This is the second in a two part series. The first article can be read here.
While transformation in any country is principally driven by domestic conditions and local dynamics this change does not occur in a vacuum sealed off from external influences. February 1990 is a case in point where South Africa’s protracted domestic crisis helped give rise to a range of global pressures which further intensified that crisis and severely restricted the government’s room for political manoeuvre.
Simultaneously, fundamental changes to the structure of the post-war international system created new opportunities and opened up the possibility that, from the government’s perspective at least, change need no longer be tantamount to capitulation. The impact of these external pressures – who they benefited, why and to what degree – continues to be the subject of considerable debate.
In this second and final article on February 1990, attention will be given to three main external drivers of change: South Africa’s exposed diplomatic position by 1989 as one of the world’s most isolated states; the impact of the seismic changes occurring in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; and, finally, the impact of the international sanctions campaign on government policy.
The diplomacy of isolation
South Africa was never a completely isolated state in the apartheid era but nor did it succeed in normalising its foreign relations. The nature of the apartheid system warped the country’s foreign policy and its diplomats had an onerous and unenviable task in combating the widespread abhorrence and opprobrium generated by apartheid. It was deeply isolated in the post-colonial world and it was no surprise to see the leading states in what was then termed the ‘Third World’ playing a prominent role in efforts to isolate apartheid South Africa politically, economically and militarily.
This campaign was only partly successful due to opposition in the West to efforts to impose comprehensive sanctions on South Africa and to sever diplomatic relations with it, the argument being that it was better to keep diplomatic channels of communication open. That said, there was also a clear recognition that the West could not fully embrace South Africa however much it emphasised its status as a western outpost in Africa or its strategic value as a Cold War ally.
To treat South Africa as a ‘normal’ state – and as a valued member of the Western ‘community of nations’ - would have poisoned the relationship with the emerging states of Africa and Asia. It would also have created opportunities for the Soviet Union, something the West - with wider political, diplomatic, economic and strategic interests to consider than the fate of white South Africa - could not countenance.
In any case, although the West did not seek to be overly prescriptive as to what an acceptable South African political system should look like, it was clear that apartheid was egregiously offensive to post-war Western liberal values and was viewed as an unacceptable basis for statehood.
To embrace race classification, segregation and discrimination as state policy, at the very point in human history when they were viewed as uniquely odious due to the experience of Nazism and the Second World War, was to virtually invite an international backlash.[1]
In some parts of the world this isolation was total, in others it was more partial though still damaging. This compelled South Africa to seek ways and means of relieving the pressure and this found expression in its so-called ‘pariah alliance’ with states like Israel and Taiwan, and to a lesser extent the military dictatorships of South America.
While the support extended by fellow pariahs was useful - Israel, for example, was the principal violator of the 1977 mandatory United Nations arms embargo on Pretoria[2]- it could not adequately compensate for the arms-length relationship with the West which prevailed after the Angolan crisis of 1975-6 and the Soweto uprising of June 1976.
An alliance with fellow pariahs also reinforced South Africa’s own outcast status. True, there were periods where apartheid South Africa received a much more sympathetic hearing in the West, particularly in the 1980s when, with Ronald Reagan in the White House and Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, the era of ‘constructive engagement’ dawned.
However, even that did not and could not produce the normalisation South Africa craved, not least because of the opposition their more indulgent approach to Pretoria generated within their own political systems, particularly in the US Congress which, with its patience exhausted, jettisoned Reagan’s policy in 1986 and opted for punitive sanctions. [3]
South Africa’s own diplomacy was also countered by that of its opponents. Although the African National Congress (ANC) was never a successful military organisation – for various reasons, which lie beyond the scope of this article, its armed struggle never posed a meaningful threat to the apartheid state – it did position itself very successfully at the centre of a network of global organisations and activist groups campaigning for the isolation of apartheid South Africa and it succeeding in making apartheid one of the most high profile global issues.
