policy making

The process related to public policy making touches the core function of democratic politics, namely the elaboration and discussion of solutions to societal problems. This article provides an overview of the different stages of policy making. In doing so, we seek to offer a theoretical entrée to the analysis of policy making as well as to highlight the determinants of ‘real’ policy choices. To this end, we combine the illustration of the policy cycle framework with an analysis of some country-specific factors. Further, we discuss the effects of international factors on the design of domestic policies and present empirical findings for the relative importance of both national and international factors.

between its professed support for African liberation and self-determination and its actual substantial assistance to corrupt and repressive regimes. In the same vein, the lack of special focus on U.S. economic interests as a motivating factor of foreign policy in Africa, particularly as regards South Africa, tends to diminish the significance of this volume.
MA TO, the Warsaw Pact and Africa not only offers a ' study of NATO's involvement in Africa from the date of its inception', but also attempts to 'lay to rest some of the more doubtful claims of NATO collusion with South Africa', as well as to 'highlight what many African states have identified as a quite different challenge from the Warsaw pact' (p. xi).
Christopher Coker first of all identifies the basic events and processes that have shaped western strategic thinking and planning in Africa since 1949, and traces N.A.T.O.'s concerns to the perception in the West that Soviet expansionism must be opposed. He discusses the differences in approach and policy among the western powers, as well as the problems engendered by decolonisation in Africa which have rendered their strategic planning and activities ever more elusive and uncertain. In addition, Coker examines the Warsaw Pact involvement in Africa since 1959, and focuses on attempts to gain and maintain a foothold in Southern Africa. He discusses the economic importance of Africa to Eastern Europe, as well as the problems and uncertainties faced in trying to maintain stable client-states which could facilitate long-term trade arrangements for the export of raw materials to the member-states of the Warsaw Pact. Finally, the author examines the activities of the Western Alliance and the Soviet challenge to its influence in postindependence Africa.
This book is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on western and eastern foreign policies in Africa, and should prove useful to all those who are interested in a critical understanding of the roots and current status of East-West competition in the continent. Particularly important is Coker's critical analysis of the mechanisms employed by the Soviet Union and its allies to maintain an uninterrupted flow of raw materials from client-states in Africa. One major shortcoming, however, appears to be the author's inability to use the wealth of data and analysis to examine the long-term implications of such competing foreign policies. Those who read this serious study may wonder if Africa will forever remain a victim in the East-West struggle for strategic dominance and economic exploitation. There is nothing like a bit of gossip to enliven the dreariness of an academic text and to convince us of the 'inside' knowledge which an author commands of his subject. It is with some enjoyment, then, that we read in the work under review that one of Eric Louw's cabinet colleagues greatly esteemed South Africa's first (1955-64) Foreign Minister's political and diplomatic capacities, but none the less deemed him a 'little shit ' (pp. 257-8, fn. 232). Today, apparently, P. W. Botha (alias' Pangaman' or' The Bald Eagle') is sufficiently aware of his short temper to appreciate that by surrounding himself as State President with a system of' government by committee and the heavy reliance on expert inputs' (p. 95), he may prevent himself from taking rash decisions in moments of ill-humour. More concretely, B. J. Vorster informed the author that at the Victoria Falls meeting in 1975 he convinced Kenneth Kaunda of the merits of re-opening Zambia's railway line to the south via Rhodesia, only to have the latter pull back from a decision (which he took three years later) because of the objections of Julius Nyerere.
In these days of political-economy analysis, this sort of personalised stuff usually gets extremely short shrift, precisely because of the need for explanation to go beyond situational trivia. None the less, there is no doubt that journalistic insights, memoirs, interviews, reminiscences, and so on, can help us to grease the wheels of what can otherwise often become analysis by rote -i.e. identify your mode of production and proceed from there.
Fortunately or unfortunately, Deon Geldenhuys, an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Rand Afrikaans University, gives the impression of never having heard of a mode of production in his life, or if he has, he gives it no significance. Instead, he is firmly rooted in the structural-functional cum political-systems theory mould of so many Afrikaans political scientists (a development, incidentally, which one day requires analysis as an attempt to make the politically unsufferable look respectable and 'scientific'). But again, fortunately, in this study the author has had to remain something of a frustrated behaviouralist, for constantly informing us that he was unable to acquire desirably solid, factual, empirical data to go on, he has had to rely inter alia upon ' numerous personal interviews with serving and former cabinet members and senior government officials closely involved with foreign policy making' (p. 71). The result is most certainly an overlong and sometimes tedious account, yet one which is none the less a valuable and informative analysis of decision-making in Pretoria for which, doubtless, the author has earned little praise from the political establishment precisely because of his rather frank comments about the capacities and personalities of several key individuals. This is not, in fact, a book many people will read all the way through. Rather, it will be dug into to ferret out bits and pieces to fill out a broader picture elsewhere. Yet having said that, The Diplomacy of Isolation: South African foreign policy making does provide us with a chronological and broad view of the policy-making process (as distinct from the Republic's foreign policy) as it has emerged over time. In brief, after sketching the evolution of the process from the formation of the Union until 1948 (during which time, external relations, such as they were, were more or less monopolised by the Prime Minister's Office, notably under Jan Smuts), it proceeds to an examination of the early post-war period until 1966, which saw South Africa slip from a respected member of a rather clubby, metropolitan-dominated 'international community' to becoming an isolated pariah. Thereupon, having explained that an increasingly complex world required the establishment of a separate Foreign Affairs bureaucracy under its own Minister (1955) and an expansion of diplomatic personnel, Geldenhuys has set the scene for a detailed analysis of foreign-policy making under Vorster and P. W. Botha.
Geldenhuys's rather disarming thesis is that the further a bureaucratic entity, political grouping, or individual is away from the foreign policy-making centre, the less input into decision-making it has. Hence, we are informed, the views of the liberation movements are not solicited by South African policy formulators (!), but that they do help shape the environment in which foreign policy operates (p. 180). More helpfully, in a fairly exhaustive survey, the author examines the 'inputs' of the different white political parties, the business community, trade unions, agriculture, churches, the media, the Broederbond, the universities, and so on. In so doing we discover, not to our surprise, that the Progressive Federal Party has rather less influence than the National Party, that the English-speaking press is rather more critical than the Afrikaans-dominated and government-controlled media, and that white public opinion counts for rather more than black.
In other words, much that is obvious is detailed with painstaking devotion. But what really is useful is the considerable space devoted to first, the implications of P. W. Botha's reorganisation of the government bureaucracy for foreign policy-making, with particular reference to the role of the State Security Council; second, the case-studies of South African engagement in the Angolan war in 1975-6, and the various secret ventures of the Information Department under Eschel Rhoodie and Connie Mulder; and third, the explanation of the 'structures' and 'functions' of the re-organised Foreign Affairs Department under P. W. Botha.
Within the confines of this framework, the most important feature of the discussion is the focus upon the respective roles of the Defence Force and Foreign Affairs as foreign-policy makers. In brief, what emerges is that after having been outpaced by the 'dirty tricks' brigade in Information during the 1970s and excluded from any participation in such vital decisions as the one to go into Angola in 1975, Foreign Affairs has become more prepared to engage in the aggressive promotion of South Africa's external and regional interests than previously (when cautious career diplomats sought rather to limit any prospect of external controversy).
Meanwhile, the Defence Force -which is much less concerned with the diplomatic repercussions of any external operation than Foreign Affairs -was able during the 1970s to push the latter aside in key areas (notably Angola) under Vorster's rather 'unstructured decision-making' (p. 82), only to be brought rather more to heel following the appointment of R. F. (Pik) Botha as Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1977, and P. W. Botha's elevation to the premiership in 1978, not least because for all its weight, the military's political objectives are rather unclear. In brief, given that key decisions are now made within the confines of the State Security Council (the principal Cabinet Committee whose decisions the full Cabinet only ratifies), the military's influence is rather more likely to be countered by Foreign Affairs, which is regarded (for the time being at least) as ' at least first among equals on foreign policy issues ' (p. 139). In this context, Geldenhuys asserts that P. W. Botha, although Defence Minister for some 12 years prior to becoming Premier, has very successfully freed himself from the military's embrace and 'acts as a more or less impartial chairman of the SSC -while still giving the Council a firm lead ' (p. 139).
In sum, for all its various limitations, this work will become required material for anyone wishing to examine South Africa's foreign relations in any depth. Geldenhuys has gained access to sources denied to anyone who is not trusted as safe by the policy-making elite, and he has served the rest of us well by presenting his analysis in an encyclopaedic and politically-open fashion. Apartheid is sometimes seen as an aberration, uniquely fashioned by various odd characteristics of South Africa's white oligarchy. Merle Lipton argues that this is only an extreme case of the world-wide persistence of ethnic and racial divisions, generated by the country's peculiar combination of historical and structural features. Her study is devoted to analysing the relationship between capitalism and apartheid, and, especially, whether the former has the power to maintain, strengthen, or destroy the latter.

