1 00:00:00,450 --> 00:00:08,170 Thanks very much for that. I've been asked to speak about the South African case, which I show you. 2 00:00:08,760 --> 00:00:20,129 Try to say something about the negotiations, an intricate and ultimately intimate series of encounters between the African National Congress, 3 00:00:20,130 --> 00:00:23,460 hence ANC and the National Party government. 4 00:00:23,760 --> 00:00:32,430 And at its heart, the multiparty negotiating forum had no fewer than 26 political groupings. 5 00:00:32,940 --> 00:00:42,060 But in fact, it is increasingly resolved to a bilateral encounter between ANC and people. 6 00:00:42,840 --> 00:00:47,850 And I just speak very, very briefly about the South African case, 7 00:00:48,150 --> 00:00:58,510 because I do want to move on and say something rather more formally comparative about the South African and Polish cases on the South African case. 8 00:00:58,530 --> 00:01:05,520 I'm going to ask two basic questions Why did the NDP and the ANC enter negotiations? 9 00:01:05,850 --> 00:01:09,050 And secondly, what did negotiations deliver? 10 00:01:09,570 --> 00:01:14,670 What were the formal outcomes of two and a half years of talks? 11 00:01:15,660 --> 00:01:25,200 The National Party negotiated because would have, quote, run out of alternatives because its policies, quote, have landed us in a dead end street. 12 00:01:25,860 --> 00:01:28,680 That was the foreign minister and the state president. 13 00:01:29,010 --> 00:01:37,950 I was speaking at the time, after 40 years in power, the National Party was in political, economic and ideological crisis. 14 00:01:38,820 --> 00:01:45,080 The crisis had long term roots, but was exacerbated by immediate pressures. 15 00:01:45,300 --> 00:01:58,320 Long term roots included the demographic shift between 1960 and 1995 the whites in South Africa at start of about one in five. 16 00:01:58,890 --> 00:02:04,410 By 1995, the just over one in ten. So the very, very decisive demographic shift. 17 00:02:05,100 --> 00:02:07,470 Secondly, economic stagnation. 18 00:02:07,890 --> 00:02:19,510 From 1974 to 1994, GDP growth averaged about one and a half percent, significantly less than population growth in the second half of the eighties. 19 00:02:19,740 --> 00:02:23,670 The economy is actually shrinking. Debt rose. 20 00:02:23,670 --> 00:02:26,700 Inflation rose and unemployment rose. 21 00:02:29,800 --> 00:02:36,129 Apartheid never recovered politically or ideologically from the challenges of the 1970s, 22 00:02:36,130 --> 00:02:40,820 the emergence of the Black Trade Union movement, black consciousness as an alternative. 23 00:02:41,530 --> 00:02:47,110 But especially the youth uprising of Soweto in June 1976. 24 00:02:48,820 --> 00:02:55,090 So winter in particular, had the consequence of weakening the moral base. 25 00:02:55,660 --> 00:03:04,450 The moral case that had been made for apartheid in terms of separate development is increasingly muffled and in fact, largely absent. 26 00:03:04,720 --> 00:03:12,730 After 1976, the intelligentsia deserted the National Party clergymen, academics, journalists and others. 27 00:03:13,210 --> 00:03:19,720 And most crucially, I believe big business made it absolutely clear that they were looking for an alternative, 28 00:03:20,020 --> 00:03:27,190 that they were looking towards a post-apartheid political dispensation, and then the immediate pressure. 29 00:03:27,280 --> 00:03:34,419 And here, I think, very much of that decomposition of the party in the Polish case that Professor 30 00:03:34,420 --> 00:03:41,829 Sola mentioned last night on adding to all of those of longer term economic, 31 00:03:41,830 --> 00:03:46,330 political and ideological crises in the second half of the 1980s. 32 00:03:46,450 --> 00:03:58,180 You have firstly a great rolling wave of popular mobilisation and protest several million members of the United Democratic Front, 33 00:03:58,510 --> 00:04:03,610 which later rebrands itself in 1989 as the mass democratic movement. 