Pragmatic internationalism: public opinion on South Africa's role in the world

ABSTRACT

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’.

KEYWORDS:

• South Africa
• foreign policy
• public opinion
• participation

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the two workshops where these findings were disseminated. We thank those who participated for their feedback as well as those who contributed to the development of the initial survey questions. A special word of thanks goes to Sanusha Naidu for her support of the project.

Notes on contributors

Janis van der Westhuizen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Stellenbosch. His research interests are comparative political economy, specifically South Africa and the Global South, and South African foreign policy. He is a member of the supervisory board of the EU-funded training network, Powers and Regions in a Multipolar Order (PRIMO).

Karen Smith is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. Between 2000 and 2010, she taught at the Universities of Stellenbosch and the Western Cape, South Africa. Her current research focuses on South Africa's foreign policy, the emerging powers, new global governance groupings like IBSA and BRICS, and Africa in International Relations theory.

Notes

1 Nel and van Nieuwkerk conducted a smaller scale study of South African foreign policy opinion in 1997, and there were also earlier public opinion polls of the ‘white’ public's foreign policy views. See, for example, Geldenhuys (1982) and van Nieuwkerk and du Pisani (1992). Commentaries on public opinion and foreign policy include Masiza (1999) and van Wyk (2012).

2 For a comprehensive overview of the period up to 1992, see Holsti (1992).

3 Walter Lippmann was a post-war journalist who believed that ordinary citizens were too busy earning a living and dealing with day-to-day challenges to be concerned with matters of foreign policy and published a critique to this effect in 1925 (Holsti 1992, 440–441). Almond's (1950) study was one of the pioneering post-World War II studies that came to a similar conclusion, based on his ‘mood theory’ which argued that ‘foreign policy attitudes among most Americans lack intellectual structure and factual content’ (69–71).

4 This is similar to what Popkin (1991) referred to as ‘low-information rationality’.

5 For a comprehensive overview of the evolution of public participation in post-apartheid South African foreign policy, see van Wyk (2012).

6 We draw this concept from Rosencrance (1986).

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge grant 03090 from the South African Foreign Policy Initiative (SAFPI) of the Open Society Foundation for South Africa for covering the costs of the survey.