The ANC built up an impressive global diplomatic profile being treated as virtually a government in exile in Scandinavia, Africa and in the Soviet bloc. By 1989 its diplomatic offices abroad were at least the equal to the number of official South African embassies, a measure of the government’s diplomatic problems. Even in those countries where the governments were instinctively hostile to the ANC – in Reagan’s America and Thatcher’s Britain where the Prime Minister infamously labelled it as a ‘typical terrorist organisation’[4] – there was eventually a recognition that it was vital to any future settlement and by 1986-7 both governments had opened up a dialogue with the ANC.
Ultimately South Africa could have apartheid or international rehabilitation – and the economic opportunities which flowed from it - but it could not have both. De Klerk was the first leader of white South Africa to explicitly acknowledge that fact and to act upon it. Previous administrations had proceeded on the basis that apartheid was a purely internal matter over which South Africa and other states could agree to disagree and which need not contaminate good inter-state relations.
By 1989 this amounted to self-deception on a grand scale and while much is made of the success of De Klerk’s regional and global overtures – his so-called ‘New Diplomacy’ - this was rooted less in his innate diplomatic brilliance and more in his acceptance that a successful foreign policy required domestic transformation and the abandonment of apartheid. Restoring international respectability was a central plank in De Klerk’s platform but it would inevitably come at a price. It was only when he embraced that change in February 1990 that the doors back to the international community began to open, although a full embrace would have to wait until the dawn of democracy in 1994.
February 1990 and the changes in Eastern Europe
The tumultuous and - Romania apart - bloodless revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe which swept the sclerotic communist parties from power, precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall and accelerated the demise of the Soviet Union itself have often been cited by De Klerk and others as providing a historic opportunity for change in South Africa.
In this version of events, the collapse of communism in the Soviet satellite states, and the changes in Soviet foreign policy initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, shifted the strategic calculus in the South African government’s favour. By removing the spectre of a Soviet threat and by severely disadvantaging its chief opponents, the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP), it opened up the possibility that while the NP government could not wholly dictate the terms of any new arrangement it might enjoy a disproportionate influence over the process. As De Klerk said, looking back on February 1990 from a distance of 20 years, ‘when history opens a window of opportunity it is important to jump through it. We knew that the circumstances for a reasonable constitutional settlement would never again be so favourable. So we jumped.[5]
There is no doubt that the changes in Eastern Europe represented a setback to the ANC. In less than a year a significant part of its global support network had collapsed. Eastern European communist regimes had provided military training, intelligence support and propaganda facilities, as well as financial backing. It soon became clear that the successor regimes would look less favourably on the ANC due to its close associations with those old repressive Stalinist autocracies.
Equally, Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ and his recalibration of Soviet foreign policy, led to a scaling down of support for armed struggles around the globe. This was being replaced by a strong preference for diplomatic solutions to protracted conflicts, whether in Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa with the December 1988 New York Accords between Angola, Cuba and South Africa - and mediated by the US and the Soviet Union – serving as a template. Given his desire to restructure an ailing domestic economy, the underwriting of apparently endless and expensive conflicts around the developing world now had a greatly diminishing appeal.
This was certain to influence its attitude to the ANC’s own armed struggle and, by the late 1980s, it was more common to hear Soviet Africanists urging the ANC to take a more pragmatic approach to the possibility of negotiations. This would greatly complicate the ANC’s ability to intensify its armed struggle thus compelling it to take the path of political compromise.
Finally, De Klerk and his team believed the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe and the erosion of communism in the Soviet Union itself had ideologically defanged the ANC and its ally, the SACP. This meant that both organisations were now in ideological retreat, the credibility of their ‘socialist’ approaches gravely undermined and that of free market solutions greatly enhanced thus making their legalisation a more palatable and safer option. The foreign minister, R F ‘Pik’ Botha was typically bombastic when stating:
‘…in Eastern Europe they literally threw communism out of the window…certain elements in this country, certain parties, unless they quickly throw out of the window their obsolete and worn out theories and systems which they have propagated for years, and which they told the South African blacks would give them a heaven, unless they do that, they will also lose their credibility with black South Africans.’[6]
There is certainly some merit in these arguments; no one could pretend that the upheavals in Eastern Europe did not trigger a period of soul-searching and introspection for the ANC which had historically supported the Soviet line on issues such as Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan (and still more for the SACP, one of the most slavishly pro-Moscow of communist parties).
