Polyarchy: Coercion's New Face in Latin America
Robinson, William I.
The promotion of "free markets and democracy" is intended to make the world both available and safe for global capitalism. Czech police confront thousands of demonstrators during September's...
...The increasing global mobility of capital has allowed for the decentralization and functional integration around the world of vast chains of production and distribution, and the unprecedented concentration of worldwide economic management, control and decision-making power in transnational capital...
...assistance, this time as part of a "democracy promotion" program channeled through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S...
...Ironically, the return to power in 1990 of Aylwin and the party that openly participated in the 1973 military coup was projected around the world as the culmination of a "democratic revolution" sweeping Latin America...
...foreign policy...
...30, No...
...But too much pressure on the PRI could have opened up space for the popular classes...
...Each country's productive apparatus was massively restructured, and vast zones of the former Third and Second Worlds were reintegrated into global capitalism, under the tutelage of emergent transnational state apparatuses.10 But why polyarchy as the political counterpart to this economic restructuring...
...But the trappings of democratic procedure in a polyarchic political system do not mean that the lives of ordinary people become filled with authentic or meaningful democratic content, much less that social justice or greater economic equality is achieved under the global economy...
...1 7 In Mexico, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was wracked by a power struggle in the 1980s...
...Czech police confront thousands of demonstrators during September's Prague protests to shut down the IMF and World Bank annual meetings...
...3 What Mosca meant by "now more or less legal, now more or less arbitrary and violent," was that elite domination could be maintained, and the social order preserved, through either democratic or dictatorial methods, depending on circumstances...
...The Point is to Change the World: Socialism through Globalization...
...The turn to promotorial ing polyarchy is an effort to modern- ize political systems in each country systems...
...This threat from below, combined with the inability of the authoritarian regimes to manage the dislocations and adjustments of globalization, generated intra-elite conflicts that unravelled the ruling power blocs...
...Olav Stokke, Aid and Political Conditionality (London: Franck Cass, EADI Book Series 16, 1995...
...Various international organizations have also established "democracy units," and the IFIs have made aid and access to global financial markets conditional upon the recipient country having a polyarchic system...
...and Robinson and Harris, "Towards a Global Ruling Class...
...policymakers wanted to see a functioning bipartisan system based on competition between the PRI and the rightist and neoliberal National Action Party (PAN...
...Interaction and economic inteir rl t gration on a world scale are obstructed by authoritarian or dicta- ntegration torial political systems, which cand scale is not manage the expanded social intercourse associated with the by old-style global economy...
...hese processes are clearly illustrated in Latin America...
...See also Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971...
...with and helped place in power local sections of the transnational elite that swept to power in country after country, and who have integrated their respective nation-states into the new global order...
...The following discussion on Chile and Nicaragua is summarized from Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy, op...
...In his first year in office Reina met with International Monetary Fund (IMF) and AID officials and tried to negotiate greater flexibility in implementing adjustment programs that his predecessors had agreed to...
...Instead, Schumpeter advanced "another theory" of democracy as "institutional arrangements" for elites to acquire power "by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote...
...10-39...
...Despite ongoing social conflict and an internally divided elite, neoliberal reform proceeded at full speed in the 1990s...
...Indeed, the United States provided support in the 1980s and 1990s for mass repression in each of the cases discussed, and in other countries as well, such as in El Salvador, Guatemala, Bolivia and Colombia...
...Sweeping changes in social control were necessary if the emergent global order was to hold together...
...Intra-elite conflict combined with the widespread mobilization of popular classes and armed insurrections by the Zapatistas in Chiapas and other guerrilla groups in the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca made stability elusive and threatened the whole transnational project for the country...
...2 0 Almost every Latin American country has experienced waves of spontaneous uprisings, generally triggered by austerity measures, the formation in the shantytowns of political protest movements among the urban poor, indigenous insurrections, resurgence of mass peasant movements and land invasions, and so on...
