ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a look at the factors that have shaped South Africa's threat perception in the post-World War II era. It deals with the changes that have occurred in the state system in Southern Africa; the initial impact that the shifts, in combination with conditions and developments in South Africa and the broad global arena, had; the reduced effect of such considerations after the late 1980s; and the importance since the late 1980s of the international economic sanctions against South Africa put in place by the West in the mid-1980s. National party leaders proposed to use their control of South Africa's white-minority government to impose separation of racial groups upon the entire population of the country. The chapter concludes with a brief assessment of the prospects for continuity and change in the 1990s in the country's revised attitude toward regional hegemony.
