The recent growing interest in our country and abroad in economic diplomacy in Africa reminds one of this Marxist analogy with paleontology: the great potential of economic diplomacy in Africa has for too long stared us back from under our very noses.
now, all of a sudden, a lot of things are becoming clearer. Bear in mind that the very first paragraph of Henry Kissinger’s epic book, “Diplomacy”, makes this very bold and sweeping assertion: “Almost as if according to some natural law, in every century there seems to emerge a country with the power, the will, and the intellectual and moral impetus to shape the entire international system in accordance with its own values.”
There is no doubt that China is currently the country that has emerged in this new century with the power, the will, and the intellectual as well as moral impetus to shape the entire international system, even if not so much in accordance with its own China-specific values. What is it that the African continent, or a willing African country candidate for world pre-eminence, can do to offer itself, for a millennial change, to be such a game-changer to the international system?
Is there a role for economic diplomacy in Africa for such a possible African global centurion leadership role? Adam Smith once said that “little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and tolerable administration of justice . . . “
This Adam Smith theory has not been of much use to Africans because, up to now, we have failed to unlock the potential of economic diplomacy in Africa.
Africa, with the possible exception of a few of its democratic countries, has enjoyed neither peace, nor tolerable administration of justice, or easy taxes, or the highest degree of opulence. The contrary is true.
Why? It seems clear that in Africa Adam Smith has to be dethroned through economic diplomacy in Africa. But what is the meaning of economic diplomacy in Africa? Nicholas Bayne and Stephen Woolcock of the London School of Economics (LSE) say, in their “The New Economic Diplomacy”, that “in some respects economic diplomacy is like sex, easier to describe if you have practised it yourself . . . it goes much wider than foreign ministries . . . Within government, economic diplomacy is less and less the preserve of closed circles of officials.”
But Africa cannot and should not accept Bayne and Woolcock’s postulation that “economic diplomacy is concerned with international economic issues” primarily. Nor should we accept their formulation that they “take economic diplomacy to embrace the whole spectrum of measures from informal negotiation and cooperation, through soft types of regulation (such as codes of conduct), to the creation and enforcement of binding rules or regime” only.
This is a very reductionist and State-centric conceptualisation of economic diplomacy in Africa. Rather, economic diplomacy in Africa should go way beyond being concerned with international economic issues only, or being State-centric, to developing a capacity in Africans to view international and domestic developments through the prism of a triangulation of governance, social and economic cohesion and sustainability, and sustainable Statecraft.
Traditional and conventional understanding of economic diplomacy, as popularised by the London School of Economics academics, (Bayne and Woolcock), on the subject, who, apparently, are still heavily influenced by, and under the spell of, the theories of Adam Smith, consigns Africa to continuing marginalisation, subservience and dependence; because of Africa’s current weak and dependent position in the international system.
In addition, an over-emphasis on the State role, in circumstances where African States are weak and fragile, or lack integrative internal State cohesion, dynamism and self-renewal, is to trap Africa in a corner of perpetual weakness from which it can hardly escape. What is even more of a constraint is that Africa, for the most part, lacks robust, independent and developed capitalist, or even middle, classes, except in a few African countries. So the challenge to vigorously mediate and engage with traditional international economic issues is limited to, and dumbed down on, the failing and failed majority African States. What predominates in Africa are lumpen, dependent and collapsing states that lack capacity to adequately mediate and engage with the international system, and thus easily become pawns in the games, intrigues, and interests of hostile externalities. These States constantly display all the negative and destructive symptoms of rent-seeking in the globalised international market, where often might is right, and the weak are bullied into subservience.
But despite these limitations on the African States, these limitations do not prevent African states from seeking to capture and dominate the great potential of economic diplomacy in Africa.

l Isaac Mpho Mogotsi is Executive Director, Centre of Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA).This article first appeared in The Thinker magazine, October 2011 – politicsweb.co.za.

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