Makers of Democracy: A Transnational History of the Middle Classes in Colombia
360
Makers of Democracy: A Transnational History of the Middle Classes in Colombia
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781478001775 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/26/2019 |
| Series: | Radical Perspectives |
| Pages: | 360 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Bastard Middle Class
In 1962, photojournalist Marvin Koner published a photo essay in Fortune, a magazine targeted to a US middle-class audience. Titled "Neighbors Who Are Neither Rich nor Poor," the essay was "intended to introduce Latin America's large and expanding middle class" (figure 1.1). For "balance and comprehension," Koner warned, the images would need to "be filed in the reader's memory along with pictures of other Latin-American classes that have long been familiar: the poor Indian beside his llama, the white-jacketed playboy, the rack-ribbed children in Rio's favelas or Lima's barriadas." This middle class, he emphasized, was becoming apparent everywhere, as US foreign policy had always hoped: "middle-classers stream[ed] early to work in tall office buildings, [ate] quick lunches, and skip[ped] the siestas that used to paralyze business for half the day." All this gave to the Latin American middle class a "configuration resembling the middle class in the US."
Yet, the photographer cautioned, this resemblance could be deceiving, the photos concealing "the difference in thought patterns, attitudes, and reactions that sets the Latin-American middle class apart" from that in the United States. This was what journalist Walter Guzzardi Jr. addressed in a companion analysis titled "The Crucial Middle Class." Like Koner, he criticized those scholars and policymakers who described Latin America as a place where "rich [were] rich and poor [were] poor," implying that "the perplexing and explosive restlessness stirring in Latin America" could be traced to a "polarized social immobility, which paralyze[d] enterprises, [froze] hope, and suffocate[d] democracy." In contrast, Guzzardi wrote,
The sharecropper and the peon, for all their misery, are largely outside their country's political life. ... As for the very rich, while they are losing over and trying to resist change, they are hardly restless. The political significance of these two groups lies not so much in what they do as in what the man between thinks should be done about them. ... The man pressing for change, generating the friction, and throwing off the sparks is the man in the middle.
As part of a transnational discussion, Guzzardi mobilized a vision that was, in the Cuban Revolution's immediate aftermath, becoming common sense: because hopes for a democratic future in Latin America rested on the middle classes, a democratic system for the region was all the more "problematical." The journalist argued that "the middle-class man" in Latin America was promoting not a democracy characterized by political stability, economic independence, and social harmony but rather "revolutionary change" and social polarization. Unlike the "North Atlantic societies," in Latin America the middle class had developed a "spirit of restlessness." Thus the journalist called on scholars and policymakers to adopt a sympathetic understanding in grappling with a class that at its best offered the only possibility for consolidating regional democracy but at its worst could produce a "Fidel Castro type — restless, utopian, word-drugged, paranoid, and possibly violent."
These preoccupations capture what was often referred to, among scholars, policymakers, and social reformers associated with development programs such as the Alliance, as the middle-class enigma. Why, they asked, were the Latin American middle classes acting so differently from the Euro-American middle classes, to the point that a democratic system still remained unreachable for the former? What was needed to overcome this middle-class enigma, foster a proper middle class, and therefore secure a lasting democracy? In this chapter, my task is to demonstrate, as Ann Stoler has suggested, a countercomparison that confronts the very comparative choices made about the relationship between democracy and the consolidation of the middle classes during the late 1950s and 1960s in different geographical locations. In so doing, I show how these comparisons produced a transnational political rationality of rule that linked an idea of a middle class with a hierarchical notion of democracy characterized by the development of a politically proper corps of professionals, free-market small-business owners, and a large stratum of white-collar office employees who embraced harmonious social and labor relationships. As a specific response to a "politicization" in Latin America — from populist experiences in Guatemala and Argentina to La Violencia in Colombia to the Cuban Revolution — this rationality both shaped development programs and legitimized the United States' self-assigned imperial role of universalizing democracy in Latin America. Policymakers and elite intellectuals across the Americas produced a hierarchical geography of class through which Latin America's middle class was politically, culturally, and socially defined as illegitimate — in a word, a bastard middle class — and thus in perpetual need of normalization by an irresistible democratic empire that supposedly embodied a proper — and superior — middle class.
The Alliance for Progress: Toward a "New Democratic Rule"
In 1939, the US government set up its first organized and systematic technical cooperation program with Latin America as a part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy. With the potential involvement of the Western Hemisphere's nations in World War II in mind, Roosevelt established via executive order the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Nelson Rockefeller was appointed to this position, and shortly thereafter the US government established the Institute of Inter-American Affairs, a corporation authorized to carry out cooperative programs with Latin American governments to promote public health, housing, economic development, public administration, and agricultural growth. In 1944 a similar corporation, the Inter-American Educational Foundation, was organized to provide hemispheric cooperation in support of elementary and secondary schools. These prepared the US government to undertake the Point Four Program, a major effort to promote technical assistance, modern technology, knowledge exchange, and capital investment initiated shortly after Harry Truman's inaugural address of 1949. The Act for International Development, approved by the US Congress in 1950, supplied financial assistance to carry out many technical cooperation programs. Simultaneously, recently established international and transnational institutions — the Organization of American States (OAS), the United Nations (UN), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) — initiated an integrated set of liberal economic development policies, technical assistance plans, social welfare activities, population improvement programs, and cultural management agendas.
