What is a South African?

The Big Read:There is renewed interest in the question of whether "South Africans" exist. Both the Helen Suzman Foundation and the Gordon Institute for Business Science have recently made the question the topic of public debate.

Since 1996, the year of the promulgation of South Africa's post-apartheid Constitution, the South African government has had to work hard to overcome a deep-seated scepticism about the very existence of a "South African society".

During the apartheid period, it was axiomatic to the government and its supporters that South African society referred to a white society. A unitary South African society that included blacks was not simply anathema, it was not a "social fact". "Blacks" were members of their own communities - conceived originally as "tribes" and from the 1970s as "nations".

Contrast this with the very premise of the anti-apartheid struggle, at least as it was organised by the ANC after 1955. The centrepiece of ANC thinking after the Freedom Charter was that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white".

Yet, for all its poetry, the Freedom Charter poses an impossibly difficult question. The idea that South Africans formed a common people made it sensible to think about the time after apartheid as the time of a single, unitary state - instead of a constellation of Bantustans, say.

But "non-racialism" raised other difficulties. It presupposed that those responsible for implementing and sustaining a brutal system of domination could be integrated harmoniously into a common society with those whom they had subjugated.

The solution of 1994 was to rewrite the history of apartheid from a situation of racial oppression into one of multicultural intolerance. On these terms, the challenge of national reconciliation became one of tolerating "diversity".

One of the commentators on this question, Eusebius McKaiser, has accepted these terms at face value. He has ventured that the promise of a democratic South Africa is the prospect of a society NOT based on any form of essentialism. From this he has concluded that there are no "South Africans" and that the pursuit of such an entity is misconceived and irrelevant.

However, if South Africans do not exist, or cannot be brought into existence, the future is very gloomy indeed.

The promise of the Constitution is that South Africans most emphatically do exist or, at least, should exist.

South Africans are those people who have come together, not on the basis of a shared race or culture or religion or language, but on the basis of a shared commitment to democratic ideals and values. The essence of a South African, from the constitutional perspective, is a democrat.

This is why there is a growing and legitimate sense of malaise in South Africa. It is not that powerful and dangerous elements of the ANC seek to reintroduce essentialism back into South African politics. It is that they appeal to the wrong essentialism. They appeal to the essentialism of race and culture instead of to the essentials of the Constitution.

The problem is not one of essentialism, in other words. The problem is one of solidarity. How does one build social solidarity or social cohesion between former masters and servants? This is the question of the hour, no less important than defining South Africa's new growth model. Such a project remains politically and also theoretically elusive.

For the philosopher of post-nationalism, Jurgen Habermas, the problem is that democratic principles are always highly abstract. They require individuals to deal with each other, not as they are empirically (of different competencies, intelligence, wealth, education and so on), but as they are in principle (of equal value).

This is a fragile basis for bonds between people, especially when they are separated by class, by language, by culture and so on. It explains why civic nationalism is in crisis in much of Europe. Since the election to the presidency of Barack Obama it has been, perhaps, resurrected in the US. But in South Africa it is not simply reconciling diversity that is at stake. What matters is overcoming a history of colonial domination.

For Habermas, the appeal to national culture was, historically, a way of cementing otherwise weak bonds. Religion, and Christianity in particular, plays a similar role for the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Thankfully, the South African Constitution forbids such a tactic.

But it leaves the social challenge of South Africa unresolved. Social solidarity is being pursued by sections of the ANC by appealing to essentialist conceptions of blackness and whiteness. The foundations of South Africa's democracy are called into question.

But democracy without solidarity is no less likely. South Africa's constitutional norms of tolerance, respect and equality seem to be weakly embedded in its society. In other words, they do not serve as the basis of meaningful social bonds.

This is South Africa's unique impasse.

The Constitution forbids founding solidarity on any "national" basis (ethnicity, race, culture or religion).

But democratic principles alone are not enough to overcome the legacy of violence and division. Hence South Africa's see-saw political culture since 1994 - swinging between civic nationalism (non-racialism) and African nationalism. This is South Africa's bind.

It seems unlikely that this tension will ever be resolved.

Perhaps, however, it can be transcended.

If South Africans exist to the degree that there can be social solidarity between former masters and servants, then it requires overcoming the historical divides between these groups.

Expelling or marginalising the white population cannot be the solution. Nor is glib multiculturalism or cosmopolitanism.

The only way forward, it seems to me, is to reduce the conditions under which South Africans grow up in worlds apart; that is, to reduce social inequality.

• Chipkin is the director of the Public Affairs Research Institute and the author of Do South Africans Exist?