Sovereignty and the Southern African Development Community

I. INTRODUCTION In late August 2003, members of the fourteen-nation Southern African Development Community ("SADC") convened in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania for the group's annual summit.1 The two-day conference opened with a standing ovation in honor of embattled Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who faces massive poverty, inflation, unemployment, and political opposition in his own country, as well as widespread condemnation from the West.2 SADC leaders urged Western nations to lift sanctions on Zimbabwe while declining to address Mugabe's numerous human rights abuses.3 Recognizing that the US and the EU have refused to fund projects in which Zimbabwe is involved, Tanzanian Foreign Minister Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete boldly stated, "We are 14 countries in SADC. The EU can either fund us as a group or keep its financial aid."4 These initial declarations signaled that the SADC, a body founded primarily to achieve economic integration in Southern Africa, was expanding its role in the international political arena. By the end of the summit, the SADC had gone one step further, casting its power in explicitly military terms. On August 26, 2003, the SADC unanimously endorsed a Mutual Defense Pact ("MDP") that gives each member nation the right to intervene in armed attacks of the other member nations. The goal of the MDP is to give the SADC the ability to quell the seemingly endless stream of invasions, civil wars, and turf battles that have become a fact of life in Southern Africa in the late-twentieth century. In moving closer to regional security integration, the SADC countries have explicitly acknowledged their interconnectedness: a security threat to one country can affect the entire subcontinent. According to Benjamin Mkapa, SADC chairperson and Tanzania's president, "If your neighbour is unstable, you will not be stable yourself."5 The MDP represents not only a divergence from the economic-focused policies of the SADC's past, but also a significant shift away from the region's traditional respect for sovereignty. Not far removed from colonial rule, the SADC nations maintain a fierce pride in their independence. They are loath to give up any of the autonomy that often took years of bitter fighting to attain. Of course, this commitment to sovereignty has evolved "in the context of immense political solidarity-Pan Africanism-that was generated and reinforced by the struggle against white settler colonialism and apartheid."6 Yet despite Pan Africanism and the SADC's stated objective to "evolve common political values, systems and institutions,"7 commentators have long regarded the region's desire to preserve sovereignty as a fixed component of its political climate and an intractable barrier to substantive regional integration. In 2001, two scholars went so far as to say that even though most of the SADC countries' economies are in poor shape, "not even the least viable state in the region is willing to contemplate the loss of sovereignty." Given all this, the resolutions and rhetoric employed at the summit, suggesting a gracious sacrifice of state sovereignty for the greater good of the region, are especially striking. This Development will examine the provisions of the SADC's Mutual Defense Pact, analyze the extent to which it charts a new course for the organization and affects the SADC's traditional commitment to state sovereignty, and finally, evaluate whether the pact represents a positive, negative, or negligible change. Section II will place the pact within the context of the history and past efforts of the SADC. Section III will consider the pact itself, paying special attention to whether its provisions add up to any cohesive message. Section IV will discuss whether the pact is a move in the right direction for Southern Africa. II. THE SADC's TROUBLED PAST AND ITS DESIRED FUTURE The precursor to the SADC, the Southern African Development Coordination Conference ("SADCC"), was established in 1980 by nine member countries. …