Democracy and Development in Latin America

zyxwvu zyxw zyx zyx zy Journal of International Development: Vol. 3, No. 5, 537-550 (1991) REVIEW ARTICLE DEMOCRACY AND DEVELOPMENT IN LATIN AMERICA PAUL CAMMACK Department of Government, University of Manchester Democracy in Developing Countries, Vol. 4: Latin America. L. Diamond, J. Linz and S. Lipset (eds) (London: Adamantine Press, 1989, E29.50, pp. 515.) Democratizing Brazil: Problems of Transition and Consolidation. A. Stepan (ed.) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, f28.00, pp. 404.) The Challenge of Rural Democratization: Perspectives from Latin America and the Philippines. J. Fox (ed.) (London: Frank Cass, 1990, E24.00, pp. 162.) Democracy and Development in Latin America: Economics, Politics and Religion in the Post- War Period. D. Lehmann (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, E29.50, pp. 235.) Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements. S . Eckstein (ed.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, E14.95, pp. 390.) The decade of the 1980s saw a political miracle in Latin America, in the midst of economic disaster. A regional process of democratic reform, launched in 1979 when the military stepped down in Ecuador and the Sandinista-led revolution overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, continued unabated into 1990, culminating in the replacement of General Pinochet in Chile by a Christian Democrat, Patricio Aylwin. Over the period, democracy was restored in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, and Uruguay; the military withdrew from direct executive control to give way to formally democratic regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras; dictators fell in Haiti and Paraguay; the US replaced a client-dictator with a client-democrat in Panama; Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela maintained semidemocratic or democratic regimes; and civilian Mexico, for 60 years under the control of the PRI, showed signs under Salinas of gradual movement towards genuinely competitive politics. No country in the region was left unaffected, except perhaps for Cuba; and, singularly, no military intervention succeeded in reversing a democratic opening once under way for a decade after Garcia Meza seized power in Bolivia in 1980, to delay the transition there until 1982. These trends are all the more remarkable in view of the economic circumstances which served as their backdrop. The international debt crisis dominated the decade, and was accompanied in country after country across the region by either severe recession, or rampant inflation, or both. By the end of the 1980s levels of per capita zyxwvutsrqp zyxwvuts 0954- 1748/ 9 1 / 050537- 14S07.00 @ 1991 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 538 P. Cammack income across the region had fallen back to those of the late 1970s, while worsening patterns of distribution brought about even sharper falls in the living standards of many. In this sense the 1980s truly represented a lost decade. The early 1990s present a novel and distinctive conjuncture, in which a virtually full set of regimes across the region practising or professing liberal democracy face as great a social and economic challenge as they have ever known in their history. The various studies reviewed here are best approached as reflections upon this unique combination of circumstances. The Diamond, Linz and Lipset collection is one of a set of four (the remaining volumes covering Africa, Asia, and comparative theory) sponsored by the US National Endowment for Democracy. It offers extended case studies of ten Latin American democracies, with a hefty introduction. In contrast, the collections put together by Eckstein and Fox respectively address the current conjuncture from the perspective of the rural and urban poor, and offer an explicit critique of the political and economic orientations of the first collection. Their call for the empowerment of the poor, and their focus upon political protest and revindicatory social movements, is echoed in Lehmann’s idiosyncratic ‘autobiography of a generation’, which proceeds, by way of an extended discussion of the theology of liberation, from the political economy of import-substituting industrialization to the prospects of contemporary movement politics. Finally, Stepan’s substantial collection on the important case of Brazil covers virtually every one of the topics touched on so far, and thereby provides a multi-dimensional picture of a single case. As this summary suggests, two broadly contrasting views are represented in this group of studies, with caution and political gradualism the watchwords on one side, versus social reform and popular mobilization on the other. I shall argue that while it is easy, and important, to identify the weaknesses of the first position, and to challenge its conclusions, it is also the case that analysis from a radical perspective is often most convincing in its explanations of past failures, and its underlining of the current weakness of both the left in general, and alternative forms of political organization in particular. As a consequence, comforting conclusions are not easily drawn. The Diamond, Linz and Lipset enterprise represents a major academic undertaking, certain to become a standard point of reference. Its most striking characteristic is the contrast between its mighty theoretical aims, and minimal achievements. The editors have instructed their authors to bear ten ‘theoretical dimensions’ in mind in the country case studies: political culture; regime legitimacy and effectiveness; historical development; class structure and the degree of inequality; national structure; state structure, centralization and strength; political and constitutional structure; political leadership; development performance; and international factors. From these they have derived ‘forty-nine tentative propositions about the likelihood of stable democratic government’(Preface: xv-xvi). It is immediately apparent that this is not a set of ‘theoretical dimensions’ at all, but an entirely untheoretical list of topics which stand in need of theoretical development. They do not receive it. The editors declare disarmingly that it would be foolish to pretend that they could test their 49 propositions, and concede that while there is no shortage of theoretical arguments and lessons to be drawn from the four-volume study, ‘these are not integrated into a single, allencompassing theory, and that it will be some time (if ever) before the field produces one’ (p. xiv). The reason for this state of affairs is soon revealed. In concluding their general preface, the editors note that while some readers might feel that their chosen countries (26 in all, in the whole set) share capitalist economic zyxwvu zyxwv zy z zyxwv Democracy