Anger and Distress about Invasions into Our Sovereignty

The African National Congress (ANC) segment of the checkered government of the broken South African state is nowadays often infuriated by impertinent invasions into “our sovereignty” – most recently in response to President Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States (US) is withdrawing from G20 proceedings while the South African government holds the G20 “presidency”.

In practical terms, the sovereignty of the South African state that is at stake here is associated with the rights-based power of the government to do as it desires, free from coercion, pressure, or interference from internal and external sources.

The ANC, having enjoyed the status of one-party domination and, since the middle of 2024, still in the driving seat of the present multiparty government, has benefitted from this “sovereignty” for three decades.

Good reason to be concerned

Surely the ANC has reason to be upset. Local political actors have engaged prominently in foreign relations, thus entering the space which specifically the ANC has meticulously protected as its sovereign turf and which state governments have for centuries also nursed as their exclusive terrain.

The actors trespassing the foreign relations terrain can count among their ranks parties the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Freedom Front Plus (FF+), and civil organisations such as the Solidarity Movement and AfriForum who are prominently engaging foreign governments such as that of the United States and various others as well as substate governments and a variety of actors operating in the civic, economic, as well as political terrain.

The ANC has reason to be even more upset about outside pressures. Foreign governments put pressure on the ANC – sometimes direct like the US and other times more subtle, which is the European Union’s preferred method – to try encourage the party to change its internal policies (in relation to questions such as expropriation without compensation, rural safely, the murderous Kill the Boer slogan, the ANC’s oligarchal project under the cloak of broad-based black economic empowerment, and so on) and its external policies (inordinately close relations with BRICS, especially China and its problematic orientation regarding Israel, Hamas, and Iran).

If the government and the ANC respond positively to the concerns of the US, the South African population is due to gain, but if the party remains recalcitrant, appealing to its “sovereignty,” and persisting with its follies, it will be at the expense of the South African populace.

Legal basis

Not only has the ANC reason to be upset about encroachment onto the sovereignty of the government, it may even claim a solid legal basis for its unhappiness because sovereignty – rule-based international relations as the idealist saying goes – is regarded as the quintessence of states (and state governments on behalf of states) in contrast to substate entities (provinces or municipalities).

Moreover, the august Charter of the United Nations (UN) – purports to vest sovereignty in states with impregnable authority. Accordingly, article 2(1) of the Charter provides that the UN is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its member states, thus also outlawing intervention of any state into the affairs of any other state.

Article 2(7) extends this prohibition by also forbidding the UN itself to interfere in the domestic jurisdiction of any state.

Idealist abstractions versus tumultuous reality

These legal principles on sovereignty are, however, hardly more than abstractions, far distanced from the realities of domestic political dynamics and the tumults of international politics, including interstate relations. In that rumbustious reality, often completely disconnected from starry-eyed musings of rule-based international relations and the norm formulations of “supreme constitutions”, there is no sovereignty – no governments exercising sovereign powers on behalf of their state.

In real life, governments are restricted: they can only act freely to the extent that their relative power allows. If they are strong, their relative freedom of action is broad and might even be reminiscent of something like sovereignty. But if they are weak, their freedom of action dwindles in accordance with the degree of said weakness, thus rendering their supposed sovereignty nothing more than empty symbolism. This weakness originates from many sources, including from the folly and mistakes of governments themselves.

The growing weakness of the South African state and government

This is precisely what has befallen South Africa’s government. In the first years after assuming the reins of government in 1994, the ANC was powerful. It enjoyed the huge benefit of having inherited a smoothly functioning advanced state. It commanded large-scale domestic support and basked in unprecedented global accolades as the formidable global moral superpower, to quote a recent cheery Ebrahim Rasool. The South African state was strong in all respects.

Its economy grew, it was militarily capable, the public service and the police were still formidable, and the ANC at the time seemed to pursue a balanced and responsible foreign policy. The ANC’s heroic struggle, high moral standing, and saintly status of former president Nelson Mandela veiled ominous signs, such as its commitment to the totalitarian “national democratic revolution.”

Alas, since it took power in the mid-1990s, a singular concoction of rashness, imprudence, and arrogance has sent the ANC and the South African state with it inexorably on a path of decline and destruction. In essence, the ANC is a neo-primitivist actor. Hence, it fails to grasp that advanced societies are based on the trilogy of continued capital formation, sustained maintenance, and professional specialisation.

It also shows a dire lack of understanding of the tenets of basic public office-bearing.

Thus, domestically, it has run the country aground, creating a self-serving oligarchy and harming the populace in general and often minorities – Afrikaners and English-speakers – and private business in particular.

Thus, it caused the deterioration of the country’s erstwhile advanced infrastructure; broke down the public service, police and the military; and vested the South African state with its newfound distinguishing features of systemic corruption, malgovernance, organised crime, and a consequently struggling populace.

In its foreign policy, it eagerly tested ever new boundaries of ideologically inspired folly. Amongst other things, it antagonises the United States; cultivates inordinate cozy ties with Iran; takes sides against Israel to the detriment of the South African state in relation to issues with no domestic benefit; acts arrogantly towards various African states (and has engendered open animosity with some, most notably Rwanda); and shows a seemingly irresistible attraction to pariahs, lately again by engaging with some of the world’s foremost failures in the so-called Hague Group pursuing extremist leftist ideological agendas.

Squandered sovereignty

In this way, the ANC has squandered the sovereignty it claims on behalf of the South African state. Today, all that remains of South African sovereignty is empty symbolism devoid of the indispensable foundation of a competent state with a government of integrity.

Hence, regarding ANC-South Africa, the provisions of the UN Charter on sovereignty are hardly of any consequence. They lack the indispensable factual basis for genuine legal norms, without which law cannot exist, and therefore they evaporate into pure symbolism. The norms elapse into mere empty formulations, failing to meet the standard for actual law.

What has remained of South Africa’s sovereignty is but the ANC’s macabre pipedream of a permanent seat for ANC-South Africa in the UN Security Council and of President Ramaphosa convincing himself that membership of BRICS vests his government with gravitas despite the embarrassing failures of the South African state.

Sovereignty is a bad idea

The last word about sovereignty is that it is, moreover, an inherently unsound and dangerous idea because unrestrained governmental power – the very essence of sovereignty – should never be embraced. It is inconsistent with the very idea of constitutionalism, which is premised on the dispersal of power and authority and comprehensive checks and balances. Sovereignty affirms absolute power.

Constitutionalism, by contrast, affirms the opposite: restriction, containment, and even healthy frustration of power. The former is to be withstood, and the latter affirmed and advocated. Hence, the loss of sovereignty should as a matter of principle not be mourned; on the contrary, it is to be welcomed and encouraged. This includes the loss of sovereignty that is now so deeply distressing to the ANC.