Author Interview: Jonathan Rauch on his reissued 'Kindly Inquisitors'

Jonathan Rauch

Twenty years after it was first published, a new, expanded edition of Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought is now available as an ebook, with an ink-and-paper edition coming out in March 2014.

Jonathan Rauch, the author of Kindly Inquisitors and other books (including Demosclerosis and his 2013 memoir, Denial: My 25 Years without a Soul), spoke to me recently following a panel at the Cato Institute, in which he discussed his book and what has happened with regard to free speech and censorship in the last two decades with Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and Brian Moulton of the Human Rights Campaign.

After the panel, Rauch explained what inspired him to write the book in the first place.

When, in the late 1980s, “Salman Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses and received a fatwa (essentially a death sentence) from Ayatollah Khomeini,” he said, “I thought that the West did not know how to respond to that. It could defend the laws of free speech but it wasn't defending the ideas of free speech. People were saying things like, 'Well, a death sentence on Rushdie is certainly offensive and wrong but Rushdie himself was offensive to Muslims,' and so forth. And I realized that a lot of people didn't understand why we have this idea of letting people say offensive stuff.”

One of the concepts Rauch introduces in Kindly Inquisitors is what he calls “liberal science.”

He explained that “most discussions of free thought and speech start and end with the U.S Constitution” but he tries “to go a little deeper and look at society's method for producing knowledge and adjudicating disputes about fact, which is in some ways the most important thing we do” – for instance, disagreements about whether Christianity or Islam is “the right religion.”

Historically, he said, the method of “settling disputes like that was war.”

By contrast, “liberal science substitutes an open-ended, rule-based, social process in which everybody throws out ideas all the time and we subject them to criticism. We kill our hypotheses rather than each other. This turns out both to be spectacularly good at mobilizing intellectual talent to find and promote good ideas and spectacularly good at defusing what otherwise would be political, often violent, conflicts.”

Liberal science, he said, is the term he coined “for the whole intellectual network we have that seeks truth in Western liberal cultures.”

He compares it to two other major social institutions for “allocating resources and adjudicating social conflicts.”

In economics, he said, “market systems are in the business of allocating resources and they use open-ended rules of exchange to do that.”

In politics, he noted, “democracies are in the business of allocating coercive political power and they use the exchange of votes and compromise to do that.”

Parallel to those two systems, he added, “liberal science is in the business of adjudicating questions about who's right and wrong and they use the exchange of criticism.”

These three systems, Rauch explained, “all have in common that it shouldn't matter who you are. Anyone can participate, there's no special authority, and no one gets the final say. No one can stand outside the system and say, 'Here's the final result.'”

The result is “always subject to change. It's a big rolling social consensus.”

Since Kindly Inquisitors was first published in 1993, there has been a major, positive change in the intellectual environment, Rauch said.

“In the last twenty years there's been a retreat by active ideologues who favored censorship and speech controls,” he said. Those views have “been replaced with a more refined case that focuses more specifically on how minorities can be hurt when hate speech rises to a certain level of prevalence in society. It's called the 'hostile environment doctrine.'”

In preparing the new edition of his book, Rauch “decided to take a really hard look at that because I think it's right now the biggest and most serious challenge to people like me who advocate very robust freedom of speech.”

He wanted to find out, “from a minority point of view, which is better: a wide open system where people are free to say hateful things about me and often do, or a more controlled system where you've got some people in charge trying to protect me from that?”

His conclusion, “based on the history of the last twenty years for gay rights” is that “there's no contest. We're much better off as minorities when our speech and the other side's speech are [both] protected because we win those arguments, and we're worse off when that process is interfered with.”

The expanded edition of Kindly Inquisitors includes a new foreword by syndicated columnist George F. Will and a new afterword by Jonathan Rauch. It is available now in both Nook and Kindle formats and a print version will be released next year by the University of Chicago Press.

(An earlier version of this interview appeared on Examiner.com.  A complete audio recording is available as a podcast through Bearing Drift.)

