Twenty Years on, It's All Academic: Progressive South African Scholars and Moral Foreign Policy After Apartheid

Abstract

This fortieth anniversary edition of Politikon is an opportune moment to examine one of the abiding themes of South African foreign policy since the end of apartheid, that of the tension between moral foreign policy and state interests. This article, situated within the literature on norm diffusion and norm localisation, seeks to examine the influence of South African leftist academics and the establishment of the ‘moral’ route in South African foreign policy after the ending of apartheid in 1994. It is suggested that the rise of an epistemic community, along with the liberation struggle history of the African National Congress (ANC), facilitated the internalisation of certain global human rights norms, but it is less clear the extent to which these norms were inhibited from becoming ‘settled’ norms or solidified in the wake of national liberation in South Africa. Many commentators have questioned the ‘loss of moral compass’ of South Africa's foreign policy after Mandela. This article seeks to analyse which norms academics were able to build, and how these norms encountered domestic and international opposition in the process of their becoming entrenched. This will go some way to resolving the puzzle of South Africa's ‘switch’ from principled state to pragmatic actor that has accompanied the country's profile in recent years.