the dignity and equality of all people.

Humanity’s Competing Impulses

Jonathan Schell, in his seminal book The Unconquerable World, writes about two competing impulses in humanity: the impulse for war and plunder and the opposing impulse for peace and serenity.

He cites the poetry of Dryden, who glorified the wars of the Roman Empire through his words, “Of Arms and the Man I Sing.” This edified a martial tradition and indeed a martial system, where at best, people and societies stood up for principles using force, but where generally it exemplified plunder, exploitation, and massacres.

The martial tradition is further edified through forms of popular culture. This includes film and TV shows that portray those who’ve been engaged in warfare in foreign lands as heroes, irrespective of the nature of the particular conflicts.

In the U.S. for example, those who did the most tours in Afghanistan, Iraq, or any of the many wars that the U.S. has been involved in over the last few decades are regarded as among the ultimate heroes and patriots. There is scant attention paid to the reasons for those wars, whether they could have been avoided, whether they were lawful, and the destruction to people and critical infrastructure.

Perhaps the most cynical portrayal of this dominant culture is the Marvel superhero named Sabra, who celebrates the murderous skills of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, and seeks to make the violence associated with Israel’s unlawful occupation of Palestine acceptable.

Schell also writes extensively on the opposing tradition, which is centered around peace, human rights, and cooperative power, as opposed to destructive violence. This culture is perhaps best exemplified by Jesus Christ, who sang about the man without arms and told his follower Simon (who was about to attack a servant of the High Priests who subsequently crucified Jesus), “Put back your sword. For those who live by the sword, shall die by the sword.” Another notable proponent of this culture would be Mahatma Ghandi and his philosophy of Satyagraha.

Sadly, as we are witnessing in Palestine, the Augustan tradition that sanctions and glorifies violence, plunder, and exploitation is dominant and has subdued the tradition discouraging violence. Humanity has not learnt lessons from the past. By now we should have learnt over the centuries — whether during the Napoleonic Wars, the two World Wars, or colonialism (which includes racism, slavery, and occupation) — that the use of force lays the basis for hatred that will only ensure forever wars. It is indeed an indictment on humanity that the last three decades have been described as the most peaceful in human history.

How can we mobilise support for a human tradition of peace that is centred on justice and equality? Or are we wedded to the Clausewitzian ethos that “war is politics by other means”? In fact, Clausewitz wrote that the perfect war was one without friction where one’s enemy is completely subdued. These “frictions” included politics, which Clausewitz argued tended to moderate the scale and intensity of wars. The horrors of the World Wars, especially World War II, led the United Nations to add in some more frictions — that is, international law, including international humanitarian law.

The Martial Legacy of Colonialism

We may no longer have philosophers to guide us to peace, but we do have the frictions that we have developed to determine when wars can be waged lawfully (jus ad bellum) and how to conduct ourselves during war (jus en bellum).

Recently Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was warmly welcomed on Capitol Hill in the United States. This is despite a request by the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his Defense Minister for crimes against humanity. Netanyahu’s welcome by public representatives on the Hill and in other so-called “responsible states” that profess to respect international law and human rights has created a significant crisis in international governance. Is this disregard of norms and laws because Palestinians are the victims, and Israel the perpetrator?

These are the same norms and laws that were supposed to frame the recent discussions at the Peace Summit on Ukraine. South Africa helped shape those agreements since the so-called “Ukraine Peace Formula” talks began in Copenhagen. These values that are centered on human rights and international legal norms were negotiated and agreed to at the G20 in New Delhi, India in September 2023. They included explicit prohibitions on the annexation and acquisition of land through the use of force. Western countries supported this at the time, as they largely negotiated in the context of the Russia/Ukraine war.

Not surprisingly, following the events in Palestine after October 7, 2023, the Western diplomatic default position was restored. That is, that these laws and norms do not apply to Israel or any actors that are deemed to be part of the West’s sphere of influence. Diplomats from countries of the South have long pushed back against the double standards in the implementation of international norms and laws. The most recent differential approach taken by the West, in which they have been outraged by the military onslaught on Ukraine but far less so about the genocide underway in Palestine, has been so crude that it has the potential to completely dismantle the international legal order.

At the root of this differential approach to international legal norms is the global martial culture that is in lock-step with the political traditions of former colonial powers. This was discussed by the South African legal team at the ICJ hearings in the Hague.

Earlier in May, Vaughn Lowe KC, acting on behalf of the South African government at the ICJ, told the court the following: 

“We have heard expressions of outrage that anyone could accuse Israel of acting in this way. We have heard sober assurances that Israel was doing and would do everything in its power to avoid civilian deaths as it exercised its claimed right of self-defense. We have heard boasts that Israel’s army is the most moral army in history. We have heard flat denials that there is famine in Gaza. For months people, particularly in the West, have appeared unwilling to accept that the accusations are true. How could people who look like us and sound like us possibly engage in anything like genocide?”

