Populism and Nationalism in Latin America

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318240310 Populism and Nationalism in Latin America Article in Javnost / The Public · July 2017 DOI: 10.1080/13183222.2017.1330731 CITATIONS READS 3 496 1 author: Carlos de la Torre University of Kentucky 67 PUBLICATIONS 669 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Assessing the Latin American Left Turn - 10 Years of the Correa Administration in Ecuador (Forthcoming in Palgrave, Francisco Sánchez and Simón Pachano (eds.)) View project Populism as a multifaceted phenomenon View project All content following this page was uploaded by Carlos de la Torre on 23 April 2018. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Javnost - The Public Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture ISSN: 1318-3222 (Print) 1854-8377 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjav20 Populism and Nationalism in Latin America Carlos de la Torre To cite this article: Carlos de la Torre (2017): Populism and Nationalism in Latin America, Javnost - The Public, DOI: 10.1080/13183222.2017.1330731 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2017.1330731 Published online: 05 Jul 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 35 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjav20 Download by: [74.136.49.222] Date: 10 July 2017, At: 08:40 Javnost: The Public, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2017.1330731 POPULISM AND NATIONALISM IN LATIN AMERICA Carlos de la Torre This article analyses the articulation of populism and nationalism in Peronism and Chavism. Despite their inclusionary policies, their redistribution of wealth and the expansion of social and political rights, Perón and Chávez built authoritarian governments. These national populist leaders concentrated power in the executive, used laws instrumentally to repress dissent and made use of the state apparatus to colonise the public sphere and civil society. Their autocratic drift is explained by a combination of four factors. First, the logic of populism transformed democratic rivals into enemies. Second, these leaders constructed the people as one, and once in power enacted policies to transform diverse and pluralistic populations into homogeneous peoples embodied in their leaderships. Third, even though these former military officers promoted national sovereignty, they acted as the only interpreters of national interests, excluding rivals from the national community. Fourth, Perón and Chávez closed institutional spaces to process dissent and conflict, exacerbating the autocratic impulses of their opponents who used any means necessary, including military coups, to try to get rid of populist presidents. KEYWORDS populism; nationalism; authoritarianism; democratisation; Chávez; Perón Introduction This article analyses the articulation of populism and nationalism in Peronism and Chavism. Despite their democratising promises and the inclusion of previously excluded groups, the outcome of these two most paradigmatic cases of Latin American national populism was authoritarianism. Juan Domingo Perón and Hugo Chávez used populist dis- courses, strategies and performances to construct politics as an antagonistic struggle between the people and their internal and external enemies embodied in the oligarchy. They challenged liberal notions of democracy and development. Perón redefined democracy as social justice and national sovereignty. Chávez understood democracy as the participation of common people in building a more equitable and sovereign society. Their democratic credentials lay in their challenges to the political, cultural and socio-economic exclusion of common people, and in their inclusionary policies. These politicians strength- ened the state apparatus, and used it to redistribute wealth. Both former military officers aimed to build their nation-states free from imperialist domination. They promised a third path between capitalism and Soviet-style communism, and promoted their models of political change abroad. Yet, despite their inclusionary policies, Perón and Chávez built authoritarian governments that concentrated power in the executive, used laws instrumentally to repress dissent and made use of the state apparatus to colonise the public sphere and civil society. Their autocratic drift is explained by a combination of four factors. First, the logic © 2017 EURICOM 2 C. DE LA TORRE of populism transformed democratic rivals into enemies. Second, these leaders constructed the people as one, and once in power enacted policies to transform diverse and pluralistic populations into homogeneous peoples embodied in their leaderships. Third, even though these former military officers promoted national sovereignty, they acted as the only interpreters of national interests, excluding rivals from the national community. Fourth, Perón and Chávez closed institutional spaces to process dissent and conflict, exacerbating the autocratic impulses of their opponents who used any means necessary, including military coups, to try to get rid of populist presidents. The article has three sections. The first analyses the processes of inclusion and nation- building promoted by Peronism and Bolivarianism. The second section focuses on their autocratic practices that aimed to manufacture Peronist and Chavista national-popular sub- jects. It analyses how these leaders concentrated power in the executive, subordinating all institutions of accountability to create plebiscitarian democracies. The third section explains how their understanding of politics as the struggle between two irreconcilable camps led to the displacement of democracy towards authoritarianism. This outcome was further facili- tated by the actions of the anti-populist opposition: whereas populists undermined democracy from within, their opponents used the closure of institutions for democratic contestation as an excuse for military interventions. Populist Inclusion in Argentina and Venezuela Peronism and Chavism are the best-researched cases of Latin American populism. This section analyses the causes that explain the emergence of these movements, and how they included previously excluded people, focusing on the ways these governments linked the popular and the national. Perón’s First Administration, 1946–1955 Laclau (1977, 190) wrote that “The strictly populist element in Peronist ideology was the radicalization of anti-liberal popular interpellations”. Peronism redefined democracy as social justice promoted by the active participation of the state in the economy. The values of nationalism and anti-imperialism replaced the previous liberal consensus formed around cosmopolitanism and Europeanism. Perón constructed ordinary people as the embodiment of the nation, while his enemies were portrayed as an anti-patriotic, foreign and pro-imperialist oligarchy. In his presidential campaign of 1946 Perón promised to re-establish free elections to break with the practice of electoral fraud (Peruzzotti 2013, 74). Indeed, once in power he expanded the franchise by giving women the right to vote in 1951. In that election seven women became senators, 24 women were elected to congress and Delia Parodi became vice president of the Chamber of Deputies (Plotkin 2003, 179). Voter turnout under Peronism dramatically surged from 18 per cent of the population in 1946 to 50 per cent in 1955 (Schamis 2013, 155). Perón promised a “real democracy” understood as “a higher standard of living to protect the worker, even the poorest, from capitalist coer- cion” (as quoted in Laclau 1977, 189). Citizenship was expanded to include social and economic rights, and his government recognised the working class as an autonomous social force that “would have direct, indeed privileged access, to the state though its unions” (James 1988, 18). POPULISM AND NATIONALISM IN LATIN AMERICA 3 Perón’s government redistributed wealth and increased the share of wages in the national Gross Domestic Product from 37 per cent in 1946 to 47 per cent in 1955. Workers received other material benefits such as access to social and medical services, and paid vacations (Plotkin 2010, 273). Peronism expanded consumption, and in particular food consumption of the working class and the poor: “By giving preference to internal con- sumers over external markets, Peronist food politics (in particular, beef politics) contributed to the elaboration of ideas of empowering the poor, as well as about economic sovereignty” (Rein 2013, 298). Indeed the state had an active role in the economy to pursue autarchic national development. It enacted five-year economic plans, and created the Argentine Insti- tute for the Promotion of Trade that held a monopoly over foreign exchange to promote import substitution industrialisation (Schamis 2013, 152). Perón’s government nationalised “the Argentine central bank, gas, telephone, and railroads” (Finchelstein 2014, 71). Peronism was a symbolic and cultural revolution that altered social classifications, class hierarchies and notions of deference (Plotkin 2010, 274). Until the 1930s and 1940s downtown, Buenos Aires was considered a space where workers did not belong. A worker interviewed by historian Daniel James remembered the 1930s as a time when: I always felt like strange when I went to the city, downtown Buenos Aires—like

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