The South African Crisis: The Major External Actors

Abstract

Hopes that the defeat of the Third Reich would usher in a new, ‘liberal’ international order lasted just long enough to secure the establishment of the United Nations Organisation (UNO). Its Charter envisaged a world in which not only would peace-loving countries be secured from aggression by the timely intervention of the Grand Alliance (reconstituted in the Security Council), but it would also be one made safe for constitutional development by the end of empire. Even before the Cold War substituted ‘realism’ for hope as the basis for relations between the great powers, however, South Africa had sounded a discordant note in the proceedings of the new organisation.