These programs reconfigured and reconceptualized the legitimate forms and methods for exercising imperial rule on a transnational terrain. Policymakers, consultants, experts, and politicians across the Americas debated how to overcome what Truman called in 1949 "the old imperialism," no longer an adequate basis for overseas expansion and influence because it was based only on "exploitation for profit." The new US political agenda needed to move away from European colonial rule because it had to spread democracy and invite those in underdeveloped areas of the world into a process of self-governance.
If Truman believed that US involvement in Latin America could be distinguished from European colonial rule because of the United States' putative lack of interest in financial gain, several policymakers argued otherwise. Ward Hunt Goodenough, a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, contended in 1957 that US foreign programs in the first half of the twentieth century had primarily been geared toward what he called "economicism." Like former European colonizers, Goodenough argued, the United States had only been concerned to offer, at worst, bread and roads, and, at best, agricultural technology. Furthermore, this imperialism was based on practices of "domination, imposition, and subjugation." These practices assumed that those in the underdeveloped countries were passive recipients of economic aid, unable to "think ... act ... feel by themselves." In contrast to both European colonial rule and earlier US economicism, the United States now would develop an international role that would depend on "negotiation ... social contracts ... meaningful encounters, and understandings." If the old imperialism was based on imposition, the United States would now approach other regions "by being sensitive" to their "cultural differences." And if the old imperialism worked by subjugating and marginalizing the underdeveloped world, the United States would now lead based on inquiry into what the people wanted, restoring the "participation and autonomy of underdeveloped people to shape their own destiny." In doing so, the United States would promote the "development [of] human welfare."
Scholars, policymakers, and experts across the Americas defined themselves as living in a new transnational order characterized by economic insecurity, anticolonial unrest, and real and imagined concerns for the spread of communism. And to make sense of such an order, they sought answers to what they defined as pressing questions: What were the most effective and appropriate ways to govern in democracies? Who was able to be effective in the arts of governing, and who should govern whom? These were transnational questions that propelled development programs such as the Alliance during the late 1950s and 1960s. The Alliance, as an international development program, was neither historically new nor a unique creation of the United States. Rather, as a response to rapid political radicalization, the Alliance was the product of a transnational discussion about who embodied the legitimate right to rule in "proper" democracies and how such a right should be properly exercised and distributed throughout different societies in the Americas.
Thus, despite the discourse critiquing the old imperialism, the first attempts at community development, agrarian reform, education, and housing by the Alliance drew heavily on the experiences of the British colonial administration with rural social projects in India; on community-based organizing prototypes in Mexico, Bolivia, Puerto Rico, and the Tennessee Valley; and on modernization programs in Colombia in the 1930s and 1940s. But as transnational, if uneven, discussions evolved, different policymakers and intellectuals across the Americas disavowed these experiences because they imagined that the United States had already achieved a "middle-class society" and thus could represent, unlike any other foreign power, an empire for democracy. Thus in the late 1950s policymakers envisioned development programs as the first — and perhaps last — opportunity for Latin American nations to consolidate the very revolution that the United States had experienced almost two centuries prior. John F. Kennedy argued that the United States had to be "culturally sensitive" to Latin American realities. He did not want the Alliance to be another imposed program of foreign aid but rather a comprehensive overhaul in which all nations of the Americas would unite to achieve "modern democracies." Kennedy contended that Latin America and the United States were not as different as they appeared. Simón Bolívar had desired to see the Americas fashioned into the greatest region that the world could witness, a region that, Kennedy added, had never been nearer "to the fulfillment of democracy." And yet, the president cautioned that such a possibility had never been "in greater danger" because, despite the desire for democracy, certain historical actors in Latin American societies were not ready to experience the irresistible gifts of modernity. It was indeed a political conundrum: how to spread the American Revolution to a region not ready to embrace such an advanced version of democracy. But it was not a moment for hesitation. As were others, Kennedy was confident that Latin America and the United States shared a colonial history. The difference was that while the latter had moved forward to achieve democracy, the former had remained frozen in history: feudal conditions still characterized the nations south of the Rio Grande. It was this shared colonial rule, however, that would allow the United States to finish what had been started in Caracas in 1811, by spreading to 1960s Latin America what had happened in Philadelphia in 1778. Kennedy envisioned the Alliance as a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, that needed to demonstrate to the entire world that man's unsatisfied aspiration for economic progress and social justice can be best "achieved by free men working within a framework of democratic institutions. ... every American family will be on the rise, basic education will be available to all, hunger will be a forgotten experience, the need for massive outside help will have passed, most nations will have entered a period of self-sustaining growth ... so that all, and not just the privileged few, share in the fruits of growth." What was at stake in this determination to supplant the old imperialism, to claim a shared "colonial past," and to promote democracy at the very moment when US foreign policy was invigorating Latin American militaries, orchestrating military interventions, and supporting intelligence agencies? Was the Alliance an attempt by the United States to mystify imperial relations by promoting "lofty humanitarian goals"? I want to study the rationalities underwriting development programs because what was at stake was not the suspension of imperial practices, as we tend to assume, but rather how to prolong imperial power through democracy. In so doing, we can critically interrogate one method of rule in the large repertoire of US practices of domination during the second half of the twentieth century.
