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Skeptical Notes on “Constructive Engagement”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

Sam C. Nolutshungu
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Extract

But do you not think that there is safety in the other course? For here also it is necessary since you have forced us to abandon considerations of justice and are persuading us to give ear to what is in your interests, for us to tell you what is to our advantage, and if our interests happen to be the same to try to persuade you.

There are many arguments advanced in support of “constructive engagement,” but the following claims are probably the most important. Apartheid is morally unacceptable. It creates difficulties in the West. It is in the interest of the West that it should come to an end with Western help. That interest coincides with that of most South Africans, except perhaps, an increasingly unrepresentative minority. Total disengagement, disinvestment, and trade boycotts are deemed impractical and unlikely, in any event, to succeed in supplanting the racist regime.

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African Issues , Volume 12 , Issue 3-4 , Fall/Winter 1982 , pp. 3 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1982 

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References

Notes

1. The Mellan Dialogue quoted in Flew, Antony, An Introduction to Western Philosophy: Ideas and Argument from Plato to Sartre (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971)Google Scholar.

2. E.g., Barber, J., Blumenfeld, J., and Hill, C. R., The West and South Africa [Chatham House Papers, No. 14] (London: RIIA and RKP, 1982)Google Scholar; South Africa: Time Running Out-The Report of the Study Commission on US Policy toward South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); M. Lipton, “British Investment in South Africa: Is Constructive Engagement Possible?” South African Labour Bulletin (October, 1976).

3. South Africa: Time Running Out, and many others.

4. Virtually all of Heribert Adam’s work since his Modernising Racial Domination, but also more subtly the various pleas for “consociation,” most notably in Hanf, T., Weiland, H., and Vierdag, G., South Africa: The Prospects of Peaceful Change (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

5. Cf. my earlier “External Intervention in South Africa,” in Yansane, A. (ed.), Decolonization and Dependency: Problems of Development of African Societies (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1980)Google Scholar.