Democratic theory and constitutional change in South Africa

Abstract

In the last two years the debate on democracy in South Africa has reached a new intensity. The unbanning of the ANC and other opposition movements occurred at the same time as the Cold War in Europe came to an end. Countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary that had for decades been ruled by totalitarian regimes began to be transformed by popular political pressure. Demands for democratic change also escalated in South Africa during the 1980s. It finally lead the South African government of F.W. De Klerk to announce in February 1990 the unbanning of the ANC, PAC and other opposition liberation movements and the release of Nelson Mandela from jail. The following year the government established the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) in order to negotiate a new constitution. The pace of the changes has caught many political analysts unawares. Craig Charney has suggested that the failure of political scientists to predict the new turn of events indicated wider methodological shortcomings. Much political science analysis of South Africa in the 1980s was still dominated, Charney has argued, by a failure to see politics as an autonomous activity rather than as simply a receptacle for social groups. This often results in crude theories of the state that fail to consider it as an actor in its own right. Moreover many political scientists still have an overly-simplistic view of model building that depend more on comparisons with the metropolitan core of Europe and North American than other developing regimes in Latin American and Asia. These criticisms suggest that new approaches are needed to explain South African political changes. The role of democracy in South African politics especially is still rather poorly understood by analysts despite the fact that it has played a prominent role in political discourse since at least the 1950s. Building a democratic state and society in South Africa is now central, to the current South African political agenda, though so far little work has been done to explore this in a comparative perspective. This paper will therefore examine the state of democratic thinking in South Africa and the conditions that could lead to the creation of some form of democratic regime. In the first part, it will examine the current state of theoretical debate over what democracy is both as an ideology and as a description of a particular kind of political regime. The second part of the paper will then discuss the evolution of debate over democracy in South African politics. Finally, the third part of the paper will look at how a South African democratic transition might occur through a process of political bargaining, taking into consideration similar processes in other regimes moving out of political authoritarianism. The methodological approach of this paper is one that seeks to learn from the past both in terms of the general formulation of democratic theory and its application to South African conditions. Hitherto social analysts and historians have tended to be preoccupied with the genesis and development of different concepts in South African politics such as segregation, liberalism, apartheid and nationalism. Democracy has frequently been seen as tangential to these other doctrines despite its considerable impact on political debate. The emergence of a new international climate favourable to democratisation following the end of the Cold War offers up the opportunity for a re-evaluation of the South African past in terms of democratic ideas and values.