Talking the Talk of Regionalism: The Quest for International Legitimation in Southern Africa

While few previous articles have dealt with foreign policy as a source of domestic legitimation of autocratic regimes, so far the international community has not been studied as an addressee of such strategies. Of particular relevance in this regard is foreign policy in terms of regional integration. Regional organizations (ROs) may serve as a symbolic ‘regime-boosting’ strategy for domestic legitimation, but can also be used to signal legitimacy to international actors. In this paper, I therefor want to address how authoritarian regimes exploit the regional level to fend off international pressure for democratic reform. To achieve this goal, autocratic regimes tend to set up ‘virtual’ forms of regionalism – that is, ROs without supra-national competencies – that they can use discursively to frame their rule as legitimate. Based on a framing approach to legitimation, the proposed paper focuses on the case of Southern African authoritarian regimes, particularly Zimbabwe, and how they exploit their cooperation within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to try to frame their rule as legitimate. By conducting a rhetorical frame analysis of speeches, statements and reports of SADC and AU summits as well as of records of meetings with EU bodies and European donor countries, I argue that regionalism serves to boost autocratic rule in two ways: Either, ROs can be used to signal “commitment” to international norms like the rule of law, democratic governance, human rights or human security without having to undergo reforms on the domestic level, or they can be exploited to de-legitimize criticism and pressure to reform as imposition of regionally alien values. This research thus adds to both the growing literature on the “dark side” of regionalism as well as to the literature on the international dimension of legitimation in authoritarian regimes.