Ambiguity and America: South Africa and US Foreign Policy.

FOREIGN opinion of the United States; FOREIGN relations of the United States; HUMAN rights; RACE discrimination; INTERNATIONAL relations

The relationship between South Africa (as represented by the majority of South Africans) and the United States has a complex history.' The reaction in the United States to racial oppression and racial discrimination, and the manner in which it shaped the foreign policy of the United States with respect to Africa and South Africa in particular, reflects a long-standing ambivalence about the promotion of and compliance with international human rights principles. The United States has been an active supporter of the codification of international human rights norms and draws from a strong American ethos based on democracy and rights protection. The United States, for example, played a key role in establishing the United Nations, contributing to the intense debate about race and equality in the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a nonbinding aspiration. In 1943, a committee of the US Department of State produced draft articles for the United Nations that included a prohibition of discrimination on the basis of race, nationality, language, political opinion, or religious belief (Goldstone and Ray, 2004:107). The State Department's work focused on securing strong antidiscrimination language in order to guard against the type of racism expressed in the Nuremberg Laws: [The] ban on discrimination [is] fundamental because without it no person's rights are assured and those of all may be undermined…. The prohibition of discrimination on the grounds of race is intended to prevent the enactment of laws like the notorious Nuremberg laws, and similar laws in other countries, discriminating against "non-Aryans" (Lauren, 1983:1). Yet, the United States has always strongly qualified any commitments made to institutional arrangements that would enforce such norms domestically or require national accountability to international bodies (Steiner, 2000:139). Even at the end of World War II, when democratic nations in the West wished to respond to the consequences of racist Holocaust policies, there was a fear that such a response would invite scrutiny of legal segregation policies in the United States and Australia, and racist policies in the British and Portuguese colonies. Tellingly, the same State Department committee crucial to the drafting of rights in the Universal Declaration, stated that the above provision would not interfere with segregation laws in the United States, because of "[t]he absence of guarantees or measures of enforcement" (Goldstone and Ray, 2004:107). Notwithstanding concerns about the domestic effect of international human rights instruments, which were becoming more and more important in the global community, policymakers in the United States recognized as early as 1942 that a commitment to human rights at the international level was necessary to the maintenance of international peace, and that prohibiting discrimination was an essential aspect of that commitment. This is the crux of American ambivalence in foreign policy: a desire for international law, yet a resistance for any possible affect it may have domestically. At the same time that the United States government sent mixed signals about its compliance with international human rights law, civil society in the United States agitated for the implementation of principles of racial equality. Undoubtedly, the United States has a vibrant and well-organized network of advocates for human rights.… [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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