However, the idea that the convulsions in the communist bloc were an unconditional blessing for the South African government and problematic only for the ANC and SACP is fanciful. The reality is those upheavals overturned many of the calculations of both sides in South Africa and created difficulties for each.
The idea of a revolutionary communist ‘Total Onslaught’ against South Africa, orchestrated from Moscow, was always grossly exaggerated, part of a long sequence of propaganda exercises designed to play down issues of race and apartheid – certain international losers for Pretoria - and to play up the idea of South Africa as a strategically ally and a central player in the Cold War conflict – a potential winner.
However, southern Africa was never a central preoccupation of either superpower as they had more pressing priorities to address in central Europe, the Middle East, and south-east Asia. Indeed the lifting of the ‘communist threat’, far from benefiting Pretoria, removed its all -purpose scapegoat, its routine go to explanation for all of the country’s ills and, with the Cold War visibly winding down, it removed whatever strategic value to the West it could previously claim.
To talk of a ‘Total Onslaught’ by international communism in the context of Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’, and his actual changes to Soviet policy and behaviour, looked absurdly anachronistic and utterly lacking in credibility. South Africa would now have to face up to the fact its problems were home grown and deeply entrenched in the nature of its own society and its own political system.
In short, its ‘communist fox’ had been well and truly shot. Moreover, the spectacle of Eastern European ‘People’s Power’ – the mass demonstrations in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania - showed authoritarian regimes being swept away by a deeply alienated population. These were hardly encouraging images for a minority, racially based, regime in South Africa.
Indeed, incredulity is the only reasonable response to ‘Pik’ Botha’s January 1990 statement where he drew a ‘contrast’ between Eastern Europe and South Africa as in Eastern Europe ‘it was that small clique, that privileged clique, who closed up and ruled the country, irrespective, as I see it, of the wishes of the vast majority of the people.’ [7]
Botha had also predicted the impact of the changes in Eastern Europe on the ANC would be ‘devastating’ but this too would prove to be wishful thinking. This overstated the impact of these events on the mindset of black South Africans, where loyalty to the ANC (and admiration for the SACP) was rooted in its historic role in South Africa as opposed to its international alliances.
Nor, given the grotesque inequalities which disfigured South African society, were calls for socialist solutions likely to melt away quite as rapidly as the government propagandists envisaged nor were wholesale ANC conversions to unfettered market economics likely. So ‘devastating’ was the impact on the ANC that the party largely prevailed at the negotiating table from 1991-1994 securing a majoritarian system before going on to win the first in a series of huge victories at the ballot box.
Finally, it is true that the events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe made the likelihood of the ANC now being able to conduct an effective armed struggle a very remote one. However, although it had assumed a place in the romantic mythology of the movement, the ANC never believed its armed struggle could overthrow the regime.
It was viewed as part of a multidimensional campaign against apartheid alongside a range of non-violent tactics. In any case, by legalising the ANC, the government had removed the need for the armed struggle and had shifted the South African conflict away from its own strongest area and the ANC’s weakest (the military terrain) to the ANC’s strongest area and the NP’s weakest (politics and elections). The ANC’s military vulnerability would have only been a crucial factor had it remained a banned organisation and had felt compelled to persist with its armed struggle. Now its mass support made it a formidable political opponent.
The sanctions debate
The use and impact of economic sanctions remains a highly controversial issue in international relations as their deployment in Iraq under Saddam, and currently in Iran, Russia and Venezuela confirms. In the context of apartheid South Africa, sanctions became a polemical battleground with all sides claiming their position on sanctions – whether pro or anti – had been vindicated by De Klerk’s 1990 speech. Mrs Thatcher claimed almost immediately that the speech provided vindication for her policy of quiet diplomacy.
