Heribert Adam

Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, B.C. CANADA, V5A1S6

 

Paper first presented at South African-Israeli-Palestinian Symposium at Africa Institute, Columbia University, New York, September 19-20, 2002

Not to be reproduced without permission. © H.A.

 

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VISIONS OF THE FUTURE DURING POLITICAL TRANSITIONS: COMPARING AFRIKANER AND ISRAELI ATTITUDES

 

This essay focuses on discourses, anxieties and competing strategies of white Afrikaners during the political transition in South Africa in the late 1980s and early 90’s. As its source it relies on opinion surveys, election results, political party pronouncements, academic analyses and personal observations in lectures, group discussions and formal interviews throughout this period. The paper seeks to   explore what can be learned from the negotiated settlement of a seemingly intractable ethno-racial conflict for the unresolved strife in the Middle East. When and why did a privileged ruling group consent to negotiate itself out of power? What divisions occurred and how were internal cleavages handled? How was the historic compromise marketed to a skeptical constituency? What role did civil society and dissidents play in the change? In short, can the South African ‘miracle’ be replicated in the Middle East?

 

Many activists advocate similar anti-apartheid strategies (divestment, boycott) against Israel and assume that strong pressure would produce similar outcomes. There is nothing wrong with such idealistic optimism, except that it may foster illusions. The underlying assumption that the SA model of conflict resolution readily lends itself to export ignores unique historical circumstances. It may actually retard necessary new solutions by clinging to visions or processes of negotiation that may not work in another context. Above all, in South Africa an entire regime had to be changed while in Israel the occupation and the status of the territories is the main contentious issue. Therefore, a more nuanced understanding of differences and similarities may enhance new approaches.

 

 

 

Differences and Similarities between South Africa and Israel/Palestine

 

The lessons to be drawn were probed in a more comprehensive comparison, published as “Peacemaking in Divided Societies: The Israel-South Africa Analogy” (Adam, 2002) on which this paper further elaborates. Six elements were evaluated in both contexts: economic interdependence, religious divisions, third party intervention, leadership, political culture and violence. As a background to the Afrikaner debate, it seems worthwhile to summarize the main arguments in each of the six realms for a clarification of the similarities and differences:

 

1. Economic interdependence and the emergence of a politicized union movement since the mid 1970s socialized South Africa in negotiation politics and trade-offs. The Israeli economy depends minimally on Palestinian labour and two economies exist more or less side by side. Israel uses closure as collective punishment. Palestinians are deprived of industrial action (strikes, consumer boycotts) that was heavily used by black South Africans to combat apartheid.

 

2. Religion in South Africa served as a common bond to assail and delegitimize apartheid, while Judaism and Islam compete for sovereignty in Jerusalem. Religiously motivated settlers and ultra-orthodox believers may not be as easily marginalized as Afrikaner extremists, merely interested in territorial autonomy.

 

3. Both the ANC and the NP eschewed third party intervention in their negotiations. An Israeli-Palestinian settlement depends heavily on US policy that strongly supports Israel. Sanctions (divestment and trade boycotts) are generally overrated in triggering SA change. Only loan refusals and, to a lesser extent, moral ostracism impacted significantly on the apartheid government. Such action against Israel by the West is inconceivable at present. Unlike Afrikaners, Israelis enjoy a supportive diaspora.

 

4. The SA negotiations were facilitated by a cohesive and credible leadership with a widely endorsed open mandate on both sides. Leaders could sell a controversial compromise to a skeptical constituency. Both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership is fragmented, with militant outbidding a frequent tool of populist mobilization. The apartheid Westminster electoral system rewarded majority parties, in contrast to the minority influence in the proportional representation in Israel.

 

5. Much more personal interaction in a vertical status hierarchy shaped SA race relations, compared with the more horizontal social distance between Jews and Palestinians. Paternalism characterized Afrikaner attitudes. Moral erosion among the ruling elite in SA contrasts with moral myopia in Israel, a few hundred military objectors notwithstanding. Both sides in the Middle East display a collective sense of victimhood. Apartheid clearly privileged beneficiaries and disenfranchised a majority in a pariah state that lacked the universal legitimacy of Israel outside the Arab and Muslim world.