...strategy was therefore to provide oriega, whom the United States helped install as Panama's leader hen later helped displace...
...Polyarchy is promoted in order to co-opt, neutralize and redirect these mass popular democratic movements-to relieve pressure from subordinate classes for more fundamental political, social and economic change in emergent global society...
...Foreign Policy," Theory and Society, Vol...
...This redefinition began with Joseph Schumpeter's 1942 classic study, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, in which he rejected the "classic theory of democracy" defined in terms of the "will of the people" and the "common good...
...BY WILLIAM I. ROBINSON S Don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people," declared National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in June, 1970, referring to the democratic election that year of Salvador Allende as president of Chile.' In the preceding decade, Washington had spent millions of dollars in covert intervention to "marginalize" Allende and the left, and bolster its favored parties, particularly the Christian Democrats...
...State repression employed by the new polyarchies has been used throughout Latin America to quell protest against neoliberal structural adjustment...
...5, (Mar-Apr 1998...
...11-54...
...As national economies are dismantled and replaced by an integrated global production system, new corporate and bureaucratic groups have emerged around the world...
...There was a contradiction between the economic dimension of the transnational project and the political dimension: An incomplete transition to polyarchy lagged far behind neoliberalism...
...64, No...
...The political goal was to reestablish authority-read capitalist hegemony-through new ideologies and by overhauling political systems around the world...
...23 (1990), pp...
...616-683...
...POLICY neoliberal blocs elected their own candidates in recent years...
...In different ways, this scenario-suppressing democracy and placing dictatorships in power, only to later organize a return to civilian rule under the banner of "democracy promotion"-repeated itself throughout Latin America and the world in the 1980s and 1990s...
...The challenge of "preemptive reform" was to remove dictatorships to prevent deeper change...
...See, e.g., Thomas Carothers, Aiding Democracy Abroad: the Learning Curve (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999...
...33, No...
...William I. Robinson, "Neo-ULiberalism, the Global Elite, and the Guatemalan Transition: A Critical Macrosocial Analysis," Journal of Inter-American and World Affairs (in press...
...See Comisi6n Econ6mica para America Latina (CEPAL), Panorama Social de America Latina (Santiago, Chile: CEPAL/UUnited Nations, various annual reports...
...American Democracy Promotion: Impulses, Strategies and Impacts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000...
...1 5 In Chile, the United States, after orchestrating the 1973 overthrow of the Allende government, provided consistent backing for the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet until 1985, when, in response to a growing protest movement, Washington abruptly shifted support to the elite opposition and began to promote a transition...
...Transitions to polyarchy have been accompanied by a dramatic sharpening of inequalities and social polarization, as well as growth in poverty...
...When Allende won anyway, Washington turned to a massive destabilization campaign against his government, with the collusion of the Christian Democrats--then headed by Patricio Aylwin-and other groups from the center and the right...
...7. For detailed discussion on the issues raised in this paragraph, see Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy...
...That year, the United States began applying myriad carrot-andstick pressures on the regime to open up and to transfer power to civilian elites...
...My view and summaries of the existing literature and of the debate is contained in the references in endnote 1., and in William I. Robinson, "Beyond Nation-State Paradigms: Globalization, Sociology, and the Challenge of Transnational Studies," Sociological Forum Vol...
...objective is to promote polyarchy and oppose authoritarianism only when doing so does not jeopardize elite rule itself...
...2 1 Polyarchy does not mean an end to direct coercion...
...If the economic component is to make the world available to capital, the political component is to make it safe for capital...
...1 (Spring 1999), pp...
...The crisis of elite rule that developed throughout the underdeveloped world in the 1970s and 1980s was resolved through transitions to polyarchies-the so-called "democratic revolution...
...In Latin America, the transnational elite has demonstrated a remarkable ability to utilize the structural power of transnational capital over individual countries as a sledgehammer against popular grassroots movements...