34 00:04:06,420 --> 00:04:14,010 Mass protests, which the state meets by a series of states in a state of emergency, 35 00:04:14,190 --> 00:04:21,870 the arrest of 37,000 activists and a very, very heavy crackdown with troops in the townships. 36 00:04:23,660 --> 00:04:26,420 This provoked an international credit squeeze. 37 00:04:26,660 --> 00:04:35,210 Banks refuse to roll over South African credit not for moral disapproval, but because they increasingly saw South Africa as a bad risk. 38 00:04:35,930 --> 00:04:41,870 And economic sanctions, particularly in the United States, acquired more teeth. 39 00:04:42,320 --> 00:04:46,400 And then finally, in September 1989, it was a general election. 40 00:04:46,520 --> 00:04:53,060 And for the first time since the 1950s, the National Party won less than half of the white vote. 41 00:04:53,540 --> 00:05:01,160 It was shedding supporters left and right. Well, what about the ANC in exile during this period? 42 00:05:01,700 --> 00:05:11,150 Why did it move cautiously but definitively towards an acceptance of talks in the second half of the 1980s? 43 00:05:12,050 --> 00:05:19,310 Firstly, and probably crucially, it had invested in exile very heavily in armed struggle. 44 00:05:19,880 --> 00:05:29,240 About 50% of the international aid it received, largely from the Soviet bloc, went into training, equipping and running a guerrilla army. 45 00:05:30,740 --> 00:05:39,500 But from 1986, the Soviet Union was signalling very clearly that it favoured a political and not a military outcome in southern Africa. 46 00:05:39,830 --> 00:05:50,570 And then in 1988, the great powers then US and USSR brokered something called the New York Accord, which saw Cuban troops taken out of Angola. 47 00:05:50,910 --> 00:05:58,370 But for the ANC, absolutely. And crucially, it meant the removal of their guerrillas from the camps in Angola. 48 00:05:59,870 --> 00:06:05,990 The military capacity of the ANC or its army in Kenya had been shredded. 49 00:06:08,090 --> 00:06:10,760 And as the guerilla project stalled, 50 00:06:11,660 --> 00:06:21,410 Mandela from within prison and the leadership from the south in Zambia both began exploring the option of talking to the end. 51 00:06:22,550 --> 00:06:30,260 And from 1985, a faint whiff of negotiations was constantly in the 1985. 52 00:06:30,560 --> 00:06:35,240 November is particularly important because the chairman of Anglo American, 53 00:06:35,240 --> 00:06:45,860 South Africa's largest corporate conglomerate, Gavin, really made the first of many, many safaris to meet the ANC. 54 00:06:46,610 --> 00:06:54,649 Kenneth Cole and his game lodge outside Lusaka. Gavin really takes the top brass in South African capitalist economy to sit down and 55 00:06:54,650 --> 00:07:02,750 talk to the ANC 1985 meetings that took place between the regime and the ANC in London, 56 00:07:03,020 --> 00:07:08,810 in Lusaka, and in secret, the ANC met equally discreetly with British, 57 00:07:09,110 --> 00:07:14,120 Soviet, Japanese, Australian and American government officials, 58 00:07:15,170 --> 00:07:23,660 with the result that by 1988 the Western powers broadly accepted that the ANC headed the opposition to apartheid, 59 00:07:24,560 --> 00:07:27,200 that it was key to any negotiated outcome. 60 00:07:28,040 --> 00:07:37,940 And although it hadn't told its members yet and that it would relinquish armed struggle, that was the deal as far as the West was concerned. 61 00:07:40,270 --> 00:07:49,840 In short, an exiled movement had been swept to the status of a government in waiting by a combination of two processes firstly, 62 00:07:50,020 --> 00:07:55,930 mass based domestic mobilisation. And secondly, an international solidarity movement. 63 00:07:56,140 --> 00:07:58,600 Which translated into diplomatic approval. 64 00:08:01,620 --> 00:08:13,800 Mandela from inside jail wrote to state and then state president P.W. Botha in March 1989, just about where the roundtable talks are going on. 65 00:08:14,160 --> 00:08:23,460 He said it is necessary in the national interest for the ANC and the government to meet urgently to negotiate an effective political settlement. 66 00:08:24,780 --> 00:08:35,670 Mandela to protest March 1989. 