 

6. During the anti-apartheid armed struggle, suicide was never used as a weapon and martyrdom never celebrated. Resulting from the huge power imbalance and the imagined Israeli defeat by Hizbollah in Lebanon, the tactics of the second intifada are nevertheless counterproductive: the attacks on civilians unify Israeli public opinion on security, and also destroy the social fabric of Palestinian society.

 

In summary, on most counts, the differences between apartheid and Israel outweigh the similarities that could facilitate conditions to a negotiated compromise. Above all, opponents in South Africa finally realized that neither side could defeat the other, short of the destruction of the country. This perception of stalemate, as a precondition for negotiating in good faith, is missing in the Middle East. Peacemaking resulted in an inclusive democracy in South Africa, while territorial separation of the adversaries in two states is widely hailed as the solution in Israel/Palestine. However, despite some promising attempts at Taba in January 2001, the opponents are so far unable to reach a final agreement on the return of refugees, borders and settlers, and the status of Jerusalem. Contrasting insights from very different solutions to a communal conflict shed light on the nature of ethnicity as well as the limits of negotiation politics.

 

Historical Background and Conceptual Clarification of ‘Settler States’

Academic comparisons of domination and resistance mostly invoke the notion of settler societies. Alien intruders conquer and displace an indigenous population. They act on

behalf of a metropolitan power. This colonial analogy has inspired both Palestinian and South African black resistance. However, settlers also develop their own interests, independent of and often against their sponsor abroad. The colonial concept leaves unanswered when and how settlers become indigenous. Yet the right of settlers to coexist with displaced people in the same land has long been conceded by mainstream Palestinian leaders and confirmed by the African National Congress’s (ANC) Freedom Charter of 1955. Disputed issues are the terms of coexistence, the meaning of equal citizenship and how to redress the legacy of past injustice. [i] The notion of “settler societies” carries explanatory weight only if their varieties are distinguished. As Donald Akenson has pointed out, “there is scarcely a society in Europe or North and South America that is not a settler society” (Journal of Military History, 65, 2001, 571).

 

In the ideological battle for legitimacy, most Jewish analysts view their relationship with the Palestinians not as a colonial one, but as a conflict between two competing national entities. In their self-concept, Zionists are simply returning to their ancestral homeland from which they were dispersed two millennia ago. Originally most did not intend to exploit native labour and resources, as economic colonizers do.  Probably the only unifying conviction across a deeply divided political spectrum in Israel concerns the preservation of a Jewish state as a response to historical anti-Semitism. Such endorsements of an official ethnic state defy many prescriptions of multicultural citizenship in a liberal democracy. As a perceived sanctuary and guarantor of ethnic survival in a hostile neighborhood, however, it is based on the trauma of collective victimhood. The legacy of the Holocaust cannot be compared with Afrikaner anxieties. From the experience of victimization emanates the tendency to reject any criticism of Israeli policy by outsiders as anti-Semitism. Therefore, the clear distinction between despicable anti-Jewish sentiments and legitimate criticism of Israeli policy has to be made and underscored. The robust debate among the global Jewish community itself about Israeli policies demonstrates this distinction.

 

 Colonisation out of necessity or out of greed makes little difference to the displaced indigenous people. The newcomers, however, acquire a different relationship to the land, because they have no homeland to return to, unlike economic colonizers. Moreover, once the quest for a safe territory is focused on an imagined ancestral homeland, the guilt of alien intruders is removed. In their self-deception, Zionists  now reclaimed the land “by right” of return. The later religious zealots of Gush Enumin even invoke divine destiny in occupying their outposts in Eretz Israel. Whatever the historical differences between Zionism and Afrikaner nationalism, their adherents share the notion of their current residential territory as their only homeland, regardless of whether this is accepted by their neighbours.

 

The Zionist project was further strengthened demographically and ideologically by the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries in response to the establishment of Israel. These low-status sephardics and their descendants in Israeli society form the backbone of anti-Arab hostility. These voters for right-wing parties deeply resent their double discrimination by Ashkenazi insiders and Arab outsiders previously.  Similarily, the social base for right-wing Afrikaner parties was predominantly rural people, the lower echelons of the civil service and the remnants of the Afrikaner working class – all sections that were dropped from state protection by an increasingly self-confident bureaucratic  bourgeoisie.