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'Mad Dreams, Saving Graces'

Although I believe this book review was published in the International Freedom Review in 1989 or 1990, I have been unable to find that particular volume in my library. What did turn up in a file box was a typescript that shows its age simply by the fact that it was produced on a dot-matrix printer.

Mad Dreams, Saving Graces – Poland: A Nation in Conspiracy, by Michael T. Kaufman. New York: Random House, 1989. Pages: 270. Price: $19.95 (hardcover). 

Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

For the Polish people, the month of September 1989 resonates with history — past, present, and future. It was fifty years ago this month that Hitler’s forces, in cooperation with Stalin’s Red Army, dismembered Poland less than twenty years after it had achieved independence upon the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires. September 1989 will be the first full month in more than forty years that Poland’s government is headed by a non-Communist, Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki. The new prime minister is an unassuming intellectual, a newspaper editor who only a few years ago was jailed by the order of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the man who last month requested that Mazowiecki form a government under the umbrella of Solidarity, the free trade union movement banned from 1981 until last year. What the future holds is anybody’s guess, but given the rapidity of events that were unpredictable even eighteen months ago, for many people, optimism hard to avoid.

Michael T. Kaufman, an American reporter born of Polish parents in exile just before the Second World War, returned to his ancestral land as a New York Times correspondent in 1984.

What he discovered was a country living in conspiracy -- consciously, surreptitiously, historically living in a conspiracy designed to show that no totalitarian government whether Nazi orCommunist can keep the Polish people down.

Kaufman’s account of the underground Solidarity movement in the years following the declaration of martial law in December 1981 is full of tales of personal heroism. The heroes, however, are modest. What they do, they say, is only what is necessary to maintain their own dignity and that of their nation. Whether running from gun-toting secret police or editing underground newspapers, the conspirators felt that their conspiracy was nothing out of the ordinary, only the honest efforts of honest people to keep their heads above water. In Polish, writes Kaufman, “the word conspiracy has absolutely no negative connotation. A Pole will say, ‘I was a conspirator,’ in the same way a Frenchman might say, ‘I was with the wartime resistance.” It is a matter of pride.

It has become a commonplace among both travel writers arid political analysts to describe a nation as being filled with paradox. For Poland, however, this cliché is undoubtedly true. Kaufman writes that Poland’s “social landscape” is dominated by “tragic though sometimes ludicrous paradoxes. Almost everyone in Poland knew that what was economically necessary was politically impossible, that what was required was forbidden. The government knew this, the party knew this, the nation knew it.” He cites a Polish writer whom he had called absurdist in the tradition of Eugene Ionesco. The writer’s reaction to this characterization? “I am a realist like Zola. It is just Poland that is absurd.”

In Poland, merely not to lose is to win. This seems a paradox to us, because, as Kaufman explains, “For those brought up in pragmatic Western cultures, a system that accepts stalemate as the best possible substitute for success seems like a Wonderland absurdity.” Kaufman reminds us of the modest aspirations apparent in the Polish national anthem, which unlike national hymns that lay claim to God’s bounty or military victories, merely states, “Jeszcze Polska nie zginela" [“Poland has not yet perished”].

Poland is a police state like other Communist countries. It is just that the police are not quite so effective at stifling dissent and the underground conspiracy. The police are held in widespread disdain. One common joke in Warsaw asks: “Why do policemen here walk in threes?” Answer: “Well, the first is there because he can read, the second, because he can add, and the third, to keep tabs on the two intellectuals.” And are Poles proud that one of their countrymen, Feliks Dzierzynski, founded the Soviet secret police (forerunner of today’s KGB) arid participated in Stalin’s bloody purges? Well, in a manner of speaking. In one story about the monument to Dzierzynski in Warsaw, “an old peasant visits the statue, crosses himself, and tells a passerby that Dzierzynski was one of the greatest Poles who ever lived. When the stunned stranger asks why, the peasant tells him, ‘Because he killed more Communists and more Russians than vodka and winter.”