and Development in Latin America 539 systems, ‘such a characteristic . . . becomes in its vagueness almost meaningless’ (p. xx). The claim which follows, that ‘democracy as a system of government must be kept conceptually distinct from capitalism as a system of production and exchange’(p. xxi) is entirely correct, but it does not excuse their failure to attempt a theoretical understanding of the latter term, ‘capitalism as a system of production and exchange’ (let alone of capitalism in the periphery of the developed world), and its relationship to ‘democracy as a system of government’. Without it, their analysis offers a classic example of a focus on surface patterns of separate variables, in isolation from any understanding of underlying process. We have seen two consequences already: the lack of an orienting theoretical framework (and in this context, their modest refusal to offer a single, all-encompassing theory, like their sagacious distinction between democracy and capitalism, works to let them off the hook by insinuating into the argument an implicit contrast with a caricatured deterministic ‘grand theory’ of Marxist derivation); and their inability to test their laboriously derived ‘forty-nine theses’. Further practical consequences follow. First, their persistent emphasis on institutions and political choice (elements essential, of course, to any political analysis) becomes vacuous in the absence of any means of conceptualizing the structure of constraints upon them, and hence their limits; in particular, they undertake no sustained consideration of the links between the class interests of elites, and patterns of institutional initiatives and political choices. Second, there is a grotesque discrepancy between the account they give of the Latin American past, and the aspirations they voice for its future. They provide a relentless documentation of the past failure across the region to produce states and executives capable of maintaining public order and the rule of law; strong and independent politicalparties free from dependence on prominent personalities, and capable of cross-cutting and softening class cleavages; public policies capable of securing steady and broadly distributed growth, economic and political inclusion of majorities, and broad and deep legitimacy; and strong and autonomouspopular organizations and associational life. They then vacuously appeal to the ‘capacity, courage, judgement and values of domestic political actors’, and ‘effective political leadership and action’(Introduction, p. 5 1) to remedy these failings in the future. It is scarcely surprising that when they turn briefly to the relationship between social and economic demands and the prospects for democracy, they counsel patience, and a judicious lowering of expectations. Both Eckstein and Fox are, rightly, critical of approaches of this kind. Eckstein argues that current approaches to Latin America generally concentrate too much on elite concerns and perspectives, while Fox condemns the Diamond, Linz and Lipset collection, among others, for concentrating on political elites and national political institutions at the expense of ‘sub-national democratic institution-building’, as exemplified by urban and particularly rural social movements (Fox, pp. 2-3). The Eckstein collection is the less satisfactory of the two, although it contains some exellent individual chapters. Eckstein advocates a historical-structural approach, and within it argues that real power in Latin America ‘is rarely vested in formal political institutions, and even when peasants, workers and the urban poor enjoy formal political rights, they lack access to the effective, informal channels of influence’(p. 28). Protest, in this context, is a consequence of structural and institutional obstacles to the realization of the substantive goals of the poor and the working classes, who rebel ‘because they have limited alternative means to voice their views and press for change’ (p. 3). This is a valuable corrective to the patrician voluntarism of Diamond, Linz and zyxwvut zy zyxwvutsrq zyxwvu 540 P. Cammack Lipset. However, despite the opportunistic subtitle, the collection is squarely concerned with political protest, rather than social movements, and Eckstein’s lengthy introduction aims to challenge the conventional literature on the former subject (psychological, rational choice, and resource-mobilization approaches) rather than to contribute to current debates on the latter. A more serious failing, and one that it shares with the Diamond, Linz and Lipset collection, is a distinct uneasiness about theory. Eckstein goes out of her way to proclaim the eclectic character of the collection, within a broad historical-structural approach. She stresses that ‘the chapters were not written to prove a predetermined theory’(p. 56), and declines herself to offer any ‘over-archingtheory of the causes and consequences of protest and resistance’ (p. 7) in the light of them. This has two drawbacks: first, as the collection is as diverse in subject-matteras in theoretical approach it lacks overall coherence; second, the introduction, for all its considerable analytical sharpness, becomes a lengthy inventory of types and circumstances of protest, without a strong organizing core. In concluding it, Eckstein states that the chapters are organized in a sequence conducive to theory-building, offering the collection to the reader as a kind of do-it-yourself assembly kit. Ironically, this echoes Diamond, Linz and Lipset, who adopt a similar strategy, inviting readers to make sense of the contents of their four-volume study for themselves (p. xxiii). I shall suggest below that a shift of attention from predetermined, over-arching theory and the ‘causes and consequences of protest’(a search for patterns in a different guise) to an examination of the relationship between protest and the underlying process of capitalist development offers a way forward. I turn first to Fox’s collection, which gains, in comparison with Eckstein’s, from its more closely defined focus. It unerringly pinpoints, in its examination of rural democratization, issues Diamond, Linz and Lipset would rather avoid. Fox reminds us, as does Eckstein, that ‘the rural poor face particular internal and external obstacles when they attempt to hold the state accountable for its actions’, largely because of regional elite control of elections, the judicial system, coercion, credit and terms of trade, and poses as a crucial test of current institution-building in Latin America ‘the creation and sustenance of social and political institutions which effectively represent both the diverse and majority interests of rural people’ (Introduction, pp. 1-3). He then raises three particular issues: the limited effectiveness of pluralist electoral systems where non-electoral participation