Forrest D. Colburn's Latin America at the End of Politics
Berman, Paul
LATIN AMERICA AT THE END OF POLITICS by Forrest D. Colburn Princeton University Press, 2002 142 pp $35 cloth $14.95 paper FRANCIS FUKUYAMA introduced his notion of "The End of History"...
...Liberal democracy in Europe turned out to be a gated community, intended to create a perfect society for the fortunate populations within the gates, with alms and best DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 93 BOOKS wishes for the rest of the world...
...The argument stressed the role of impersonal and inevitable factors in world history, which are bound to lead to ever higher social developments, unto the End of History, which Fukuyama defined as liberal democracy...
...It was a new prestige for liberal democracy all over the world, sometimes also a political triumph...
...Forrest D. Colburn takes up this question in his own response to Fukuyama, Latin America at the End of Politics...
...Even the left-wing dictators, in Cuba and Nicaragua, were careful to wear their military uniforms...
...Colburn gazes at bookstores throughout the region...
...If income in Latin America were distributed as it is in the countries of Southeast Asia," Colburn explains, "poverty in Latin America would be reduced by four-fifths"—an astounding fact (even if I'm not entirely sure which countries should go under the rubric of Southeast Asia...
...Peru was one of the first countries to embrace a liberal democratic alternative...
...But, beginning in the middle 1990s, those claims became ever more difficult to sustain...
...And he argued that liberal democracy's triumph was going to be, all in all, a disappointment—a triumph of the gray, the ignoble, and the mediocre...
...the innumerable victims of Islamism in Afghanistan, and so on...
...In this way, the 1990s turned out to be a decade of liberal democracy in government—and of a certain kind of anti-statism in economics, all across Latin America, with a couple of exceptions here and there...
...It was a stimulating idea, if only because it challenged us to tally up the ways in which he was wrong—and right...
...Indeed, no revolution is ever really 'necessary.' There are no sufficient causes...
...He was systematic in his analyses, yet personal, too...
...A complete understanding of revolution necessarily leads one into the murky world of passion and imagination," he wrote...
...UnfortuDISSENT / Spring 2003 n 9 5 BOOKS nately, he was unable to report a success...
...Colburn is a political scientist who, in the early 1980s, was driven by the spirit of the age to spend a couple of years in Nicaragua, when the Sandinista People's Revolution was in its prime...
...Nor did the Islamic Republic of Iran turn out to be a success...
...And he produced, at last, a wideranging analysis of third world revolution as a whole—a series of general observations about Marxist and third worldist revolutions all over the planet: a truly global analysis...
...Government spending in the world's richest countries, measured against the gross domestic product, tends to be about double what it is in Latin America...
...Who does what, and to what effect...
...The Mexican Revolution during the 1930s and 1940s, Juan PerOn's corporatist dictatorship in Argentina, the Bolivian revolution of 1952, the Peruvian military coup of 1968— those were serious endeavors...
...This was a big question...
...He went to see with his own eyes...
...And yet there are so many problems, even apart from the distriDISSENT / Spring 2003 n 99 BOOKS bution of wealth...
...His argument reflected a deep knowledge of guerrilla affairs and the Latin American left, which made the book authoritative...
...but repression and defeat and even success took their toll...
...There is an end to ideological confrontation and contestation," he says...
...The Islamists were perfecting their technique of random massacres and suicide attacks—the technique whose true origin was the "human wave" suicide attacks of Khomeini 's army...
...Latin America's poverty is largely rural...
...Agency for International Development, and other powerful institutions with Washington addresses...
...He laid out an argument against keeping up the guerrilla challenge from the past...
...and somehow the gigantic massacres did not upset us...
...We have got to find a language for speaking about equality and fraternity and not just about liberty—a new socialism, whatever it will be called, to replace the several failed socialisms of the past...
...Colburn's book is only 142 pages, with many brief chapters punctuated with illustrations by contemporary Latin American artists—a book to be read at a rapid clip...
...Constitutional and democratic rule appears to be fairly successful in El Salvador...
