United States policy toward Zambia and southern Africa: From Eisenhower to Reagan (Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan)

This study argues that in its global dealings, the American foreign policy establishment socially constructs the world in form of an international hierarchy in which states are treated differently according to their position on the hierarchy. The thesis also argues that in the process, this hierarchization produces a systematic ignoring and concomitant narrowing of the attentive field of policy makers so that issues become defined in certain pre-set ways. In this way, the socially constructed hierarchy influences policy decisions by defining the range of available policy options open to policy makers. The hierarchy is generally culturally defined, although other factors such as a nation's strategic importance, economic importance to the U.S. economy, and geographical location all have bearing on how the country is perceived in terms of importance or significance for ‘American interests’.; Within this context of a socially constructed international hierarchy, American policy toward African countries has persistently and consistently been shaped by a discourse of Anglo-Saxon superiority which not only ‘actively construct the reality’ upon which foreign policy is based, but also effectively exclude other policy options from consideration. This discourse in turn has been based on and articulated in representational practices which have socially constructed Zambia and other independent African countries in southern Africa as “inferior and insignificant others”. The study therefore finds that as a result of the discourse of Anglo-Saxon and African inferiority, Zambia was discursively constructed as both inferior and insignificant to U.S. interests in southern Africa, although the fact that the country contained sizable American private investment interests and its geo-political position during momentous changes in the region suggests that possibilities existed for Zambia to play an important role in the unfolding developments.; The dissertation further argues that US diplomatic historians have failed to seriously grapple with the complex and critical issue of representational practices in international relations and how these in turn shape and circumscribe policy decisions. The study therefore argues that more than anything else, representational practices as reflected in western imperial discourse have been fundamental in defining and shaping the nature of U.S. policies towards Africa and the ‘third world’ in general. In this regard the dissertation calls for increasing awareness and acknowledgment of the fact that historians need to move beyond their disciplinary confines and adopt interdisciplinary approaches that shed light on the complex factors that contribute to the shaping of American foreign policy.