Suchergebnisse

Over the past 20 years of democracy, there has been a strategic reorientation of South Africa's trade policy. In the early 1990s, the post-apartheid state undertook extensive tariff reform, driven by its multilateral and regional commitments, as well as unilateral liberalisation consistent with the austere macro-economic agenda of the time. By the second decade of democracy, an institutionalised industrial policy designed to strengthen and diversify South Africa's productive capabilities had come to determine and shape South Africa's external trade agenda and negotiations. This more strategic trade policy orientation has required the preservation and expansion of policy space in bilateral, regional and multilateral agreements, and more novel approaches to South-South economic cooperation. There was also a fundamental shift in thinking on regional integration away from a conventional market-led model premised on the European Union's experience, to a 'developmental integration' approach that concurrently prioritises market integration, infrastructure development and structural economic transformation. This article critically reviews how South Africa's trade policy and negotiating agenda have been recalibrated as instruments of industrial policy over the two post-apartheid decades. The article concludes with some observations about the future direction of South Africa's trade agenda during the third decade of democracy.

With abundant resources and growing markets, the African continent is once again at the centre of a new 'great game of courtship' between the established and rising powers. However, compared with previous decades, African countries are no longer passive players in international relations. This article explores Africa's recent negotiating behaviour in relation to a selected set of actors that animate the current shifting global economic order: rising powers, established powers and international organizations. Despite potential sources of bargaining leverage, most African countries (with some notable exceptions) are still reactive to the bilateral overtures of Brazil, China and India and unable to set the terms of engagement. Nonetheless, the rise of these new powers provides alternative negotiating partners (and potentially more developmental outcomes) to the established powers. By comparison, at the multilateral level the African Group has been far more active and assertive in contesting global governance in the pursuit of greater distributive justice, particularly in the climate, trade and security regimes. This has taken place largely through the adroit use of distributive bargaining and tactics, supplemented by normative-based strategies highlighting Africa's underdevelopment. The central argument of the article is that African countries require judicious negotiating strategies, improved deliberative capacities and coalitions with local/continental/global civil society and business networks in order to ameliorate their weaker bargaining power and reshape the terms of their engagement with their international partners, particularly the rising powers. (International Affairs (Oxford) / SWP)

For most of the Mandela presidency, South Africa's foreign policy was characterised by controversy, criticism, confusion and even paralysis. A spirited debate emerged in both the government and the academic and policy communities as to the appropriate approach to and the doctrinal bases (if any) of South Africa's foreign policy. Two ideologically-opposed camps, the idealist solidarists and the neo-realist free-marketeers, emerged and converged in this debate and vied to shepherd South Africa's foreign policy discourse and praxis. The emergence of this debate moreover underscored the inherent difficulties of reconciling idealism and development within the existing framework of the globalising neo-liberal world order. This article examines the core ideas, rhetoric and intellectual capital of each camp. It also highlights a number of tensions and dilemmas in South Africa's new foreign policy as revealed by the debate. In doing so, important insights are drawn as to who in South Africa spoke truth to power in the formulation and conduct of Mandela's foreign policy. (Politeia/DÜI)