Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, and H

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, a

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Part 1 of 4

Chapter 6: Haiti: The "practically insolvable problem" of establishing consensual domination

The experience of Liberia and Haiti shows that the African race are [sic) devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government. Unquestionably there is in them an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization which are irksome to their physical nature. Of course there are many exceptions to this racial weakness, but it is true of the mass, as we know from experience in this country. It is that which makes the negro problem practically insolvable.

-- US Secretary of State Robert Lansing, 1918 [1]


Cite Soleil (Sun City) is a name filled with bitter sarcasm. It refers to the vast shantytown slum just north of Port-au-Prince. Poverty here reaches absolute bottom, below which can only be death.' Barefoot children play on banks of muddy streams of raw sewerage or amidst toxic waste spills. A crippled man hasn't been able to get enough to eat for two days. A mother can't treat her baby's serious injury because of the cost of medical care. Despite these conditions, the most striking thing about Cite Soleeil is not its desperate poverty. Rather it is the hope that is surging here with the growth of the Lavalas mass movement and the election of radical priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

-- US visitor reporting from Cite Soleil, March 1991 [2]


As in the Philippines, Chile, and Nicaragua, the United States sustained an alliance in Haiti with a dictatorial regime, the Duvalier family dynasty, during much of the post-World War II period. By the early 1980s, the dictatorship was beginning to crumble under pressure from a burgeoning popular movement. Washington intervened to bring about a "transition to democracy." The first step, "preventative diplomacy," proved highly successful: Duvalier was removed from power in early 1986,in the face of a mass uprising, yet the Haitian state and, in particular, its coercive apparatus, the army, remained intact, and the elite order largely unaltered. But the second step, cohering elements of the Haitian elite around the transnational agenda and placing this elite in power through free elections, proved hopelessly elusive. The project fell completely out of Washington's control: it backfired, bringing to the Haitian presidency, through elections in 1990 organized and financed by Washington, the representative of the highly mobilized and belligerent popular classes, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide. "Preventative diplomacy" averted a revolutionary insurrection, but ironically the installation of a popular government and the initiation of a program of socioeconomic transformation was achieved through the very "democracy promotion" structures set up by Washington.

The military coup d'etat against Aristide in September 1991 represented a regression to outright dictatorship. For the Haitian majority, this military dictatorship represented a return to the suffering and tribulation endured throughout the nation's history. For the United States and the Haitian elite, it was a mixed outcome. On the one hand, the dictatorship was an embarrassing and destabilizing anomaly in an emergent transnational political system whose legitimization lay in polyarchy, and its coming to power; created a foreign-policy crisis for Washington. On the other hand, the new military dictatorship, not unlike Pinochet in Chile, showed an uncanny proficiency in cutting short the embryonic project of popular democracy and in demobilizing and resubordinating the popular classes. The September 1994 US invasion, conducted under the banner of restoring Aristide to power and democracy to the country, was the complex and paradoxical result of the failure of the project to modernize the traditional structures of power in Haiti and to stabilize elite domination. The goal of the invasion, despite appearances to the contrary, was to place back on track that project contra Aristide and the popular classes.

The attempt to facilitate a "transition to democracy" in Haiti is illuminating on several accounts. First, it took place after the Cold War, and after the string of transitions in the 1980s, demonstrating that the reorientation of US policy has been less a conjunctural response to events in that decade than a long-term transformation. Second, as analyzed below, it brings home the point made by Gramsci that effective hegemony (as distinct from mere domination) is exercised in both civil and political society (in "state and society"); achieving superordination in only one is insufficient, either for the popular sectors or for dominant minorities. Third, it lays bare the deep contra- dictions internal to the project of the transnational elite, a theoretical and practical issue which I take up in the concluding chapter.

Saint-Domingue: paradise and hell [3]

In 1492, Columbus landed on the northwestern coast of the island of Hispaniola, in what is now Haiti. The place he described as a lush tropical "paradise" was inhabited by up to three million Taino-Arawak Indians. The indigenous population were soon put to work as slaves, and within two generations the Taino-Arawak people had become extinct, the victims of massacres, overwork, European diseases, and despair. Diego Columbus, who was given abundant lands and Indian slaves by his brother Christopher, set up the first sugar plantation in Haiti. Diego Columbus not only introduced "King Sugar" into the Caribbean Basin, which soon became the principal world supplier of the sweet substance that tied the region into the emergent world system, but also first imported African slaves into Hispaniola when the supply of Indian labor became exhausted. Spanish colonial development was concentrated in the eastern two-thirds of the island, which would eventually become the Dominican Republic. The relative neglect of the western portion, now Haiti, made it possible for French competitors to establish influence. At the end of the seventeenth century Spain ceded to France, engaged in intense commercial rivalry with other expanding European powers, the western portion of the island, which was renamed Saint-Domingue by France. The colony soon became France's richest and the envy of other European powers.

With its fertile soils and the thousands of sugar, coffee, cotton, and indigo plantations set up by French settlers and administrators of the French monarchy, Saint-Domingue furnished two-thirds of France's overseas trade, employing one thousand ships and fifteen thousand French sailors. In addition, the colony, which came to be known as La Petite France (Little France), supplied half of Europe's consumption of tropical produce. The 800 sugar plantations in the Grande Ile ti Sucre (the Great Sugar Island) produced more than all the English Caribbean islands put together and the colony's overall trade is said to have outstripped that of the thirteen North American colonies.4 This colonial paradise, however, was sustained by the most brutal slavery in recorded human history. French planters calculated that replenishing slaves with new ones after several years brought in more profit than making outlays to keep slaves alive. At the height of its productivity, from the early to the late eighteenth century, slavery killed some one million Africans, and Saint-Domingue became one of the world's greatest markets for the African slave trade. By the 1780s, 40,000 French whites ruled over 700,000slaves and 28,000mulattos who were technically free but enjoyed limited rights. [5]

In 1791, Haitian slaves launched a revolt against French plantation owners, led by the famed Toussaint L'Ouverture. The revolutionaries had to face successive onslaughts not only from Napoleonic France, but from Spanish and British forces - reflecting the magnitude of the interests involved, and fierce European commercial rivalries. All were defeated at the hands of the Haitians. The only successful slave revolt in modem history led to the proclamation of the Haitian republic in 1804. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who became the revolutionary leader after Toussaint was captured and died in a French dungeon in 1802, adopted the ancient Taino-Arawak Indian name of Haiti, meaning "land of mountains," for the newly independent country. The establishment of the second independent republic in the New World and the first "Black Republic" had profound international repercussions. It inspired independence movements in Spanish America (Haiti, in fact, provided crucial support to Simon Bolivar), slave revolts throughout the Caribbean and the southern United States, and it decisively shifted the balance of power among European commercial rivals. The masses do, in fact, make history: the revolution led to the withdrawal of French ambitions in the New World, symbolized by the sale, shortly after losing Haiti, of the Louisiana territory to the United States, thus shoring up Britain and the United States as dominant powers in this period of capitalist world history.6

Independence, however, saw the replacement of the French elite with a new local elite, and led to chronic political instability, changes in government from one elite civilian or military clique to another through coups d'etat, palace revolutions, and armed revolts, and deep and violent racial tensions. Beneath the post-independence turmoil lay the failure of a century-long attempt at nation-building, a result of contradictions internal to the new republic and of continued outside intervention. This century-long period culminated in 1915 with the invasion by US marines and a subsequent nineteen-year occupation which would lay the basis for the ascension of the Duvalier dictatorship.

Haiti's complex historical experience has been little understood by outside commentators, whose simplistic and Eurocentric observations, usually tinged by (if not steeped in) racism, have led to notions that Haitians are somehow inherently prone to violence, corruption, authoritarianism, disorder, and disaster. The country's tragic history of perpetual misery and crisis is attributed to an unexplainable and ingrained inability of the Haitians to organize their affairs successfully. As late as 1957, for instance, New York Times, in an article commenting on the first few months of the Duvalier regime, explained: "With only a few exceptions, Haiti has been unfortunate in her political leadership ... This was inevitable in a country with an illiteracy rate of over 90 percent. The highly emotional people, who have little but tribal rule and superstition to guide their thinking, have been notoriously susceptible to demagogic political appeal. The political leaders by and large have approached their tasks with the utmost cynicism."7 These images of Haiti persisted in the 1990s, with the Haitian people projected internationally as an "AIDS-infested" population, a "boat people" fleeing (not analyzed and not understood) misery, a people living on "international handouts," and a "basketcase" in efforts at nationbuilding and development.

Haiti's troubled past can only be grasped in its historical and structural context through an analysis of the colonial state of Saint- Domingue, the circumstances in which the Haitian state came into being, the conditions under which it had to survive, and the resultant class and socioeconomic structure. Several factors stand out: the peculiar class and racial composition of the dominant groups; the complete fusion of elite rule with the state and the absence of any organized civil society; an entrenched culture of authoritarianism, corruption, and violence bequeathed by the Spanish, the French, and the Northamericans; and most of all, the crippling limits imposed on Haitians' ability to determine their own national conditions by the country's subordinate position in the world system. An analysis of Haiti belies "political culture" theories, which hold that a people's cultural patterns determine historic socioeconomic outcomes. To the contrary, Haiti is a striking demonstration that historic socioeconomic structures, production and class relations foment certain political cultures, not the reverse.

Slaves in Haiti were kept down by perhaps the most extreme and arbitrary terror known in modem history, which left deep roots for a culture of violence, a political culture which became self-perpetuating after independence with the need for the tiny elite to resort to permanent repression to sustain its rule in the face of enormous inequalities. The incredible wealth produced in, and syphoned out of, Saint-Domingue led to an extremely pronounced system of corruption. As one study by the London-based Latin America Bureau notes, the colony of Saint-Domingue was a volcano of irreconcilable conflicts and racial hatreds. "The economic system which reigned in Saint-Domingue was a predatory one based on an enslaved labour force and unequal trade relations. To keep the conflicts in check and ensure that the process of extracting wealth continued to function, a militarized and authoritarian state was developed, run by the Navy Ministry in France." In turn, French military officers and colonial administrators in charge of towns and districts eagerly took advantage to turn their power into profits and "shamelessly held the island's inhabitants to ransom, exacting tributes far higher than the official taxes." The chief sources of revenue of colonial administrators "were the sale of trading permits, land and decisions on property matters, and involvement in smuggling rackets." The study concludes: "These two features of the colonial system - authoritarian military power and extensive corruption - became so deeply entrenched in the colony that they survived through the following 200 years as permanent and essential features of Haitian life."8

Another key factor in explaining post-independence Haitian history was the virtual lack of any continuity between the old colonial economy, based on linkage to the world market through capital accumulation on slave plantations, and the post-independence economy, based on subsistence peasant production.9 The plantation system was broken up and lands parceled out to peasant smallholders, who over the generations further sub-divided plots among offspring. A process of capital accumulation internal to Haiti never really developed after the revolution. The elite did not engage directly in production but rather acquired wealth through international marketing of peasant production and usurious relations with peasants and small craft producers. As a consequence, rather than the production process, it was the Haitian state, extracting tribute from the peasantry from taxes, duties, and outright thuggery, that became the principal, and virtually only, source of wealth and power for the tiny Haitian bureaucratic and commercial elite. This explains the long-standing practice of ruling cliques to regard the state and government as their personal property, as well as the seemingly endless feuds and intrigues among the elites in and out of the army over which clique would hold the reins of the state - what Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot refers to as "state fetishism," and what an Althusserian structuralist might refer to as the "overdetermination" of the state in the Haitian social formation. The lack of a process of internal capital accumulation laid the material basis for a disjuncture between civil and political society and created a structural situation highly inpropitious to any variant of consensual domination.

Moreover, the threat of an independent Black Republic at a time when slavery still flourished in the Caribbean, the United States, and much of the eastern seaboard of Latin America, and when Africa was just being conquered and colonized, led the Great Powers that controlled world trade to castigate and isolate Haiti, for whom recognition was a precondition for entry into the world market. Not until 1825 did France recognize Haitian independence, and even then only on extremely onerous terms, requiring an indemnity of 150 million French francs - perhaps the only case in history in which the victor was forced to pay reparations to the vanquished. This "independence debt" placed a heavy burden on the Haitian economy, forced the country into mortgaging arrangements with French, and later US, banks, and was not repaid until 1922.10 The Vatican withheld recognition until 1860.The United States maintained a century-long de facto commercial embargo, refused to recognize Haiti until 1862, and did not establish diplomatic relations until 1886.11

The dynamics of race (or color) and class in Haiti is a further crucial historical factor. The mulattos, although they suffered discrimination under the white planters, also acted as a buffer between the French and the African slaves, and were able to acquire education, property, professional titles, and administrative experience. A substantial minority of their ranks even became slave and property owners themselves. Following the revolution, the white colonial elite was virtually banished from the country. In much of Latin America the "creole bourgeoisie," or the colonial elite, assumed. the reins of power with independence, and in Africa and Asia post-colonial ruling elites' power had deep historical roots in their native lands and cultures. In Haiti, however, there was no indigenous ruling elite at the time of independence. Class and nation formation proceeded on the most fragmentary basis possible. The mulatto population became a privileged stratum, a new bureaucratic and merchant elite dominating commerce and government. The legacy of French colonialism was thus a deep class divide expressed in ethnic terms between a mulatto elite and a mass of impoverished ex-slaves, along with a tiny black elite that came into existence with independence (the categories of "black" and "mulatto" should be seen sociologically as social constructs particular to Haitian society).

Finally, owing to the fusion between the Haitian elite and the state and the localized, subsistence nature of much of the economy, civil society remained underdeveloped - indeed, virtually non-existent - in Haiti. The elite exercised power through control of the state and through coercion, and thus never developed their own organs in civil society. It was not until the large-scale penetration of transnational capital began in the 1960s and 1970s that localized communities were sufficiently disrupted and integrated into a national formation that the masses began their own organizing in civil society beyond the local level. Indeed, the state was the impenetrable domain of the elite, and civil society that of the popular classes. Thus the struggle of the popular majority against the dominant groups took on the perfect expression of a struggle of civil society against the state, or as Trouillot puts it, "the state against the nation," rooted in the historica; disjuncture between civil and political society which reached its peak under Duvalierism. This also meant that when Washington stepped in in the 1980s to try and implement "democracy promotion" programs, US organizers discovered a civil society already densely organized by the popular classes and under the hegemony of these classes.

Haiti provides graphic empirical support for Andre Gunder Frank's thesis that those regions most intensively exploited during the formative years of the "modem world system" would later, owing to the very intensity of that exploitation and the structures it left behind, become the most backward, marginalized, and impoverished areas.12 From the wealthiest of all of Europe's overseas colonies, Haiti became, and has remained, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest in the world. In 1982, the country exported a mere $197 millions worth of goods, per capita income was $315, life expectancy stood at 48 years, infant mortality at 130 per 1,000, illiteracy at about 80 percent, malnutrition and undernourishment were endemic, and 74 percent of the nation's 6 million people remained in the agricultural sector. A full,74 percent of the rural population, and 55 percent of urban dwellers, were considered by the World Bank to live at or below the absolute poverty level. In that same year, 1 percent of the GNP went to public education and 0.9 percent to health, while the military consumed 8.3 percent of the GNP.13 The Haitian blood plasma scandal of the 1970s was a grizzly expression of how the powers that be in the world system have - literally - sucked the life-blood of the Haitian people. Such is the level of poverty that Haitians blood develops much higher levels of antibodies than most societies in the world, making it highly valued on the world market. In the 1970s, Haitian businessmen, in cooperation with transnational pharmaceutical and chemical firms, among them Armour Pharmaceutical, Cutter Laboratories, and Dow Chemicals, set up a thriving business by indiscriminately extracting blood plasma from poor Haitian donors for $3 a pint and reselling it abroad at $35 a pint.14

From the US marine occupation to the Duvalier dictatorship

Dear me, think of it! Niggers speaking French.

-- US Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, after receiving a briefing on Haiti, 1912 [15]


The first republic in the New World, the United States, showed only contempt for the Black Republic. The Haitian revolution had inspired Gabriel Prosser's slave uprising in Virginia in 1800, and the Denmark Vesey uprising in 1822. The white government in Washington, which maintained the US slave system for nearly sixty years more, responded to the newborn Haitian republic with a policy of isolation and nonrecognition. When official relations were finally established in 1886, the black diplomat sent by Port-au-Prince was deemed socially unacceptable and instructed by the US government to remain in New York rather than Washington, D.C.16 Over the next few decades Haiti would acquire strategic importance for the nascent US empire because of the Windward Passage, a waterway shared with Cuba and considered vital to Caribbean and eastern US sea-lanes. Between 1857 and 1913 US Navy ships entered Haitian ports nineteen times to "protect American lives and property."17 The Spanish-American War was fought by the United States in part to gain control over the vital waterway.

Over 3,000 Haitians died fighting US marines who invaded the country in 1915 and stayed on for nineteen years.18 The marines were in Haiti as part of the Wilsonian project to install and stabilize elite regimes in the heyday of the young empire's effort to secure domination over the Caribbean Basin, considered the geopolitical springboard for worldwide expansion. In Haiti, however, the United States sent in a High Commissioner to directly rule the country, which became not a mere protectorate, but an outright colony. "The Haitians are negro for the most part, and, barring a very few highly educated politicians, are almost in a state of savagery and complete ignorance," wrote a State Department official in 1921.Therefore, "in Haiti it is necessary to have as complete a rule within a rule by Americans as possible."19 Nine years later, in 1930,the US charge in Haiti reported: "In general, while the Anglo-Saxon has a... profound conviction of the value of democratic government," the Haitians were unsuitable for democracy because they were, "in common with the Latin in general .. in the main directed by emotion rather than by reason" and is therefore "apt to scorn democracy."20

Operating with a vicious racism not felt in the country since the defeat of Napoleon's army, and with little understanding of the nation's peculiar history and social complexion, the white occupation force assembled political structures responsive to outside interests that only complicated endogenous political development. As noted above, by the 1820s, less than two decades after Haiti's independence, the mulatto and formally free elite, which represented 5 percent of the population, had come to control the reins of government and most of the nation's wealth. Thus began a century of conflict and accommodation between the mulatto elite and the small black upper and middle classes. La palitique de daublure, or "the politics of the understudy," took root in the final decades of the nineteenth century, in which a black president, responsive to the mulatto elite structure, often occupied the presidential palace and satisfied his own personal constituency through graft. But as the nation's indebtedness and impoverishment increased, lower class unrest and elite infighting began to undo the palitique de daublure, which had provided a modicum of stability. Between 1911 and 1915, seven presidents were overthrown. The unrest gave Washington the pretext it needed to intervene. The US occupation authorities further aggravated the racial and class divide by excluding all blacks from public life, placing the mulatto elite in power (the US High Commissioner installed four successive mulatto client-presidents), and transferring the economy to near total external control.

The occupation force established a customs receivership, took control of the nation's finances and of every ministry except justice and education, and rewrote the constitution to permit foreign ownership of property, long prohibited by the independent Haitians, who feared a return to complete foreign economic domination. The US official charged with drafting this constitution was Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at the time was pursuing numerous private investment schemes in Haiti.21 One of the US companies that set up operations was the Haitian American Sugar Company (HASCO). HASCO ran a large sugar estate and the country's one giant mechanized sugar mill. The country's sole railway connected the HASCO sugar mill to the port capital, Port-au-Prince, and was also in the hands of US investors. The principal shareholder and financial underwriter of this railway was the National City Bank of New York, which took over Haiti's Banque Nationale. Roger L. Farnham, the bank's vice-president, became the State Department's principal advisor on Haitian affairs during the early years of the occupation. General Smedley D. Butler, who had in 1909 led US forces in the intervention in Nicaragua, would later charge that the marines invaded Haiti as a bill collector for the National City Bank.22 With the occupation, the United States displaced its French and German rivals and became the principal external power, reorienting the Haitian economy towards dependence on the US market.

"The Marines perform a double function," explained a report by one US commission sent to investigate conditions in Haiti in 1926. "First, they protect the President from assassination; and second, they enable the American High Commissioner, Brigadier General Russell, to give the President authoritative advice."23 The occupation force instituted forced public labor to construct military roads and other works. Blacks were manacled like slaves, compelled to work for weeks with little or no pay and inadequate food and shot down if they attempted to escape.24 The US High Commissioner instituted severe press censorship (one proclamation forbad articles or speeches "reflecting adversely upon the American forces in Haiti") and detention without trial of dissidents, declared martial law for much of the occupation, militarized the entire country (US marine officers were appointed as administrators in every province and district and given near-dictatorial powers), and arbitrarily dissolved two rubber-stamp Haitian National Assemblies when deputies refused to carry out Washington's dictates. 25 The occupation force - exclusively white - introduced strict Jim Crow racial segregation in the country. No fewer than 147 brothels, hitherto unknown in Haiti, sprang up to cater for the decadent marines. The absolutely authoritarian and violent character of the occupation exacerbated the adverse local political culture.

The US marines disbanded the army and created a local gendarmerie staffed exclusively by mulatto junior officers under the command of US senior officers.26 The occupation force departed in 1934, and the Haitian army they left behind became the repressive and corrupt regulator of power and guardian of elite interests inside Haiti, while the country remained firmly under US domination. US interests were transmitted via the US ambassador to the mulatto elite which remained in office for another twelve years, until President Elie Lescot was deposed by a military coup. Lescot was replaced by a black president, Dumarsais Estime, but the army remained the backbone of real power, and overthrew him with US support. His military replacement, Colonel Paul Magloire, was thrown out of office in late 1956, leading to nine months of political chaos which saw five provisional governments and a one-day civil war that left several dozen dead. Thus the US occupation, far from resolving the crisis of elite rule, had aggravated it. This post-occupation instability laid the basis for the advent of Duvalierism, or what Trouillot refers to as a transition from authoritarianism to totalitarianism in response to the crisis of elite domination. Trouillot uses the term totalitarian as defined by Nicos Poulantzas, whereby dominant classes face a deep structural crisis, are unable to organize themselves politically, and face either the immediate threat of, or complete absence of, subordinate classes organizing and contesting political power. In distinction to mainstream political science notions of anti-democratic capitalist regimes as "authoritarian" and former Soviet-bloc regimes as "totalitarian," the term totalitarian is derived from "total" in the original sense meant by Mussolinists, whereby coercive domination pervades every aspect of social relations.

