The New South Africa in the New World Order: Beyond the double whammy

Abstract

The rapid pace and gargantuan scale of global and regional change means that those who choose to speculate about South Africa's future international prospects are presently subject to a 'double whammy'. On the one hand, they are compelled to assess the consequences for South Africa of the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism; on the other, they need to assess the causes, depth and likely outcomes of the internal changes generated by the new political era inaugurated on 2 February 1990. This saw President De Klerk announcing the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC), the South Africa Communist Party (SACP), the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and other popular movements, and setting the country on the road towards an uncertain, post-apartheid future. The implications of either transformation, taken alone, are themselves subject to enormous controversy and debate; taken together, they plunge the unfortunate analyst into the midst of an earthquake, struggling to negotiate a route towards a safe destination when both walls and floor are moving, and when the ceiling is likely to collapse at any moment. It is scarcely surprising, then, that a number of those who have ventured to discern potentialities for post-apartheid South Africa within a new international division of power have attempted to simplify their task by in effect stabilising one of the major variables. In short, because communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has indisputably gone, leaving behind it an enormously fluid, more disordered, and crucially, a more unpredictable global environment, the nature of the post-apartheid South African state is assumed. In other words, apparently because it is still widely deemed impolite to suggest otherwise, the body of literature to which this article is referring tends to characterise the 'new South Africa' (NSA)-that is, a South Africa which emerges in the early 1990s with a government elected by the majority of its citizens-as 'democratic' and/or 'stable'. It is then from this basis that analyses are rendered concerning South Africa's future relations with the United States, the European Union (EU), the African continent, different regional organisations (notably the Southern African Development Community, SADC) and so on, as well as treatments concerning the various external economic, moral, security and other challenges which the country faces. The purpose of this article is not to provide its own assessment of South Africa's prospects in the changing global order. Instead, the intention is to