 

Six Categories of Political Attitudes and Strategies in Transitional Regimes

 

Ruling groups must not be treated as monolithic blocks, particularly in ethnic democracies, such as Israel and South Africa. Antagonisms within the dominant group often overshadow differences with designated opponents. Taking Afrikaners as an  example, three categories of status quo supporters and three categories of dissident strategies may be distinguished. Each ‘ideal type’ contains several distinct sub-constituencies that are in constant flux and may overlap on some contested issues. The six categories on a right-left spectrum may be labeled: 1. CRITICAL EXTREMISTS, 2. REGIME APOLOGISTS, 3. CONFORMIST BYSTANDERS, 4. STRATEGIC DISSENTERS, 5. MORAL CRUSADERS and 6. POLARIZING MILITANTS.

 

1. Extremist Afrikaners (AWB, HNP. CP) were strongly opposed to the Afrikaner National Party government in the literal sense but, above all, critical in potentially blocking reforms and negotiations, both electorally and violently. In the white election of 1989, this growing block commanded about 35 percent of the popular white vote and more than 40 percent of the Afrikaner vote. Critical extremists are often confused with neo-Nazi or fascist movements. The media focused heavily on the antics of Terre’Blanche’s insignificant band of street performers and ignored the far more respectable  ideologues of Treurnicht’s Conservative Party. While the AWB shared with European predecessors fascist symbols and the readiness to use violence, their goals differ. Fascist terror aimed at overthrowing democratic states and promote right-wing social change. Ultra-right Afrikaners, like Jewish settlers, support the ethnic state, want to preserve it and prevent its reform. Extremist terror emerges when the state is perceived as abandoning its traditional identity and concede rights to common opponents. Looming peace settlements pose a real threat to groups who fear their special privileges eroded and being betrayed by concessions to the enemy. Like the colons of Algeria, the loyalist vigilantes in Ulster, or the armed zealots in the occupied territories, Afrikaner paramilitaries not only targeted blacks, but above all their own ‘volksvereir’ (traitors). The state’s legal monopoly of force is tested by illegal armed challengers. Since sections of the official security forces often sympathize with the right-wing extremists, the loyalty of the army and police is also at stake. In this contest, a conscript army, representing all sections of society, can be more relied upon than a self-selected professional force. On the whole, the SA police loyally backed the ‘legitimate’ government and even shot some right-wingers in a decisive confrontation in Ventersdorp in 1989. During the transitional period of power-sharing, fragmented extremists became gradually marginalized by the moderation of influential leaders (Viljoen), gestures of reconciliation by the ANC and the vague promise to achieve Afrikaner self-determination via political participation and ‘cultural councils’. Incorrigble extremists, bent on sabotaging the new order in the security establishment and senior civil service, received a generous ‘golden handshake’ in what may be dubbed a “purchased revolution”. The  right-wing strategy was decisively defeated in ‘the last exclusively white referendum’ in March 1992 in which a surprising 69 percent of the white electorate gave de Klerk an open-ended mandate to negotiate a new constitution.

 

2. Regime apologists of the ruling National Party and the Broederbond as its think-tank, since the early 80’s, had adopted the language of reform and negotiations provided conditions were ripe and pliable black leaders with credible legitimacy were available. Only a small minority in the inner circle of the NP considered ‘the communist-led ANC’ to fit this bill. Another group hoped for a split between communists and nationalists, whom they considered more amenable without the Soviets and its SACP client dictating their strategy. Yet others wanted to build up Buthelezi’s Inkatha for an internal solution without the ANC. Great hope was placed on the co-optive strategy of separate parliaments for Coloureds and Indians, without realizing that omission of the African majority politicized all disenfranchised groups and led to the formation of a new united protest in the form of the UDF in 1983. Many NP politicians also believed their own propaganda that the free enterprise, law and order NP was relatively popular among the black majority. Some projected a 20 percent support vote among Africans, perhaps misled by the majority support of coloured cultural Afrikaner  for the NP. This unwarranted optimism – only 5% of the 76 % Africans voted for white parties in the first democratic elections – paradoxically led NP politicians to embrace a truly nonracial party system and to reject the Rhodesian model of guaranteed racial minority representation. In the words of Foreign Minister Pik Botha: “In the new South Africa, the colour of a person’s skin or his race will not form the power base of any political parties. Shared interests, values and standards will transcend racial lines so that ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ should no longer be mistaken for ‘white’ and ‘black’ (Quoted in INDICATOR SA, Vol 8, No 1, Summer 1990, 10).