...4, (Jan-Feb 1997...
...Analysis based on the nation-state is outdated and obstructed obscures our understanding of dicta transnational dynamics in the new era...
...On an ongoing basis, this repression turns structural violence into direct violence...
...13, No.4, pp...
...These elites are helped in opposition to popular sectors and also against the far-right, authoritarian-oriented elites, "crony" capitalists, and other dominant strata opposed to the transnational project...
...ally, came to power following Torrijos' death in 1981, opening a period of crisis and instability...
...Philip Wheaton, Panama Invaded (Trenton: The Red Sea Press, 1992...
...40, Nos...
...It is now evident that the global system limits the ability of popular majorities to use polyarchy in order to prevail...
...John Weeks and Phil Gunson, Panama: Made in the USA (London: Latin America Bureau, 1991...
...In 1903 the United States orchestrated the country's independence from Colombia and brought to power a tiny white oligarchic elite (in an overwhelmingly black country) that would support its plans to build the canal...
...111-131...
...To bring the term "democracy" in line with reality, redefinition was necessary...
...In Chile, Aylwin and his party once again received U.S...
...movement between 1985 and 1987 when this hegemony was in dispute...
...William I. Robinson, "Latin America and Global Capitalism," Race and Class, Vol...
...As the U.S...
...8. There has been an explosion of literature on globalization in the 1990s...
...The Globalization Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000...
...POLICY transitions to polyarchy that took place in almost every country in the region during the 1980s and early 1990s...
...This article necessarily simplifies complex arguments, which are developed more fully in William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S...
...Robert W. Cox, "Ideologies and the New International Economic Order: Reflections on Some Recent Literature," Intemrnational Organization, Vol...
...POLICY With signs reading: "This is how privatization leaves us," Colombiar their clothing removed and bodies painted the colors of the Colom the proposed privatization of state companies...
...Tom Barry, Zapata's Revenge (Boston: South End Press, 1995...
...strong and consistent support for an authoritarian state even while prodding it to complete a transition to fully functioning polyarchy...
...Yet under polyarchy, physical coercion through military and police force is replaced by economic coercion, as the threat of deprivation, poverty and hunger forces people to make certain decisions and take certain actions...
...These aspects are discussed in detail in William I. Robinson, A Faustian Bargain: U.S...
...See also Robinson and Harris, "Toward a Global Ruling Class," op...
...And even then, it limits democratic participation to voting in elections...
...The Mexican case also underscores that the U.S...
...9. For early analyses of this reorganization, see, e.g., Albert Fishlow, Carlos F. Diaz-Alejandro, Richard R.Fagen, and Roger D. Hansen, Rich and Poor Nations in the World Economy (New York: McGraw Hill, 1978...
...Promotion political intervention was key to :come achieving unity among a splintered elite opposition, in eclipsing popular onalized opposition, and in assuring elite hegemony over the anti-dictatorial eadership...
...In recent decades, these groups have gradually coalesced into a new, global capitalist bloc led by a new elite, comprised of the owners and managers of the leading transnational corporations and banks, as well as bureaucrats and technicians who administer the international financial institutes (IFIs), the upper echelons of state bureaucracies in the "North" and the "South"-developed and underdeveloped countries alike-and transnational forums including the Group of Seven, the Trilateral Commission, and the World Economic Forum...
...The campaign also involved a multimillion dollar political intervention program to create a "democratic opposition" by bringing together "modernizing" groups from within the oligarchy tied to international banking and trade...
...On transnational state apparatuses, see William I. Robinson, "Capitalist Globalization and the Transnationalization of the State," in Mark Rupert and Hazel Smith (eds...
...We are witnessing the decline of political U.S...
...The emergence of new transnational fractions in Latin America is discussed in William I. Robinson, "Maldevelopment in Central America: Globalization and Social Change," Development and Change, 29 (1988), pp...
...But these candidates soon found it impossible to resist the pressures of transnational forces...
