Every student of international relations has thought about the question of why world communism fell apart when it did.  Fewer have considered the sudden and dramatic collapse of another totalitarian bulwark which many deemed equally impregnable before 1989: the South African apartheid state.  In his fine overview of recent developments and future scenarios ("The Next South Africa," Summer 1991), Francis Fukuyama offers many insights into the causes of this other democratic revolution, and helps explicate its relationship to events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that overshadowed it.  

Fukuyama finds the most basic source of South Africa's transformation in the country's phased economic development.  To summarize briefly, when the National Party came to power after the Second World War, it represented a constituency of Afrikaners who were themselves resentful, second-class citizens of a former colony.  "They were poorly educated and many were not even literate: fully one-fifth of the Afrikaner population in 1949 could be classified as `poor whites'," Fukuyama writes.  Such a people were necessarily isolated from the commercial and intellectual influences of the modern world.  But the Pretoria regime's battle against the pressures of modernity was a losing one, thanks to urbanization and the rising material condition of the Afrikaners.

Fukuyama believes that economic progress created inevitable contact with the powerful liberal democratic idea, which in turn cut loose the moorings of the apartheid state.  As Afrikaners began to recognize the injustice of apartheid, the economic irrationality of the system became increasingly evident as well.  Thus internal modernization, abetted by international disapproval, helped apartheid fall victim to its own "internal contradictions."  Fukuyama touches on a number of more temporal causes of reform, such as the failure of the Dutch Reformed Church to continue to provide a theological rationale for apartheid and the decline of communism as a meaningful alternative.  He even makes a grudging bow to international economic sanctions, which he believes had a "real, though secondary effect."

This analysis does a better job of explaining why apartheid was ultimately doomed than why it tumbled.  Fukuyama notes that there is a strong correlation between socioeconomic advance and democratic development around the globe.  This linkage is genuine, but falls short as a causal explanation.  Economic and political modernization can remain out of alignment for generations, if not centuries.  In the 1940s, Afrikaners as a people were already largely post-agricultural, and nearly as prosperous as the Spaniards, Greeks, and Portuguese when their respective countries democratized in the 1970s.  Latin American nations whose per capita income lags far behind that of white South Africa have already been democracies, of sorts, for several years.  The poverty-stricken Philippines went democratic in 1986.  Yet monarchies rule without challenge in many wealthy Arab states which have extensive contact with consumer capitalism, as well as a high degree of urbanization.  Egypt, the most nearly democratic of the bunch, is one of the poorest states in the Arab world. 

To explain why apartheid fell when it did, it is necessary to move beyond historical inevitability and examine more closely than Fukuyama does the quotidian political, economic, and moral pressures that broke its back.  The most direct and important cause of apartheid's downfall, which Fukuyama somehow manages to ignore entirely, was resistance by black South Africans.  Economic systems based on exploitation, or even slave labor, can function effectively for the benefit of the masters, but only so long as the laborers who make the system work remain cowed and quiescent.  This was never the case in South Africa.  The entire history of apartheid is one of massive, sustained, and largely peaceful internal disobedience.  As in Eastern Europe, South African dissidents, who were punished and in some cases killed for their beliefs, developed popular followings that translated into a legitimacy the regime lacked.  The institutions of apartheid crumbled in response to acts of rebellion that were based sometimes on economic need, sometimes on political or moral belief, and sometimes on a combination of the two. 

To take only a few important examples, black unions were legalized in the 1970s after they became an undeniable reality in industrial relations.  The hated pass laws were abolished after more than 17 million blacks were arrested for violating them between 1916 and 1982, and the annual tally continued to rise exponentially.  Laws against black residence in white neighborhoods and attendance at white schools were scrapped after blacks became an unremovable presence in both.  The influx control law, which prohibited blacks from living in cities, was finally scrapped in 1986 after repeated bulldozings and burnings failed to roust hundreds of thousands of illegal squatters from shanties around Cape Town and the other large cities.  The uprising of 1984 to 1986, which made the townships totally ungovernable for the first time, was not the beginning of the resistance struggle; it merely accelerated it and brought it to the attention of the larger world.  It might be said that apartheid failed when the Afrikaners realized that if they were not about to be overthrown by revolution, they could not indefinitely contain the revolt either. 