is blocked by coercion by local elites and state security forces; the obstacles placed in the way of effective citizenship by the prevalence of clientelism; and elite resistance to the building of strong and autonomous associations of the poor in the countryside. He concludes that meaningful democratization in rural areas requires ‘a shift in the balance of forces in society’ (p. 1I), carried over in turn into the institutions of the state. This patently requires a willingness on the part of entrenched rural elites to countenance some sacrifice of their own interests. The case studies the collection brings together provide a privileged vantage point from which the prospects for such a shift in the balance of power can be assessed, on account of both their strategic substantive content, and their ability to illuminate the connections between variables treated separately by Diamond, Linz and Lipset. Grzybowski locates the origins of social movements in the Brazilian countryside in the ‘range of conflicts generated by capitalist agricultural development, elitist political practices, and authoritarian traditions’ (p. 36). They represent a threat to existing relations of power which elites have sought to preserve through the transition because they reject elite or state control, and seek to enable rural workers to develop their own zyx zyxwvuts zy Democracy and Development in Latin America 541 independent forms of organization and political projects. This is precisely the outcome that liberal democratic political institutions seek to avoid. Grzybowski shows, in relation to two representative movements (the Rural Workers’ Union in Santarem and the Rubber Tappers’ Movement in Acre) that in Brazil it is avoided not by the success of accountable and representative institutions, but by public and private repression and clientelism which render them unrepresentative and unaccountable. In such circumstances, he argues, political democracy can only be brought about if existing political institutions can be transformed from outside by the conquest of genuine citizenship through autonomous social movements. What is more, the conquest of full citizenship by the rural population will inevitably bring with it demands for ‘an alternative rural development strategy which attends to the economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations of the majority of the rural population’ (p. 22). The struggles for political rights and social and economic demands go hand in hand. These conclusions are reinforced by three excellent studies in the Stepan collection. In each case the movements described were organized around quite specific demands, for which they sought to achieve independent representation, in defiance of repression, and clientelistic co-optation by the state. The neighbourhood movements of Nova I g u a y studied by Mainwaring arose in the context of extremely rapid urbanization, in which the provision of basic urban services lagged hopelessly behind. Initial provision of health care by grassroots volunteers led to a process of organization around efforts to satisfy pressing material needs, despite hostility from local state representatives. In turn, a broad political movement grew up (Stepan, pp. 173-4). It threatened the clientelistic politics dominant in Rio de Janeiro state since the populist period, and incarnated in the 1970s in the person of the conservative token opposition governor, Chagas Freitas. He eventually responded by mounting a rival federation of neighbourhood associations through which official patronage could be channelled, although the effort came too late to stem the development of the grassroots movement. Similarly, the various women’s movements of SPo Paul0 described by Alvarez came together in pursuit of specific demands for contraception, day care, and protection from rape and male violence, and in the knowledge that ‘women’s political claims and women’s movement organizations have most frequently been co-opted, instrumentalized, or manipulated by political elites and the political apparatuses of the state in ways which serve the needs of the prevailing pact of domination - even when women have achieved limited gains through their increased participation in politics’ (p. 206). After 1979 the ruling PDS, aware of its precarious electoral position, made a serious effort to co-opt the day-care movement, building a number of creches in areas where popular mobilization had been most intense. At the same time its programme was heavily distorted by electoral considerations. As the 1982 elections approached, ‘directors’ were appointed for some 200 as yet unbuilt creches as part of a broader patronage effort. As far as contraception was concerned, once the state began to show an interest, it sought to impose population control as the aim, shifting the emphasis the women’s movement had placed on individual choice over the control of fertility. Finally, Keck’s account of the rise of the PT locates its origins in the wage recovery campaign of 1977, in which workers sought to win compensation for a 34.1 per cent wage cut arising from official manipulation of the cost of living index to which wages were linked by law. Here workers sought to organize independently of the state-controlled system of labour representation into which they had been corralled since the 1940s. In each case the origins of the movement lay zyxwv zyxwvut zyxwvuts zy z 542 P. Cammack in substantive demands reflective of the exclusion of these groups from power, and freedom from clientelistic control was essential to their achievement. In addition, all three movements arose against a background of pervasive repression - the harassment of officials, closure of unions and breaking of strikes in the case of workers, the activities of death squads responsible for 764 deaths in the area in the first half of 1980 alone in the case of the neighbourhood movements of Nova IguaGu, and a level of male violence which prompted 200-300 complaints per day from the women of Silo Paulo when an innovative Police Unit for Women was eventually set up in the city. The nature of the conflicts and the attitude of the state are best understood in each case in the light of current patterns of capitalist development and the popular demands they provoke, with wage compression, the denial of adequate urban services, and the increasing exploitation of female labour which provoked the call for day care, all central to the current model of accumulation, and the primary focus of the movements in question. These conclusions are further supported by Zamosc’s excellent work on Colombia, in complementary contributions to the Eckstein and Fox collections. In the first of these he interprets the history of the government-sponsored National Peasant Association (ANUC) in the light of changing patterns of rural