Rethinking Latin America

Development, Hegemony, and Social Transformation

R. Munck

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137004116
• eBook ISBN: 9781137290762
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In a subtle but powerful reading of the shifting relationships between development, hegemony, and social transformation in post-independence Latin America, Ronaldo Munck argues that Latin American subaltern knowledge makes a genuine contribution to the current search for a social order which is sustainable and equitable.

1

Placing Latin America

Placing Latin America might sound like an odd place to start. After all, we all know where Latin America is situated on the global map. But when we dig a bit deeper, even the term “Latin America” itself is doubtful given the non-Latin origins of many of its peoples. We thus do need to situate this world zone politically, historically, and culturally if we are to understand its specific characteristics. What is probably most noticeable is how the very different “placings” of Latin America that have been developed, seemingly coexist without apparent strains or contradictions. First we look at Latin America as part of the “West,” albeit a backward zone that still has not undergone the full modernization treatment and achieved modernity, defined in fairly ethnocentric ways. This is the classic modernization theory view and one that underlies much of the area-studies approaches to Latin America. We then counterpose to this a view of Latin America as part of the “East,” a semicolonial “Third World” region or, one that is posited as an exotic exemplar of magical realism, the Other to the West. Indigenismo can be read, for example, as a new form of Orientalism. Much as the West needed Orientalism to create its own identity, Latin America needs indigenismo to become what it is. We can also then pursue an analysis based on the route of hybridity in which Latin America is seen to be “Betwixt” and between the West and the East, sharing some characteristics of both in a novel form of cultural mestizaje. On the face of it this might seem more fruitful than the binary opposition of West versus East but problems remain as we shall see. We also look at Latin America as a Post-world, that is as postcolonial—albeit quite a long time ago—and postmodern, which is a much more controversial reading, but one which throws up many interesting contradictions of the contemporary Latin American condition. Finally, I advance a “Political” reading of Latin America’s place in the world, starting with an introduction of some of Gramsci’s key concepts, to be later expanded on in subsequent chapters. I would argue that to rethink Latin America there is an urgent need to bring the political back to center stage, in a field where it is cultural characterizations that tend to prevail after the decline of economistic readings. This chapter thus sets the terrain for the subsequent historical/structural reading of Latin American development.

West

Latin America as we know it today was originally called the “West Indies” given that the Spanish Conquistadores thought they had arrived in India. Since then, this part of the Americas has been an integral part of the story of the West. It entered this stream later than North America and Europe—at the start of the nineteenth century—but that was only because that was when the independence movement came to fruition. The reference points of this independence movement were the Enlightenment values of rationality, order, and science. There was never any doubt that South America, Central America, and Mexico were part of the West. It would have come as a great shock, for example, in Argentina in the 1950s, to find out that the country was now to be classified as “underdeveloped” in the new Western (or North American) paradigm of development.

It was one of Argentina’s early political leaders, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–1888) who most clearly articulated the Latin American choice: Civilization or Barbarism. For Sarmiento, when independence was declared in 1810, “there were two different, incompatible and rival societies: two diverse civilizations: the one Spanish, European, civilized and the other barbarian, American, almost Indian” (Sarmiento [1845] 2004, p. 77). Civilization is created through commerce and urbanization, which will, in turn, lead to progress. Conversely, the gaucho and the Indian live on the pampas, isolated from civilized life and that can only lead to barbarism. The savage campaign of extermination of the indigenous populations in the so-called Campaña del Desierto (Desert Campaign) of 1878–1879 was acknowledged as an “injustice” by Sarmiento but thanks to it, he argued, the country was “today occupied by the Caucasian race, the most perfect the most intelligent, the most beautiful and the most progressive of all that populate the earth.”

Another of Argentina’s early leaders Juan Bautista Alberdi expressed this matter most clearly: “Nostros, europeos de raza y de civilización, somos los dueños de América” (We Europeans by race and civilization are the owners of America). The non-European Other would have to be eliminated if not physically (although Argentina did pretty well on this front) at least in terms of any significant role, cultural, or otherwise. This was part of a process of self-definition of the criollo elite that, while breaking from Europe, needed to recreate itself as Europeans in America and most certainly not as people to be classified with the inferior indigenous American peoples. Right up to Jorge Luís Borges the theme of civilization versus barbarism saw Europe as the privileged site of progress and America as its opposite. Race was also a critical marker of difference and creator of social differentiation, with whites (criolllos) above the Amerindians or simply Indians, not to mention the black African slaves.

