Democracy and Apartheid: Political Theory, Comparative Politics and the Modern South African State (review)

This ambitious volume is both provocative and frustrating. It sets twin, lofty goals of critiquing the discipline of political science and elucidating the South African case. Either of these goals would be a tall order, and in this treatment neither seems quite satisfactorily addressed. Because both tasks are so large, the results are hit-or-miss. This sometimes gives the appearance that the author's choices are illogical or at least insufficiently justified. Nevertheless, when the target is hit, the author is deft and provocative in the sound analytic judgments he makes or the sketches he draws for further inquiry.

The book is organized into an introduction, six substantive chapters, and a conclusion. The substantive analysis begins with a survey of South African history. This is followed by a sometimes integrated analysis of how the discipline of political science has been used to explain the South African experience. At other times the author concentrates more exclusively on the discipline and its analytic concepts and methods.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this analysis is that which is least akin to contemporary political analysis—the effort to develop a historical periodization of South Africa's political history. While there are quibbles here and there about the interpretations of history, the author cogently draws together a set of frames with which one can make sense of how this territory was shaped. Moreover, the focus on the importance of minerals to the patterns of interactions amongst whites and the emergence of a distinct interracial labor environment are especially revealing about the emergent postapartheid political community.

The other parts of the analysis appear significantly burdened by efforts to assign responsibility for the system that developed in South Africa to external sources. This problem emerges in the historical section when we are told that the Afrikaners sought first and foremost to replicate a society consistent with that of Victorian England, and that therein lay most of the ideas and processes that would ultimately sustain the system of segregation that began to evolve shortly after 1910. It is true that the would-be Afrikaners, like the British, were imbued with ideas of superiority vis-à-vis the local Africans they encountered. But it is something else again to absolve this community of Dutch/French Huguenots of responsibility for the legally- enforced racist system they began to institutionalize after their electoral victory in 1948. To be sure, there is otherwise enough blame to apportion to the British, much of which owes to the author's excellent discussion of how Anglo-Afrikaner relations were transformed by the discovery of minerals in the territory.

A major consequence of the flawed argument about responsibility for the "bizarre" system in South Africa is the equally flawed judgment that apartheid actually represented a "democracy." That is in itself a bizarre conclusion regarding a system that avowedly excluded the majority of the community from political participation. The author, of course, is not ignorant of this fact. What he posits is that, insofar as democratic government on the ground is always below the threshold of the ideal-typical model, Afrikaner democratic pretensions were as reasonable as some other well-known systems. Unfortunately, that approach ignores several minimal conditions that any government aspiring to democracy must meet: rules and procedures guaranteeing open participation and substantive values that protect the rights of individuals within the community. The apartheid system made no pretense of meeting these conditions in regard to Africans. The rules in the system were designed to denigrate Africans, not because they were theoretically outside the community, but because they were a ubiquitous presence within it. Africans could not be accommodated in the so-called democracy precisely because of the uncertainty this would introduce for the ruling white elites.

The author is on more solid ground when he seeks to help us understand...