Essay: Influence of international community on apartheid in South Africa

In the 30 years between 1960 and 1990, South Africa was subject to a complicated and evolving set of sanctions directed at affecting the South African government to destroy the system of apartheid. In the process, various original schemes were forged that have been a successive inspiration for other movements in support of distressed people around the world. The emerging diplomatic, cultural and economic isolation accepted the apartheid government’s outsider status.
These international initiatives were not planned to pressure the main parties in South Africa to engage in a process of negotiations but rather intended to end the system of apartheid. Later the supporters of ‘constructive engagement’ ‘ and most notably the British government under Margaret Thatcher ‘ were able to draw on their reliability as ‘friends’ to reassure South African President F.W. De Klerk to engage with the African National Congress (ANC). At the same time, by the late 1980s the Soviet Union and many African governments inspire the ANC to work out a political resolution to the conflict.
In reconsideration, it seems that the numerous retaliatory measures were only indirectly significant in influencing the government’s arrangement on whether and when to negotiate a transition. Yet while other external and internal components were decisive, it seems that sanctions had the effect of enforcing the position of those in the white community ‘ and essentially, in the business sector ‘ who recognised the need for reform. They were also likely to have been an important factor in building support for negotiations amongst a white electorate tired of international isolation and being treated as an outsider in the global community. Finally, they were undoubtedly a source of support for the struggle and the ANC continued to value their impact during the negotiations development.
Resistance to apartheid was slow to establishing at the Western government level. South Africa considered itself, and was advised by others, to be an important part of the Western world, valued both for its vital position in association  to trade routes around the Cape of Good Hope, and as a source of beneficial and necessary minerals. In a period of conflict for independence throughout Africa, and at the height of the Cold War, the white South African government was noticed by many in the West as a stronghold against communism in the region. These considerations usually took preference over any worthy questions regarding apartheid throughout the 1950s and’despite worry over the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre’the 1960s. Nelson Mandela has noted that ‘in the 1950s and 1960s, when we went to Western governments seeking contributions to the ANC, we were turned down flat’
The most important moves against South Africa in this period came from international bodies such as the Commonwealth and the UN. The Commonwealth became more bitter towards South Africa as newly independent states joined the organisation through the 1950s and beyond; Sharpeville organised the issue of South Africa’s membership. When South Africa’s whites narrowly voted in 1960 for the country to become a republic, the government applied for continued membership of the Commonwealth, but met with extensive opposition. ‘Seeing the writing on the wall, Verwoerd withdrew South Africa’s application. Although technically South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth, in actuality it was removed. This removal from the British Commonwealth, however, was not completely to the avoidance of the Afrikaner-dominated National Party government, which spoke of ”freedom’ from old colonial masters and outside domination’
Resistance to apartheid was also more and more voiced in the United Nations during this period, with calls by African states through the 1960s for South Africa’s eviction from the UN. Because of the need for Security Council blessing for such action, which because of the veto held by Western powers was not anticipated, these calls were never formally obeyed, although from 1973 the General Assembly ‘rejected   … the credentials of the South African authorization and … thereby denied South Africa its seat’ The Assembly ‘did not go so far as to banish South Africa in 1973. Rather, it promised action in consequent years. When Pretoria saw that the Africans had an easy majority in 1974, they decided to withdraw.’
A rewarding campaign was conducted against South Africa, however, in other UN organs. In the 1950s, UNESCO published reports critical of apartheid The Food and Agriculture Organisation enforced South Africa’s withdrawal in 1963, as did the International Labour Organisation and the World Health Organisation in 1964; others later followed. The UN Trust Fund for South Africa was well-established  in 1965, with most of its funds ‘exploited for … humanitarian support to abolition  movements: legal release, education programs, development projects, and backing for the victims of apartheid’. The improvement from large Western powers, however, were somewhat small, and far overcome by improvements from the Scandinavian countries, who were also notable during this period for their absolute financial help for the ANC.
A further important UN action against apartheid in the 1960s was its ”voluntary’ ban against the sale of military weapons to South Africa which was finally adopted commonly by the Security Council in December 1963′. By the mid-1970s, however, it was clear that this had ‘not stopped the flow of arms from the West, nor had it altered the relationship in any crucial way’. One constraint upon the Security Council was its ambition to appreciate member states’ dominance; when the Council finally adopted an essential arms restraint against South Africa on 4 November 1977, it statedly did so because of South Africa’s ‘threat to the maintenance of international peace and security’. The barrier, of course, distressed South Africa internally also, but here the results were varied. South Africa was refused access to new generation fighter aircraft which it was not able  to build for itself, which took its toll on its opposing capabilities; but it also advanced its own mature arms-manufacturing industry which left it ‘virtually self-sufficient in armour and artillery’.
