00:00 (dramatic music)
00:02 - Mats is the architect of South Africa.
00:13 I don't think the country would exist at all
00:15 if it wasn't for him.
00:16 And there are historians who don't agree with me,
00:18 but I think if you track through the many crises
00:21 that the country faced under the period
00:23 in which he was in charge of the state,
00:25 he really is the key.
00:27 He's the figure that holds the whole country together.
00:30 I really don't think union would have happened
00:32 if Mats hadn't told the thing together.
00:34 His primary collaborator is Merriman.
00:36 Merriman doesn't have the constituency.
00:38 He can't really hold the Boers and the English together
00:41 in the way that Mats was able to.
00:43 You can say the same thing about 1922.
00:46 In 1922, the state comes very close to falling over.
00:48 And as in before, there are several events,
00:50 1914 is exactly the same,
00:52 in which the rebellion essentially threatens the state.
00:55 They've come very, very close to falling over altogether.
00:58 And Mats holds the thing together.
01:00 But at the same time,
01:01 if you look at the difficulties we face now,
01:04 and there are many,
01:05 but the first one is the weakness of local government.
01:08 So if you look at how bad administration, tax collection,
01:12 the provision of basic services is in little towns
01:15 across the country, outside of the three big cities,
01:18 that's a function of the fact that Mats really mistrusted
01:21 how local politics would work out.
01:24 He didn't want the towns to have any power.
01:26 He didn't want the people in the towns to have any power.
01:29 And he designed a state that really had left all the power
01:32 in the center, and in particular,
01:34 it left all the power in Pretoria.
01:36 So everything in South Africa hinges around
01:38 what happens in Pretoria.
01:40 We collect birth and death registration in Pretoria.
01:42 We collect how police force runs out of Pretoria.
01:45 Almost anything we do with the state
01:47 comes out of a single central capital.
01:49 And it's pretty much unique in the world.
01:51 There's hardly another society that is like this.
01:54 There are many other things I could link.
01:56 Smuts is a key figure in the evolution
01:58 of the very strange state that we end up with
02:01 in South Africa before apartheid.
02:04 If you look at the key acts that Smuts is responsible for,
02:06 most of them are written before he really has
02:08 any kind of imperial authority.
02:10 They're written in that short period in which he's
02:12 basically the state's lawyer in Kruger's Republic, 1898, 1899.
02:17 There are several laws that are drawn up in that period,
02:21 which then get adopted later.
02:22 And there are two that are really key.
02:23 The one is the Pass Law, the basic Pass Law.
02:26 And the second is a law that allowed for
02:28 the registration of the identity of Indians.
02:31 And that law is the law that was used against Gandhi
02:33 and the Indians in the Transvaal
02:34 when Milner takes over in 1905.
02:37 And Smuts implemented them because he was asked to do that.
02:40 It wasn't, they weren't his plan.
02:42 They were brought to him as plans,
02:45 very largely by other people who were experts in that field.
02:48 He was just acting as any other lawyer would.
02:51 But he didn't, he really stopped and said,
02:53 what will be the long-term moral and political implications
02:56 of the thing that I'm about to do?
02:58 So by 1948, we have a system in place that allows
03:02 the state to arrest people, black people,
03:05 who are present outside of the tribal areas
03:08 without a document, without a pass.
03:10 And it allows the state to hold those people
03:12 for a week in prison.
03:14 And they never have to be,
03:15 and there's no question of their being proven
03:17 of having done anything wrong.
03:19 And Smuts drafted the legislation for that in 1899.
03:22 What the Nats did is they turned that into,
03:25 and it became a kind of instrument of very brutal policing.
03:30 We can see many things in the way in which
03:32 the Nats imposed apartheid that Smuts
03:35 would have had no interest in.
03:36 The way the law, the anti-communism law was used to,
03:41 I mean, it was used on liberals.
03:42 It was used on people who would have been Smuts' friends.
03:45 It's very unlikely that we would have had
03:46 that kind of a state.
03:47 It would have been much more of a liberal state.
03:49 And certainly South Africa's relationships
03:54 with the rest of the world would have been different.
03:55 Smuts was much more skilled at maintaining
03:58 those relationships than anyone in the National Party was
04:00 through the whole period of the apartheid state.
04:02 Two of the most influential new studies
04:04 of the global political system around the United Nations,
04:09 a book by a guy called Mazower called "No Enchanted Palace,"
04:12 and a new book by Timothy Mitchell called "Carbon Democracy."
04:16 These are really influential studies
04:18 of transnational history.
04:19 The eminent, eminent professors,
04:21 one's at Princeton, I think the other one, NYU,
04:24 they both place Smuts right at the center
04:26 of this constitutional order that emerges
04:29 through the United Nations.
04:30 The one at Versailles and the other
04:32 in the United Nations negotiations.
04:34 And most of that is not known by South African historians.
04:36 Few people actually really understand
04:38 how key Smuts is in the crafting of the world system
04:42 that emerges outside of South Africa,
04:44 in particular this idea of national self-determination.
04:47 So after the Versailles, every state
04:50 is supposed to relate in some way to a nation.
04:53 And that's pretty strange, actually,
04:55 when you look back through the course of time,
04:57 there are very few states that have
04:58 that kind of characteristic.
05:00 And Mitchell's argument is that Smuts,
05:04 using this Bruer history, saying the peoples
05:06 of Eastern Europe should have self-determination.
05:09 (dramatic music)
05:12 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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