In the early twentieth century, Europe represented modernity for Latin America, which at best could only aspire to a peripheral form of modernity. Thus, for example, from the last third of the nineteenth century the Buenos Aires elites “were imagining and constructing a colonial city based on a European model” (Sarlo 2000, p. 10). This “Paris of the South” not only copied French architectural styles but also the sewerage, water, and lighting systems. This technical modernity, which came to fruition in the 1920s and 1930s, also had profound cultural effects. As Beatriz Sarlo puts it, “Beginning with new perceptions of time and space these changes generate new forms of subjectivity” (Sarlo 2000, p. 110). What began as a copy of a European model was beginning to achieve its own identity and also generated a strong sense of modern urbanism.

As the Second World War came to a close, the clearly victorious power within the West—the United States—began to articulate a new modernization paradigm. Certainly since the 1930s at least, the United States was beginning to articulate a strong cultural and economic presence in the region. But the definitive decline of British (and French) imperialism after the Second World War created the space for a new US imperialism based on the economic power of the corporations and the cultural pull of the new “American way of life.” Development was seen as a one-way process, a continuum along which all countries progress, it was just that some were further along the way than others. Modernization theory in the 1950s was an integral element of the newfound hegemonic role of the United States at that time: it created a model designed to discipline the development process and channel it in a direction less likely to lead to communism. The Cold War was the overarching framework for development theories and practice for this whole period.

Thus Walt Rostow’s classic text on the stages of economic growth was significantly subtitled A Non Communist Manifesto (Rostow 1960). Latin America was characterized as being in transition from a traditional society to a modern society, but only if it adopted the correct policies. The stages of economic growth, as outlined by Rostow, were quite mechanical and had a certain air of universal inevitability about them. It was a quite ethnocentric approach as well, with Hispanic traditionalism considered a distinct handicap vis-a-vis the Protestant ethic supposedly characterizing North America’s settlers. In Latin America it was Gino Germani’s Política y Sociedad en un epoca de transition (Germani 1965) that most clearly and intelligently articulated this modernization approach. His main argument was that Latin America needed to move from the institutionalization of the traditional to the institutionalization of change. Germani was born in Italy in 1911 but emigrated to Argentina in 1934. Banned during the Peronist era (1946–1955) because of his strong opposition to Peronism, which he linked with fascism, he effectively founded sociology in Argentina in 1955 with strong US linkages. This functionalist analysis of social change was deemed conservative by his critics, but his critique of “totalitarianism” was probably based on his imprisonment by Mussolini (who was, indeed, admired by Perón). Scientific sociology, for Germani, needed to be based on universal concepts, theories, and methods, hence his commitment to US sociology. Interestingly, when Germani left Argentina in 1966, driven out by the military dictatorship, his sociology began to take on a more critical edge. Increasingly his modernization perspective began to shift toward an understanding of social transformation rather than simply seeking to stifle it. Today this migrant-led national sociology is beginning to have an impact again and Germani has an honorable place in Latin American critical sociology.

At one level we can see modernization theory as a simple cover for rationalization of westernization, hence its inclusion in this section. This was the West placing itself at the center or apex of civilization, contrasting itself favorably with the traditional, backward, and underdeveloped rest, or its Other. It also most certainly acted as a legitimating discourse for the neocolonial approach by the United States toward Latin America from the 1950s onward. While this ideological critique is justified, it is also vital to focus on the analytical failings of the approach. It almost completely downplayed power inequalities and differentials in society, and there was no room for social class (or other) contradictions or struggles. With inequality within and between countries being an all-pervasive factor determining development paths, and with an abundance of social and political conflicts arising from it, this neglect was a basic explanatory flaw. It was essentially a political framework to maintain the status quo.

