Democratic South Africa and the Asian paragon: issues of foreign policy orientation

Not unlike Spain after Franco in the 1970s, post-Apartheid South Africa in the 1990s, is a state whose democracy is built on a broad based effort to manage a transformation towards constitutionalism and the open rule of law. In what is still an ongoing process towards the transformation of public life, a democratising South Africa remains a prime example of one of the most hopeful democratic orders in the Southern hemisphere. How this state, engaged in transformation at home, projects itself in its relations with other, largely less democratic states abroad, represents a test for the evolution of a foreign policy which pays heed to both economic need as well as its newly won democratic credentials. In the country's relations with Asia, the attempt to strike a balance between the two concerns, is something which points, more than anything else, to the ongoing, evolving nature of South African foreign policy