The 1970s also saw an oil barrier establish in 1973 by OPEC. This, however, was ‘circumvented with only minor difficulty’, through oil purchases from Iran in the 1970s and later by other means, including illegal ones. The message sent to South Africa by these boycotts was perhaps, therefore, not as demoralized as their exponent might have wished: ‘The lesson to be learnt from previous boycotts is that South Africa can get by, but with some great holes and at a cost.
In most of the fundamental economic areas, the West continued to conduct business more or less as usual with South Africa throughout this period. Not all of its lack of effective action against apartheid in the period is necessarily attributable to Western self-interest, however, as ‘in the context of regional and domestic circumstances in the late 1960s and early 1970s the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa was thought to be inevitable’. Only when the staying power of the South African regime became apparent did the arguments for more substantial international pressure become more compelling.
Efforts to isolate apartheid South Africa were initiated on three fronts: individuals and groups leading anti-apartheid campaigns in their own countries; governments acting individually or in concert through organisations such as the Commonwealth; and the UN.
International efforts to abolish the apartheid system of discrimination date from the early 1960s, in response to the ANC’s 1958 appeal for international solidarity. In 1962 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution that deemed apartheid to be a violation of South Africa’s obligations under the UN Charter and a threat to international peace and security. The resolution paved the way for voluntary boycotts by requesting Member States to break off diplomatic relations and to stop trading with South Africa and to deny passage to South African ships and aircraft. It also established the UN Special Committee against Apartheid, which was to coordinate many of the efforts to impose vindictive sanctions in the coming decades. Most Western governments rejected the resolution’s call for sanctions and ignored the new committee. Yet the resolution lent moral and political support to the growing civil society-based international solidarity campaign ‘ most notably the London-based Anti-Apartheid Movement ‘ which pressed ahead with calls for economic and other sanctions.
One prominent feature of apartheid was the racial segregation of sporting activity within South Africa, and the arena of international sport was an early proving ground for international opposition to apartheid, beginning in 1956 with the expulsion of white South Africans from the International Table Tennis Federation. South Africa was excluded from both the 1964 and 1968 Olympics because of its racial policies, and expelled from the International Olympic Movement in 1972, in a period of snowballing moves against South Africa by world sporting bodies. By the end of the 1980s, South Africa was ‘effectively excluded from around 90 percent of the world’s international sporting activities’.
A prominent British activist described 1970 in particular as a ‘catastrophic year for white South African sport’, a year when huge demonstrations were staged in Britain in protest against the Springbok rugby tour’despite consistent British government opposition to the sports-boycott campaign. One effect of these and similar international demonstrations was the introduction by Pretoria in 1971 of a new ‘multinational’ sports policy. ‘In essence, the different racial groups in South Africa … would be allowed to compete against each other as four separate ‘nations,’ within the country, but in ‘international’ events alone. This shift, of course, preserved the logic of apartheid. These moves did nothing to alleviate South Africa’s sporting isolation, since it was recognised that ‘despite extravagant claims to the contrary, South African sport remained totally dominated by apartheid’. The South African government acknowledged as much, one spokesperson confirming in the country’s House of Assembly in 1979 that ‘integrated clubs and integrated sports [constituted] far less than 1 per cent of the total sport activities in South Africa’.
Undoubtedly, sporting isolation had a profound psychological impact upon white South Africans. ‘South Africans are extremely sport conscious. … A severance of sporting contacts, then, has sensitized them to their isolation from the rest of the world more than any other issue.’ The ‘truly transnational’ character of the sports campaign clearly demonstrated to ‘every South African … that his government’s policies are not respected abroad’. But the overall success of the sports boycott is less clear, because its aims went beyond merely the achievement of reform in South African sport:
Isolationists work not solely for total sport integration but to end apartheid in all its guises. So sport becomes instrumental to the larger political issue. … Sporting isolation may add to the global opposition against apartheid, but it is not likely to be the major factor in its eventual demise.
An earlier observer concurred that the sports boycott ‘cannot be said to have succeeded, for the essential class and caste discrimination remain,’ but added that ‘insofar as there has been any progress at all, it has been as a result of the boycott’.
Sporting boycotts were paralleled by a campaign of entertainment and artistic boycotts, also aimed at isolating white South Africa. Some argued that these boycotts were possibly counterproductive: ‘By depriving white South Africans of sustained exposure to western ideas and thinking, they are being encouraged, possibly, to remain within their laager mentality’. Further questions arose after the release of Paul Simon’s Graceland album and his subsequent tour in the mid-1980s, both of which involved black South African musicians: ‘To the astonishment of not a few supporters of the struggle and to the baffled outrage of Simon himself, he [was] severely criticized by the ANC, the UN, and other key forces in the antiapartheid struggle’ for breaking the cultural boycott, despite the anti-apartheid theme of the Graceland tour. One band member lamented of the critics, ‘If they say they are helping South African musicians by keeping them away from the world, how is that help?’. Similar questions arose in the field of economic sanctions.