External pressure was crucial, both in effecting specific reforms and in fostering an overall climate of change.  One analyst points to the importance of Margaret Thatcher raising the issue of influx control with P.W. Botha when he visited her at Chequers in 1984.(1)  But pressure of the unfriendly variety, in the form of sanctions, was more obviously effective.  It is possible to credit the international sports boycott with integrating South African athletics.  (According to one survey, more than half the white population was willing to support broader political changes before de Klerk came to power just to get South Africa back into world sports.2)

For the most part, sanctions worked not because they put a coercive financial squeeze on whites, but because of their psychological effect.  Sanctions and, even more important, the threat of sanctions made clear to Afrikaners that the alternative to democratic reform was eternal pariah status.  Not only would this eventually lower the white standard of living, it would have denied whites access to the West, to its consumer products and cultural life.  Afrikaners often used to pride themselves on their isolation from the modern influences they correctly understood would undermine their peculiar institution.  (My favorite fact about South Africa is that it had no television before 1976.)  But faced with a future of increasing and punishing quarantine, they flinched.  This is a hard point to discern from white South Africans, including many authentic liberals.  Having bitterly opposed sanctions, often for the legitimate reason that they hurt blacks more than whites, they are still reluctant to acknowledge their effectiveness.  I am in full agreement with Fukuyama that the sanctions are no longer necessary, but would argue that their effect was primary, not secondary. 

Another important factor Fukuyama neglects is the role of ethical change and moral leadership among the Afrikaners.  The revised, nonracist theology of the Dutch Reformed Church is but one of many manifestations of the growing realization that apartheid was not just impractical but also profoundly wrong.  Another institution that reflects this shift in sentiment is the secret Broederbond, which like the church counts most of the country's political leaders among its membership.  Talking to Afrikaners of de Klerk's generation, one is struck by the genuine moral awakening many of them have experienced, often brought on by contact with blacks.  De Klerk has told friends and acquaintances that he has undergone such a spiritual conversion himself.(3)  To my mind, he is not, as Fukuyama views him, a representative Afrikaner.  After coming to power, de Klerk quickly overtook the terrain held by the liberal Democratic Party.  This was, and remains, a risky maneuver: de Klerk has no white mandate for a one person, one vote democracy, but he's going ahead with it anyway.  So far, he has been masterful at pulling a hesitant party, and an even more recalcitrant constituency, along with him.

The comparison of de Klerk and Gorbachev is instructive in this regard.  Where the Soviet leader appears to back reform for purely pragmatic reasons, de Klerk evidences a moral as well as a practical motivation.  Gorbachev wants to modernize Soviet communism to enable its survival.  De Klerk wants to scrap apartheid entirely because it is unjust, even though he will probably put himself out of office if he succeeds.  The last two years have seen Gorbachev pulled along by events, dragging his feet on fundamental reform.  The same period has seen de Klerk moving far in front of white public opinion.  As recently as a year ago, the conventional wisdom held that de Klerk could not repeal the Population Registration Act, the most fundamental cornerstone of apartheid, until he had a new constitution in hand.  He repealed it anyway.  Aware that both the far-right Conservative Party and many elements in the ANC view him as Pretoria's answer to Kerensky, de Klerk has sought to protect himself by keeping the pace of reform so rapid that his opponents cannot organize a response. 

If Fukuyama underestimates de Klerk, it seems to me he also overrates the danger that an autocratic and dictatorial ANC will succeed him in power.  The troublesome signs Fukuyama points to are genuine enough: the preeminence of Communists among the organization's leadership, its lack of internal democracy, and its allegiance to potentially ruinous ideas about redistributing wealth.  I too am worried about the ANC's poor record in support of press freedom, its intolerance of other black political parties, and the pressure it puts on independent groups of all kinds to bow to its leadership.

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.

Finally, I certainly hope that Weisberg is right that moderates will prevail over the Communists within the ANC.  Part of my pessimism stems just from personally witnessing the extraordinary extremes of wealth and poverty in South Africa, far more visible than in any Western democracy.  Under those conditions, it seems to me that even if Margaret Thatcher were elected head of the ANC tomorrow in place of Mandela, she would be forced to heed her constituency's perfectly understandable demands for immediate improvement in their housing, education, health care, and the like through massive government social spending.  The fact that the resources simply do not exist to bring the vast majority of black South Africans up to white living standards will not seem like a plausible counter, when so many are so wretched.

On the other hand, recent developments give some grounds for hope.  The ANC's recent congress in Durban turned out very well, both in the efficiency of its execution and in the fact that it elevated pragmatists like Cyril Ramaphosa over militants like Chris Hani.  It is, in fact, de Klerk's government whose credibility has suffered a serious setback as a result of revelations of its funding of Inkatha and its at least indirect fostering of township violence.  Let us hope that what we are witnessing is a period of adjustment as all of South Africa's diverse ethnic groups and political forces get used to the fact that they will have to live with one another over a very long period of time.

Francis Fukuyama is a consultant to the RAND Corporation.