Thanks very much for that. I've been asked to speak about the South African case, which I show you.
Try to say something about the negotiations, an intricate and ultimately intimate series of encounters between the African National Congress,
hence ANC and the National Party government.
And at its heart, the multiparty negotiating forum had no fewer than 26 political groupings.
But in fact, it is increasingly resolved to a bilateral encounter between ANC and people.
And I just speak very, very briefly about the South African case,
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.
I'm going to ask two basic questions Why did the NDP and the ANC enter negotiations?
And secondly, what did negotiations deliver?
What were the formal outcomes of two and a half years of talks?
The National Party negotiated because would have, quote, run out of alternatives because its policies, quote, have landed us in a dead end street.
That was the foreign minister and the state president.
I was speaking at the time, after 40 years in power, the National Party was in political, economic and ideological crisis.
The crisis had long term roots, but was exacerbated by immediate pressures.
Long term roots included the demographic shift between 1960 and 1995 the whites in South Africa at start of about one in five.
By 1995, the just over one in ten. So the very, very decisive demographic shift.
Secondly, economic stagnation.
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.
The economy is actually shrinking. Debt rose.
Inflation rose and unemployment rose.
Apartheid never recovered politically or ideologically from the challenges of the 1970s,
the emergence of the Black Trade Union movement, black consciousness as an alternative.
But especially the youth uprising of Soweto in June 1976.
So winter in particular, had the consequence of weakening the moral base.
The moral case that had been made for apartheid in terms of separate development is increasingly muffled and in fact, largely absent.
After 1976, the intelligentsia deserted the National Party clergymen, academics, journalists and others.
And most crucially, I believe big business made it absolutely clear that they were looking for an alternative,
that they were looking towards a post-apartheid political dispensation, and then the immediate pressure.
And here, I think, very much of that decomposition of the party in the Polish case that Professor
Sola mentioned last night on adding to all of those of longer term economic,
political and ideological crises in the second half of the 1980s.
You have firstly a great rolling wave of popular mobilisation and protest several million members of the United Democratic Front,
which later rebrands itself in 1989 as the mass democratic movement.
Mass protests, which the state meets by a series of states in a state of emergency,
the arrest of 37,000 activists and a very, very heavy crackdown with troops in the townships.
This provoked an international credit squeeze.
Banks refuse to roll over South African credit not for moral disapproval, but because they increasingly saw South Africa as a bad risk.
And economic sanctions, particularly in the United States, acquired more teeth.
And then finally, in September 1989, it was a general election.
And for the first time since the 1950s, the National Party won less than half of the white vote.
It was shedding supporters left and right. Well, what about the ANC in exile during this period?
Why did it move cautiously but definitively towards an acceptance of talks in the second half of the 1980s?
Firstly, and probably crucially, it had invested in exile very heavily in armed struggle.
About 50% of the international aid it received, largely from the Soviet bloc, went into training, equipping and running a guerrilla army.
But from 1986, the Soviet Union was signalling very clearly that it favoured a political and not a military outcome in southern Africa.
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.
But for the ANC, absolutely. And crucially, it meant the removal of their guerrillas from the camps in Angola.
The military capacity of the ANC or its army in Kenya had been shredded.
And as the guerilla project stalled,
Mandela from within prison and the leadership from the south in Zambia both began exploring the option of talking to the end.
And from 1985, a faint whiff of negotiations was constantly in the 1985.
November is particularly important because the chairman of Anglo American,
South Africa's largest corporate conglomerate, Gavin, really made the first of many, many safaris to meet the ANC.
Kenneth Cole and his game lodge outside Lusaka. Gavin really takes the top brass in South African capitalist economy to sit down and
talk to the ANC 1985 meetings that took place between the regime and the ANC in London,
in Lusaka, and in secret, the ANC met equally discreetly with British,
Soviet, Japanese, Australian and American government officials,
with the result that by 1988 the Western powers broadly accepted that the ANC headed the opposition to apartheid,
that it was key to any negotiated outcome.
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.
In short, an exiled movement had been swept to the status of a government in waiting by a combination of two processes firstly,
mass based domestic mobilisation. And secondly, an international solidarity movement.
Which translated into diplomatic approval.
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.
He said it is necessary in the national interest for the ANC and the government to meet urgently to negotiate an effective political settlement.
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.
Open Parliament with a famous speech in which he declared the release of all political prisoners, including Mandela,
the unbanning of the Communist Party, the ANC, the Parliament, Congress, and the commitment to engage in negotiations.
