Abstract
International recognition, through diplomatic ties and membership in international organizations, plays an important part in legitimating a state or its government.1 Opponents of apartheid thus sought to undermine the South African government by promoting diplomatic sanctions. Beginning as early as the late 1940s, many states broke bilateral ties and suspended Pretoria’s membership in multilateral institutions. But the National Party (NP) resisted international calls for reform. By the 1960s, South Africa had become a pariah, left out from the everyday interactions that characterize normal international “citizenship.”
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Notes
I. L. Claude, Jr., “Collective Legitimation as a Political Function of the United Nations,” International Organization 20 (1966), pp. 367–79. Claude stresses that this process of legitimation is fundamentally political, rather than legal or moral.
See A. Klotz, Norms in International Relations: The Struggle against Apartheid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), ch. 3.
J. Barratt, “South African Diplomacy at the UN,” in G. R. Berridge and A. Jennings, eds., Diplomacy at the UN (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985), p. 195;
E. Louw, The Case for South Africa, ed. H. H. H. Biermann (New York: Macfadden, 1963), p. 13.
D. Geldenhuys, Isolated States: A Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 159.
J. Barber and J. Barratt, South Africa’s Foreign Policy: The Search for Status and Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 79.
See J. D. B. Miller, “South Africa’s Departure,” Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies 1 (1961), pp. 56–74.
D. Geldenhuys and D. Venter, “Regional Cooperation in Southern Africa: A Constellation of States?” International Affairs Bulletin 3 (1979), pp. 43–5; Geldenhuys, Isolated States pp. 433–5.
J. Butler, R. I. Rotberg, and J. Adams, The Black Homelands of South Africa: The Political and Economic Development of Bophuthatswana and KwaZulu (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 31;
D. Geldenhuys, The Diplomacy of Isolation: South African Foreign Policy Making (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984), p. 24.
G. Wood and G. Mills, “The Present and Future Role of the Transkei Defence Force in a Changing South Africa,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 11 (1992), pp. 255–69.
S. Greenberg, Legitimating the Illegitimate: State, Markets and Resistance in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Greenberg focuses primarily on the labor control aspects of the Bantustan policy.
Also see H. Giliomee, “Democratization in South Africa,” Political Science Quarterly 110 (1995), p. 90. For a more quantitative assessment of the costs, see the budget allocations (such as the Department of Foreign Affairs’ “Development Cooperation Branch”) in the Report of the Controller and Auditor-General; also Geldenhuys, Isolated States pp. 435–6.
United Nations, Department of Public Information, The United Nations and Apartheid 1948–1994 (New York: United Nations, 1994), pp. 43–5.
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© 1999 Audie Klotz
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Klotz, A. (1999). Diplomatic Isolation. In: Crawford, N.C., Klotz, A. (eds) How Sanctions Work. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403915917_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403915917_10
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