The notion of modernization theory as a disciplinary agency is based to a large extent on the work of Michel Foucault. Western development theory, particularly during the Cold War period (1945–1985), needed to construct “underdevelopment” as a means to dominate, restructure, and impose its authority over the postcolonial world. In many ways this objective carries on to the present day, for example, with the World Bank’s concern for “good governance” in developing countries, which is still based on the assumed superiority of Western development models. In terms of Foucault’s knowledge-power paradigm, it is necessary to possess knowledge in order to dominate. This discourse is designed to subordinate and contain the rebellious postcolonial subject. Rather than a frontal contestation of the modernization paradigm—as posed by dependency theory—this critique bids us to reappropriate the indigenous, autonomous, and localized strategies to construct “another” development based on different values (see Escobar 2000).

Countering the “made in the USA” modernization theory was Latin America’s own indigenous development theory, known as the dependency approach or paradigm (see Kay 1989). While in its more grounded variants—such as the Cardoso and Faletto classic Dependency and Development in Latin America (Cardoso and Faletto 1969, 1979)—it was a nuanced structural-historical take on development and its relationship to social classes, it also had a much cruder manifestation. The later trend, best exemplified by the work of Andre Gunder Frank (1970)—elevated outside Latin America to “the” dependency theorist—often seemed to just reverse the modernization discourse to create its binary opposite. Where one saw the diffusion of capital into backward areas as the key to development, the other saw it as simply developing underdevelopment. Diffusion of innovation would develop the traditional areas for one and simply create stagnation and de-capitalization for the other. Creating a mirror image of a theory is probably not the best way to move critical analysis forward. The main issue was that modernization and dependency theory both took for granted and saw as natural the nation-state framework. National economic development was the objective and the state would play a crucial role in that process. Inevitably the diversity of social interests—and the capital/wage-labor conflict in particular—was somewhat subsumed under this paradigm. A social transformation perspective on the development process in Latin America would stress, rather, the emergence and development of social classes and class conflict. From the colonial period, different social groupings were vying for hegemony and to impose their particular interests as the general interest. Landowners, industrialists, urban workers, rural smallholders, artisans, and others, all had diverse social interests. It was the struggle for hegemony that set a particular development path and determined the modalities of social transformation in each country. National development choices were really the outcome of class development and struggle, not something emerging spontaneously.

Ultimately the modernization and simple dependency approaches shared a methodological nationalism that took the nation-state note to be a natural and self-sufficient envelope for the development process. They also shared a strong economism that led them to ignore or at least downplay the political process, not to mention the cultural dimension. They were also equally teleological in assuming a given end-station for the development process. For modernization theory the end of the journey was to be a consumer based modernity á la United States, while for the dependency approach it was socialism á la Cuba, based on an ill-defined delinking from the global system. Both thus rejected the complexity of history, the contradictions of the accumulation process in a context of class struggle, and that the future is open to different outcomes and not present in some original DNA pattern of development or underdevelopment. We could go further in relation to a critique of the dependency approach from a postcolonial stance. In a way dependency shares with modernization theory a strong attachment to modernity as an overarching perspective and a commitment to the logos of development. It is very much centered on the nation-state that it takes as the unproblematized unit of analysis and the sovereign subject of development as it were. But some authors have gone further and accused the dependency approach of ignoring culture and the politics of representation leading to a general ethnocentrism bordering on Orientalism (Kapoor 2008, p. 10). Europe is still seen as the universal model against which development on the periphery is judged and deemed (in)adequate. For their part, the broad-brush visions of capital accumulation on a world scale run the risk of submerging the local and creating a totalizing narrative that itself may disable alternative accounts of and strategies for development. We should maybe direct ourselves instead to the more complex cultural and political boundaries that shape the subaltern consciousness in the majority world.

