South Africa emerged from the Allied victory with its prestige and national honour enhanced as it had fought tirelessly for the Western Allies. South Africa's standing in the international community was rising, at a time when the Third World's struggle against colonialism had still not taken centre stage. In May 1945, Prime Minister Smuts represented South Africa in San Francisco at the drafting of the United Nations Charter. Just as he did in 1919, Smuts urged the delegates to create a powerful international body to preserve peace; he was determined that, unlike the League of Nations, the United Nations would have teeth. Smuts signed the Paris Peace Treaty, resolving the peace in Europe, thus becoming the only signatory of both the treaty ending the First World War, and that ending the Second.
However, internal political struggles in the disgruntled and essentially impoverished Afrikaner community would soon come to the fore leading to Smuts' defeat at the polls in the 1948 elections (in which only whites and coloureds could vote) at the hands of a resurgent National Party after the war. This began the road to South Africa's eventual isolation from a world that would no longer tolerate any forms of political discrimination or differentiation based on race only.