The Foreign Policy of the Republic of Zaire

Abstract

In many ways, dependency has been the keystone of Zairian foreign policy since independence. Domestic preoccupations—political or economic stability, legitimacy or sheet regime survival—as perceived and interpreted by an oligarchic elite, rather than any ideological premise or any projection of Zaire's role in a global or regional context, have been the only consistent and predictable determinants of Zairian foreign policy. The successive regimes have seldom been able to fully control their domestic environment or even to insulate it from external manipulations. Within a narrowly circumscribed set of options, however, Zairian foreign policy—especially under Mobutu—has demonstrated considerable dexterity at playing off one patron against another, and thus at limiting some of the potentially adverse consequences of the country's lack of a solid power base.