By July, more than fifteen hundred people had died in political violence in 1990. “Our country was bleeding to death,” Mandela writes.
That same summer Mandela’s own credibility with de Klerk took a major hit. The government arrested forty members of the ANC and discovered documents that appeared to describe a Communist Party plot to overthrow the government. The incident was a terrible embarrassment for Mandela, who knew nothing about it,38 and for de Klerk, who had just lifted the state of emergency and now had to calm his constituents’ fears that the ANC was planning a violent takeover.39
To mitigate the damage and keep the talks moving forward, Mandela decided to make a concession. De Klerk, Mandela wrote later, “needed to show his supporters that his policy had brought benefits to the country.” So Mandela told his own supporters that it was time to suspend the armed struggle. Not end it, he emphasized, just suspend it. This was a very tough sell behind the table. Although the Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military arm, had been quiescent for more than a year,40 “the aura of the armed struggle had great meaning for many people,” Mandela writes. Many of them thought the ANC was giving up too much bargaining leverage.41 But Mandela prevailed, and, in August 1990, the ANC promised to suspend the armed struggle. This concession was widely praised internationally and brought the ANC significant political and financial support.42
But continuing violence in the black townships took a heavy toll on Mandela’s relationship with de Klerk. Mandela came to suspect that the National Party, and perhaps de Klerk himself, was purposely fomenting black-on-black violence to weaken the ANC’s credibility as a party that could someday lead the government.43 Here was Mandela trying to make the case for majority rule, and the “majority” was rioting and looting. This was all too convenient for the NP, which claimed to be the only party capable of maintaining order. Mandela became increasingly convinced that there was a “hidden hand behind the violence[,] … a mysterious ‘Third Force,’ which consisted of renegade men from the [white] security forces who were attempting to disrupt the negotiations.” He repeatedly asked de Klerk to explain why the police were failing to control the Inkatha rampages; the police rarely made arrests and often seemed to encourage the violence. De Klerk never provided an answer.
Mandela’s suspicions were later confirmed when a newspaper investigation revealed that the police had been secretly financing Inkatha.44 Although de Klerk denied any personal knowledge of such a “third force,” Mandela never got over the feeling that he was somehow complicit.45 I suspect that neither Mandela nor de Klerk could completely control their most militant followers—not to mention people outside their own parties. Some of the looting, rioting, and gang warfare was carried out by thugs whose motivations were not even political. But the resulting carnage had a destructive and lasting effect on the peace process.
For the next two years, it was all Mandela and de Klerk could do to keep the negotiations alive. The dynamic among the rival black groups and the white security forces was just too destructive. The talks lurched, faltered, and broke down several times.46 As Mandela told his supporters in July 1991, “[T]he struggle is not over, and negotiations themselves are a theater of struggle, subject to advances and reverses as any other form of struggle.”
It is often dangerous when talks bog down. Each party blames the other and the anger needs an outlet.47 The summer of 1992 proved to be the most terrifying period of the peace process. Despite Mandela’s misgivings, the ANC resolved to pursue a campaign of “rolling mass action”—a wave of strikes, boycotts, and other protests—to pressure the government to make concessions. Mandela feared the demonstrations could get out of hand and lead to further violence and loss of life. And he was right. But many of his followers were impatient with the lack of progress at the table and he relented. The campaign began on June 16, the sixteenth anniversary of the Soweto uprising, and would culminate in August with a national strike.48
But before this campaign was even twenty-four hours old, the country was shaken by yet another debilitating spasm of black-on-black violence. It was the fourth in a week, killing forty-six ANC followers, mostly women and children.49 Again, the police made no arrests. For Mandela, this was the “last straw.” In a rare display of anger, he publicly compared the NP to the Nazis in Germany and withdrew from the negotiations.
His followers, too, had lost faith in the peace process. One day, he arrived at a mass meeting of the ANC and found an anonymous note waiting for him on the podium. “No peace, do not talk to us about peace. We’ve had enough. Please, Mr. Mandela, no peace. Give us weapons. No Peace.” Mandela threw away his prepared text and in his “most regal manner” exercised his moral authority:
[W]e must accept that responsibility for ending the violence is not just the government’s, the police’s, the army’s. It is also our responsibility. We must put our house in order. If you have no discipline you are not a freedom fighter. If you are going to kill innocent people, you don’t belong to the ANC. Your task is reconciliation.
When some in the crowd shouted their objections, Mandela said, “Listen to me! Listen to me! I am your leader. As long as I am your leader, I am going to give leadership. Do you want me to remain your leader?” The crowd roared back that it did. “Well,” he declared, “as long as I am your leader, I will tell you, always, when you are wrong.”50
The summer culminated in a tragic incident. A group of ANC militants planned a demonstration in Bisho, a black homeland that was known to be hostile territory for the ANC. Unwisely, they included women and children in the protest and failed to control their own ranks. When some protesters tried to climb through an opening in a fence and take a different route to town, twenty-nine people were gunned down by untrained homeland police.