More significantly, I will demonstrate how the development programs of community building, agrarian reform, education, housing, and financial literacy — crafted by intellectuals and policymakers across the Americas, supported by private foundations, sponsored by the United States, and put into practice as expansive state policies during Colombia's FN — consolidated a specific hierarchical vision of democracy as common sense. The Alliance — mediated by a transnational production of knowledge in cultural anthropology, social psychology, economics, administrative management theories, and rural sociology studies — galvanized a political rationality oriented toward interrelated projects of economic development, human welfare, and proper political preparation for "modern democracy." These community development programs would incorporate, as President Kennedy said in 1961, a "cultural and socially sensitive approach" that considered how people in the underdeveloped areas of the world were "socially and culturally embedded human subjects." US leadership would depend on constant encounters leading to social arrangements that allowed the communities of the underdeveloped world, through proper economic, political, and cultural guidance, to "best utilize the human capital and natural resources available in promoting the interests of their own communities." In this way, the "poor populations of the world" could "learn to understand their own current situation, the disastrous effects of poverty for them, their families, and their countries." Furthermore, this "new mentality" would enable a "society [in which] human beings" could "take care of themselves and others." The Alliance would develop a new paradigm that would work within a "democratic framework," promoting "bottom-up social approaches" to create participatory and "democratic spaces" where the people would be able to develop their own ideas and cultures, enhance their own capabilities, and understand what economic goals they were able to reach.
Thus, imperial governance was to occur neither by coercively imposing nor by marginalizing people's participation but through a process of schooling in proper forms of self-government and self-discipline that targeted "people's talents ... people's actions, feelings, and beliefs." This imperial humanist rationality would target what was often called "human capital." In short, this imperial humanist governance sought to make "the Third World" a society of governors, a society capable of governing itself.
The Role of the Middle Class
Central to this rationality was a (re)formation of a middle class. Imperial humanist rationality was to take place through a democratic middle class properly selected, guided, and disciplined to become competent in stimulating and distributing the necessary human capital for "national democracies to emerge." It is in this specific sense that the imperial humanist rationality at the core of development programs, rather than weakening regional democracy, sought to legitimize a classed and gendered definition of democracy. As early as 1948, the Pan-American Union (soon to become theOAS) decided that it was imperative to develop a series of studies on the middle classes' role in Latin American societies. The Social Science Research Office of the Pan-American Union, a wellspring of modernization theory, defined this as "perhaps the most important political endeavor of the twentieth century." Theo R. Crevenna, a sociologist in charge of this project, argued that studying the middle class was "the last hope for a democratic world" in a region so long displaying the undemocratic tendencies of a "two-class society." Thus, this research office contacted those whom they considered the most qualified intellectuals in Latin America and the United States to prepare ethnographic studies about the social structure and the political and economic roles of the middle class in Latin America.The hope was that these studies would spark an "intellectual excitement" that would push Latin America, like the United States, to think of itself "in middleclass terms."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations ixAcknowledgments xiii
Introduction. "There Is No Other Class in Democracy" 1
Part I. Conscripts of Democracy: The Alliance for Progress, Development, and the (Re)Formation of a Gendered Middle Class, 1958–1965
1. A Bastard Middle Class 21
2. An Irresistible Democracy 42
3. The Productive Wealth of This Country 62
4. Beyond Capital and Labor 86
Part II. Contested Democracies: Classed Subjectivities, Social Movements, and Gendered Petit Bourgeois Radicalization, 1960s–1970s
5. In the Middle of the Mess 109
6. A Revolution for a Democratic Middle-Class Society 139
7. A Real Revolution, a Real Democracy 172
8. Democracy: The Most Important Gift to the World 225
Epilogue. A Class that Does (Not) Matter: Democracy beyond Democracy 255
Appendix 263
Notes 271
Bibliography 303
Index 333
What People are Saying About This
“In this fascinating and stimulating work A. Ricardo López-Pedreros deconstructs the oft-assumed direct connection between the rise of the middle class and democracy through a rich study of the formation of the new Colombian middle class. Makers of Democracy makes a major contribution to debates about the role of the middle classes and Latin American conceptualizations of democracy and how, through the language of class, gender, and democracy, claims of legitimacy to rule are made.”
“Few authors manage to tie the inner life of experience to the broader frame of ideas and political economy as skillfully as A. Ricardo López-Pedreros does here. Clearly structured and carefully argued, Makers of Democracy is a master class in how to use one national history to think through transnational theoretical debates and social processes. This bold and impressive book is a landmark work on democracy and the middle class worldwide and an important recasting of Colombian history.”