Chapter Three—
Obstacles to Democracy

When the old order dies, the future will not necessarily be secure. Several features of South Africa's structural situation put the democratic future in doubt. One of these is the need for carefully designed institutions to mitigate the conflicts of any severely divided society. Another derives from the possibly hegemonic aspirations of some of the contenders for power. Both of these problems I shall discuss in subsequent chapters.

Here I intend to treat impediments of a different sort. Some, such as dissensus on the means required to produce a democratic system and the sense of differential legitimacy resulting from a claim to indigenousness, form part of the ideological dissensus described in Chapter 1. Others, such as wishful thinking about the future and widespread suspicion about the intentions of other actors, are reactions to the harshness of the apartheid regime. Another impediment is a serious set of misconceptions about the nature of majority rule. The misconceptions are not confined to South Africa, but they can be fatal to democracy in a divided society. Finally, the fact that democratization was delayed so long has made dramatic rather than gradual change essential, but the very rapidity of the required change vastly increases the chance that some important social supports of democracy will not emerge in time to do their job. The multiple sources of these obstacles can either feed discouragement or motivate herculean efforts to build carefully.

The very first obstacle to democracy is the common tendency to think it will be easy to attain, that the hard part is eliminating the apartheid regime. There is a sense that what is needed is a transfer of title, when in fact the house is not yet built.

One truism not heard sufficiently in South Africa is that every solution creates new problems. Many eloquent volumes have been devoted to depicting apartheid in all of its ugly manifestations. With a few notable exceptions, hard, and hardheaded, thinking about a post-apartheid South Africa has been much rarer. But a good cause does not assure a good result. It is a pernicious myth that all struggles are over when the struggle is over. South Africa may be pregnant with a new order, but it has had no political amniocentesis to check for birth defects.

Confronted with foreboding, even justifiable foreboding, a common reaction is to look on the bright side, to search for neglected, positive elements. This can be a useful exercise, but it frequently results, not in a more balanced assessment, but in an unbalanced prognosis in an opposite, unjustifiably optimistic direction.

There is a particularly strong propensity to such wishful thinking when it comes to democratic futures. At the height of glasnost and perestroika , when many observers thought Mikhail Gorbachev's future leadership in the Soviet Union imperiled, it was suggested that Gorbachev and the reformers could draw upon powerful democratic currents in the Russian past. The implication of the argument was that these traditions, plus a strong reformist leader, together were likely to produce a democratic outcome in the Soviet Union.^[1] Since each of the democratic movements being invoked had been suppressed, however, one might have thought the contemporary power equation in the Soviet Union was a better guide to the outcome than was a vague collective memory of repeated failures. Admittedly, this example is far from South Africa, but it illustrates clearly the tendency to confront difficult political problems wishfully. The aspiration to a democratic future requires more than imagining it, but profound, psychologically induced distractions get in the way.

There have been good psychological reasons for the nearly exclusive emphasis on the present. If the current structures are evil, then their

[1] S. Frederick Starr, "A Usable Past," New Republic , May 15, 1989, pp. 24–47.

abolition will bring about good. To the extent that we engage in foreboding, do we not then implicitly cast doubt upon the unmitigated justice of the present struggle? While these are good psychological reasons to repress the future, they are not good reasons. The present may be bad, but that fact does not tell us whether the future will be good or bad. It is, in short, very common to expend energy on thinking about ways to achieve "a fundamental reversal of race policies in South Africa" without the least idea—or with confused, contradictory, inchoate ideas—of what the replacement regime would look like.^[2]

It is natural to think that it detracts from the revolutionary goals of the struggle to plan for the future. Planning may mean playing at least a hypothetical role as a future "insider," and this may seem contaminating.^[3] But that is exactly the sort of "contamination" required for democracy to emerge. It is sobering to reflect that, at least since 1789, hardly ever, if at all, has revolution alone "produced a stable democratic regime in an independent state."^[4] Revolutions require the use of undemocratic methods and the consolidation of undemocratic leadership. Both are inimical to the development of democracy later. If a democratic South Africa is desired, a future orientation is required.

Only recently has a future orientation emerged. In 1988, the African National Congress inaugurated the latest and most serious phase of the indispensable constitutional debate with the publication of its Constitutional Guidelines for a Democratic South Africa .^[5] I shall say more about these guidelines later. All I want to say now is that they came not a moment too soon.

Yet the future has been slighted.^[6] Again, South Africa is not unique.

[2] A splendid example of this approach is provided by John A. Marcum, "Africa: A Continent Adrift," Foreign Affairs 18, no. 1 (January 1989): 159–79, at 176, from which the quotation in the text is drawn.

[3] "[Allan] Boesak seems uncomfortable when it comes to the specifics of what should be done in South Africa. Those are 'insiders' questions,' he feels, and Boesak does and does not want to be an insider." Richard John Neuhaus, Dispensations: The Future of South Africa as South Africans See It (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986), pp. 194–95.

[4] Samuel P. Huntington, "Will More Countries Become Democratic?" Political Science Quarterly 99, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 193–218, at 213. To the same effect, see Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, "Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies," in Guillermo O'Donnell et al., eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pt. 4, p. 11; Alfred Stepan, "Paths toward Redemocratization: Theoretical and Comparative Considerations," in ibid., pt. 3, p. 79.

[5] The text is contained in the Weekly Mail (Johannesburg), October 7–13, 1988.

[6] With some notable exceptions, some of which I shall discuss below. Some interesting contributions, worthy of note at the outset, are Peter L. Berger and Bobby Godsell,eds., A Future South Africa: Visions, Strategies and Realities (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau Tafelberg, 1988); Hermann Giliomee and Lawrence Schlemmer, eds., Negotiating South Africa's Future (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989); F. van Zyl Slabbert and David Welsh, South Africa's Options: Strategies for Sharing Power (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979).

Even where the goal is policy planning, practically nobody does it. In responding to a problem, the modern democratic state behaves like a voyeur: it adopts a wait-and-see attitude.

In fact, the advantages of planning are widely touted and largely true. Solving a problem earlier is better. There will be more accumulated obstacles to success later; a deliberative process is likely to be less prone to error than is a crisis-driven process; lead time is valuable in coping with complexity; and early action allows phasing in, a form of gradualism conducive to adaptation but foreclosed once crisis has struck.

Despite all these advantages, many of the most important policy decisions are taken at exceptional times—times of crisis, times when there is a strong demand for change, times when unusual events have immobilized obstacles to new policy or made proponents of innovation suddenly seem more credible.^[7] This tendency has two serious implications for severely divided societies.

First, there is a good chance that it will be too late by then for the innovation to have a significantly positive effect on ethnic relations. The crisis probably means that measures that would have been ample to alter a conflict situation at an earlier period will be insufficient at the later period. Anyone who doubts this proposition should compare the two very modest devolution schemes for the Tamils proposed in Sri Lanka in 1957 and 1968—schemes that nevertheless produced a Sinhalese backlash that prevented their implementation—with the far more sweeping scheme ultimately put in effect but inadequate to stop the warfare.

Second, delaying policy making until after disaster has struck means that the time for deliberation is foreshortened. When serious conflicts exist, the pressure to settle builds up over a long time, but the actual settlement process tends to occur in a short time and is usually less considered and less future oriented than it should be. This is a particularly important disadvantage for ethnically divided societies, because the institutional arrangements they require to preserve harmony and

[7] See John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), pp. 17–18. See also the issue "Policymaking in Developing Countries," Policy Sciences 22, nos. 3–4 (November 1989).

civility are often complex; they are best not improvised but precision engineered.

Not surprisingly, states that took explicit account of their ethnic heterogeneity at the outset have so far done better, even with worse problems, than those that failed to do so. Malaysia, with some of the world's most difficult ethnic problems, adopted institutions that moderated their behavioral manifestations. Sri Lanka, with more modest problems, exacerbated them.^[8] Earlier is better, but later is much more common; and that is ground for concern.

Majority Rule and Democracy

If there has been insufficient attention to the future, one might guess that the attention that has been given has not produced a rich array of models. Scholarly observers and independent commissions have produced their share of plans. But to focus on political actors is to recognize that most of the already-stated visions of the South African future are at best merely precatory, at worst utterly impoverished.

Before the legalization of the African National Congress and other resistance organizations in 1990, A. S. Mathews summed up the regime's positive aspirations in a concise, discouraging, but altogether accurate formula: " . . . the rhetoric of the political reform policy of the government goes no further than sharing power without losing it."^[9] "White domination" and "discrimination," it was said, "must go,"^[10] but the regime's most sophisticated theorists of constitutional reform habitually envisioned "democratic decisionmaking" only "as far as possible" and specifically rejected what they called "the erroneous equation of democracy with majority rule."^[11] Majority rule, they said, is appro-

[8] See Donald L. Horowitz, "Incentives and Behaviour in the Ethnic Politics of Sri Lanka and Malaysia," Third World Quarterly 11, no. 4 (October 1989): 18–35.

[9] A. S. Mathews, "National Security, Freedom and Reform in South Africa" (January 27, 1988; unpublished paper), p. 20.

[10] Acting President Jan Chris Heunis, quoted in the Durham Morning Herald (N.C.), February 16, 1989; F. W. de Klerk, speech in parliament, May 9, 1989 (mimeo.), p. 4.

[11] Fanie Cloete, "Constitutional Change in South Africa," (August 1988; unpublished paper), p. 10. Cloete was then chief director for constitutional planning. See also Jan Chris Heunis, "Finding a Formula for Constitutional Reform," in S. Prakash Sethi, ed., The South African Quagmire (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1987), pp. 73–83. Heunis was, for several years, the minister of constitutional development. For a similar formulation, emphasizing a Black role in decision making, without universal suffrage, see the National Party's five-year Plan of Action, issued in Pretoria on June 29, 1989.

priate to homogeneous societies but inappropriate to heterogeneous societies like South Africa.