 

Already in the 197Os, Prime Minister Vorster used the slogan ‘adapt or die’. An Afrikaner future ‘too ghastly to contemplate’ was painted as an alternative.  In the early 1980’s a secret Broederbond circular identified the greatest risk to Afrikaner survival as ‘not to take any risks’. By the end of the decade, the Afrikaner electorate had slowly shifted to the left on apartheid issues, but to the right on security. Since  1986, a steady stream of dissidents, including a delegation of corporate South Africa,  visited the exiled ANC leadership abroad. Initially the state sought to criminalize such contacts, just as in Israel the architects of Oslo are now denounced as ‘lackeys’ of terrorists. After the 50 person Dakar delegation returned from exploratory talks in July 1987, the Defence Minister Magnus Malan threatened: ‘Those who talk to terrorists and condone terrorism owe South Africa an answer’ (SAIR, 1987/88: 55). In reality, at the same time PW Botha himself had authorized some trusted colleagues to establish secret contact with the ANC, especially the imprisoned Mandela. The National Intelligence chief explained later (Interview, March 2002) that “powerless people” constitute a nuisance and “only muddy the water” when they take it upon themselves to play high-level politics.

 

The NP fought the 1987 elections largely with a law and order campaign. Cabinet ministers boasted about the successes of the security forces, ‘resulting largely from information forwarded to the police by the (black) public’. Police Minister Vlok contended that his forces were effectively ‘bloodying the nose’ of the ANC, and that they turned the assignments of insurgents into ‘suicide missions’ (SAIR, 1987/88:56). All the while, the townships were in turmoil, schools and factories on frequent strikes, a few bombs exploded weekly in different parts of the country – mostly without causing loss of life, some police stations were attacked with hand grenades and a permanent state of emergency was in force.

 

In the 1989 elections the NP lost votes to both the conservative CP and liberal DP, but retained its majority of seats. Now issues of group rights, minority protection and own affairs featured strongly. After the resignation of the unpopular, bullying state president P.W. Botha, the pressure was on the successor F.W. de Klerk to deliver. In comparison with his close competitors (Barend du Plessis and Pik Botha) for the position, de Klerk held the advantage of a cautious, conservative Transvaal image – a person who would not engage unnessarily in liberal experiments, as proven in his previous role as hardline education minister. In an interview two years later, one of his cabinet colleagues considered de Klerk an outright racist. In another interview in 1990, the  Finance Minister Barend du Plessis confessed that ‘he as President would not have gotten away’ with the policy shifts of de Klerk, due to his suspect liberal image in the caucus and Afrikaner constituency.

 

How far and fast a new leader is willing to move obviously depends on many factors, not the least on the assessment of voters support. Our third category of “conformist bystanders” formed the majority of the Afrikaner population and its interests and attitudes in South African transition were decisive.

 

3. Stanley Cohen (2001:140) has stated that “the word ‘bystander’ has acquired the pejorative meanings of passivity and indifference”. Whilst the majority of the voting public may be mere onlookers or spectators to the political process, they are not all politically apathetic and most hold firm opinions. Their attitudes can be mobilized in elections or activated for other forms of irregular intervention.

 

In a revealing survey of ‘white attitudes towards black majority rule’ in 1979, 84 and 87 Pierre Hugo (1989) has focused on such questions as ‘ how frightened are whites and of what exactly? How long will white South Africans resists black majority rule, both in terms of capacity and will to resists?’ Hugo assumes a ‘pain-threshold’ whose crossing breaks down the will to rule when the costs outweigh the benefits. In the late 1980’s, virtually all South African social scientists, from the leading pollster Lawrence Schlemmer to astute analysts like Hermann Giliomee or Van Zyl Slabbert, agreed that Afrikaners in particular are not to tolerate the loss of political status easily, that they will not give up economic privilege and that the white’s fear of black rule is deeply entrenched. Indeed Hugo’s (254) survey data seem to confirm this assessment, particularly for Afrikaners.

