Ivor Chipkin: “The commitment to certain democratic values holds South African people all together”

The African National Congress (ANC) was unbanned in 1990 when I was nineteen, nearly twenty, years old. I come from a politically-mind family on the left. So we are very invested in this kind of republican public projects. Some of us came on ages to represent the United Democratic Front: the huge anti party movement that operated internally in South Africa and which actually was illegal, some parts were illegal. I worked for the trade unions. Then a new kind of organizations emerged in the 1980s in South-Africa, in opposition to the apartheid state, we call them civil organisations. And what they were? They were quite particular and fascinating organizations. They were community-based organizations, they organised protests around lack of electricity, lack of water, high prices, terrible environment, townships, lack of toll roads, all these things, and link those very local issues to high issues around the apartheid. I was involved for ages in that movement; it was an unbelievable movement. My theoretical interests came out of those questions.

 

 

You put your finger on exactly one of the key issues for me. And that was partly what I was talking about when I gave my lecture at the University of Barcelona in December. South Africa is a very interesting place to look up, it raises discussion. The argument really is that people only emerge in and through the process of struggling for, in this case, democracy. In the case of South Africa, it is not South African people prior to the anti-apartheid struggle. It is not the nation what is being established, that is the argument. The nation emerges in and through the process.

The South African nation has never existed, and in the apartheid methodology it could never existed. The African National Congress said people in South Africa had different races, different languages, different cultures, different religions, and they could not constitute a single nation, a South African nation. It was about producing a nation with the new group of people, by bringing together Indian people, coloured people, but people from different language groups, in a single unity that would constitute the South African nation. And even the whites who share the values of the democratic project could be part of the nation too. People do not exist prior to the struggle to become a nation.

 

 

My sense is that this is how all nations are. So, what I find interesting about the Catalan case is that certain kind of Catalan national politics reminds me of South Africa. Catalan people have had their own language and territory for hundreds of years and they demand for independence from Spain which has been historically ʻthe presidentʼ. So it is a nation, own language, culture and territory. But there is another exciting tradition that reminds me of home. Catalan people are rather representatives of a particular democratic tradition within Europe or within Spain, a republican tradition. In this case, the claim of the Catalan cause is not a national claim of people with a language, a culture and a territory who want independence; rather Catalans are those people who represent a republican democratic condition, against monarchy, against fascism. The people, the Catalans, emerged only through the claims, republican claims, democratic claims. In that sense, like the Catalan tradition, people in South Africa are democracy people.

What is interesting about the republican definition in South Africa or Catalonia is that it means that anybody can quick be South African or Catalan provided that they share or are committed to some basic democratic values. South African people are not a nation in any sense: we do not have a common language, we have many official languages; we do not have a common culture, there is not any common culture; we do not have a common religion, we have lots of religions. The South African Constitution does not tell you who you are or you are not, what we are supposed to have in common is the commitment to certain constitutional democratic values and this is what specially holds us all together.

 

 

I think that cosmopolitanism is something to aspire towards. Every place is already cosmopolitan in the sense that it already includes people from all different origins. The big question I have —and this is the hard work I am doing now— is to think about under what conditions people who are different can live together in a democratic political community. Because it seems that much of the literature supposes certain basic kinds of social trust. In order to make common decisions, we need somehow to know each other. If there is no trust or we do not know each other, we do not share a common language, we do not speak each other, read the same newspapers or share the same ideas, how is it possible to develop the solidarity needed to run a political community, to run a state? We say that the territory is cosmopolitan, it compiles different people, and that is good. But, actually, how do we constitute a political community? That I think is the challenge of our time, in Europe, in South Africa, etc.

To work on this idea, I am trying to move away from this philosophical tendency that sustains that what is required in order to have social trust or unity is an identity. We need to find an identity that is essentially inclusive to the whole but it should also be opened to the differences of language, culture, religion, etc. I am increasingly moving away from that approach. I am increasingly doing work on state, on institutions, as actually we do not need an identity to hold everyone together. So the work I am doing is on bureaucracy and the effects of organizations.

 

 

Our society is structured on the basis of colonialism. But it is a different form of colonialism as white South Africans, colonial populations, and black South Africans, we all live in the same territory. In other words, settler populations have not gone back to where they come from, it is not like when the colonial empire was ended in other parts of Africa, or in South America, or wherever, that the colonial power went home; most white South Africans have remained. The challenge in South Africa is double. It is very interesting, I think. The challenge is to overcome the legacy of apartheid, terrible inequality, and produce a structure which builds a common community on the basis to overcome that tremendous tradition. That means to find some basis of commonality.

So, it is a very exciting map, a scaring map. Most state institutions were designed to serve a small white minority, like bus services or school services. Public health, for example, was designed for a small white minority and suddenly it serves to everybody. Access to education is now universal, but schools are performing terribly. Health services have now universal access, but public health services are struggling.

We are about to have an election this year and it could be a very interesting election. ANCʼs majority could come down quite dramatically; it is used to get in the upper sixties, two thirds, or below, sixty five per cent of votes; but there is a chance to come down below sixties. Not huge by general standards (fifty-eight per cent maybe), but in South Africa symbolically that is a big change.