Leaving aside the fact that most of the world, including that part of the world that practices majority rule, is heterogeneous, this position, I shall argue momentarily, is based on a misconception about the nature of majority rule. The misconception is not unique to the South African government. For the moment, it is sufficient to point out that democracy cannot be achieved in the modern world without universal suffrage. Although many countries countenance deviations from equal apportionment of legislative seats and many require special majorities of one kind or another for various purposes, very few qualify the franchise with education, property, or literacy requirements.^[12] The franchise is a necessary—but not a sufficient—condition for democracy in conditions of mass society.^[13] South Africa, no less than other societies, partakes of those conditions. In such conditions, without universal suffrage elections, there cannot be representation; without representation, there cannot be democracy.

The National Party's five-year Action Plan, prepared for the 1989 general elections, did not rule out universal suffrage, but it emphasized the need for group protection.^[14] Cabinet ministers dropped heavy hints of separate electoral rolls for Whites.^[15] When President F. W. de Klerk finally acknowledged the need for one person, one vote in February 1990, he coupled the concession with the usual formulation about the need to prevent group domination and to protect minority as well as individual rights.^[16] Universal suffrage did not necessarily imply majority rule.

What long troubled the regime's reformers about majority rule is, of

[12] Vernon Van Dyke, "One Man One Vote and Majority Rule as Human Rights," Revue des Droits de l'Homme 6, nos. 3–4 (1973): 447–66.

[13] See Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 63–75; Harry Eckstein, Division and Cohesion in Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 229. Compare Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 14; Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 266.

[14] National Party, Plan of Action of the National Party, Election of 6 September 1989 (Pretoria: Federal Information Service, n.d.), pp. 2–4. See F. W. de Klerk, "Address Introducing the Debate on the NP's Plan of Action," (Pretoria, June 29, 1989; mimeo.), p. 3.

[15] See Citizen (Johannesburg), July 24, 1989.

[16] The text of the speech is contained in the Cape Times (Cape Town), February 3, 1990.

course, their equation of majority rule with Black rule and White subordination, just as minority rule is White rule with Black subordination. Unfortunately, some opponents of the regime agree with this prescription wholeheartedly, if almost absentmindedly. Nadine Gordimer, for example, has written of a "black republic," of "the black majority which will rule," and of "the black state that is coming."^[17] Even the Economist of London speaks of the need to accept what it calls "black rule"^[18] in South Africa, though, so far as I am aware, it has never spoken of the need to accept either Catholic rule in undivided Ireland or Protestant rule in Northern Ireland.^[19]

In its understanding of the future, the Economist is very much in line with what a great many Western Europeans and North Americans reflexively believe the concept of majority rule implies, even requires, in South Africa. It is, they believe, the natural meaning of the words majority rule . And unwittingly, of course, this notion hardens the determination of the South African government not to embrace the conception.

If we are to be completely honest, if this is the inevitable implication of majority rule, why should the regime embrace it? What is the ethical foundation for requiring minority oppressors to submit to majority oppressors? Reviewing Gordimer's essays, Denis Donoghue remarks pointedly that what she proposes could not be "anything more or better than the present [system] turned upside down."^[20] The American theologian Richard John Neuhaus, hardly a friend of apartheid, expresses a similar thought and goes a step further when he notes that, between what he calls "the extremes" of Afrikaner nationalism and Black nationalism, "moderation and wisdom" are thought to reside. "But I think it more likely," he continues, "that wisdom, and reason for tempered hope, is to be found not on middle ground but on quite different ground. No lasting dispensation can be established by splitting the difference

[17] Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (New York: Knopf, 1988), pp. 32, 264. In her confusion, she calls the "black state" she foresees "non-racial." Ibid., p. 278. Winnie Mandela writes, "Our future South Africa will be multiracial. It will accommodate all of us." In the very next paragraph, she adds that the White opposition parties should help Whites "adjust to the inevitable black government of tomorrow," and she later refers to "a black-ruled South Africa." Part of My Soul Went with Him (New York: Norton, 1984), pp. 123, 144.

[18] "White South Africa," Economist, May 20, 1989, p. 24.

[19] See "Soldiering On in Ulster," Economist, August 12, 1989, pp. 19–20.

[20] Denis Donoghue, "The Essential Posture," New Republic, November 28, 1988, p. 29.

between the white oppression of blacks and the black oppression of whites."^[21] This insight, which Neuhaus does not develop, is, I shall suggest, full of possibility.

The unsatisfactory quality of theorizing about the nature of majority rule in South Africa can be illustrated very easily by turning it around in the United States. The United States is assuredly governed by principles of majority rule, but it would be totally unacceptable to declare, merely because there are many more Whites than Blacks, that the United States is or ought to be subject to "White rule." The very notion of White majority rule carries strong connotations of minority exclusion and discrimination.

In recent years, the United States Congress and the courts have not been wholly content to let numbers take their course in the electoral process. In 1982, the Voting Rights Act was amended; and, as interpreted, the act now makes it easier to carve out legislative constituencies in which minority representatives are likely to emerge. The notion is that, so long as voters of given ethnic or racial groups vote cohesively, deliberate action needs to be taken to forestall minority exclusion from political power, defined, in this case, in terms of elected minority representatives.^[22] The burden does not fall on American Blacks to, as South Africans say, "become part of the majority." So long as the groups tend to have different interests, provision is made to insure against the permanent neglect of minority interests.

The same logic applies in South Africa. If majority rule means Black majority rule and White minority exclusion, something has gone wrong. It need not and should not mean that; and, at the threshold, if it does mean that, Whites will have no reason to choose an inclusive democracy for South Africa. Apart from altruism, that is one of several good reasons why Blacks should not prefer "Black rule."

The moral duties of ethnic groups to one another constitute largely uncharted territory. In the United States, there has recently been a de-

[21] Dispensations , p. 293.

[22] See Abigail M. Thernstrom, Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). I do not mean to imply here my agreement with all that has been done under the amended act, particularly the definition of power in terms of the identity of elected representatives alone. See Donald L. Horowitz, "The Voting Rights Act," in J. Jackson Barlow et al., eds., The New Federalist Papers (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988), pp. 314–17. Rather, my aim is simply to stress the strong impulse to prevent majority domination and minority exclusion. For elaboration, see Chapter 5, pp. 165–66, below.

bate on the ethics of excluding aliens from free entry into the country. The debate shows the issues to be at least murky and at best difficult; but the most liberal arguments for open boundaries are premised on the morality of sharing, the fortuity of the status quo ante, and "the equal treatment of individuals in the public sphere."^[23] On the other hand, several Lockean, liberal, and communitarian socialist thinkers—respectively, Peter H. Schuck and rogers M. Smith, Bruce Ackerman, and Michael Walzer—contend that the exclusion of immigrants can be justified to protect what they call, in turn, civic "homogeneity," "the process of liberal conversation," and the distinctiveness of the "political community" and its social life.^[24] As I understand the debate, however imperfectly, no one would be prepared to argue for unrestricted immigration if it were likely to result in political subordination of the population already in place. Precisely such objections underlay the ultimate liberal Western consensus against colonialism.^[25]

I do not intend to extrapolate any positive principles from the ethics of immigration to the ethics of ethnic politics.^[26] All I need to say for now is that I share the reservations of Donoghue and Neuhaus on this matter. I do not believe that any group is under a moral duty to legislate itself into a position of political subordination. I use the phrase "all I need to say for now" advisedly, because I do not believe that the inevitable result of universal suffrage is majority domination or, for that matter, that majority rule is necessarily the same as Black majority rule.

Before I explain what I mean, let me note that the ANC certainly does not equate majority rule with Black rule. Upon his release from prison, Nelson Mandela flatly opposed the government's insistence on group rights and in the same breath added: "We are aware of the fears of whites in this country of being dominated by blacks, and we are addressing that very seriously."^[27] The ANC wants a "non-racial state"

[23] Joseph H. Carens, "Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders," Review of Politics 49, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 251–73, at 268.

[24] The quotations are, in order, from Peter H. Schuck and Rogers M. Smith, Citizenship without Consent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 28; Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 95; Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 39. Compare Sanford Levinson, "Constituting Communities through Words That Bind: Reflections on Loyalty Oaths," Michigan Law Review 84, no. 8 (June 1986): 1440–70, at 1445–46.

[25] Cf. Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 295.

[26] Nor even to advert to the voluminous literature on the ethics of affirmative action (positive discrimination).

[27] Quoted in the New York Times, February 15, 1990.

based on "one person / one vote," though, in its Constitutional Guidelines, The ANC does not prescribe any specific electoral system.^[28] The omission is not inadvertent, since the ANC had before it a quite comprehensive description of electoral alternatives.^[29]

There are, then, two theoretical positions: (1) majority rule produces majority domination; or (2) majority rule produces something else. The ANC calls the something else a "non-racial state." As I have explained, it is more appropriate to envision a multiracial state with nonracial institutions.

I have said that the first position—majority domination—is not inevitable. But it certainly is a common result. One only needs to stipulate a few conditions to make it the most probable outcome by far. Suppose in a given state there are two groups, A and B, with, respectively, 60 percent and 40 percent of the population and the voters who vote.^[30] Suppose, in this polarized society, that Group A is a majority in 60 percent of the territorially demarcated single-member parliamentary constituencies and that the rule of election is the British rule of first-past-the-post or plurality election. This is the rule according to which the victorious candidate is the one who has managed to obtain the largest number of votes (a plurality), even if that number is less than 50 percent. The plurality rule is one which, I note with parenthetical irony, both the government and many of its most serious opponents believe to be the appropriate one for a future South Africa.^[31] Make one further assumption, richly supported by the comparative experience of divided societies—namely, that, under conditions of free elections, groups in polarized societies will line up behind ethnically based political parties representing their respective groups. If overwhelming majorities of Group A vote for candidates of Party A and majorities of Group B vote for candidates of Party B, the result is a predictable and permanent en-

[28] Constitutional Guidelines, ¶ E: "In the exercise of their sovereignty, the people shall have the right to vote under a system of universal suffrage based on the principle of one person / one vote."