Francois ("Papa Doc") Duvalier, through a cunning manipulation of the inauspicious blend of local politics and US power, had been quietly working his way into the power structure with the departure of the marines. The black Duvalier appealed to the "politics of the understudy" to win support from the mulatto elite. At the same time, he built support among blacks, who made up 95 percent of the population, through manipulation of the Noirist backlash that spread after the marines departed. Noirism, a form of cultural nationalism, was an ideology of the black middle and upper classes, denied participation in leadership, that stressed racial pride, African cultural revival, and black political rule, yet did not question basic elite structures,27 In this way, Duvalier squeezed an opening for a black elite and paved the way for a tenuous elite consensus that bridged the racial divide at the level of the dominant groups. Papa Doc was eventually elected president in 1957, with the backing of the army and with secret US support, in elections organized in the chaotic aftermath of Magloire's departure and mired in fraud and intrigue,28 Rather than facing a second election, Duvalier declared himself President for Life in 1964, promising a stable, long-term alliance between the black and the mulatto elite and foreign (US) interests. "It was a mutually satisfactory relationship," noted one observer, "they [the local elite and the United States] profited from his power, and he became more powerful from their profits."29 Just like Somoza, Duvalier thus achieved stable, although not consensual, domination.

If a modicum of elite consensus and US support was one girder of Duvalierism, its other was a combination of limited cooptation and a new black upward mobility for a chosen few, and the systematic, mass repression of the popular majority. Within days of assuming power, the first Duvalier initiated a wave of terror with few parallels in modem history, and which soon became permanent and institutionalized. At least 50,000 people are reported to have been executed by the Duvalierist regime between 1957 and 1985, hundreds of thousands were detained and tortured or disappeared, and another 1.5 million were driven into voluntary or forced exile.30 Duvalier used the 1957 election campaign to establish a patronage network, recruited directly from the lower classes, the chefs de section (a national network of rural sheriffs), and the houngans, or vodoun priests, based on personal loyalty, cronyism, extortion, and intimidation of opponents.31 The original members of this patronage network provided the basis for building the Volunteers of National Security (VSN), known throughout Haiti and the world as the Tonton Macoutes, the notorious paramilitary goon squads that terrorized the population.

Always the Machiavelli, Duvalier formed the Macoutes both as a counterweight to the army - as an insurance policy against a possible putsch to oust him - and as a highly efficient, if brutal and merciless, instrument of mass repression. The Macoutes reached into every layer and niche of society. Armed Macoutes were said to have outnumbered the army by two to one, while card-carrying VSN members numbered up to 300,000. "Duvalier's genius lay in how he designed their hierarchical structure, chose their social origins, and encouraged their recruitment in numbers so vast, they enabled him to survive every obstacle," noted one analyst. "The hierarchy was simple, a giant-bottomed pyramid with most Macoutes at the bottom and a few Duvalier fanatics as commanders. At the pinnacle, in absolute control was Duvalier himself. Socially, the Macoutes came from the most disadvantaged classes and regarded the VSN as their sole escape from the relentless misery and hard work that inevitably awaited them."32 The virtually all-black VSN thus insulated the Duvalier dynasty from the popular masses and also from any destabilizing elite intrigues, and at the same time provided the Duvaliers with a minimal social base; Macoutes could, and did, terrorize, extort money from, and just plain rob, any and every citizen, and thus the survival of 300,000 VSN members and their families in the lower classes came to depend on the survival of the Duvaliers.

As with Somocismo, Duvalierism was sustained by naked repression and a triple - if always tension-ridden - alliance between Duvalierist cronies, the Haitian elite, and the United States. To be sure, relations between the Duvaliers and Washington became highly strained at certain moments, particularly in the early years of Kennedy's Alliance for Progress and under Jimmy Carter's "human rights" policy, when dictatorships blemished stated foreign-policy projects. In 1962, the CIA attempted unsuccessfully to organize a coup d'etat against Papa Doc similar to that which was successfully staged against the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.33 Although the incident led to a temporary suspension of economic (but not military) aid, shortly afterwards Washington saw the wisdom in long-term accommodation to Duvalier. US economic aid became the mainstay of the regime, while US military advisors providing training and weaponry for the army, the Tonton Macoutes, and later the counterinsurgency Leopard forces.34 These military forces successfully suppressed scattered guerrilla movements in the 1960s and 1970s, sometimes with direct US participation.35 When the ailing Duvalier's hand-chosen successor, his nineteen-yearold son Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc"), was sworn in upon his father's death in 1971 and appointed as the second "President for Life," the US ambassador, Clinton Knox, the only diplomat present at the ceremony, greeted the new unelected head of state by calling for an increase in aid to Haiti, while two US Navy warships stood offshore from Port-au- Prince to assure an orderly transfer of power.36 US economic and military aid continued throughout the duration of the regime, including under the Carter administration notwithstanding its human rights policy.37

Foreign capital had first entered Haiti in the late nineteenth century, when French, German, and US business began to invest in commerce, public utilities, and some agricultural concerns, but this investment was small-scale and sporadic. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the complete exhaustion of peasant holdings, the large-scale penetration of transnational capital, and the bounding of the country more closely to the international financial system, led to the gradual breakup of the peasant economy. The continuous subdivision of land, one of the most severe ecological crises in the world (due to deforestation), the theft and concentration of lands by Duvalierists and agro-exporting fractions of the elite, and the arrival of foreign agri-business in the 1960s and 1970s, led to massive urban migration and the semi-proletarianization of those remaining in the countryside.38 In turn, in the 1970s, Haiti was selected by the AID and the international financial agencies as a test-site in the Caribbean Basin for enclave manufacturing and industrial free-trade zones that signalled the beginnings of globalization (in 1981, the Reagan administration's Caribbean Basin Initiative, or CBI, would extend to the entire region the experiment set up a decade earlier in Haiti).39

Taking advantage of Haiti's abundant supply of cheap labor, some 240 transnational corporations poured into Port-au-Prince's free-trade zone in the 1970s and early 1980s, employing 60,000, mostly female, workers for a government-set wage of $2.70 a day. By the late 1970s, enclave manufacturing, almost exclusively of baseballs, lingerie, and electronic parts, came to account for about half the country's exports.40 The Duvalier regime provided the transnational corporations with a tax holiday of ten years, no restrictions on profit repatriations, and the suppression of all trade union activity. Haiti "has an authoritarian style of government," explained the founder of the Haitian American Chamber of Commerce, Stanley Urban, "but there are more freedoms and opportunities in private enterprise than in many Western-style democracies."41 While this type of assembly production contributed only marginally to government revenue and the number of jobs it created was insignificant in relation to the extent of unemployment and poverty in the country, the Duvalier regime boasted that Haiti was the coming "Taiwan of the Caribbean." A 1982 AID report asserted that it was "a real possibility" that Haiti would soon become developed through enclave industry assembling, and that the final goal was "a historic change to a greater commercial interdependence with the USA."42

US economic aid, directed toward bringing about the infrastructural and the technical-administrative changes necessary for assembly production, increased every year in the early 1970s, and quadrupled between 1975 and 1976 alone, reaching nearly $150 million in the latter year.43 Other "development programs" sponsored by the AID and the international financial agencies accelerated this restructuring of the Haitian economy. These included programs to shift agriculture from subsistence food to agri-business export production, a goal achieved, in part, by dumping surplus food on the Haitian market under the CBI's self-proclaimed "food security" program, which further undercut peasant production. Under these programs, 30 percent of cultivated land shifted from food production for local consumption to export crops. A 1985World Bank report stated that domestic consumption had to be "markedly restrained in order to shift the required share of output increases into exports [emphasis should be placed on] the expansion of private enterprises Private projects with high economic returns should be strongly supported [over) public expenditures in the social sectors [and) less emphasis should be placed on social objectives which increase consumption." An AID report was candid: "AID anticipates that such a drastic reorientation of agriculture will cause a decline in income and nutritional status, especially for small farmers and peasants ... Even if transition to export agriculture is successful, AID anticipates a 'massive' displacement of peasant farmers and migration to urban centers."44

The CBI in the early 1980s and other "development programs" accelerated this structural process, along with its social repercussions and political consequences for the elite and for the masses. As part of these changes, corresponding to Haiti's insertion into the emergent global economy, Washington and the international financial agencies pressured Baby Doc into adopting a "liberalization" and "modernization" program involving an easing of political repression and greater fiscal and accounting responsibility. The Haitian elite became the local agents and managers of the transnational companies, signalling the alliance, still under authoritarian arrangements, of local and transnational elites.45 In particular, that fraction of the elite tied to transnational capital assumed greater importance within the dominant groups. The complete exhaustion of the peasant economy and the nascent process of capital accumulation and proletarianization provided the structural context for a growing popular movement against the dictatorship. Between the 1970s and the 1980s,absolute poverty in Haiti is estimated to have increased from 50 percent to 80 percent of the population.46 While the masses began to organize and demand popular democratization, new fractions of the elite tied to assembling and other external sector activities began to feel the need for a new political structure - elections, an efficient government, and so forth.

The Haiti case demonstrates the dialectic between globalization and social, cultural, and political variables. Transnational capital, helped along by its institutional agents (in this case, the AID and the World Bank), penetrates and disrupts local communities. The autonomy and cohesion of even the most remote or autonomous communities are undermined, dispersing populations into new roles connected to a national formation and international relations. Simultaneously, the communications revolution brings together these dispersed populations and creates intersubjectivities who push for social change and democratization. Trouillot documents the change in collective behavior among disrupted peasant communities and new urban clusters which became aware of the decadent opulence of the urban-based elite only after their seclusion had been eroded. Even the poorest and most remote of Haitian communities came to witness - and resent - the ostentation of the elite, whose wild parties and extravagant consumption, broadcast on Port-au-Prince television and "society" communications outlets for the purpose of elite families trying to impress and outdo one another, acquired a national projection through expanded communications. "With the new national roads and major improvements in telecommunications [required by transnational capital], Haiti had become a truly 'national space'," Trouillot points out. "Words and images meant to impress certain segments of the population now reached unintended audiences. In the streets of the provincial towns, despair turned into anger, and anger into defiance ... [popular sector leadership] undertook a systematic if modest politicization of the populace, infusing a civil discourse within the 'national space' newly created by increased centralization and improvements in transportation and telecommunications."47 What Trouillot should add is that this new national space was, in turn, linked to emergent transnational space.

The Haitian case also demonstrates how an authoritarian political system is unsuitable, on two accounts, for the global economy. On the one hand, the corruption and cronyism of traditional authoritarianism impedes the efficient and modernized technical-rational administration required for the operation of transnational capital. Every effort in the 1970s to "modernize" Haiti ran up, under Duvalierism, against the ingrained system of graft and corruption (to complicate matters, Haiti under Baby Doc became a major drug trafficking center). On the other hand, populations such as the Haitian peasantry, disrupted by capitalist penetration and incorporated into broader structures, begin to mobilize beyond their local concerns and demand democratization. Infrastructural and other projects under which capital accumulation takes place require not just the technical participation, but also the political and social incorporation, of elites, professional strata, and popular sectors.48 Washington attempted in Haiti, in the 1970s and early 1980s, to "liberalize" and "modernize" the regime without replacing the authoritarian system itself. Only when it became clear that this system could not resolve the two contradictions mentioned above did the United States turn to "democracy promotion." By that time, however, it was too late in Haiti for a smooth "transition to democracy."
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Re: Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, a

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Part 2 of 4

Preventative diplomacy in Haiti: removing Duvalier from power

Washington maintained cordial relations with the Duvalier dictatorship in the early 1980s, while simultaneously trying to clean up the regime and continue the free-market policies begun the previous decade. During this time mass popular unrest was increasingly in the face of us support for dictatorship. The "modernization" and "liberalization" measures had led, by the early 1980s, to several attempts by a handful of elite opponents of the regime, many of whom were former Duvalierists themselves, to organize small political parties and other opposition groups, among them the tiny but vocal Social Christian and Christian Democratic parties. However, much of the anti-Duvalier movement was led not by traditional political parties, much less by that tiny fraction of the elite opposed in principle to authoritarianism, but by the popular sectors which had begun in the late 1970s a feverish organization at the grassroots level, often under the loose leadership of grassroots clergy and laypeople from the Catholic Church despite strong support from the church hierarchy and the papal nuncio for Duvalier. Among this grassroots Catholic leadership, Father Jean- Bertrand Aristide, the Salesian priest who had been excommunicated from the Catholic Church for his outspoken opposition to Duvalier, criticism of US policy, and promotion of liberation theology, was quietly becoming one of the leading voices of the downtrodden Haitians.

In 1985 localized protests which had been steadily expanding in frequency and scope erupted into nationwide demonstrations. The Haitian masses, from that moment on, began a virtually permanent yet largely uncoordinated uprising that would culminate with the ouster of Duvalier in February 1986. A reassessment in Washington, and concomitant shift in US policy to "preventative diplomacy," took place in 1985. In that year, economic aid was reduced and Washington's public stance on human rights in Haiti suddenly changed. The State Department quietly informed Duvalier officials that Washington expected "free elections, a free press, and genuine improvements in human rights observance" before former aid levels could be restored.49

When Duvalier made dear that he would not step down voluntarily, Washington turned to orchestrating his removal. US embassy officials contacted army Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Henri Namphy.50 In turn, Namphy recruited Col. Williams Regala, inspector of the armed forces. The two/ in consonance with US embassy activities, began garnering support among key members of the elite in and out of the security forces and important Tonton Macoutes. Wrote one insider sympathetic to the elite-US machination:

The conspiracy that took shape ... was predicated on the inescapable realization that Jean-Claude Duvalier had to go. But after Duvalier, who would rule Haiti, and how? The key issues related to the conditions of Duvalier's replacement. .. Namphy and Regala, with their military and civilian allies and the American officials who encouraged them, all agreed in principle that no new dictator would replace the old one and that democratic elections would be held as soon as possible. In the interim a provisional government would oversee the difficult period of transition. " None of those who led it [the conspiracy) were revolutionaries, or even interested in profound social change... Friendly Americans, including Ambassador Clinton McManaway, Jr., gave them that reassurance [that Washington supported the putsch) and went even further. The US could also be counted on to help them in the ouster and its aftermath... The conspiracy to force Duvalier out was given impetus by surging popular protests, as throughout Haiti oppressed people rose up against Jean-Claude, his government, and the very nature of their daily existence under Duvalierism.51


A key turning point came when the powerful Haitian Industrialists Association (ADIH) issued a statement in January 1986 calling on Duvalier to step down and for "democratic structures" to replace him, citing popular unrest as a grave danger to "chances for attracting future investment."52 The ADIH represented that fraction of the elite tied to the transnational economic concerns that had poured in in the previous two decades, and which was now deeply concerned that the popular-sector uprising could bring down the whole social order. Its break with Duvalier represented the irreversible separation of the elite, except for the Duvalierist inner circle of cronies, from the dictatorship. The ADIH statement coincided with the announcement by the State Department that $26 million in undisbursed economic aid was to be immediately suspended.53 The conspirators and US officials were in near round-the-clock contact, including regular meetings between Namphy and Ambassador McManaway, who also sustained continual telephone communication with Duvalier himself over the terms of his departure from the country.54 By this time, all of Haiti was in mass insurrection. Hundreds of thousands of people were attacking Macoute and army posts all over the country, sacking businesses, taking over towns, controlling roads, and nearly paralyzing the capital. In January 1986, US warships were stationed near Port-au-Prince and military planes and other reinforcements were placed on alert on the US mainland:55 an integral element of coercive diplomacy is the use or threatened use of military force to back up diplomatic posturing. As with Marcos one year earlier, it finally became clear to Duvalier that his only choice was to step down. In the pre-dawn hours of February 7, the Duvalier entourage was accompanied to the airport under a US-French diplomatic escort and flown into exile in France on a US Air Force jet.

While the army and Macoutes carried out numerous massacres, in the final months of the insurrection key army commanders involved in the plan of "preventative diplomacy" ordered soldiers not to fire on demonstrators, in a tactical maneuver meant to place pressure on Duvalier to step down. For a brief period, the army as an institution was tactically aligned with the popular majority against the dictatorship, as part of the anti-dictatorial polarization and convergence of diverse sectors, a situation which, not unlike the Philippines, gave the appearance that the army was an ally of the democratic aspirations of the poor majority. This was one key distinction between Haiti in early 1986 and Nicaragua in the final months of its 1979 revolutionary insurrection: in Nicaragua the National Guard remained loyal to Somoza to the very end, and thus the coercive apparatus of the state disintegrated with the demise of the dictatorship (in addition, the Haitian insurrection was a largely unarmed insurrection). In Haiti, the separation of this apparatus from the dictatorship meant its preservation. Another key distinction, owing to Haiti's distinct history and circumstances, was that the Haitian masses lacked an organized and unified political leadership (whether popular or elitist) ready to seize state power itself. The anti-Duvalier role of the army explains why, in the early morning hours of February 7, when hundreds of thousands of Haitians took to the streets in jubilation over Jean-Claude's pre-dawn departure, they hoisted many a Haitian soldier on their shoulders and shouted such slogans as "long live the army."

But beyond this tactical convergence, the army's strategic objective as an institution was that of preserving the social order. The honeymoon between the army and the people would be extremely short-lived. Six hours after its installation, the new military junta issued its first decree, imposing an immediate and unlimited curfew, and detained hundreds of people - the junta's response to the jubilation that had broken out at once throughout the country.56 Almost immediately after the dictator's departure, mass protests began against Duvalierism without Duvalier. Over the next five years, Haiti experienced a national power vacuum and became immersed in a cauldron of turmoil - workers' strikes, demonstrations and conventions of opposition groups, shifts in the government, arrests and shootings, mass protests and massacres - as contending interests fought it out and political constellations took shape.

From Duvalier to Aristide: the aborted transition to polyarchy

Elites in the state versus popular classes in civil society


The removal of Duvalier was one phase in a Haitian "transition." The second phase involved two simultaneous processes: one was the cultivation of a modernized Haitian elite with its own political parties and civic groups; the other was countering and neutralizing the influence of the mass and popular organizations that were already flourishing in civil society. Accomplishing this second phase would be extremely difficult. The Haitian elite had a scant presence of its own in civil society, lacked internal cohesion, and demonstrated little interest in forsaking the politics of power plays and patronage for polyarchic competition in its own ranks, much less traditional graft for a process of "honest" capital accumulation in which its relation to a free market, rather than extortion, would be its source of privilege, as called for by the transnational elite agenda.

An even greater challenge was to wrest influence from popular sectors. The correlation of forces favored popular hegemony in civil society by the time the "transition to democracy" began, even though the state remained a bastion of the dominant groups, firmly under elite-US control. The post-Duvalier struggle of the popular classes against the elite took the near-perfect form of a struggle of civil society against the state, or what Trouillot calls "state against nation." This unique situation was explained by factors particular to Haiti's own "deep" structural history: the character of the dominant and subordinate groups, the state, the economy, and so on. But it was also due to the more recent history of the Duvalierist "totalitarian" period: by eliminating political parties, trade unions, media, the rule of law, and every arena of "private" initiatives and activities which Gramsci considered to be the pillars of civil society, Duvalierism eliminated virtually all state-civil society linkages (this was not, it should be noted, the case in the Philippines, Chile, or Nicaragua). This led the popular sectors to seek out new forms of organization based on loosely organized popular and civic groups operating largely outside of the traditional political arena. In particular, neither the elite nor left and popular forces had significantly developed political parties as mediating links between the state and civil society. The anti-dictatorial uprising was not under any unified or coherent leadership or organized national movement of any political stripe.

Each side, therefore, faced enormous challenges. For the United States and the Haitian elite, particularly its transnational kernel organized in the ADIH, tied to the international financial institutions and/ or to the network of US "democracy promotion" agencies that streamed into the country after Duvalier's departure, the challenge was how to simultaneously cultivate elite constituencies that would forsake the old authoritarian patterns for the culture of polyarchy and neutralize the influence of the popular classes. But which representatives of the elite were not tinged by Duvalierism and corruption? And how could Washington juggle its requirement for the army to assure internal order in the face of a growing mass movement for popular change with the need to overcome Duvalierist authoritarianism? Clearly, the process would be gradual, incremental, and long-term, and would be accomplished through political and ideological competition with popular groups as well as through direct state repression. For this purpose, the United States broadly employed economic, military, and political aid in the post-Duvalier period.

For the popular majority, the challenge was how to dismantle the deeply entrenched structures of Duvalierism, resist the ferocious repression that was unleashed within days of Duvalier's departure, and forge a viable popular project in a chaotic and uncertain milieu. "What Haiti represented in the aftermath of Duvalier's flight," noted Latinamericanist scholar James Ferguson in 1987, "is not a post- but a pre-revolutionary society." He continued: "Already, the slum-dwellers of Port-au- Prince, Cap Haitien and Gonaives have organized their own committees and action groups. Already, too, the peasantry of every department are beginning to forge links around common problems of rural underdevelopment and exploitation, thus breaking down the traditional obstacle of regional parochialism."57 The depth, breadth, and scope of this grass roots activity between Duvalier's ouster and the 1991 coup d'etat was truly astonishing. A vibrant popular democracy was being constructed at the local level, a spontaneous process of bottom-up democratic development, what Gramsci called "expansive hegemony." One first-hand report by an international delegation noted:

Until the September 1991 coup, Haiti boasted an abundance of peasant associations, grass-roots development projects, trade unions, student organizations, church groups and independent radio stations... Known broadly as "popular organizations," the members of these groups came mostly from the country's vast poor majority... While many international observers of Haiti bemoan its lack of economic development, its civil society was remarkably advanced. In contrast to many other countries emerging from dictatorial rule, where pluralism among political parties was not matched by social and ideological diversity, political parties in Haiti were among the least developed parts of civil society. Rather, the strength of Haitian civil society lay in its breadth and diversity outside the narrow realm of electoral politics. This development allowed Haitians a considerable voice in local affairs, even as their ability to influence national politics was limited by an unrepentant army intent on preserving the spoils of power.58


Thus the elite remained in control of the state and nominally in charge of the country, but the popular majority came to occupy and control civil society. Preventative diplomacy had succeeded in preserving the formal structures of power, but this majority was developing a sense of its own power, irrespective of the eventual outcome of any election.