...The Nicaraguan philosopher Alejandro Serrano Caldera published a response to Fukuyama as early as 1991 under the title El fin de la historia: ReapariciOn del mito (Havana: Editorial 13 de Marzo, 1991), intending to defend a revolutionary Marxist project...
...This evolution would seem to be another example of a vogue or fashion in political and economic theory—a set of new ideas that has swept Latin America, just as, in the past, the tides of Marxist revolution swept across the universities and some of the trade unions: a huge and fundamentally inexplicable event...
...Quickly, quickly...
...Colburn wrote a third book, too, a modest and amusing volume of anecdotes and personal memoirs of Nicaraguan life called My Car in Managua, in 1991, full of the colors and flavors of the Sandinista revolution...
...The national states have grown weak and underfinanced, and this needs to be remedied...
...So let us draw up a tally...
...Every single government in Latin America today, except Cuba's, conforms at least outwardly to the principles of liberal democracy...
...The misery owes, instead, to a frightfully unjust sharing of the wealth...
...Modern totalitarianism arose in Europe after the First World War...
...He describes a Nicaraguan Sandinista who, after having suffered horribly for the revolution, has retreated to a life of cattle ranching, just as he might have done even if a vogue for leftism had never swept across Nicaragua...
...In Latin America to 98 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 day these are 'good times'—economies are on the rebound, prosperity is welcome, and it is hard to question the free trade strategy that has led to growth...
...It was principally the American military, not the rich and powerful Europeans, who rescued Bosnia and Kosovo...
...But such was his destiny...
...He looks at the ecological crises of the region...
...The vogue in this new case may be even stronger than any vogue of the recent past...
...That was not a Hegelian argument...
...In the past, revolutionary Marxism struck many Latin Americans as merely a new, scientific variation on the old Latin theme of the all-powerful state...
...Fidel Castro has entered his fifth decade of one-man rule, and, when he travels abroad, crowds of naive and misinformed people still come out to cheer...
...He fears something else, instead...
...He looks at the cultural influences from the United States, which are vast and growing...
...Europe's democrats have proved to be noticeably reluctant to put up a fight on behalf of anyone else, or even on behalf of their own European civilization...
...Will the European powers likewise do more, instead of less...
...You could even argue that Fukuyama's End of History, together with the ebullient theories of 94 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 many other delighted observers of communism's collapse, helped to obscure the panorama of crime and tragedy in the Muslim world...
...Police forces need to be completely rebuilt...
...And will our American left come to its senses and encourage the Bush administration to do more in this regard, instead of less...
...Colburn offers a couple of portraits, which he presents as representative...
...But the worst problem in Latin America is a spectacular inequality of wealth, not so much between nations as within them—the greatest inequality of any region in the world, Colburn says...
...Nietzsche supplied the second half of Fukuyama's doctrine, the part about "The Last Man," after the Hegelian part about "The End of History...
...The End of Politics means something larger, too...
...The European democrats have shown themselves to be admirably gifted at securing the good life for themselves, and often they have been generous to other people, too...
...Latin American cinema is blossoming...
...At the start of the 1980s, most of Latin America was dominated by despots and military dictators, principally on the extreme right...
...But not when it comes to taking a risk...
...Nor does he consider the new populist and left-wing movements or leaders that have come to power in Brazil and Ecuador—events that took place after he had finished his book...
...That is his conclusion, anyway (though I know that some people would argue otherwise...
...We will see...
...Europe would not defend its Jews, sixty years ago, and Europe would not defend its Muslims ten years ago...
...That was an antiHegelian argument...
...But in recent decades, statist economics tended to wilt pretty dramatically in Latin America...
...The tropical breezes of Central America ran up against a glacier of managerial advice from Bulgaria and other countries from the Soviet bloc, and impossible fogs drifted across the Nicaraguan economy, to the detriment of all...
...The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan tried to reinstate the Golden Age of the Muslim Caliphate from the seventh century, in a Central Asian version of the present day...
...and though people all over the world snickered at the naiveté of his idea in 1989, and snickered again in 1992, and have kept on snickering, Fukuyama's marvelous provocation has never entirely faded into the past, as provocations usually do...