[29] Kader Asmal, "Electoral Systems: A Critical Survey" (paper presented at the In-House Seminar, African National Congress, Lusaka, Zambia, March 1–4, 1988).

[30] The example is taken from Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 83–86. The same problem was identified earlier in J. A. Laponce, "The Protection of Minorities by the Electoral System," Western Political Quarterly 10, no. 2 (June 1957): 318–39, at 325–26, and for South Africa by Slabbert and Welsh, South Africa's Options, p. 85.

[31] Which is one reason the government drew the unfortunate conclusions that it did about universal suffrage. For an influential Black view, see, e.g., Dr. Nthato Motlana, quoted in Neuhaus, Dispensations, p. 267. Motlana wants the present South African constitution "minus race."

trenchment of Group A in power. As a matter of fact, because first-past-the-post is a plurality rule, even if Group A gave its support to more than one party, Party A might still end up with a firm majority of seats.^[32]

Such polarizing elections have been very much more common in Asia and Africa than we might like to think. It is quite possible that, in the first instance, South Africa's universal suffrage elections under such a system would turn out that way, too. As I have shown elsewhere,^[33] such elections are a major (though not the only) source of the decline of democracy in both continents. Polarizing elections have divided such countries as Nigeria, Uganda, the Sudan, Chad, Congo (Brazzaville), Burkina Fasso (then Upper Volta), Mali, Zambia, Togo, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and, most recently, Zimbabwe. In the first four countries on this list, such elections were the indispensable prelude to civil war, as they were also in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In the remaining countries, military coups or the institution of a one-party state replaced democratic elections with authoritarian regimes, sometimes more or less benign, more often highly oppressive, almost always ethnically less than fully inclusive. A common initial response to polarized election results of this sort is for Group B—the permanent minority—to engage in violent strategies of resistance. These include riots and, if Group B is well represented in the armed forces officer corps, military coups (Nigeria, January 1966, being merely one example) or, if Group B is territorially concentrated, secessionist movements. None of these possibilities can be ruled out for South Africa.

And so there are two kinds of majority rule. Democratic theory demands that they be distinguished from each other. Ascriptive majority rule, with few if any floating voters, is one kind. It is the kind found in polarized societies, of the sort South Africa would be the day after universal suffrage based on the present electoral system. The election is

[32] By winning pluralities in repeated three-way contests or by winning in repeated four-way contests if Group B were also divided. Sri Lanka's elections until the electoral reforms of 1978 approximated this situation. In the 1948 and 1953 elections in South Africa—and again in 1989—the National Party (together with an allied party in 1948) won a majority of seats on less than half the votes—a very common result in first-past-the-post systems, as witness Margaret Thatcher's own electoral victories in Great Britain, whence the system emanated. For vote-seat relationships in South Africa, see Gwendolen M. Carter, The Politics of Inequality: South Africa since 1948, 2d ed. (New York: Praeger, 1959), pp. 448–52; Richard Hodder-Williams, "South Africa: Democratic-Centralism versus Elite-based Parties," in Alan Ware, ed., Political Parties: Electoral Change and Structural Responses (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 25.

[33] Ethnic Groups in Conflict, pp. 473–86.

tantamount to a census, and it locks out the minority from any significant political power, save what it can pry loose by violence or disruption. And there is the other kind of majority rule, associated with stable democracies, where marginal voters choose—that is, elect in the true sense—among competing parties and where the outcome is not foreordained by demography. If democratic alternatives were available, I have never understood why anyone would choose institutions that would produce the first kind of election—the census-type election—except, of course, because of the common failure to distinguish between the two types.

In point of fact, after 1948, Afrikaner political domination of English-speaking Whites was based on an electoral system conducive to minority exclusion. Only recently, as intra-White social and political differences have declined, has democratic choice within all segments of the White electorate been enhanced. Albie Sachs's scathing indictment of White hypocrisy is, on this score, wide of the mark. "Now that the majority is going to be black," he says,

South African whites suddenly believe majority rule is a terrible thing. They've been very happy with the idea until now—South Africa has had majority rule since it was formed in 1910—but that's because it's been reserved for the whites. Now that the majority stands to change color, you no longer hear people talking about majority rule but about "majoritarianism," which sounds worse than Marxism-Leninism.^[34]

If English-speaking Whites were happy with the particular form of majority rule that gave them Afrikaner domination, they certainly did not show it. And the problem of the future is neither majority rule nor majoritarianism, both of which are essential to democracy, but ascriptive majority rule, which kills democracy by turning elections into censuses and locking minorities out.

Beneath this confusion lie fundamental misconceptions about democracy and majority rule. If democracy is defined as "a system of rule by temporary majorities,"^[35] rule by permanent majorities is plainly incompatible. If democracy is characterized by "the quality of being completely or almost completely responsive to all its citizens,"^[36] then per-

[34] Albie Sachs, "Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Constitutional Framework," World Policy Journal 6, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 503–29, at 513.

[35] Dankwart A. Rustow, "Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model," Comparative Politics 2, no. 3 (April 1970): 337–63, at 351.

[36] Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 2.

manent exclusion of minorities is a disqualifying condition. If democracy requires the creation of a majority out of "shifting temporary alliances,"^[37] the pre-formed racial or ethnic majority is not democratic.

In the most comprehensive consideration of the concept of majority rule, Elaine Spitz takes cognizance of the special problems posed by permanent minorities. Constituencies are ordinarily organized by geography, she notes, because of the assumption that territorial contiguity creates bonds among people; but that assumption is highly doubtful in the case of racially or ethnically divided societies.^[38] In seriously divided societies, where minorities cannot "coalesce to form a majority,"^[39] attention must be focused on the method "of organizing the representative system in general . . . . The opportunities for organizing and becoming a majority or a minority become critical. No group that feels it has a fair chance to dominate or influence importantly the outcome of the political process will be likely to feel permanently excluded."^[40] Put succinctly, community is a prerequisite for majority rule. Where community exists, minorities acquiesce "in hopes that they will someday become majorities."^[41] Severely divided societies are short on community, and the problem is to organize the system of representation so that those hopes are not doomed in advance.

One way to approach the problem of representation, suggested by Robert A. Dahl and other writers, is to limit the majority principle whenever people of different languages, races, religions, or national origins "with no firm habits of political cooperation and mutual trust" are to unite in a single polity.^[42] A distinguished historian, Hermann Giliomee, has argued for such an approach, because of the likelihood of a census-type election—in South Africa. The conflation of majority rule with ascriptive majority rule and the census-type election, in his view, leaves only one alternative: the "shelving (for the time being) of the concept of majority consent."^[43] One common possibility is to constitute each

[37] Elaine Spitz, Majority Rule (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1984), p. xiii.

[38] Ibid., pp. 56–58.

[39] Ibid., p. 58.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Ibid., p. 163.

[42] Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 89.

[43] Hermann Giliomee, "South Africa, Ulster, Israel: The Elusive Search for Peace," South Africa International 19, no. 3 (January 1989): 140–51, at 150. But see the somewhat different formulation in Hermann Giliomee and Lawrence Schlemmer, From Apartheid to Nation-Building (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1989), which I shall discuss in Chapter 4, below.

such group a subpolity and then apply the majority principle to it and a different linking principle between groups.

In my view, however, there is no alternative to majority consent, and the division into subpolities is neither the only nor the best way out of the problem, which is to avoid a system that produces racially or ethnically defined majorities and minorities. There are ways of thawing frozen majorities and minorities within a single polity without providing for concurrent majorities and—most important of all—without doing violence to the principle of one person, one vote, one value.

The Dissensus on Means

Democratic alternatives are available, as the Nigerians, among others, have shown. The major questions are (1) whether they are acceptable to South Africans and (2) whether, if they are, they can actually be made to work in South Africa. These are separate questions.

When I ask whether they are acceptable, as I have already said, I do not mean to imply that they entail any dilution of the principle of universal suffrage. Among the options that can and should be eliminated at the outset are the qualified franchise (that is, qualified by property, tax payment, literacy, or any other requirement besides age and citizenship), ethnically or racially demarcated houses of parliament, and socalled communal (ethnic or racial) electoral rolls. It needs to be said, as emphatically as possible, that every vote should count for one and none should count for more than one.

As I shall indicate later, the institutions I am referring to entail a revision of the first-past-the-post electoral system, under which the candidate who receives the largest number of votes (even if less than a majority) wins the election. The plurality system is not, in any event, accepted in most Western democratic countries outside the Anglo-American orbit or, for that matter, even in such British-derived parliamentary systems as Austrialia's or Ireland's. Moreover, the plurality system is under attack in two of its historical bastions: in Great Britain and in New Zealand, where a Royal Commission in 1986 recommended proportional representation.^[44] The problem of acceptability is

[44] See Arend Lijphart, "The Demise of the Last Westminster System? Comments on the Report of New Zealand's Royal Commission on the Electoral System," Electoral Studies 6, no. 2 (August 1987): 97–103; Jonathan Boston, "Electoral Reform in New Zealand: The Report of the Royal Commission," Electoral Studies 6, no. 2 (August 1987): 105–14; Vernon Bogdanor, "Electoral Reform and British Politics," Electoral Studies 6, no. 2 (August 1987): 115–21.

not that any alternative to plurality election in single-member constituencies is a ruse for cheating the majority out of its due. The problem is that South Africans of all colors seem to equate first-past-the-post with majority rule and majority rule with first-past-the-post.

