We've had the dotcom bubble burst and the sub-prime loan bubble burst. The rumpus around the government's refusal of a visa to the Dalai Lama should serve to burst another bubble.
I'm not particularly referring to a prevailing view that the visa refusal has punctured South Africa's international reputation, which might well be the case in certain quarters. I'm referring to something more general, more insidious: the grand illusion of the 1990s of an ideologically free, transcendent set of universal values laid down by the International Monetary Fund, Amnesty International and the Nobel Prize committee.
Let me first concede that the government's handling of the Dalai Lama invitation has been clumsy. We were told the visa was declined because we didn't want the Dalai Lama's presence in South Africa to distract world attention from 2010 soccer World Cup preparations. The refusal has achieved exactly the opposite.
We were told that refusing the visa was our own decision. The next day, the Chinese ambassador said his country had raised the matter with our government. The two statements are not necessarily in contradiction, but where's the harm in saying our sovereign decision was informed by, among other things, China's concerns?
I can hear many readers saying: Outrageous! I might be inclined to agree. But how many of these scandalised voices are the same voices that spent the last decade telling us we couldn't do this or that because we'd scare off foreign investors (presumably those in New York and London and not those, who now have the serious money, in Shanghai)?
South Africa has been fortunate to have four Nobel peace laureates and we have felt a legitimate sense of collective pride in our winners. But let's not delude ourselves that these awards have somehow been free of ideological framing.