 

 

Table 1: AFRIKANER ATTITUDES TO BLACK MAJORITY RULE IN 1987 (N=1012)
STATEMENTS		AGREE	DISAGREE
Life for whites would carry on as before		7.1	91.2
The physical safety of whites would be threatened		78.5	19.1
The language and culture would be protected		8.3	88.5
The income and living standards would suffer		82.4	15.5
Law and Order would be upheld		12.8	84.0
Blacks would discriminate against whites		91.4	6.8
White women would be molested by blacks		85.3	10.8
Communist policies would be implemented		88.3	7.6
White possessions would be safe		8.4	87.5

                                                                            

 

           

       

               

          

                 

                                               

                                         

                                           

 

With hindsight, however, the predictions of Afrikaners digging in to defend their state to the last man proved wrong. The conventional wisdom of a bloodbath overlooked that the reported attitudes were, first, the result of indoctrination, not historical experience and, second, mediated by influential leaders in an authoritarian culture. Therefore, if the leadership redefines the threatening situation, their constituency is likely to follow.

 

Clearly Afrikaners entertained anxieties about a future under black rule, and a minority seriously flirted with establishing a ‘volksstaat’ along the Jewish model. The dream failed to garner support not only because of economic interdependence. Unlike Diaspora Jews, the ruling Afrikaner elite did not feel particularly vulnerable and had not faced persecution from blacks. Despite all the anxieties about ‘black numbers swamping whites’, ‘white women being molested’ or ‘administrative chaos erupting’, the  Afrikaner paternalistic mindset did not believe that blacks collectively were inclined to or even capable of seriously harming their white overlords. To be sure, there was the occasional bombing of Wimpy bars and super markets or mines on remote farm roads. Many civilians were maimed when the airforce headquarter in a busy Pretoria street was targeted or later a Cape Town church attacked by a black fringe group. Still, most Afrikaners dismissed the ‘armed struggle’ as the work of a few misguided communist terrorists. The signs of growing militancy did not shake the average bystander out of the customary complacency. Unlike Israelis, average urban Afrikaners hardly lived on the edge in their cocooned suburbs, they continued to attend the Saturday afternoon rugby games and trusted their government to handle the occasional disturbances. Personal security was perceived as protection from individual black criminals rather than the rage of an entire population as in Israel.  When during a provocative invasion of Bophutatswana, a few surrendering white rightwingers were finally shot in revenge by black policemen before rolling cameras, the event caused a traumatizing shock in the Afrikaner community.

 

It is the differential experience of vulnerability between Zionists and Afrikaner nationalists that accounts, in part, for the different responses of separate versus common states. As obvious beneficiaries of racial minority rule, Afrikaners could hardly portray themselves as victims the way both Israelis and Palestinians sanctify victimhood. Israelis are far more convinced of their own rationalizations than Afrikaner nationalists ever were. A long time foreign correspondent (Suzanne Goldenberg, Globe&Mail, August 17,2002,F4) observes that “Israelis and Palestinians appear to suffer not from doubts, but from certainties”. Afrikaners never idealized their society or elevated their army into a ‘moral force’ the way Israelis think their country operates on higher ethical standards. Such generalized reflections need to be supplemented with a close analysis of the three dissident strands in Afrikaner political thoughts. 

 

4. Strategic dissenters constitute insiders who aim at feasible alternatives rather than utopian ideals. As ‘intellectual voortrekkers’ they are nevertheless pragmatists who continue to engage the rulers in their own terms. The regime apologists cannot dismiss them as despised liberals, and have to respond to their critique. Van Zyl Slabbert would be the epitome of this type of dissent, whether operating inside or (after 1986) outside of parliament.

 

5. The epitome of the fifth category of ‘moral crusader’ would be Beyers Naude, if one wishes to personalize a strategic position. He founded the Christian Institute in 1963 after breaking with his assigned role in the church and Broederbond. Moral crusaders primarily give witness to human rights violations, they expose injustices relentlessly, but are less concerned with incremental improvements. Moral crusaders are frequently aligned with religious groups in civil society or have themselves a theological background. They are a thorn in the flesh of regime apologists, because of their disproportional influence on foreign opinion, but are dismissed as outsiders by the conformist bystanders. The Black Sash in English South African culture or segments of the Peace Activists in Israel  belong in this category.

