South Africa’s foreign policy : 2010 overview

Abstract

For most South Africans, regardless of their interest in foreign policy, the advent of 2010 signalled a major and distinctly foreign engagement: South Africa’s hosting of the FIFA1 World Cup. This much anticipated event, hosted for the first time on the African continent, induced a frenzy of infrastructural projects, security arrangements and reorganisation of other national priorities. The imperious presence of FIFA officials in the country during the preparation for and staging of the World Cup irked many observers, both domestic and foreign, and fed into a simmering International Relations (IR) debate on the behaviour of powerful nonstate actors. The increasing ability and even inclination of such actors to encroach on state sovereignty in pursuit of commercial gain has generated concern, particularly in the developing world. As Jakkie Cilliers points out, FIFA commands governments to spend billions of dollars on sport infrastructure ‘literally irrespective of local development needs’ while the net beneficiary of all this expenditure is FIFA itself.2 In South Africa’s case, this concern is underlined by the fact that the 2010 World Cup turned out to be FIFA’s most profitable ever.