...Gilles Kepel, the scholar of contemporary Muslim society, makes the case in his book jihad: The Trail of Political Islam that Islamism gathered strength during the whole period from the 1970s into the early 1990s—but then entered into a fateful and irreversible decline...
...How does the End of History seem to be faring in those parts...
...Surely there has got to be another alternative...
...In Latin America, as almost everywhere else, Fukuyama's theory was taken (somewhat unfairly) to be a Reaganite shout of triumph, and it aroused an instant feeling of outrage and indignation...
...In these books, Colburn was somehow able to retain the sobriety of his own thinking, even amid the inebriating breezes of Marxist and anti-Marxist ideology...
...The general outcome of those revolutionary failures was something he could hardly miss...
...In presenting his theory about the capital-letter End of History, Fukuyama made three related points...
...I think that, in some ways, his book is a little too gloomy...
...It is difficult to maintain analytic rigor because, in the end, revolution is neither predictable nor rational...
...Nobody reading Fukuyama's argument would have expected to see such a thing in the Muslim world—even if, in a chance phrase here or there, he did allow for terrible possibilities...
...Chile can likewise boast of a long tradition...
...The origins of those crises are fantastically complex, and the underfinanced national states cannot begin to cope...
...yet Venezuela today is floundering, as Colburn observes...
...Naturally, he blamed the contra war and the United States foreign policy for some of the problems...
...He knew how to invoke the experience of daily life...
...Mafias and tyrants may have kept their hold on power, here and there...
...How did so many countries in Latin America, each unique, come to embrace liberalism at the end of the twentieth century...
...There are fashions in ideas as well as clothes, and revolution was one," he wrote...
...And Colburn describes a Salvadoran communist who, without having given up her idealism, has turned away from politics in favor of social work on behalf of Salvador's grievously oppressed women—a commendable and important project, given the gender inequalities everywhere in Latin America...
...He wanted to know, in a practical vein: how does wealth get produced...
...Those days are gone...
...Nor did we imagine that we ourselves would end up in danger...
...and in the next few years, millions more—between 1.5 and two million in the Sudan alone...
...B B UT WHAT HAS been the larger result of these developments in Latin America...
...And Castaneda did more...
...He argued that challenges to liberal democracy from other ideological and social systems had failed, and any new such challenge in the foreseeable future was likewise bound to fail...
...Saddam's Ba'ath never did entirely recover from the 1991 Gulf War, even if the tyrant could boast of having fended off the United States, for the time being...
...Still, Fukuyama's argument never promised liberal democracy for everyone...
...It was merely a vogue...
...In Nicaragua, where coffee is the principal export, a mall sells Maxwell House tins from the United States...
...But the good times are unevenly distributed...
...The influences are, in many respects, entirely harmful—a cult of gang violence, for instance...
...And yet this terrible statistic does not owe to the overall poverty of the region...
...These are great strengths, but these particular strengths happen to fall outside of Colburn's scope, in this book...
...His book was the first substantial report about the Sandinista failure in agriculture—a brave and original book, which he wrote in a period when quite a few other academic scholars were blithely repeating all sorts of preposterous claims of success by the Sandinista government...
...Colburn did not address Fukuyama in this book...
...W W HAT DOES this phrase mean—The End of Politics...
...Some people have kept on chanting the erroneous and antiquated slogans of long ago, which is pointless and even harmful, and other people have chosen to waste away their lives in shopping malls, which is idiotic...
...and Peru has undergone all kinds of political mayhem and instability ever since...
...This was not the End of History...
...Colburn concluded that Sandinista policies had led to a devastating fall in farm productivity— a disaster for Nicaragua, which has always depended on agricultural exports...
...This was the economics DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 97 BOOKS of what was called the "Washington Consensus," more or less as dictated by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, the U.S...
...No sooner did Fukuyama's book come out, back in 1992, than the Europeans threw up their hands in helpless despair at the fate of Europe's principal indigenous religious minority, the Muslims of the Balkans...
...Latin America has produced a new political literature to accompany and encourage this transition, and, in that literature, the single most important book has been, I would think, Jorge Castarieda's Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War, in 1993...