I cannot help but mark the special irony that Afrikaner politicians and intellectuals (but not only they) were, for so long, fixated on British institutions and the further irony that the principal impetus for adopting continental electoral systems came initially from English speakers in Natal. Of course, the irony may have something to do with the benefit the National Party has historically derived from plurality elections and the benefits the former Anglophone opposition might have gained from a different system. It took a civil war in Nigeria and the threat of one in Sri Lanka to overcome, at least in part, the intellectual power of British colonial institutions. Will it take the same in South Africa?

Constitution making is not an a priori exercise in taking principles from on high and parachuting them into any environment but a matter of starting with certain democratic objectives and choosing among constitutional principles to secure those objectives in a particular environment. There is nothing wrong with borrowing institutions. After all, how can any people be expected to invent everything from scratch? The trick is to borrow the right institutions, those that are apt for the predicament of the borrowers. As we shall see later, one test of aptness is to see how various institutions have functioned elsewhere.

As I read the South African evidence, there is a large paradox involved in the question of the acceptability of democratic alternatives. It is this: In sample surveys, majorities of all groups, and particularly majorities of Blacks, appear firmly committed to an inclusive South African polity, based on majority rule but not on Black domination. At the same time, the means to achieve such results are viewed with understandable suspicion by that same majority. Whites, on the other hand, are prepared to abandon White rule, but they equate majority rule with Black rule. There is some consensus on ends but not on means.

In 1986, an urban South African sample was asked about various possible future governments.^[45] Overwhelming majorities of all groups professed support for a future government in which "no group dominates." This is perhaps unsurprising, given the motherhood-and-apple-pie character of the question, but it is worth pointing out that even 58

[45] C. P. de Kock, "Revolutionary Violence in South Africa: 1,000 Days after 3 September 1984," in D. J. van Vuuren et al., eds., South Africa: The Challenge of Reform (Pinetown, South Africa: Burgess, 1988), pp. 343–405.

percent of the Whites thought such a future government would be good, despite the fact that the question probably was interpreted to suggest major regime changes so far as Whites were concerned. (On the other hand, perhaps not. For several years, the South African government had been touting the idea of "no domination" in a way that might suggest only marginal changes.) More revealing in my view are the responses to the question asking about a future under a "Black majority government." Less than 6 percent of every group except Blacks thought such a future would be good. This is no surprise. The surprise, if there is one, consists of the urban Black response. Only 25 percent of Black respondents approved of such a future—a decline of 60 percentage points from Black respondents approving of a future government in which no group dominates. Can it be that urban Black respondents were making a sharp distinction that had eluded both Nadine Gordimer and the editors of the Economist?

I do not regard this survey as conclusive evidence of anything: the hypothetical and aspirational character of such questions is a problem in survey research. As we shall see shortly, Black opinion may ultimately be more equivocal than it is depicted here. Black students—future elites—certainly seem to provide rather different responses. Nevertheless, this survey is suggestive of support for measures to break the impasse that results from the prospect of the census-type election, in which majority rule comes down to Black rule, and it is supported by the results of other surveys of Black opinion.^[46]

[46] Similar results to the de Kock results were obtained in surveys reported by Theodor Hanf et al., South Africa: The Prospects of Peaceful Change (London: Rex Collings, 1981), p. 439, with substantial majorities of Whites accepting a government that included all groups but in which none dominated the others and only 35 percent of Soweto Blacks in 1978 favoring a government "in which blacks as the majority rule the whites," compared to 57 percent of that sample preferring "equal numbers of blacks and whites in [the] Cabinet." There are other surveys in which Black respondents indicate a strong preference for equality rather than Black control, even in sectors apart from politics (such as industry). See, e.g., Lawrence Schlemmer, Black Worker Attitudes: Political Options, Capitalism and Investment in South Africa (Durban: Centre for Applied Social Sciences, University of Natal, 1984), pp. 31–32. See also Lawrence Schlemmer, "Build-up to Revolution or Impasse?" in Heribert Adam, ed., South Africa: The Limits of Reform Politics (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1983), p. 77, reporting a survey conducted for the Buthelezi Commission in which 70 percent or more of Black respondents "not only would oppose discrimination against whites but . . . valued white participation in South African society. . . ." (emphasis in the original); KwaZulu Natal Indaba, "Black Attitudes in KwaZulu Natal" (September 1988; mimeo.), p. 18, reporting that only 11 percent of the sample favored Black-only rule in a future South Africa, compared to 40 percent favoring rule by "all races together" and 15 percent favoring rule by Blacks and Whites, with support for the "all races" option increasing steadily with education level. For even stronger and more recent survey results in the same direction, see Giliomee and Schlemmer, From Apartheidto Nation-Building , pp. 214–15, 223. But compare the rather different results reported in Mark Orkin, Disinvestment, the Struggle, and the Future: What Black South Africans Really Think (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986; pamphlet), p. 51.

A 1989 survey of White university student preferences points in a similar direction. Among six options for a future South Africa, the "White control" option came in third, with the support of only 16.6 percent of the students, and actually came in a very distant fourth (3.2 percent)—far below an undifferentiated majority rule option (20 percent)—among English-speaking students.^[47] These results obtained even though the White students responded quite candidly that they would expect to experience positive "conditions and quality of life" under a White-controlled government and negative conditions and quality of life under a Black-controlled government.^[48] Either their candor on the one question is marred by hypocrisy on the other, or, very much more likely, they actually prefer alternatives to White domination, despite the privileges that come with it.

These results are not very different from adult White opinion expressed in other surveys asking about preferred options. Although very few Whites want a single, majority-controlled parliament, only a minority favors White rule or the current three-chambers variant of White rule. Most Whites—in fact, close to two-thirds—prefer some form of power-sharing accommodation of Blacks (though the options to which the respondents subscribe have been framed by researchers in a variety of ways).^[49] Majorities of Whites appear to be ready for an end to apartheid in schools, group residential areas, and public accommodations.^[50] There is also considerable support for fundamental political change. In 1988, two-thirds of White voters in Natal agreed with the statement "Until black people are included in Parliament, I don't think there will be peace in South Africa"; only one-fifth disagreed.^[51]

There is, then, some fairly persuasive evidence that many Whites would

[47] Jannie Gagiano, "Ruling Group Cohesion in South Africa: A Study of Political Attitudes among White University Students" (paper presented at the Biennial Conference of the Political Science Association of South Africa, October 9–11, 1989), pp. 41–42.

[48] Ibid., pp. 57–58.

[49] See the summaries of three surveys, administered between 1986 and 1989, in Giliomee and Schlemmer, From Apartheid to Nation-Building , pp. 156–58.

[50] Michael Sutcliffe, "The Integration of Facilities: Results and Conclusions from a Survey of Residents of Durban" (Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa, Durban, 1989; mimeo.), pp. 9, 13, 15; KwaZulu Natal Indaba, "New Indaba Survey Shows That Most White Natal Voters Reject Apartheid," KwaZulu Natal Indaba Press Release (Durban, February 3, 1988; mimeo.), tables 1, 2, 3, 6. The Durban site of the surveys is, of course, an important limitation

[51] KwaZulu Natal Indaba, "New Indaba Survey Shows That Most White Natal Voters Reject Apartheid," table 4.

like a change from White rule and that many Blacks would not like a change to Black rule.

Still, there are obstacles to electoral engineering. To enumerate them is to complete the paradox.

On the White side, the main obstacle is simply stated. The assumption is that universal suffrage will produce Black domination. Consequently, in the same year as 58 percent of White respondents expressed support for a government in which no group dominates, only 30 percent of White respondents in a different survey professed support for equal suffrage.^[52] The apparent inconsistency between the White desire for Black participation and the absence of support for majority rule is explicable by the inability of most Whites to square majority rule with anything other than a straight reversal of the present system.

This obstacle is reinforced by another, solidly grounded in much of White opinion. It is that African-led governments are not likely to be democratic. The objection has two forms: a crude, bigoted one and a more substantial one. The crude version is typified by the remark of a superintendent of local administration in a Black township. Explaining the violence in the township, the official told a researcher: "You must forget about elections and democracy among Africans. The ones who stand in your way you eliminate—it's normal in the African way."^[53] The more substantial objection is based on the very poor record of democracy in most of independent Africa thus far—a record scrupulously noted and well publicized, albeit without any careful causal analysis, by South African officials.

With respect to the excluded majority, the source of the obstacles to electoral engineering lies, initially, in the history of franchises and parliaments in South Africa. That history has given rise to a perfectly understandable Black suspicion of electoral manipulation. Since at least 1960, liberal South African Whites have been attempting to persuade Black leaders to focus on alternatives to plurality electoral formulae. The efforts include reports by the Molteno Commission and the Political Commission of the Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society.^[54] With the notable exception of Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Blacks generally have been unconvinced. Black suspicion helps explain why.

[52] Times (London), August 3, 1986. See also Gagiano, "Ruling Group Cohesion in South Africa," pp. 42–43, reporting that most White students choose an option other than undifferentiated majority rule. Most of the alternatives involve some sort of group protection. Giliomee and Schlemmer, From Apartheid to Nation-Building , pp. 156–58.

[53] Quoted in Colin Legum, ed., Africa Contemporary Record, 1986–87 (New York: Africana, 1987), p. B748.

[54] Donald B. Molteno et al., Final Report of the Commission Set Up by the Pro-gressive Party to Make Recommendations on a Revised Constitution for South Africa , vol. 1 (N.p. 1960), pp. 7–28; Political Commission of the Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society, South Africa's Political Alternatives , SPRO-CAS Publication no. 10 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1973), pp. 144–73.