Duvalierism without Duvalier; popular democracy without the state

Baby Doc's departure left intact many of the structures of the dictatorship, including the hated Tonton Macoutes and the army. In fact, as one insider to the "preventative diplomacy" plan noted: "An integral part of the plan was for the post-Duvalier government to protect the Macoutes in return for their cooperation [in removing Duvalier], exempting them from judicial prosecution for crimes committed under Duvalier and guarding their physical safety as much as possible."59 Following Duvalier's departure, the army, although it formally disbanded the Macoutes, began a process of integrating Macoutes into the armed forces and also allowing them to regroup and resurface, while the junta, led by Namphy, blocked all but a handful of attempts to bring Duvalierists to trial (after the 1991coup, those few who had been tried and imprisoned were released).60

This Duvalierism without Duvalier was sustained by the United States as Washington set about to guide a "transition to democracy." Economic assistance to Haiti jumped from $55.6 million in 1985 to $77.7 million in 1986 and $101.1 million in 1987,61 while the NED and the AID launched "democracy promotion" and "electoral assistance" programs to mount electoral machinery and develop elite civilian constituencies inside Haiti. Most importantly, the Defense Department and the CIA sustained the military forces of Duvalierism with a security assistance program. Within two weeks of Duvalier's exit, the United States gave the military government $500,000in anti-riot gear.62 In July 1986, the US Congress approved $4 million dollars in "nonlethal" military aid to the Haitian army.63 In early 1987, the Pentagon sent in twenty military advisors.64 Simultaneously, the CIA set up and funded a National Intelligence Service (SIN) in the Haitian military. When this covert program was revealed several years later, in 1993, CIA officials claimed the unit was intended to fight narcotics trafficking. Yet narcotics trafficking, which had become rampant under Jean-Claude, was run mostly by the military itself and leaders of the unit were also central figures in the drug trade. In practice, the unit had little to do with drug interdiction, and instead acted as an instrument of political repression and as a channel for establishing contacts between Washington and key military and political figures in the post-Duvalier political landscape. These same figures would emerge as important leaders and supporters of the 1991 coup. [65] Among those on the CIA payroll was Lieut.-Gen. Raoul Cedras, who led the 1991 coup, and other key members of the junta that took over after Aristide. During the 1986-1991 period the CIA-ereated SIN unit "produced little narcotics intelligence," but, stated one US intelligence officer, its members "committed acts of political terror against Aristide supporters, including interrogations and torture" (among courses taught to SIN trainees were "The Theology of Liberation" and "Animation and Mobilization").66

Meanwhile, the Haitian masses, emboldened by their victory over Duvalier and new-found sense of power, demonstrated a burst of creativity and grassroots activity. Thousands of popular community councils sprung up in slums throughout Port-au-Prince and other cities. They engaged in political mobilization, human rights activities, literacy and adult education programs, improvement and self-help projects. In the countryside, peasant leagues, which had been organizing since the 1970s, now burgeoned, demanding land, credits, the removal of local bosses, and so forth. The process of exorcizing Duvalierism became known as dechoukaj, meaning "uprooting" in Creole, or, as the slogan went, "we cut down the tree, but we haven't got rid of the roots." The process, portrayed abroad as lawless Haitian mobs obstructing the construction of democracy, was actually a highly selective targeting of those individuals who had committed the worst atrocities and whom the government refused to prosecute.67 Alongside uprooting the old, new social relations flowered in civil society, based on a new-found sense of hope, community, and collective identity.

This loss of fear on the part of the popular sectors, the sense of self-confidence and hope in place of desperation and passivity, instilled a deep trepidation in the elite and their US backers. Yet US officials pinned their hopes - indeed, displayed an almost blind faith - in a successful electoral process and on repression in the interim to hold back the popular avalanche. With their eyes on elections scheduled by the junta for November 1987, well-known opponents and supporters of Duvalier from the elite set up their own parties. With few exceptions, traditional political parties, when they existed at all, were barely more than arrangements of convenience among a self-aggrandizing leader, his clients, and followers. Some 200 such parties were formed in 1987, either by old-guard politicians and "former" Duvalierists or by the new technocrats and career politicians that had emerged during the "liberalization" and "modernization" period and were being groomed by US political aid programs (see below). None of these parties had ties to the grassroots popular movement, which continued to distrust the formal political arena. Some two dozen of these parties named candidates as the elections approached.68

The November 22, 1987 elections, however, were canceled by Namphy's junta on election-day morning, after the army opened fire on civilians at polling stations, killing at least thirty-four and wounding hundreds more. The election-day massacre was not an attempt to prevent a popular electoral victory - neither Aristide nor any other prominent figure from the grassroots popular movement were candidates. Rather, it was an outcome of the lack of consensus among the elite, the fear among the army and the still prevalent Duvalierists of any change that could come through elections, and the extreme difficulty of any orderly transition to polyarchy in Haiti's environment. After the bloody massacre, Washington formally suspended military aid, but the covert CIA assistance to the security forces did not stop.69 In fact, Washington continued to work closely with the military government. Repression by the new military junta once again became systematic and institutionalized. The strength of authoritarian forces, and of authoritarianism ingrained in the state itself, begat a series of coups and counter-coups over the next few years, against the backdrop of chronic elite infighting and state repression of the popular movement. The Namphy regime and those which succeeded it through the 1991 inauguration of Aristide were responsible for more civilian deaths than Baby Doc managed in fifteen years.70 Yet US officials downplayed or entirely ignored the systematic violation of human rights that continued, and escalated, under the post-Duvalier regimes. Asked by human rights organizations shortly before the 1987 elections about reports of routine abuses, US ambassador Brunson McKinely said, "1 don't see any evidence of a policy against human rights." True, he said, there was violence, but it was just "part of the political culture." [71]

Between 1987 and 1990, three coups took place and another scheduled election was canceled. Namphy was followed in early 1988 by Leslie Manigat who became president in unconstitutional elections boycotted by over 90 percent of the population. When Manigat made preliminary moves to loosen military control over the presidency, he was promptly sent into exile by Namphy, who took over the presidency for himself in June 1988, only to be overthrown by General Prosper Avril in a bloodless coup three months later. In November 1989, newly appointed US ambassador Alvin P. Adams, Jr., arrived in Port-au-Prince. Adams, a former USIA officer in Vietnam and member of the NSC under Kissinger, soon became a familiar face in Port-au- Prince, shuffling from one meeting with Haitian factions to another, conducting political and electoral negotiations, and reminding the military regime that its relations with Washington depended on it carrying through the "transition."72 When it appeared that Avril might waver in a resumption of the electoral process, it was Adams who personally convinced him in March 1990 to step down.73 Avril was replaced in the presidency by Supreme court Justice Ertha Pascal Trouillot. Behind the scenes, the US Embassy placed additional pressure on the military to allow new elections, which were subsequently scheduled for December 1990.

As the 1990 elections approached, the grassroots movement burgeoned into a popular revolt against the traditional structures of power and corruption. The issue of electoral participation became a point of contention. Many organizations, especially the grassroots church groups, argued that the establishment of local councils, local empowerment, and regional structures of participatory democracy was more important than national elections and the formal political process. In 1986, dozens of organizations close to the grassroots church groups formed the Liaison of Democratic Forces. In 1987, these and other groups expanded into a loose coalition known as the Democratic Movement. Shortly afterwards, a total of 284 national and local grassroots organizations came together to form the National Congress of Democratic Movements (KONAKOM). Two other multi-sectoral coalitions were formed in 1987, the Group of 57 and the National Popular Assembly (APN).74 The grassroots base of the Catholic Church, and particularly the Ti Legliz (literally, the "Little Church," or Christian Base Communities), played a major role in the popular movement, providing loose organizational structures and networks and the broad ideological umbrella of liberation theology's "preferential option for the poor" - an ecclesiastical enunciation of popular democracy.

Most towns and cities boasted umbrella organizations which brought together hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of individual community councils. In turn, most of these urban, district, and provincial groups banded together into loosely structured national federations, such as the National Alliance of Popular Organizations. In the rural areas, the poor peasantry was becoming an organized social force with its own identity for the first time in Haitian history. Peasant leagues that had sprung up locally joined together into decentralized regional federations, and then, in 1991, into a loose national coalition, known as the National Peasant Movement of the Papaye Congress, which brought together the powerful Tet Kole movement of the northwest, the Papaye Peasant Movement of the central plateau, the Trou de Nord Peasant Organization of the northeast, and the Sunrise Peasant Movement of the southeastern provinces, among others.75 These peasant leagues, in turn, joined forces with local development groups in rural social, development, and empowerment projects.

One important link between the urban and rural groups was the Autonomous Federation of Haitian Workers (CATH), which had sprung up in the 1970s among workers in the industrial-free trade zone, led by the veteran trade unionist and anti-Duvalier militant Yves Richards. The CATH had been banned by Duvalier in 1980 but reemerged publicly in 1986. It practiced an activist and communitybased trade unionism, bringing together some forty workers' unions with some two dozen urban neighborhood committee federations and twelve peasant associations. Importantly, therefore, Haiti's poor peasant majority allied with other popular sectors in a broad national front for popular democratization, thus avoiding what anthropologist Eric Wolf has identified in other studies of peasant revolts as rural parochialism or manipulation by outside elite interests.76

In turn, specific sectoral organizations, including women's, youth, and student groups, proliferated. The Haitian Women's Solidarity (SOFA) formed itself in 1986, with branches throughout the country, for the advocacy of equal rights and social justice for women. Regional women's groups, such as the Determined Women collective in Jacmel, which organized collective boutiques, literacy instruction for women, and meetings to discuss issues of politics and gender equality, also flourished. Youth, which had been most active in the anti-Duvalier uprising, and later in the transition period, formed the Youth Coordinating Committee, tied to Christian Base Communities, and other national, regional, and local groups. Then there was the militant National Federation of Haitian Students, bringing together university and vocational school students, and the Students' Concerns organization, which brought together high-school students nationwide.

A remarkable transfer of the functions of the state from the government to the organized population began to take place: self-governing committees and action groups in urban and rural areas functioned outside formal state structures. Many were identified with the Ti Legliz and others with the CATH, but even more were local and autonomous, creating their own forms of representative leadership and laying the groundwork for radical social transformation. They set up clinics and schools, dug irrigation ditches, constructed silos for grain storage and opened roads connecting agricultural communities to previously inaccessible markets, eliminating the role of exploiting middlemen and a source of urban elite profits. These peasant groups established agricultural cooperatives and collective labor teams, occupied state lands, redistributed private properties and refused to pay rent to large landowners whose land they worked - all of this while state power remained firmly in the hands of the elite and their United States backers.

The outspoken and charismatic Aristide had emerged as the leading voice for change and the unifying symbol of the popular mass movement. Consequently, he was targeted for repeated assassination attempts, including the September 1988 attack on his church, which was burned to the ground by Tonton Macoutes as army units sat by idly watching. Twelve parishioners were killed and seventy-eight wounded. Aristide escaped unharmed and was forced underground. A year later, when Aristide was expelled from the Salesian order, he opened and ran an orphanage in Cite Soleil, a sprawling Port-au- Prince slum. US officials showed nothing but contempt for Aristide during the 1986-1990 period. The US Embassy monitored his every movement and US diplomats portrayed him as a dangerous demagogue and an "extremist" bent on opposing the democratic process.77

By 1990, groups from the KONAKOM, the Group of 57, the APN, and other coalitions had effectively joined forces, forming what became known as the Lavalas movement, literally meaning "avalanche" or "flood," or more figuratively, "the cleansing flood." The Lavalas movement was not a political party. Nor was it an organized leftist movement. It was a semi-spontaneous and loosely organized popular "civic uprising" from within civil society. It brought together hundreds of thousands, and later millions, of poor Haitians from the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince and other cities together with the impoverished rural population. Lavalas became the political and electoral expression of all Haitians who aspired for a fundamental break with the old order. Aristide had by now become the leader of Lavalas and the most popular figure in Haiti. "Aristide and the poor are one," became the slogan. One would have expected any outside power truly interested in promoting democracy in Haiti to have given technical or organizational support to this highly representative force as a most authentic expression of "people's (demos) power (cratos)." However, the United States was out to promote polyarchy in Haiti, not popular democracy. This meant cultivating elite constituencies (described by the United States as "the moderates," or the "center") and training them in the art of formal democratic procedure. So, as the US funded and guided the development of electoral structures, it simultaneously bypassed the popular democracy movement and instead built up the civic and political organizations of the Haitian elite.

US political aid programs between 1986 and 1990

The NED initiated activities in Haiti in 1985 with a program handled by the CIPE to strengthen the technocratic sectors of the elite tied to transnational capital and organized in the ADIH. After Duvalier's ouster political aid programs were expanded dramatically. The NED spent several million dollars between 1986 and 1990 to organize and fund a series of political parties, trade unions, professional associations, human rights groups, and elite clearing-houses. These included: the Haitian International Institute for Research and Development (IHRED); the Human Resources Development Center (CDRH); the Haitian Center for Human Rights (CHADEL); the Association of Journalists; the mostly conservative Catholic Church hierarchy; Celebration 2004;and two conservative trade union federations.78

The IHRED and the CDRH functioned as clearing-houses for efforts to coalesce an elite that could promote the transnational project, establish its own civic organizations, and penetrate civil society. The IHRED became active in Port-au-Prince and other cities, while the CDRH focused on the rural areas. Established by an AID grant in 1985, the CDRH operated a full-time staff of about forty people in Haiti, and, according to one AID document, focused on influencing grassroots groups and on organizing "rural professionals and the elite."79 The methods used were similar to those documented in the chapter on Nicaragua: identifying potential leaders among the elite; organizing them institutionally around US-funded groups with interlocking boards; imparting training sessions in "democratic" and free-market ideology; utilizing the multiplier effect to recruit and train mid-level and local leaders; and providing these interconnected networks with a political action capacity, communications skills, and the material resources to develop a social base.

The IHRED was created in 1986 at the behest of the USIA and directed by Leopold Berlanger, a conservative Haitian technocrat and well-known figure from the mulatto upper class.80 Its Board of Directors and its larger Advisory Council brought together many of the prominent leaders of the business and political technocratic elite who had begun to organize in the late 1970s and early 1980s period of "liberalization" and "modernization." Over the next few years, the IHRED fostered a loose formation known as the "Democratic Center," which incorporated the leaders and cadres of the string of NED-funded groups and other elite organizations then under development, and set about to counter Lavalas influence. The IHRED sponsored seminars and colloquia, research activities, and communications and media programs, facilitated the creation of "local leadership councils," and conducted training workshops for professionals and elite leaders, acting as a centripetal think-tank and clearing-house in an effort to bring together a network of political and civic leaders from outside of the Lavalas movement and tied to the elite.81 The IHRED also participated in intensive "party-building" and "civic education" campaigns in the 1987-1990 period, which were financed with approximately $2 million from the NED and the AID and supervised by the NOI and the NRI, as well as by the ADF and the IFES (the latter groups had also administered US programs in Nicaragua).82 In these "party-building" activities, leaders from US-sponsored "democracy" programs in the Philippines, Chile, Nicaragua, and elsewhere were brought into Haiti to impart advice and share experiences, demonstrating again how US "democracy promotion," as an expression of transnationalized politics, acts as an "integrating mechanism" for cross-national elite blocs in the South. The NDI and the NRI brought together ten political leaders from the elite, who became known as the Group of Ten. "Haitian participants [in NDI-sponsored party-building seminars] included representatives from 'The Group of Ten,' a centrist grouping that meets periodically under the auspices of the Haitian International Institute for Research and Development," explained one NED document.83 A US Embassy document advising the NED on which political leaders to select for "party-building" seminars cautioned that Yves Richards, the leader of the militant CATH, "is a Marxist extremist; anti-US," and should be excluded.84

The Group of Ten included Leslie Manigat, Louis Dejoie Fils, Gregoire Eugene, Colonel Octave Gayard, Hubert Deronceray, Rockefeller Guerre, and Marc Bazin, among others, all well-known conservative political figures from the elite and most of them tainted by former association with the Duvalier regime, yet touted by Washington as "the leaders of the post-Duvalier democratic movement."85 Most of these people proved to be more interested in personal ambition that in a coherent political program, and went on to become presidential candidates in the aborted 1987 elections. As the 1990 elections approached, the NRI and the NDI funded a total of sixteen political parties, most formed in Baby Doc's "modernization" and "liberalization" period or through the NED programs in the post-Duvalier period, and none of them from the Lavalas movement. "What unites these disparate parties is a common belief in private enterprise, fiscal responsibility and economic reform as well as a detailed plan for how to bring it all about," explained the NRI.86 Of these parties, ten fielded candidates, most of which garnered less than 1 percent of the votes in the 1990 elections (see below).87 The coalition that ran Aristide as its candidate and won nearly 70 percent of the vote, the National Front For Democracy and Change (FNDC), did not receive any funding from the NED.

Among the organizations to emerge from the party-building efforts was the Movement to Install Democracy in Haiti (MIDH), which was headed by Bazin. Bazin was the quintessential representative of the New Right technocrats of the new mold promoted by the NED, the AID, and other institutions of the transnational elite. A World Bank official, Bazin had served briefly as Jean-Claude Duvalier's finance minister in 1981, sent in by the international financial agencies as part of the process of "liberalization" and "modernization." Bazin was to oversee fiscal and monetary reforms and clean up the country's accounting. He resigned after serving only five months and returned to the World Bank, finding it impossible to push through economic reforms in the quagmire of corruption, and he thus enjoyed respectability among the Haitian public.88 Bazin, a colleague of Berlanger and a member of the IHRED Advisory Council, was back in Haiti after Duvalier's departure, and soon became Washington's preferred candidate for the December 1990 elections.89 As the IHRED helped cultivate his base, other organizations funded by the NED and the AID cultivated constituencies for his presidential bid. According to one US businessman tending to his investments in Haiti during this time, "US neutrality in the electoral process was only theoretical." Bazin was "adequately financed by the US embassy in Port-au-Prince to build a political machine:' He was provided by Washington with the funds and guidance "to campaign throughout most of Haiti's 19 political departments ... His campaign included US-style advertising - posters plastered on walls in most towns and the capital, plus radio speeches and television time."90

The NED-funded human rights organization CHADEL was headed by Jean-Jacques Honorat, a former minister of tourism under Duvalier. Following the September 1991 coup d'etat, Honorat was chosen as figurehead prime minister by the military, while the CHADEL released a torrent of criticism of Aristide's human rights performance to justify the military takeover. Honorat himself said the Aristide government was responsible for its own overthrow. "The coup was provoked by the comportment of those in power, " he said. "It was a reaction by the social body politic, and force had to be exerted by the only part of the social body with arms: the army."91 (After Honorat resigned as figurehead prime minister in June 1992 the regime appointed Bazin to the post.) Washington had selected CHADEL for support despite the fact that several prestigious and internationally prominent human rights organizations already existed in Haiti. These included the League of Former Haitian Political Prisoners, the Fran.;ois LaFontant Human Rights Committee, and the Platform of Haitian Human Rights Organizations, a national coalition of local and regional groups, among others, all of which were bypassed in the US funding because of their links to the popular movement and the difficulty in manipulating them from the outside.92

The Association of Haitian Journalists was founded in 1955 and maintained a close association with the USIA. It brought together journalists working in the Duvalierist state-run media outlets and was closely associated with the dictatorship.93 Celebration 2004 (that year will mark the 200th anniversary of Haitian independence) was formed by several Haitian professionals in the diaspora who returned to Haiti following Duvalier's ouster. Between 1986 and 1990, it played a role similar to Via Civica in Nicaragua - the "civic component" of a national "democracy" network, involving "civic education" programs, "get-out-the-vote" drives and media campaigns. In addition, Celebration 2004 focused on organizing women and youth, given the absence of any elite women's or youth organizations that could operate on their own.94

The trade union programs were considered crucial because workers in the enclave assembly industries and rural workers' unions had become among the most militant and an important base of the Lavalas movement. The NED spent some $2 million, via the FTUI, on the Federation of Unionized Workers (FOS), while the AID funneled additional monies through the AIFLD. This was the smallest of three trade union federations in Haiti. It was set up in 1984 with Duvalier's support and funding from the AIFLD, and was the only one which had been allowed to function legally under Baby Doc. Its president was Joseph Senat, who was also a member of the board of the IHRED. The State Department, at the request of several chief executive officers of US-based transnationals operating in Haiti's free-trade industrial zone, had directly requested AIFLD involvement in 1984 "because of the presence of radical labor unions and the high risk that other unions may become radicalized."95 The "radical labor unions" to which the State Department referred was the CATH, which was tied to the Lavalas movement and had launched a campaign to raise the minimum wage. Yet another NED program went to fund and organize several peasant organizations which set out to compete with the Papaye Movement and other peasant groups.

