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.