11 months later, on the 2nd of February 1990, the new president de Klerk only in office for five months. 67 00:08:36,090 --> 00:08:42,660 Open Parliament with a famous speech in which he declared the release of all political prisoners, including Mandela, 68 00:08:42,990 --> 00:08:50,460 the unbanning of the Communist Party, the ANC, the Parliament, Congress, and the commitment to engage in negotiations. 69 00:08:50,610 --> 00:08:55,380 A very dramatic moment and these initiatives by the two leaders. 70 00:08:55,530 --> 00:09:01,920 Mandela's letter, the speech reflected the balance of forces. 71 00:09:02,820 --> 00:09:07,350 The government remained militarily powerful. It was politically weak. 72 00:09:08,430 --> 00:09:13,770 The liberation movement headed by the ANC was politically potent, militarily feeble. 73 00:09:15,030 --> 00:09:18,810 The National Party could not impose stability from above. 74 00:09:19,770 --> 00:09:22,920 The opposition was unable to seize power from below. 75 00:09:24,210 --> 00:09:29,250 So the position that had been arrived at was what political scientists call the hurting stalemate, 76 00:09:30,000 --> 00:09:37,260 where the status quo is damaging to both parties and both parties came reluctantly to this recognition. 77 00:09:38,520 --> 00:09:46,170 What did negotiations deliver? The broad position of the ANC and the NP when they went into it is absolutely clear. 78 00:09:46,650 --> 00:09:55,370 The ANC went to the table demanding universal suffrage, equal rights for all citizens and a strong legislature. 79 00:09:57,510 --> 00:10:02,790 It defined the future in terms of majority rule in the unitary state. 80 00:10:04,720 --> 00:10:10,120 The National Party saw the future in terms of power sharing, consolidation of democracy. 81 00:10:10,330 --> 00:10:20,230 They were talking to too many American political scientists. Consolidation of democracy within a federal structure, entrenched group rights. 82 00:10:20,710 --> 00:10:27,460 And they actually entered negotiations convinced that they could avert what they called simple majoritarianism. 83 00:10:29,410 --> 00:10:34,930 Quite clearly, one set of those positions felt much better in the course of negotiations. 84 00:10:35,350 --> 00:10:43,690 An interim constitution signed in 1993, November 93, strongly favoured the agency's initial positions. 85 00:10:43,930 --> 00:10:48,040 There would be a Bill of Rights. It conferred equal rights for all citizens. 86 00:10:48,370 --> 00:10:52,780 Elections on all levels of government were on the basis of one person, one vote. 87 00:10:53,260 --> 00:11:00,370 And although nine provinces would retain certain powers, substantive power was quite clearly at the Senate. 88 00:11:01,720 --> 00:11:06,490 The main concessions made by the ANC were time bound. 89 00:11:07,360 --> 00:11:11,560 These included a sunset clause which guaranteed security of tenure, 90 00:11:11,770 --> 00:11:18,760 imposed to senior to white civil servants and also white officers in the security forces and police. 91 00:11:20,290 --> 00:11:26,710 It included an amnesty for officials, particularly those in the security forces. 92 00:11:26,980 --> 00:11:36,700 In exchange for full disclosure. It included an agreement that the first election would usher in a government of national unity with a 93 00:11:36,700 --> 00:11:44,620 kind of proportional representation of seats in the government by parties based on the election outcome. 94 00:11:45,130 --> 00:11:52,000 And a deal that there would be two vice presidents, one from the National Party, one from the DNC. 95 00:11:53,410 --> 00:12:04,750 So much power was conceded by the National Party that although they did win 20% of the vote in 1994, this had shrunk in ten years to 2%. 96 00:12:05,200 --> 00:12:08,560 And in 2006, the party ceased to exist. 97 00:12:10,860 --> 00:12:20,340 That was the political outcome. But it leaves unanswered the question of what socio economic relations the new order would promote. 98 00:12:21,270 --> 00:12:26,250 The majority rule means redistribution from the few to the many. 99 00:12:27,480 --> 00:12:33,930 What development path with the new state pursue? How closely would have to stick to international orthodoxy? 