...leadership...
...Reina's own social base rapidly deteriorated, and his government faced a spiral of popular protest and loss of legitimacy in the mid-1990s...
...He was backed by national groups among the elite who were threatened by the opening to the global economy, and by broad popular sectors whose resistance to neoliberal austerity mounted in the early 1990s...
...The program called for eliminating state intervention in the economy and sharply curtailing state regulation over capital flows in all nations...
...0 z S 42REPORT ON U.S...
...Polyarchy is not dictatorship, and the distinction between the two should not be derided...
...Yet the The cases of Chile, Nicaragua, Panama and Mexico polyarchy integrating econ phrase cynically captures the ideological sales pitch that a new transnational elite has used to sell the project of global capitalism in recent decades...
...political aid programs, operated through peaceful, noncoercive means in civil society to undermine Sandinista hegemony.1 6 The shift from hard-line destabilization to polyarchy promotion culminated in the 1990 electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, a conservative restoration and installation of a polyarchic political system, reinsertion of Nicaragua into the global economy and far-reaching neoliberal restructuring...
...6 0 0 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 44REPORT ON U.S...
...8 Transnational capital emerged as the agent of globalization as the world capitalist system entered into a political and economic crisis in the 1970s...
...hegemony...
...In the face of this crisis, transnational elites became convinced that both the economic and the political pillars of the system needed to be transformed...
...4. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1942), p. 285...
...William I. Robinson, "Promoting Capitalist Polyarchy: The Case of Latin America," in Inoguchi, Kenberry, and Cox (eds...
...10-39...
...1 (Spring, 1999), pp...
...trends are not particular to Latin America...
...It means that coercion is applied more selectively than under a dictatorship, and that repression becomes legalized-legitimated-by civilian authorities, elections and a constitution...
...Their apparently "free" choices are, in fact, coerced by structures and by groups who control those structures...
...Promoting polyarchy is thus a political counterpart to the project of promoting capitalist globalization...
...5 Promotion of polyarchy is a policy initiative that has become transnationalized under U.S...
...In several countries, antiVol XXXIV, No 3 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2000 47 Vol XXXIV, No3 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2000 47REPORT ON U.S...
...This included support for the Mexican state's brutal counterinsurgency program in Chiapas against the Zapatistas and their supporters...
...In Panama, as in Nicaragua, military aggression was combined with political intervention to achieve a polyarchic outcome...
...Such actions, which have grown out of popular struggles of the past, fall outside of the formal institutions of the political system, and almost always involve violent clashes between state and paramilitary forces versus the protesters...
...intervention also was important in consolidating a reconstituted elite and in securing the commitment of much of that elite to the process-begun under Pinochet--of far-reaching neoliberal restructuring and integration into the global economy...
...The result was the bloody 1973 military coup...
...s role in Behind the policy of "democracy promotion" is the eternal problem the global that dominant groups face: how to maintain order and exercise effective omy...
...approval and often active assistance, in the face of mass struggles that broke out everywhere against the prevailing social and economic inequalities and highly restricted political systems...
...5 (1988) p. 119...
...In the end, the imperative of social order makes itself felt in coercive domination...
...63, No...
...Latin America's polyarchic regimes face growing crises of legitimacy and governability...
...2 (1979), pp...
...A policy of conditional promotion of polyarchy is perfectly compatible with, and in fact regularly includes, the promotion of repression...
...9 The neoliberal program involved worldwide market liberalization and the construction of a new legal and regulatory framework for the global economy, along with internal restructuring and global integration of each national economic system...
...4 This redefinition culminated in 1971 with the publication of Robert Dahl's study, Polyarchy...
...AID explains, "Democracy is complementary to and supportive of the transition to market-oriented economies...
...Roger Burbach and William 1. Robinson,"The Fin de Siecle Debate: Globalization as Epochal Shift," Science and Society, Vol...