A post-dependency approach would need to break out of its binary opposition with regard to modernization theory. We might still question, of course, whether the structures of domination located by the dependency theorists in Latin America have simply been superseded in the era of “interdependent” globalization (see Cardoso 2001). Few progressive or critical analysts would argue today that the problems of development, as conventionally defined, have been overcome in Latin America. What is being challenged has more to do with the totalizing vision of dependency, one it shares with other modernist epistemologies. The challenge of a transformationalist approach would be to decolonize development knowledge and to adopt a more critical or deconstructionist approach toward the received terminology of development/dependency. We might thus consider more insecure forms of knowledge, a greater receptivity toward bottom-up or indigenous forms of knowledge, and less assurance in presenting a polished alternative to the status quo developed solely at the level of social and political theory.

With the emergence of globalization as the new modernization or development paradigm in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Latin America’s role would change yet again. The language of reform would be subverted to simplify a willingness to conform to the dictates of the new world order. Globalization, or actually existing neoliberal globalization to be precise, was seen as a smooth terrain, devoid of passions or conflicts. All could succeed in this new domain if only they followed the correct politics. Even more so than modernization theory, this paradigm ignored or even rejected the possibility of different/alternative development paths. There was only one right way to achieve development, and only reactionaries and those with vested interests (such as trade unions) could possibly refuse to reform for the common good. An exemplar of this trend in Latin America is Michael Reid’s Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul (Reid 2009) that focused on the misdiagnosis of Latin America’s development failures by “populists” and, somewhat anachronistically perhaps, on dependency theory. They were the causes of underdevelopment, not the asymmetric world system or the pro-market policies of neoliberalism.

At one level, we could say that globalization theory as the contemporary development prescription is simply the old modernization theory repackaged for the global era. It is probably more than just a rebadged modernization theory however. It is truly post-national and assumes a global terrain for the development of capitalism. Its strongest feature is perhaps its total rejection of any possible role for the state in the development process, which has always been there in the past. On a more positive note, the globalization approach tends to have at least a rhetorical commitment to equality, manifest, for example, in the shift from the neoliberal Washington Consensus to the more “socially responsible” Post Washington Consensus. In true liberal fashion it also articulates its elective affinity with democratization, whereas modernization had also seen the value of authoritarianism to achieve its aims.

Globalization can, of course, be read as Westernization writ large. In Latin America many critical social analysts would tend to read it as simply the latest “made in the USA” externally imposed theoretical and disciplinary framework. It is seen as seeking to naturalize what is effectively a strategy of the US corporations to expand their domination. It can, most certainly, lead to a “flattening” of national realities, all seen as mere reflections of an overarching globalization process. It can also be seen as disempowering if social transformation is now seen possible only at a global level through the formation of global social movements. The rather vacuous concept of global civil society might not mean that much “on the ground” where the state is still very much a real player and people’s social imagination is more local than national, let alone global.

East

While Latin America is, indeed, a peripheral, late-developing, and, arguably, dependent part of the West, it is also different from the advanced industrial societies. Walt Rostow asked himself in the 1950s if Latin America was part of the general case of transition from traditional to modernity or if, rather, it was “among the lucky offspring of already transitional Europe” (Rostow 1960, p. 10). Unfortunately he found that Latin America was not to follow the path of the other settler societies of North America and Australia and had to go through all the stages of development from traditional society, through takeoff to the blessed age of high mass—consumption. That is to say, speaking plainly, that Latin America would need to earn its place in the West. While it might aspire to the status of its northern neighbors, fortunately settled by English (and some French?) settlers, it was for now in another place.

Walt Rostow was, of course, largely symptomatic of the modernization discourse as a whole. While he recognized that “Latin American cases vary among themselves” (Rostow 1960, p. 19), overall he saw the region as part of a general or universal story of modernization. Presumably it would not take the “European offspring” route of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand because its settlement was not by Anglo-Saxon Protestants, but the rather dubious Iberians. Certainly the “traditional Latin Europe and native traditional cultures” (Rostow 1960, p. 18) were deemed to be impediments to modernization by Rostow. What is also worth drawing attention to are the partially valid parallels that Rostow draws between his stage-of-grow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1  Placing Latin America
• 2  Conquest to Modernity (1510–1910)
• 3  Nation-Making (1910–1964)
• 4  Hegemony Struggles (1959–1976)
• 5  Market Hegemony (1973–2001)
• 6  Social Countermovement (1998–2012)
• 7  Globalization Within (1510–2010)
• References
• Index