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South Africa: Violence, Myths, and Democratic Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

David D. Laitin
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Extract

Experience shows that framing of a future, in some indeterminate time, may, when it is done in a certain way, be very effective, and have few inconveniences; this happens when the anticipations of the future take the form of those myths … which give an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action by which more easily than by any other method, men can reform their desires, passions, and mental activity. … The myth must be judged as a means of acting on the present; any attempt to discuss how far it can be taken literally as future history is devoid of sense. It is the myth in its entirety which is alone important.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , January 1987 , pp. 258 - 279
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1977

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References

1 Sorel, , Reflections on Violence (1906), trans, by Hulme, Thomas E. and Roth, Jack (New York: Collier Books, 1961), 124–26Google Scholar; emphases in original.

2 Ibid., 57, 80.

3 Unlike many American social scientists who have written on South Africa in recent years (such as Robert Price, William Foltz, and Thomas Callaghy), the authors of the books under review have not done research in an African state that overcame colonial status and was ruled by black Africans. Neither work is therefore imbued with the ethic, common in the writings of those who have done such research (including myself), that political independence is itself a key to racial dignity, and that in the African context of the 20th century, human dignity is an issue that precedes political democracy. See Price, Robert and Rosberg, Carl, eds., The Apartheid Regime: Political Power and Racial Domination (Berkeley, CA: Institute of InternationaStudies, 1980)Google Scholar; William Foltz, “The Foreign Factor in New Constitutional Provisions for South Africa,” in Zyl Slabbert, Frederik van and Opland, Jeff, eds., South Africa: Dilemmas of Evolutionary Change (Grahamstown, R.S.A.: Rhodes University, 1980)Google Scholar; and Callaghy, Thomas M., ed., South Africa in Southern Africa: The Intensifying Vortex of Violence (New YorkPraeger, 1983).Google Scholar

4 Both Lijphart and Adam understand the Afrikaans language (Lijphart's mother tongue is Dutch; Adam's is German), and both have good contacts with Afrikaner elites. Furthermore, both have served on the Buthelezi Commission, organized by the leader of the KwaZulu “homeland,” which produced a report on political reform for South Africa, entitled The Requirements for Stability and Development in KwaZulu and Natal, 2 vols. (Durban: H and H Publications, 1982)Google Scholar. Kogila Moodley is a sociologist working in Canada, born in the Indian community of South Africa. She has not only studied but lived under apartheid. She speaks Zulu and has many contacts as well as family in South Africa.

5 Lijphart, , The Politics of Accommodation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968)Google Scholar. Lijphart does not address the socioeconomic preconditions that led to consociational pacts in Europe; he focuses on the political bargains.

6 Lijphart, , Democracy in Plural Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

7 See, e.g., Dahl, Robert, Polyarchy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

8 A volume that features many members of this invisible university is McRae, Kenneth, ed., Consociational Democracy (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lijphart's book under review has an excellent bibliography on the consociational literature.

9 Among the critiques cited by Lijphart, the following seem most important: Schendelen, M.P.C.M. van, “Critical Comments on Lijphart's Theory of Consociational Democracy,” Politikpn 10 (June 1983)Google Scholar; Barry, Brian, “The Consociational Model and Its Dangers,” European journal of Political Research 3 (December 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jürg Steiner and JeffreyObler, “Does the Consociational Theory Really Hold for Switzerland?” in Esman, Milton, Ethnic Conflict in the Western World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Boynton, G. R. and Kwon, W. H., “An Analysis of Consociational Democracy,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 3 (February 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholarden Berghe, Pierre van, ed., The Liberal Dilemma in South Africa (New York; St. Martin's Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Enloe, Cynthia, “Internal Colonialism, Federalism and Alternative State Development Strategies,” Publius 7 (Fall 1977)Google Scholar; Lustick, Ian, “Stability in Deeply Divided Societies: Consociationalism versus Control,” World Politics 31 (April 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mughan, Anthony, review of Lijphart's Democracy in Plural Societies, in Ethnic andRacial Studies 2 (October 1979)Google Scholar; Bohn, Davi, “Consociationalism and Accommodation in Switzerland,” Journal of Politics 43 (November 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kieve, Ronald, “Pillars of Sand: A Marxist Critique of Consociational Democracy in the Netherlands,” Comparative Politics 13 (April 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pappalardo, Adriano, “The Conditions for Consociational Democracy: A Logical and Empirical Critique,” European Journal of Political Research 9 (December 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 As readers of World Politics know, analysts of international relations have been working directly on this theme. See Oye, Kenneth, ed., Cooperation under Anarchy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; originally published as issue No. 1 (World Politics 38 (October 1985).