...The Sandinista government that came to power in the 1979 revolution became the target of a massive U.S...
...There is a fundamental structural contradiction between global capitalism and the effort to maintain polyarchic political systems that require the hegemonic incorporation of a sufficiently broad social base...
...The "dinosaurs" (the old bourgeoisie and state bureaucrats tied to Mexico' s corporatist import-substitution model of national capitalism) could not prevent the rise of the "technocrats" (the transnational sector of the Mexican elite) who captured the party and the state with the election of Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1988...
...Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992...
...Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy, pp...
...Transitions to polyarchy gave transnational elites the chance to reorganize the state and build a better institutional framework to deepen neoliberal adjustment...
...Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique (Lanham, Md: University of America Press, 1980...
...5. See Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance, "Bipartisan Objectives for American Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs, Vol...
...He teaches sociology at New Mexico State University...
...At stake was what type of social order-nascent global capitalism or some popular alternative-would emerge...
...I use the term to refer to a system in which a small group actually rules, and mass participation in decision making is confined to choosing leaders in elections that are carefully managed by competing elites...
...POLICY I stress the collective nature of this new policy because I disagree with Economic the prevalent notion that the emergent global capitalist order is based on a woi on U.S...
...They were thus able to gain a controlling influence over democratization movements, and to steer the breakup of authoritarianism into polyarchic outcomes...
...1 s The electoral triumph of the PAN in July of this year may complete the transition to polyarchy and bring the political system in synch with economic changes...
...Symptoms of this crisis included economic stagnation, declining corporate profits, the growing strength of the Non-Aligned Movement and its calls for a New International Economic Order, and rising popular protests around the world...
...On the economic front, transnational elites began this project by reorganizing and dismantling national economies and redistributive projects, and constructing a new global production and market system...
...257-302...
...Early twentieth-century elitism theory argued, in the words of one of its leading exponents, Italian social scientist (and Mussolini admirer) Gaetano Mosca, that "in all societies, two classes of people appear-a class that rules and a class that is ruled...
...In addition to mediating inter-class relations, polyarchy is also a better institutional arrangement for resolving conflicts among dominant groups...
...For discussion of this new model of development and its social implications, see Duncan Green, Silent Revolution: The Rise of Market Economics in Latin America (London: Cassell, 1995...
...This crisis of elite rule was defused, at least momentarily, through Vol XXXIV, No 3 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 200045 Vol XXXIV, No3 NOVEMBERIDECEMBER 2000 45REPORT ON U.S...
...The power of global capitalism to impose discipline through the market usually makes the all-pervasive coercion of authoritarian regimes unnecessary...
...On this neoliberal restructuring around the world, see, inter-alia, Henk Overbeek (ed...
...John Walton and David Seddon, Free Markets and Food Riots: The Politics of Global Adjustment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994...
...2. For a detailed analysis of this transnational elite, see William I.Robinson and Jerry Harris, "Towards a Global Ruling Class...
...Manuel Noriega, an unpopular CIA asset and close U.S...
...U.S...
...By the 1980s it had become clear to dominant groups, and especially to emergent transnational elites, that the old methods of political domination in Latin America would no longer work...
...See, e.g., John Dinges, Our Man in Panama (New York: Random House, 1991 edition...
...And "democracy promotion"-free markets through neoliberal restructuring-has become a singular process in U.S...
...Restructuring Hegemony in the Global Political Economy: The rise of transnational neoliberalism in the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1993...
...Mass popular movements for democracy and human rights threatened to bring down the whole elite-based social order, along with the dictatorships-as happened in Nicaragua in 1979, and looked likely to occur in Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala and elsewhere...
...William I. Robinson, "Globalization: Nine Theses of our Epoch," Race and Class, Vol...
...This new elite-the product of recent changes in transnational development-constructed and imposed a paradigm of "free markets and democracy" that became so hegemonic in the 1980s and 1990s that it came to be seen as common sense, and those who challenged it as crazed heretics...
