Left Turns?

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Overview: a left turn or left turns?

In quick succession, left-leaning governments have been elected in much of Latin America. Beginning in 1998, with Chávez’s election in Venezuela, an apparent trend emerged with Workers’ Party leader Lula’s victory in Brazil in 2002, and then spread as the left Peronist Kirchner won in Argentina in 2003, and as former guerrilla Vásquez came to power in Uruguay in 2004. The tendency has since accelerated: in December 2005, former coca union leader Morales was elected president of Bolivia, while Socialist Bachelet won in Chile in January 2006. Even where it has lost, the Left has transformed the political landscape: Humala’s surprise showing in Peru gave credence to his platform of indigenous revindication; and in Mexico, following his disputed and wafer-thin .5% margin of electoral defeat, López Obrador has now been acclaimed the country’s “legitimate” president by the social movements that support him. This “left turn” seems set to continue. Lula and Chávez both have serious prospects for re-election this year, and Sandinista Daniel Ortega is set to mount a major campaign in Nicaragua.

The election of so many left-leaning governments has led to speculation about a broader shift. This “left turn” moves Latin America away from neoliberal economics and a long-standing alignment with United States political interests, toward alternative models of democracy and development. US influence is declining: the Bush administration’s choice of a secretary general for the Organization of America States lost out to a Chilean Socialist; and the US is now battling Venezuela’s bid to join the UN Security Council. The Inter-American Democratic Charter has been trumped by Latin America’s new pro-sovereignty mood and oil-rich Venezuela’s growing influence. The US has lost ground it gained among the elite in the 1990s, when the “Washington Consensus” drove policy decisions throughout the region. And across electorates, polls show marked decline in the popularity of the United States.

But such broad brushstrokes lack nuance, contributing to misconceptions and poor analysis. The idea of a unitary trend misses the complexity and diversity of left-wing movements and parties in Latin America, as well as the often contradictory social circumstances that produce them. It also begs the question: does the left matter? How are left-wing governments different?

We therefore propose five inter-related objectives:
1. We will question and complicate the notion of a Latin American “left turn.”
2. We will identify the differences and commonalities between Left parties.
3. We will examine their origins and their relations to social movements.
4. We will analyze the consequences of the election of left-wing governments.
5. We will offer predictions and policy recommendations.

We will invite leading scholars to present at a workshop in May 2007. All papers will be circulated in advance, and discussants will be drawn from UBC and SFU. Graduate students will be research assistants and active participants. Revised papers will be collected in an edited volume. Workshop attendance will be by invitation only (to ensure productive, intimate interactions), but additional public roundtables downtown will reach a wider audience. Parallel to the workshop, both as preparation and to extend its discussions, we will establish a trilingual web log and invite debate about Latin America’s left turns, opening up our discussions to a public throughout the region. This project marks a new stage of cooperation between the Latin American Studies programs at UBC and SFU, and is a step towards a joint SSHRC MCRI bid.

Structure: parties, movements, policies

1. The workshop’s first section will look at regional trends in outline. It will focus on the diversity as well as the commonalities between left-wing parties and movements. We will assess the argument that the Latin American Left divides ideologically into radical populists versus social democrats. But it may be that the Left merely reflects the conditions in which it emerges: populism arises where the party system has collapsed and in countries with enduring colonial legacies and long-standing patterns of social exclusion; by contrast, where the rule of law is secure and party systems stable, and so in smaller, ethnically homogeneous countries that were marginal to the colonial enterprise, the Left is more likely to be reformist. But even these patterns can be misleading. So we will seek further explanations for differences and resonances, for instance in terms of the strength and histories of social movements, the presence of particular cultural and political traditions, the durability of institutional (including party) apparatuses, and external factors such as relations to the world market, natural resources (oil, gas, coca), and outsider figures’ ability to catch the mood of novel political conjunctures.

2. The second section will look at these progressive parties themselves, tracing the social, political, cultural, and economic circumstances that contribute to their resurgence and electoral successes. Are the Left’s advances a backlash against two decades of market-friendly economic policies sponsored by Washington and the international financial institutions? Neoliberal economic policies often failed to produce economic growth, and many Latin American countries still under-perform in terms of both economic competitiveness and human development. Yet the region’s experience with market reforms has varied widely, as has willingness to experiment with policy alternatives accordingly. Moreover, the Left’s rise can be as much due to prosperity as poverty: Andean nationalisms, for example, have been fueled by natural resource price rises that lead some to suggest appropriating these resources to address long-standing social deficits. Perhaps the left is more trusted to administer prosperity. In addition, the rise of the Left reflects other trends--such as the growth of indigenous movements, the war on drugs, and the collapse of traditional parties. These factors are as much cultural as economic, and promise new ways of doing politics rather than the traditional pendulum between market and state.