capitalist development, and the class struggles to which they gave rise. ANUC was set up in 1967 under the Liberal regime of Lleras Restrepo, in order both to win peasant support and to facilitate capitalist development by securing reform in areas of backward latifundio agriculture. A split developed in the early 1970s as the movement radicalized under autonomous pressure from below, while the bourgeoisie regrouped around a strategy of outward-oriented development which made agrarian reform a less pressing priority. The Conservative Pastrana government cracked down sharply on a wave of land invasions from 1971 onwards, while setting up a parallel ANUC as a vehicle for co-optation through state-backed clientelism. When the Liberals returned with Lopez Michelson in 1974, they declared the process of land reform at an end, and channelled resources into support for peasant smallholders under the slogan of integrated rural development. By 1975 the original ANUC had lost its ability to sustain a struggle for land, and by 1981 its remaining rump had rejoined the parallel movement. ANUC had been through a three-stage cycle, beginning with government-sponsored reform, passing through a brief phase of radical autonomy, and ending in conservative cooptation. The period as a whole saw the consolidation of capitalist agriculture, and the failure on ANUC’s part to secure ‘a pattern of rural development in which the free peasant economy would prevail’ (Eckstein, p. 103). What resulted was ‘a political system that denies effective participation to the popular sectors and a pattern of capitalist development that has failed to respond to the needs and aspirations of the majority’(p. 126). Zamosc’s contribution to the Fox collection, taking up the story for the 1980s, reveals that this is as much a failure for the Colombian state as for the majority of Colombians, and points an obvious moral for current attempts at democratization. During the past decade, mounting disaffection with the elitedominated political system led to spreading popular protest, attributed to the failure of the National Front (the 1958-74 Conservative-Liberal agreement to share power, continued informally until 1986) to deliver on its initial promise of development and social justice (Fox, p. 49). Elites have had direct access to policy-making and to the benefits of growth, while the popular sectors have been incorporated through traditional clientelism ‘utterly irreconcilable with the principle of political citizenship’ zyxw zy zyxwvut Democracy and Development in Latin America 543 (p. 50). Successive attempts to pursue reform from the presidency under Betancur and Barco have been hampered by the resistance of the armed forces, and of traditional clientelistic politicians of both parties in the countryside, reinforced by the massive influx of cocaine traffickers into land ownership and belligerent anti-peasant politics in the 1980s. Zamosc identifies the reforms as ‘defensive responses that try to contain the disintegration of the regime through merely institutional measures’, and concludes that ‘the incorporation of the popular sectors requires socio-economic and political reforms that would address their basic needs, abolish clientelist practices, and provide effective guarantees of state accountability’ (pp. 71-2). Here, too, the options and strategies of different groups are interpreted in relation to capitalist development and the patterns of class alliances and conflicts to which it gives rise, and the battle for political rights on the part of the peasantry develops not in isolation from social and economic issues, but around concrete demands for land, credit, and services. As in every other case it requires a fundamental shift in relations of power if it is to succeed. In Colombia then, as in Brazil, landowners and their political allies are able t o control rural politics through a familiar blend of repression and co-optation. The following studies in the Fox collection, on Mexico (Park) and Bolivia (Rivera Cusicanqui), show that revolutions in those two countries allowed peasants to escape from the social control of local landowners, only to become clients of the state. In the Mexican case the starting point of the process was the vesting in the state itself in the 1917 constitution of ultimate jurisdiction over land rights, to the detriment of the customary rights and local autonomy of village communities; in the Bolivian case, while Rivera Cusicanqui argues that the pre-Colombian ayllu retains vitality as a site of direct democracy, it remains the case that since the revolution of 1952, subsequent land seizures, and land reform in 1953, indigenous groups have allowed themselves t o be recruited as unconditional allies of the military state at crucial moments. Between 1952 and 1964 the MNR won massive electoral victories on the strength of the peasant vote despite its fading urban support while, as Park notes, the PRI secured its victory in 1988, as often in the past, by gross manipulation of the vote in selected rural areas. Whether as clients of landowners or as clients of the state, peasants in all these cases have found that even where democratic institutions exist, they are neither representative nor accountable. Against this background the Nicaraguan case presents a striking contrast. Marvin Ortega, again in the Fox collection, makes the point concisely, claiming that it is important ‘because it not only involves peasant support for a revolutionary process, but also represents a break with past forms of patronclient and coercive domination under the Somoza regime’ (p. 135). Before 1979 the abstract norms of democracy were regarded with indifference because they were experienced through the distorting mediations of landlords, the Church, rural militias, and the political apparatus of the state. For Ortega, while peasants are not predisposed against representative democracy and electoral processes, ‘they do not support those devoid of practical utility’ and, as a result, ‘theoretical formulations of democracy that emphasise only formal representative institutions and/ or electoral processes have found little active support in rural civil society’. In the circumstances prevailing in Nicaragua, democracy had to be based upon ‘a series of demands for redistribution of power and wealth to meet basic human needs, to boost agricultural production and wages, and to uphold labour rights’(pp. 123-4). The Sandinista state neither repressed the peasantry nor made them its clients, although the initial policy of statist agrarian development with respect for the ownership rights of productive large 544 zyxwvutsrq zyxwvu P. Cammack farmers might have led to either outcome. In fact the regime proved far more responsive to the goals thrown up by autonomous peasant movements than other Latin American regimes