...This is a puzzle...
...And perhaps of something more—a portrait of liberal democracy and its fateful limitations at the End of History...
...Fukuayama's theory came out of Hegel...
...In Costa Rica, which exports mangos, a mall sells imported mango juice...
...And what is the solution for this terrible inequality...
...The liberalism of presentday Latin America has embraced the liberte of the French Revolution, but wants nothing to do with egalite or fraternite...
...But he was able to identify the precise ways in which the Sandinista plans and planners had wreaked their own damage...
...An urge to get started with something new...
...We have got to find a new way of posing the old questions of social conscience...
...Colburn describes the new shopping malls that have become a fad across the region...
...Fukuyama unveiled his argument at the very moment, in 1989, when those movements were, ironically enough, in full bloom...
...Having labored not only in Nicaragua but in Costa Rica (where he is associated with Latin America's principal management school, called INCAE), he went to teach for a while in Addis Ababa, in order to observe the Marxist revolution in Ethiopia...
...But this pace, structure, and style accommodate the response to Latin America's present reality that his analyses and impressions arouse, which is, in two words, indignant impatience...
...Nothing of the sort can be seen in the Muslim world...
...And how has the political left responded to these new circumstances...
...In observing these political and economic trends, Colburn pauses to wonder at the uniformity of Latin America's evolution...
...Do these movements represent a sign of hope, or an ominous sign that Latin America may slide back into the authoritarian instability and demagoguery of the past, as seems to have happened in Venezuela...
...There ought to be a huge investment in education, in health care, and in income support for the very poor...
...T T HE PRACTICAL results have been odd, though...
...This is what a partisan of the End of History would have predicted...
...Then he broadened his outlook...
...The economic collapse in Argentina evidently took place after Colburn had completed his book, but Argentina's pitiful condition today merely illustrates his larger point...
...The champions of the Washington Consensus confidently expected that economic growth was going to solve the problem, in time...
...untold thousands in Iraq...
...a hundred thousand in Algeria...
...But in the next few years, over the course of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the Muslim world generated, by my reckoning, two variations of its own on the European totalitarian inspiration, and those two variations eventually flowered into powerful movements—into the Arab Ba'ath Party of Saddam Hussein and other people today, and into the Islamist movement of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and other radical Islamist currents...
...But they do need to establish a proper system of law and order...
...Will the failure and defeat of the Ba'ath and the Islamists lead to the BOOKS rise of liberal democracy...
...How does the End of History look today, fourteen years after Fukuyama first broached his theme...
...But, taken in sum, Fukuyama's three-pronged prediction in regard to Europe has turned out to be reasonably accurate, as predictions go...
...But what will this new alternative be—the new appeal to the social conscience...
...The promised economic growth duly took place...
...He looks at crime...
...S S TILL, FUKUYAMA'S argument may have touched on a truth even in the Muslim world, at least prospectively...
...He can find no adequate explanation...
...How is the End of History faring in that part of the world...
...And so, when the new liberal democracies emerged, the people in charge felt obliged and even eager to abandon the economics of the past, whether those policies had gone under right-wing or left-wing labels...
...They have created sturdy and stable nation states—which is why, among all the regions of the world, Latin America, together with North America, has engaged in the fewest wars between states, a triumph of politics...
...Venezuela can boast of a long democratic tradition...
...Let us turn from Europe to the larger Muslim world...
...But, even without taking on every conceivable theme, his present book, with its mix of grand generalizations, philosophical puzzlement, and personal portraits, offers a usefully nuanced, sympathetic, and knowledgeable portrait of Latin America...
...What will be its sound and rhythm...
...Extreme inequality is an old Latin American theme...
...he saw backward steps, one calamity after another...
...LATIN AMERICA AT THE END OF POLITICS by Forrest D. Colburn Princeton University Press, 2002 142 pp $35 cloth $14.95 paper FRANCIS FUKUYAMA introduced his notion of "The End of History" in the National Interest in 1989 and added a few lively elaborations in The End of History and the Last Man in 1992...
...Colburn observes that, over the BOOKS course of the twentieth century, the Latin Americans have tried over and over to address it...