Poles are more aware of their history than perhaps any other European society. A university lecturer told Kaufman that “everywhere else, people think history is something that happens to strangers, while here it is what happens to our mothers and fathers and what is happening to us and our friends.”

What is happening now is the gradual transformation of a Communist police state into a democratic republic. The underground movement that arose spontaneously after martial law was declared in 1981 was not violent but intellectual. Said Solidarity leader Zbigniew Bujak, “Once resistance had meant taking up a gun. Now, people instinctively took up typewriters.” The underground consisted of “firms” of people engaged in political propaganda activities: newspapers, books, plays, musical performances, debates. The result was stimulation of political ideas and, finally, forcing the government to hold genuinely free elections in which Solidarity candidates won every seat that they contested.

Although Kaufman’s book necessarily ends its chronology of events some months before the most recent occurrences, it is interesting to note his guarded optimism about Poland’s future. Polish hopes for economic rescue by the West, he says, are “politically unrealistic. Some limited growth in capital from abroad [is] probable, particularly if state and society established a truce, but full-scale rescue by a consortium of benefactors seem[s] a chimera.” Moreover, the Polish example poses a threat to Soviet domination over its own republics, particularly Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, where clamor for independence is loud today, and in the Ukraine and elsewhere farther down the road. How far will Gorbachev allow the Poles to go before saying “Enough!”?

It is far too early to make an accurate assessment of Poland’s economic and political future. What is clear to me, at least, is that the hard-won status now enjoyed by Solidarity is Solidarity’s to lose. Economic or political failure is the unfortunate likely outcome for a government made up of people who have never before held responsible public offices. The hard choices necessary to reform the Polish economy will come down most severely on Solidarity’s own constituents, the workers: higher food prices, layoffs, closing plants and industries. In fact, it may be necessary, on the basis of economic realities, to close down the inefficient and archaic Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, which besides being totally non-competitive with foreign shipbuilders, is the birthplace of Solidarity. What an ironic, paradoxical grace note to accompany Solidarity’s triumph!


Richard Sincere, a Washington-based issues analyst, is an American of Polish descent.

'Elections and Democracy in Central America'

This book review ran originally in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, August 9, 1989.

RICHARD SINCERE
Scholars See More to a Real Democracy Than Just Elections 

Elections and Democracy in Central America, edited by John A. Booth and Mitchell A. Seligson, The University of North Carolina Press, $29.95 cloth, $10.95, 214 pp. 

Elections alone do not a democracy make. From Moscow to Monrovia, grand and petty dictators use elections as a tool to legitimize their totalitarian or kleptocratic regimes. It was just a few years ago that the Soviet press tried to assure the Kremlin’s subjects that Communist Party leader Konstantin Chernenko was in good health by broadcasting a photograph of him casting his vote in a Soviet parliamentary election. A few months later, Chernenko was dead — a bad cold, they said — and Mikhail Gorbachev became party leader. Just a few months ago, he was “elected” president with nary a dissenting vote in the Supreme Soviet.

Sham elections do not just take place in established communist states. Central America has had its share of them in the 150 years since the five states of the region declared their independence from Spain. The most stolidly democratic of the Central American countries, Costa Rica, has a remarkable record: almost 100 years of popular rule, interrupted by just one brief period of civil strife in 1948-49.

In this slim volume of collected essays, the electoral experience of the Central American countries is discussed by a handful of scholars who have been studying the region since before it inserted itself into American consciousness 10 years ago. The authors were members of a discussion panel at the Congress of the Latin American Studies Association. Each of the panelists, writes co-editor Mitchell Seligson in the introduction, “had been studying Central American politics for nearly 20 years, and some longer. While the length of their experience does not make them wiser than newcomers, it does give them a sense of perspective possibly lacking among scholars who began studying the region only after Central America became front-page news.”

These scholars had an experience at that conference that other Latin American experts, notably Mark Falcoff of the American Enterprise Institute, have also reported. In Seligson’s words: “It was with a certain sense of wry amusement that the panelists looked out upon a standing-room-only audience at the panel; these same scholars had grown accustomed to presenting papers on Central Ameirca only a decade before to audiences that were sometimes smaller than the number of panelists.”

