South African Foreign Policy

Abstract

South Africa’s foreign policy is often accused of being schizophrenic. It often engages in ‘policy summersaults’, as one observer characterizes the wide fluctuations in South Africa’s foreign policy practice. This chapter argues that such conflicted nature of South Africa’s foreign policy practice is indicative of the ambivalent thread that runs through the very idea of South Africa. South Africa is both a rainbow nation and a black country, a country long held to be trekking towards Europe and simultaneously trying to re-turn to Africa. Embodied in the tropes ‘rainbow nation’ and ‘African renaissance’, two different sets of ideas about South African national identity are representative of as well as refracted onto South Africa through its foreign policy practice. The chapter analyses South Africa’s foreign policy practice through debates around South Africa’s national identity.