A very dramatic moment and these initiatives by the two leaders.
Mandela's letter, the speech reflected the balance of forces.
The government remained militarily powerful. It was politically weak.
The liberation movement headed by the ANC was politically potent, militarily feeble.
The National Party could not impose stability from above.
The opposition was unable to seize power from below.
So the position that had been arrived at was what political scientists call the hurting stalemate,
where the status quo is damaging to both parties and both parties came reluctantly to this recognition.
What did negotiations deliver? The broad position of the ANC and the NP when they went into it is absolutely clear.
The ANC went to the table demanding universal suffrage, equal rights for all citizens and a strong legislature.
It defined the future in terms of majority rule in the unitary state.
The National Party saw the future in terms of power sharing, consolidation of democracy.
They were talking to too many American political scientists. Consolidation of democracy within a federal structure, entrenched group rights.
And they actually entered negotiations convinced that they could avert what they called simple majoritarianism.
Quite clearly, one set of those positions felt much better in the course of negotiations.
An interim constitution signed in 1993, November 93, strongly favoured the agency's initial positions.
There would be a Bill of Rights. It conferred equal rights for all citizens.
Elections on all levels of government were on the basis of one person, one vote.
And although nine provinces would retain certain powers, substantive power was quite clearly at the Senate.
The main concessions made by the ANC were time bound.
These included a sunset clause which guaranteed security of tenure,
imposed to senior to white civil servants and also white officers in the security forces and police.
It included an amnesty for officials, particularly those in the security forces.
In exchange for full disclosure. It included an agreement that the first election would usher in a government of national unity with a
kind of proportional representation of seats in the government by parties based on the election outcome.
And a deal that there would be two vice presidents, one from the National Party, one from the DNC.
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%.
And in 2006, the party ceased to exist.
That was the political outcome. But it leaves unanswered the question of what socio economic relations the new order would promote.
The majority rule means redistribution from the few to the many.
What development path with the new state pursue? How closely would have to stick to international orthodoxy?
And the answers to those questions lay largely outside the negotiating chamber.
Negotiations on the interim constitution were full.
Every session limited, their details pored over and consensus hammered out alongside them took a less visible,
less formal set of interactions, fluid and ephemeral, which yielded, I think, not consensus, but convergence.
These were discussions on the economy between economic and political elites.
And by late 1993, the ANC leadership had drifted away from its base.
It no longer proposed economic transformation.
It no longer spoke the language of the Freedom Charter, but was much more concerned with economic stability and continuity.
In November 1993. In September 93, just before the interim constitution was signed,
the ANC co-signed with the MP a letter to the IMF securing a loan from the International Monetary Fund,
but also committing the new regime to fiscal orthodoxy.
Balanced budgets and reduced. There was a hugely important event compromise that ruled out any left of centre economic policies.
Now, the Mac Mandela was released from jail. He stood on a platform, Cape Town City Centre.
And you read a speech written for him by a committee.
And he reiterated what's in the Freedom Charter that an ANC government would nationalise the banks and the monopolies of the land.
The ANC economic policy, which I think could best generously be described as fluid, central from a rhetorically socialist platform,
chugged briefly down the social democratic branch line, but by 1993 steamed into neoliberal central.
The ANC jettisoned a social democratic alternative and left the structures of production, ownership and income substantially intact.
And in return for endorsing the capitalist status quo.
The ANC won undertaking from business to proceed with black economic empowerment,
changing the complexion of boardrooms, and of having a kind of hothouse growth of a black capitalist stratum.
In other words, the negotiated settlement combined significant restructuring of the political sphere and broad continuity in the economic sphere.
Politically, negotiations outcome was fairly radical, economically relatively conservative, and both sides of that agreement.
The sweeping political change and the essential continuity in economic relations with the product of a
process conducted at a particular time and place that reflected the balance of forces locally and globally.
I've hinted at the balance of forces locally as a kind of stalemate, obviously globally.
The fall of the Berlin Wall had left only one system standing.
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.
It was a moment when the balance of forces was unfavourable to poor and marginalised citizens.
Choices had shrunk. The range of options have narrowed.
For the elites, it made sense to act as they did.
Let me now try to think briefly,
but comparatively across the two cases I'm going to do very crudely by setting out some similarities and then some differences.
Similarities include that in both cases, an authoritarian state was challenged by broad based popular unrest.
Opposition groups in South Africa and Poland had a presence in many, many towns, in crucial industries and across social classes.
