Neoliberalism and the State of Belonging in South Africa

Derick A. Becker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030399306
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030399313
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explains the making of the South African state and thereby contributes to the development theory by analyzing the concept of the embedded neoliberal state. The author offers a theoretical exploration of state formation as an inherently interconnected international and domestic social process as applied to the history and development of South Africa. A genuine social science that eschews disciplinary boundaries, this will appeal to a wide audience of scholars in the fields of political development, political science, African and development studies.

© The Author(s) 2020

D. A. BeckerNeoliberalism and the State of Belonging in South Africahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39931-3_5

Begin Abstract

A State in Transition: The Negotiated Birth of the Post-Apartheid State

Derick A. Becker¹

(1)

University of Nottingham Malaysia, Semenyih, Malaysia

Derick A. Becker

Keywords

NeoliberalismScenario planningPost-apartheidAfrican National CongressGood governanceGlobalization

End Abstract

It seems to me that if we are to understand the state we must be willing to grasp it in its myriad forms, which are only in part captured by stating that it is a social product. It is not a construct. Though it is that too. It is an intentional act and ongoing production, however contested and without telos. The state always serves a function, a purpose, at once stated and debated and set into constitutions. This we might say is bound up with notions of citizenship and identity. But for Lefebvre the modern state serves another function in practice: to facilitate what he called the ‘state mode of production’ (SMP) (2001). His is a point well beyond the traditional Marxist links between the economic and regulative governing apparatus. In Lefebvre’s understanding the state in modern times takes on a far more important role in facilitating and creating the possibility of economic processes than merely regulating them. Though never explicitly addressed by Lefebvre, apartheid is arguably a form of SMP. But it is also one that cannot be fully grasped without attention to the questions of race and citizenship that defined its purpose, who belonged, and ultimately the organisation of the state itself. Apartheid was, at its base, a multi-lateral project of racial empowerment and exclusion that was essential to the development of the state itself. Its racial roots are, of course, much deeper and have been dealt with in earlier chapters. What concerns us here is how we might understand the legacy of apartheid so that we may understand the post-apartheid. In this regard, then, no accounting of the state, now or then, is complete through a simple analysis of the institutions themselves, nor the legacy of wealth accumulation that leaves its trace in the racial socio-economics of class; so too must we also examine this other purpose of the state, the one bound up in a notion of citizenship—at once both abstract and cultural and concrete in law and policy. As Rancière has argued, before there is politics there is the question of who counts, who belongs, and how (2004).

To understand this, however, we must situate what is essentially an idea—or sets of ideas, ideology—in its context. Any idea of the world, even of our place in it or the purpose(s) of the institutions we seek to create, must speak to or in relation to an extant world. In Lefebvre’s ontology of space this dialectical relation between the mental and material stems from a simple recognition that as humans we not only produce our world (space in his terminology) we dwell in one that already exists. This world and its attendant mental, social, and material processes appears before us no differently than a wall (Lefebvre 1991, 57). Our ideas about the world then reflect this existence as dwelling. For our purposes here, then, it becomes necessary to situate the question of who belongs within the broader context of the socio-material status-quo: the legacy of apartheid. A change in the governing body does not equate with a radical disjuncture with the past in this broader sense. In spatial terms, then, we are interested in the legacy of apartheid as the texturing of space from which the post-apartheid state emerged and toward which, explicitly and implicitly, all ideas, policies, and ideologies are situated.

This is not to suggest determinism or that a radical disjuncture is impossible—even one that transforms the state itself. As Philpott (2001) argues, even radically transformative ideas spread slowly in society as individuals come to accept them; as such, ideas reflect upon, inform, and propose condemnation of and solutions to a given state of affairs. Certainly the ascension of the ANC and a black majority more generally might constitute—or allow for—such a radical state of affairs. But as is clear now this has not been the case. As we shall see, the ideological radicalism of the struggle was amenable to adaptation and the transformation of the state far from radical as a result. The ideology of the ANC during the struggle certainly presented an understanding of the apartheid state concomitant with a vision for its replacement. But the politics of the post-apartheid state do not reflect a radical departure. No single work could fully explore the ways in which the texture of apartheid is reflected in the contemporary state. But in the individual, central to the question of who belongs and to any proper ontology of the social world, we find an analytically revealing focus on the nature of the production of the state and its politics.