Apart from these NED programs, the CIA, in addition to the SIN program, conducted other clandestine programs to establish ties with Haitian political and military leaders.96 In early 1990, the 001 allocated $10 million for the 1990 elections. Some of these funds were channeled through the NED, another portion was given directly to the Provisional Electoral Council, and yet another to several electoral observer groups, including Carter's organization, and NDI-Ied observer teams.97 According to the US game plan, by the time the December 1990 vote arrived, the elite should have developed enough to be able to field several credible candidates, articulate a national development program, and attract enough internal support to gamer winning candidates that would enjoy a minimum enough social base and enough international recognition to legitimize the new government as the culmination of the "transition to democracy." But this scenario did not unfold. Elite constituencies in civil society remained sparsely developed between 1986 and 1990 - indeed, virtually negligible - and could not fulfill their role in electoral mobilization, much less in holding back the Lavalas tide. The US program, nevertheless, did generate enough interest within the elite for it to support Bazin's candidacy. More importantly, the very organizations and individuals tapped by the 1986-1990 US programs surfaced as the core organized opponents of the Aristide government, and later as important backers of the 1991 coup.
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Re: Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, a

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Part 3 of 4

The 1990 elections and the 1991 coup d'etat

Distrust of formal political parties and of an electoral process controlled from above - a military junta supported by the United States - led the popular groundswell to reject over twenty candidates from the elite as the December 1990 elections approached. Instead, several dozen groups associated with the Lavalas movement formed a center-to-left electoral coalition, the FNDC, and asked Aristide to run as its candidate. The Catholic priest at first declined, but in October, just two months before the vote, finally accepted the nomination, under strong pressure from the Lavalas movement organizations. Within days of his nomination, 2 million Haitians, who had earlier shown little interest in the electoral process, rushed to register, bringing the number of registered voters almost overnight from 40 to 90 percent of the voting age population. Despite US support for Bazin and the complete absence of external support for the Lavalas movement, Aristide swept the elections with 67.5 percent of the popular vote. Bazin, who outspent Aristide 20-1,98 captured 14.2 percent of the vote. A third candidate, the populist Louis Dejoie, won 4.8 percent (the remainder was shared among another eight parties, seven of them NEDfunded). 99

Taking place in the post-Cold War era, and without formal links to traditional political parties (of the left or otherwise), much less to any foreign powers, the popular revolt in Haiti in the late 1980s constituted a new and innovative form of social mobilization. As the first experiment with meaningful social change and popular democracy after the end of the East-West conflict, the triumph of the Lavalas uprising represented not only a new option for the Haitian majority but also new hope for the Third World - a model in which popular sectors organized in civil society take primacy over the state. In the words of many observers, this was the first political revolution since the end of the Cold War. [100] And it was one whose democratic legitimacy could not possibly be called into question.

The tasks faced by the new government were overwhelming: reorganizing a chaotic and praetorian state, applying sanctions to army officers for past abuses, responding to the demands of the hemisphere's poorest population, and addressing one of the worst ecological crises in the world - the near complete deforestation and soil depletion of the tiny country. At the time of his inauguration, Aristide said, "Our major goal for the coming years and our basic program of action is to go from extreme poverty to a poverty with dignity by empowering our own resources, the participation of the people, and not expecting much from abroad." Aware that his administration had to operate within the constraints of an anti-democratic state and bureaucracy and an ancien regime not yet dismantled, Aristide declared: "1 will not be president of the government, I am going to be president of the opposition, of the people, even if this means confronting the very government I am creating."101The brief period before the new administration's mandate was cut short did not allow for any essential change in the social structure. Among the programs undercut by the coup was a national literacy campaign and an agrarian reform that would have set limits on the size of property holdings, channeled resources to poor peasants and redistributed available lands. A program was in the planning stages to institutionalize participatory structures alongside the formal government apparatus. Although he was making only symbolic gestures, Aristide himself took a salary cut of 60 percent and tried to reduce other top government salaries. He fired and replaced all Duvalierist holdovers, and rid state enterprises of corruption, which increased state revenues and also reduced the ability of the elite to engage in its timehonored graft. The reform program also called for retaining strategic public enterprises under state control as a source of public income for redistributive measures and raising the minimum wage. A crucial measure Aristide did implement was the elimination of the rural sheriffs (the chefs de section), an essential component of the Duvalierist structures and a pillar of traditional power relations in the rural areas.

Under the Aristide government, popular organizations redoubled their activities and attracted new members. After 500 years of oppression, the Haitian people had finally found their voice. For eight fleeting months, Haitians had become the collective subjects of their own social reality. The hegemony won by the popular sectors in civil society in the 1980s was snowballing into a pre-revolutionary situation: representatives from these sectors, as in Chile in 1970-1973, now had one foot in the formal state apparatus. The situation was approximating that of "dual power." Despite the mild reformist character of Aristide's program, all the ingredients for a unique social revolution were present. The elite and the United States acted before those ingredients could brew.

The 1990 elections underscore that the new political intervention enters into play with local forces in intervened countries which are often beyond external control. The new strategy implies risks for the United States, namely, uncertain outcomes and no guarantee of success. The Chilean and the Philippine situations approximated the Haitian, as regards the departure of a dictatorship and US efforts to assure that a pliable centrist alternative replaced the ancien regime. In the first two countries, however, the United States was able to interface with local forces in such a way that it obtained the preferred outcome. In Haiti, the United States was not able to secure its preferred outcome, owing in large part to Haiti's unique historic conditions and to the structural limits to a polyarchic system presented by the absence of an elite grounded in a process of internal capital accumulation. Until Aristide entered the race, Bazin had been seen as a shoo-in for what was to be an election with a small voter turnout and international certification as "free and fair." Aristide was therefore the unexpected and unwanted outcome of the "transition to democracy" that the United States had so arduously tried to facilitate - an uninvited guest at the table Washington was trying to set. Aristide's rise .to power was, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, a "fluke" in the political system the United States was trying to implant in Haiti.

The US government demonstrated a pattern of increasing hostility and disapproval toward Aristide's govemment.102 The Bush administration approved but then withheld the disbursement of $84 million in economic aid because the Aristide government had failed to meet several conditions attached to the aid package, among them, certification by Washington that human rights were being respected (the previous military regimes suffered no such withholding of economic aid despite their gross human rights violations), and Aristide's plan to raise the minimum wage from $3 to $5 a day, criticized by the AID as a measure that would discourage foreign investment and undermine the enclave assembly sector.103 In addition, US officials launched a campaign to denigrate Aristide's personal integrity and the legitimacy of his government. Alleged human rights violations became the centerpiece of this campaign. Aristide's brief term was "the first time in the post-Duvalier era that the United States government has been so deeply concerned with human rights and the rule of law in Haiti," noted Amy Wilentz, a Haiti specialist. The State Department "circulated a thick notebook filled with alleged human rights violations" under Aristide - "something it had not done under the previous rulers, Duvalierists and military men; they were actually praised by Washington ... [which] argued for the reinstatement of aid - including military aid - based on unsubstantiated human rights improvements ... "104 This "thick notebook" was compiled by Jean-Jacques Honorat, whose human rights organizations, CHADEL, was the recipient of massive NED funding. [105]

Cedras and other coup leaders were figureheads for an alliance of old-guard forces in the army and the elite, who, having tolerated Aristide for eight months, feared that any further consolidation of the first democratic regime in the country's history would irreversibly threaten their interests. The Washington Office on Haiti circulated a list of a dozen businessmen said to have spent more than $40 million to back the COUp.l06Haiti is not only one of the poorest countries in the world, but also one which registers some of the sharpest contrasts between wealth and poverty. An estimated 3,000 extended families comprise the Haitian elite, including a reported 200 millionaires. This elite lives in luxury air-conditioned villas in the cool suburbs in the hills above Port-au-Prince, complete with tennis courts, swimming pools, carefully tended gardens and armies of servants. Another 10 percent of the population, the country's middle and professional classes, are reported to earn an average of $90,000 annually. The remaining 90 percent, with a per capita income of a little more than $300, live in conditions of total destitution and squalor. The World Bank reported in 1981 that, of an estimated population of 6 million, just 24,000 people own 40 percent of the nation's wealth, and 1 percent of the population receives 44 percent of national income but pays only 3.5 percent in taxes.107 Under such conditions, even a minimal plan of social reform - such as was drawn up by the Aristide government - strikes at the very heart of the elite's interests.

Redistributive reforms in themselves were not necessarily a threat to transnational interests. Recall the point made in chapter 1 that tensions and contradictions often checker the relations between dominant groups in intervened countries and the transnational elite operating under Washington's overall leadership. However, the popular social movement which was consolidating and fusing with the state under Aristide's government was, in fact, a deep threat, not just to the social order in Haiti, but to a worldwide project whose purpose is to subordinate popular majorities to the "logic of the minority." There was thus a perverted and tension-ridden convergence of interests between the tiny Haitian elite's exaggerated social privileges and the defense of the social order itself. Although some reform measures (such as subordinating the military to civilian authority) are actually part of the transnational agenda in other countries and under other conditions, Aristide's program was rigorously resisted by the Haitian elite and the United States. The difference between these measures in Haiti and similar measures taken with the approval of the transnational elite in other countries is that, in Haiti, their effect was to embolden and hasten the mobilization of the popular majority, which was now seeking a viable formula for becoming a sovereign majority, while in other countries such measures merely make elite political rule and the economy stronger and more efficient. What was at stake for the transnational elite in Haiti was not economic interests (such as those that Allende's government threatened in Chile), but the social mobilization from below and the dangerous "demonstration effects" this could generate in the Caribbean and the Third World in general. In defense of transnational hegemony, the United States was forced to rely on, and ally with, historically underdeveloped and vice-ridden dominant groups in a national formation which lacked the structural basis for a polyarchic political system.

There is no documented evidence of direct US involvement in the coup.108 What the evidence reveals is that those sectors cultivated by US political, economic, and military aid programs from 1986 to 1990 formed the key constituency of the new dictatorial regime - the NEDAID political elite, the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie tied to the assembly sector and other transnational economic activities, and the army and security forces. Moreover, evidence indicates that US officials knew of the coup before it was underway and chose for tactical reasons not to intervene to try to prevent it,109 and once consummated, the coup was incorporated into the the larger US strategy, as discussed below. There need not be direct conspiratorial linkages between Washington and the coup-makers, and empirical evidence of intentionality in US policy regarding the coup is not relevant to the underlying analytical and theoretical issues at hand. First, Haiti's experience bears out Gramsci's argument that hegemony is "consensus backed by armour," such that latent coercion becomes activated when consensual mechanisms of domination either break down or cannot be established. Relations of domination, in Haiti as elsewhere, are, in the last instance, relations of force. Second, given the inability to establish consensual domination, US programs and policies placed great importance on strengthening, and also on emboldening, the coercive apparatus of the Haitian state.110 The resurgence of authoritarianism in Haiti was a spasm of self-preservation of the social order induced by the very logic of the US-transnational project; the reactionary Caesarist outcome to the dominant groups' crisis of authority.

Beyond the lack of evidence that Washington had a direct role in the coup, some of the evidence suggests, to the contrary, that US policymakers were developing an alternative three-pronged strategy for undermining popular democracy in Haiti. First, fundamental social transformations would be prevented by withholding US aid, by applying other pressures, and by allowing the global economy and the country's dependence to impose their own constraints. A $26 million AID program to nurture a policy development capacity among the local private sector and its ability to interface with the Aristide government had already been launched.111 Second, there would be a major expansion of political aid and "democracy promotion" programs, with the aim of gradually accomplishing over a prolonged period what could not be achieved during 1986-1990 - the development of an elite organized around a program of polyarchy and neoliberalism, able to mount its own project in civil society and challenge Lavalas hegemony. Third, the state apparatus itself, particularly such countervailing powers as the legislature, local government councils, and the security forces, would be strengthened and space would be opened up in this way for the elite to exercise influence over both the state and the popular masses.

The clearest indication of this strategy came in May 1991, when the State Department approved a massive $24 million Democracy Enhancement Project program, to be managed by the ODI and designed to hasten the organization, institutional influence, and the communications and political action capacity of elite and anti-Aristide constituencies. Recipients of these funds were the same groups the NED had funded in previous years as well as a host of new groups from those sectors of the Haitian political spectrum where opposition to Aristide could be encouraged. The project included an important legislative and local government component, including advisors and programs to train and guide members of the National Assembly. This component must be understood in the particular Haitian context. The constitution approved in 1987 under which Aristide took power had severely reduced executive strength and given important powers to the legislature. At the time, this was seen by US legal experts who advised the drafters of the constitution as a mechanism best suited for developing polyarchy in Haiti, since it would disperse power among the highly fragmented elite and its numerous ambition-driven leaders, and also curb the tradition of a centralized and all-powerful presidency.112 The popular movement, with scant enthusiasm in elections except for the vote it gave to Aristide, showed little interest in the legislative elections. As a result, the Assembly remained the domain of the elite after the 1990 vote (anti-Aristide parties won 60 percent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 52 percent in the Senate). Ironically, the legislature, and the constitution itself, became an ideal juridical weapon in limiting the Aristide government's ability to implement its program - a situation remarkably similar to that of Chile under Allende, except under very different international conditions. Strengthening the Assembly under the pretext of "democracy enhancement" became a means of shifting formal institutional power from Aristide's mass constituency to the elite and of blocking implementation of Aristide's program. And after the coup, it allowed the legislature to playa counterrevolutionary role.

"The Democracy Enhancement Project has been designed to strengthen legislative and other constitutional structures, including local governments, as well as independent organizations which foster democratic values and participation in democratic decision-making," stated a highly revealing AID document:

Pursuit of this [Democracy Enhancement Project] goal is based on three critical assumptions: 1) the democratically elected Government will endure and carry out its mandate according to the terms of the 1987 Constitution; 2) the US Government will have access to and influence with the GOH [Government of Haiti]; and 3) an aggressive project of the kind recommended will make a difference to the durability and effectiveness of the country's evolving democracy ... The project has been designed with a built-in flexibility to respond to the changing social, institutional and political context for democracy-enhancement activities ... The project constitutes our principal effort to advance the overriding objective of US policy towards Haiti ... The design provides for a number of entry points to different institutional "actors" in the democratic scene, with the recognition that some will evolve more quickly than others ...

This [the program] must also be accomplished within the atmosphere of strong nationalism, to avoid any sense of a donor or interest group being disruptive of what the rhetoric describes as "the will of the people" ... Given current sensitivities, the new relationships must be approached judiciously to mitigate against possible "anti-American" backlash. At the same time, we must not be timid in the pursuit of key foreign policy objectives which our project is designed to serve.113


The document went on to note that "the absorptive capacity [of the National Assembly, the electoral council and local government bodies] is in question" - meaning that elite constituencies were not in a strong position to exercise an organized influence in these formal state structures, and that state-civil society linkages needed to be strengthened under the mediation of groups cultivated through the US political aid program. It identified three broad areas for US intervention: (1) "Civil society development, consisting of funding 10 to 15 Haitian independent sector organizations"; (2) "Local government development," consisting of funding " 2 to 3 Haitian independent sector organizations and activities to link local government and civil society interest groups"; and (3) "Institutional development, with emphasis on developing plans for participating independent sector organizations to sustain programs." The same recipients of NED funding in the 1986- 1990 period were among the specific organizations selected for funding, as well as several new groups, including the Haitian Federation of Aid to Women, the Haitian Lawyers' Committee, the Haitian Bar Association, the Center Petion-Bolivar (a new elite think-tank), and the Integral Project for the Reinforcement of Democracy in Haiti (PIRED). The State Department chose this latter organization, set up entirely with US funds and by US organizers, as an "Umbrella Management Unit" to oversee the entire $24 million program inside Haiti.114 The AID gave the NDI and the NRI new monies to continue "party-building," and also set up a Consortium for Legislative Development to oversee the work conducted by NED-funded US groups (sub-grantees) with Haitian parties and members of the National Assembly. The AID reported in the wake of the coup d'etat that it had spent $13 million of the $24 million in the course of Aristide's presidency. The Democracy Enhancement Project was frozen in the aftermath of the coup, and then resumed in late 1992.115

The military interlude: the attempted destruction of civil society

The key question following Aristide's ouster was how US policymakers would respond to the coup. Here was a government elected in free and fair elections organized and paid for by the United States and scrutinized by the international community perhaps more meticulously than the Nicaraguan vote of February 1990.Aristide was the unwanted and unexpected outcome of the "transition to democracy" that the US had tried to guide. But formal support for a military coup at a time when Washington was promoting tightly managed "free elections" around the world as the cornerstone of its new political intervention, was simply out of the question. Demonstrating consistency in Haiti was important. Support for the Haitian coup could embolden militaries in Latin America and elsewhere to attempt takeovers, thus undermining the fragile structures of a transnational polyarchic political system then emerging in the Western Hemisphere. The Haitian case became a test for policymakers. Infighting broke out in Washington over post-coup policy. From Aristide's ouster in September 1991 to the September 1994 invasion that restored him to office, Washington became involved in a complex and sometimes contradictory effort to resolve its dilemma in Haiti in a manner compatible with its overall "democracy promotion" strategy.116

Washington publicly condemned the coup, declared that it would continue to recognize Aristide, and supported limited economic sanctions imposed by the OAS. At the same time, the Bush administration claimed that the coup-makers had a legitimate grievance in their argument that the Aristide government had violated human rights. Bush officials "have begun to move away from unequivocal support they have voiced for the ousted Haitian President," reported the New York Times a week after the coup. "With this shift, the officials, who had said his reinstatement was necessary for the hemisphere's democracies to resist a comeback of military rule, are now hinting that Father Aristide is at least in part to blame for his fall from office."117 In fact, international human rights monitoring groups had reported that human rights violations in Haiti during Aristide's tenure actually decreased significantly. These groups praised the progress made under Aristide in human rights, noted that not one human rights abuse was attributable to the Aristide administration itself, in distinction to the previous regimes, and that most abuses were committed by the security forces which he did not control.118

The US concern in Haiti, as elsewhere, was not human rights but how the issue of human rights could be manipulated in diverse manners to further foreign-policy objectives. The unsubstantiated charges were a thinly veiled disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting the Aristide government's international legitimacy and his own integrity - the continuation, in the post-coup period of hostilities toward Aristide dating back to the mid-1980s, and which became, during his brief tenure in office, a campaign to portray his government as repressive, incompetent, and ideologically extreme. Aspects of this disinformation campaign were publicly exposed several years later, in late 1993,when the CIA was forced to admit that it had fabricated and disseminated false reports that Aristide had undergone psychiatric treatment, was "clinically manic-depressive, prone to violence and an unreliable supporter of democratic reform."119 Such "black propaganda," or "character assassinations," as they are termed in official intelligence jargon, are standard components of destabilization campaigns.

The campaign to blemish Aristide's international stature was one aspect of a broader post-coup US strategy. There were two initial positions in Washington: those arguing for efforts to legitimize an elite civilian alternative to the Aristide government-in-exile, and those favoring the restoration of Aristide. Over the next few years, these two initial positions merged into a more complex, if at times contradictory, strategy of seeking to undermine the possibility of implementing popular democracy in Haiti, yet continuing formal recognition of Aristide as the legitimate head of state. This strategy had two complementary and mutually reinforcing aspects. One was searching for a formula under which Aristide would return as a powerless and largely ceremonial president, under various euphemisms of "power sharing," "reconciliation," and a "consensus government," which would give significant quotas of power to business and political elites who enjoyed no popular mandate yet controlled important levers of the country's economy and the state apparatus. Aristide would thus return with his institutional power so diluted, and the power of the coup-makers and their civilian backers so enhanced, that it would be impossible for his government to fulfill its own political agenda and that of the popular majority. Simultaneously, Washington explored the possibility of installing and legitimizing a new elite civilian regime in Port-au-Prince - a scenario which could be held up as blackmail to the Aristide government-in-exile should it reject the terms imposed on it for its own restitution. The other aspect was the repression and demobilization of the popular classes inside Haiti, a process which the new military regime carried out with brutal efficiency. These two aspects went together like hand and glove: the longer the coup's supporters were in power, the more beaten down and disoriented the population became, the better organized the anti-popular constituencies (both polyarchic and authoritarian) became, and the more elusive the goals of popular democratization and social transformation became. This strategy involved a series of highly duplicitous diplomatic undertakings whose ostensible purpose was to restore Aristide to office, first under OAS-mediated negotiations, then through the UN, and finally under direct State Department mediation. US actions also included a refugee policy broadly condemned as inhumane and illegal, an ineffective and unenforced embargo, the resumption of political aid to anti-Aristide "democratic" constituencies inside Haiti, and the continuation of the CIA campaign to discredit Aristide.

Within days of Aristide's forced exile, the legislature declared his office vacant and named a mulatto old-guard member of the elite, Supreme Court president Joseph Nerette, as interim president, and Jean-Jacques Honorat as provisional prime minister. The OAS opened negotiations between Aristide and Honorat's de facto government. Embassy officials in Port-au-Prince drafted a memorandum on the eve of the OAS negotiations, at the request of the junta, which provided guidelines for the de facto regime's negotiating team, drawn from anti- Aristide forces in the Haitian legislature. And although the new regime in Port-au-Prince was not officially recognized by Washington, US ambassador Alvin Adams accompanied its delegation to the negotiating table as an informal advisor.120 The embassy document stated:

other points of the deal should surely include some of the following: that if A [Aristide] returns it would not be until some time later (months away); that he could be impeached and sent back out; that time was permitted to enact new laws limiting some of his outrageous behaviours and that of his followers; that the Prime Minister become the real power of the government; that the Prime Minister be given adequate economic support to secure his position; that no Lavalas people be included in the new Government ... If A refuses to deal or refuses what Q.A.S. considers a reasonable deal, he is finished ... What is needed is a comprehensive, sustained and very discrete approach to US policy-makers and the US media that will balance off and negate the propaganda of the Lavalas organization.121


The OAS-mediated talks culminated in an agreement in February 1992 in which Aristide would return in exchange for an amnesty for the coup-makers, recognition of all legislation passed by the Assembly after the coup, and the selection of a new prime minister with legislative approval, instead of one appointed freely by Aristide, as called for by the constitution. The appointment of the prime minister was crucial, because the constitution placed most executive power in the office of the prime minister, not the presidency; the latter's power rested in the president's mandate to appoint a prime minister of his or her choice. Nevertheless, the military and the anti-Aristide legislators reneged on the accord at the last minute, making clear that they considered unacceptable the mere presence of Aristide in Haiti, where, even without much presidential power, he would be the leadership figure around which the Haitian masses could rally. Instead, the parliament approved an alternative plan for a "consensus government" that bypassed Aristide and appointed Bazin as prime minister in June 1992. Washington attempted briefly to legitimize the Bazin regime, threatening to withdraw their recognition of Aristide if he did not negotiate with Bazin.122 However, Bazin, like Honorat before him, was unable to win enough legitimacy to exclude Aristide from a solution or to move the country towards internal stability.

