South Africa and Switzerland: The Jan Smuts paradox (2/2)

We continue our portrait of Jan Smuts, South African statesman, imperialist and convinced racist, who illustrates the ambivalences of the colonial world order in the quest for a global balance of peace embodied by the League of Nations and then the UN. A strange balance in our 21st-century eyes, where state racism coexists with the quest for universalism, but a hierarchical universalism, where peace and progress do not call racial discrimination into question.