11 Lijphart does discuss a fallback position if consociation fails—namely radical partition. This undesirable solution could easily result in the massive violence associated with the IndiaPakistan partition. In recognizing this, Lijphart contends that the horror of the fallback would create incentives for the maintenance of the consociation. He agrees, then, that the costs of consociational failure would be high; but he would have to hold (although he does no systematic analysis here) that the cost of consociational failure, multiplied by its probability, would be lower for the Afrikaner elite than the cost of losing power to revolutionary forces, multiplied by its probability.

12 Adam, Heribert, Modernizing Racial Domination (Berkeley: University of Californi Press, 1971).Google Scholar

13 Their premise appears questionable. The South African Institute of Race Relations reports that the rate of deaths per day resulting from the country's turmoil is on a steady rise, and reached 3.6 for the first two months of 1986. (See New York Times, March 9, 1986, p. 1.) Furthermore, in the three months since the declaration of a state of emergency on July 12, 1986, the South African government acknowledges that 9,300 people have been detained. Opposition leaders reckon on a figure closer to 14,000. (See New York Times, September 14, 1986, national ed., p. 10.) On the other hand, the relative openness of the society seems to support Adam and Moodley. Recent journalistic accounts—e.g., Lelyveld's, JosephMove Your Shadow (New York: Times Books, 1985)Google Scholar; O'Brien's, Conor Cruise“The South African Prospect,” Atlantic 257 (March 1986)Google Scholar; and Coetzee's, J. M.“Tales of Afrikaners” in the New York Times Magazine (March 9, 1986)Google Scholar—demonstrate that, despite recent restrictions imposed on television: overage and more severe restrictions on the foreign press, the apartheid system is the most vividly reported oppression in human history. That the South African elites oppress 80 per:ent of their people, and do so without closing themselves up, Albania-style, is consistent with: he puzzle of Adam and Moodley's premise.

14 This is a misreading of the political economy of the consociational pacts in Europe. See Katzenstein, Peter J., Small States in World Markets (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, chap. 4. It is mind-boggling that Adam and Moodley imply that South African blacks in the 1980s are more entrenched in modern capitalism than were European workers in the 1930s.

15 See, e.g., Bates, Robert, “Modernization, Ethnic Competition, and the Rationality of Pol-itics in Contemporary Africa,” in Rothchild, Donald and Olorunsola, Victor, eds., State Versus Ethnic Claims: African Policy Dilemmas (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983).Google Scholar

16 Their table on religious membership (p. 199), broken down by race, belies their argument. The overlap in church membership among whites, coloureds, Asians, and Africans is negligible.

17 See Cohen, Abner, Two-Dimensional Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974)Google Scholar, and Laitin, David, Hegemony and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).Google Scholar

18 The informal meetings between South African business elites and the ANC that took place in the fall of 1985 give some credence to these assumptions.

19 I would like to thank William Foltz for raising the possibility of this game to me. For lack of a good sense of Chief Buthelezi's strategic preferences, however, this game cannot be modeled at present.

20 Clough, Michael, “Beyond Constructive Engagement,” Foreign Policy No. 61 (Winter 1985–86), 22.Google Scholar

21 Sorel (fn.I), Appendix 2.

22 Verligte South Africans are not immune to the construction of liberal myths. See Hanf, Theodor et al., South Africa: The Chances of Peaceful Change (Bloomington: Indiana Universit Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Zyl Slabbert, Frederik van and Welsh, David, South Africa's Options (Cape TownDavid Philip, 1979)Google Scholar; and Klerk, Willem de, The Second Revolution: Afrikanerdom and the Crisis of Identity (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1984).Google Scholar