But each of these pernicious tendencies is matched by a countervailing force.  The ANC is filled with authoritarians, but sincere and committed liberals and democrats work alongside, and may outnumber, them.  For every statement by an ANC leader calling for nationalization of industry, one can find another forswearing it.  Albie Sachs, one of the party's constitutional negotiators, is an eloquent defender of artistic and intellectual freedom.  The country's most powerful union, COSATU, has refused to take its cues from the ANC, even now that its president, Cyril Ramaphosa, is the party's general secretary and a possible successor to Mandela.  Other young institutions of civil society are showing a robust independence.  These are all hopeful signs.  Because of its conflicting factions and policy statements, the ANC becomes something of a palimpsest for outside observers.  In his inclination to accentuate the negative, Fukuyama sometimes misreads evidence.  For example, Winnie Mandela may have "many supporters within the ANC," but, with the exception of her husband, the organization's leadership has rejected her quite decisively.

A year and a half after its unbanning, the ANC remains massively disorganized and shows no signs of overcoming the profound divisions within it.  Historically, Communists have been adept at capitalizing on just this kind of disarray.  But I am less worried than Fukuyama about Joe Slovo and other Communists pulling the strings behind non-Communist front men like Mandela, or replacing them after an interval.  This time, the Leninists will be operating on their own, without significant help from an internationally powerful communist movement.  Gorbachev has yet to meet with Mandela, not because Mandela hasn't had a chance to visit him but because Gorbachev is unwilling to continue the financial support the Soviet Union has given the ANC in the past.  Fidel Castro, friendly as he and Mandela might be, is in no position to send financial or technical assistance.  This weakens the hand of the Communists within the ANC. 

Without external support for the radicals, it seems likely that relatively conservative forces within the ANC will gain an upper hand.  Most of the ANC's supporters are churchgoers, wage-earners, and union members who aspire to more prosperous and peaceful lives.  Some of them already support the National Party even though it only recently became integrated and has no black leaders.  If the ANC becomes more radical, its loss in black middle-class support will be de Klerk's gain.  In any case, it seems reasonable to assume that many of the same practical and moral considerations that have pushed South Africa's minority government to yield its position of dominance will condition the policies of the ANC as negotiations progress.  The ANC has already responded to the moderating pressure it has received from the white business community. 

Fukuyama makes a common mistake in automatically assuming that the outcome of the current process will be an ANC government.  A look at public opinion shows Mandela popular as ever, but his party by no means has a monopoly of power among disenfranchised blacks.  One recent survey suggests that if an election were held tomorrow, the ANC would win only 43 percent of the vote in Soweto.(4)  Inkatha would get 10 percent, while the Pan-Africanist Congress and AZAPO would have a combined total of 27 percent.  (Though these parties adhere to radical platforms, their support testifies more to their independence from the ANC than to their extremism.)  The National Party would get 17 percent.  In some of the townships around Johannesburg, de Klerk actually enjoys a higher approval rating than Mandela.  Given its internal divisions and organizational shortcomings, there is a strong chance that the ANC will not even survive an All-Parties Conference as a single entity.  If Mandela dies or becomes incapacitated, the congress will lose its strongest unifying force.  

Of course, the ANC is still the most likely contender for power after majority rule, and one should not be naively optimistic about its good intentions.  That is why the specifics of the new constitution are so vital.  It is true, as Fukuyama reminds us, that "Africa is full of beautiful constitutions that aren't worth the paper they're printed on." But without a viable, liberal constitution, South Africa's prospects for democracy, peace, and stability, are nearly nonexistent.  The cornerstone the constitution needs is an American-type bill of individual rights, guaranteed by an independent judiciary.  The most detailed draft is one developed by the South African Law Commission.

De Klerk now accepts this idea, as does the ANC.  The second crucial principle is that there be sufficient devolution of power to protect minority rights from unrestrained central authority, which may be a sticking point.  If the ANC continues to drag its feet on roundtable negotiations to draft such an agreement, de Klerk might be wise to proceed unilaterally, by putting a liberal constitution up for a national referendum, and proceeding with democratic elections.