The extraordinary fact is that, over the last 150 years, while the franchise was expanding in the West and even in parts of the then-colonial world—Sri Lanka, for example, had universal suffrage by 1931—it was contracting in South Africa. When the Cape Province first received representative government, in 1853, the franchise had, in fact, been "colorblind."^[55] By 1910 and the Act of Union, Blacks had already been stripped of their right to be elected to parliament,^[56] although some 7,000 Blacks and 14,000 Coloureds still held the franchise in the Cape Province at that time. When the franchise was extended to all White adults, in 1930–31, property qualifications were left intact for other groups. In 1936, Blacks in the Cape were deprived of the common roll vote they had had and were placed on a separate electoral roll, from which they could choose three White representatives. Throughout the Union, Blacks were allowed to elect four White senators.^[57] After a five-year legal struggle that included a packing of the Senate, so-called Coloured voters in the Cape were also placed on a separate electoral roll in 1956. And, finally, in 1959, the White representatives of Black voters were removed from parliament and from the Cape Provincial Council, so that, with the exception of the four Whites elected by Cape Coloureds, all voters, as well as all representatives, were White.

Most recently, in 1983, two new chambers of parliament were created, one for Coloureds and one for Indians, both with limited powers. Both were inaugurated over the boycott of majorities of those who were to be represented in those chambers and over the flat opposition of the Black majority that was not to be represented. In the light of all this history, can anyone wonder that the vast majority of South Africans might be suspicious of fancy franchises and might prefer for themselves the same first-past-the-post system that White South Africans have chosen for themselves?

The suspicion is pervasive. It manifests itself, for example, in an otherwise highly sophisticated survey of electoral alternatives prepared for the ANC, in which the tendency to wonder whether proportional rep-

[55] See Carter, The Politics of Inequality: South Africa since 1948 , pp. 19, 21, 120.

[56] See Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (London: Longman, 1983), p. 2; D. A. Kotzé, "African Politics," in Anthony de Crespigny and Robert Schrire, eds., The Government and Politics of South Africa (Cape Town: Juta, 1978), pp. 116–17.

[57] Paul Maylam, A History of the African People of South Africa: From the Early Iron Age to the 1970s (London: Croom Helm, 1986), p. 166.

resentation might be a superior electoral system for a future South Africa is identified with "the ineluctable need of the racial oligarchy to maintain its power. . . ."^[58]

I shall lay out later some of the details of the electoral innovations that seem to me to give South Africa a chance for majoritarian democracy with universal suffrage and without racial bifurcation. It suffices to say here that an electoral system in South Africa should provide every inducement to candidates and to political parties to reach out across racial and ethnic lines for support. If the parties do this, they will tend to interracial and interethnic compromise. To make such a system work, a plurality of political parties—a multiparty system—is better than just two parties, which would tend to bifurcation; and first-past-the-post elections in single-member constituencies will not produce the desired result.

Indeed, it may also be desirable to have a separately elected president, rather than a prime minister, so that the election of the president can be accomplished by an electoral system that provides strong incentives—as the Nigerian presidential system of 1979 did—for the candidates to reach out to groups other than their own or risk losing the election. And, finally, if there is to be multipolar fluidity in the party system, instead of bifurcation, a federal system of government may be preferable to a unitary system.

As soon as we say this, of course, we have evoked yet another understandable suspicion. The so-called Black homelands created by the regime of apartheid have made federalism a dirty word among many South Africans. They see federal states as a way of perpetuating divide and rule, of compartmentalizing people.^[59] Federal proposals have been described by the ANC as "'manoeuvres' to perpetuate Bantustans under new guises. . . ."^[60] All "compartments," in the words of a UDF leader, are unacceptable.^[61] And so, as majority rule can mean two things, a

[58] Asmal, "Electoral Systems: A Critical Survey," p. 2. Inexplicably, the paper ends by asserting that proportional representation systems "have a built-in mechanism to ensure that no party obtains over 50% of the seats; they inevitably give rise to coalitions through the over-representation of minority interests." Ibid., p. 14. Both halves of the sentence are erroneous; and the whole statement is extremely curious, since the author displays elsewhere in the paper a knowledge of electoral systems, including proportional systems.

[59] See, e.g., Democracy in Action (Cape Town), May 1989, p. 5.

[60] Heribert Adam, "Exile and Resistance: The African National Congress, the South African Communist Party and the Pan Africanist Congress," in Berger and Godsell, eds., A Future South Africa , p. 104.

[61] Interview, Johannesburg, September 20, 1985.

unitary South Africa can mean two things. Either it can mean one South Africa devoid of secessionist and partitionist schemes, or it can mean something more: one South Africa without federal components. To many people, unfortunately, it means the latter as well as the former.

Federal units, of course, need not be ethnically homogeneous or resemble the homelands in any way. It is not well recognized that divided societies can gain benefits even from federal units that are heterogeneous.^[62] Perhaps that difference might change some minds, as well it should. But I do not think there is any blinking the deep suspicion of federalism that is entertained by many Black South Africans.

If this is where things stand, one of the major obstacles to a democratic South Africa may be that, while South Africans of all groups devoutly will the end, they do not necessarily will the required means to that end. Many White South Africans reject universal suffrage on a common roll—exactly the sort they have prescribed for themselves—and many Black South Africans seem to reject any institutions other than those borrowed by Whites from Great Britain. If that is so, the South African tragedy may be even sadder than we think.

It is worth noting that the suspicions of Black South Africans to which I advert are directly traceable to apartheid—to the apartheid of White-only elections and of Black exclusion, as well as to the apartheid of the Bantustans. And so the deeper irony is that the White regime, in its policy of separate development, has created resentments that may spill over and taint even some of the best prospects for living, not separately, but together.

The Burden of Alienation and the Myth of Indigenousness

Two further obstacles derive from the sense of being excluded and of having had one's land stolen. One is a common heritage of rigidly authoritarian societies; the other is common to many plural societies.

A particular kind of political learning seems to take place among those long excluded from political participation. The late Merle Fainsod pointed out many years ago that the tsarist autocracy helped create the conditions for the Soviet autocracy that followed. In his words, tsarist policy "alienated substantial sections of the vital and creative forces

[62] Compare the recommendations in Arend Lijphart and Diane R. Stanton, "A Democratic Blueprint for South Africa," in S. Prakash Sethi, ed., The South African Quagmire , p. 92.

in society. They denied these forces experience in self-government, and where they could not deny, they limited such experience to the narrowest possible range. By damming up the constitutional channels for the expression of social grievances, they helped create a situation in which popular disaffection overflowed into revolutionary turbulence."^[63]

Like the tsars, colonial regimes in Asia and Africa often taught their subjects that politics was the art of domination. In a few colonies, a form of limited, but not meaningless, democracy was practiced for some years or decades before independence. The association is not susceptible of proof, but it appears to be more than coincidence that three of those ex-colonies that practiced pre-independence self-government—India, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines—have maintained (or lost and then restored) vigorous democracies in the face of considerable obstacles, whereas others have generally done less well.

South Africans, deprived of democratic participation, have assuredly developed a keen sense of suspicion. They may also have learned lessons in domination. The fear, however well or ill founded it may prove to be, argues for the most careful design of institutions to foster democratic outcomes. To some extent, they will have to substitute for the trust that helps sustain most of the world's democracies.

The general obstacle is not unique to South Africa but is quite common in ethnically divided societies that have experienced international or interregional migration. It is a claim by some groups to legitimacy, to priority in the polity—even to the exclusion of others—by virtue of indigenousness, by having arrived first. In Malaysia, the Malays claim to be the sons of the soil and claim that the Chinese are mere immigrants. Assamese in India make similar claims against the Bengalis in their state. In the Nigerian First Republic of 1960–66, northern Nigerians made such claims against Ibo, who migrated from the south. Where claims to priority by virtue of indigenousness are made, interethnic compromise is far more difficult. Not that indigenousness is an unshakable fact. On the contrary, it is a feeling, a social construct. Wherever claims to indigenousness are heard, there is a large measure of fiction about who arrived when.^[64]

[63] Merle Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled , 1st ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 5.

[64] In Sri Lanka, for example, where Sri Lankan Tamils arrived, on the average, about a thousand years ago, they are nonetheless occasionally called by Sinhalese kallathoni , a term referring to recent, illegal Indian immigrants. In Malaysia, many Malays actually arrived significantly later than many Chinese.

Such claims are now occasionally heard in South Africa, where Whites are, from time to time, referred to as colonial "settlers" like those in Kenya or Zimbabwe. In the background, of course, is a powerful history of land grabbing, relegation of "natives" to "reserves," and creation of impoverished Bantustans. There is both an organizational component and an underlying popular-attitudinal component to these claims.

As we saw in Chapter 1, the place of Whites (and other minorities) in South Africa has been a frequent source of friction among the extraparliamentary opposition. The ANC has itself been somewhat ambiguous on the question. Adhering to the racially inclusive Freedom Charter,^[65] the ANC has also referred to the leading role of Africans in the struggle and to the South African government as a "colonial regime," a diagnosis that implies that Whites are mere colonists. For its part, the Black Consciousness Movement and the Pan Africanist Congress call South Africa "occupied Azania." The United Democratic Front, with a good many White and Indian members, is a loose confederation of organizations professing allegiance to the Freedom Charter, but individuals entertain a variety of views on the relative connections of groups to the territory. "We are the indigenous people of the country," a strongly committed, well-educated, African UDF leader stated in 1985.^[66]

No doubt the "people's history" currently being taught by the resistance movement embodies a view of the conquest and warfare that took place in South Africa that is diametrically opposed to the White regime's view of wide open spaces, to which Black and White groups migrated. The "people's history" view will likely strengthen conceptions of Black indigenousness. In his inaugural address, the rector and vice-chancellor of the University of the Western Cape, a bastion of "people's history," referred to "the settler-dominated social order" in South Africa.^[67]

Already, popular conceptions of Black indigenousness are strong. A survey among Black high school and university students, conducted in 1985, revealed racial sentiments far more exclusive than those elicited from random samples of the African population. Offered a "Black hegemony" option and a "majority rule" option, the former was chosen

[65] See, e.g., Sechaba, Official Organ of the African National Congress, South Africa , July 1983.