It is unfortunate that North Americans have been so oblivious to Central America. Certainly, the United States looms large in the minds of Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans. Their recent history only underscores the long-standing mutual relationship that, for good and ill, extends back to the 1830s.

The study of Central American elections is not a parochial proposition. The Central American countries have much in common with other developing democracies around the globe, elsewhere in Latin America, in Africa, in the Caribbean, and in Asia. Experience in electoral democracy in Central America can teach us much about the means to imbed democratic traditions in a country’s political culture. It can teach us what works and what does not work, because in Central America there are examples of both success and failure.

As co-editor John Booth writes in an essay providing a framework for analysis, “Democratic values and support for civil liberties develop among populations through participation. A series of fair and free elections could increase popular confidence in elections per se, in participatory norms, and in a regime [an explicit or implied contract about the rules of the game worked out by the nation’s political elites].”

Booth goes on to note something that is quite important, if we want o contribute to the building of foundations for democracy throughout Third World countries that lack the basic framework or democratic culture necessary for fully participatory democracy. ‘It is also true, however,” he writes, “that other types of political participation, particularly those that are more continuous or relevant to ongoing and immediately important activities in the everyday lives of citizens, may be more likely than electoral participation to build participatory norms and support for civil liberties.”

For example, participating in decision-making in the workplace — through management or labor unions — is an important teaching forum for democratic values. This has been a motivating idea in the philosophy of the National Endowment for Democracy, which channels its monies to labor unions, small businesses, and the press as well as political institutions like opposition parties.

Some of the contributors to this volume have had an obvious adversarial view toward the policies of the Reagan Administration in Central America. There are accusations that the U.S. government has tried to manipulate elections there (in Guatemala and El Salvador, for instance) while trying to discredit valid elections (in Nicaragua).

There is room for debate on these points, but the behavior of the Sandinista junta under Daniel Ortega surely points to the conclusion that there is little possibility that the democratic opposition can gain power through a free election in Nicaragua.

Because Nicaragua is so much in the public eye, there will no doubt be plenty of readers who can dispute the authors’ views there. Knowledge of the other countries — especially Guatemala and Honduras — is harder to come by, so it will be up to Central American experts in the press, in the government, and in the universities to engage the authors in a continuing debate on this and other topics of importance.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based analyst and writer.

'The Struggle' and "Dialogue in Williamsburg'

This review essay originally appeared in Volume 3, Number 4 of International Freedom Review (Summer 1990).

Book Review
NEGOTIATING IN SOUTH AFRICA:
NEW TIMES DEMAND NEW APPROACHES
The Struggle: A History of the African National Congress
by Heidi Holland
(New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1990, 256 pages, illus., cloth. $19.95)
and
Dialogue in Williamsburg: The Turning Point for South Africa?
edited with commentary by Michael Briand
(San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 1989, 165 pages, paperback, $10.95)
Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

The people who write books on South African issues, and their American publishers, must be quite pleased these days. Since the election of F.W. de Klerk as South Africa’s president in September 1989, political conditions in that country have been changing at a dramatic, if not literally breathtaking, pace. The legalization of the African National Congress and other banned anti-apartheid groups in February 1990, along with the long-awaited release from Victor Verster Prison of Nelson Mandela, brought South Africa back into an international spotlight it had successfully tried to avoid for several years.

Indeed, after the U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986. which imposed severe economic sanctions against South Africa, American interest in events there languished. Since Americans had the sense that Congress had already “done something,” there was no need to think about South Africa or apartheid, the system of separate development and racial discrimination, or to “do anything” else. Despite the best efforts of some American anti-apartheid groups, South African Issues played only a marginal role—if any at all—in the 1988 presidential campaign. College campuses became quiescent as demands for divestment In South Africa-related stocks slowed and then ceased. Ritualistic protest demonstrations in front of the South African embassy in Washington failed to get covered on the evening news, except on such occasions as Nelson Mandela’s birthday, when media interest could again be aroused.