...The malls attract crowds of the wealthy and the privileged, who find there a refuge from poverty and crime, and spend their money on ridiculous luxury items from abroad in order to dream of life in other parts of the world...
...In Latin America, 150 million people—a third of the entire population—live on less than two dollars a day...
...He argued that liberal democratic societies were therefore destined to dominate the world...
...And so, the End of Politics is, in Colburn's eyes, a gray age in Latin America, an age of something worse than mediocrity, an age without promise, a tragic and inglorious age...
...Reading Latin America at the End of Politics, I came away thinking that the political revolutions of the last couple of decades have achieved marvels in the field of political liberty...
...In that respect, Colburn ended up noting the same phenomenon that occupied Fukuyama's attention—the triumph that Fukuyama mischievously called the End of History, but which Colburn, in his Fukuyama-influenced but antiHegelian mood, prefers to call the End of Politics...
...In the field of politics, Latin Americans have achieved one great historic success...
...What was the grand factor around the world that pushed thousands and millions of people into the revolutionary ranks, in spite of every evidence of tragedy, crime, failure, and disaster...
...In any case, the End of History appears to be, in regard to the Muslim world, mostly a sci-fi speculation, at least for now—an insight into European history that has thus far yielded not too many insights into the history of the Muslim countries...
...The massacres took place, but we liberal-minded inhabitants of the Western world were reveling in our own successes...
...100 n DISSENT / Spring 2003...
...What has triumphed, more through default than victory, is liberalism: democracy and capitalism," and nothing has arisen to challenge it...
...Only, a pity, here again, for all his revolutionary sympathies, he felt obliged to report on the managerial inefficiencies and errors...
...Totalitarian movements have pretty much disappeared from the Euro pean landscape...
...And still more: Castaneda served until just recently at the head of Fox's foreign ministry, where he pushed Mexico to adopt a liberal, human-rights foreign policy—sometimes even a pro-American policy, an unheard-of development in Mexican history...
...In that book, Castaneda addressed his comrades of the Marxist left...
...And, in fact, revolutionary Marxism did manage to survive in Latin America...
...But Colburn does not see any Hegelian factors at work in world affairs, and neither does he fret over the factors that worried Nietzsche...
...This was the crimson tide of the twentieth century...
...But the inequality has shown no sign whatsoever of diminution...
...He finds many fewer political books about Latin America than in the past...
...And yet, this kind of social work, in Colburn's estimation, holds out no possibility of transforming the whole of society, precisely because social work is not political and does not aim at achieving or deploying state power...
...The forward step is enormous—though, to be sure, much could be said about conditions in this place and that, almost everywhere in the region...
...Let us turn to Latin America...
...It was only later, in the 1990s, that the Sandinistas themselves, in a series of writings and analyses, finally confirmed Colburn's analyses...
...Colburn did not see a forward step in the many socialist revolutions around the world...
...And he asked a question: if revolutions around the world were producing backward steps in economic development, if the revolutions were leading to poverty and war, why did so many people eagerly rush forward to lead those revolutions, to suffer and die on their behalf...
...The new era is unintellectual, lacking in curiosity, unadventurous— an age without ideas...
...His accounts of the economic aspects of the revolution ended up being, as a result, more detailed, more human, 96 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 and more reliable, in my judgment, than anyone else's...
...and yet his argument contained an important observation that weighed against Fukuyama and the End of History...
...That might help...
...Politically speaking, liberal de mocracy has created a solid and useful stability in some countries, and not much stability at all in other countries, and for reasons that are hard to identify...
...In Colombia, the Marxist guerrillas remain extremely powerful, even if their Marxism contains a strange mix of cocaine revenue and jungle millenarianism...
...And it is good to be rid of the failed and false economic doctrines of the past...
...Radical Islamism in the Sudan, in Egypt, and in Algeria seemed promising and vigorous and strong, for a while...
...By the time that Fukuyama presented his argument, Ba'athism and radical Islamism had already killed probably more than a million people...
...Such was his three-pronged provocation...
...Similar oddities characterize the economic consequences of the new wave of market-ori ented (or relatively market-oriented) reforms...