100 00:12:35,340 --> 00:12:41,400 And the answers to those questions lay largely outside the negotiating chamber. 101 00:12:43,110 --> 00:12:46,270 Negotiations on the interim constitution were full. 102 00:12:46,770 --> 00:12:55,980 Every session limited, their details pored over and consensus hammered out alongside them took a less visible, 103 00:12:56,070 --> 00:13:04,710 less formal set of interactions, fluid and ephemeral, which yielded, I think, not consensus, but convergence. 104 00:13:06,190 --> 00:13:10,840 These were discussions on the economy between economic and political elites. 105 00:13:12,550 --> 00:13:18,640 And by late 1993, the ANC leadership had drifted away from its base. 106 00:13:19,780 --> 00:13:22,450 It no longer proposed economic transformation. 107 00:13:22,480 --> 00:13:30,700 It no longer spoke the language of the Freedom Charter, but was much more concerned with economic stability and continuity. 108 00:13:33,870 --> 00:13:40,200 In November 1993. In September 93, just before the interim constitution was signed, 109 00:13:40,590 --> 00:13:48,750 the ANC co-signed with the MP a letter to the IMF securing a loan from the International Monetary Fund, 110 00:13:49,020 --> 00:13:53,700 but also committing the new regime to fiscal orthodoxy. 111 00:13:54,030 --> 00:14:05,610 Balanced budgets and reduced. There was a hugely important event compromise that ruled out any left of centre economic policies. 112 00:14:07,530 --> 00:14:14,580 Now, the Mac Mandela was released from jail. He stood on a platform, Cape Town City Centre. 113 00:14:14,790 --> 00:14:17,100 And you read a speech written for him by a committee. 114 00:14:17,310 --> 00:14:23,670 And he reiterated what's in the Freedom Charter that an ANC government would nationalise the banks and the monopolies of the land. 115 00:14:25,770 --> 00:14:35,340 The ANC economic policy, which I think could best generously be described as fluid, central from a rhetorically socialist platform, 116 00:14:36,000 --> 00:14:43,230 chugged briefly down the social democratic branch line, but by 1993 steamed into neoliberal central. 117 00:14:44,820 --> 00:14:54,690 The ANC jettisoned a social democratic alternative and left the structures of production, ownership and income substantially intact. 118 00:14:55,950 --> 00:14:59,520 And in return for endorsing the capitalist status quo. 119 00:15:00,150 --> 00:15:05,910 The ANC won undertaking from business to proceed with black economic empowerment, 120 00:15:06,240 --> 00:15:16,440 changing the complexion of boardrooms, and of having a kind of hothouse growth of a black capitalist stratum. 121 00:15:19,020 --> 00:15:28,440 In other words, the negotiated settlement combined significant restructuring of the political sphere and broad continuity in the economic sphere. 122 00:15:29,640 --> 00:15:40,230 Politically, negotiations outcome was fairly radical, economically relatively conservative, and both sides of that agreement. 123 00:15:40,530 --> 00:15:46,859 The sweeping political change and the essential continuity in economic relations with the product of a 124 00:15:46,860 --> 00:15:55,500 process conducted at a particular time and place that reflected the balance of forces locally and globally. 125 00:15:55,650 --> 00:16:02,880 I've hinted at the balance of forces locally as a kind of stalemate, obviously globally. 126 00:16:03,270 --> 00:16:07,770 The fall of the Berlin Wall had left only one system standing. 127 00:16:08,430 --> 00:16:18,240 The best bet for a new South Africa argued the persuasive representatives of capital was to join the winning side to accept the Washington consensus. 128 00:16:19,050 --> 00:16:24,360 It was a moment when the balance of forces was unfavourable to poor and marginalised citizens. 129 00:16:25,080 --> 00:16:29,160 Choices had shrunk. The range of options have narrowed. 