This volume, edited by seasoned analysts of democratisation in Latin America, is part of a wide and growing body of literature on the so-called ‘pink tide’ in the region. The editors have sought to produce a catch-all volume that will serve as a topical introduction to the convoluted process of democracy-building in Latin America, with particular attention to the unprecedented electoral successes of the so-called left wing in the past decade and to the policies of incumbent ‘pink’ governments.
The breadth of the volume is quite astounding. It covers no less than 18 major themes, with contributions addressing the opportunities and challenges that present themselves on the road to viable democracies: methodological issues in the measurement of democratic consolidation and of the ambiguous notion of democratic ‘culture’; the public perception and legitimacy of liberal democratic institutions; the rule of law; executive–legislative relations; the role of old and new actors (the military, the old and emerging party systems); the role of the media in democratic consolidation; the relationships between democracy and, respectively, human rights, gender equality, economic growth, corruption, crime and citizen security; and the challenges of globalisation and social change for democracy. The most controversial and hence exciting part of the volume focuses expectedly on populism in the Andes, the ‘left’ in government, the impact of indigenous nationalism on the viability of the national state and of democratic polity, and the United States’ ambiguous role in democracy promotion.
The structure of the book is reasonably cohesive, although the editors' choice for the succession of themes is not explained adequately. The volume's introductory chapter feels like a foreword and the concluding chapter, in turn, stands as an introduction, which merely summarises the volume's chapters and attempts neither to identify emerging issues and future research themes nor to offer a synthetic theoretical reflection on the arguments built by the contributors. In fact, the volume does little in terms of advancing theoretical debates on democratisation from the empirical analyses featured, a necessary undertaking even for an introductory text.
The volume also offers a confrontation of ‘North’ and ‘South’ perspectives on democracy, which surprises by its perpetuation of anachronistic dichotomies made patent by the reconfiguration of world order generated by the United States' imperial overstretch, the sovereign debt crisis of the EU, and the emergence of new poles of capital accumulation (including in Latin America) and geopolitical shifts manifested in the substitution of the G-8 by the G-20. As such, one of the key deficiencies of the volume is its lack of a holistic approach to democratisation, which would allow the idiosyncrasies of the region to be analysed as constitutive of global processes, and globalisation to be analysed not as an external force but as the interface of domestic and international processes. As such, the volume ignores the evidence on the transnationalisation of production and the correlation between emerging transnational social forces, the neoliberal restructuring of state and society that followed the region's hyperinflationary crises in the early 1980s, and the shape that democratisation has taken in Latin America since.
At a deeper analytical level, addressing the transnationalisation of production would imply the need to analyse perhaps the fundamental theme of Latin American democratisation: the relationship between capitalism and democracy, manifested in the contradiction between the concentration of power in business forces (through deflationary policies, wage controls and privatisations), growing material inequalities and persistent social polarisation on the one hand, and the liberal rationality of universal access to citizenship, equal rights and, indeed, equal political power on the other. Yet the volume, by focusing on ‘institutional’ developments, misses the social content of these institutions. For example, Isaac Cohen's chapter on the relationship between the economic and the political addresses only in a superficial manner the impact of growth on democracy, neglecting to address how growth is generated, and the form that democracy takes as part of such growth patterns. Cohen's chapter perfectly illustrates the persistence of logics informed by positivism that inevitably lead to reification (turning internally related historical processes into things-in-themselves) in mainstream academia.
The unravelling of political and economic liberalisation efforts in Latin America at the turn of the twenty-first century has opened a window of opportunity for scholarship to make a serious attempt at dissolving the ontological, epistemological and methodological fragmentation of social fields (the ‘social’, ‘cultural’, ‘economic’ and ‘political’ spheres) painstakingly built and reproduced by mainstream academia. The volume edited by Millet, Holmes and Pérez unfortunately does not take on this challenge, in spite of Holmes' laudable critique of minimalist conceptualisations of democracy.