The present chapter sets out to disentangle a complex phenomena that lends itself only to an equally complex argument linking institutions, the individual, and the state in South Africa. The conclusion put forth is not itself novel. Post apartheid South Africa has, like many states over the last several decades, elevated the abstraction of the market into a central role in policymaking—in practice delineating the politics of the possible and impossible. In doing so it has also greatly attenuated the ability of politicians to address the legacy of apartheid. What is unique, however, is the attempt to link this to a question of belonging and the spatial organisation and processes of the state with the legacy of apartheid understood as the texture of space. In this way it contributes—if only obliquely—to a growing literature on what we might call ‘neoliberal citizenship’ (see for example Foucault 2008; Brown 2006; Ong 2006). The focus here, however, is on the conceptualisation of the subject at the heart of policymaking and to what extent the legacy of apartheid can be read on this subject. Neoliberalism is far too often seen simply as a form of ‘governmentality’ without an explicit link to actual behaviour, any theorisation of such agential behaviour, or as a gross elevation of the conceptual over the material world. It exists solely in a problematic separation of mind and matter, ideas and the material world. In contrast, spatial theory seeks a dialectical relationship between the conceived, the perceived, and the lived. Or, rather, the ideas of the world, how we actually feel and understand the world, and how we in turn live in the world. If the world, and the state, is a social product in a constant unfolding of social production then we must properly grasp its totality. And this totality must include an analysis of the extant texture of space; the legacy of apartheid textures even while it does not define and determine the post-apartheid spatial processes.

As is explored below, much of the legacy of apartheid and its explicit white welfare legacy is left untouched for the most part by this elevation of the market as the central locus around which policy debates occur. This alone would not tell us much without linking it to the spatial organisation and processes of the state itself. This is the textural legacy of apartheid. Lurking behind all of this, however, is a question that animates but is not directly addressed here: namely how did a movement aimed at eradicating apartheid come to pursue policies that fail to address its legacies? But as I seek to argue, this is not an entirely accurate reading of the politics of immediate post-apartheid era. The ANC and its alliance did in fact believe it was eradicating this legacy. The goals of the ANC never changed, only the means. A diverse strand of thoughts must be woven together, I readily admit. To keep it from becoming unwieldy, then, this chapter will orient itself around the individual as the subject of policy, particularly the policies of reform embedded in the wide ranging concept of ‘good governance’. In doing so I hope we may shed light on contemporary politics in South Africa as a question of belonging, as a reality of exclusion, and a fight to be recognised and included.

This elevation of the abstract, this question of belonging as a problem of marketised citizenship, is quite distinct from the origins of citizenship tied to the nation and national identity. This is not to say, of course, that this abstraction is absent from the traditional heartlands of the nation-state. Far from it (see Brown 2006). This abstraction, however, can never be fully removed from the socio-economic processes to which it implicitly must refer. In this sense, then, this transformation of the subject from an explicitly white nationalist one to an economic abstraction cannot be fully understood without also reflecting upon the texture of apartheid. Whatever reforms the post-apartheid government sought to pursue, however such reforms were conceived and however weak they may be, they still reflect back upon the socio-material world that exists; it is the texture of space within which we dwell even as we seek a transformation.