[66] Interview, Johannesburg, September 20, 1985.

[67] Jakes Gerwel, "Inaugural Address by Professor Jakes Gerwel at His Installation on 5 June 1987 as Sixth Vice-Chancellor and Rector of the University of the Western Cape" (1987; pamphlet), p. 4.

by half of the respondents, nearly twice as many as chose the latter. Only seven of 119 Blacks in the sample preferred a future "society in which group identity has ceased to be crucial in determining who governs."^[68] By contrast, large majorities of Coloured and English-speaking White respondents preferred such a society.^[69] "Moreover," concluded the principal investigator, "it is clear from interviews that most black students perceive all 'Whites,' English and Afrikaans, in the role of immigrants who have illegally seized the land of their birth and reduced them to the condition of a subject people."^[70] And 40.5 percent of the African respondents in a 1983 survey answered "Don't know" to a question about the meaning of human rights, compared to only 14.2 percent of Coloureds, 7.7 percent of Indians, and 6.8 percent of Whites who gave such a reply.^[71] Such results are disquieting in the light of comparative evidence from divided societies, because they augur distinctions (or worse) based on perceived indigenous or immigrant status.

In the larger society—as opposed to student society—according to a 1986 survey, an overwhelming majority of Africans (78 percent) believe that Whites should continue to live in a future South Africa,^[72] but there is no good evidence on what the acceptable terms of political interaction might be or on what the significant minority of respondents who gave a different answer were thinking.^[73] This much is clear: claims to indigenousness always make democratic accommodation more difficult. Rarely, as I have indicated, are they historically supportable in the form in which they are made—any more than official White historical claims are supportable—particularly in a country where so many people have historically moved around so much. All over the world, the truth is that virtually all peoples come from somewhere else, and the history of migration and conquest that is propagated is usually highly selective. How important that history, and the claims to priority that flow from it, will be in South Africa remains to be seen, but it certainly has a chance of becoming a dominant strand in African political discourse.

[68] Peter Collins, The Ethnic Factor in South Africa's Politics (University of Cape Town, n.d.; mimeo.) p. 95.

[69] Ibid.

[70] Ibid., p. 96.

[71] Ibid., p. 98.

[72] Times (London), August 3, 1986.

[73] But see the studies reported in note 46, above.

Constitutional Change:
Gulps Or Sips?

Both gradual constitutional change and dramatic constitutional change create risks for the future of South African democracy. Gradual change, accomplished much sooner, would have reduced the risks. There is now no alternative to dramatic change, and this stark fact, as I shall suggest, means that some of the most important supports for democracy will be, at best, imperfectly developed.

It is, of course, possible to acquire democratic institutions slowly, as Great Britain did. Moreover, students of the process of democratization suggest that democratic stability is enhanced where democratic rights, including suffrage, are institutionalized before mass claims are made on the political system.^[74] Gradual incorporation of social groups by stages into the political system is generally a good formula for durable democracy. This statement alone should indicate the problematic future of a country in which the opposite course was followed.

It has been said that democracy can come in parts, in fragments, that it is always under construction.^[75] No doubt there is a sense in which this is true, but it is more true of some times and places than of other times and places. Whatever good opportunities there were, twenty or even ten years ago, for South Africa to get its full democracy by a process of gradual but politically shrewd reform,^[76] South Africa will not now get its democracy in parts or in small increments. It will get it, if at all, in a few spurts, rather like those that characterized decolonization in most Asian and African countries.^[77]

I say this, not because I think great leaps into democracy are the best way, for, as I remarked earlier, under ideal conditions the Indo—Sri Lankan—Philippine way is the better way, as recent work on democratization attests.^[78] Rather I say it because, as Disraeli pointed out, one

[74] Seymour Martin Lipset, "Political Cleavages in 'Developed' and 'Emerging' Polities," in Erik Allardt and Yrjö Littunen, eds., Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems (Helsinki: Academic Bookstore, 1964), pp. 34–35.

[75] Richard L. Sklar, "Developmental Democracy," Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, no. 4 (October 1987): 686–714.

[76] See Samuel P. Huntington, "Reform and Stability in South Africa," International Security 6, no. 4 (Spring 1982): 3–25.

[77] In using the decolonization analogy, I am not at all suggesting that South Africa is a colonial situation, as I shall make clear below. The analogy relates only to the issue of pacing.

[78] See Larry Diamond, "Beyond Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism: Strategies for Democratization," Washington Quarterly 12, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 141–63, at 144–47.

cannot cross a great chasm in several leaps. There is a great chasm to be crossed in South Africa. Psychologically, a clean break with the past is necessary, because no change will be fully legitimate, given all that has transpired over the apartheid decades, without a sense that something momentous has occurred. For Black attachment to any new regime, the change must be palpable. The advantage of gradual change—its smoothness—is precisely its disadvantage in South Africa.

Even from the regime's standpoint, a strategy of change in big gulps rather than small sips is probably desirable. Perhaps with some justification, the government complained that it received no credit, either internationally or domestically, for reforms undertaken in the 1970s and 1980s. The parliamentary and extraparliamentary opposition simply pocketed them and went on to make new demands. To take one of many examples, protests at segregated sport finally produced integrated teams, at which point South Africa was met with continued boycott on the ground that there could be no normal sport in an abnormal society. The same goes for influx control, pass laws, freehold land ownership, and so-called residential gray areas, among others.^[79] The government's changes went unreciprocated, partly because they were accomplished in a manner conducive to "salami tactics," one slice at a time, until, imperceptibly, the whole salami is gone.^[80]

Moreover, gradual change risks a loss of control that may not be in the interest of the public in general. For example, Whites who prefer to stay in South Africa but are fearful of the uncertain end-state toward which the government is leading them may be able to use the time accompanying protracted change to find ways to export their capital and emigrate. This they might do in greater proportions than they would if more rapid changes took place in a surefooted way that provided assurance of a stable future. It is not clear at all that "radical change in incremental steps" is more likely to be "orderly."^[81]

Perhaps the most important reason of all to prefer big gulps is that, at this point, small sips will be tainted by their association with the government in power. We have already seen that the regime's history of disenfranchisement and territorial division has placed a cloud over promising innovations in the electoral system and in federalism. Be-

[79] For the regime's reforms of the 1970s and 1980s, see Giliomee and Schlemmer, From Apartheid to Nation-Building , pp. 114–49.

[80] Cf. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 66–69.

[81] Hendrik W. van der Merwe, Pursuing Justice and Peace in South Africa (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 110–12.

cause of their gradualness, even more substantial and genuine incremental reforms risk more of the same effect that Eugene Lourens and Hennie Kotzé have identified for the regime's earlier perversions of potentially promising ideas:

One gains the impression that the National Party has appropriated the form of concepts like consociation and confederation while simultaneously rejecting their substantive contents. This may in the long run have unfortunate results for more committed proponents of these ideas. By using their form but perverting their contents the NP may be vitiating federalism and consociationalism as political alternatives. . . .^[82]

A future South Africa will need some fairly complex institutions. Those institutions can stand on their own merits. They ought not to be put at risk by becoming the property of a government whose legitimacy is far from universally recognized.

Whether to proceed by sips or gulps is a question that cannot easily be finessed. There are tensions between the two methods.^[83] And, of course, there is the ever-present question of which forces, on each side, will be strengthened, and which weakened, by one strategy or the other. There is a substantial risk that incremental reforms will strengthen the hand of those forces on both sides most interested in revolutionary solutions and least amenable to compromise.^[84]

To suggest that the time for gradual change has passed does not mean that everything has to happen at once. If it did, that would be a prescription for failure. There is no prospect that White opinion would take the requisite risks or, even if it did, that a wide array of new institutions could all be made to work at once. To advocate big gulps is not to advocate choking to death. Nor does what I have said imply that the more dramatic, nonincremental strategy is free of difficulty. Quite the contrary. Securing and maintaining democracy will not be easy. There are problems of enactment and problems of maintenance. Speaking comparatively, there may be a tradeoff between getting democracy and keeping it. Those states that came to democracy more slowly may have less trouble maintaining it.

If we look at the difference between democracy achieved in incre-

[82] Eugene Lourens and Hennie Kotzé, "South Africa's Non-unitary Political Alternatives," in A. Venter, ed., South African Government and Politics (Johannesburg: Southern, 1989), p. 327.

[83] See Samuel P. Huntington, "Whatever Has Gone Wrong with Reform?" Die Suid-Afrikaan (Cape Town), Winter 1986, pp. 19–22, at p. 21.

[84] See generally Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 362–69.

ments and democracy achieved in bold strokes, we can see exactly what the maintenance problems are for the latter. The difficulty of maintaining democracy achieved in bold strokes lies in the frequent absence of some conditions that support democracy. By supporting conditions, I mean two things: propitious sequencing of political change and the growth of social complexity.^[85]

Propitious sequencing has full participation as the culmination of a process of building national identity and legitimate authority, rather than the reverse.^[86] Poor sequencing has something to do with the general failure of democracy in Africa thus far. Where sequencing has been favorable, democracy has done better, as the cases of Botswana and Senegal show. In their comparative study of Democracy in Developing Countries,^[87] Diamond, Linz, and Lipset employ a minimal conception of democracy, embracing nonviolent competition for power at regular intervals, inclusion of all major social groups in the selection of leaders and policies, and maintenance of basic civil and political liberties. Using that standard, their edited volume for Africa covers a mere six countries of the approximately 36 countries below the belt of North African states. Of the six, four are not democracies. Zimbabwe became, unofficially, a one-party state while the book was in press; Uganda and Ghana have been democracies for no more than 20 percent of their 30 years of independence; and Nigeria has twice seen democratic regimes overthrown by military coups. Of the remaining two, Senegal is described as a "semi-democracy," and Botswana is called a "paternalistic democracy" or, less kindly, "a de facto one-party state."^[88] Nevertheless, these two states, with some continuous history of reasonably free elections and respect for liberty, provide some interesting contrasts with likely patterns of political participation in South Africa.