In addition to trying to isolate South Africa, campaigners sought to hurt its economy. A number of initiatives were tried, from imposing an oil embargo to trade sanctions and finally a series of disinvestment initiatives. The oil embargo was first proposed by the UN in 1963 but made little progress until Arab governments acted to impose an embargo in 1973 ‘ a move that was counteracted when the government successfully obtained assistance from multinational oil companies to continue supply. Despite General Assembly resolutions in 1979 and 1980 and support from many oil-producing countries, including OPEC, opposition from key European and North American governments constrained the comprehensive implementation of that instrument.
The economic sanctions strategy was renewed in the mid-1980s, spurred on by the mass resistance to the attempted reforms introduced in the 1983 constitution and the government’s subsequent violent crackdown and imposition of a state of emergency in 1985. The European Community and Commonwealth countries imposed limited trade and financial sanctions. The US administration of President Reagan opposed sanctions but imposed a limited export ban to head off stronger action in the US Congress. This move was trumped, however, when the US legislature forced through the 1986 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act banning new US investment and new bank loans, sales to the police and military, and specific prohibitions against a range of goods ‘ although strategic minerals, diamonds and gold, South Africa’s largest export, were not included.
Innovative private sector initiatives complemented these governmental actions. Especially in the US, campaigners lobbied businesses to end their activities and investments with the South African state and businesses. Concerned shareholders introduced resolutions at company AGMs aimed at getting them to adopt the ‘Sullivan Principles,’ which required that businesses operating in South Africa ensure that all employees were treated equally in an integrated environment, both inside and outside the workplace, as a condition of doing business which essentially made it impossible to operate given apartheid laws.
Campaigners also lobbied institutional investors, such as pension and endowment funds, to withdraw direct investments from South African-based companies and for US companies to divest from their South African interests. This ‘divestment’ strategy became a key focus of campaigning at American universities. By 1990 more than 26 US states and 90 cities had taken some form of binding economic action against companies doing business in South Africa. By the late 1980s, most of the world’s largest companies had withdrawn from South Africa ‘ motivated by a combination of the reputational risk of continued operations and because the climate for investment in South African had deteriorated badly.
In retrospect, analysts suggest that the direct impact of these economic sanctions was limited. South Africa circumvented trade sanctions through transhipment via countries not participating in the embargoes. The divestment campaigns were costly to the foreign firms that withdrew ‘ often selling assets cheaply to local white businesses but keeping non-equity links that permitted them to continue operating ‘ but did not significantly dent the economy.
Determining the precise impact of international moves against apartheid remains difficult; those moves cannot be judged in isolation from internal pressures from South Africa’s black population. There is, however, evidence to suggest that the economic pressures of the 1980s, in particular, played a critical part in bringing about the demise of apartheid. As even the most optimistic advocates of external pressure acknowledged at the time, external pressures before the 1980s resulted only in ‘token moves’ and ‘cosmetic changes’ from Pretoria (”zg”r 1982: 134), although they had the positive effect of encouraging internal opposition to apartheid’as Nelson Mandela wrote in a message smuggled out of Robben Island prison in the 1970s, ‘every effort to isolate South Africa adds strength to our struggle’
Probably the most positive result of international anti-apartheid moves was their psychological impact on both black and white South Africans. White South Africans, despite protestations to the contrary, were concerned about world opinion, and feared being abandoned by those they considered their friends, particularly America. For that reason, ‘constructive engagement’ approaches to relations with South Africa could never be as effective as stronger measures: ‘The power of the U.S. was never its ability to talk to Pretoria, and always its ability to stop talking’.
The precise effects of economic pressures on South Africa were always difficult to measure, although one South African observer noted that:
Increasingly one hears South African government ministers who are admitting to the powerful effect of sanctions in constraining their political options. For instance, Minister of Finance Barned du Plessis said at a public meeting, and I quote him, ‘Our economic problems began with the imposition of the arms embargo in 1964.’
These concerns reinforced white South African fears about their future. Those fears were not so much about whether economic activity could continue at existing or slightly diminished levels, but about the barrier to growth which lack of foreign investment and capital obviously was. A 1984 Department of Health and Welfare report on demographic trends received particularly close attention from the government: it projected that South Africa’s population was set to grow from 28.44 million in 1980, with 15 percent whites, to about 40 million in 2040, with only 5 percent whites Besides its implications of an increasingly outnumbered white population, the report made it clear that for South Africa to sustain its projected population growth, it would need substantial economic growth and thus investment.
