It’s twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the world’s nations have yet to establish a new equilibrium. Two recently-published SA authors team up to pinpoint South Africa’s place in the ongoing political and demographic evolution. “This is the age in which the facts of borders and visa applications matter much to the rich but very little to the poor,” they write. Highly recommended:
So, this conclusion is undeniable: the facts that make for the social world, as the sociologists insist, are stubborn. This explains why, in recent years, much attention has been given to the mechanical idea of “statemaking”.
Most visibly this has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan where respective invasions have struggled to create the conditions necessary for viable states. This is a return to the 19th-century idea that states could be hacked out of often adverse social conditions if the necessary force were brought to bear on the social world.
In other places the idea of states as a means to social organisation — let alone social discipline — has simply disappeared. It is not difficult to understand why Somalia is said to be a “failed state”.
And when New Orleans almost drowned three years ago that little corner of the United States looked decidedly like a “failed state”. What this confirms is that all social formations are “working models” — to use a recent phase from the Indian writer, Arundhati Roy.
In South Africa these have revealed a particular pathology. It was apartheid’s infatuation with modernity and its long support by Western capital that stunted any hope that the nationalism on offer in Afrikaner-ruled South Africa could be anything but partial.
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Re-imagining the Social in South Africa: Critique, Theory and Post-aparheid Society
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