A Taylorian Approach to Social Imaginaries. the Origins of Chile's
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A Taylorian Approach to Social Imaginaries. The Origins of Chile’s Democratic Culture ___ Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades doctor philosophiae (Dr. phil.) vorgelegt dem Rat der Fakultät für Sozial- und Verhaltenswissenschaften der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena von Dipl. Soz. Darío Montero geboren am 15.07.1980 in Santiago de Chile Gutachter: 1. __________________________________ 2. __________________________________ __________________________________ Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: _____________ 2 Contents I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................. 5 1. The present malaise: Legitimation crisis in contemporary Chile .......................................... 5 2. The anti-democratic matrix of the Chilean state – a long-term perspective ......................... 9 3. The origins of Chilean democracy .......................................................................................... 11 II. THE IMAGINARIES APPROACH .................................................................................................. 18 4. A historical approach to the political: Representative and sovereign politics ................... 18 5. Charles Taylor’s notion of the social imaginary .................................................................... 23 6. Some theoretical implications of the imaginaries-approach to political change ................ 29 7. The plurality of modernity and democracy ........................................................................... 34 8. A Taylorian approach to legitimation crises .......................................................................... 36 9. Some consequences for the study of social movements ....................................................... 41 III. CHILE’S FOUNDING TRANSITION TO DEMOCRACY ............................................................. 47 10. The pueblos imaginary: A reinterpretation of the colonial past in the new Republic .... 49 11. The revolutionary ideology: The arrival of the modern social imaginary ...................... 59 12. The founding clash – Two republican imaginaries ........................................................... 67 12.1. Republican virtue and aristocratic rule ..................................................................... 70 12.2. Popular-democratic republicanism ............................................................................ 89 Liberalism and military centralism under O’Higgins ..................................................................... 90 The 1823-28 liberal-democratic movement – The revival of an old social imaginary ................... 95 The liberal-democratic Political Constitution of 1828 ................................................................. 111 13. The revolution of 1829 and the Portalian state: Militarism and mercantilism ............ 113 IV. INFLUENCE AND CONNECTION BETWEEN EARLIER AND LATER IMAGINARIES .......... 129 14. Portalian ‘order’ and nineteenth-century liberalism ...................................................... 129 15. A digression on the Portalian state and its ‘republican phases’ ..................................... 135 16. ‘Politics of representation’ and ‘politics of sovereignty’ ................................................. 137 17. The ‘social question’ and the second wave of constituent social movements .............. 143 3 18. The Democratic Republic under the Alessandrian Constitution.................................... 151 19. The military regime and the 1980 Constitution .............................................................. 154 20. Sovereign politics in the twenty-first century ................................................................. 156 Chile’s recent wave of social movements and ‘citizens assemblies’ ............................................ 156 Sovereign politics and popular power ......................................................................................... 161 The historical problem of ‘constituent popular power’ .............................................................. 163 V. CONCLUDING REMARKS ........................................................................................................... 166 The founding period as the matrix of Chile’s political culture ......................................................... 166 Influence of the earlier imaginaries on subsequent political history ............................................... 173 The present-day legitimacy crisis and prospects for democracy ..................................................... 181 VI. BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................... 187 A. Primary sources ..................................................................................................................... 187 B. Secondary sources ................................................................................................................. 188 i. Taylor .................................................................................................................................. 188 ii. Monographs........................................................................................................................ 189 iii. Articles ............................................................................................................................ 195 iv. Online material ............................................................................................................... 198 VII. Appendix: Interview with Charles Taylor ............................................................................ 199 Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................................... 211 Eidesstattliche Erklärung .............................................................................................................. 213 4 I. INTRODUCTION 1. The present malaise: Legitimation crisis in contemporary Chile ”If the Arab Spring has lost its bloom halfway across the world, people here are living what some have come to call a Chilean Winter. Segments of society that had been seen as politically apathetic only a few years ago, particularly the youth, have taken an unusually confrontational stance toward the government and business elite, demanding wholesale changes in education, transportation and energy policy.” New York Times, August 5, 2011 As Jürgen Habermas wrote, crises of capitalism tend to evolve into crises of representative democracy.1 However, the 2011 outbreak of mass demonstrations in Chile suggest that in this case a different interpretation is needed. Unlike Spain and Greece, countries which have been affected by approximately five years of contracting economies and record high unemployment rates, Chile has enjoyed steady economic growth and low unemployment. And yet during this period, socio-economic inequality in Chile has systematically increased and the perception of many lower and middle class people is that life has become more difficult to endure. As a result, since 2006 Chile’s so-called neoliberal ‘success story’ has been assaulted by unprecedented social protest. The student mobilizations of 2011 overtly rejected the Chilean educational system built during the 1980s under the Pinochet dictatorship, the culmination of which was the enactment of the Ley Orgánica Constitucional de Enseñanza (LOCE) in 1990. This law allows the private sector a high level of participation as a provider of education leaving the state in a largely regulative role. In their protests, students were joined by many segments of the population including teachers, workers, intellectuals and pobladores (shanty town dwellers), and there was widespread recognition that these protests were the largest Chile had seen for decades. It became clear during the course of 2011 that protests were not only about particular reforms regarding such matters as access to higher education, grants and funding, improved conditions for university loans, or more transparency in the system but more importantly a reflection of a ‘deep discontent’ among some parts of society with respect to the country's high inequality levels, to the point that reform alone would not have satisfied citizens’ aspirations.2 Eventually the discussion moved towards challenging the ‘individualistic model’ of education and other 1 Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, Boston: Beacon Press 1975 2 Gideon Long, “Chile Student Protests Point to Deep Discontent”, BBC News (11 August 2011), Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/ 5 areas of social protection, which in Chile are considered ‘services’ or ‘consumer goods’. In this respect, some scholars have interpreted this shift in the national debate as a change of paradigm, from market goods to social rights.3 Underpinning the critique of the educational system and its concomitant segregation and inequality, these recent social movements have articulated a coherent discourse which directly confronts the political system as a whole and in particular the Political Constitution of 1980, written during the Pinochet dictatorship. All the issues raised by these movements –such as free public education, public health care, the elimination of the current private pension system (AFPs), reform of the tax system, greater autonomy for the regions, and crucially, a demand for a new constitution born in democracy—