Browsing by Author "van der Westhuizen, Janis"

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    Pragmatic internationalism: public opinion on South Africa's role in the world
    (Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2015) van der Westhuizen, Janis; Smith, Karen
    This report of a public opinion survey on South Africa’s foreign policy did not attempt to gauge South Africans’ knowledge about specific issues in international politics, but rather their underlying attitudes, specifically their foreign policy postures. After providing a brief overview of the scholarly debates about the role of public opinion in foreign policy analysis, we contextualise the nature and methodological approach of the survey. Thereafter we organise the article according to three key themes that illuminate ‘ordinary’ South Africans’ foreign policy postures and how South Africans view their country’s international identity. These themes include, first, debates about what the purpose of our foreign policy should be; second, the country’s international role; and third, who South Africans consider to be our allies and role models. Finally, we distil possible patterns emerging from the survey into a posture that we relate to two concepts: ‘pragmatic internationalism’, and a ‘middle power role’.
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    South Africa's role in the world: A public opinion survey
    (2013-12) van der Westhuizen, Janis; Smith, Karen
    Over the last fifteen years, South African foreign policy has been subject to tumultuous twists and turns, as the immediate post-1994 ‘honeymoon period’ with its remarkable enunciation of a human rights centred foreign policy increasingly gave way to processes reflecting greater complexity. South Africa emerged as a leading spokesperson for the global South and, at the same time, increasingly had to assert its African identity. These factors, as well as the usual rough-and-tumble of realpolitik in daily diplomacy, slowly eroded the premium placed on human rights under the vanguard of the Mandela presidency. In short, South African policymakers are often hard pressed and face trenchant critiques for failing to strike a balance between material demands and normative constraints. These material demands usually entail dealing with divergent constituencies clamouring for domestic expectations of redistribution on the one hand and market-led demands on the other; whilst normative constraints involve having to seek a compromise between cosmopolitanism and pan-Africanism on the other.