Apartheid and Anti-Apartheid in Western Europe

Knud Andresen, Sebastian Justke, Detlef Siegfried, Knud Andresen, Sebastian Justke, Detlef Siegfried, Knud Andresen, Sebastian Justke, Detlef Siegfried

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030532840
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This edited collection examines how Western European countries have responded and been influenced by the apartheid system in South Africa. The debate surrounding apartheid in South Africa underwent a shift in the second half of the 20 th century, with long held positive, racist European opinions of white South Africans slowly declining since decolonisation in the 1960s, and the increase in the importance of human rights in international politics. While previous studies have approached this question in the context of national histories, more or less detached from each other, this edited collection offers a broader insight into the transnational and entangled histories of Western European and South African societies. The contributors use exemplary case studies to trace the change of perception, covering a plurality of reactions in different societies and spheres: from the political and social, to the economic and cultural. At the same time, the collection emphasizes the interconnections of those reactions to what has been called the last 'overtly racist regime' (George Frederickson) of the twentieth century.

Part IMoral and Economy

© The Author(s) 2021

K. Andresen et al. (eds.)Apartheid and Anti-Apartheid in Western EuropeCambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53284-0_2

Begin Abstract

Between Goodwill and Sanctions: Swedish and German Corporations in South Africa and the Politics of Codes of Conduct

Knud Andresen¹

(1)

University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

Knud Andresen

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In June 1986, top representatives of West German business met in Bonn to discuss their concerns regarding the situation in South Africa as new sanctions by the European Community were about to complicate trade there. They agreed that companies should be more political and press for reforms in South Africa, and their proposals included projects to promote training and social benefits for black workers and cooperation with desegregated trade unions. Siegfried Mann, Managing Director of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), even proposed making contact with the African National Congress (ANC),¹ which met with scepticism but was not rejected in principle. One result of the meeting was a letter from West German business associations to Prime Minister Botha calling for decisive steps towards ending apartheid.²

This episode illustrates how the attitudes of multinational companies to apartheid changed in the mid-1980s from a lack of interest in its disenfranchisement of the South African majority in the 1950s and 1960s to demanding its end. Companies that had trade relations with or production facilities in South Africa were important determinants of Western countries’ perceptions of apartheid and participants in their debates over it. Anti-apartheid movements saw such companies headquartered in their countries as their main domestic opponents and had conducted campaigns for disinvestment from and trade sanctions against them since the early 1970s. For they saw them as driven by greed to collaborate with the apartheid regime in order to reap profits from its institutionalized racism.³ Especially in export-oriented economies, such as the Federal Republic of Germany and Sweden, politicians saw these companies as important players in their economies, whose profits should not be jeopardized by government intervention. Also, Europe’s strategy of ‘critical dialogue’ (and the US ‘constructive engagement’), according to which companies should exert their influence positively to help end apartheid, relied on those companies’ links to South Africa.⁴

How did companies position themselves in these conflicts, how did they understand their role in South Africa and how did they react to the political pressure that the apartheid debates in their own countries generated? These questions raise a multitude of further questions, as companies interacted with a multitude of factors, including the foreign policies of their own countries, domestic political developments in South Africa and the tension between economics and morality. In a nutshell, there are two relevant questions. Did companies see themselves as a political force in South Africa at all? If they did, did they see themselves as collaborating with apartheid or, rather, as progressive, forward-looking companies, working for peaceful change in South Africa?

Multinational Corporations in Sweden, West Germany and South Africa

The answers are more complex than a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Foreign capital and technology were vital to the apartheid regime. Beginning in the 1950s, it had sought to industrialize the country by attracting foreign firms and capital, and its success led to the economic boom of the 1960s.⁵ It was multinational companies, in addition to a few small and medium-sized enterprises, that had the interest and ability to establish subsidiaries in South Africa. The country was attractive to them because of its wealth of raw materials and the relative prosperity of the privileged white population. In particular, producers of consumer goods and metalworking companies, especially automobile companies, often set up subsidiaries in South Africa in the 1960s. Executives who were seconded to, or already lived in, South Africa joined the white ruling class and had little interest in the situation of the disenfranchised majority. Many were in favour of apartheid, sometimes because of their own racism.⁶ Because their primary interest was political stability, companies largely ignored the oppression of the majority before the 1970s. However, their South African subsidiaries were also players in South Africa, where it was widely believed in business circles that racist oppression would disappear as prosperity increased.⁷ In the early 1970s, South African business associations, especially those in industries that depended on skilled labour, began to criticize the apartheid system and demand reforms.⁸ By the second half of the 1980s, most were calling for its abolition.

According to the business ethicist John M. Kline, these multinational subsidiaries had a ‘dual character’. They were organized in accord with South African law, but they were also representatives of international companies.⁹ The South Africanization of management in the 1960s reinforced their dual character. Foreign managers were made responsible mainly for technical production, personnel and finance, and South Africans often became the managing directors and other executives.¹⁰ In general, then, multinational subsidiaries were transnational contact and exchange zones. Their management groups became more international in the 1980s.¹¹

Compared with South African companies, foreign subsidiaries were under double pressure: the pressure of South African politics, which the former also faced, and that from the increasing international condemnation of economic relations with South Africa. Their main argument against adopting a political agenda was the principle of political non-interference, according to which a foreign company must respect a country’s laws and not interfere in its politics. Following that principle, companies refused for a long time to condemn apartheid publicly. However, Kline pointed out a contradiction that had become evident in the human rights campaigns of the early 1970s. Activists considered US-American corporations’ support for the conservatives during Chile’s coup in 1973 unacceptable interference, but they called upon Gulf Oil, for example, which did business in Angola, to overthrow Portugal’s colonial regime there. As Kline put it:

The principle of political non-interference forged in the Chilean experience clashed with calls for corporations to advance particular political goals. In other words, the standard for the ‘rightness’ of MNE [Multinational Enterprises] conduct was shifting from a process-based rule against political interference to a case-dependent evaluation of whether projected outcomes might justify such involvement.¹²

This shift was the result of an upsurge in human rights campaigns in Western countries and their influence on those countries’ foreign policies. The transnational campaign against South Africa was the most prominent example of a human rights campaign that sought regime change.¹³ It led governments to intervene in the activities of companies doing business there and, so, to alter somewhat the traditional relation between government and business. Such intervention occurred in both Sweden and West Germany, where companies with South African sub...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• Part I. Moral and Economy
• Part II. Apartheid in Culture and Media
• Part III. Transnational Entanglements in Politics and Churches
• Back Matter