Every student of international relations has thought about the question of why world communism fell apart when it did. Fewer have considered the sudden and dramatic collapse of another totalitarian bulwark which many deemed equally impregnable before 1989: the South African apartheid state. In his fine overview of recent developments and future scenarios ("The Next South Africa," Summer 1991), Francis Fukuyama offers many insights into the causes of this other democratic revolution, and helps explicate its relationship to events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that overshadowed it.
Fukuyama finds the most basic source of South Africa's transformation in the country's phased economic development. To summarize briefly, when the National Party came to power after the Second World War, it represented a constituency of Afrikaners who were themselves resentful, second-class citizens of a former colony. "They were poorly educated and many were not even literate: fully one-fifth of the Afrikaner population in 1949 could be classified as `poor whites'," Fukuyama writes. Such a people were necessarily isolated from the commercial and intellectual influences of the modern world. But the Pretoria regime's battle against the pressures of modernity was a losing one, thanks to urbanization and the rising material condition of the Afrikaners.