While it may seem obtuse to momentarily venture into urban planning, bear with me as Lefebvre’s critical thoughts on his field are far more enlightening of the nature of what I am getting at than any discussion of neoliberalism heretofore. His thoughts on the state of urban planning—originally from a talk given to graduate students in the 1970s—are easily transposed to economics, political science and, yes, International Relations. Lefebvre (2009) spoke derisively of the then emerging trend of a ‘scientific’ study of urban planning (not at all unlike the contemporaneous behavioural turn in the social sciences). Planning is concerned above all with space. But the attempts to create an objective study of space and thus an objective way to properly assess and design urban planning meant that space itself became removed from lived practice into an abstract thing. This placed the planner as an intermediary between the politicians and their visions on one side and the people on the other. The planner looked upward to ideas, into the abstract, and only then down to the social, whose primary problem was being made to ‘fit’ into the abstract remaking of the world; people were meant to fit and the struggles to make them fit were secondary to the purity of the abstract. By contrast, Lefebvre wondered what such planning might look like if the content (i.e. the people) were prioritised over the form (i.e. space). The reverse had long been true. The reality of this is manifest to any pedestrian walking the famed modernist—and eminently planned—cities of Brasilia and Chandigarh. These are not cities of life. They are the abstract made manifest. The problem for Lefebvre is that when the content, the people are not prioritised something is necessarily lost when they are forced into such abstractions (ibid., 169). Is this not in essence the problem good governance and a notion of citizenship that abstracts the human into pure economic form as a particular subject?

Homo economicus is a pure abstract. It exists solely within the abstraction of the market. And no one thinks it is real. And yet it informs policy. It lies at the centre of the far more wide ranging policies promulgated internationally within the concept of good governance. Such abstractions inform policy, and thus the making and remaking of the state in much the same way as Lefebvre lamented. Good governance touches upon a range of institutions and processes from local governance and service delivery to judicial autonomy. The allocation of resources, the formulation of tax policy, the policies of housing and water and so forth are derived from an abstract modelling of an agent of needs and interests resting at the nexus of various markets. But as they are framed in such terms, whether by design or by default, they define a citizen—and thus citizenship—as a cluster of needs to be met via the market or by increasing one’s ability to function within it not as a people in a community. It is not the bottom up of the content seeking a relevant policy. It is a top down of the abstract forcing the content into its mould.

Before moving on let us return to some basics, some outline of the premises at work here in what I mean by the state and how it thusly informs the present analysis. The state, it has been argued, is an ongoing socio-material spatial practice. But it is also a conscious social project for some end; this idea and ideal of the state hovers above any government. We see this as a problematic conflation of the state and government only by ignoring that in every utterance the government is spoken of as the government of some people, some place, some state. It has a purpose. At times this purpose has been linked to a definite notion of the people, a nation. It is a state of belonging with a clear notion of who belongs. In all of its history South Africa has been an explicitly racial state or one, at a minimum, whose social production rested upon race, from colonialism through apartheid. From the ‘poor whites’ problem of the postbellum turn of the century politics to apartheid’s explicit creation of a white welfare state, the question of who belongs—and thus for what purpose the state exists—has been inseparable from race. The post-apartheid ‘rainbow nation’ and the equally problematic (and as we shall see, mostly impotent) idea of a citizenship grounded in ubuntu has merely removed the question of race from the purpose of the state. But it has not removed it from its legacy in the spatial organisation of the state.

Socialising the State

The state remains a key concept to both the field of International Relations and interstate relations themselves. Yet beyond critiquing our assumed holism apropos of the state (see Wendt 1999), it’s unclear what theorising we have done that would provide us a glimpse into the dynamics of the state in an international system of states. In an increasingly, if unevenly, interconnected (perhaps globalizing?) world that question takes on both empirical and normative theoretical importance. Constructivist scholars have quite ably demonstrated that the international system can be easily understood socially, that states can b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: There Is No Alternative—Globalization and Post-Apartheid South Africa
• No Island Unto Itself: Spatial Performativity and Production of the State
• The Meaning of Belonging: Race and the Making of South Africa
• The Politics of Discontent and the Early State: On the Origins and Death of Apartheid
• A State in Transition: The Negotiated Birth of the Post-Apartheid State
• On the State of Belonging: What a Theory of Space Tells Us About Neoliberalism and Apartheid in Contemporary South Africa
• Back Matter