All that has changed now. With negotiations beginning in earnest after a several-month period of hesitation and—to put it bluntly—grandstanding among all the parties involved, the legalization of the ANC is beginning to have its full impact. De Klerk’s National Party government has announced that it is willing to share power but unwilling to submit to majority rule. Nelson Mandela has been named Deputy President of the ANC for purposes of leading the negotiating team. With the parties around the table, the question becomes: What are they negotiating about?

It is in this context that two recent books become relevant and informative. One, Heidi Holland’s The Struggle, helps to answer the question of who (or what) is the ANC. The other, Michael Briand’s Dialogue at Williamsburg, provides a microcosmic insight into what the negotiating process itself is all about and what we might expect during the long bargaining period ahead.

Holland’s new history of the African National Congress was published in the same month as the ANC was legalized after nearly thirty years in exile and underground in South Africa, and as President F. W. de Klerk released ANC leader Nelson Mandela after twenty-seven years in prison.

The African National Congress has long been recognized as the pre-eminent voice of South Africa’s blacks in the struggle against apartheid, imposed by the National Party in 1948 and now being disowned by that same party.

However, the ANC is not the only voice. Many black South Africans vehemently disagree with the ANC’s policies and dislike its personalities. For instance, Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Chief Minister of KwaZulu and leader of the Inkatha organization, argues that the ANC is wrong in calling for economic sanctions against South Africa. Buthelezi shares this view with many blacks displaced from their jobs when American and other foreign companies left the country after the 1986 sanctions.

On the other side, the Pan-African Congress takes issue with the ANC because the ANC believes in a non-racial South Africa, a country where both whites and blacks have a home. The PAC believes only blacks should have political, civil, and economic rights in South Africa. This belief is shared with the Azanian People’s Organization and the followers of the late Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement.

Currently, the PAC—also unbanned by de Klerk in February 1990—is actively opposing negotiations, saying that whites should have no role in shaping the future South Africa. This is a curious mirror-image of the position taken by members of the (white) Conservative Party, whose MPs walked out of Parliament on the day negotiations began (May 2, 1990), protesting what they called an “act of treason” by President de Klerk.

Holland, a South African journalist, chronicles the birth and growth of the ANC In a readable, non-academic fashion. Her narrative could easily be understood by a high school student. This simplicity, however, might be considered a drawback to its rendering a realistic account at a desperate, intense moment in history.

In the early chapters especially, Holland’s history reads like a hagiography of Mandela and Walter Sisulu, two of the founders of the youth wing of the ANC In the 1940s and of the military wing (Umkhonto We Sizwe, or “Spear of the Nation”) in the early 1960s. Holland tells stories of Mandela that echo Parson Weems’ story of George Washington and the cherry tree: how ten-year-old Nelson saved pennies for his school fees, how teenage Nelson participated in a tribal puberty rite, or this description of Nelson the young man when he first arrived in Johannesburg:

Crowing roosters scuttled away to clear a path for Nelson in the hour before sunrise when, as a budding boxer, he jogged around the houses In his daily fitness routine.

Even the animals make way for this messianic leader! This type of presentation makes it difficult to accept Holland the author as Holland the unbiased journalist.

Still, she does offer some unexpected Insights. Though she does not draw the connection herself, there are some interesting parallels between the (white) Afrikaner Nationalists, who openly sympathized with the Nazis during World War II, and ANC activist Walter Sisulu. After war was declared in 1939, Sisulu “helped campaign to stop Africans from volunteering for the army. He became an admirer of the Japanese, hoping they might someday invade South Africa.”

Holland does not hide the fact that the ANC has been heavily influenced by Communist ideology. She traces Communist infiltration of the ANC to 1928, soon after the South African Communist Party led white workers in the Rand Rebellion under the banner, “Workers of the World, Unite and Fight for a White South Africa.” Seeing that this proletariat form of class struggle was bound to fail, the Communists joined forces with black activists. Ultimately this probably set back the cause of democracy in South Africa by several generations, giving paranoid Afrikaner nationalists an excuse to deny blacks their civil rights.