 

6. Polarizing militants comprise those group members who unreservedly have joined the other side. Braam Fisher, an early Afrikaner leader of the outlawed Communist Party, would be one such example. They are prepared to work in exile or underground as revolutionaries to change a system which they consider unreformable. Some prominent Afrikaner dissidents, like Breyten Breytenbach, have oscillated among all three positions at different times. The last two categories commanded miniscule support in the Afrikaner community and even if all voters for the PFP/DP during apartheid are included among strategic dissenters, their support never exceeded 6 percent. However, their main impact lies not in the weakening of regime support, but in conveying to the other side that generalizations about the hated enemy are problematic.

 

One of the world’s leading criminologists, Stanley Cohen (2001: 146) in his perceptive book “States of Denial”, has compared different bystander motivations under Nazi rule, in Communist Eastern Europe and in Israel and South Africa. Unlike the compliance out of fear in the totalitarian Nazi and communist regimes, Cohen diagnoses as voluntary the conformity with government policy in the ethnic democracies of Israel and white South Africa. “But denial of the injustices and injuries inflicted on the Palestinians is built into the social fabric. The Jewish public’s assent to official propaganda, myth and self-righteousness results from willing identification” (Cohen, 157). The real threat to life and limb through suicide bombers has, of course, reinforced a “defensive self-image and a character armour of insecurity and permanent victimhood”. Cohen (165) traces the different idioms of denial in Israel that inflicts even critical visitors: “The same American Jews who are outspoken critics of human rights violations everywhere from El Salvador to Tibet now change from sophisticated observers into dumbed-down collective victims. Their fellow Jews who criticize the Israeli treatment of Palestinians too strongly or openly are denounced as ‘self-hating Jews’ or as having a ‘Diaspora mentality’”.  

 

In apartheid South Africa, the regime apologists, but also most of the ‘conformist bystanders’, did not share this mindset. Their compliance resulted from indoctrination and community pressure. Most of the bystanders simply could not envisage a life outside the values and codes of proper Afrikaner behaviour. They had minimal exposure to alternatives, because the exclusive discourse in a separate language already barred this temptation. Socialized in all-Afrikaner schools and universities, informed exclusively by Afrikaans newspapers and sanctified by at least nominal religious adherence, the life of racial privilege was taken for granted and ‘natural’. Deviation resulted in ostracism that only a few autonomous individuals could bear.

 

Cohen (146) writes that “the essence of white consciousness in apartheid South Africa was a continuous shutting out of what seemed ‘obvious’ to any outsider”. If ‘shutting out’ implies a conscious effort to repress contradictory information, the statement is problematic. On the contrary, at least the elite of regime apologists showed a keen interest in what the maligned opposition was arguing, particularly when it was written in Afrikaans. One could visit government offices in Pretoria for interviews, and the senior bureaucrats or generals often had Hermann Giliomee and Andre du Toit’s “Die Suid-Afrikaan” or Max du Preez’  “Vrye Weekblad” on their desks. Since the critical views were expressed by respectable fellow Afrikaners (and not by despised English liberals), they weighed more heavily, particularly since a compliant party media hardly ever exposed government scandals. The successful patient erosion of a political hegemony by ethnic insiders cannot be quantified and also has never been recognized by the new rulers. Israeli and Palestinian peace activists can draw important lessons from this precedent. Those with the most impact on recalcitrant regimes are neither the ‘moral crusaders’ who merely express outrage, ridicule, or condemn the political actors, nor the ‘polarizing militants’ who have joined the ‘enemy camp’ unreservedly. Their critical line is predictable and instantly dismissed. Yet when a ‘strategic dissenter’ speaks out and engages the regime apologists with feasible alternatives and lays bare the group’s own moral follies, the critique originates from a creditable source and hits home.    

 

