ABSTRACT
The Afrikaner National Party that took office in that year nationalized and codified existing laws into the single system of apartheid, one of the most extensive forms of segregation the world has ever seen. South Africa’s decision to reinforce its system of racial discrimination directly challenged broader global trends encouraging greater domestic equality and international parity between nations. As decolonization and the civil rights movement pushed Europeans and Americans to address problems of segregation and racial inequality at home, they expected their allies to follow suit in their own countries. Beginning in the 1950s, grassroots allies placed democratic pressures on their governments to support desegregation and self-determination abroad. The Swedish historian Hakan Thorn has referred to the development of this transnational consensus as the first manifestation of a global civil society, in which revolutionaries, activist networks, multinational corporations, and states negotiate in a common political arena.
