Home › Features › Essays › South Africa: Why Constructive Engagement Failed

South Africa: Why Constructive Engagement Failed

Sanford J. Ungar and Peter Vale
Winter 1985/86
Summary -- 

Ronald Reagan's imposition of limited economic sanctions against the South African regime in September was a tacit admission that his policy of "constructive engagement"--encouraging change in the apartheid system through a quiet dialogue with that country's white minority leaders--had failed. Having been offered many carrots by the United States over a period of four-and-a-half years as incentives to institute meaningful reforms, the South African authorities had simply made a carrot stew and eaten it. Under the combined pressures of the seemingly cataclysmic events in South Africa since September 1984 and the dramatic surge of anti-apartheid protest and political activism in the United States, the Reagan Administration was finally embarrassed into brandishing some small sticks as an element of American policy.

Sanford J. Ungar, former Managing Editor of Foreign Policy, was until recently a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of Africa: The People and Politics of an Emerging Continent. Peter Vale is Research Professor and Director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. Copyright © 1985 by Sanford J. Ungar and Peter Vale.

We're sorry, but Foreign Affairs does not have the copyright to display this article online.

Related

Essay, Winter 1983
Revolution in the Making: Black Politics in South Africa
Thomas G. Karis

For a quarter-century, the goals of American policy toward South Africa have remained remarkably consistent, but that consistency has served to mask sharply contrasting perceptions of the nature and direction of change in that country's racial policies. U.S. policymakers--including those of the Reagan Administration--have deplored official South African racism, affirmed the American belief in government by the consent of the governed, predicted fundamental change, and prayed that it would come peacefully. But beyond such broad outlines, American analysts have differed sharply in their specific judgments regarding the effectiveness of white-led change in South Africa, and the importance of black opposition to white rule.

Read
Essay, Special 1986
South Africa Embattled
John de St. Jorre

Examines the nature and extent of Botha's reforms, and their failure culminating in the 1986 state of emergency. Despite his policies to defeat or co-opt all opposition groups both black and white, the confrontation between government and anti-government forces is deepening. Traces how and why South Africa reached the top of the US and Western political agenda, which led to the end of Reagan's policy of constructive engagement and the failure of the Commonwealth's EPG, and the beginning of disengagement. The effects of sanctions and South Africa's policies towards the front-line states are polarizing the country and worsening the crisis throughout Southern Africa.

Read
Essay, Special 1985
Africa: Year of Ironies
Helen A. Kitchen

President Reagan's sweep of 49 of the 50 states in the November 1984 elections set in motion mutations within both the Republican and Democratic Parties that have substantially affected U.S. relations with Africa. The mushrooming of groups and individuals in the coalition known as the Free South Africa Movement is ascribed by its founder, TransAfrica's Randall Robinson, to a post-election assessment that a very daring gamble was the only hope of keeping anti-apartheid activism alive in the face of another four years of "constructive engagement." On another front, the congressional leaders of the shattered Democratic Party seized upon apartheid as the most promising issue for drawing Jesse Jackson's constituency and other blacks sidelined during the campaign back into the party's mainstream. The 35 Republican congressmen who dispatched a sharply worded letter of protest against Pretoria's racial policies to South African Ambassador B. G. Fourie in December 1984 were at least partially motivated by a new belief that it was historically and practically shortsighted for the Republicans to concede the black vote and the civil rights constituency as a given to the Democratic Party.

Read
Cover image

In the Magazine

November/December 2009 / 6, 88
Essay
In the Quicksands of Somalia
Bronwyn Bruton

Washington's repeated attempts to bring peace to Somalia with state-building initiatives have failed, even backfired. It should renounce political intervention and encourage local development without trying to improve governance.
Read