...The United States and other core powers have conducted programs worldwide through diverse "democracy promotion" instruments as part of their foreign policy and military/security apparatuses...
...Agency for International Development, "The Democracy Initiative," Washington, D.C., December 1990 12...
...The demands, grievances and hopes of the popular classes tend to be neutralized less through direct repression than through ideological mechanisms, political co-optation and disorganization, and through the economic or "market discipline" imposed by the global economy...
...This endeavor involves the development of new methods of domination, new political institutions and forms of transnational social control intended to achieve a more stable and predictable world ) illustrate environment...
...Market democracy" may be an oxymoron for those who see the concentration of social and economic power brought about by capitalist "free" markets as fundamentally' incompatible with the democratic exercise of political power...
...The destabilization campaign included economic sanctions, coercive diplomacy, psychological operations and finally, a direct, military invasion...
...In the second phase, launched in the 1990s, U.S...
...Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971...
...This classic definition was quite at odds with the rapid increase in the concentration of wealth and political power among dominant elites, and their evergreater control of social life, with the rise of corporate capitalism...
...66, No...
...policymaking community in the post-World War II years of U.S...
...Agency for International Development (AID), which would help Aylwin become the Chilean president...
...2 The promotion of "free markets and democracy" is intended to make the world both available and safe for global capitalism by creating the best conditions around the world for the unfettered operation of the new global production system...
...Worldwide inequality in the distribution of wealth and power is a form of permanent structural violence against the world's majority...
...Simultaneously, it implemented political aid programs, through the AID and the NED, to help organize and guide the coalition that ran against Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite and against the dictatorship's candidates in the 1990 general elections...
...In Honduras, for example, Carlos Roberto Reina headed an insurgent progressive, social democratic-oriented faction within the Liberal Party and won the 1993 elections on Under polya coercion is r economic c the thr deprivation a populist platform of opposition to the neoliberal program...
...7 Seen in historical perspective, the shift to polyarchy corresponds to the emergence of the global economy in recent decades...
...world power...
...While masses pushed for a deeper popular democratization, emergent transnationalized sections of local elites, backed by the political and ideological power of the global economy, often counted on the direct political and military intervention of the United States and other transnational forces...
...W hen transnational elites talk about "democracy promotion," what they really mean is the promotion of polyarchy...
...Because of its mechanisms for intra-elite compromise and accommodation, and with its hegemonic incorporation of popular majorities through elections and other mechanisms, polyarchy is better equipped in the new global environment to legitimize the political authority of dominant groups and to achieve a stable enough environmenteven under the conflict-ridden and fluid conditions of emergent global society-for global capitalism to operate in the new world order...
...This elite was kept in power by U.S...
...Larry Diamond, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s: Actors, Instruments, Issues, and Imperatives, Report of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict (New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1995...
...During these contested transitions, bian flag to protest transnational dominant groups tried to reconstitute hegemony by changing the mode of political domination-from coercive control exercised by authoritarian and dictatorial regimes to more consensually based (or at least consensus-seeking) new polyarchies...
...academic circles closely tied to the U.S...
...These transitions constitute real political reform-"preemptive reform," in the words of former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance-in an effort to contain mass popular movements...
...In the first, begun in the 1980s, the United States launched "democracy promotion" along with other interventions during mass struggles against authoritarian regimes and for popular democratization...
...they are part of a broader pattern under global capitalism...
...See also: Leslie Sklair, Sociology of the Global System (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995, Second Edition...
...Wat is most striking about the new polyarchies is the extent to which globalizing elites have been insulated from popular pressures and mass opposition to the neoliberal project...
...These programs liaisoned under U.S...
...Ironically, then, the same market which generates an affinity between capitalism and polyarchy also creates and recreates the socioeconomic conditions that make genuine democracy impossible...
...31, No...
...These uprisings and their forcible suppression highlight the relationship between violation of socioeconomic rights and the violation of traditional human rights...