Intermittent negotiations ensued over the next few years, under the joint auspices of the UN and the State Department. A familiar pattern emerged: demands for new concessions were placed on Aristide in exchange for retaining international recognition. "In two years of negotiations," noted Haiti analyst Kim Ives, "the putschists have given up nothing of their usurped power, and the legitimate government has traded away almost everything."123 The popular government in exile was caught in a pernicious Catch-22. If it rejected an unfavorable settlement, it faced the loss of international legitimacy. In the new world order, this legitimacy is a prerequisite to any nation's social and economic participation in global society, yet that legitimacy is increasingly conferred by those who control the levers of the global economy, through control over transnational communications media, allocation of resources, and so forth. Sustaining recognition as the legitimate government of Haiti therefore required that Aristide's team play the game of "off-again, on-again" negotiations with the military dictatorship, mediated by international organizations pliant to US manipulations. On the other hand, making continual concessions, each more weakening than the previous, meant forfeiting any chance of bringing about fundamental social change in Haiti, and, for the Aristide government, the loss of its legitimacy and authority within its own mass constituency. The popular movement became increasingly disillusioned with its government-in-exile and frustrated over a negotiations process managed by transnational actors, showing no signs of resolving the situation, and bearing no relation to their daily reality of repression and struggle. The alternatives of sustaining authority among its own mass base by withdrawing from the international negotiations charade, or returning to Haiti under international auspices only to immediately resume the popular project under the status quo ante, could well have led to the loss of all legitimacy internationally under the argument that it was attempting extra-constitutional, extra- institutional forms of social change, and thus a future coup or international sanctions would become "legitimate." Behind the criticism of the Aristide team's strategy are deeper theoretical issues often overlooked by critics of Aristide. The loss of international legitimacy and isolation from world markets that transnational forces are capable of imposing can just as easily suffocate any revolutionary project as could the tenuous strategy that Aristide pursued of trying to walk the tightrope of popular democracy internally and legitimacy internationally. It is not at all clear that the popular struggle in Haiti would have been better off had Aristide simply refused to cooperate in any way with Washington.

As this diplomacy unfolded, at least 3,000 Haitians were executed by the regime in the first few weeks after the coup, and hundreds - or thousands - more over the next several years. Tens of thousands were detained, tortured, and maimed, and several hundred thousand more went into hiding or fled the country. Following the coup, the Macoutes rapidly reorganized and the military government initiated a systematic campaign of repression which human rights groups reported to be worse than at any time since the Duvalier era.124 The notorious chefs de section posts, abolished by Aristide, were reinstated by the military. All but pro-regime media outlets were closed, meetings banned, unions, peasant leagues, and other popular organizations dissolved, leaders "disappeared," and elected representatives in local and regional government structures dismissed and persecuted.

While the diplomatic charade bought time, the military regime was accomplishing precisely what could not be done either with Aristide in power or under any polyarchy regime nominally respecting traditional civil liberties and political rights: the destruction of the organs of the popular classes in civil society and the resubordination of the Haitian masses through the only effective instrument for this purpose under Haitian conditions - direct, widespread, and systematic repression. One international human rights report (echoing many such reports) affirmed that "the goal of the repression is two-fold: first, to destroy the political and social gains made since the downfall of the Duvalier dynasty; and second, to ensure that no matter what Haiti's political future may hold, all structures for duplicating those gains will have been laid waste."125 While the "ethnic cleansing" that took place in Bosnia in the early 1990s shocked the world, this lesser known but no less brutal process of "class cleansing" of Haitian civil society took place following the coup. This was a process remarkably similar to Chile under Pinochet and to the other Southern Cone dictatorships, yet with the goal of compacting it into a period of a few short years. Once the popular leadership was decimated, its organizational structures shattered, and the masses sufficiently terrorized, it would be "safe" to dismantle the coup government, with or without Aristide's return.

That the United States did not participate directly in this unprecedented wave of repression (for that matter, neither did it participate directly in Marcos's, Pinochet's, or Somoza's repression, and even sometimes criticized that repression) is not relevant to the analytical point. Most of the coup leaders and members of the junta that directly conducted the systematic repression, and the political figures such as Honorat and Bazin that tried to legitimize a post-Aristide order, had long since established extensive relations with Washington through the CIA and the DIA, the NED, and other programs. And Haitian army officers, in fact, continued to receive training after the coup in US military facilities.126 "Virtually all observers agree that all it would take is one phone call from Washington to send the army leadership packing," noted the New York Times a year after the coup. But given "Washington's deep-seated ambivalence about a left-ward tilting nationalist. .. United States diplomats consider it [the army] a vital counterweight to Father Aristide, whose class-struggle rhetoric threatened or antagonized traditional power centers at home and abroad."127

The US refugee policy, condemned by human rights organizations and the UN as blatantly racist and a violation of both US and international law, also fed into this strategy. The exodus of refugees out of Haiti under the Duvaliers and subsequent regimes had ground to a halt the moment Aristide was elected, but then recommenced within days of the coup. The Bush administration strengthened a forced US repatriation program in place since 1981, denounced by Aristide as a "floating Berlin wall," and a policy ratified by the Clinton administration. Human rights groups documented a blatant distortion by US officials of evidence that repatriated Haitians suffered persecution, and pointed out that US embassy officials even informed the Haitian army of the whereabouts of those refugees whom it repatriated, thus making them even more susceptible to persecution. A sharp escalation of death squad-style killings coincided with Washing ton's decision to repatriate Haitians, and those repatriated were subjected to systematic repression.128

Right-wing political and paramilitary organizations tied to the army, the de facto regime, and US intelligence services, sprang up in the postcoup period. In late 1993, CIA and DIA officials in Haiti encouraged a Haitian official from the SIN (the CIA-run clandestine unit), Emmanuel Constant, to organize these groups into the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH) in order to "balance the Aristide movement" and conduct "intelligence" against it.129 The FRAPH added a new element to the Haitian political scene that served the antipopular agenda in the short run but complicated the long-term transnational elite agenda for Haiti. It became a well-organized instrument of repression, operating in a death-squad manner to continue the process of decimating popular sector organization, yet also constituted the political institutionalization of forces bent on preserving an authoritarian political system. FRAPH leaders were not only on the CIA payroll but were also integrated into post-coup, and later post-invasion, US political and economic aid programs.130

A concomitant aspect of post-coup US strategy was to provide enough of a lifeline for the military regime to survive ..Following the coup, the OAS imposed an economic embargo on Haiti. But the embargo, with numerous loopholes, was largely ineffectual (in sharp contrast to total embargoes against Nicaragua, Chile, Cuba, Panama, Iraq, and elsewhere, which were implemented with devastating effectiveness). Two days after the coup, Washington vetoed the Aristide government's request to have a hearing at the UN security council, arguing instead that the OAS was the appropriate forum to address a matter internal to the Western Hemisphere. As a result, the embargo was hemispheric and not worldwide in scope. The embargo restrictions were breached by exporters and importers not only from Europe, but from the United States and Latin America. Oil tankers and freighters not flying flags from OAS member-states kept Haiti well supplied with petroleum and other goods until the UN finally imposed international sanctions in 1993; even then, the sanctions were limited to oil and arms deliveries.131 More significantly, in February 1992 the Bush administration unilaterally relaxed the embargo to exclude all goods produced in the free-trade zone, as well as other goods claimed necessary to protect Haitians from losing their jobs. As a result, while the image of a US government engaged in active diplomacy to isolate the military dictatorship was propagated, trade between the United States and Haiti actually flourished and registered a sharp increase under the dictatorship. According to US Census Bureau figures, US trade with Haiti jumped from $316.2 million in 1992 to $375.6 million in 1993.132

In late 1992, the $24 million Democracy Enhancement Project, which had been suspended following the coup, was resumed. New programs included a resumption of funding for political parties, and a program, jointly managed by the NDI and the NRI, to "promote the consolidation of democracy in Haiti by assisting Haiti's civilian and military leaders to develop mechanisms to integrate the Armed Forces of Haiti in to civilian society." The program "proposes to establish a broad civil-military relations program with senior members of the Haitian government," stated one document.133 Another NED program, handled by the CFD, was the creation of a new private-sector organization in Haiti, the Center for Free Enterprise and Democracy (CLEO). In early 1994, the CLEO organized a two-week "strike" of private-sector commercial and industrial enterprises to demand the lifting of the embargo. The CFD also conducted a "legislative development" program to continue training and advising members of the Haitian parliament. Yet another NED program established and funded a group called the Development and Democracy Foundation, which promptly launched a campaign whose slogan was "democracy is discipline." The AID funded a string of newly created community centers known as Centers for Health and Development, headed by the wealthy businessman and Bazin colleague, Reginald Boulos. These Centers were placed in charge of distributing AID-donated food and charitable goods, and were criticized by popular groups as outlets intended to replace the grassroots neighborhood councils and as vehicles for "getout- the-vote" and other "civic" campaigns in future elections.134
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Re: Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, a

Postby admin » Mon Apr 11, 2016 10:08 am

Part 4 of 4

The 1994 US invasion: reinforcing political society as an instrument of the elite

In analytical abstraction, what unfolded in Haiti between 1991 and 1994 was an all-sided war of attrition against the Haitian people, attuned to the unique context of Haiti. US diplomacy and economic, political, and military aid, the transnational communications media, continued economic activity by transnational capital inside Haiti, the Haitian state, the elite, and the military regime, all converged. The complete dilution of the formal power of the popular Haitian majority within the state (both during Aristide's tenure and after his ouster) was being accompanied by the neutralization through repression of the capacity of this majority to mobilize in civil society in pursuit of its interests. The interim status quo could not be sustained because it failed to meet the two requirements of legitimacy and being a basis for long-term stability. Apart from intentionality on the part of individual actors, public pronouncements made by US officials, and even specific policy actions (none of which should be seen as underlying causal or explanatory factors in historical outcomes), the historical outcome was moving precisely towards that which met the interests of the United States and the Haitian elite: the defeat of a project of popular democracy in Haiti. By mid-1994 either a return of Aristide or his permanent exile looked like creating a no-win situation for popular democracy in Haiti.

The October 1994 invasion was intended to place back on track the decade-long effort to stabilize elite polyarchic rule in Haiti, once the military interlude had thoroughly transfigured the political, social, and economic variables, internally and internationally, to the point where Washington could resume this effort even with Aristide in the presidency. 135 From the coup until mid-1994, US policy failed to persuade the coup-leaders to step down because it was not designed to do so. During this period, US strategists began to fathom just how difficult it would be to carry through the transnational project for Haiti. The undertaking would be very long term and policy goals would have to be gauged over a period of many years. Policymakers set about to devise a long-term strategy to achieve lasting results, independent of how the short-term crisis was resolved. "Hope for quick breakthroughs is being revised to consider a longer-term process of institution building," noted one US official in 1993. "This is the central political/ economic context for the US-Haitian relationship in the 1990s. US policy response needs to address both the complexity of the underlying problems and the relatively long time frame for achieving results."136 In a redefined time-frame, Aristide's return under controlled conditions became a requirement of resuming the overall project. The postcoup strategy was unsuccessful in legitimizing an alternative to Aristide, while the Haitian elite and military rulers proved utterly intransigent regarding his return. The transnational elite had begun to play Aristide's return as their "stability card." "We in the US have misunderstood the Aristide question, which isn't an issue of the evil military versus the good Mr. Aristide," stated the president of the International Industrial Exporters Inc., a major transnational contracting firm operating in Haiti. "Mr. Aristide isn't any more the answer to Haiti's problems than is the military. But his return to power is worth the cost of the US military incursion if it fosters a resumption of free trade and the sale of US goods and services."137 The road to stability in Haiti necessarily passed through Aristide.

After undertaking a policy reassessment in May 1994, the Clinton administration imposed effective economic sanctions for the first time, which finally squeezed the elite, and utilized the threat of a military action as a high-risk gamble in coercive diplomacy. These measures were intended to apply pressure on the elite to compromise with Aristide in a "power-sharing" arrangement in the short term to get the US policy back on track in the medium and long term. The threat of an invasion was at first intended to be only that - a threat. But once the threat was made without the intended effect on Port-au-Prince, Washington ran the risk of losing credibility if it did not follow through, US options began to dwindle, and a foreign-policy crisis developed. The economic squeeze and diplomatic momentum leading up to the invasion, and the invasion itself, drove a wedge between the elite and the military, and convinced enough of the elite of the need for Aristide's return to establish a solid elite base of support for the invasion. As with the military interlude, policymakers incorporated the invasion, once the plans were drawn up, into the larger, long-term strategy as a powerful instrument to further overall goals in Haiti.

True to the original script, Aristide returned as a largely lame-duck president required constitutionally to step down after elections scheduled for December 1995, having spent the vast majority of his presidency in exile. And by having been returned to office by US marines, he was beholden to the very same foreign power that had consistently sought to defuse the popular project he led. The Lavalas movement was forced to accept the piper of US military intervention, thus leaving policymakers in a much stronger position to call the Lavalas movement's - and the country's - political tune. The jubilation expressed by Haitian masses as they took to the streets to welcome the invading marines reflected a momentary and tactical convergence between Haiti's popular majority and US policymakers almost identical to those between the Haitian army and the people, and the Philippine army and the people, in the immediate aftermath of those dictators' departures. The invasion had the image of a clash between a liberating foreign force and a corrupt local ruling class, hut it was the sealing of a long-term pact between that foreign force and the Haitian elite.

At all times, the focus of invasion itself was to control the Haitian population during the brief power vacuum following the the departure of the military regime. If the military were to fall before US forces and programs were in place, said one US army psychological operations official, "the people might get the idea that they can do whatever they want."138 For this purpose, Jimmy Carter led a delegation in advance of the invasion to work out with Cedras what in military parlance is a "permissive entry." The Carter-Cedras deal called for a "peaceful, cooperative entry of international forces into Haiti, with a mutual respect between the American commanders and the Haitian military commanders."139 The essence of the deal, stated Secretary of State Warren Christopher, was twofold: (1) to keep Cedras in power until October 15, the date Aristide was to return under US military escort, while the US occupation force was "inserted," and (2) to ensure that "a general amnesty will be voted into law by the Haitian Parliament."140

The goal was to separate the Aristide government from the popular movement, and to thoroughly penetrate, take control of, and reorganize Haitian political society, and elites operating therein, through massive new US economic, political, and military aid programs that would inundate the country under the canopy of the occupation and the legitimacy afforded to these programs by Aristide's return. "The task," said one AID report, was to "substantially transform the nature of the Haitian state."141 Post-invasion economic reconstruction aid was a powerful instrument in class restructuring, encouraging the formation and ascendance to internal leadership over the elite of the transnationalized fraction, whittling away at remnants of crony capitalism, and constructing a neo-liberal state. A month before the invasion at a meeting in Paris between the Aristide transition team and representatives from the AID, the World Bank, the IMF, and other mulitlateral, bilateral, and private lenders, a five-year $1.2 billion multilateral and bilateral (mostly US) aid package for Haiti was approved. As in Nicaragua, the vast part of these monies was to go to paying the country's foreign debt arrears, to strengthening the private sector, and financing infrastructure and other amenities for foreign investors. Most of the funds would bypass the Haitian government itself and instead be handled directly by the AID and the private sector.142

Conditions for the disbursal of these international resources were many times more stringent than in the pre-coup period, and in the completely redefined environment the Aristide government could not hope to resist outside impositions. It called for across-the-board neoliberal restructuring, including privatization, trade liberalization, the lifting of price and other controls, the reduction of public-sector employment by 50 percent, a further contraction of already pitiful social service spending, a commitment not to raise the daily minimum wage, and so forth. The international funders expected to see "a government of reconciliation" [read: power-sharing between Aristide's team and the elite) that could "guarantee stability and a sound economic environment," said one official at the meeting.143 Even the most mild reforms it had proposed before the coup were absent from the Aristide government's post-invasion social and economic policies. "You have to understand, the world has changed in these three years," said Aristide official Father Antoine Adrien. "What was good in 1991 is not necessarily good in 1994."144 Adrien was, in effect, acknowledging the tremendous advance made in reinforcing political society as an instrument of the elite as a result of the military interlude, the invasion, and the conditions attendant upon Aristide's return. His comment expressed the Aristide team's decision - taken under overwhelming constraints and limited options - to abandon pre-coup plans to try to transform political society to conform to popular hegemony won by the masses in civil society.

In the weeks following the invasion, personnel from the Pentagon, the AID, the USIA, the Treasury, and other agencies organized into a "Civic Affairs Ministerial Advisory Team," fanned out to virtually all government ministries as "advisers" to the restored government, in an almost instant penetration of the Haitian state for the purpose of, in the words of one US official, achieving "the full merging of their [the ministries'] plans with AID."145The invasion itself acted structurally and economically to strengthen the technocratic fraction of the elite. Leaders of the fraction quickly moved into formal institutional positions in the ministries or into the leadership of the countless programs set up by the occupation forces. Held to ransom by the conditions attendant upon his restoration, Aristide turned over key cabinets and areas of the Haitian state to the tiny transnational kernel, including the central bank, the ministries of commerce, public administration, public works, and the treasury, as well as the prime ministership itself, which was given to Smarck Michel, a prominent businessman and leading representative of the fraction.146 "Businessmen [had) been clamoring for a prime minister able to oversee a new economic plan acceptable to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and top business leaders here," reported the New York Times upon Michel's appointment, adding that the program enunciated by Michel "reads like an IMF primer."147

Placed into key posts from which it could implement policies formulated in transnational forums abroad and in private-sector policy planning institutes and elite clearing-houses set up inside Haiti by US political aid programs, the embryonic kernel became a transmission belt through which the transnational agenda would be imposed on Haiti via key organs of the Haitian state. All this achieved a hastened externalization of the state and subordinate linkage to emergent transnational state apparatuses - a process which had not been able to go forward, despite US efforts, either under the earlier authoritarian regimes or the pre-coup Aristide tenure. According to this script, the restored government, held ransom by a transnational elite and its structural and direct (political-military) power, would bear all the political cost of neo-liberalism and see its own legitimacy eroded, while a transnational kernel would be quietly cultivated under the shield of the popular government itself.

According to the plan, political society would still remain shielded by a coercive apparatus, which was to be preserved and reorganized, first through the Carter-Cedras deal and the subsequent amnesty for the military, and second, by submitting the unwieldy Haitian army to the "Panama model." The plan was to reduce the army from 7,000 to 1,500 troops, and to create a civilian police force of about 7,000 officers (many simply transferred from the old army to the new police) to handle internal "law and order." Military "retraining" was launched by the US government's International Criminal Investigations Training and Assistance Program (ICITAP). The ICITAP was created in 1986 "to fortify the development of emerging democracies in the Western Hemisphere," run by the Justice and State Departments, and staffed by the FBI and diverse local and federal US police agencies, as part of the development of a transnationalized "democracy promotion" apparatus within the US state,148 The new Haitian police force was to be subordinate to elite-US authority, not as prone to indiscriminate violence, and better versed in focused surveillance, selective repression, and more "benign" methods of control over popular mobilization. Aristide himself called for the constitutional elimination of the army, a plan which, at the time of writing (mid-1995) was strongly opposed by the elite and Washington. Even if the army was formally abolished, a "Panama model" police force would be an adequate instrument of coercive social control in defense of a legal order which sanctified and codified the juridical relations of the existing social order, including its property relations.

New political aid programs were launched almost immediately following the invasion and dwarfed in relative size and scope anything that had been implemented earlier - in Haiti or in any other country of the world. Up to $85 million in "Democracy Enhancement" and "Democratic Governance" programs was allocated to expand earlier NED and AID programs with civic and political groups, to create and support a slew of new groups, to an "Institution-Building Initiative," a "Social Reconciliation and Democratic Development" program, an "Electoral Assistance" project, and so on.149 While the Aristide government struggled to maintain some influence over the military plank of the US post-invasion plan, it practically gave up any attempt to resist these political intervention programs. "We really can't fight this huge machine," said a transition team member.150 US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott was more to the point: "Even after our exit in February 1996 we will remain in charge by means of the USAID and the private sector." [151]

Conclusion: the failure to establish consensual domination in Haiti

No social order can sustain itself indefinitely on the foundation of organized state power. As Gramsci argued, the inclination of dominant groups to revert to repression and violence is a sign not of strength but of weakness. Despite the complete penetration and capture of political society it achieved, the US reliance on the military regime for three years to carry forward the project, and the invasion as the US evocation of organized transnational force, were paradoxical signs of the protracted failure of the US-transnational project in Haiti.

In the revised "long-haul" strategy, the capture of political society was to provide a trampoline for the gradual and incremental pacification of civil society through political intervention. The plan called for dividing the Lavalas coalition, according to one AID memo, by weaning away and winning over "responsible elements within the popular movement."152 The objective was to transform Lavalas from a mass popular-left bloc that united middle and professional strata with the poor majority, into a center-to-left bloc that would incorporate those same middle and professional strata along with a portion of the poor, under the leadership of an embryonic transnational kernel. This new hegemonic bloc would gradually dilute the original Lavalas project of its popular content. If enough of the mass base could be coopted into this bloc, then a "center" could cohere, and grassroot leaders unwilling to abandon the project of popular democracy would be marginalized politically and ideologically rather than by repression.

