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The sanctions and external pressure was a big influence on South Africa. There's no rule that says you have to have elections, or that you need to put everyone's names on the ballot. China certainly doesn't! Even in liberal democracies there are all kinds of ways to suppress undesirable parties - the campaign against the AFD for instance.
If the Anglosphere stood behind white South Africa rather than against it, it'd still be here today.
The Anglosphere standing behind white South Africa here means something like ‘American troops keeping the Afrikaner minority government in power’. Apartheid might have lasted another few years without international pressure, but it fell mostly because pro-apartheid forces were losing a war(and their opponents were not backed by the Anglosphere) and de Klerk chose to negotiate rather than take his chances.
Yes, in hindsight it was foreseeable that the black majority can’t govern a functional country for themselves. But 8% of the population can’t rule over a majority actively waging war against them indefinitely. Some solution needed to be come to to replace apartheid.
What war were they losing? The South Africans had Mandela in prison, it was De Klerk who gave up before giving war a try (due to the arms embargo amongst other things). The Anglosphere absolutely were against white South Africa (logically they supported the rebels), they sabotaged white South Africa until they gave up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Anti-Apartheid_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during_apartheid
It never came to a war, the South African govt never even tried serious repression because of Western pressure.
Meanwhile, when Israel uses repression the US showers them with military aid. Have as many bombs and shells as you need! Lo and behold, Jewish Israel is still around, having forcibly expelled a good number of undesirables.
American sanctions didn’t have much impact on the Safrican economy, most of their econ indicators get slightly better after 86 even. This is likely in large part due to Reagan being opposed to them (they were passed over his veto) and slow walking their enforcement. The Treasury said they had lists of Safrican SOEs but not lists of which goods originated from them, so they were pretty limited in application. There was I believe a GAO report saying basically “sanctions didn’t hit most companies, those it did hit just rerouted trade through third party intermediaries in neutral countries”
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The South African government was increasingly unable to control its own territory while adventurism in the near abroad was going much worse than it had been(not that it had ever been going particularly well). The ANC was an insurgent group that was actually literally fighting the apartheid government with weapons and the fighting was going more and more poorly for the government as time went on. The white population found itself unable to bring more into the coalition- the cape coloreds wanted racial equality- the way alawites could count on support from Syria’s Christians and other minorities and chose to negotiate as an alternative to losing the war, which would result in either an attempted great leap forwards or a massacre of the white population.
Apartheid was not long term sustainable without mass deaths among the black population, or importing several million additional whites. Neither of those were in the cards; Israel treats the Palestinians pretty badly, but not as badly as South Africa would have had to treat the Bantus to maintain apartheid. Being a majority of the population instead of a single digit percentage has its advantages.
If Afrikaners had managed to boost their birth rate in the 60’s and 70’s perhaps they would have been able to maintain apartheid. They couldn’t, because that’s a really hard problem to solve, so demographic reasons meant their system was going to unravel.
The Portuguese gave up after a military coup toppled the govt, they didn't lose on the battlefield. They were winning the war on the battlefield. Rhodesia was strangled by sanctions, as was South Africa. Without sanctions and with assistance, they could easily have survived. When Israel gets into spats with Lebanon or bomb their neighbours they enjoy the unconditional assistance of the US, who'll happily lend munitions and vehicles. South Africa was paying their own way: they had an arms embargo and had to design their own jet fighters to counter the Soviets. The cost of having to prepare for proxy wars against a superpower is too much for a small country by itself.
The South Africans could easily have copied Israel's notes and just expelled anyone they didn't like the look of to maintain their demography. Demography is mutable. It's only appearances that stopped them, they weren't fully committed to the settler-garrison state way of life and they knew the West would suppress them if they did.
Israel got away with the nakba in the 40s, and South Africa realized it had the choice of nakba or majority rule in the 80s. Yes, alawites rule Syria without being a much bigger minority, but they’re seen as preferable to the Sunni majority by most people who are neither, and also have Russian troops keeping them in power. Without an influx of several million more whites apartheid couldn’t stay.
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Israel is vastly more Jewish (even counting neighboring Palestinians) than South Africa was white. And I’m not sure your analysis of what happened in Portugal is entirely correct, Angola had a very small white population, many other Portuguese colonies had already been lost (eg in India) and the people in the metropole were tired of their tax money being spent and young men being sent off to die in the colonies. In addition, the regime limped along after Salazar’s death and his replacements were widely disliked within the military.