...This is Colburn's point, and I am entirely sympathetic with it...
...And there is good reason for this...
...At some point the confounding question needs to be broached: What is the origin of ideas, of understood possibilities...
...Saddam in that year, having already fought his war with Iran and with his own Kurdish rebels, was gearing up to launch his new war in Kuwait and still more wars against his own people...
...For what deep factor can explain why Argentina is failing miserably—even while Chile, which shares with Argentina one of the largest borders in the world and shares a rather similar European population, too, has had no trouble keeping its head above water...
...Will the United States devote the energy and effort and the courage to bolster the Muslim liberals...
...and much less so in Nicaragua, next door...
...But the feeling of having come to an "end," the feeling that Marxism and some other doctrines of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have become hopelessly antique—this feeling had better give way to a feeling of new promise, and soon...
...0 0 N THE OTHER hand, nobody could argue today that Europe's liberal democracy has turned out to be especially noble or inspiring...
...That was why, during the 1980s and into the 1990s, so many serious-minded and even nationalistminded people in Latin America were happy to embrace dictates from faraway, gringo-dominated, financial institutions...
...He put together a little group of leftliberals who helped bring about the election of Vicente Fox, no left-winger, to the presidency two years ago...
...And the Latin Americans have tried to build on this triumph, too, by looking to their national states to dominate economies and to establish social equality...
...but mafias and tyrants do not seem to be the wave of the European future...
...and Chilean democracy is doing relatively well...
...PAUL BERMAN is the author most recently of Terror and Liberalism...
...Colburn addressed the Marxists as well as the modernization theorists—the many people who, from different points of view, had tried to explain third world revolutions by identifying their deep social and economic causes, and who had tried to see in those revolutions a forward step for society...
...But Colburn's observations in The Vogue of Revolution in Poor Countries stressed the role of personal and even idiosyncratic factors...
...What will it look like...
...but the resurrected Caliphate proved to be a reign of war, starvation, despair, oppression, and poverty— a failed undertaking by every measure, even if, in Saudi Arabia and other places around the Muslim world, people continued to look on Islamist Afghanistan as utopia achieved...
...The overall economic results of the new dis pensation in Latin America have been admi rable, Colburn reports...
...He thought that revolutionary socialism (or what was called socialism) was a kind of fad or fashion, which had swept the world...
...These are some of the anomalies of Latin American life today...
...Colburn came up with what might seem a shocking answer...
...Fukuyama feared that liberal democracy, in its triumph, was going to lack nobility of purpose and the ability to fight for higher things, was going to lack the warrior traits that Nietzsche yearned to see restored to modern life...
...But nothing entirely succeeded—except the Cuban Revolution of 1959, which achieved a remarkable equality of wealth only by destroying the national culture, eliminating any vestige of political freedom, and apparently eliminating the capacity for economic growth...
...I hope he will turn to these new topics soon...
...In Mexico, he broke through the petrified categories of "left-wing" and "right-wing," which had always prevented the democrats of the left and the right from uniting...
...Still, in these books Colburn took note of a distinctive turn in world events, which was the failure of Marxism and Marxist-like doctrines in vast portions of the world...
...He did not rely simply on government figures, as almost everyone else seemed to do...
...Nor does any other kind of social system, something different from liberal democracy, seem to be in the offing, even as a remote possibility...
...This book, The Vogue of Revolution in Poor Countries, which came out in 1994, proposed a number of bold conclusions about the entire wave of revolution in the third world...
...The wealthy class throughout the region has known how to keep up its own development—how to establish and maintain some good universities, even private universities, and keep up the professional skills that are necessary for a modern life...
...There was a period when the Ba'ath and the radical Islamist movement, both of them, could claim to have found novel and idiosyncratic Muslim roads to modernity and a successful society, superior to anything in the liberal democracies of the West...
...But then again, in Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela, a great many extremely poor people dwell in cities, just to confound still further any generalization that someone might like to propose...
...Everyone knows that, in Russia and other Slavic zones far to the east, Europe's transition to liberal democracy has turned out to be, at best, slow and shaky...