At the same time, the gold industry, upon which South Africa’s economy so heavily depended, faced ‘a falling price, ageing mines, depleting reserves, declining grades, a rising cost structure, high capital requirements to finance a new generation of mines, [and] potentially difficult mining conditions in the new mines,’ a situation which was naturally of deep concern in white South Africa. The development of alternative sources of income would be extremely difficult under circumstances of international economic pressure.
Fortuitously, wider international events quelled other white South African fears of the consequences of ending apartheid. The end of the Cold War removed ‘the bogey of the communist onslaught that the South African government so successfully used in the past’
Under the new circumstances, the end of white rule no longer automatically meant the triumph of socialism, Soviet intervention, or the presence of Cuban troops. … The change in the international climate thus made it much easier for the government to move toward negotiations [with the ANC].
Ultimately, the interaction of external and internal pressures’which had always influenced each other’brought about key concessions from Pretoria:
From all accounts, the final factor that made the government realize that the unbanning of the ANC absolutely had to be done was the Foreign Minister’s argument that if the ANC was not unbanned, there would be no point in the government attempting to achieve anything overseas anymore.
The release of Nelson Mandela on 11 February 1990 and the granting of independence to Namibia the following month led to the disintegration of ‘the international community’s willingness to maintain economic pressure on South Africa, … despite the ANC’s insistence that the time had not yet come for Western countries to modify their policies’. The international community was anxious to be free of a complex problem, and willing to rely on internal momentum within South Africa to carry negotiations forward; and ‘neither the government nor the ANC, nor indeed any of the other parties, wanted outside intervention in the negotiations’. No doubt the memory of past international action helped to maintain the South African government’s commitment to the continuation of negotiations through the early 1990s.
The international anti-apartheid movement, then, in which ‘churches, civil rights organizations, trade unions, and student and professional organizations were… in the vanguard, pressing governments, businesses, and other NGOs to sever their ties with South Africa’, played an integral role in determining the pace of change within South Africa. Without strong international pressure, the South African government was able to ride out the local repercussions of Sharpeville and its other repressive acts from the 1950s to the 1970s, but when international support collapsed in the 1980s the combination of internal and external pressures became more than it could acceptably bear.
Despite the array of initiatives designed to pressure or encourage the South African government to abandon apartheid, they were not decisive. Instead, a combination of internal and external factors created conditions that led both the NP and the ANC towards the realisation that their aims might be best met through political negotiations.
The apartheid system was riddled with economic inefficiencies and intrinsically unsustainable. This structural problem was exacerbated by the financial crisis of the 1980s and compounded by the increasingly widespread economic sanctions and embargoes on South African companies and goods ‘ which also had significant symbolic impact. These factors convinced many in South Africa’s influential business community that it was necessary to seek a more dramatic solution.
These economic challenges surfaced alongside other geopolitical developments. Key was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of communism throughout Eastern Europe and in much of Africa. The ANC had received considerable backing and been associated with advocating state socialism. Apartheid leaders used fear of communism as a central justification for their policies. Thus the collapse of communism helped to increase their confidence when ANC leaders indicated they had relinquished their socialist aspirations. De Klerk later acknowledged that it would not have been possible for him to pursue political negotiations if the ‘communist threat’ had remained strong. Furthermore, the peace processes in neighbouring states and their rapprochement with the South African government meant the ANC was cut off from some of its previous bases.
Perhaps most significant of all, however, was the strength of the opposition in the democracy movement. As the country became increasingly ungovernable, many NP leaders began to realise that incremental reform would be unlikely to contain the conflict over the longer term. Yet while international isolation and the sanctions regimes may not have decisively forced the government to change its policies, it seems that they were influential in strengthening the case of those who argued for reform. They also offered considerable moral, political and practical support to various elements in South Africa’s anti-apartheid democracy movement. Black leaders at the time and subsequently emphasised the effectiveness of the sanctions, and on his release from prison Nelson Mandela argued that lifting sanctions then would have risked aborting the process towards ending apartheid.
Crucially, international sanctions may have also helped to create a climate within South Africa’s white communities that was more supportive of reform and endorsed De Klerk’s strategy. This support became critical in 1992 when, responding to intense criticism from conservatives, he called a risky referendum to gauge the support of the white electorate. His overwhelming victory confirmed that the majority of whites supported a negotiated settlement. Ultimately, however, it seems that it was the leadership shown by pro-negotiation elements in all the parties that was responsible for South Africa’s successful transition.
Therefore to a greater extent the international community put pressure on the national party government to reform the apartheid system from the 1960s until the 1980s.