have been, acceding in 1985 to peasant pressure for a change of policy, along with redistribution of land on a large scale. Perhaps as a consequence, the rural population, under the Sandinistas and the successor Chamorro regime, has proved far more able to hold the state accountable through representative institutions than its counterparts elsewhere in the region. This suggests that democracy may now work in Nicaragua (often to the discomfort of those who would rather keep the rural poor in their place) rather better than it does elsewhere, precisely because the reforms undertaken by the Sandinistas went beyond ‘merely institutional measures’, to address the issue of the empowerment of the poor as full citizens. There are five major implications here for the Diamond, Linz and Lipset approach. Firstly, the importance of relating political and institutional developments to the specific character of capitalist development is strongly confirmed. Political options and strategies cannot be reduced to it, but neither can they be understood in isolation from it. Secondly, the establishment of political democracy in the sense of full citizenship, even leaving aside social and economic content, is seen to require shifts in relations of power. Thirdly, wherever pressure for political rights comes from below, it comes as part of a broader struggle which is bound to include social and economic demands. Democracy is of value ‘for itself‘, as Diamond, Linz and Lipset suggest; but the project of limiting it to narrowly construed political rights is conceivable only where it is handed down from above in a reflection of elite interests and popular impotence to challenge them. Such a strategy can work only if the institutions through which the poor are linked to the political process are democratic only in form, rather than in content. Fourthly, then, clientelism, along with repression, plays a vital part in maintaining such a situation, by stripping formally democratic institutions of any accountable or representative character, and rendering them channels for the maintenance of dominant class hegemony. Fifthly, social movements expressive of the autonomous democratic projects of the dispossessed may challenge the limits of liberal democracy, but they may also, in certain circumstances, be central ingredients in bringing about the full extension of citizenship which makes liberal democracy a reality. In the light of these considerations we may return to the case studies in the Diamond, Linz and Lipset collection. All the contributors struggle with the framework laid down by the editors, which condemns them to combine encapsulated national histories with serial consideration of each of the specified ‘theoretical dimensions’ in turn. In addition, practically every study is vulnerable to a critique founded upon the points listed above. Some are less valuable than others, and will not detain us. Levy on Mexico, for example, lacks any organizing idea of his own, while Lamounier approaches Brazil through the filter of classical political philosophy, and in an oblique manner which all but buries a number of telling analytical insights. Of the rest, Hartlyn on Colombia pays lip-service to the idea of the autonomy of politics, but actually does a good job in linking clientelism to class projects, and identifying structural obstacles to change; McClintock on Peru avoids even lip-service, and concludes that, because of the severity of Peru’s structural problems, ‘Peru’s political leaders seemed able to achieve either: (1) social and economic reform on behalf of the nation’s impoverished majority; or (2) consensus-building and the maintenance of a liberal political process; but not both’ (p. 373); and Levine, on Venezuela, notes the zy Democracy and Development in Latin America 545 symbiotic relationship between powerful mass organizations and skilled leadership, although he still tends to downplay the extent to which repression and co-optation were used in the decade after 1958 to neutralize the radical potential of mass organizations attached to the ruling party itself, and to resist a clearly available reading of the politics of the period as a successful institutionalization of dominant class hegemony. In this connection his conclusion that the Venezuelan case offers the lesson that it is necessary to ‘encourage civilian political participation and spur free associational life’ is misleading, particularly when compared to the more balanced view expressed earlier that ‘social and political activity of all kinds is channeled through the party organizations and concentrated in a limited range of arenas, especially electoral competition’ (p. 259). However, these are three balanced and respectable contributions. In contrast, the studies of Waisman on Argentina, Valenzuela on Chile, Gillespie and Gonzalez on Uruguay and Wiarda on the Dominican Republic illustrate the analytical deficiencies noted above, as a more detailed analysis will reveal. Despite the formal unity provided by the common chapter structure, the theoretical framework proves so permissive that these authors are able to pursue pet theories of their own unhindered. Waisman argues that Peron succeeded in Argentina, with negative consequences for democracy, because the Argentine elite panicked in the face of what they wrongly thought was a communist threat; Valenzuela argues the case for Chilean exceptionalism on the basis of early democratic incorporation of the majority along ‘European’ lines; Gillespie and Gonzalez attribute Uruguay’s lapse from democracy to the flawed structure of the party system; and Wiarda makes his familiar pitch for the relevance of an authoritarian cultural tradition derived from Hispanic colonial practice. In each case, when these arguments are approached from a process perspective, along lines suggested by the critique outlined above, they are shown to be seriously misleading. Waisman argues that elite hegemony was lost in Argentina in the wake of the depression. He then narrows this argument down to the assertion that it was the irrational fear of revolution on the part of key non-economic elites (the military, the Church, anti-liberal conservatives and right-wing nationalists) which led to the rise of Peron to power. This ‘distorted political knowledge’created the space, in his view, for the emergence of a radically protectionist and corporatist regime entirely inconsistent with the social and economic structure of the country. But capitalist development requires not only the containment of class struggle, but also a viable process of productive investment (a strategy of accumulation). The failure of the latter in Argentina as a consequence of the depression was central to the loss of hegemony by agrarian elites, and it was this which directly prompted, for good or ill, the radical protectionism