Intermediary Power and Global Dependency: The Case of South Africa

Utilizing data on South Africa, the author seeks to demonstrate the ambiguities and policy alternatives confronting intermediary states in the context of global politics and economics. A dependency model of international relations between industrial states and the less-developed countries is sketched. This model is founded on the linkage between the distribution of power and wealth internationally and similar distributions within states. Hence, the product is a core-periphery model that takes further note of center-fringe relationships in intrastate and interstate terms. But within the total picture are intermediary actors that serve as agents of the Core states at the same time that they seek to inflate their own influence within the system. Such an intermediary status could, conceivably, provide a center of a periphery state with the maneuverability to assert its power regionally and potentially to challenge a weakened Core state. Settler-colonial regimes, for reasons discussed herein, are inclined to search out interstices in the total system. Finally, the foreign policy behavior of the center forces in South Africa are analyzed in these terms. It is concluded that by conscious governmental policy, a symbiotic and competitive relationship between South Africa and the capitalist Core states has evolved that is transitional in character and eventually difficult to analyze in terms of who dominates whom. This, in itself, is confirmation of the existence of an important intermediary status in dependency relationships.