The Bisho massacre strengthened Mandela’s hand behind the table. Within the ANC, the balance of power shifted back toward Mandela and others who favored reaching an agreement through negotiation.51 Although the police were condemned for their part in the massacre, the ANC was condemned as well for irresponsibly failing to control a provocative demonstration.
Around the same time, Mandela realized that the violence was destroying the South African economy. After receiving a briefing by the ANC’s head of economics, Mandela said, “[I]t appears to me that if we allowed the situation to continue … the economy is going to be so destroyed that when a democratic government comes to power, it will not be able to solve.”52
The Bisho massacre, in the words of Allister Sparks, forced Mandela and de Klerk “to stare into the abyss in order to recognize their mutual dependency.”53 They resumed their negotiations and the two parties began to work together in earnest. During the next fourteen months, a deal was finally hammered out. In June 1993, the parties set a firm date for elections based on universal suffrage. In November, Mandela and de Klerk reached agreement on the interim constitution.
On the core political issues, Mandela prevailed. It was a classic liberal constitution providing for three branches of government, an independent judiciary, and a bill of rights protecting individual human and property rights. The new South Africa would be a parliamentary democracy based on one man, one vote. There would be no white veto of any sort, no “group rights.” For five years, there would be a transitional government in which all significant political parties would be represented. Thereafter, a government would be formed on the simple basis of majority rule. De Klerk agreed.
Why did de Klerk make so many political concessions? In part because it was pragmatic for him to do so, and in part because Mandela helped make these concessions bearable. For one thing, Mandela guaranteed de Klerk a role in the transition. Although it was understood that the ANC would get the most votes and Mandela would head the interim government, he agreed that de Klerk would be a deputy president. As Mandela told de Klerk, “I’ve always acted on the basis that you’re needed and that you have a role to play.”54
Another reason, of course, is that on the core economic issues, de Klerk essentially p
revailed. Nothing would be nationalized. Private property would remain protected. And the jobs and pensions of white civil servants were guaranteed.
Finally, Mandela helped the cause of peace by reaching across the table to white political leaders who were far to the right of de Klerk. These stakeholders had to be brought around and de Klerk couldn’t do it alone. The Volksfront, for example, was an extremist Afrikaner party headed by General Constand Viljoen. Mandela built a rela-tionship with Viljoen by inviting him to his home and talking openly with him. Viljoen was impressed by Mandela and appreciated his candor. At one point Mandela told him, “If you want to go to war, I must be honest and admit that we cannot stand up to you on the battlefield … [but] you cannot win because of our numbers: you cannot kill us all.”55 Ultimately, Viljoen and his party supported the interim constitution.
These negotiations transformed South Africa. By 1994, apartheid was dead. In a free election based on one man, one vote, Mandela was elected the first president of the new South Africa. Soon thereafter, he signed a new constitution that guaranteed equal rights for blacks and whites.
Assessment
Mandela’s achievement is unique in modern history, largely because of his extraordinary personal characteristics. But even for us ordinary mortals, there are negotiation lessons to be drawn from his story. In this chapter I will focus on three tensions that are common to many conflicts, and which I think Mandela managed brilliantly.
The first tension is between what is going on across the table with your adversary and what is happening behind the table among your constituents. Robert Putnam has called this a “two-level game” in which a leader must negotiate in both directions.56 This requires enormous skill. History is full of political leaders who have failed this test, especially when dealing with violent ethnic conflicts. The tension is also common in business contexts, as we will see later in this book.
The second tension is between pragmatism and principle, which you will recognize from previous chapters. It relates to the clash between “rational” and “intuitive” thinking, between utilitarian and moral concerns. It is the tension that usually causes Spock to make an appearance.
The third tension is so fundamental that I teach it as part of my basic negotiation course. We encounter it often with friends, relatives, co-workers, and strangers. It is the tension between empathy and assertiveness, and its mastery requires two different kinds of skills. Empathy requires good listening skills and the ability to demonstrate an understanding of the other side’s needs, interests, and perspectives, without necessarily agreeing. Assertiveness requires the ability to state clearly and confidently the interests and perspectives of one’s own side. A good negotiator has to do a lot of both, no matter how strong the emotions or how high the stakes. This can be surprisingly difficult, even when the stakes are low and the bargaining power is more or less equal—for example, when we’re negotiating with a spouse, a friend, or a business associate of similar status. When the stakes are high and one party clearly has the upper hand, the tension is even more difficult to manage. For black South Africans of Mandela’s generation, very little in their lives prepared them to negotiate effectively with the white power structure, either to understand the whites’ perspective or to assert their own.
In praising Mandela, I don’t mean to minimize the role of F. W. de Klerk. Mandela needed someone he could do business with, and de Klerk was that man. De Klerk found a way to end white rule without surrendering white prosperity.57 He made some excruciatingly painful decisions that required a great deal of courage. He made far more concessions than Mandela ever thought about making. And he was a highly skilled leader. In Waldmeir’s words, he managed “to keep his party together, with no significant defections, from the day that he unbanned the ANC to the day he agreed to hand power over. He had dragged his party from the backwater of ethnic politics into the modern world. It was an extraordinary achievement.”58
But Mandela’s achievement strikes me as far more extraordinary. In fact, I would award him the title of the greatest negotiator of the twentieth century.