Hydro is correct that the primary reason apartheid was unsustainable is that the Afrikaners were utterly unable to offer anything much to the rest of the non-Bantu population. Not to the indigenous Khoisan, not to the Indians and Cape Colored (who were also officially lesser under apartheid), and not even to the Anglos and Jews, who dominated business but who were systematically discriminated against in government and had to deal with corruption and kickbacks to the Afrikaners (not to mention spurious lawsuits, fines and other harassment) who ran the National Party, all of which built up a huge amount of resentment.
So - unlike the Alawites in Syria - it was unclear to non-Afrikaners in South Africa that they were going to ‘get massacred’ if popular democracy was implemented. Remember also that this was in the early 90s, a decade before Mugabe started seizing white land, and when whites in Botswana, Namibia and so on appeared to be doing fine under black-majority rule.
None of this is to dispute the fact that, yes, a sufficiently motivated bloc of 4 million Afrikaners probably could have held South Africa indefinitely (even under sanctions, given the nation’s bountiful natural resources and the fact that the Israelis and others would have continued buying from them). But there was little popular desire for that, in part because the pressure valve of emigration back to the West was open.
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Presumably, Apartheid could have been maintained if South Africa's white leaders chose to become a North Korea-style shithole. At least for a time, it was a good thing that they chose another path, it's simply a shame that those under the ANC's flag were so corrupt that SA is probably going to become a NK-tier basketcase anyways.
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The ‘plan’ was to concentrate the black population in bantustans which then seceded to become fully independent, leaving South Africa proper a white-majority country. This plan looked just a bit better during decolonization when South Africa got a wave of white migrants every few years due to things like the Portuguese withdrawal from Angola. To be completely fair to the planners, this was essentially a temporary plan that only got adopted when it became clear that the fertility differential couldn’t be fixed(South Africa was 22% white on independence, a perfectly reasonable number for a ruling minority, even a disliked one), and de Klerk opened negotiations with the ANC not long after it became clear that it was completely unworkable and there wasn’t a solution that left white supremacy intact.
The hardline white supremacist faction could commit genocide, like an actual real one, or they could admit they lost. They chose the latter.
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In Syria, 2-3 million Alawites control a country of about 23 million. They dominate the country, putting down Sunni/Islamist revolts from the majority in Hama and elsewhere. It isn't so starkly obvious as apartheid but when all is said and done, the Alawites are in control. There's always an Alawite subordinate to any non-Alawite in the officer corps and they are in charge of the security forces. Their minority status unites them - they know that if they give up power, the Islamists will massacre them. And they have a powerful foreign backer in Russia. If Russia had turned away and demanded that they allow competitive elections and give up control over the country, they would've collapsed. There'd be no flow of arms, no backer in the UN, they'd be isolated.
In South Africa, whites would've had the advantage of superior HBD whereas Alawites are roughly on par with everyone else. In Rhodesia they fought for 15 years despite crushing sanctions on oil, weapons and huge numerical mismatch. If there had been a full-scale race war between white South Africa (with moderate Western support) and black South Africa (with moderate Soviet support) then I'd bet on the whites every time. They'd have the vast majority of military hardware and the skills to use it effectively. There's a reason white empires conquered the vast majority of the world in the first place.
The British mauled insurgents in Malaya, they put down the Mau Maus. South Africa would be easier than either of those campaigns since there'd be a good number of trustworthy locals to help an expeditionary force from overseas.
Well, being starkly obvious was a big part of the problem. Apartheid was dead the moment Jim Crow ended; America was the Western hegemon, American policy was eventually going to implemented everywhere. They could have held on, but there was a lot of malaise in the country. The British were reticent, even under Thatcher; Anglo South Africans had always opposed the ANC and were generally skeptical of apartheid, and so increasingly were even many young Afrikaners.
What the white South Africans should have done is retreated en masse to the Southern Cape where they could have declared independence and, with some gerrymandering, established a state with a white majority (certainly a white and cape colored majority). But they didn’t, perhaps because unlike the Alawaites they didn’t actually expect to be massacred when apartheid ended (and indeed, thirty years later, most of them haven’t been).
In Syria maintaining Alawite rule came at an extraordinarily high cost; something like half of young Alawi men died in the war (some estimates are even higher); Sunni businessmen are increasingly close to Assad and other inner circle leaders. The final chapter of that story is not yet written.
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