3. The third section will therefore examine the insurgent movements to which left parties respond, on which they depend, and with whom they often uneasily coexist. From Venezuela’s Caracazo of 1989 to Mexico’s Zapatista campaign in from 1994, from the Argentine protests of December 2001 to the Bolivian protests that came to a head in October 2004, a multitude of new movements have emerged, often marginal or even actively opposed to traditional organizations such as unions or NGOs. Some of these spectacular displays of popular protest quickly disappeared. Others created the conditions for the electoral successes of a new breed of leaders. Each has often appeared spontaneous and surprising, generating new strategies of protest and grassroots self-organization or appropriating old tactics in new ways. We will ask how far left-leaning governments are expressions of such social insurgencies, whether they translate movement demands and desires into action, or whether rather they function as reactive pressure valves: venting steam, but little else. In other words, as well as examining the differences between left parties and movements across national and cultural borders, it is also necessary to examine the tensions between social movements and the electoral campaigns that claim to be their vehicles.

4. The fourth section examines policy alternatives: what the left has done in power, and the extent to which it offers real change. We will consider economic policy, including tax and expenditure, employment generation, and relations with multinationals. Can left wing governments combine innovation and redistribution with macroeconomic stability? Can they provide a coherent alternative to a stagnating neoliberalism? We will also focus on social welfare: do left-wing governments have distinctive priorities, and how have they addressed exclusion and marginality? Closely connected is citizenship: how have left wing governments responded to the challenge of recognizing the rights of subordinate groups, fostering participation and mobilization? This leads to the question of political institutions. What constitutional reforms have left-wing governments instigated, and what are their records in preserving or weakening the separation of powers, the rights of opposition, and the rule of law? Finally, we will also consider international relations, including the complex alignments and tensions between left-wing governments. We will consider trade negotiations and investment policies, and attempts to create the image of a regional “left turn” through diplomatic and foreign policy channels.

5. Our fifth section looks to the future. What room for maneuver will left-leaning parties and social movements have in coming years? We will consider the international context: Latin America has been left alone with the US and the “international community” transfixed by interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia. How might the Latin American Left’s prospects change should attention turn once more to the South, either in response to circumstances (say, Fidel Castro’s death), or after military withdrawal from Afghanistan or Iraq? We will also appraise the possible outcomes of the tensions within the Left. How will the balance of forces between parties and movements change as left-leaning regimes win or lose upcoming re-election battles? Will movements that support incumbent left-leaning governments continue to do so with the same alacrity as, for instance, in Brazil the Worker’s Party is hit with accusations of corruption, or in Argentina the Peronist apparatus disintegrates? Finally, we will suggest policy alternatives as yet untried: what, for example, is the feasibility of the Left adopting East Asian models of industrial policy, more thoroughly altering democratic practices and institutional routines, or consolidating trade and political integration to create (at last?) a more unified regional “left turn”?

Outcomes

• We will gather distinguished analysts from throughout the hemisphere and across disciplines to address critical changes in Latin American societies, focusing on prospects for enhancing social justice and deepening democracy.
• We will gather high quality essays to be disseminated initially on the web, as a platform for a web log that will attract contributions from other analysts.
• We will edit the revised papers to be published by a leading university press.
• We will also produce a special issue of NACLA, the journal of the North American Congress on Latin America.
• We will establish the basis for long-term research, grant application, and publications collaboration between researchers at UBC and SFU.
• We will enable graduate students at both UBC and SFU to engage state of the art research and debate on Latin America.

This project asks structured questions about the resurgence or reinvention of the Latin American left, bringing scholarly rigor at a time when most commentary has remained journalistic or impressionistic. It has the breadth of a comparative and interdisciplinary investigation, but goes beyond superficial assumptions of a unified continental tendency. “Left Turns” enables us to understand Latin America, and its likely future, in new ways. Any such undertaking is necessarily a collective project. A central tenet of our approach is that the Latin American “left turns” cannot be understood in standard political terms of a unified and unproblematic Left facing a monolithic right. We will go beyond the forced simplicities of electoral politics, to take seriously the social, cultural, economic, and historical aspects of this complex set of regional transformations.

But “Left Turns” will also contribute to a more general understanding of the ways in which left movements arise and gain ground, and of possible futures for and alternatives to neoliberal globalization. While so much media and policy attention has (understandably) been paid to the Middle East and Central Asia, it is Latin America that has perhaps more quietly offered the prospect that (in the words of the Zapatistas) “another world is possible.”