You have seen his patience and tenacity. When negotiating with his adversaries, he was respectful but never fawning or sycophantic. He demanded respect in return. You’ve seen his pragmatism. He hated violence but was not a pacifist. He was one tough hombre. He understood the power of violence and used it strategically—to force the government to negotiate. He rejected the simple-minded notion that one must either negotiate with the Devil or forcibly resist. He did both. He was willing to make concessions, but not about what was most important to him. With respect to his key political principles, he was unmovable.
But the most important lesson goes to the core of this book: We must reject as foolish the categorical claim that it is wrong to negotiate with an evil adversary. Mandela hated the apartheid regime, which most people would agree was evil. But he didn’t demonize whites, including those who participated in the oppressive regime.
Paradoxically, Mandela’s attitudes toward these whites softened during his years of incarceration. “In prison, my anger toward whites decreased, but my hatred for the system grew. … I hated the system that turned us against one another.” Instead he saw his political adversaries as individuals; he avoided easy generalizations. Mandela came to appreciate many of his white guards. “Men like Swart, Gregory and Warrant Officer Brand reinforced my belief in the essential humanity even of those who had kept me behind bars for the previous twenty-seven and a half years.” Mandela was able to separate the people from the problem.59 The contrast with Sharansky is striking. Recall that in order to maintain his resolve, Sharansky found it necessary to distance himself from—and even demonize—his captors. Sharansky feared that trying to understand them, and learning about their families and children, would subvert his will.
Mandela understood that the goal of negotiation is to persuade your adversaries. He ultimately achieved through negotiation an outcome that could never have been accomplished solely through violence or resistance. Moreover, he did this without making any concessions with respect to his core political beliefs. Why was he so persuasive? I don’t want to claim that the implicit threat of black violence played no role. But fear of civil war does not fully explain why de Klerk and the Afrikaners were able to make concessions to Mandela.
The explanation lies in the fact that Mandela was a negotiator to whom one could make concessions and yet maintain one’s self-respect. Mandela worked hard to establish and maintain a personal, human connection with Afrikaner leaders whose life experiences and attitudes were radically different from his own. These leaders came to see that Mandela really believed in racial reconciliation. They saw that his vision for South Africa included them.
“Peace was made,” Waldmeir concludes, “because Mandela was able to persuade such Afrikaners that he had the best interests of the nation—their nation, his nation, the South African nation—at heart. They learned to trust him with their fate.”
I am not saying that Mandela was perfect. I wish I could say he avoided completely the trap of demonization. But he didn’t. He never forgave de Klerk for his failure to mitigate the violence in the townships. Mandela was all too aware of his own difficulties controlling his own followers, but he doesn’t seem to have given de Klerk the same benefit of the doubt. I think Mandela may have held that grudge too long. It led to a two-year impasse in the peace process, during which many people, primarily blacks, were killed.
The two men were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,60 but their personal relationship never healed. In naming them “Men of the Year” for 1993, Time noted that their “mutual bitterness” was palpable. Time asked rhetorically, “How could these two have agreed on anything—lunch, for instance, much less the remaking of a nation?”61
The answer is that both men recognized that they were stuck with each other. With few exceptions, neither man allowed his personal feelings to stand in the way of doing business. When it was pragmatic to negotiate, the
y negotiated—even though they didn’t feel like it. As Mandela once confessed to friends, “My worst nightmare is that I wake up one night and that de Klerk isn’t there. I need him. Whether I like him or not is irrelevant, I need him.”62
As we will see in Parts III and IV, parties in protracted business and family conflicts also find themselves stuck with adversaries they don’t much like.
PART III
Business Devils
SEVEN
Giant Software Wars: IBM vs. Fujitsu
I had often spoken to large audiences, but I had never addressed a press conference in a ballroom with a live feed to Japan. Nor had I ever helped resolve a dispute with so much at stake. It was September 15, 1987, and I was standing with my co-arbitrator, Jack Jones, on a stage in the Villard Ballroom at the Helmsley Palace Hotel in New York City, about to announce a major turning point in the legal war between IBM and Fujitsu.
IBM was the biggest computer company in the world, Fujitsu was its biggest competitor, and their dispute dealt with software that was essential to both of them. The parties still despised each other—that hadn’t changed. Jack often joked that they couldn’t agree on anything, even the color of a stoplight. The news was that Jack and I, with the help of the parties, had found a creative solution.
But our story was complicated, involving arcane computer tech-nology, an undeveloped area of law, and a solution that had never been tried before. The core issue was whether Fujitsu had illegally copied IBM’s operating system software.1 This was back in the days of mainframe computers—gigantic machines used by banks, insurance companies, and other large institutions. IBM had long dominated this market, but Fujitsu had made inroads by selling computers that were “IBM-compatible”—that is, capable of running applications originally written for an IBM. The problem, from IBM’s point of view, was that Fujitsu had not created its own operating system from scratch. It had copied IBM’s programming materials.
Bargaining with the Devil Page 16