I'm hesitant to be drawn into Fukuyama's predictive game.  For many of its citizens, South Africa already resembles his worst-case outcome, since large areas of the townships are torn by Beirut-like civil strife.  Though the seeds of a Lebanese-type ethnic disaster are present, I don't think this scenario will be fulfilled short of economic catastrophe.  The country's inherent wealth, its well-developed infrastructure, and its rooted white population are all important additional factors that will promote stability after the transition.  Most important of all is a surprising amount of good will, and a widespread desire to build a nonracial future.  But it isn't any more realistic to expect South Africa to resemble a European-style social democracy any time soon.  Both material resources and the political culture of liberal democracy are in too short supply to make this a real possibility. 

This leaves a vast middle ground of imperfect democracies-- the category in which South Africa is most likely to find itself by the end of the decade.  Will it be like Brazil? Costa Rica?  India?  The Philippines?  Namibia?  The new South Africa will probably bear some relationship to each of these, but won't resemble any one of them very closely.  How it evolves depends a great deal on the behavior of its principal actors, the health of the economy, unpredictable developments on the international scene, and the still-to-be-determined shape of the negotiating process.  What is to be hoped is that in the next few years South Africa will succeed in devising a political framework that expresses its democratic aspirations while containing the forces that may conspire to refute them.

Jacob Weisberg is a senior editor of the New Republic.

(1) John Kane-Berman, South Africa's Silent Revolution (Johannesburg: Institute of Race Relations, 1990), p. 27.

(2) See for instance The Impact of Sanctions on South Africa, Part II: Whites' Political Attitudes, by Jan Hofmeyr, The Investor Responsibility Research Council (March 1990), p. 46.

(3) Steven Mufson, ``South Africa 1990,'' Foreign Affairs (America and the World 1990/91), p. 123.

(4) Lawrence Schlemmer, ``Black Township Residents Amidst Protest, Negotiation and Violence: an Empirical Study,'' University of Witwatersrand's Centre for Policy Studies,  Research Report No. 18, May 15, 1991, p. 8.

Fukuyama Replies:

As I feared, my attempt to give an account of the common moves toward democracy on the part of South Africa and the former Soviet bloc in the late 1980s has led to the misunderstanding that I am somehow an economic determinist.  In my article, I argued that South Africa, the Soviet Union, and for that matter Spain, Portugal, Greece, South Korea, and other democratizing countries in the 1970s-1980s all experienced a comparable sort of socioeconomic transformation over the past 40 years as they moved from predominantly agricultural societies to much more modern, industrialized, and educated ones.  This is what they hold in common.  On the other hand, I also noted that "politics and ideology must intervene: leaders must lead wisely, publicists must put forward arguments," etc.  In this respect, each of these cases is unique and dissimilar from the others.  If I understated the importance of the "superstructure" of consciousness in favor of the "substructure" of economics, it is only because I was looking for similarities.

Even so, it seems to me that Weisberg confuses economic with political causes.  Black South Africans have certainly undertaken a heroic political struggle for their rights over the past several decades, but this was supported by powerful economic forces.  The pass laws, influx control regulations, and the like were massively violated not only because they were unjust but because they sought to somehow prevent the urbanization of a rapidly growing black proletariat required by South Africa's modern industries.  Apartheid's lack of economic rationality is one feature it held in common with communism.

I don't know how one can prove empirically that sanctions were the primary cause for apartheid's breakdown in the late 1980s, given the myriad other factors pushing toward this result.  I am certainly willing to believe that their effect was significant--why else would the South African government and business community spend such time and money (including the recently revealed subsidies to Inkatha) to persuade the outside world to lift them?  Both liberals and conservatives are guilty of considerable hypocrisy on the question of economic sanctions, arguing for their effectiveness against regimes they don't like, and for the effectiveness of "dialogue" or "constructive engagement" with regimes they view less unfavorably.  But it seems to me that both liberals and conservatives alike are wrong in believing that the fundamental origin of social change around the world--whether in South Africa, Nicaragua, or the Soviet Union--is the U.S. Congress.