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to the United States, with the attendant possibility that it could still be used innuclear weapons later on. 346With the end of apartheid, South Africa immersed itself in a reinvigoratedinternational role. Following its marginalisation as a pariah state, the country’s imagewas rehabilitated as the transition to democracy progressed, sometimes too rapidlyfor the ANC’s purposes or preparedness. Between 1994 and 2000,South Africa … joined, rejoined, or acceded to around forty-fiveintergovernmental organizations and multilateral treaties. It alsocommitted itself heavily to the reform of the UN, the InternationalMonetary Fund, and the World Bank, and to the possibilities of South-South cooperation in the framework of the Indian Ocean Rim Associationfor Regional Cooperation and the Zone of Peace and Cooperation of theSouth Atlantic. 347The country also accepted a number of multilateral leadership responsibilities andthe hosting of a number of important international meetings. (For these, and a listof internationalist actions taken by the South African government under Mbeki, seeAppendix 5). For analysts, dual state-level and systemic influences were at play:“This wider multilateral role [was] both a function of a deep-rooted internationalistcommitment among the ruling party and a reflection of responsibilities being foistedon South Africa by high peers…”. 348Similarly, for Alden and le Pere,This acute sense of global mission, in contrast with other post-transition regimes inEastern Europe and Latin America, is the product of South Africans’ own sense ofaccomplishment in having successfully navigated the transition, coupled with theinternational expectations of its continental role, as well as liberation-movementidealism and residual solidarity politics. 349Therefore, South Africa’s internationalist posture was to some extent ‘built-in’ tothe country’s geopolitical positioning and its natural endowment of resources, along346 Ibid., 33.347 Philip Nel, Ian Taylor, Janis van der Westhuizen, South Africa’s Multilateral Diplomacyand Global Change (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001): 47-48. For a list of multilateralorganizations and treaties acceded to by South Africa between 1994 and 2000, see‘Appendix’, in Nel et al.348 Ibid., 48.349 Alden and Le Pere, “South Africa’s Post-Apartheid Foreign Policy”, 71.152