 A similar subversive role can be played by critical foreigners who cannot be instantly labeled ‘supporters’ or ‘opponents’. For the colonized minds of apartheid South Africans – Afrikaners and blacks alike – anything imported from abroad, from fashion to academic expertise, carried a mythical quality and undeserved prestige. Most of the ethnic Afrikaner intelligentsia were keen to have their world views of ‘the communist threat’ or the fickle nature of hostile world opinion or the ‘moral decay of liberal America’ confirmed by the foreign visitor. There was little cognitive retreat from disturbing news – the average Afrikaner adult did not mind discussing with visitors delicate subjects plainly or even admitting their own racist atrocities. Non-South Africans were generally viewed as biased or mislead, and National Party supporters went out of their way to enlighten the assumed ignorant foreigners and show them ‘the real South Africa’. Unfortunately, few liberal intellectuals from abroad took the opportunity to engage their hosts critically. Instead of sowing doubts and shattering the complacent myths of apartheid indoctrination, they boycotted the pariah state. Reaffirming their own purity and pseudo-radical credentials seemed more important to many foreign academics than achieving an impact. The underlying assumption that racist and fascist minds were totally closed, overlooked the quest for moral recognition by a shunned outcaste people. Similar to the uncritical solidarity groups on pilgrimage to Israel, conservative foreigners filled the need of justifying the unjustifiable. Paradoxically, when liberal intellectuals broke the ill-considered cultural boycott – as did the renowned Irish academic Connor Cruise O’Brien in 1987 – they were hounded out of South Africa by the very activists whose cause they supported.

 

As previously argued, in South Africa, receptiveness to alternative visions among regime apologists was always greater than among Zionists in Israel, because of economic necessities, because of lower levels of violence, because of weaker religious justifications, because of different demographic ratios and because of the obvious illegitimacy of racial minority rule, compared with the global empathy with persecuted Jews in their only sanctuary. With an articulate liberal opposition hammering home the contradictions of institutionalized racism and even powerful business lobbies constantly clamoring for the “high road” in fashionable future scenarios, Afrikaner nationalism soon fragmented into pragmatic reformists and into an ideological ethnic wing.

 

 The split roughly resembles the Labour-Likud or ‘left-right’ division in Israel, except that the National Party always held a slight majority among the ‘volk’ and could rely on support from English voters for its reforms, if it lost majority support in its core constituency. Similar to Rabin’s reliance on Arab parliamentarians in the Knesset, such support by ethnic outsiders was castigated by the right-wing opposition as betrayal, but constituted a legitimate fallback position. Unlike the destabilizing PR electoral system in Israel, the first-past-the post system in South Africa favoured the stronger party and led to stable governments that could take controversial decisions without being held hostage by small special interest groups that commanded the balance of power. Therefore, unlike the disillusionment with Labour in Israel, the National Party did not lose control of the reform process.

 

The authoritarian Afrikaner culture places great trust in legitimate ethnic leaders, unlike the more quarrelsome, individualistic and fragmented Jewish political scene. Even most disaffected right-wingers would respect the legitimacy of democratically elected incumbents of office, despite their deep disenchantment and distrust. A few months before de Klerk unbanned the liberation movements, no breakdown of ethnic cohesion had taken place.  A comprehensive student survey by Stellenbosch political scientist Jannie Gagiano (1990: 191-208) in mid-1989 revealed solid sympathy towards public authority with only 6 percent of Afrikaans-speaking whites unsympathetic, but 41 percent of English-speakers. Less than 10 percent of Afrikaner males (as opposed to 35.5 % of English-speakers) would consider refusing to do military service and only 6 percent of Afrikaners expressed unsympathetic attitudes towards the security establishment (21 % among English students). What Gagiano calls the “repression potential” amounted to more than 90 % among Afrikaners and the author concludes: ‘The state need have no inordinate fear that repression will be seriously resisted by strategic sections within the white community’ (203).

 

Yet a few months later repression was replaced with liberalization and a new power sharing, transitional state. Gagiano, unfortunately, does not explain what accounts, in his words (207) for the “symbolically very significant and previously unthinkable, defections from the Afrikaner community to the ranks of the liberation movements” within the course of a year.  Following trustingly a political leadership by ethnic conformists, regardless of major policy changes, would seem to provide a large part of the answer. If that is the case, the quality and vision of leaders in ethnic democracies would appear far more important than sociologists commonly tend to admit, although successful leaders must also be in tune with major material and ideal interests of their constituencies. Conventional explanations of regime change focus on turning points when rising costs outweigh benefits. These rational choice conceptualizations underestimate leadership agency. Leaders, however, are rarely only shrewdly calculating individuals, but always come with their own idiosyncracies.  Even a major change of the political environment, - such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War that finally triggered the South African transition - might not have been sufficient to have lead a Conservative Party in power to similar shifts. Equally important: without a conciliatory Mandela counseling moderation and assisting the Afrikaner ideological leap into another order, it may have gone off the rail. Unfortunately, neither has Sharon the vision of de Klerk, nor does Arafat resemble Mandela.