...38, No...
...What is most striking about this shift from promoting dictatorships to promoting "democracy" is that it coincides with the rise of the neoliberal economic project...
...Voting against the dominant project by electing candidates who oppose it has not given electorates the ability to change that project...
...Then, in 1987, the objective of this campaign changed dramatically, from a military overthrow of the Sandinistas by an externally based counterrevolutionary movement to new forms of polyarchy promotion supporting an internal, moderate opposition...
...Philip McMichael, Development and Social Change (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge, 1999, Second Edition...
...polyarchy promotion in Latin America has involved two phases...
...I NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS William I. Robinson is the author of Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S...
...William I. Robinson, "Globalization, the World System, and 'Democracy Promotion' in U.S...
...1 2 These programs sought to train the new transnationally oriented elites in the procedures of polyarchy, to inculcate a polyarchic political culture, and to strengthen a polyarchic institutional environment, as a complement to economic restructuring under the superintendence of the IFIs...
...incorporated into global structures so that they operate through consen"sual, rather than direct, coercive domination...
...But Washington abruptly switched tracks in the mid-1980s and began to "promote democracy" in Latin America and around the world...
...By the time the United States assumed global leadership after World War II, the polyarchic definition of democracy had come to dominate social science, political and mass public discourse...
...This structural violence generates collective protest, which calls forth state repression...
...support and numerous direct interventions until it was e I 46 r'cj REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 46REPORT ON U.S...
...Hegemony, Gramsci reminds us, is consensus protected by the "armor of coercion...
...policy has aimed to "consolidate" democracy through broad "democratic aid" and other government-to-government and multilateral programs...
...Building on this Vol XXXIV, No 3 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2000 43REPORT ON U.S...
...3. Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York: McGraw Hill, 1965) p. 51...
...This agenda has an explicitly political component, involving a shift in the policies of the United States and other capitalist powers from bolstering authoritarianism and dictatorship in much of the South to promoting "democracy...
...467-497, and in book manuscript, same title, forthcoming...
...Globalization and the Transnational Capitalist Class," Science and Society, Vol...
...1, Spring 2000, pp...
...This opposition, organized and trained through large-scale U.S...
...Green, Silent Revolution, op...
...London: Routledge, forthcoming...
...In Nicaragua, the United States supported the Somoza family dictatorship for nearly five decades...
...supremacy and the early stages of an emerging transnational hegemony as expressed in a new historic bloc that is global in scope and based on the hegemony of transnational capital...
...Between 1980 and 1995, some 94 million Latin Americans joined the ranks of the poor, as the number of people living in poverty went from 136 to 230 million-an increase from 41 to 48% of the total population...
...People were becoming integrated globally, and many engaged in mass mobilization as they saw their ways of life profoundly altered by capitalist development...
...Contesting Mexico," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...It has claimed thousands of lives...
...Roger Burbach and William 1. Robinson, "The Fin de Siecle Debate:Globalization as Epochal Shift," Science and Society, Vol...
...destabilization campaign...
...2 (1996), pp.13-31...
...Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996...
...Their interests lie in advancing the global economy over any national economic projects...
...In Haiti, Nicaragua and elsewhere, these movements were powerless to change the social structure even when they gained access to the state, because of the ability of the global economy and the transnational elite to dictate internal conditions...
...The "democratic consensus" is consensus among an increasingly cohesive global elite on the best type of political system for reproducing social order...
...From 1987 to 1990, U.S...
...Polyarchy: Coercion's New Face in Latin America 1. Cited in Seymour M. Hersh, "The Price of Power: Kissinger, Nixon, and Chile," Atlantic Monthly, December 1982, p. 35...
...POLICY will suggest here that not only are these two linked, but that what Washington refers to as "democracy" has become a functional imperative of economic globalization...
...The Chilean coup was part of a pattern in Latin America of military takeovers in the 1960s and 1970s, with U.S...