[85] These are hardly new ideas with me. See Diamond, "Beyond Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism," p. 148; Huntington, "Will More Countries Become Democratic?"

[86] This is the theme of much writing on the subject. See Dahl, Polyarchy , p. 36. See generally Leonard Binder et al., Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).

[87] Larry Diamond et al., eds., Democracy in Developing Countries , vol. 2, Africa (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1988). The study might have included the two minidemocracies of Mauritius and the Gambia; but, any way the computation is done, African democracies can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

[88] The quotations in the text are drawn, in sequence, from Christian Coulon, "Senegal: The Development and Fragility of Semidemocracy," in Diamond et al., eds., Democracy in Developing Countries, vol. 2, Africa, pp. 141–78; John D. Holm, "Botswana: A Paternalistic Democracy," in ibid., pp. 179–215; Louis A. Picard, The Politics of Development in Botswana: A Model for Success (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1987), p. 142.

Both Botswana and Senegal are one-party-dominant systems, in which alternation of government has never taken place. The same is true of the Gambia, which, though more or less democratic, is not included in the Diamond, Linz, and Lipset volume. In the three African countries with regular elections, opposition parties can be permitted to operate relatively freely, because they pose no threat of defeating the ruling party in a general election. The axiom that toleration of an opposition is likely to increase as the costs of toleration decrease is entirely apposite here.^[89]

The basic reason for the uneven distribution of support is the same in Botswana and Senegal. In Botswana, there is a dominant ethnic group, the Tswana, which comprises about 90 percent of the population. Opposition parties have support among two non-Tswana minorities and among a dissident Tswana subgroup fearful of others. In the Tswana heartland, the ruling party commands about 90 percent of the vote, and the support of two large Tswana subgroups is alone almost sufficient to gain a majority of parliamentary seats.^[90] In Senegal, the ruling party can generally count on the support of two large blocs: Wolof, who constitute more than 40 percent of the population, and Muslims (including Wolof and other ethnic groups), who constitute about 90 percent. As in Botswana, opposition strength has been located disproportionately in a few ethnic and religious minority areas, especially in the non-Muslim Casamance region, dominated by the Diola ethnic group.^[91] Neither Botswana nor Senegal represents the likely pattern in South Africa, which is a much more thoroughly heterogeneous society.

More to the present point of sequencing of participation, elections in Senegal go back at least to 1871 in the four main communes . During the Fourth French Republic, Senegalese sat in the French parliament. Parties flourished before independence, and political mores had roots before the period of mass participation.^[92] In Botswana, elections came late, but mobilized mass participation came even later. Initially, low levels of education meant that demands on the system were very mod-

[89] Dahl, Polyarchy , p. 15.

[90] Holm, "Botswana," p. 181–92; John D. Holm, "Elections in Botswana: Institutionalization of a New System of Legitimacy," in Fred M. Hayward, ed., Elections in Independent Africa (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987), pp. 123, 133, 137–39; Picard, The Politics of Development in Botswana, pp. 148, 152–54, 158, 171; W. A. J. Macartney, "Botswana Goes to the Polls," Africa Report, December 1969, pp. 28–30.

[91] Coulon, "Senegal," pp. 163–65; Fred M. Hayward and Siba N. Grovogui, "Persistence and Change in Senegalese Electoral Processes," in Hayward, ed., Elections in Independent Africa, pp. 263–64, 269 n. 74.

[92] Coulon, "Senegal," pp. 142–43; Hayward and Grovogui, "Persistence and Change in Senegalese Electoral Processes," pp. 240–43.

est. Elites have had time to get the rules of contestation straight, to establish norms, even as participation has gradually been expanding.^[93] In short, Senegal's early elections and Botswana's late participation both allowed time for elites to be socialized into politics before they had to contend with mobilized mass participation. Such conditions will surely not obtain in South Africa, as they have not obtained in many other African countries.

Writers on Senegal and Botswana stress the peaceful, accommodative political cultures of most Senegalese groups and of the Tswana.^[94] These make political contests less violent and more amenable to compromise than in some other African countries. The South African political cultures are more various; some are assuredly more contentious; and the long history of internecine warfare is hardly forgotten. Again, more to the point, in both Senegal and Botswana, participation has been highly structured and controlled by intermediaries. The Senegalese mediators are the marabouts, leaders of the important Muslim brotherhoods, under whose auspices followers were integrated into the political system.^[95] In Botswana, the political class has been largely continuous with traditional rulers, and participation has been mediated by the chiefdoms to whom voters owe allegiance.^[96]

Considering all of these conditions, John D. Holm concludes that if "Botswana succeeds in establishing elections as a means for transferring government power when other African polities have failed . . . the critical reason may be the fact that elections were already institutionalized before the full force of modernization took hold."^[97] The same can certainly not be said for South Africa, where mass mobilization has preceded the expanded franchise.

The importance of social complexity refers to the state-society balance. There needs to be time for the growth of a middle class—or, in a plural society, broadly distributed middle classes—the group that recurrently demands democratic participation and a return to democracy when authoritarianism periodically creeps in. In fact, democracy is fostered by the development more generally of autonomous social forces, of vol-

[93] Holm, "Elections in Botswana," pp. 143–45.

[94] Hayward and Grovogui, "Persistence and Change in Senegalese Electoral Processes," p. 240; Holm, "Botswana," p. 196.

[95] Coulon, "Senegal," pp. 171, 173; Hayward and Grovogui, "Persistence and Change in Senegalese Electoral Processes," p. 239.

[96] Picard, The Politics of Development in Botswana, pp. 121–44; Holm, "Botswana," p. 190.

[97] Holm, "Elections in Botswana," p. 144.

untary associations and interests,^[98] of a civil society that stands apart from the state, of forces that can balance each other in utilizing the future state machinery for political ends.

There is now a large literature on the process of democratization in Latin America and southern Europe. One thing it shows very clearly is the utility of social complexity.

In Brazil, for example, there was a growing middle class with a stake in democracy. The working class, politicized by the Catholic church, by barrio organizations, and by trade unions, also demanded a voice. Business wanted a more open system that might provide influence over sources of credit controlled by the state and protection against international competition. Although Brazil had a strong tradition of the domination of civil society by the state, the "gradual decompression"^[99] that took place over more than a decade provided time for social groups to redress much of the balance. Once it began, Brazil's "slow road to democratization"^[100] produced something like a balance among the state, political parties, and civil society.^[101]

Portugal did not have the same long transition: its democracy followed a military coup. At first, the Communist Party took advantage of its traditional strength. Slowly, the Socialists, the Centrists, and the Conservatives caught up, because they were supported by a strong peasantry and a strong bourgeoisie. Within two years, the Socialists had an electoral plurality, and the authoritarian right and left had been defeated by the complexity and balanced forces of a differentiated society.^[102] The Portuguese experience shows that a rapid transition is not necessarily fatal, but only because organized sectors of the society with a stake in a democratic order took steps to protect their interests.

Will the plurality of forces be sufficient to sustain democracy in South

[98] Such as the growing South African trade union movement. See, e.g., C. R. D. Halisi, "The Political Role of the Trade Union Movement," in Anthony G. Freedman and Diane B. Bendahmane, eds., Black Labor Unions in South Africa (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs, 1986), pp. 37–44.

[99] Bolivar Lamounier, "Authoritarian Brazil Revisited: The Impact of Elections on the Abertura, " in Alfred Stepan, ed., Democratizing Brazil: Problems of Transition and Consolidation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 45.

[100] Thomas E. Skidmore, "Brazil's Slow Road to Democratization, 1974–1985," in Stepan, ed., Democratizing Brazil, pp. 5–42. See also Maria do Carmo Campello de Souza, "The Brazilian 'New Republic': Under the 'Sword of Damocles,'" in ibid., p. 381.

[101] Scott Mainwaring, "Grassroots Popular Movements and the Struggle for Democracy: Nova Iguaçu," in Stepan, ed., Democratizing Brazil, pp. 189–95.

[102] Kenneth Maxwell, "Regime Overthrow and the Prospects for Democratic Transition in Portugal," in O'Donnell et al., eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, pt. 1, pp. 109–37.

Africa? By limiting Black social mobility, apartheid has prevented the emergence of a strongly differentiated Black civil society. By insuring that the racial issue transcends others, the regime has repressed differences among those who oppose it. There are many ideological streams, to be sure, but at least in the Black townships the complaint of thoughtful participant-observers is that opposition to the regime should not, but generally does, produce conformity, often coerced conformity, to a single line.^[103] Apart from racial and ethnic cleavages, which have a tendency in any event to preempt other forms of social differentiation, it is difficult to foresee a post-apartheid South African version of the Brazilian or Portuguese counterbalancing complexity.