Martial law in Poland and the states of emergency in South Africa were expressions of the state's coercive power,
but also admissions of the state's loss of legitimacy. In Poland, different from most of the other Eastern European cases.
Opposition delegates at the roundtable talks came from a united, well organised and pre-existing organisation.
We were reminded several times yesterday of the importance of the decade preceding the 99 talks and in South Africa to the ANC.
Leadership in exile had cohered for 30 years and domestically this sort of domestic struggles had
produced trade union and united Democratic front leaders who played a central role in the negotiations.
Two sets of, if you like, battle hardened negotiators.
In both cases, the opposition groupings occupied the moral high ground.
And I think this is reflected in the international approval of individuals like Williams and Mandela.
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.
And I think the very next call for an anti crisis pact is a kind of sotto voce.
It's a lower key equivalent of Mandela's letter preceding the formal negotiations.
51 negotiations began.
They have their own dynamics and their own logic. Are recognisably similar dynamics in the two cases.
Negotiations, by definition, involve concessions, trade offs and compromises as a means to consensus.
And this is clear in both cases, and I think the MADHULIKA talks have acquired something of the same reputation or elite practice
as those informal meetings between big business and the ANC in the South African case.
Finally, similarity what Professor Smollett yesterday called the Gorbachev factor.
The role of the Soviet Union in that context and the accelerating changes that led to
the Cold War were crucial to the context in which the talks to place the code wrote
afterwards that he offered to enter negotiations because he thought the ANC had been
weakened by events in the Soviet Union and the ANC did indeed lose both financial support,
military capacity and I think some of its ideological moves.
What about the differences? Firstly, is obvious difference in the status of the two processes.
The act lasted for two months and produced no binding agreement.
It did not write a new constitution or introduce political democracy, although it set in train dynamics to these periods in South Africa.
It was clear from early on that negotiations would be protracted, detailed and that they would indeed produce a new constitution dispensation.
Secondly and corresponding and corresponding to that first difference,
the political outcomes are very different in Poland, fluid fractures and unstable politics,
and in particular the fact that the main opposition force, that solidarity fell apart in South Africa,
the ANC has cohered it has won over 60% of the vote in four consecutive general elections, between 62.7 69%.
And it will win about 60% in May, as you know.
In two respects the dynamics of the Polish opposition to authoritarian rule different from the South African case.
There's no direct equivalent in South Africa of that sustained and creative role played by intelligencia.
They know the creation of an underground press mobilisation of ideas as well as people.
And equally, there's no South African equivalent of the role played by the Catholic Church in Poland.
And I'm thinking both of its function as a broker to the talks,
but more especially its ability to endorse mobilisation, to rally large numbers of people,
its virtual monopoly of symbolic discourses, and its contribution to nationalism, and I suppose, to to nation building.
That is a kind of equivalence, perhaps, between Pope John Paul and Archbishop Desmond Tutu,
both of whom are seen as broadly supportive of the opposition.
But I think I wouldn't push it further than that.
Fourthly, although Cosatu, Congress, the South African Trade Unions and Solidarity well mass based trade union umbrella movements,
the post negotiation treatment of organised labour has been very different in the two places.
In South Africa there was an explicitly corporatist arrangement which conferred on the trade union movement a formal role in a tripartite structure,
business, government and the unions called NEDLAC and a major informal role as a component of the Triple Alliance, ANC, Communist Party and COSATU.
And there clearly is no corresponding role for trade unions in Poland over the last 55 years.
Tim Garton Ash yesterday evening mentioned the absence in Poland of any equivalent to the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission and the corresponding lack of catharsis or moral resolution.
Yes, that is the case that there was the absence.
But I think it's important not to overstate the extent to which the truth policy achieved that in South Africa.
It's important to recognise its compromise nature.
It was a late cut deal in the negotiations process.
It was spelled out in a post Tambo to the interim constitution,
and it was essentially a trade of amnesty to keep amnesty for disclosure, to keep the security forces on board.
Many felt that subsequently it achieved near the truth, no reconciliation.
Finally, the biggest difference between the two cases is the economic outcome.
Drastic change in the Polish case as the command economy was dismantled in favour of radical free market monetarism,
the embrace of externally applied shock therapy in South Africa and existing capitalist economy was, if anything, strengthened by the negotiations.
The main change after 1994 was that it shifted further towards radical free market monetarism and internally imposed shock therapy.
Thanks much.