But the Haitian masses remained the wild card in the deck. If US political intervention specialists could not exorcize the culture of authoritarianism and clientelism from the elite, neither could they exorcize what had become a deep-rooted culture of resistance among the poor majority. Emboldened by the removal of the military regime, Haitians resumed their struggle for popular democracy following the invasion. Thousands of grassroot leaders came out of hiding, rural and urban networks were rearticulated and reatctivated, and civil society again became a beehive of popular organizing, intensely resistant to US-elite penetration and control. Despite the tens of millions of dollars that poured in following the invasion to organize anti-Lavalas constituencies and candidates, Lavalas and independent candidates representing grassroot organizations swept the 1995 parliamentary and local elections, throwing a new monkey wrench into the gears of the US project, to the frustration and chagrin of US officials. Without conquering civil society, the elite project for hegemonic order in Haiti would remain elusive and the crisis of authority would continue.

On the other hand, the popular classes would never be able to realize their own project of popular democracy without conquering and transforming the state. Some in the Lavalas movement criticized Aristide and his administration for confusing the "fluke" of the 1990 electoral victory with the possibility of bringing about fundamental changes in the social order through the elite-oriented political structures set up by the US-sponsored "transition to democracy," and argued that basic social change could only be brought about by the same mass mobilization that brought Duvalier down. "Rather than judging his electoral victory as a fluke, Aristide has tried to universalize the tactic into a political strategy of trying to beat the system at its own game," argued one Haitian analyst. "The question: has the US government lured Aristide into a new, hopelessly rigged game by letting him think he can win again?"153

Not surprisingly, the dilemmas faced by the popular sectors following the coup led to increasing infighting and fissures under the Lavalas umbrella and, after the invasion, to formal splits. The middle and professional strata that contributed the core of the institutionalized FNDC leadership and occupied posts in the legislature and the government (what some critics called the "Lavalas bourgeoisie") had begun to operate within the logic of polyarchy and in defense of privilege. Unable or unwilling to commit what Amilcar Cabral referred to as "class suicide," they began to distance themselves from the Lavalas mass base and popular leadership even before the military interlude.154 Following the invasion, popular sectors created the Lavalas Political Organization (OPL). Instead of joining the OPL, many from the "Lavalas bourgeoisie" chose to remain in the FNDC and the earlier KONAKOM organization, which became formal parties of their own, and even incipient power-bases for ambitious middle-class leaders to participate in polyarchic competition. This gradual fragmentation of Lavalas should be seen within the theoretical argument made in chapter 1 that democratization movements usually become transformed from majoritarian social struggles to class struggles once the polarizing conditions of a disintegrating authoritarianism give way to more complex and multidimensional struggles over the nature and reach of the democratization process. The further popular classes push the process, the more dominant classes, elites, and privileged strata taper off, fall out of the movement, and even become opponents.

The Haiti case demonstrates the contradictions between polyarchy and popular democracy. "In attempting to bring his Lavalas movement into government, Aristide confronted state institutions that had always represented the power of wealth, privilege, and violence," noted Haitian sociologist and Aristide official Jean Casimir, referring to Aristide's pre-coup period in office. "In such an environment, politics was a difficult enterprise... The accountability that the population demands has irritated many elected officials, even some of Aristide's supporters [the "Lavalas bourgeoisie"]... The Haitian parliament represent[ed] a cross section of the intelligentsia, not simply the traditional elites that previously controlled the state machinery ... These parliamentary representatives tend[ed] to operate according to the conventions of the formal political system."155 But when the popular majority used its mobilizing capacity to try to force the state to respond to its interest - in conformity with the model of popular democracy, which posits a state subordinated to and controlled by majorities who have gained hegemony in civil society - then this majority lost its legitimacy (outside of Haiti) because it transgressed the procedures of "representative democracy," In early August 1991, the parliament began to consider a vote of no confidence against Aristide's appointed prime minister, Rene Preval. Believing that opposition to the prime minister was an attempt to usurp Aristide's mandate, angry Lavalas crowds surrounded the parliament, assaulted two legislators and threatened several others. At the technical level, the legislators, and not Haiti's popular masses, were acting "legally" and "constitutionally." The "harassment" of the parliament by "mobs" was the initial event which precipitated the internal crisis culminating in the coup d'etat.

A breach in the constitutional procedures of polyarchy in the interests of popular democratization and basic social change required moving beyond the legitimizing parameters of low-intensity democracy. Aristide recognized as much on the eve of his overthrow, declaring: "This is a political revolution, but it's not a social revolution. Now we are trying to achieve a social revolution. If we don't do that, the political revolution will not go anywhere."156 (For such comments, he would later be accused of bringing on his own downfall.) "It is not really that Aristide advanced too rapidly or not rapidly enough in his reform project," noted Casimir. "Rather, the project itself - built around the enfranchising of the oppressed in Haiti - inevitably produced a reaction."157 Low-intensity democracy served well as an instrument to contain, within the parameters of the existing social order, the demands of subordinate majorities. The efforts of this popular majority to transform society in its interests, once its representative won the presidency, ran up against polyarchy's "constitutional" limitations. It was no wonder that the Democracy Enhancement Project placed so much emphasis on strengthening legislative and other "constitutional structures." When the Haitian masses attempted to transgress these formal structures, whose levers were still controlled by an elite unresponsive - indeed, antagonistic - to the demands of the majority, their actions were brandished as "anti-democratic" and extra-legal ("mob rule" became the buzzword) - and could be delegitimized, less within Haiti than at the international level. And in the era of the transnationalization of political systems, each nation requires for its survival that its internal political system be legitimized in the international arena (said legitimization deriving from functioning polyarchy).

This, in turn, underscores another theoretical point: effective hegemony is won by a bloc which conquers both civil society and the state. Either control of the state alone, or dominance in civil society alone, is not sufficient to construct a stable hegemonic bloc. As Casimir noted, "Haiti is really the juxtaposition of two societies, one forced to live without the state, even against the state, and one that is associated with the state machinery ... This manifestation of anarchism in the proper meaning of the word - a society that previously had not known the state and that suddenly lays its hands upon the state apparatus - has threatened entrenched interests in Haiti and confused other countries in the region."158 This "confusion" goes a long way in explaining endemic infighting in both the Bush and Clinton administrations over Haiti policy and the see-saw diplomacy of officials from Washington, from other hemispheric governments, and from international organizations, during the 1991-1994 military interlude, as well as the continued feeling of frustration and disorientation experienced by US officials after the invasion. The underlying point is that hegemony, whether it is exercised by dominant minority groups or popular majorities, is not a viable form of rule unless the groups which are to exercise their sovereignty control both the state and civil society. Hegemonic rule is exercised in an extended state. Political and civil society are, in Gramsci's Hegelian phrase, "moments" in the same process. Yet in Haiti, the popular sectors could not wrest the state from the elite, and the elite could not wrest civil society from the popular sectors. Neither side could forge a viable hegemonic bloc within the country.159

Relatedly, Haiti demonstrates that the transnational elite project of establishing polyarchy and neo-liberalism, under conditions such as those presented in Haiti, runs up against the struggle for popular democratization and fundamental change in the social order. The impossibility of stabilizing the transnational project in Haiti in the short to mid-term forced the US to deny legitimacy to the different post-coup regimes and to continue conferring legitimacy upon Aristide right up until 1995. Moreover, polyarchy, or consensual domination, requires a bourgeoisie that formulates a political discourse on the basis of an economic foundation of capital accumulation. Such accumulation was historically absent among the Haitian "merchant bourgeoisie" and presented a weak, dysfunctional basis upon which to try and implant polyarchy. This, in turn, leads back to the issue raised in chapter 1, and which I touch on in the concluding chapter: the relationship between democracy and capitalism, or democracy and modes of production. Similarly, despite three years of intense repression followed by a dramatic escalation of internal political intervention after the invasion, the popular classes could not be stamped out or coopted. The military interlude and the invasion solidly clenched political society for the transnational elite, but did little to overcome the historic disjuncture between political and civil society. The prospect in 1995 for achieving anything closely resembling a hegemonic bloc in Haiti under a polyarchic elite was close to nil. The Haitian people have proved deftly intelligent in their own collective mass actions, and there is no evidence to conclude they will be pacified into consensual domination. "State against nation" could, at best, lend itself to a highly transient and unstable standoff, and at worst, to new cycles of Caesarism. Thus we see in Haiti contradictions internal to the transnational elite project which the new political intervention, as an instrument to facilitate that project, is unable to overcome. The pro-Aristide slogan which gained popularity after the coup, "democracy or death," was highly instructive: the Haitian downtrodden majority had appropriated the legitimizing symbols and discourse of the transnational elite project. Ongoing crisis is the most likely forecast in the complex Haitian scenario.
 
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Re: Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, a

Postby admin » Mon Apr 11, 2016 10:58 am

Part 1 of 4

Chapter 7: Conclusions: The future of polyarchy and global society

Most people in the world put up with very great inequalities, but when these inequalities appear to be increasing without prospect of being reversed and when they mean famine, epidemic, and certain death for millions of people, they cease to be merely aesthetic problems and acquire the status of political crises.

-- Richard Barnet and Ronald Muller [1]


The world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality. Concepts like "nation," "society," and "culture" name bits and threaten to turn names into things. Only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by placing them back into the field from which they were abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and increase our share of understanding.

-- Eric Wolf [2]


The present study, as stated in the introduction, has a dual purpose. The first was to analyze and explain the promotion of polyarchy in US foreign policy. The second, more open-ended, was to explore political and social dimensions of globalization. This concluding chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part, I recapitulate my main thesis, take a brief look at "democracy promotion" programs in the former Soviet bloc and South Africa and US activities worldwide so as to strengthen generalizing conclusions, and summarize in comparative perspective the case studies. I then go on to address the relationship between capitalism and democracy in light of globalization, and present a novel Gramscian framework for analyzing this relationship. This discussion forms the backdrop to an analysis of the contradictions internal to the transnational agenda and to an evaluation of the prospects that the promotion of polyarchy will succeed in its objectives. It also forms a logical bridge to the second part of the chapter, an exploration of broader theoretical issues, including the prospects for world order, intended to contribute to current research and debate on emergent global society.

Prospects and contradictions of the transnational agenda: capitalism and democracy in light of globalization

A recapitulation of the central thesis


A significant shift has taken place in US foreign policy, from backing authoritarianism and dictatorships to promoting polyarchic political systems. Behind this shift is a change in the salient form of social control exercised in a transnational setting, from coercive to consensual means of domination within a highly stratified international system, in which the US plays a leadership role as the dominant world power. This policy shift was analyzed through a methodological approach that weaved together practical-conjunctural, or behavioral, analysis with structural analysis (along with a third mediating level, the structural-conjunctural). At the structural level, the shift is grounded in globalization, which occasions highly fluid social relations, "stirs" masses of people to rebel against authoritarian forms of political authority, and thus calls forth new political structures to mediate social relations within and between nations in the world system. Just as polyarchy emerged in the core countries of the world system when capitalism became fully consolidated there, polyarchy is now emerging as the principal political system in the Third World, and increasingly, as a transnational political system corresponding to global capitalist society. At the practical-conjunctural level, the extended policymaking community in the United States developed a theoretical awareness and· a practical attunement to changes taking place in the world and to what is required for the maintenance of social control in twenty-first-century global society, which led to the development of new policy instruments, to the reorganization of the foreign-policy apparatus, and to the launching, from the early 1980s and on, of "democracy promotion" operations around the world. The immediate purpose of US intervention in national democratization movements was to gain influence over and to try to shape their outcomes in such a way as to preempt more radical political change, to preserve the social order and international relations of asymmetry. Beyond this immediate purpose, the new political intervention is aimed at advancing the agenda of the transnational elite - consolidation of polyarchic political systems and neo-liberal restructuring. It seeks to develop technocratic elites and transnational kernels in intervened countries who will advance this agenda through the formal state apparatus and through the organs of civil society in their respective countries.

The operating assumption is that these analytical precepts and theoretical propositions should be evaluated by assessing their utility in providing rational explanations congruent with empirical findings. As the case studies make clear, there is a "good fit" between those precepts and propositions and the findings. But to what extent generalizations can be made based on these four case studies alone remains open to question. The particular history and conditions of each country and region determine the circumstances under which it enters global society. Exactly what form US political intervention takes in a specific country (if it even occurs) depends on a host of factors, including the complex of circumstances within the intervened country and its historical relationship with the United States. The countries examined in preceding chapters, while they differed from each other, all shared a long history of US penetration and intervention. The Philippines was an outright colony, Nicaragua and Haiti were near-protectorates, and Chile, although it enjoyed more clout and autonomy vis-a-vis the United States, had been under US domination since late last century. It is safe to rule out a "deviant case" argument on the basis of definite patterns identified in four countries. However, on this basis alone it is difficult to draw general conclusions with certainty. Brief overviews of US "democracy promotion" programs in the former Soviet bloc and in South Africa, and a summary of these activities worldwide, allow us to make generalizing claims with much greater certainty and to strengthen the validity of the general thesis.

The Soviet bloc and South Africa: complex convergences of US intervention and globalization pressures

A brief look at the former Soviet-bloc countries and South Africa reveals the same patterns of US conduct apparent in the four case studies, and the intersection of US intervention with endogenous developments and globalization pressures, under circumstances dramatically different from those in the studies. The former Soviet bloc was not a part of the Third World but constituted the "Second World" - powerful contenders in the semi-periphery in the world system framework. South Africa was also a strong semi-peripheral country with a well-developed domestic capitalist class and an advanced process of internal capital accumulation. The United States was not the principal outside power in South Africa, much less in the former Soviet bloc, and relations were never ones of domination and dependency in either case.

The new instruments of political intervention were deployed throughout Eastern Europe starting in the mid-1980s, and later on in the Soviet Union itself. Similarly, the NED and other "democracy promotion" programs were set up in South Africa in the mid-1980s. In neither of these cases did the United States create movements for democratic change - these movements were endogenous developments - but it did set out to gain as much influence as possible over their outcomes. In the former Soviet bloc, the objective was not specifically to bring about the demise of communist regimes; this was a goal already actively pursued on all fronts since 1917. Rather it was to accelerate that demise and, more significantly, to contribute, through elections and in subsequent programs, to strengthening the most procapitalist factions with favorable perspectives for developing a "global outlook" and for promoting the agenda of the transnational elite. US intervention helped these factions come to power in place of discredited communist parties, or at the minimum, helped them to spread their influence and position themselves strategically in post-communist societies. In South Africa, the goal was to bring within manageable bounds the struggle against apartheid so as to limit the extent of a popular outcome and to try to substitute white minority rule with inter-racial polyarchic minority rule, as part of a transition from racial to non-racial capitalism.

The Soviet bloc

During the first half of 1982, a five-part [US] strategy emerged that was aimed at bringing about the collapse of the Soviet economy, fraying the ties that bound the USSRto its client states in the Warsaw Pact and forcing reform inside the Soviet empire. Elements of the strategy included: The US defense buildup already under way, aimed at making it too costly for the Soviets to compete militarily with the US ... Covert operations aimed at encouraging reform movements in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland; Financial aid to Warsaw Pact nations calibrated to their willingness to... undertake political and free-market reforms; Economic isolation of the Soviet Union and the withholding of Western and Japanese technology ... Increased use of Radio Liberty, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe to transmit [US] messages to peoples of Eastern Europe.

-- Time magazine [3]


In the 1960s and onward, the Soviet-bloc countries became increasingly integrated into the capitalist world market through loans, trade, technology transfers, and even direct foreign investment (a process which, in my view, was inevitable). This integration overlapped with globalization, and had social, political, and ideological ramifications that interacted with, and aggravated, problems internal to the bloc, namely rigid statist models of socialism and highly authoritarian political systems that suppressed popular participation and subordinated civil society to the state. The social response to this process eventually burgeoned into the mass movements for democratic change of the 1980s.A review of these movements prior to the collapse of the bloc in the period 1989-1991 reveals, in highly simplified terms, that two broad strands had developed among the region's political leaders, trade unionists, grassroots activists, and intellectuals who led the revolutions in civil society: those whose vision of change was the creation of societies free from the defects of both capitalism and the existing brand of statist and authoritarian socialism (that is, those who were seeking some type of a democratic socialist renewal along the lines of the model of popular democracy), and those who were more closely tied to the West and who, whether for reasons of personal ambition or of political conviction, sought the creation of capitalist systems modeled after the developed Western countries and managed by polyarchic elites.4

It was in this milieu, and alongside the extraordinary structural power which transnational capital could impose on the former Soviet bloc once it had become integrated into the world economy, that the United States introduced massive "political aid" programs into the region. This aid started with support for the Solidarity trade union federation in Poland in the early 1980s and snowballed by the end of the decade into multi-million dollar programs in all the countries of the bloc, in synchronization with the rekindling of the Cold War under the Reagan presidency and a host of military, economic, political, and ideological activities.5 Political aid was utilized in a very specific and highly effective manner. Its purpose was to identify and support those groups and individuals within the loose coalitions of political clubs and civic groups in civil society that could gain leadership positions in highly fluid and semi-spontaneous mass movements and steer these movements into outcomes of "free-market democracy."

In 1982, the United States and the Vatican launched a joint secret program, managed largely by the CIA and by the AFL-CIO, to support Solidarity. In 1984, the NED took over much of the US support for Solidarity, which became overt and channeled through the FrUI, in close coordination with the CIA. "Money for the banned union came from CIA funds, the National Endowment for Democracy, secret accounts in the Vatican and Western trade unions," reported Time magazine in a 1992 after-the-fact expose.6 Solidarity had emerged several years earlier as an authentic movement for democratization incorporating some ten million Polish workers. The covert aid did not create the movement but facilitated US influence over it and helped the more pro-Western elements assume leadership during the course of the 1980s. In 1982, the same year as President Reagan signed the National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) authorizing Project Democracy (see chapter 2) and parallel to the Washington-Vatican program, he also signed NSDD 32, which authorized a vast range of economic, political, diplomatic, military, and psychological operations to destabilize the Soviet bloc. One of the key planks of the regional operation was the use of Solidarity to launch operations throughout the region, often without Solidarity leaders - much less Polish workers at the grassroots - having any knowledge of such external linkages or manipulation for outside purposes. "The Solidarity office in Brussels became an international clearinghouse: for representatives from the Vatican, for CIA operatives, for the AFL-CIO, for representatives of the Socialist International, for the congressionally funded National Endowment for Democracy, which also worked closely with [CIA director William] Casey," reported Time.7

The assistance for Solidarity provided a precedent and a model for massive overt, as well as covert, political aid programs throughout the decade and into the 1990s. Solidarity was utilized as a point of penetration not only of the Polish state, but of governments and of dissident civic and political groups throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In this way, the endogenous and authentic stirrings in civil society in the Soviet bloc were latched on to a US destabilization campaign. It is worth reiterating that the United States did not create the democratization movements in the Soviet bloc or the crisis that led to the collapse of Soviet communism, but rather manipulated that crisis and intervened in the mass movements to try to assure an outcome favorable to the interests of the transnational elite. US activity sought to encourage existing discontent and to harness that discontent. Between 1984 and 1992, the NED spent an astonishing $50.5 million in the former Soviet bloc.8 On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Gershman argued:

[P]iecemeal reforms and greater openness will release pent-up political pressures for change ... Indeed, it has now become possible to consider practical measures to support democratic efforts that are already underway in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, as well as in the Soviet Union itself. The measures will naturally vary, depending on the extent to which democratic movements have developed in different countries... Efforts to assist the emergent pluralism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe should have as their overriding objective the growth and eventual empowerment of civil society ... As democratic movements in the Soviet bloc take this path, they should receive moral, material, technical and political support from their democratic friends in the West.9


One month after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in August 1991, the Washington Post reported: "Preparing the ground for last month's triumph was a network of overt operatives who during the last 10 years have quietly been changing the rules of international politics. They have been doing in public what the CIA used to do in private - providing money and moral support for pro-democracy groups, training resistance fighters, working to subvert communist rule."10 A "strategy paper" drafted a month later, in October 1991, stated that "the Endowment's mission was from the very outset conceived not as anti-communist but as pro-democratic [read: not just to destabilize existing regimes, but to place viable alternatives into power]. Its aim was not only to assist those seeking to bring down dictatorships, but also to support efforts to consolidate new democracies." The document went on to note that NED activities throughout the 1980s involved three essential tasks: "strengthening democratic culture"; "strengthening civil society"; and "strengthening democratic political institutions. "11

Although a full exploration is not possible here, these programs, in much the same way as programs documented in the case studies, ranged from support for trade unions, to the creation of new business associations, women's, student, and youth organizations, and media outlets, and/or support for existing ones. US officials also convened hundreds of bilateral and multilateral seminars, conferences, and training sessions for the development of political leadership among the civic groups, political clubs, and social movements that sprang up in the bloc. These activities helped to establish a network of individuals and groups throughout the Soviet bloc, to place them in contact with one other, and, with US and other Western backers, to provide them with an effective "political action capacity" and the ability for public projection (thus to creating demonstration effects) through diverse communications technologies. Such financial, technical; and political support allowed these "agents of influence" to assume leadership roles in the uprisings in civil society and was critical in tipping the balance in the string of elections held in the region in 1989-1990. Many of the US organizations that were involved in NED and other "democracy promotion" operations in the Philippines, Chile, Nicaragua, and Haiti also became involved in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Prominent among these was the CFD, which opened a permanent office in Moscow and undertook "a broad program of technical assistance to independent groups and publications."12

The case of the Inter-Regional Deputies Group (IRG) in the Soviet Union is a concrete illustration of how strategic doses of US political aid, injected into the complex milieu of a disintegrating communist bloc, proved to be highly effective. The IRG was formed in summer 1989 at a meeting of the Congress of People's Deputies, was led by Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin, and brought together some 400 members of the Congress, or about 20 percent of the 2,250 seats. The IRG won international attention, but its links to US intervention programs were little known. By the end of 1989, with assistance from the right-wing Free Congress Foundation, the CFD, and other US groups operating with NED and other "private" and public US funds, the IRG had set up a training school for candidates to put forward the IRG program, which called for the restoration of private property, a market economy, and a constitutional system of formal representative (polyarchic) democracy. The IRG provided the institutional basis for Yeltsin's electoral success in securing the leadership of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic. From that institutional foothold, Yeltsin and the IRG network continued to extend their influence.