ROGER SOUTHALL
Previous considerations of this relationship have produced a vast literature, dominated by the assumption, now challenged by Lipton, that capitalism is a homogeneous and monolithic entity. She argues that it has never been wholeheartedly or unanimously in favour of apartheid, the essence of which she sees as policies which control labour. By the mid-1960s, even the mining and agricultural sections of capital that had once unreservedly supported apartheid began to find that the costs of maintaining a reservoir of unskilled and cheap black labour were too high. Meanwhile, the shift in the balance of the economy towards urban manufacturing and commence had helped to make these sectors of capitalism dominant, and their interests were best served by the development of a class of skilled workers who were free, mobile, and able to be attracted by higher wages. The reforms in the economic and social dimensions of apartheid served the interests of some sections of capital by creating such a class of skilled workers. However, there remains a great deal of ambivalence about political reforms, reflecting the fact that the changes demanded by capitalists are not the result of enlightened or liberal thinking but naked economic advantages. The political supremacy of whites still remains in the interests of capitalism.
Although it is wrong to assess a book by the claims made for it by the publishers, Capitalism and Apartheid: South Africa, igio-84 is neither new nor controversial since many have made a similar analysis of the political economy of South Africa's hesitant reforms. None the less this is a very impressive work, with a wealth of closely argued and detailed information on a wide variety of issues which bear upon the central thesis, notably richly researched examinations of the interests and policies of the various sections of capital and the white working class, the shifting balance between the costs and the benefits of