The National Party of South Africa: A Transnational Perspective

Abstract

The National Party (NP) dominated South Africa’s modern Right. Founded in 1914 to defend the interests of Afrikaners (descendants of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch, German, and French colonists), it ruled from 1924 to 1934 and 1948 to 1994. In the years it was not in power, it led the opposition in an all-white parliament. In this period, its embrace of hard Right ideas peaked. From 1948 on, it moderated its stance on, for example, anti-Semitism but increased repression and segregation (“apartheid”). The NP distanced itself from “foreign ideologies,” claiming roots in the nineteenth-century Afrikaner “Boer” republics1 yet had a complex relationship with the international Right.