Democratization of the State: A Global Perspective and South African Case Study

ABSTRACT

This essay provides a global perspective on the democratic transformation of the state in societies undergoing democratization. Comparative research indicates that the development and effective performance of democratic political systems require the establishment of honest and competent public bureaucracies that avoid political partisanship and demonstrate respect for the diverse values and interests of the populations they serve. Especially important in democratizing the state is the development and practice of the norms of secondary democracy. The practice of these norms of mutual respect, fairness, and collaboration create the essential culture or modus vivendi of democracy. The Republic of South Africa is analyzed as an important case study of a contemporary state that is attempting to create a democratic and corruption-free public service in a country with an extremely racist, authoritarian, and corruption-ridden past. This case study reveals that the democratization of the state in South Africa, as in the case of other countries around the world, requires the members of the state bureaucracy to practice the norms of secondary democracy in their daily relations with one another and in their relations with the citizenry.     

Theft,Gift-Giving,and Reciprocity: A South African Experiment

Abstract

This paper uses a taking game to examine how South African subjects alter the amount they choose to ‘steal’ in response to a resource transfer from the potential victim. Any positive resource transfer significantly reduces the amount taken. ‘Small’ transfers reduce a victim’s total losses, including the transfer and the subsequent ‘theft’. Larger transfers increase a victim’s total losses. This study failed to find that differences in the frame of a transfer (i.e. gift, as a bribe, or as a payment) influenced a taker’s response to the transfer.     

The Freedom Charter: the contested South African land issue

The Freedom Charter represents a desire to create a society that is based on common citizenship and democracy in a society divided in all aspects of its life. This paper problematises and interrogates the Charter’s theoretical and philosophical claim on land. It uses the methodology of Afrocentricity and Africana critical theory to dispute the theoretical and philosophical basis of the Freedom Charter. The paper argues that the understanding, desire and vision of the Freedom Charter are irreconcilable. It concludes that the Charter reconciles the dispossessed with their dispossession, reflecting coloniality and white domination in South Africa.     

Placing Ethical Trade in Context: wieta and the South African wine industry

How ethical trade develops in specific ways in particular national-institutional and historical contexts remains largely unexamined. This paper analyses approaches to ethical trade in the South African wine industry through a case study of the Wine and Agricultural Ethical Trade Association (wieta). It examines factors influencing wieta, including the legacies of colonialism and apartheid, its relationship with post-apartheid restructuring and legislation, and the role of international retailers. wieta's impact within the wine industry, stakeholder perceptions, and improvements in on-farm standards are explored. The paper illustrates how these impacts are mediated by political and economic factors operating at various scales, and by the contradictions of improving working conditions within free market globalisation. Within these broader contexts, it argues that expectations of wieta are unrealistic and its role in transformation widely misunderstood. Instead, ethical trade initiatives need to be understood within their spatial, institutional, and historical contexts so as not to overestimate and undervalue their contribution to socioeconomic transformation.     

Food Price Volatility and Vulnerability in the Global South: considering the global economic context

Abstract

Most official analyses of the recent food price crisis have focused on the market fundamentals of supply and demand for food as key explanatory factors. As a result, most of the policy recommendations emanating from the major international institutions include measures to boost supply and temper demand. In this paper I argue that international macroeconomic factors played a key role in fostering both price volatility and vulnerability, and as such they need to be recognised. With respect to the recent price volatility, the weak US dollar and speculation on agricultural commodities futures markets greatly influenced agricultural prices. With respect to price vulnerability, global economic forces played an important role in dampening production incentives in the world's poorest countries over the past 30 years, leading to a situation of food import dependence. Policy responses to the food crisis must consider the role of these broader international macroeconomic forces—both in the immediate context and their longer term impact.     

Reckoning with the Communist Past in Romania: A Scorecard

During the first two decades following the collapse of the communist regime, Romania has reckoned with the human rights infringements perpetrated from 1945 to 1989 with the help of a range of official and unofficial, judiciary and non-judiciary, backward- and forward-looking methods pursued by a variety of state and non-state actors. This article summarises the progress registered to date in court trials, lustration, access to secret files, property restitution, the truth commission, rehabilitation of former political prisoners, compensation to victims and their descendants, the opinion tribunal, forensic investigations, rewriting history books, unofficial truth projects and memorialisation.     

The hares,the hounds and the African National Congress: on joining the Third World in post-apartheid South Africa

The utility of framing questions of global inequality in relation to a ‘First World’ and a ‘Third World’, a North and a South, or developed countries and developing (or underdeveloped) countries, has been much debated since the end of the Cold War. This article addresses the issue of the perceived weaknesses and possible continued strengths of the notion of the ‘Third World’ in general terms, and then grounds such a discussion through an analysis of the way that the African National Congress (anc) government in post-apartheid South Africa has approached the question of global inequality. Since its election in 1994, and more particularly since Thabo Mbeki succeeded Nelson Mandela as president, the anc has presented itself as having an especially important leadership role on behalf of the Third World. The profound contradictions inherent in the anc's effort both to retain its Third Worldist credentials and to present itself as a reliable client to the Bretton Woods institutions and foreign investors provides insights into how to design alternative strategies for overcoming world-wide poverty, strategies which might be more effective than those chosen by the anc. Since the anc was elected to government in 1994 it has pursued a brand of deeply compromised quasi-reformism, analysed here, that serves primarily to deflect consideration away from the options presented by other, much more meaningfully radical international and South African labour organisations, environmental groups and social movements. At the present juncture a range of increasingly well-organised grassroots movements in South Africa find that they have no choice but to mobilise in active resistance to the bankrupt policies of the anc. The increasing significance of these efforts points to the possibility that they might eventually be able to push South Africa—either through a transformation of the anc itself or through the creation of some new, potentially hegemonic, political project in that country—back into the ranks of those governments and groups that seek to use innovative and appropriately revolutionary approaches to challenge the geographical, racial and class-based hierarchies of global inequality.     

The politics of trade unions in transition: the case of the Congress of South African Trade Unions

This article explores changes in political allegiances within the South African labour movement, drawing on the findings of a nation-wide survey of members of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Recent research shows that the Tripartite Alliance between the ANC, COSATU and the South African Communist Party remains overwhelmingly popular amongst COSATU members. This article shows that this appears to be both a product of South Africa's recent past and a reflection of a lack of credible alternatives.     

Research on African Women since 1972: A Commentary

This article discusses several problematic aspects of the call for reparations to Africa for the slave trade. The call for reparations is based on questionable interpretations of international law, and questionable interpretations of history. There are debates regarding both the numbers of slaves, and the characteristics of slavery, in the Americas, the Arab world, and Africa itself, which influence consideration of whether reparations are justified. There are also debates regarding both the contribution of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to Western development, and how the trade under-developed Africa. Thus, the call for reparations is heavily based on a counterfactual approach. Nevertheless, serious discussion of whether the West owes reparations to Africa for the slave trade might deflect the future consequences of political resentment of the West in Africa.