Matt Yglesias

Post-Liberation Politics

A few days backed I linked to a short take from Sasha Polakow-Suransky about the failures of opposition politics in South Africa. He has a longer take in The National that, I think, puts this in an enlightening perspective:

COPE, despite the hopes it inspired, fell flat – taking just under eight per cent of the vote, while the DA took almost 17 per cent and won control of the Western Cape. The fact remains that South Africa has not yet emerged from the era of national liberation politics. The Congress Party, which led the anti-colonial struggle in India, was not seriously challenged nationally for the first 20 years of independence and it did not lose control of the parliament until 1977. It was in the same year, three decades after the establishment of Israel, that voters there shocked the nation’s founding elite by electing the Likud opposition for the first time.

South Africa has not yet reached the stage where, as Johnny Copelyn puts it, “the previous order is so far in the background that it is no l­onger a compelling explanation for the problems people have”.

That said, there are also a bunch of countries that never emerged from the phase of initial domination by the liberation political party. Thus far, though, despite much hand-wringing related to Jacob Zuma I haven’t seen any real indication that democratic institutions don’t continue to exist in South Africa. The ANC just continues to have an extremely strong grip on the public imagination.

Why COPE Failed in South Africa

There’s been some hand-wringing for a while ever since Jacob Zuma consolidated his position as next leader of the African National Congress. Zuma has a variety of unsavory characteristics, including serious charges of corruption and even rape, and poses some risk that South Africa will slide off its promising path of democracy and relative prosperity.

At the same time, though South African politics isn’t something I follow closely, I had a vague sense that it might in some ways be a good thing. Zuma’s ascension led to some of his rivals in the ANC leaving to form their own political party, the Congress of the People (COPE), which raised the prospect of giving South Africa a credible, black-led opposition party. That would, it seems to me, be a very healthy development since the ANC’s structural supermajority, no matter how well-deserved, presents a constant temptation to abuse of power and so forth. But when the elections results came in, COPE proved to be a huge bust. Eusebius McKaiser and Sasha Polakow-Suransky have an interesting article in The New Republic laying out some of the reasons why.

The Strategic Logic of Nonviolence

Jonathan Zasloff writes about a national liberation movement that didn’t resort to indiscriminate killing to achieve its goals:

The ANC maintained a strict policy of nonviolent protest for nearly 50 years, until the 1961 Sharpeville Massacres. Even after the founding of Umkhonto We Sizwe, the vast majority of its targets were government installations and military outposts. Its record was hardly perfect, including the infamous “Magoo’s Bar Bombing” and similar incidents in the mid-80’s, but overall, the ANC was highly disciplined and refrained from hitting civilian targets. Indeed, Umkhonto We Sizwe started a landmine campaign in the mid-80’s, but ended it because of too many civilian casualties. Overall, the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the rare soft target attacks were the outcome of either misunderstandings or rogue operators among MK agents.

And of course there’s the civil rights movement in the United States. And it’s worth emphasizing here the extent to which strict adherence to non-violence was important to helping the movement Martin Luther King led to get what they wanted. When people who you regard as being “on your side” start killing people for what you deem a reasonable cause, you tend to look on the killing in an understanding light. But when you don’t regard those people as “on your side” then things like firing rockets at populated areas or dropping bombs on schools begins to look monstrous. And when you’re faced off against monsters, the last thing you want to do is give them any room to breath. The white south resisted desegregation pretty fiercely, but resistance would have been much fiercer if the civil rights movement had been killing tons of people and stoking fears that empowering blacks would lead to massacres.

Much the same applies to the South African situation. At a certain point, it became clear to the apartheid leaders that there system was untenable. But they were still more interested in the upholding the interests of white South Africa than in abstract considerations of justice. The fact that ANC behavior didn’t imply that the organization was led by cold-blooded killers made it much easier to contemplate handing power over to them. In Israel, decline in political support for wild “Greater Israel” notions has been swamped by the way Israeli discourse has become dominated by fear that any easing up on the Palestinians will endanger Israeli lives — a fear that’s hard to assuage driven by how violence-obsessed the Palestinian movement has been.