The issue is indeed, to what ‘ideal type’ democratic forms are the volume's contributions referring? Almost unfailingly, they refer to democracy in a liberal representative form (that is, polyarchy), based on heuristic measurements of the rule of law, of the existence of representative institutions of governance, of a ‘cold’ and rational bureaucratic apparatus, of a balance of power between the executive, legislative and judicial organs of the state. The problématiques featured in the volume are thus restricted to a closed system of meaning and norms, in line with dominant developmental discourses informed by Parsonian evolutionism. The contributors would readily acknowledge the limitations of minimalist definitions and the potential contradictions between economic restructuring and political democratisation, yet they swiftly overlook Holmes' initial reflections on broader conceptions of democratisation by taking polyarchy as a starting point for the purpose of empirical measurement, especially in relation to the ‘left’ in government, populism in the Andes, and indigenous movements.
Minimalist approaches may appropriately be criticised for ascribing autonomy to state life – that is, for their ‘statolatry’, to use Gramsci's terminology. Such statolatry causes inevitable gaps in a volume that has the ambition of addressing all ‘relevant’ issues in Latin American democratisation: it would be of salutary relevance to analyse the role of business confederations and of individual entrepreneurs in democratically elected governments (through the endemic phenomenon of ‘revolving doors’); to tackle key institutional developments, including the internationalisation of states and the depoliticisation of economic management that accompanied democratisation processes in the 1980s and 1990s; to focus on the possible contours of a reinvigorated state capitalist socio-economic order and its implications for democracy; and needless to say, to analyse in much greater depth the internal relationships between democratisation and production relations, which would help explain the mechanisms that underlie the contradictions between formal legal equality and substantial inequalities in the region.
Minimalist approaches unsurprisingly inform negative assessments of contemporary ‘deviations’ from Parsonian liberal modernity. Mitchell Seligson's endorsement of the volume (‘This cohesive volume provides a comprehensive analysis of recent trends away from democratization’) bluntly settles the ostensibly open-ended question of its title, and brings to light the contributions’ implicit claim: that the neo-populist stance of ‘pink’ governments is currently driving their nations away from democratisation.
Unsurprisingly, too, Hugo Chávez is yet again portrayed as a dangerous usurper of the public interest. The heterogeneity of the Chavista movement (constituted both by subaltern forces and emerging capitalist factions benefiting from state largesse, bureaucrats and professional sectors), the continued prevalence of market relations in Venezuela, and the pragmatic foreign policy of the Chávez government (at odds with his belligerent discourse) are silenced. So are the government's attempts to promote participatory forms of democracy and new poles of power (consejos comunales, misiones sociales) in a national polity historically conditioned by patrimonialism and crony capitalism.
The volume is therefore conspicuous not only for its comprehensiveness but also for its screaming silences. Its quality is not in doubt, but its façade of impartiality cannot veil its underlying political bias: it makes no mention of the fact that bastions of the conservative opposition in the state (senates, prefectures, municipalities, central banks) have hindered and redirected otherwise positive social and institutional reforms. It brushes under the carpet the vicious and sometimes brutal struggles of conservative and business forces against pink governments through such means as financing violent regionalist movements and initiating inflammatory referenda on regional sovereignty in the eastern departments of Bolivia, disrupting the proceedings of Bolivia's Constituent Assembly by various legal and extra-legal means in 2008, the respective coup attempts of 2002 and 2010 in Venezuela and Ecuador, and the successful 2009 coup in Honduras. These struggles have not only undermined alternative forms of governance, but have also unfailingly damaged polyarchy in the process.
Rather than concentrating merely on the ‘concentration of power’ taking place in the person of Chávez, an argument oblivious to the fact that highly centralised executive power is a hallmark of the region's constitutional orders, the editors would be well advised to promote analyses of the trajectories, shortfalls and potential benefits of Chávez's and other governments' attempts to alleviate the paradox of formal equality and real inequality through redistributive justice and the promotion of socialised forms of production and participatory forms of democracy. These attempts may be partial and likely to fail, but they cannot be buried under claims that authoritarian and anti-democratic ‘tendencies' are the only forces at play in these social spaces.