The IRG brought together the core group that not only pressed for the demise of the Gorbachev government from within Soviet institutions, but also managed to assume the reins of the state following the abortive 1991 coup d'etat. Its members most closely approximate those groups within the post-communist elite which are identified with the transnational agenda.13 The IRG developed enough organizational coherence and a network of strategically placed leaders in the crumbling Soviet government and its different branches to quickly fill the vacuum of power that developed after the abortive coup. The IRG members were not pliant US puppets: US political aid and intervention gave a crucial boost to the IRG by helping its members come together and develop a working network, and create a capacity for communications amongst themselves and before the Soviet public, and for political action from within different institutional bases of the Soviet state. This was achieved on the part of US operatives, apart from the supply of important communications equipment and training programs, through establishing numerous liaison mechanisms with external constituencies, in conjunction with USdiplomacy and other components of US policy.14
Similarly, throughout Eastern Europe US political intervention played the role of organizing small nuclei that could sweep into vacuums left at the top, once mass pressure from below forced the collapse of the old communist regimes. The Free Congress Foundation and the CFD, for instance, established offices and set up equipment supply, communications, and training programs in Hungary, East Germany, Estonia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, just as they had done in Moscow with the IRG and other Soviet groupSs15 Reciprocal to Western efforts to seek out potential nuclei, factions in the bloc that identified with the transnational agenda gravitated naturally toward those who managed US political aid programs, knowing that these programs would link them to Western constituencies and resources. In this way, US political aid facilitated East-West elite bonds and shared identities of interest in the heady transition period.

Following the demise of the old communist regimes, the United States played the leadership role on behalf of the transnational elite in a long-term project for integrating the former Soviet bloc fully into the global economy and for promoting the transnational agenda. On the economic side, this involved massive restructuring, including privatization, eliminating trade barriers, creating a new legal framework for private property and the institutions of capitalist economic management, and opening up the region's natural resources and labor force to transnational capital. On the social and political side, this involved attempts to create formal polyarchic structures and to encourage post-communist class formation and the emergence of elites that could promote the transnational agenda within their countries. This included not just bolstering an elite with a transnational outlook, but countering nationalist elements (of the right, in particular) that were exploring inward-looking strategies.

Whether the former "Second World" would move towards the core of the global economy or experience peripheralization was certainly not clear in the 1990s. Nor was it possible to predict whether tenuous polyarchic political systems would stabilize in Russia and Eastern Europe. But the collapse of the Soviet bloc, seen at the structural level and beyond the immediate political unknowns, had the effect of accelerating world economic integration into a single global economy. Economic restructuring went together with the inflow of tens of billions of dollars in external aid, from the G-7 industrialized countries, the IMF, the World Bank, and other multilateral sources, while political aid programs that continued after the 1989-1991 transitions pushed institution-building and class fonnation.16

South Africa

Endowment programs in Africa continued to stress building such pluralist institutions as free trade unions, business associations, a free press, and independent civic organizations as a basis for the eventual development of democratic political institutions. The country of greatest priority for the Endowment in Africa was South Africa... The Endowment has begun programs to develop black consumer groups and cooperatives, support the activities of community groups working to reduce violence and encourage peaceful change, and aid intellectual and informational efforts to promote understanding of democracy and dialogue among anti-apartheid groups seeking alternatives to violence.

-- NED Annual Report, 1987 [17]


US policy toward South Africa was the linchpin of policy toward Black Africa for much of the post-World War II years, and was predicated on support for colonial and racial authoritarian regimes. Successive Democratic and Republican administrations in this period, despite verbal condemnation of white minority regimes, developed strategic alliances with Portuguese colonies and with white minority governments in South Africa, South-West Africa (now Namibia) and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). In 1969, the Nixon administration drafted National Security Study Memorandum 39. This document, which became known as the "Tar Baby Report," concluded that Africa policy should be based on a long-term strategic alliance with the apartheid regime in South Africa.18 The African National Congress (ANC), the South-West African People's Organization (SWAPO) and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), all of which went on to win elections and head post-independence and post-apartheid governments, were labelled "terrorist" organizations by the State Department throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s, and the United States provided low-key military assistance, political and diplomatic support, and intelligence information to the white minority regimes. The US alliance with racialized authoritarianism was complementary and subordinate to European imperial powers who pursued similar policies and were historically the dominant outside powers in the region. Support for authoritarianism in southern Africa was not a particularly US policy but a general practice of the core powers in the world system toward this region.

From the 1960s and on, South African capital became thoroughly intermeshed with capital originating in Europe, the United States, and Japan. As globalization advanced, South Africa became a key outpost of transnational capital. South African capitalists had themselves become thoroughly transnationalized (epitomized by the Oppenheimer family and the Anglo-American Corporation, a leading transnational corporation, in the same league as any Northern-based global corporation), and South Africa became the principal staging point for the operations of transnational capital throughout southern and central Africa. In this way, the relations of dependence and the peripheral status in the world system of a good portion of Black Africa "passed through" South Africa itself. On the heels of the mass rebellion that began with the 1976 Soweto uprising, the transnational elite began to push their South African counterparts to search for a political solution that would involve a transition from racial to non-racial capitalism and thus preserve the interests of transnational capital, not just in South Africa but in southern and central Africa as a whole. US calls for such a transition were coordinated with concerted European support for this transition. In was in this context that US policy changed dramatically in the mid-1980s, from support for apartheid to "promoting democracy. "19

This shift in policy towards southern Africa was part of a broader process of policy reformulation from the 1960s to the 1990s in the face of the mass, popular movements against the repressive political systems and exploitative socioeconomic orders established during the Cold War years. In Africa, this included the collapse of Portuguese colonialism and successful revolutions in Angola and Mozambique in 1975 (these revolutions were subsequently subject to low-intensity warfare campaigns similar to that waged against Nicaragua) and a transition to black majority rule in Zimbabwe in 1980 in the face of an armed insurgency which came close to seizing power. In 1977, the United States, under the Carter administration, publicly called for the first time for majority rule in South Africa. It adopted a policy of applying diplomatic pressure to, but not withdrawing support for, the apartheid regime. At the same time, it sought to identify and support "moderates" among both black and white groups and to isolate the radical elements, including the ANC, which were leading the mass movement against apartheid. The first Reagan administration launched a "constructive engagement" policy similar to its "quiet diplomacy" policy towards the South American dictatorships. This policy was jettisoned in the mid-1980s, however, as mass protests escalated in South Africa and as domestic pressure against apartheid heightened in the United States. The latter included a grassroots anti-apartheid movement and growing consensus among elites that a post-apartheid strategy had to be developed and implemented while events still remained within limits which could be managed by the transnational elite. In 1981, the Foreign Policy Association - a leading private group of the extended US policymaking community tied to the transnationalized fraction - published a 520-page report titled South Africa: Time Running Out, or simply the SATRO report. This report was prepared by a special Study Commission on US Policy Toward South Africa set up in the Council on Foreign Relations. It called for a transition to "democracy" and non-racial capitalism.20

A key turning point in US policy came in 1985, when Congress imposed limited economic sanctions on South Africa. A year later it enacted the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which tightened sanctions, as part of a strategy of pressuring the white regime into negotiations. President Reagan vetoed the Act, but his veto was overridden by a large congressional majority, including a majority of his own Republican Party.21 Seen in the abstract, the Reagan administration's policies until 1986 reflected the disjuncture analyzed in chapter 2 between the neo-conservatives who held important posts in the formal state apparatus in the first part of the 1980s and the agenda and policies of the transnational elite which had become hegemonic and gradually became official US-state policy during the 1980s.

US policy turned to increasing pressure on the apartheid regime and to developing moderate black leaders and organizations in civil society as a counterweight to the militant black movement. This change in policy, synchronized with pressures exerted by the transnationalized capitalist fraction inside South Africa and by other core powers on the state, led the regime to open a reform process. In September 1989, Frederik de Klerk was elected president of South Africa and announced his intention to create a "new [post-apartheid] South Africa." Four months later he released Nelson Mandela from prison and legalized previously banned opposition groups, including the ANC. De Klerk and his cabinet - "proximate policymakers" representing South Africa's transnationalized fraction - faced the dual challenge of negotiating with the black majority and easing the fears of the regime's white base that an end to apartheid would mean radical change in the social order. In 1992 the de Klerk government began negotiations with the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups. In April 1994, Mandela was elected president of South Africa and apartheid came to an official end.

From the mid-1980s and on, the issue for the United States became not whether apartheid would be dismantled, but how South African capitalism and the interests of the transnational elite in the region could be preserved following a transition period. US influence in South Africa should not be exaggerated: intervention in the transition period was only one of many factors shaping the outcome, and events in South Africa consistently overtook US policy. Given the overwhelming support the ANC enjoyed among the black population, and Mandela's tremendous international stature, the USobjective was not to disregard the ANC or Mandela, but to check the growing radicalism among the black population by developing counterweights to popular leadership through US political and economic aid programs. One prominent "credible black leader" promoted in this way was Zulu Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, whom President Bush attempted to place, in his public diplomacy toward South Africa, at par with de Klerk and Mandela during the transition period.22 What concerned the transnational elite most was Mandela's insistence that the dismantling of apartheid should involve not just eliminating racial discrimination from the political sphere but also eliminating inequalities in the socioeconomic order. "As far as the economic policy is concerned, our sole concern is that the inequalities which are to be found in the economy should be addressed," stated Mandela shortly after his release. "We have mentioned state participation in certain specific areas of the economy, like mining, the financial institutions and monopoly industries."23 Such economic thinking was not only diametrically opposed to the transnational project of neo-liberalism but also went to the "commanding heights" of the powerful (and thoroughly transnationalized) South African economy - mining, finance, and industry. In contrast, Buthelezi argued that "Socialism... has failed miserably ... The free enterprise system remains the only system in which wealth can be generated in such a way as to provide the jobs and infrastructure necessary for growth and stability."24

In 1985, the NED launched Project South Africa to "identify and assist South African organizations dedicated to a non-violent strategy to eliminate apartheid and to achieve democracy. Among the South African organizations already identified are trade unions, churches and church groups, human rights and voluntary agencies, educational associations and many others. Project South Africa hopes to facilitate direct contact between such groups and Americans dedicated to providing material and moral support to their efforts."25 Between 1985 and 1992, the NED set up programs with a host of trade unions, community groups, and black business associations. It also set up and funded several clearing-houses whose multiple functions ranged from developing strategies on a transition, coordinating diverse "moderate" political activities, and funding moderate black media outlets and publications. These clearing-houses played a role similar to the thinktanks funded in Chile in that country's transition and to the two clearing-houses of this type funded by the NED and the AID in Haiti.26

Alongside NED programs, the AID initiated in the late 1980s a multi-million dollar program, known as Assistance for Disadvantaged South Africans, to fund housing, economic development, and educational programs for black South Africans and provide loans and grants to blacks to set up private businesses. The objective was to open up the economic system to greater black participation without proposing basic restructuring. The program sought "to broaden understanding of the free market system and prepare black business owners, managers, and employees for success in a post-apartheid South Africa." Funding went to "strengthen black business associations" and to "training black women to become leaders in the accounting and financial services field and providing credit to small businesses."27

These NED and AID programs had several overlapping strategic objectives: (1) identify and support an emergent black middle class of professionals who could be incorporated into a post-apartheid hegemonic bloc (2) develop a nationwide network of grassroots community leaders among the black population that could win leadership positions in diverse organs in civil society and compete with more radical leadership and (3) cultivate a black business class among small and mid-level black-run or mixed enterprises that would have a stake in stable South African capitalism, develop economic power, and view the white transnationalized fraction of South African capital as allies and leaders. Scrutiny of the NED-AID programs reveals that recipients were almost all moderate and conservative groups that competed with the ANC and with the mass popular organizations of the United Democratic Front, a militant national coalition of some 600 affiliated civic associations.28 For instance, the NED provided funds to the FTUI and the AID provided funds to the AALC in order to support the United Workers Union of South Africa, which was linked to Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Council, and the small but influential South African Black Taxi Association, both of which competed with the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the powerful federation, oriented to the social movement, that sympathized with the ANC and organized over one million black workers from the mines, and the industrial, commercial, and civil service sectors. The NED-funded think-tanks and clearing-houses, among them the Get Ahead Foundation and the Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South Africa, organized workshops, seminars, conferences, research programs, and media activities, and set up training programs for black business and community leaders, and for moderate and conservative trade unions, and women's, youth, and church groups. Through these programs, US intervention helped foster a core of grassroots leaders that were strategically placed throughout the organs of an already densely organized civil society comparable to that of Haiti.

Neither Washington nor the apartheid regime had the ability to control the South African mass movement. The counterweights to the ANC and the mass popular movement were not expected to win transitional elections, but rather to continue building constituencies and exerting influence in the post-apartheid period, as part of a long-term project for the construction of a hegemonic post-apartheid social order. The election of Mandela and the end of apartheid was a tremendous victory for democracy worldwide. But it was not clear, given South Africa's thorough integration into the global economy and the strength of transnationalized South African capital and its control over the country's resources, how much structural power Mandela's government would actually be able to exercise in bringing about fundamental transformations in the social order.
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Re: Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, a

Postby admin » Mon Apr 11, 2016 11:02 am

Part 2 of 4

US "democracy promotion" operations worldwide

Between 1984 and 1992, the NED and other branches of the US state mounted "democracy promotion" programs in 109 countries around the world, including 30 countries in Africa, 24 countries in Asia, 21 countries in Central and Eastern Europe (including the republics of the former Soviet Union), 8 countries in the Middle East, and 26 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition, what the NED referred to as "regional programs" (Asia-wide, Africa-wide, Latin America-wide, etc.), and what it referred to as "multiregional programs" (worldwide) involved dozens of other countries.29 The NED, as discussed in chapter 2, is only one of many policy instruments in "democracy promotion" operations, and is usually not even the principal one. Since it is an adjunct component of US engagement abroad and of the full panoply of foreign-policy instruments, the presence of its activities in a country or region generally indicates that broader and related activities are underway as part of a larger "democracy promotion" undertaking. The operation of the NED in 109 countries in every region of the world underscores that the new political intervention is a worldwide policy.

A review of the NED's Annual Reports from 1984 to 1992 indicates that most of its activities were concentrated in the 1980s in those areas and countries where the United States has traditionally exercised domination, particularly, in Latin America, in key client regimes, such as the Philippines, as well as in crisis situations and in strategic zones and countries, such as Poland throughout the 1980s and the entire former Soviet bloc by the end of that decade. In the early 1990s,NED operations continued in these countries and regions, but also expanded dramatically in Africa, the Middle East and other Asian countries. For instance, the NED reported programs in just two African countries in 1986 but in seventeen in 1992.The new political intervention started in those areas of traditional US influence and then began to spread out around the globe. In an early 1993 meeting of the board of directors, Gershman reported: "the Endowment has taken measures to address ... three key elements of its long-term strategy, namely, providing venture capital to advance democratic forces in 'pre-breakthrough' countries; developing mechanisms to facilitate coordination among its grantees; and increasing its role as a center of democratic thought and activity." He noted that the NED "has begun an active program in the Middle East and increased its efforts in the 'tougher' countries in Africa and Asia."30

This expansion of NED activities also reflects the broader issue of the transnationalization of political processes in the age of global society. "Developing mechanisms to facilitate coordination among its grantees," which Gershman identified as one of three key elements in the NED's long-term strategy, implies the development of mechanisms to facilitate coordination among the organs of civil societies [i.e., NED "grantees"] which the United States is promoting around the world - a further sign of the transnationalization of civil society, and relatedly, of the tendency toward a shift in the locus of social control toward civil society. A careful review of the Annual Reports also underscores the tight correlation between the promotion of polyarchy and of neoliberalism, and efforts to promote political and economic integration of countries and regions into global society. The NED's "regional programs" and "multiregional programs" generally focused on arranging international forums or launching transnational communications projects for the purpose of establishing cross-national South-South and North-South linkages around programs and strategies for promoting polyarchy and neo-liberalism. In turn, individuals and groups drawn into these regional and international forums are the same people involved in NED and other "democracy promotion" programs in their own countries, and represent their country's transnational pools. In this way, we see how "democracy promotion" acts in a recursive manner to facilitate globalization.31

The Philippines, Chile, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Soviet bloc, and South Africa in comparative perspective

Each study illustrated, in different manners and on the basis of particular circumstances, the analytical precepts and theoretical propositions advanced in chapters 1 and 2. In all four countries, cross-class majorities had coalesced into national democratization movements against US-backed authoritarian regimes, yet behind these majoritarian movements were distinct visions of what type of social order should follow dictatorship. Opposition elites sought the establishment of polyarchic political systems and free-market capitalism. Popular forces called for fundamental changes along the lines of the model of popular democracy. (The same was true, although in their unique settings, for the Soviet bloc and South Africa.) The strength of the elite versus that of popular sectors and their leaderships varied from case to case. In Nicaragua and Haiti popular sectors were considerably stronger than elites, and in both countries they came to power and attempted to implement projects of popular democracy. In the Philippines, the correlation between popular and elite sectors hung in the balance during a tenuous transition period. In Chile, a combination of circumstances assured a fairly smooth consolidation of elite hegemony over the transition. In all cases, the forces of global capitalism acted to strengthen projects of polyarchy and neo-liberalism and to weaken the projects of popular social change.

The United States intervened when these national democratization movements were reaching crescendos, threatening not just the existing regime but the social order itself. The beneficiaries of this intervention were neither the popular sectors nor the old autocrats, dictators and "crony" elites, but new technocratic sectors tied to the global economy that articulated the transnational agenda. In the Philippines and in Chile, policymakers withdrew support for Marcos, Pinochet and their respective cohorts, and placed support fully behind elite opponents. In Nicaragua, policymakers failed in their attempt to facilitate a transition from Somoza to his elite opposition. By the time they retook the "democracy promotion" effort - in the mid-1980s and as part of a broader war of attrition against the Nicaraguan revolution - they supported not the old Somocistas but new elite groups that went on, following US intervention in the 1990 elections, to assume the reins of the executive. In Haiti, the United States orchestrated the replacement of the Duvaliers with an interim junta but could not place in power a weak and fledgling technocratic elite. After Aristide came to power, support for this elite escalated. How decisive US intervention was as one key variable among many in assuring elite outcomes varied from case to case and depended on the circumstances of each country. However, in all cases, the new political intervention became well synchronized with the complex of factors determining outcomes.

All four cases and the two synopses demonstrated the intersection of globalization and "democracy promotion" and the relationship between polyarchy and neo-liberal restructuring. This included multiple overlaps between the penetration of transnational capital, the reorganization of productive processes, the recomposition of national class structures and the emergence of new political protagonists, external constraints which the global economy placed on internal policy options and socioeconomic transformations, and so on. Transitions to polyarchy coincided with structural adjustment and a deeper insertion into the global economy, and US policymakers intentionally linked the two in the process of policy formation towards each country. In the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Haiti, the increasing penetration of transnational capital starting in 1960s simultaneously spawned popular, mass movements and clashed with local brands of "crony capitalism," making a transition to polyarchy and neo-liberalism necessary for both political and economic reasons (to prevent a popular revolution and to dismantle "crony capitalism" impediments to transnational capital). The transition in the Philippines was followed by a broad neo-liberal program. In Nicaragua, the global economy imposed enormous constraints on the ability of the revolutionary government to effect internal socioeconomic changes in favor of the poor majority. After the 1990 "electoral coup d'etat," the country's rapid reinsertion into the global economy and free-market mechanisms helped to reverse quickly those transformations that had occurred during the revolution. In Haiti, Aristide's mild reform program was opposed by transnational capital, which helped generate conditions propitious to the 1991 coup d'etat. In Chile, massive economic restructuring that began under Pinochet corresponded to that country's reinsertion into the world market under new conditions of globalization. This restructuring disaggregated and demobilized popular sectors and facilitated the emergence, and eventual hegemony, of entirely new fractions among dominant Chilean groups tied to transnational capital who became articulate ideologues and promoters of the transnational agenda. The Soviet bloc and South Africa presented more multifarious scenarios, but these same patterns were manifest, including the pressures induced by globalization and the role played by transnational pools as protagonists. Political and economic aid was carefully synchronized in all countries, and these aid flows facilitated the recomposition of internal classes, tied local classes to transnational class structures, and bolstered transnational kernels in each country. Networks were developed that linked the organs of civil society in the United States and in the intervened countries. Penetration of civil societies in the intervened countries by the organs of US civil society, linked in turn to the US state, sought to strengthen elite groups in order to compete with and suppress popular organizations and movements and to construct elite hegemony, "bottom-up," from within civil society. Political and economic aid and the policies promoted from within and without the formal state apparatus by these transnational kernels contributed to the construction of neo-liberal states.