The answer to the question we posed was offered to the Court as part of pleadings by Ambassador Vusi Madonsela:

These questions “stem from a form of amnesia and denial by former colonial powers in relation to the crimes associated with colonial violence perpetrated against indigenous peoples. This includes the denial of genocide. This denial is clearly at play in Palestine.”

This denial of atrocities by Israel, and the tacit condemnation of the horrific killings of Palestinians, has led to the question: Does the West believe that Palestinian lives matter less than Israeli, American, or European lives?

By extension, it begs the question whether the ideologies of superiority that justified colonial conquests, occupations, and genocides in Africa and other parts of the world still determine which people are deserving of protection by international human rights law and the international legal framework. This is not an outlandish assertion. Recently the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court stated that in his engagement with U.S. senators and congress people, he was told that the ICC was not meant to hold the leaders of Israel accountable, as the Court was designed for Africans and others.

This institutionalised impunity for the powerful is steeped in the history of colonialism and indicates that the martial culture referred to by Schell is not only persistent but is condoned when the victims are the international law sub-alterns — that is, “non-Western” people and countries. War and international law are only invoked when the victims are “Western.”

An Alternative to Realism

This martial culture poses a danger to all of humanity. Contestation for power, influence, resources, and territory through the use of force has the potential to destroy all of humankind and the planet that sustains us. The potential use of nuclear weapons in the current wars in Europe and the Middle East cannot be ignored. There is also an increase in localised violence fuelled by the growth of narrow nationalism and ultra-nationalist politics. This, together with the resurgence of the global war system, heightens the risk of regional war and even a type of World War which will be existential in nature.

We need a reset towards a global political culture that is based on cooperation, peace, and justice, where diplomatic actions seek to build global well-being. That is, a world where the use of force is replaced by dialogue and negotiation, and where force is prohibited. This will require changes to the UN Charter. The same UN and its related institutions must be reconfigured so that it is transformed from protecting previous empires to a system that regards all people and countries equally and is geared towards being the engine for inclusive development. This will assist in dealing with the root causes of conflicts.

This vision is not new. It formed part of the foreign policy vision of the very first post-apartheid administration in South Africa. In 1994, our international relations strategic stance was centred on “progressive internationalism.” This was underpinned by a commitment to South-South cooperation and approaches to peace, security, and disarmament that were guided by a commitment to human rights. We foregrounded the issue of human rights as the experience of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and highlighted the negative impact that collusion with the Apartheid regime had on the oppressed in South Africa and on the Southern African region. This collusion took place under the guise of pragmatism and realism. Such collusion was most visible with Thatcher and Reagan’s “constructive engagement” policies in relation to the Apartheid regime.

The impact of this de facto “realism” by Western countries served to prop up the Apartheid government with disastrous consequences for black South Africans and our allies in the then front-line states. This experience compelled us to state, at least on paper, that issues of expediency and narrow economic considerations in our foreign policy would not govern a democratic South Africa. We sought to be a country that would act in solidarity with all peoples who face oppression and discrimination. This includes raising our voices in opposition to our allies when they discriminate against their own people based on issues of gender and sexuality. We continue to stridently support those still under the yolk of colonialism and occupation.

At some point, this idealism in our foreign policy stance was supplanted by an unstated “constructivist”’ approach, which was code for “realism,” that weakened our normative human rights framework and led to inconsistent actions in the international arena. Over the last five years, we have recalibrated and have reset the normative stance. This has led to some in the international community referring to South Africa as the moral superpower. Whether this label is accurate or not, the expectation to fulfil this vision is one that we need to aspire to over the next five years. However, we need many more so-called moral powers to emerge and seek to shape the trajectory, moving us from global destruction to cooperation for peace, justice, and equality.

Perhaps with other middle power countries we can work to transform the global political landscape to be peace-centered and rights driven. For South Africa, this will require us to increase our consistency in diplomatic practice to reflect this normative stance. This is not too difficult as our mandating environment supports this. The South African constitution, which outlines our national interests, was informed by our collective history of struggle against colonialism, and the denial of rights based on race, religion, gender, sex, sexual orientation and origin amongst others.

The values embedded in the South African constitution place a duty on us to aspire to become moral global citizens. This mandate provides us with a legitimate explanation to our partners from within the groupings we are active in who may have different perspectives. This values-based foreign policy stance that we are mandated to execute, given our history, can help us move away from simplistic definitions of being constructivist, realists, or idealists.