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ISBN 0-8078-5483-2

Published: Fall 2003

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Copyright (c) 2003 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Introduction

The principal phenomenon occurring throughout Latin America in recent decades, with effects that vary from country to country, is the disarticulation of the relations between state and society that have characterized it since the 1930s. This is accompanied by attempts to recompose those relations, and attendant changes in the development model and the way the region is inserted into the world. This breakdown could be permanent, or it could give way to positive recompositions in which the state, the system of representation—especially the party system—civil society actors, and the democratic regime that binds all the elements together, are simultaneously strengthened, made autonomous and complementary to one another. Such a decomposition and likely recomposition are carried out through four processes that are interrelated but that nevertheless have their own dynamics. None of these can be subordinated to another, nor can one be given priority over another, since all of them are immediate concerns.

The first process is to build working political democracies that counteract the de facto powers, guarantee representative majoritarian governments, advance citizenship, and channel social conflicts and demands. In addition to the incomplete tasks of the democratic transitions and the consolidation of institutions to prevent authoritarian regressions, the main challenges that these countries must face are those of the deepening quality and relevance of their democracies.

The second process is that of social democratization, which includes the phenomena of participation and overcoming growing inequalities. The main problem to address here, which affects all areas of social life and collective action, is the new nature of exclusion. The world of the excluded, which in some countries constitutes 60 or 70 percent, and which totals hundreds of millions throughout the region, tends to be defined today by their total marginalization and by the disregard with which the mainstream society treats them. Today the organizational and ideological resources that characterized exclusion in the national popular era and the era of so-called inward-oriented development, which prompted populist or revolutionary forms of mobilization, are absent.

The second phenomenon is multidimensional and has to do with the expansion and narrowing of citizenship. The concept of a territorial "polis"—the classic space of citizenship, the polity—seems to be exploding. Citizenship has always been the demand and the recognition of a subject's bearing of rights before power and authority. This was identified early on as civil rights, later was associated with the right to belong to the "polis" (political rights), and was subsequently extended to economic and social rights. Today, gender relations, the media, the environment, and local and transnational systems are among the areas in which there are powers to be opposed and rights to be claimed. Therefore they constitute spaces of citizenship. People want to be citizens, and not merely to have access to justice, a minimum wage, and social and political rights. Yet these new areas are not recognized by the political institutions, a problem that evidently is not unique to Latin America. On the one hand the concept of citizenship is taking off and spreading. On the other hand, it has to contend with new exclusions.

The third process is that of the redefinition, beyond structural adjustment and autonomization of the economy from politics, of the development model. Here markets and international opening are not sufficient to redefine a process of insertion into a transnationalized economy that has to integrate all of society and not merely the "included" part. If the inward-oriented development model seems to have run its course, it is unlikely that inequalities and the problem of exclusion can be resolved within the framework of the new model that is being implemented in the region. Due to economic growth, there seems to have been a reduction in poverty, but not inequality, in several countries. If a process of redistribution is not brought about, however, there is a limit to this growth. One must bear in mind that the redistributive dimensions should be carried out in a democratic, noncoercive framework. To accomplish this, the formation of large political majorities is needed. And today, such redistribution would involve not only economic resources but also information, knowledge, communication, organization, and diversified mechanisms of power. All that entails a strengthening of the role of the state as the fundamental agent of development, social integration, and redistribution in a context of greater autonomy of economic phenomena that must be regulated.

The fourth process—which in a sense encompasses the previous ones yet has its own specificity—is that of defining an alternative model of modernity, in other words, the constitution of social subjects and the generation of collective action. The classic expressions of collective action (populism, clientelism, revolutionary ideologies, antiimperialist nationalism, etc.) are widely challenged today by two models of modernity that are fighting for control. One model involves the marriage of market and technocratic rationality with mass media culture, which wipes out collective identities and memories. The other model is the invocation of historical community and identity (religious, ethnic, or a combination of the two), which brings the risk of new fundamentalisms. Between these models lies a void of subjects and collective action.

Any successful unfolding of these processes will depend on the emergence of political projects that manage to respect diversity without breaking down society into particularisms; incorporate technological and scientific rationality without suppressing the expressive-communicative dimension or historical memory; generate coalition-building capacity without overlooking societal conflicts; and generate capacity for representation without falling into ideological voluntarisms. There is no single social subject or single political actor that can face this task and be the sole bearer of a project of this sort.

The role of intellectuals lies in elaborating and implementing projects that can account for this complexity. The fulfillment of these tasks, always ambiguous and ambivalent, will force them to abandon messianic prophesying and subordination to new forms of technocratic domination. In addition, it will require joining a knowledge of reality and of what it hides with utopian, always partial, visions of the possible and the desirable.

In the Latin American context, the Chilean case has been wrongly judged to be a double transition: a transition to the so-called market economy, considered "successful," and to democracy, considered "exemplary." Neither assessment seems accurate, though they may serve to give undue satisfaction to those who through blood and fire assembled a difficult-to-change economic model that gave rise to profound upheaval and huge inequalities, and who had prepared a transition to a limited democracy riddled with authoritarian inheritances. In this framework, the opposition to the dictatorship had to accept both economic and political determinants and, as a government, later had to become embroiled in a struggle that was not always successful—not to prevent an authoritarian regression, a goal that was already assured, or to consolidate a limited democracy, but to correct the economic model and achieve full democracy.

Transformations of the political system, especially those involving democratizations, and their relations with the whole of society in Latin America and Chile, make up the central topics of this book. This study cannot be understood without the twofold reference to an intellectual and a political trajectory.

This study is heir to the intellectual tradition of Latin American sociology and Chilean social thought and, thus, to the trajectory it has followed. It is also an attempt to move away from ideology and the determinisms permeating that tradition. This search, at once engaged and removed, for an interpretation of situations that have been experienced firsthand and have affected the course of our lives, was begun under the Chilean military dictatorship, though all the chapters of this book were written under the new democratic regime. My ongoing involvement in intellectual debate, the founding of working groups and networks, discussions, seminars, and teaching in Chile and internationally have been instrumental in this search, as have my professional involvement in social science research and ongoing participation in political debate through self-critical polemics, participation in democratic struggles, the renewal of ideological thinking, and programmatic development.

Thus, topics considered over the last ten years, many of which have had preliminary versions published elsewhere, are revisited and reworked here. The reader should not be surprised to have already read some of these studies and should accept the reiteration of certain ideas throughout the chapters, as well as the deliberately cursory treatment they receive in certain sections, since they are developed more fully in others.

The book is divided into two parts. The first concerns Latin America and begins with the elaboration of analytical orientations in the first chapter. In the following two chapters, I reflect on the transformations that are redefining the historical context of Latin America. In that framework I take stock of the theories about and processes of democratization. Subsequent chapters consider the transformation of the state, the meaning of social policies, the crisis of representation, and the role of political parties. I end with some brief reflections on civil society and political culture in the region.

The second part, focused on Chile, is presented in three chapters. First, I examine the fall of democracy; I then look at the struggle for its recovery, and finally, I assess the Chilean political democratization undergone in the last decade. The epilogue is devoted to conclusions on the prospects for Latin American and Chilean democracies.