130 00:16:29,730 --> 00:16:33,510 For the elites, it made sense to act as they did. 131 00:16:35,360 --> 00:16:37,370 Let me now try to think briefly, 132 00:16:37,370 --> 00:16:45,620 but comparatively across the two cases I'm going to do very crudely by setting out some similarities and then some differences. 133 00:16:47,180 --> 00:16:54,260 Similarities include that in both cases, an authoritarian state was challenged by broad based popular unrest. 134 00:16:54,950 --> 00:17:04,220 Opposition groups in South Africa and Poland had a presence in many, many towns, in crucial industries and across social classes. 135 00:17:05,180 --> 00:17:12,380 Martial law in Poland and the states of emergency in South Africa were expressions of the state's coercive power, 136 00:17:13,010 --> 00:17:22,140 but also admissions of the state's loss of legitimacy. In Poland, different from most of the other Eastern European cases. 137 00:17:22,620 --> 00:17:29,850 Opposition delegates at the roundtable talks came from a united, well organised and pre-existing organisation. 138 00:17:30,030 --> 00:17:39,989 We were reminded several times yesterday of the importance of the decade preceding the 99 talks and in South Africa to the ANC. 139 00:17:39,990 --> 00:17:47,160 Leadership in exile had cohered for 30 years and domestically this sort of domestic struggles had 140 00:17:47,160 --> 00:17:53,490 produced trade union and united Democratic front leaders who played a central role in the negotiations. 141 00:17:53,640 --> 00:17:57,930 Two sets of, if you like, battle hardened negotiators. 142 00:17:59,460 --> 00:18:04,620 In both cases, the opposition groupings occupied the moral high ground. 143 00:18:05,220 --> 00:18:11,580 And I think this is reflected in the international approval of individuals like Williams and Mandela. 144 00:18:13,730 --> 00:18:23,900 Fourthly, in both cases, the regime and the opposition arrived at a recognition of the need to talk as an alternative to the status quo. 145 00:18:24,710 --> 00:18:30,180 And I think the very next call for an anti crisis pact is a kind of sotto voce. 146 00:18:30,310 --> 00:18:36,260 It's a lower key equivalent of Mandela's letter preceding the formal negotiations. 147 00:18:37,790 --> 00:18:41,180 51 negotiations began. 148 00:18:42,350 --> 00:18:49,640 They have their own dynamics and their own logic. Are recognisably similar dynamics in the two cases. 149 00:18:50,390 --> 00:18:58,190 Negotiations, by definition, involve concessions, trade offs and compromises as a means to consensus. 150 00:19:00,170 --> 00:19:07,790 And this is clear in both cases, and I think the MADHULIKA talks have acquired something of the same reputation or elite practice 151 00:19:08,210 --> 00:19:14,480 as those informal meetings between big business and the ANC in the South African case. 152 00:19:17,780 --> 00:19:23,080 Finally, similarity what Professor Smollett yesterday called the Gorbachev factor. 153 00:19:23,570 --> 00:19:28,820 The role of the Soviet Union in that context and the accelerating changes that led to 154 00:19:28,820 --> 00:19:34,370 the Cold War were crucial to the context in which the talks to place the code wrote 155 00:19:34,370 --> 00:19:41,449 afterwards that he offered to enter negotiations because he thought the ANC had been 156 00:19:41,450 --> 00:19:48,739 weakened by events in the Soviet Union and the ANC did indeed lose both financial support, 157 00:19:48,740 --> 00:19:52,220 military capacity and I think some of its ideological moves. 158 00:19:54,680 --> 00:20:01,340 What about the differences? Firstly, is obvious difference in the status of the two processes. 159 00:20:01,910 --> 00:20:06,200 The act lasted for two months and produced no binding agreement. 160 00:20:06,710 --> 00:20:17,280 It did not write a new constitution or introduce political democracy, although it set in train dynamics to these periods in South Africa. 161 00:20:17,300 --> 00:20:26,750 It was clear from early on that negotiations would be protracted, detailed and that they would indeed produce a new constitution dispensation. 