Armed Struggle in South Africa: Consequences of a Strategy Debate
It would be possible to draw a line from the founding leaflet of Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK), issued on December 16, 1961 (and from the 1962 South African Communist Party [SACP] programme, The Road to South African Freedom) to the Harare Declaration of 1989 – and to the eventual outcome and claim that the strategy of the African National Congress (ANC) was always for a negotiated settlement to achieve democracy in South Africa (Umkhonto we Sizwe 1961, 1989a, 1989b). That indeed is the idea which Allister Sparks attributes to NelsonMandela: “I startedUmkhontoWe Sizwe ... but I never had any illusions that we could win a military victory; its purpose was to focus attention on the resistancemovement” (1994:26). However, that standpoint is contradicted by the decisions of the ANC conference at Morogoro (April 25–May 1, 1969) and by countless other ANC documents which insist that the goal was the armed seizure of power by the masses.
Dans Le Parti, Dans Le Quartier : Les Branches Locales De L'African National Congress (Anc)
This article deals with the African National Congress (ANC)’ s local structures. It focuses on the ANC local branches : their role for the party, their local activity. It relies mainly on the mass party model and on empirical analysis and is a contribution to the organizational analysis of African political parties, a field largely neglected.
Analysis: The Agenda 2007 Proposals: Evolution or Revolution?
On 10 February 2004 the Commission published its proposal for the financial perspective 2007-2013. A week later it adopted the third report on economic and social cohesion. These two documents form the basis of the so-called ‘Agenda 2007 reforms’. They will be the greatest challenge for the enlarged EU after the intergovernmental conference, since they will determine the financial basis for EU policy-making until the middle of the next decade. The Agenda 2007 proposals certainly hint at courageous reforms, because they place a previously unheard-of emphasis on performance and quality. Under the proposals, structural operations should generate value for money, and the funds should focus on projects which generate added value at a European level. Overall the Commission’s proposals point in the right direction, because they balance, on the one hand, solidarity for the new Member States and weak regions in the old Member States with, on the other hand, investments in future tasks. Moreover, they constitute a paradigm shift. For the first time, the Common Agricultural Policy will not be the dominant expenditure category. Now it is up to the Member States to examine the proposals politically and find a compromise between sometimes very divergent interests. It is to be hoped that, during the debate over expenditure limits and division of funds, national interests do not outweigh European interests.