Preventing the Vacuum: Determinants of the Namibia Settlement
This paper examines the political, military and economic factors behind the diplomatic agreements which led to the withdrawal of South Africa's colonial occupation of Namibia in 1989–90, and it identifies some of the major constraints which Pretoria placed upon the independence of the new Namibian state. The view that the South African government withdrew from Namibia — but not Walvis Bay — because of military defeats in Angola during 1988 is rejected. It is argued that explanations for the settlement given by US diplomats, Chester Crocker and Charles Freeman, do not take into account key variables such as the underlying economic imperatives, South Africa's state and party building strategy in Namibia, and the political actions of the Namibian people themselves. Such determinants have also been ignored or obscured by most of the radical literature on South Africa's destabilisation of the sub‐region. It is argued here that Pretoria's attempts to consolidate stable conditions for a semi‐colonial state on it...
Southern Africa: Eight Years Later
time that this phrase was self-evidently consistent with main stream U.S. internationalism and essential to the very meaning of activist diplomacy. I recognized that there was a major risk in suggesting that the United States was prepared to deal seriously and substan tively with a distant foreign policy minefield with which Amer icans were overwhelmingly unfamiliar. The risk, in other words, seemed to lie in its very ambition, its commitment to a realistic and sustained pursuit of U.S. goals in the region as a whole (the concept was not proposed as the basis of policy toward South Africa alone). If we were to undertake such a commitment, I argued, we would need to base our actions on a solid grasp of the region's dynamics and to have the ability to interpret its actors and their motives. We would require an adequate internal consensus to prevent Americans and South Africans from exploiting each other's internal debates and conflicts. Finally, we would need to recognize the sharp limits on U.S. influence and to focus carefully on the likely consequences of possible U.S. actions. In describing the possibilities for constructive Western states manship, the 1980 article painted a sober picture of a deeply troubled region. Regarding South Africa, it underscored the ambiguity of political trends within Afrikanerdom. It was far
Work, Status, and Income: Men in the American Occupational Structure since the Late Nineteenth Century
The historical record rarely presents researchers with precisely the evidence they desire. This is particularly true for social historians and like-minded scholars, whose subjects left precious few signs of their passing. Consequently, certain data have borne a disproportionate evidentiary load in social-historical research. The occupation a person pursued is one key piece of information on which scholars have come to depend. Our understanding of the historical social structure and where people fit into it is bound up with the interpretation of occupations. But this reliance on occupation as the primary social locator in historical research depends on some largely unexamined premises. Whether scholars group occupations or convert them into numerical status measures, they make assumptions about the nature of the occupational structure. When researchers incorporate change over time into their analyses, they suggest that the meaning of occupations remained stable for the purpose of measuring social mobility, class position, or group status-attainment. This assumption has been the subject of little discussion and even less research. For all the use to which historians have put occupation, there has been little effort to assess systematically its stability as a social or economic indicator.