espoused by Peron. Policies of labour incorporation followed as much from this as from an inordinate fear of revolution. In his fascination with theories of cognitive dissonance, Waisman entirely ignores this aspect of the situation. Once Peronism is placed in the context of a broader evaluation of the process of capitalist development in post-depression Argentina, his monomania itself appears a reflection of distorted knowledge. Valenzuela’s contribution on Chile takes us from the general issue of the centrality of the process of capitalist development to the specific theme of clientelism. He argues that Chile was exceptional, if not unique in Latin America, in that conservatives embraced the extension of suffrage in the nineteenth century, in a strategy not unlike zyx zyxwvut 546 P. Cammack that employed in Britain in a similar period. This set in motion a process of peaceful incorporation of the majority into the electorate, and led to the survival of democratic politics into the 1970s. This argument, a triumph of formalism over substantive content, is exploded by the analysis of clientelism outlined above. As Valenzuela reports in some detail, conservative backing for the extension of suffrage reflected their awareness that by mobilizing their dependent peasant clienteles they could regain the control of the state they had lost, and subsequently neutralize the growing urban working class vote. In structural terms, therefore, this strategy represented the exact opposite of the British case, where Conservatives and Liberals alike appealed to the urban working-class vote, and gained a substantial foothold before the Labour Party came into being. Valenzuela’s argument backfires, as it suggests that the conscious purpose of the conservative strategy in Chile was to deny full citizenship t o the majority of the population, in order to protect their own narrow interests. For most of the twentieth century they used their electoral reserves to protect backward agriculture and block reform; and when the majority showed signs of pressing for both full citizenship and substantive reform, they abandoned their commitment to ‘democracy’ altogether. The argument offered by Gillespie and Gonzalez in relation to Uruguay takes us further into the question of clientelism and its links to class interests. They attribute the failure of democracy there in 1973 primarily to the weakness of the party and electoral system, in conjunction with economic stagnation, and in particular to the ‘double simultaneous vote’, which tends to encourage factionalism and party fractionalization. In so doing, they specifically reject the claim that the country remained under the tutelage of the oligarchy up to that time as ‘a form of rhetoric’ rather than ‘an objective statement’(p. 209). They also dismiss claims for the centrality of clientelism, citing in their support Solari’s description of it, offered in 1967, as a ‘self-defeating practice’. However, on their own account Uruguay’s leaders ‘have long been more adept at building consensus than at implementing reforms’ (p. 236). The Blanco and Colorado parties were able to reach an accommodation with each other ‘once the progressive Colorados abandoned hopes of land reform’(p. 21 1). They did so through the extensive penetration of agencies and state enterprises by party factions, erecting a spoils system on the basis of the sources of patronage thus provided. This had the virtue of winning middle-class support and maintaining elite control, much as in Colombia after 1957. But at the same time, as Gillespie and Gonzalez note, it hampered efficient government, and contributed to economic decline. However, they seem determined to overlook the broad implications of their material. First, these arrangements did perpetuate oligarchic control (however imprecise the term), as they were intended to do. In particular, they provided a barrier to reform. Second, clientelism, a means of achieving oligarchic unity and hegemony in conditions of economic reverse similar to those experienced in Argentina, became a source of weakness from the 1960s as an increasingly autonomous logic of factional struggle for spoils came to dominate over policy considerations. Solari is right to describe clientelism as self-defeating, but Gillespie and Gonzalez should make something of the fact that democracy collapsed in Uruguay not long after the judgement was made. They note that ‘the fractionalization of parties played a positive role in certain crucial respects during the first twenty years of the century, but a negative one in the twenty years preceding the coup’(p. 232). But they fail to relate this observation to the dynamic which linked the initial protection of class interests zyx zy Democracy and Development in Latin America 541 through joint party access to state patronage, the consequent avoidance of reform, and the eventual degeneration of clientelism, leading to the dominance of the logic of spoils over the logic of class alliance in pursuit of hegemony and capitalist development. The double simultaneous vote was the means through which the system perpetuated itself. But by failing to see its place in this chain of events Gillespie and Gonzalez arrive at a superficial analysis which makes it impossible to understand why such an apparently perverse electoral system has been retained for so long. As a result they make it appear, quite wrongly, that a purely institutional analysis can account for the collapse of democracy. They are then able to offer an institutional change as a precondition for a more stable democracy, without having to trouble themselves with the shifts in power that would be required to alter the structural situation which accounts for the current institutional framework. Finally, I turn to Wiarda’s examination of democracy in the Dominican Republic. He argues that if democracy has only recently been established there, and on a fragile basis at that, it is because of the continuing vitality of an authoritarian, corporatist, and hierarchical tradition dating from the colonial period. Recent use of patronage and strong executive power, and ‘governmentalassistance to trade union, peasant and professional associations’(a coy euphemism for state corporatism, which is officially frowned upon in this collection) are depicted as ‘attempts by a manifestly democratic regime to accommodate and reconcile itself to that other tradition’ (p. 454). One’s confidence in this argument is tested at the outset by the fact that the editors see the need to signal their disagreement with it in their preface (p. xiv), and a cursory examination reveals that, even by Wiarda’s notoriously lax standards, it is extremely weak. In fact, he himself contradicts it in three different ways. First, he states persistently throughout the chapter that Spanish colonial institutions