Challenges and Ambiguties of South Africa's Foreign Policy

30 September 2013

The Challenges and Ambiguities of South

Africa's Foreign Policy

If South Africa wants to enhance its global and regional status, it must correct a growing imbalance

between its commitments and power, argues Jean-Paul Marthoz. That means solving deep-rooted

domestic problems and outgrowing the safe nostalgia of past anti-apartheid struggles.

By Jean-Paul Marthoz for Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre (NOREF)

A new country

South Africa’s foreign policy has come a long way from the apartheid period, when the Pretoria

regime was considered an international pariah and carried out an aggressive foreign policy that was

mostly focused on protecting white minority rule in an increasingly hostile regional and international

environment.

In 1994, in a clear break with the past, President Nelson Mandela announced an ethical foreign policy

that was meant, on the one hand, to establish South Africa as a "model global citizen" and, on the

other, to leverage this new foreign policy to transform South Africa from the preserve of a racist,

unjust and authoritarian regime into a non-racial, just, prosperous and democratic nation.

The challenges have been immense. South Africa had to create a new foreign policy from scratch,

linking with dozens of countries that had boycotted the apartheid regime, joining dozens of

international organisations that had banned the country, reforming a foreign affairs bureaucracy

mainly focused on the defence of white supremacy, redefining relations with countries that had been

complicit with South Africa’s “rogue policies” and redirecting international economic relations that

had been constrained by United Nations (UN)- imposed sanctions.

Two decades later South Africa has fully reintegrated itself into the international community. It has

even taken an active role in trying to forge a new international order, in particular in Africa, where it

worked hard to establish the African Union (AU), and at the...