If apartheid, and the transnational social movement formed in opposition to it, helped shape the international political culture of the late twentieth century, how did South Africans come to embrace this culture of constitutionalism as a means to transcend their own bitter conflicts? Although law was central to the creation and maintenance of apartheid, reliance on law and the judiciary to overcome apartheid and its legacy was by no means a logical outcome of the struggle against apartheid. The dismantling of discriminatory laws and extension of democratic rights to the majority of South Africans had become a central demand of the international community from the mid-1970s, but the notion of a justiciable constitution as a necessary part of an internationally acceptable post-apartheid order would only come much later.

Despite the obvious internationalization of the question of apartheid and the struggle against it, the dominant view of South Africa's political transition is that it was a local ‘miracle’. Accounts of participants in the negotiations and even the semi-official history of the constitution-making process now assert that there was no external role in this process. Of course this is formally correct. Unlike other processes of decolonization in Africa, there was no formal role for external parties, whether foreign states or international organizations; rather, the negotiations and constitution-making process were conducted as purely South African affairs. The problem with this ‘correct’ version of history is that it fails to acknowledge or understand that, in the post-imperial, post-colonial age, the modes of international interaction have changed.