collapsed as early as 1550, leaving virtually no trace behind. Second, after 20 laborious pages he offers the view that ‘the differences even between these two traditions [authoritarian and democratic] have not been that great’ (p. 445). And third, when he comes to the one modern regime that fits his authoritarian mould, that of Trujillo (1930-61), he comes clean and admits that it was novel in its use of ‘modern organisational, technological, and informational techniques’ (pp. 432-3), and that its explicit corporatist structure was based on contemporary European parallels, rather than a late flowering of the transplanted fifteenth-century Spanish psyche. The significance of all this is that Wiarda’s cultural argument allows him to avoid drawing for the case of the Dominican Republic exactly the moral drawn for the cases of Brazil and Colombia by Grzybowski and Zamosc above: the landed elites of the demi-island have simply moved from a strategy of repression of the demands of the impoverished majority (most notoriously, with the aid of 20,000 US marines, in 1965) to one of practising a form of state-orchestrated clientelism which continues to deny them meaningful citizenship. The materials for a better understanding are present in Wiarda’s statements that the ‘Dominican countryside . . . remains backward and semi-feudal, dominated by patron-client relationships’ (p. 442) and that the political system ‘is based strongly on patronage, and has a patronage intensive style of politics’ (p. 449), but his all-purpose reliance on a mythical authoritarian tradition dispenses with the need to look for links in the present between dominant class interests and formal and informal political institutions. As we have seen, he is thus able to present a manifestly authoritarian political practice as the work of sincere democrats struggling with a recalcitrant heritage, rather than as the accommodation of formally democratic zyxw zyxwvutsr zyxw zyx 548 P. Cammack institutions to the demands of class power. As it happens, this exactly parallels the ‘white legend’ peddled by Skidmore in the Stepan collection, to the effect that Castello Branco, the first of the military presidents, was a sincere democrat who constructed an authoritarian system to keep worse tyrants at bay. In each case the argument functions as a justification for departures from democracy. We may now turn to Lehmann’s essay on democracy and development in Latin America. It resembles nothing so much as the cluttered sitting-room of an elderly relative, in which one recognizes that the articles gathered together have a meaning for the owner, but rather wonders what it is. Nothing has been thrown away. Alongside the lengthy accounts of the political economy of import-substituting industrialization and the theology of liberation we find disquisitions on Argentine nationalism in the 1930s, O’Donnell, dependency theory, land reform and NGOs, policy advice on the setting-up of co-operatives, and much more besides. Whatever else it may be, it is not the ‘autobiography of a generation’. In this claim, as elsewhere, creative indulgence has been carried too far. This is a pity, as many passing judgements reflect mature consideration. Lehmann is aware of the deficiencies of state intervention in the past, rightly faulting state-led industrialization for being too mindful of the privileges of dominant economic groups and too easily captured by them - too conservative, in other words, rather than too radical (pp. 37-8). He is intermittently hopeful that the emphasis on citizenship characteristic of the new social movements may lead, through the proliferation of schemes for communal self-management (basismo), t o the ‘modernization of the state and of institutions of political representation’(p. 147). And he notes the use of clientelism to stifle the development of autonomous initiatives from below, and the ‘sacrifice of principles’ (p. 153) involved in liberal calls for moderation in present circumstances in Latin America. But he is no more willing to engage in a sustained analysis of the power structures underlying those circumstances than they are, and as a result his position is no less impotent. He demonstrates repeatedly the failings of the Latin American state, and its continued reliance upon repression and clientelism, then calmly turns round in his conclusion t o urge that it needs ‘to develop mechanisms of response to the grassroots which are non-clientelistic and transparent’ (p. 195). This parallels precisely the Linz, Diamond and Lipset call for courageous leadership, and betrays the same lack of realism in ignoring what has gone before. He is forced, in consequence, to a similar conclusion: that a ‘realistic’ basista approach should recognize at the outset the risks involved in macro-style structural reform, and the indigence and inefficiency of the state (p. 199). In doing so though, as he immediately notes, it stands in danger of becoming a form of self-exploitation, as grassroots participation obviates the need for an outlay of state resources. Despite these failings, Lehmann’s account does capture many of the weaknesses of social movements as agents for change. Their initial aspiration for autonomy cannot be translated into a continued refusal to have no dealings with the state. Mainwaring, Alvarez and Keck, in their Brazilian studies, all bring out the dilemmas which faced social movements which found genuinely reform-minded governments willing to listen to them rather than to enlist them as powerless clients. Brizola in the state of Rio, the opposition PMDB state government in S g o Paulo, and the post-1985 Ministry of Labour under Pazzianotto were far from perfect, but they offered a degree of access to state power which could not be ignored. In asimilar manner, the pitfalls of too close an entanglement with political parties are rehearsed throughout these various collections; but if the paths of social movements and political parties committed to change zy zyxwvu Democracy and Development in Latin America 549 were never to cross, the prospects for effective contestation of power would be bleak. Church-based movements offer optimum conditions for autonomous organization precisely because the Catholic Church is constrained from making too close an alliance with particular political parties. However, the contribution by Mainwaring and Levine to the Eckstein collection makes graphic use of two representative life histories (from Brazil and Colombia respectively) to remind us that base communities are as likely to be agents of depoliticization in the hands of aconservative hierarchy (as they are in Colombia) as agents for politicization and change (as they are in Brazil). Even here, as Della Cava’s account (in Stepan) of the motivating forces behind the radicalization of the Brazilian hierarchy and its