Writing of the oscillating Nigerian experience of democracy, Sam C. Nolutshungu, a South African, has emphasized a major difference between the emergence of democracy in western Europe and in Africa. Whereas in Europe a preexisting bourgeoisie resisted state power and sought influence over it, the nascent Nigerian bourgeoisie has had no special need to limit the power of the state but rather a desire to enlarge it and live off its largess. There has been little sense of "empowering the people against the state" and no "equilibrium of power between classes, but a balance of weakness."^[104] In a post-apartheid South Africa, there is an excellent chance that emergent Black middle-class interests will also see the state as a source of largess rather than as an impediment to be kept in a limited sphere. In addition, the depressed African peasantry might well have differentiated interests to assert against the state, given the proclivity of African states to extract a surplus from agriculture and to subsidize urban food consumption at the expense of the peasantry.^[105] But Black South African peasants and wage laborers, now subordinated in White rural areas or pushed aside in the homelands,^[106] have hardly been heard from in the struggle thus far. There is considerable doubt whether, given their economic debility and ethnic fragmentation, rural

[103] See Nomavenda Mathiane, South Africa: Diary of Troubled Times (New York: Freedom House, 1989).

[104] Sam C. Nolutshungu, "Fragments of a Democracy: Reflections on Class and Politics in Nigeria," Third World Quarterly 12, no. 1 (January 1990): 86–115, at 110, 111.

[105] Robert H. Bates, Essays on the Political Economy of Rural Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

[106] The South African economy no longer has a sizable sector of traditional agriculture. Stephen R. Lewis, Jr., The Economics of Apartheid (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1990), p. 129. Cf. Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 221–47.

Africans could be organized to play a role strongly supportive of democracy, along Portuguese lines. The peasant sector in Portugal was much stronger and politically dynamic. The South African resistance organizations have been mainly urban in focus, rural leaders are few, and most (though not all) homeland leaders are discredited.

Some of these social conditions would surely have been different if democracy had been given a chance to evolve in South Africa. South Africa needs more time, but South Africa does not have much more time.

As I intimated earlier, there is a vast difference, for democratic prospects, between having political organizations that oppose for a time and then are pulled into government to practice democracy before independence and having political organizations forced to oppose to the bitter end. As Juan J. Linz has said, conflicts within the political elite that hamper cooperation between government and loyal opposition

are not so great when the democratic political system has evolved slowly out of a more restricted political system like a semiconstitutional monarchy with representative institutions, an oligarchic democracy in which democratic reformers had already participated in a minority role, or a system of dual authority like that of India before independence. They are exacerbated when the instauration of democracy follows a prolonged period of authoritarian rule that provided no opportunity for the emergence of counterelites, and the[ir] interaction in certain political arenas such as legislatures, municipal governments, or interest-group bargaining.^[107]

Clearly, this would have been an argument for the gradualism and incorporation of the opposition for which the time has long since passed in South Africa. How tempting it looks in retrospect to have enlarged the functioning South African parliamentary system in stages to embrace the dispossessed and excluded, along the lines of the British Reform Acts or the Senegalese communes during the French period, and how tragic it is that the opposite course was followed instead, with the disfranchisement of those few who were already at the edges of democratic participation.

White South Africa has had functioning parliamentary institutions, but I do not see any way of enlarging them in phases to secure the advantages of gradualism. Indeed, it could well be argued that, for Whites, democracy, insofar as it means electoral competition, has grown in re-

[107] Juan J. Linz, "Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration," in Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pt. 1, p. 34.

cent years: the electorate has more options than it had when White politics was defined in clear terms of Afrikaner inclusion and English exclusion. The White electorate has the Conservative Party and the Democratic Party, in addition to the Nationalists and the small Herstigte Nasionale Party. But this helps the cause of fully inclusive democracy not at all, because the main issue in the competition among the White parties has been what posture to adopt toward the aspirations of all other groups. Plainly, the growth of intragroup democracy by no means implies the growth of intergroup democracy. Electoral competition among Whites has involved a fair amount of outbidding for the exclusivist White vote, to the detriment of the participation of everyone else.

Anyone who thinks that this is a unique feature of the South African system, having no implications once that system is dissolved, needs to look carefully at the comparative evidence. From 1956 on, the growth of party competition in Sri Lanka made the system more responsive to Sinhalese aspirations. Their fulfillment came at the expense of the Tamils. From the early 1970s on, the growth of party competition in Northern Ireland made more options available to Protestants but impeded the accommodation of Catholics. From 1970 on, Malaysia became somewhat less democratic overall, but the Malays were offered significantly more choices, resulting ultimately in unprecedented intra-Malay contests for deputy prime minister and prime minister.^[108] Divided societies, in short, tend toward segmented electorates and toward within-group party competition that makes democratic accommodation more difficult.

Indeed, there is frequently an inverse relationship between intragroup democracy and intergroup democracy. Intergroup accommodation may be easier where ethnically based parties do not need constantly to be looking over their shoulders to see which of their competitors might make political gains as a result of compromises made across group lines.

I have digressed a bit from my point that South Africa will need, for the most part, to attain its full democracy in large gulps, rather than small sips, but that there are grave perils accompanying such a strategy. Along the way, we have noted that segmented electorates and ethnically

[108] See Donald L. Horowitz, "Cause and Consequence in Public Policy Theory: Ethnic Policy and System Transformation in Malaysia," Policy Sciences 22, nos. 3–4 (November 1989); 249–87, at 273–74.

based parties are likely to further conflict in divided societies. It is a point that can hardly be emphasized too often.

One more word about the transition to full democracy. Several of those post-colonial states that received their independence without fighting for it—India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and the Philippines—have done better in maintaining democracy than some near neighbors who engaged in warfare to secure independence (Indonesia, Bangladesh). There are, it seems to me, clear advantages in a peaceful transition.

When, then, is the time right? I said that earlier is generally better, but once an obvious juncture, such as the attainment of independence, has passed, not every moment is equally propitious. The best time is after a common disaster, such as those that have befallen Nigeria and Uganda and have given rise to desires not to repeat the disaster. But disaster can hardly be recommended on the ground that it might create a sense of community later. If, short of disaster, serious conflict is already well along, the participants will not be motivated to move if they think they are winning. Perhaps fortunately for South Africa, neither the government nor the forces of opposition can feel secure about the future—the government for the obvious reason that there is a clock ticking on White-only rule, the opposition for the equally obvious reason that the government's control of the instrumentalities of force is thus far overwhelming. So the government is vulnerable in the long term, and the opposition is vulnerable in the short and perhaps the medium term. As the settlement of a decade-and-a-half-long Sudanese civil war in 1972 shows, mutual vulnerability can provide an occasion for accommodation.

It may be objected that the Sudanese settlement lasted only about ten years. The impermanency of the arrangements, however, has much to do with their substance—specifically, the asymmetrical devolution that was imposed, with only one regional authority for the entire south but several for the north—and nothing to do with the propitiousness of the occasion. This reinforces a point I shall make more forcefully later—namely, that it is not enough for the parties merely to reach agreement but is necessary to inquire carefully into the content of the agreement.

Now it may well be that the asymmetry between the government and the extraparliamentary opposition will be conducive not to action but, at the crucial moment, to great caution on the part of Whites. If the government is not vulnerable in the short and medium term, and if, in addition, what is demanded are some great leaps, Whites may ulti-

mately be reluctant to take a risk.^[109] This risk aversion would be most unfortunate.

The misfortune for the whole society is obvious. The misfortune from the standpoint of the self-interest of Whites alone needs to be stated. It seems unlikely that the passage of time will greatly improve the bargaining position of Whites and quite likely that it will erode that position. Precisely such a sense that "continued resistance may lose them even more ground in the end"^[110] underlies a number of historical decisions by regimes to incorporate those excluded from the democratic process. It is no longer a question of the best time but of the least-bad time. Sheer self-interest suggests the desirability of overcoming the misplaced risk aversion of Whites. Despite the enormous obstacles to democracy inherent in rapid political change, gulps are necessary.

Against the Odds

This grab bag of obstacles to democracy can, to some extent, be explained in terms of the metaconflict described in Chapter 1. Wishful thinking derives from a sense that the only problem is apartheid. The equation of majority rule with Black rule, the dissensus on the means to democracy, the alienated and suspicious opposition, and the sense of African indigenousness all form part of the contested description of the future South Africa. Only the problems that attend the need for rapid political change can really be described as more structural than ideological.

For present purposes, the source of the obstacles is less important than the scale of the obstacles. They are considerable. Nevertheless, it should not be thought that the structure of the South African problem includes every conceivable problem of democratic legitimacy that besets the most severely divided societies. Despite the obstacles I have enumerated, South Africa has one advantage not enjoyed by, for example, Northern Ireland. Once South Africa reverses the homelands policy, it will not run afoul of what Adrian Guelke calls "international legiti-

[109] For the view that the state of affairs in South Africa does not give rise to propitious timing, see Steven Friedman, Reform Revisited (Braamfontein: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1988), p. 28. If that is true, it is discouraging, for it is hard to envision a set of conditions, short of disaster, under which timing will be more propitious. See also Huntington, "Whatever Has Gone Wrong with Reform?" p. 22: "In a sense, South Africa today has a government too weak to impose reform from above—assuming it wanted to—and opposition groups which are too weak to compel reform from below through negotiation."

[110] Rustow, "Transitions to Democracy," p. 357.

macy," a norm which, after World War II, came to mean self-determination within the boundaries of the undivided state.^[111] Whereas the partition of Ireland violates this norm, the unitary South Africa that even the regime now seems to accept means that the problem loses its intractable territorial aspect and comes down to the (still intractable) matter of engineering arrangements for multiracial, multiethnic democracy within the agreed boundaries.

Whether the requisite engineering can be accomplished will depend very much on whether South Africans can shed some of their acquired biases against the arrangements that are most apt to ease their predicament and whether they can summon the moral courage to will the means to the amelioration of the group tensions that cloud the South African future. About the odds for this, only a seasoned gambler could be sanguine.

[111] Adrian Guelke, "The Political Impasse in South Africa and Northern Ireland: A Comparative Perspective" (paper presented at the International Political Science Association World Congress, Washington, D.C., August 28-September 1, 1988).