...There is urban atomization, personal isolation, and, he concludes, a lack of vigor in the graphic arts...
...We felt happy and confident about the stability of our own liberal democracy...
...The argument predicted, instead, liberal democracy's domination over other systems, and that is the case in Europe...
...Latin America has continued to be wonderfully vigorous in the field of literary art, and wonderfully vigorous musically, as the world has happily recognized...
...The wave of revolution in poor countries "was neither foreordained nor historically inevitable...
...And so, Colburn became the chief scholarly chronicler and analyst of revolutionary Marxism's historic failure in Central America—not a role that he would have picked for himself...
...in Belarus and a few other places, non-existent...
...But the wealthy class has lost interest in the poor...
...The national states do not need to resume state ownership of industry...
...I think it is fair to say that, like most of the other academics and journalists who journeyed to Nicaragua from around the world in those years, Colburn keenly hoped for a Sandinista success— that is, a revolution that would succeed in creating a new society with much more wealth, social equality, and freedom than before...
...The most salient of Fukuyama's three points was his observation about totalitarianism and its defeat...
...B B UT HERE we arrive at the final oddity of democratic liberalism in Latin America today—an oddity of Latin America at the End of Politics which, I might add, may be visible in other regions, too, perhaps even in the same hemisphere...
...Some of the Europeans have lately been showing a little more fight in Afghanistan and even in the Middle East, which is good to see...
...He did not think that grand factors around the world had pushed thousands and millions of BOOKS people into the revolutionary ranks...
...There is even a fairly wide agreement about what needs to be done, Colburn tells us...
...He pointed out, as he had previously done in Nicaragua, that revolutionary policies do not always achieve anything even remotely useful and sometimes produce the opposite of their intended effect: poverty instead of wealth, inequality instead of equality, civil war instead of civility...
...The other Islamist experiments were disasters...
...He made careful observations of Sandinista agrarian policies, and he produced a sophisticated and observant study called PostRevolutionary Nicaragua, in 1986...
...That was a breakthrough for political liberalism in Latin America...
...Still, in most other respects, Latin American Marxism has collapsed, and so have the several Latin traditions that descend from the Fascism of the 1920s and 1930s...
...A lack of warrior traits in modern Latin American life does not upset Forrest Colburn...
...He identified the power of what ought to be called whim in history: the consequences of mere fashion and fad, without any higher rationality at work...
...He is withering on the new customs and tastes of the Latin American rich...
...What about Fukuyama's other points, in that case...
...It is a lack of social conscience...
...In Colburn's de scription, it pretty much means what Castarieda wrote about in Utopia Disarmed, which is to say: the abandonment of the Marxist revolutionary ambition that got its start in 1959 with the Cuban Revolution—the abandonment of guerrilla insurgencies and the end of the mass Marxist and Cuban- or Soviet-style revolutionary movements: the end of what Castaneda calls Latin America's "Thirty Years War...
...And he demonstrated the plausibility of this observation by pointing to the many extraordinary ways in which socialist and even Islamist revolutions in the third world tended to resemble one another, down to the iconography of their posters and costumes—this, despite the huge differences in local reality and cultural traditions from one country to the next...
...The larger vector of political thought and action in Latin America has definitely pointed in the direction that Fukuyama identified...
...The 1980s were a decade of authoritarian collapse in the field of politics, and were also a decade of economic collapse—a decade of depression and setback, which badly damaged the prestige of the old-fashioned statist solutions...
...A specter is not haunting Europe...
...It has reached disastrous levels in many countries...
...In Europe today—Fukuyama's End of History was, I think, mostly a theory about Europe— his three points seem to me, in retrospect, all too accurate...
...VI VI EANWHILE, he wrote a second book called Managing the Commanding Heights, which came out in 1990...
...Latin America plainly needs to make another, newer effort, on an even larger scale, drawing on the accumulated wisdom of the past—an effort of a different kind, stripped of the errors of earlier times, more sophisticated and less authoritarian than before...
...This book described the Sandinista management of a handful of prominent enterprises in Nicaragua...
Vol. 50 • April 2003 • No. 2