162 00:20:29,090 --> 00:20:32,660 Secondly and corresponding and corresponding to that first difference, 163 00:20:32,840 --> 00:20:42,170 the political outcomes are very different in Poland, fluid fractures and unstable politics, 164 00:20:42,590 --> 00:20:50,450 and in particular the fact that the main opposition force, that solidarity fell apart in South Africa, 165 00:20:50,750 --> 00:21:01,370 the ANC has cohered it has won over 60% of the vote in four consecutive general elections, between 62.7 69%. 166 00:21:01,970 --> 00:21:05,810 And it will win about 60% in May, as you know. 167 00:21:09,010 --> 00:21:15,790 In two respects the dynamics of the Polish opposition to authoritarian rule different from the South African case. 168 00:21:16,150 --> 00:21:23,860 There's no direct equivalent in South Africa of that sustained and creative role played by intelligencia. 169 00:21:25,920 --> 00:21:32,080 They know the creation of an underground press mobilisation of ideas as well as people. 170 00:21:32,530 --> 00:21:38,380 And equally, there's no South African equivalent of the role played by the Catholic Church in Poland. 171 00:21:38,950 --> 00:21:42,850 And I'm thinking both of its function as a broker to the talks, 172 00:21:43,120 --> 00:21:49,630 but more especially its ability to endorse mobilisation, to rally large numbers of people, 173 00:21:49,810 --> 00:21:57,910 its virtual monopoly of symbolic discourses, and its contribution to nationalism, and I suppose, to to nation building. 174 00:22:00,300 --> 00:22:07,600 That is a kind of equivalence, perhaps, between Pope John Paul and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 175 00:22:08,260 --> 00:22:12,520 both of whom are seen as broadly supportive of the opposition. 176 00:22:12,790 --> 00:22:15,310 But I think I wouldn't push it further than that. 177 00:22:18,080 --> 00:22:28,570 Fourthly, although Cosatu, Congress, the South African Trade Unions and Solidarity well mass based trade union umbrella movements, 178 00:22:29,920 --> 00:22:35,530 the post negotiation treatment of organised labour has been very different in the two places. 179 00:22:36,310 --> 00:22:46,450 In South Africa there was an explicitly corporatist arrangement which conferred on the trade union movement a formal role in a tripartite structure, 180 00:22:46,510 --> 00:22:58,630 business, government and the unions called NEDLAC and a major informal role as a component of the Triple Alliance, ANC, Communist Party and COSATU. 181 00:22:59,230 --> 00:23:07,690 And there clearly is no corresponding role for trade unions in Poland over the last 55 years. 182 00:23:09,010 --> 00:23:15,100 Tim Garton Ash yesterday evening mentioned the absence in Poland of any equivalent to the Truth 183 00:23:15,100 --> 00:23:21,370 and Reconciliation Commission and the corresponding lack of catharsis or moral resolution. 184 00:23:22,780 --> 00:23:25,060 Yes, that is the case that there was the absence. 185 00:23:25,210 --> 00:23:32,320 But I think it's important not to overstate the extent to which the truth policy achieved that in South Africa. 186 00:23:32,630 --> 00:23:35,890 It's important to recognise its compromise nature. 187 00:23:36,250 --> 00:23:40,629 It was a late cut deal in the negotiations process. 188 00:23:40,630 --> 00:23:44,950 It was spelled out in a post Tambo to the interim constitution, 189 00:23:45,340 --> 00:23:54,640 and it was essentially a trade of amnesty to keep amnesty for disclosure, to keep the security forces on board. 190 00:23:57,490 --> 00:24:02,020 Many felt that subsequently it achieved near the truth, no reconciliation. 191 00:24:03,990 --> 00:24:08,640 Finally, the biggest difference between the two cases is the economic outcome. 192 00:24:09,480 --> 00:24:18,810 Drastic change in the Polish case as the command economy was dismantled in favour of radical free market monetarism, 193 00:24:19,320 --> 00:24:31,470 the embrace of externally applied shock therapy in South Africa and existing capitalist economy was, if anything, strengthened by the negotiations. 194 00:24:31,770 --> 00:24:41,880 The main change after 1994 was that it shifted further towards radical free market monetarism and internally imposed shock therapy. 195 00:24:42,590 --> 00:24:43,150 Thanks much.