Holland does, however, suggest strongly that Mandela and his close friends—including current ANC president Oliver Tambo— fought the Communists. This is strange, because Mandela in the 1960s proclaimed himself a Marxist. Tambo, until very recently, embraced the assistance of the Kremlin, speaking glowingly of Communism as the cure for South Africa’s ills.

Now out of prison, however, Mandela seems a changed man— more moderate, more conciliatory, more dignified than the terrorist who was sent to prison In 1964. Tambo, incapacitated by ill-health, is out of the picture. Those who sat glued to their televisions on February 11, 1990—the day of Mandela’s long-awaited release—know that a new day has dawned in South Africa, and that Mandela’s cooperation with Nationalist leader F. W. de Klerk is key to a peaceful, permanent settlement to South Africa’s long struggle to create a democratic system for all its citizens.

Mandela’s commitment to peaceful change and the deeper understanding he may have regarding the issues involved was indicated by his remarks about guaranteeing the rights of Afrikaners in a Cape Town press conference on May 2, 1990. As if to demonstrate the sincerity of his pledge, he made his remarks in Afrlkaans rather than English or Xhosa. Perhaps out of the woodwork, operating as a political party alongside the Democrats, the Conservatives, Labour, and others, the ANC can find its place in South African society without recourse to violence.


At the Negotiating Table: Where Do We Go from Here?
Of course, as they say, the proof is in the pudding. On what experiences can South Africans draw for achieving compromise after so many years of severely dichotomized conflict?

One is the negotiating experiment conducted in Williamsburg, Virginia, by Michael Briand, president of the Center for Public Philosophy. Based on his experience at this meeting—which brought together South African thinkers, politicians, and activists—Briand believes that substantial constitutional change can occur in South Africa and that an end to the conflict there can be achieved through negotiation, not violence.

It was no accident that the meeting took place in Williamsburg, one of the cradles of American democracy. The earliest American politicians learned the art of compromise at Williamsburg and, when pressed against the wall, resolved to fight against tyranny. It was there that Patrick Henry proclaimed. “Give me liberty or give me death!” The spirit permeating Williamsburg had to be felt among the participants.

Briand’s concept of the gathering was a small-scale practice session for eventual constitutional discussions—indeed, even negotiations—that will require the participation of representatives of all competing groups in South Africa. This meeting itself was not designed to negotiate a settlement, nor to pass resolutions that would be trumpeted by the participants upon their return to South Africa. It was instead a low-key affair, and those who participated did so in an almost anonymous fashion: no names of participants were published in the book that resulted from the meeting, Dialogue In Williamsburg: The Turning Point for South Africa?.  However, those familiar with the South African political scene can probably guess the identities of some, if not most, of the participants quoted.

Twenty-seven South Africans participated at the meeting. They ranged from Conservatives wanting the country partitioned along racial lines, to liberal Afrikaners and English-speaking whites preferring a federal or unitary system with a universal franchise and free market economics, to black South Africans in accord with the African National Congress, calling for universal suffrage, multiracial representation in a single parliament, and nationalization of major industries.

In a paper circulated among participants before the meetings, Briand set out the conditions necessary for a successful constitutional settlement, not only in South Africa, but anywhere that seemingly irreconcilable conflict prevents peaceful disposition of political matters. The most important point to remember, Briand says, is that:

a simple majority cannot suffice to establish a society’s fundamental legal framework. At this level—the constitutional level—something approaching unanimity is both a theoretical and a practical requirement, at least In the first instance. Thus delegates to a constitutional convention might agree to adopt provisions of a new constitution by majority vote. But the legitimacy of the decision would depend on a prior unanimous agreement to relax the unanimity requirement.

Both inside South Africa and elsewhere, the purpose of negotiations is misunderstood. Briand writes:

Many people, South Africans not least of all, act as if a solution must be found before negotiations can begin. As one South African put it, ‘negotiate about what?’ The answer is, negotiate an end to the conflict, Sit down with the representatives of every point of view and every set of interests and try to identify proposals that would protect the most important interest of each constituency. The solution will emerge from this process of discussion and negotiation.