subsequent retrenchment makes clear, a movement back to a more conservative position under strong pressure from the Vatican can quickly drain the radical edge from the institutional church, and put its most outspoken reformers under a vow of silence. Mainwaring’s case study in the same collection confirms the point that social movements with their origins in Church initiatives need to move out of them at some stage into more overtly political activity if they are to succeed. Even so, the link between social movements and parties remains problematic. Lehmann reports Ruth Cardoso’s scepticism that social movements can prosper while turning their backs on parties (pp. 74-9, while Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in his contribution to the Stepan volume, rightly defends the MDB in the 1970s and early 1980s as a mass vehicle for democratization in Brazil. Similarly, contributions on Chile (Garreton) and Brazil (Alves) to the Eckstein collection confirm that pressure for change was most sustained when party political activism and pressure from below were working together to the same end. Both the registration drive which led to the ousting of Pinochet and the mass movement for democracy which narrowly failed to achieve its objective of direct presidential elections in Brazil were led by political parties. Then again, the (P)MDB has since reverted to being a conservative and clientelistic political machine, and Cardoso himself has despaired of it, and moved on. In fact, the point is not to choose between democratic parties and social movements, but to recognize that, given present relations of power in the region, the deficiencies of each as agents for change often reflect the weakness and the previous defeats of the actors involved with them. If the analysis is taken no further than this, though, it leads to undue pessimism. If the new democracies are resistant to claims for reform, it is not only because they have been captured by conservative interests; it is also because of serious weaknesses of their own. The state ceased to function as an instrument of effective intervention on behalf of the dominant classes long before the military left power. Fishlow’s account (in Stepan) of the evolution of Brazilian economic policy under Geisel and Figueiredo, provides ample evidence of the loss of authority and efficacy in what had earlier been a powerful force for the furtherance of elite interests. Even in the 1970s, as he remarks, ‘the Brazilian problem, at root, was a weak, not a strong state’(p. 96). The extent of this weakness was dramatically revealed in the total loss of capacity to make effective economic policy in the early 1980s. By and large, this point can be generalized to the region as a whole. The elites who have inherited the state have been unable to establish a new pattern of accumulation, or to promote the kind of fundamental reforms that might build general support for their regimes. Wickham-Crowley’s thorough and valuable analysis of guerrilla movements past and present (in the Eckstein collection) argues persuasively that these have been least successful where governments have responded with reform. As he zy 550 P. Cammack zyxwvut zyxwv points out, they continue today - in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru, where reform has been absent or ineffective. The general response on the part of elites to the economic crisis of the 1980s, centred upon the debt issue, has been to disengage the state, as far as possible, from any role in either welfare or intervention, in favour of a thoroughgoing economic liberalism. As a result, there is less of a state to which reformist parties or radical social movements can address themselves, and this offers a partial explanation for the shift that has taken place. At the same time, the activities of the interventionist states of the past have been crucial to the practice of co-optation through patronage politics which have kept ‘democracy’ within bounds, while the option of repression, though still in active use, has obvious costs and weaknesses in view of the negative repercussions of repressive military regimes of recent memory. As Campello de Souza’s insightful analysis of Brazil’s ‘New Republic’ (in the Stepan collection) makes clear, practices of clientelistic recruitment and control have been strengthened rather than weakened. Yet the general withdrawal of the state, under financial pressure, from social and economic intervention undermines the basis of continued patronage politics. In the closing essay of the Eckstein collection, Walton documents the tide of protest (50 separate protest events across 13 states by 1987) which has resulted from the austerity programmes of the decade. He argues that the social and economic depredations of recent years ‘have undermined the whole mechanism by which states cultivated legitimacy with apparent development’(p. 308), and shows that the protests have been launched against carefully selected targets by ‘organized working class communities through their associations’ (p. 320). He then concludes, in an implicit critique of the stance adopted by Eckstein herself and criticized above, that ‘a case for fundamental change requires a deeper reading of these events - one that shifts from questions about the causes, forms, and direct effects of protest to an interpretation of the connection between social unrest, the state, and the international system’ (p. 322). A starting point for such an analysis, I suggest, would be a recognition that the accepted principles of liberal democracy and current practice of liberal economic doctrines stand in flagrant contradiction to the two central strategies - co-optation and repression - upon which Latin American democracy generally continues to depend. Analysis of the new economic, social and political circumstances in Latin America from a consistent political economy perspective identifies the contradictions in present strategies of accumulation and legitimation. The significance of parties and social movements should be assessed in relation to these. Here, the centrality of an understanding of the process of capitalist development in the region again asserts itself. As noted above, rural movements, new unionism, women’s movements for day care, and urban movements for basic services all reflect direct struggles against facets of the present structure of capitalism in the region. If they are interpreted in those terms, in the light of a parallel analysis of the problems facing Latin American capitalism and its associated political forms, it will be possible to discern where the points of contact between the different movements might lie, and how projects might be developed for the coming together of parties and social movements behind broader and more ‘realistic’ programmes for substantive social change.