De Klerk himself initially said that sanctions were irrelevant and counter-productive in that they impeded two forces for change: economic growth and exposure to the outside world. However, in an interview 20 years on, he also acknowledged they caused ‘enormous distortions in the economy and probably cost us 1.5% growth per annum.’ [8] The ANC and the broader Anti-Apartheid Movement viewed them as providing an indispensable stimulus for change.
Ultimately, the precise impact of sanctions is both unknown and unknowable in most situations but, as Berridge notes, while they may rarely be decisive in interstate conflict, it does not follow that they are rarely effective.[9] There is little doubt that sanctions intensified the pressures on the Pretoria government after Botha’s Rubicon disaster.
Trade sanctions, whether bilateral and multilateral, were a barrier to economic growth which was down to a mere 0.5% by 1990. Although it is true that states may find ways around sanctions (and sanctions busting is a lucrative trade) that is not without cost. For example, South Africa was able to circumvent the oil embargo and was able to buy oil on the international black markets but with a significant price hike. In 1989 the Shipping Research Bureau estimated that the cost to the South African government of breaking the oil embargo was approximately $2 billion per year.[10]
P W Botha conceded these costs when telling parliament in April 1986 that ‘between 1973 and 1984 the Republic of South Africa had to pay R22 billion ($25 billion) more than it would normally have spent. there were times when it was reported to me that we had enough oil for only a week. Just think what we could have done if we had that R22 billion today.’ [11]
In short, sanctions busting was so costly – not just for oil but arms too – that it constituted a sanction in itself, a so-called ‘apartheid tax.’ South Africa was also denied facilities readily available to other states: access to World Bank loan facilities and to IMF credit lines to help offset balance of payments difficulties.
Despite other countries illicitly helping to reinforce South Africa’s military machine, the 1977 mandatory UN arms embargo had an obvious impact on the Defence Force’s effectiveness in Angola, where, by 1986-7, the South African Air Force was struggling to compete with the Angola’s Soviet supplied MIGs and South African ground troops were sustaining higher casualties as a consequence.[12]
This prompted a reappraisal of the South African position in Angola-Namibia in 1987-8 and started a process which led to a South African withdrawal from Angola and Namibia and to Namibian independence in 1990. Beyond the bilateral and multilateral measures which made up ‘public’ sanctions, the impact of ‘private’ sanctions, or the sanctions of the marketplace, should also be mentioned.
These were the commercial decisions of companies and banks deciding not to invest as a result of instability – because South Africa was simply unable to provide a good environment for business – or to withdraw from the country due to the damage inflicted on their global brand by involvement in apartheid South Africa, as with Barclays Bank in 1985.[13]
These commercial decisions had a powerful impact on South Africa’s own business community, and they became an important lobby for change in the post-Rubicon period. This was too late for the critics of business, however, who viewed this as a rather self-serving ‘deathbed conversion’ - one prompted by concerns about profitability rather than a focus on human rights and democracy - and who highlighted the collaborative approach of capital to the apartheid regime in the boom years from the mid-1960s through to the Soweto uprising in 1976.
The indirect impact of sanctions
Sanctions also had two indirect consequences. First, they symbolised South Africa’s exclusion from the international mainstream and the denial of international respectability. They helped concentrate the minds of the government and the white community that normal international relations would be impossible within the context of apartheid and therefore helped promote change even if, for nationalistic reasons, this could never be publicly conceded.
Second, sanctions created an environment in which diplomatic pressures could be more potent. This amounted to a form of carrot and stick, or coercive diplomacy. In the rather crude ideological worldviews of Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan, sanctions and diplomacy were treated as polar opposites, but this has rarely been the case; indeed, Mrs Thatcher’s own Foreign Office officials never proceeded on that basis.
In fact, they are often complementary techniques of statecraft with sanctions (and the threat of further sanctions) giving diplomatic pressures more muscle and credibility. De Klerk himself conceded this point two decades later when he acknowledged that ‘had we not grasped the transformation initiative when we did in February 1990 South Africa would soon have been completely isolated in the international community…our international trade would have ground to a halt, we would have been confronted by escalating conflict on our borders and in our townships’ [14]
In other words, the threat of further, even more punitive, sanctions formed an important part of his calculations, emphasising the importance and value of having South Africa on the sanctions rack in the first place. It also meant that Western governments had more leverage and could lean on the Pretoria government reminding them that without real change it would be difficult for them to continue holding the line against more drastic measures.