...An explosion of the informal sector, mass unemployment and underemployment, the spread of hunger and rchy, armed malnutrition, and the epidemic reapeplaced by pearance of such diseases as malaria, tuberculosis and cholera have accom:oercion- panied the transitions to polyarchy and the integration of Latin America eat of into the global economy...
...Foreign capital poured into Central America in the 1960s and 1970s, integrating the region into the global economy and laying the structural basis for the social upheavals of the 1980s...
...By the late 1970s, authoritarian regimes there faced an intractable crisis...
...63, No...
...The struggle between the national and transnational wings of the party, however, was not fully resolved, and things turned violent in the early 1990s...
...561-594...
...Washington continued its support for the Noriega regime, despite its practice of electoral fraud and mass repression, until a combination of short-term political concerns and the broader shift to its new, worldwide strategy led to a decision to overthrow it...
...POLICY displaced, but only partially, by the populist 1968 coup led by General Omar Torrijos...
...Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Maldevelopment in Central America: Globalization and Social Change (forthcoming...
...On Mexico, see, among other sources, "The Wars Within: Counterinsurgency in Chiapas and Colombia," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them," explained Schumpeter...
...2 and 3, (1998-99), pp...
...This group implemented sweeping neoliberal structural adjustment, thoroughly transforming the Mexican economy and integrating the country into global capitalism...
...Through the invasion this "mod- Manuel N1 ernized" sector was placed in power--literally...
...1 9 Income polarization has aggravated the dramatic deterioration of social conditions as a result of neoliberal policies...
...Similar stories can be told for Rafael Caldera' s government in Venezuela, elected in 1993, and for governments elected in the 1990s in Ecuador, Argentina and elsewhere...
...New modes of social control became a political counterpart to economic restructuring on a world scale, in the context of the transnationalization of the economy and of politics itself...
...intervention synchronized political Polyarchy aid programs with covert and direct has b military operations, economic aid or sanctions, formal diplomacy, gov- transnat ernment-to-government programs, and so on...
...elitism theory, a new polyarchic or institutional redefinition of democracy developed within U.S...
...Global capitalism generates social conditions and political tensions-inequality, polarization, impoverishment, marginality--conducive to a breakdown of polyarchy...
...6. In addition to Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy, op.cit., see Joan M. Nelson and Stephanie Eglington, Global Goals, Contentious Means: Issues of Multiple Conditionality (Washington, D.C.: Overseas Development Council, 1993...
...The first class, always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolizes power and enjoys the advantages that power brings, whereas the second, the more numerous class, is directed and controlled by the first, in a manner that is now more or less legal, now more or less arbitrary and violent...
...social control in the face of popular pressures for change...
...The economic goal was to restore growth and profitability through a new global production system...
...Frank J. Lechner and John Boli (eds...
...But when threatened with suspension of new bilateral and multilateral credits, and with the denial of much-needed debt relief, the government caved in, and by 1995 had recommitted Honduras to the neoliberal program...
...4172...
...These and hunger...
...The concept of polyarchy is an outgrowth of elitism theories that developed early in the twentieth century to counter the classic definition of democracy as power or rule (cratos) by the people (demos...
...In undertaking this adjustment, the new elites have set out to modernize the state and society without any fundamental deconcentration of property and wealth, or any redistribution of political and economic power.13 Instead, the elites have implemented a transnational model of development based on new economic activities linked to global accumulation, shrinking domestic markets, and making cheap labor and abundant natural resources available to transnational capital as the region's "comparative advantage" in the global economy.14 The cases of Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, and Mexico demonstrate these patterns...
...In contrast to more popular conceptions of democracy, which see political power as a means for transforming s n demonstrate with unjust socioeconomic structures and democratizing social and cultural life, the polyarchic definition restricts democracy to the political sphere...
...This, of course, is the system in place in the United States...
Vol. 34 • November 2000 • No. 3
