A Middle Power Paradox? South African Diplomacy in the Post-apartheid Era
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Academic and media discourse on the conduct of South Africa's foreign relations has acquired an almost schizophrenic character in the post-1994 period. On one level, there has been fulsome praise for the country's successful reintegration with the international mainstream. On a second level, however, the new government has been criticized for its inability to articulate a coherent foreign policy agenda, to prioritize its various international relationships, and for its general failure to bring a sense of order, purpose and direction to a chaotic foreign policy environment. This article, whilst recognizing many of the deficiencies in both foreign policy formulation and implementation in the post-apartheid period, seeks to argue that the new South Africa is - albeit rather haphazardly - in the process of creating a distinctive and constructive niche for itself in global affairs. This is the attempt to join the ranks of the so-called middle powers - states seeking to be 'good international citizens' primarily through mediating initiatives and brokering deals - thereby securing many of the benefits which have traditionally flowed to states with the capacity to assume such an international posture. The article will attempt to locate the study of South Africa's middle power attributes, and its expectations of and attitudes towards middle power status, within the context of the wider theoretical literature on the subject. It will then progress, via the use of three case studies at both the global and regional level, to discuss South African attempts to execute this particular diplomatic option. The article concludes with a discussion of the problems South Africa is likely to encounter as it develops this option. Here attention will be given to the paradox of South Africa's middle power status. This is that the country has been more successful in its attempt to position itself as a good international citizen on issues with a genuinely global resonance as opposed to those issues addressed within the regional and sub-regional contexts where Pretoria might have been expected to excel. This paradox has potentially serious implications for South Africa's ability to emulate the Canadian and Australian experiences and to stay the course as a truly credible and effective middle power into the 21st century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".