The point is often made that coincidence is not causality but there is now little doubt that sanctions, alongside other pressures, accelerated the process of change which, without them, ‘would have come much later and after much more bloodshed.’ [15] As noted above, even F W De Klerk himself has recognised as much.
All of the major political breakthroughs in the southern Africa region – the Angola-Namibia Agreement, the end of South Africa’s campaign of regional destabilisation and the initiative of February 1990 – came in the era of punitive sanctions rather than the era of constructive engagement. The record of the latter in promoting change between 1981 and 1986 had been lamentable. South Africa was in turmoil by 1986 and, far from being peaceful and stable, the southern Africa region was reeling in the face of a South African aggression which constructive engagement had helped encourage as the US and Britain had made clear sanctions were off the agenda however Pretoria behaved.
These twin failures paved the way for a new approach with the rug pulled from under Reagan’s policy when the Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA) of 1986 imposing wide-ranging sanctions over the presidential veto.[16] It is also worth noting just how closely the De Klerk announcements on 2 February resembled the stipulations contained within the CAAA as well as the recommendations of the 1985-6 Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group (EPG).
Both the CAAA and the EPG called for the lifting of the State of Emergency, the release of political prisoners, free political expression, equal justice for all, a timetable for the elimination of apartheid laws, a commitment to negotiations with representatives of all groups.[17] If De Klerk did not meet these demands in their entirety, then he certainly came very close to doing so - so close as to be more than mere coincidence.
De Klerk’s 1990 speech was the end product of a complex web of inter-dependent factors – economic, political, ideological, personal, regional and global. Internal drivers should remain pre-eminent in any assessment of February 1990 and we should note that without the internal resistance which made the system unworkable there doubtless would not have been increasing diplomatic isolation and an increasing ratcheting up of sanctions.
The South African government would then have had much greater scope to impose its own idea of an acceptable settlement. it is also clear, however, that isolation, sanctions and the complex new geopolitical environment created by the collapse of communism played a significant role. As it would in Zimbabwe two decades later, a reliance on quiet diplomacy alone as a singular policy tool failed in South Africa. How ironic then that in the Zimbabwean case it should be the ANC itself which would dust off, rehabilitate and champion arguments it had so bitterly denounced when they were deployed in South Africa in the 1980s.
Footnotes:
[1] J.E. Spence, ‘Why is South Africa so unpopular abroad?’, International Affairs Bulletin, Vol. 10, 3, 1986
[2] Chris McGreal, ‘Brothers in arms – Israel’s secret pact with Pretoria’, The Guardian, 7 February 2006
[3] Sanford Ungar and Peter Vale, ‘Why Constructive Engagement Failed’, Foreign Affairs, Vol.64, 2, Winter 1985-6
[4] Andy McSmith, ‘Margaret Thatcher branded ANC “terrorist” while urging Nelson Mandela’s release’, The Independent, 9 December 2013
[5] F W De Klerk, ‘Why I did it’, Politicsweb, 3 February 2010
[6] ‘Botha sings a song of glasnost’ The Independent, 24 January 1990
[7] Ibid
[8] De Klerk, op cit
[9] G. R. Berridge, International Politics: States, Power & Conflict since 1945 (3rd edition, Prentice Hall, 1997), p. 127
[10] Bronwen Manby, ‘South Africa: The Impact of Sanctions’, Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 46, 1, 1992, p. 205
[11] Ibid
[12] Richard Dowden, ‘Sanctions became an article of faith, The Independent, 6 December 1990
[13] Ibid
[14] De Klerk op cit
[15] Manby, op cit p. 217
[16] Simon Williamson, ‘Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986’, The Congress Project, 6 April 2016
[17] Derek Ingram, ‘Conflict Over Sanctions’, New African, March 1990, p. 12