For some South Africans, negotiations cannot take place until certain conditions are met. For Instance, the National Party government has long insisted that the African National Congress must renounce violence before it can be admitted to the negotiating process. For its part, the ANC has called for the unbanning of certain organizations, the release of certain prisoners, and ending the prohibitions against certain forms of political activity.

The National Party representatives made clear their commitment to the concept of “power sharing,” which they argued:

is not tantamount to domination by the majority. It is not the takeover of South Africa by the ANC. Power sharing is the assurance that tone-party] domination In South Africa will not come about.

The Nationalists also see “power sharing” as a transitional phase: “Power sharing, as a basis for the future, must be exercised In such a manner as to allow that shared power eventually to grow into a proper democracy.”

Yet black nationalist groups such as the ANC fear that “power sharing” is a white ruse to hold onto power and to continue white domination over blacks. In the meantime, one black participant warned:

it is becoming riskier in black politics to remain reasonable. It is becoming more fashionable to be unreasonable. Those of us who try to be reasonable are under attack from both left and right. We are called puppets by the left. We are called revolutionaries and communists by the right.

A liberal English-speaking South African argued that:

South Africa is at the moment visionless. It is directionless. Politics is unpredictable for both Blacks and Whites. On both sides, people distrust the Government. The National Party has no credibility because it will not say clearly where it is going, and why. It tries to appease everyone by talking and acting vaguely or contradictorily.

The discussions also addressed the topic of individual rights versus group rights, and the shape a new constitution would take based upon the consensus on that issue. Dr. Briand comments:

Like Americans (who ought to know better). South Africans habitually confuse the ideas of liberalism and democracy. Liberalism concerns the degree of liberty that persons enjoy and the spheres of activity in which they are free to act (i.e., the scope of liberty). In other words, liberalism addresses the question of the relative size of the private and public realms. . . . ‘Democracy’ is not synonymous with the form of government that we in the Western political tradition have come to value so highly. Properly speaking, democracy is only one element in that tradition. The more fundamental element is liberalism.

Briand believes, as a result of the Williamsburg meeting, that “in the South African conflict, mutual understanding (which facilitation fosters) is still desperately needed.” South Africans of different backgrounds still have difficulty coming to terms with the different ways of looking at life and the different goals that their adversaries and fellow-countrymen have. He concludes that “prudence as well as justice requires that South Africans seriously contemplate—and contemplate soon—Initiating genuine negotiations for the purpose of reaching a fair and viable resolution of their conflict.” He draws from his experience of meeting South Africans of varied backgrounds and persuasions that “a fair and self-enforcing settlement is possible” if dialogue and negotiations can be initiated and sustained.

Now Briand’s predictions can be put to the test: Mandela and de Klerk are sitting across from each other at the same table, discussing the future shape of South African politics and society. A joint statement issued by the ANC and the government after the first round said the discussions were characterized by “openness and straightforwardness on both sides.” Mandela said he wanted to see the remaining obstacles to full negotiations removed “so that we can together move forward as rapidly as possible to end the inhuman system of apartheid.” For his part, de Klerk noted that “the vast majority of South Africans desire the negotiation process aimed at a new constitution to get started in all earnest,” adding that confrontation will get South Africans nowhere. Our joint destiny demands that all of us steer clear of it.”

To succeed, however, negotiations must include more parties than just the ANC and the National Party. The Conservatives, Inkatha, the PAC, churches and religious organizations, business groups, and labor unions must all be invited to take part. As Briand points out, a constitutional structure decided by anything short of consensus is almost guaranteed to fail. Neither South Africans nor Americans should grow complacent simply because Mandela and de Klerk are talking to each other.

Richard Sincere, a frequent contributor to the book review pages of International Freedom Review, is author of Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa (International Freedom FoundatIon, 1990) and The Politics of Sentiment: Churches and Foreign Investment In South Africa (Ethics and Public Pbllcy Center, 1987).