The case studies also made evident the contradictions between polyarchy and popular democracy. In the Philippines, for instance, regular elections, a free press, constitutional rule and formal political and civil rights became institutionalized in the post-Marcos period. Yet the elite, through control over the formal legislative process, executive prerogative, and of low-key, but systematic, repression, was able to prevent any significant reform in the social order and to minimize actual mass participation in the formal political process. A similar situation occurred in Chile. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas' attempt to win international legitimacy led them to expand the institutions of representative democracy (polyarchy) at the expense of the structures of participatory democracy that were established in the early years of the revolution. This process gave the elite increasing institutional leverage and led to a loss of popular support for the revolutionary government - factors which contributed to the subsequent restoration of elite rule. This contradiction became crystal clear in Haiti, where highly organized popular majorities were utterly unable to utilize the formal structures of polyarchy to advance their own interests. These structures acted to institutionally block and to ideologically delegitimize the demands for fundamental change in the social order. All cases show mixed outcomes as regards the stabilization of polyarchic political systems and hegemonic social order. Chile was a tremendous success for the transnational elite (and is touted as such). The Philippines and Nicaragua approximate a situation of highly unstable polyarchies and problems of governability. Haiti was a failure for the US effort to implant a polyarchic political system. The situation in the former Soviet bloc was highly unstable and unpredictable in the early 1990s.The end of apartheid in South Africa is too recent at the time of writing (1995) to venture any predictions.

Comparative conclusions in mainstream social science, whether quantitative or qualitative in approach, are often based on an abstracted empiricism that examines different variables and then measures and correlates the presence or absence of variables (X1, X2, etc.) to distinct outcomes (YI, Y2, etc.). These relationships are important but must be tempered. In a dialectic model based on the methodology of historical materialism, variables as empirical approximations are recursive, multicausal, and subsumed under holistic reconstruction. The various sequences of historical events are not separate and independent; they are elements of a dialectic process of "social ensembles" in the course of which relations of cause and effect intervene, reverse, and interact. With this caveat in mind, we may note the following: there are clearly certain general conditions propitious to successful transitions to polyarchy and the consolidation of polyarchic political systems. Among these conditions, five stand out: the relative strength of popular versus elite forces; reciprocity of domination in political and civil society; the legacy of authoritarian arrangements and attendant political cultures; the presence and relative strength of transnationalized fractions among dominant groups; and historical timing and conjunctural circumstances during transitions.

A comparative summary reveals a direct correlation between these five factors and outcomes. Popular forces were the strongest in Nicaragua and in Haiti. They were the weakest in Chile. In the Philippines they were on the ascent but faced an elite that had not exhausted its own capacity for political protagonism. Similarly, the transnationalized fraction was the strongest in Chile. It was present and in the process of development in the Philippines, and, to a much lesser extent, in Nicaragua. In Haiti, a technocratic elite was unable to coalesce effectively. Similarly, Haiti, followed by Nicaragua, shows the deepest legacy of authoritarianism and dictatorship, while Chile had a long history of functioning polyarchy prior to dictatorship and globalization. The Philippines also experienced several decades of proto-polyarchy before its lapse into authoritarianism. In Haiti, the correlation of forces favored popular hegemony in civil society even though the state remained a bastion of the dominant groups. State power was seized in Nicaragua by popular classes simultaneously with the development of a Sandinista hegemony in civil society. In the Philippines, hegemony and the state were disputed for several crucial years before the elite consolidated a tenuous hold over the social order. A similar dispute took place in Chile in the Allende period, and then by the time of the late 1980s "transition," the state was returned to the dominant groups simultaneously with the construction by those groups of hegemony in civil society. It is not surprising, therefore, that Chile showed the most developed post-authoritarian hegemonic social order, the Philippines showed a consolidated but somewhat unstable polyarchy, while Nicaragua had a nearly ungovernable polyarchy, and Haiti seemed as far away as ever from hegemonic order. Such "preconditions" for successful transitions to polyarchy can only be gauged by analyzing each country's particular circumstances in historical context, and by factoring in the fifth variable, that of historical timing and conjunctural circumstances, neither of which lend themselves to predictability or facile generalizations.

However, "success" is not measured only by the stabilization of consensual forms of domination. It is also measured by the extent to which projects of popular democracy were suppressed, and to which neo-liberal restructuring has taken place. In this regard, there was remarkable "success" in five of the six cases (South Africa is the unknown) in suppressing popular democracy and in initiating neoliberal restructuring. The structural power of transnational capital and the impossibility of individual countries and regions remaining outside the global economy makes the imposition of neo-liberal restructuring, as the economic plank of the transnational elite project, considerably easier than the political counterpart of that project, the development of functioning polyarchic systems. Clearly, it is easier to suppress popular democracy than to stabilize its "consensual" antagonist, polyarchic systems, which leaves open the question of a possible general reversion to its "coercive" antagonist, authoritarianism and dictatorship.

Behind the issue of mixed outcomes and the prospects for the consolidation of functioning polyarchies are the contradictions internal to the transnational project. A discussion of these contradictions appropriately rests on a reexamination of the historical relationship between capitalism and democracy. All five variables mentioned above as determinants in outcome are structurally contingent. The structural basis of the variables is the social structure of accumulation: a set of mutually reinforcing social, economic, and political institutions and cultural and ideological norms which fuse with, and facilitate, a successful pattern of capital accumulation over specific historical periods. In turn, examining capital accumulation under distinct institutions and norms brings us to the relationship between capitalism and democracy, which is central to my entire thesis and which allows us to answer the questions: what conditions actually allow for stable polyarchies and what are the prospects that these conditions will be met in specific regions and in the world as a whole? The reexamination, taken up in the following section, paves the way for discussion on the prospects for hegemony and world order in the twenty-first century and forms a logical bridge between the two parts of this concluding chapter.

Capitalism and democracy

The contradiction between neo-liberalism and polyarchy


If the promotion of polyarchy is concerned chiefly with social stability, an assessment of its prospects necessarily begins with an examination of the causes of social instability. Such an examination brings us to the very heart of the contradiction internal to the transnational project of neo-liberalism and polyarchy: the dramatic growth under globalization of socioeconomic inequalities and of human misery in nearly every country and region of the world, and a frightening increase in the gap between the haves and the have-nots in the new world order. The problem of "poverty amidst plenty," a consequence of the unbridled operation of transnational capital, appears to be worldwide and generalized. The tendency is for wealth to become concentrated in a privileged stratum encompassing some 20 percent of humanity, in which the gap between rich and poor is widening within each country, North and South alike, simultaneously with a sharp increase in the inequalities between the North and the South.

In its widely disseminated report, Human Development Report 1992, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) provided a frightening global snapshot of this chasm between a shrinking minority of haves and a vast majority of have-nots. The report provided a "structural photograph of the planet," which it described as a global "champagne glass" (see fig. 2). In this champagne glass, 83 percent of the world's wealth is concentrated in the shallow but ample cup of the North to the benefit of the 20 percent of the world's population living there, while 60 percent of the planet's human beings are crammed into the slender stem and base of the South, which sustains this wealth yet benefits from only 6 percent of it. The North, noted the report, with about one-fourth of the world's population, consumes 70 percent of the world's energy, 75 percent of its metals, 85 percent of its wood and 60 percent of its food. It controls 81 percent of world trade, 95 percent of its loans, and 81 percent of it&domestic savings and its investment.32

Image
Fig. 2. Distribution of world income.

The report noted that the gap between the rich and the poor nations is becoming an abyss. In 1960, the wealthiest 20 pert cent of the world's nations were thirty times richer than the poorest 20 percent. Thirty years later, in 1990, they were sixty times richer. This comparison was based on the distribution between rich and poor countries, in which the ratio of inequality went in the thirty-year period from 1:30 to 1:60. However, the report noted: "these figures conceal the true scale of injustice since they are based on comparisons of the average per capita incomes of rich and poor countries. In reality, of course, there are wide disparities within each country between rich and poor people" (emphasis in original). Adding the maldistribution within countries, the richest 20 percent of the world's people got at least 150 times more than the poorest 20 percent.33 In other words, the ratio of inequality between the global rich and the global poor seen as social groups in a highly stratified world system was 1:150. Broken down into quintiles, global income distribution in 1992, according to the report, was as follows:

World population / World income (percent)

Richest 20 percent / 82.7

Second 20 percent / 11.7

Third 20 percent / 2.3

Fourth 20 percent / 1.9

Poorest 20 percent / 1.4

Source: UNDP, Human Development Report 1992. (The UNDP report notes that these statistics hide a part of the picture, because a further breakdown of the distribution of wealth within the top quintile, if one were to generalize from a pattern revealed by forty-one countries for which statistics are available, could be expected to show a very high concentration among the top 1 percent and one-half percent.)


Simultaneous with the widening of the North-South divide, there has been a widening gap between rich and poor in the United States and the other developed countries, along with heightened social polarization and political tensions.34 Between 1973 and 1990, real wages dropped uniformly for 80 percent of the US population and rose for the remaining 20 percent.35 The top quintile in the United States had increased its share of income from 41.1 percent in 1973 to 44.2 percent in 1991. The concentration of wealth (which includes income and assets) was even more pronounced. By 1991, the top 0.05 percent of the population owned 45.4 percent of all assets, excluding homes. The top 1 percent owned 53.2 percent of all assets, and the top 10 percent owned 83.2 percent. The United States belonged to a tiny minority. In that same year, those living either below the government-established poverty line or below 125 percent of the poverty line represented 34.2 percent of the population of the United States. In other words, 34.2 percent of the US population was "poor" or "very poor," or in more sociologically precise terms, over one-third of the US population lived in absolute or relative poverty. The pattern is similar in other developed countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Globalization involves restructuring in both center and periphery, which is resulting in what some have called the "Latinamericanization" of the United States or the "Third-Worldization" of the First World. The same globalizing forces bringing forth the new international division of labor discussed in chapter 1 are also resulting in a new structure of labor within the developed countries of the North. Labor there is recomposing into three clusters. First, there is that sector "above" traditional industry: those involved in global management, professional services, and high-skill, high-technology production, which constitutes an affluent 20 percent of society in the United States and the other developed countries. Then there is the service sector "below" traditional industry: tens of millions of low-wage, dead-end jobs in diverse local services and assembly line operations which have been subdivided by new technologies to the point at which it has become deskilled work. These jobs often do not even amount to subsistence-level employment. Finally, there is an entirely new group completely marginalized from the production process itself: permanent surplus labor, the "structurally unemployed," or the "supernumeraries" of global capitalism - what mainstream sociology in the North has termed a "permanent underclass." Those in the second and third of these clusters (the tendency is for these two clusters combined to encompass some 80 percent of the population) increasingly approximate, in their life conditions, the vast impoverished majorities of the Third World. This tendency should not be exaggerated. There remain important distinctions between life conditions and opportunities in the underdeveloped and the developed regions. Absolute poverty is becoming generalized in the South; relative poverty is becoming generalized in the North. Nevertheless, the phenomenon further underscores increasing uniformity of social life under global society, and a general worldwide polarization between rich and poor.

There are deep and interwoven racial, ethnic, and gender dimensions to this escalating poverty and inequality in the North, the South, and globally. As transnational capital moves to the South of the world, it does not leave behind homogeneous working classes but historically segmented and racially and ethnically stratified ones. Labor of color, drawn originally, and often by force, from the periphery to the core as menial labor, is disproportionately excluded from strategic economic sectors in the North, relegated to the ranks of the second and third clusters - particularly to the ranks of the supernumeraries - and subject to a rising tide of racism, including repressive state measures against immigrant labor pools.36 The theoretical root of the historical subordination of women - unequal participation in a sexual division of labor on the basis of the female reproductive function - is exacerbated by globalization, which turns women from reproducers of labor power required by capital into reproducers of supernumeraries for which capital has no use. Female labor is further devalued, and women denigrated, as the function of the domestic (household) economy moves from rearing labor for incorporation into capitalist production to rearing supernumeraries. This is one important structural underpinning of the global "feminization of poverty" and is reciprocal to, and mutually reinforces, racial/ethnic dimensions of inequality. It helps explain the movement among Northern elites to dismantle Keynesian welfare benefits in a manner which disproportionately affects women and racially oppressed groups, and the impetuousness with which the neo-liberal model calls for the elimination of even minimal social spending and safety nets that often mean, literally, the difference between life and death.

The socioeconomic portrait of the world makes clear that in the North-South global divide, the "South" refers to the impoverished people of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and also to all the poor and excluded within the rich countries, and the "North" refers to the centers of power that tend to be found in the richest countries of the world and to the rich and powerful in both the North and the South who sustain, enjoy, or manage these centers of power. In other words, the geographic fragmentation of production and the separation of production from territoriality is leading to a decrease in the significance of geographic or spatial factors in the division of humanity into haves and have-nots, which requires a rethinking of the whole concept of dominance and spatial organization. Globalization is producing vacuums at national levels, and simultaneously opening up new international spaces, in which the consumption patterns of the top quintile of humanity, through demonstration effects associated with global communications, the marketing strategies of transnational corporations, and the breakdown of cultural barriers in the new "global village," become the standard for generalized emulation and the source of a dramatic rise in global relative deprivation.

The shift in US policy from promoting authoritarianism to promoting polyarchy thus takes place at a time of dramatic increases in global inequalities, in the backdrop of what can only be considered a situation of structural injustice and systemic violence against the world's majority. It is more than a commonsense axiom that deepening socioeconomic inequalities lead to social polarization, and that such polarization leads to social conflict and political instability. The correlation between a deepening of socioeconomic inequality and the breakdown of polyarchy has been fairly well established in the sociological literature. Sociologist Edward Muller, whose research has focused on the relation between income inequality and "democracy," found in a study which analyzed over fifty countries that:

A very strong inverse association is observed between income inequality and the likelihood of stability versus breakdown of democracy. Democracies... with extremely inegalitarian distributions of income... all experienced a breakdown of democracy (typically due to military coup d'etat), while a breakdown of democracy occurred in only 30 percent of those with intermediate income inequality. It did not occur at all among democracies with relatively egalitarian distributions of income. This negative effect of income inequality on democratic stability is independent of a country's level of development. .. Indeed, level of economic development, considered by many scholars to be the predominant cause of variations in the stability of democratic regimes, is found to be an irrelevant variable once income inequality is taken into account.37


Because the political system is separated from the socioeconomic basis of society in the polyarchic conception of democracy upon which policymakers and "organic intellectuals" of the extended policymaking community base "democracy promotion," these same intellectuals and policymakers have not concerned themselves with this correlation. Whether this is merely a methodological flaw or a political self-delusion is not relevant to the obvious conclusion: there is a fundamental contradiction between promoting neo-liberalism and promoting polyarchy. By its very nature, the neo-liberal model is designed to prevent any interference with the workings of the free market, including state redistributive policies and such structural transformations as agrarian reform, which could counterbalance the tendency inherent in capitalism toward a concentration of income and productive resources. The neo-liberal model therefore generates the seeds of social instability and conditions propitious to the breakdown of polyarchy. "Democracy promotion" is an attempt at political engineering, at tinkering with the political mechanisms of social control, while simultaneously leaving the socioeconomic basis of political instability intact, and even aggravating that basis through the liberation of capital from any constraints to its operation. This is a contradiction internal to the transnational elite's project.

In a 1990 report assessing the prospects of democratization in the Third World, the State Department affirmed: "Past failures to establish enduring democratic regimes were the consequence of an inability to meet six critical challenges. To succeed, the peoples and governments of democratic societies must: a) build a national identity; b) foster democratic values and practices; c) build effective democratic institutions; d) guarantee the honesty of government; e) promote democratic competition; and, f) ensure civilian control of the military."38 What is astonishing is that the State Department did not so much as mention economic inequalities and the lack of social justice as an explanation for the failure of "democracy" in the past or as factors relevant to its prospects in the future. In the view of the State Department, the success of "democracy," even in its polyarchic form, is merely the inculcation of polyarchic political culture and procedures - identity, values, practices, institutions, honesty, competition, and civilian authority over the military.

The global economy is increasing what can already be considered a level of generalized immiseration in the South of the planet and relative deprivation in both South and North, and widening the gap between "democratic" political systems and inequalities in the socioeconomic system. A stable polyarchic political system, in which social control is exercised through consensual mechanisms, has historically rested on the material basis of concentric economic development which has brought generally rising standards of living and material well-being. Herein lies the pitfall of the post-World War II modernization and political culture/development theories and their latter-day variants. Ultimately, stability is not grounded in "political culture" but in a socioeconomic system which meets the needs of the majority of society. The possibility of achieving social stability in the South (and of maintaining enough stability to secure the social order in the North) is dependent upon greater socioeconomic equalities within and between nations in the world system, which in turn depends on the extent to which popular democratization advances around the world against the efforts to curtail popular democracy via the promotion of polyarchy. Stability in the emergent global society, I submit, enjoys a correlation not with polyarchy but with popular democracy. This poses the need for historical reflection on this relationship between the growing socioeconomic domination of a wealthy minority and the ostensible opening of formal political systems through transitions to polyarchy. In turn, such reflection raises important theoretical questions regarding the future of capitalism and democracy in the era of globalization.

Democracy, imperialism and the state

Karl Marx predicted that as capitalism develops, it would polarize society into an ever smaller and richer minority and an impoverished majority. This social contradiction would eventually lead to the breakdown and supersession of the capitalist system. Analyzing the capitalist system before its monopoly stage, there were two factors which Marx did not foresee and which help account for the failure of his prediction to materialize over the past century. The first was the intervention of states to regulate the operation of the free market, to guide accumulation, and to capture and redistribute surpluses. The second was the emergence of modem imperialism to offset the polarizing tendencies inherent in the process of capital accumulation in the core countries of the world system. Both these factors therefore fettered the social polarity generated by capitalist production relations, and attenuated contradictions between capitalism and democracy.

The role of states in stabilizing capitalism was already apparent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the advanced capitalist countries, with the first social welfare programs, anti-monopoly legislation, and other measures of the "progressive era." John Maynard Keynes raised state intervention to regulate capitalism and offset its internal contradictions to theoretical status, and also developed practical monetary, fiscal, tax, and other policies to achieve this regulation. Keynesianism provided the basis for the "welfare capitalism" or "New Deal capitalism" which prevailed in the core countries of the world system from the Great Depression to the eve of the global economy, and for the various populist models and the "developmentalist states" which prevailed in the peripheral regions.

On the second development, both capitalists such as Cecil Rhodes and socialists such as V.I. Lenin saw eye to eye. Lenin argued that in its monopoly stage, capitalism would incorporate pre-capitalist and peripheral regions via colonization and capital export, which would help offset the social contradictions internal to capitalism in the advanced capitalist countries. Rhodes, a British financial magnate who led colonial expeditions in southern Africa at the turn of the century, wrote in 1895:

I was in the West End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for "bread!" "bread!" and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism ... My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.39


Rhodes had the perspicacity to recognize what social scientists from dependency, world systems and related social science schools of underdevelopment and international political economy would argue decades later: the surpluses syphoned out of the underdeveloped regions and into the centers of the world economy, via direct mechanisms such as colonial plunder and a host of indirect mechanisms such as unequal exchange, would ameliorate in the advanced countries social contradictions germane to capital accumulation. The extraction of surpluses from the peripheral to the center regions of the world system, and the redistribution of these surpluses in the center countries via state policies, led to the emergence of a huge "middle class" in the developed countries (what Lenin termed a "labor aristocracy" and what modernization theorists such as S. M. Upset assert is essential for "democracy"), averted the civil wars which Marx predicted and Rhodes feared, and provided the social conditions for relatively stable polyarchic political systems. It is not without irony that some baptized as "democratic capitalism" this particular social structure of accumulation that emerged in the center countries on the basis of state intervention in the free market and surplus flows from peripheral to center regions to sustain a high level of development. It was, after all, these two factors that provided the conditions for relatively stable "democracy" in the centers of world capitalism. It is no coincidence that the enfranchisement of the propertyless, the poor, and the illiterate in the centers of world capitalism occurred in the final decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century - precisely as modem colonialism and imperialism were taking hold. The per capita income ratio between rich and poor countries was only 1:2 in the year 1900. Six decades later it was 1:30.40 Instead of polarization within the nations of the North between a tiny minority of the rich and an overwhelming majority of the impoverished, such a polarization took place on a worldwide level, between the prosperous nations of the capitalist North and the impoverished nations of the newly created Third World - a contradiction which, as I argued at the beginning of this study, always stood behind the East-West conflict. It was therefore no coincidence that formal democratic structures tended to develop in the capitalist North (consensual mechanisms of domination) while authoritarian structures (coercive domination) tended to develop in the South.

By reducing and even eliminating the ability of individual states to regulate capital accumulation and capture surpluses, globalization is now bringing - at a worldwide level - precisely the polarization between a rich minority and a poor majority which Marx predicted. Yet this time there are no "new frontiers," no virgin lands for capitalist colonization and incorporation into the world system which, as Cecil Rhodes argued, could offset the social and political consequences of global polarization. Behind the contradiction between neo-liberalism and polyarchy there is a more fundamental issue, the contradictory relationship between capitalism and democracy.
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Re: Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, a

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Part 3 of 4

The relationship in historical perspective

Gaetano Mosca, who most fully developed elitism theories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stood on the diametrically opposite side of the social struggles of his time from that of his contemporary and fellow countryman, Antonio Gramsci. Yet they did agree on two points: dominant minorities rule society in their own interests, and they rule by force in the last resort. Generally, a ruling minority succeeds in stabilizing its rule by making it acceptable to the masses. Mosca advanced two intertwined notions of how dominant minorities stabilize their rule. One was a "political formula," or the particular political relations through which the rulers rule, and the other was the "moral principle" which envelops and justifies the particular political formula. He noted that every ruling class constructs a political formula for its rule and then "tends to justify its actual exercise of power by resting it on some universal moral principle."41 The "political formula" and its "moral principle," although akin to Marx's ruling class ideology, Max Weber's "legitimation" of power, or George Sorel's "myths," is most equivalent to Gramsci's "hegemony." According to Mosca, the "political formula" is not invented and employed "to trick the masses into obedience." It is a "great superstition" or illusion that, at the same time, is a great social force, in the absence of which, maintained Mosca, it is doubtful that societies could exist.42

How minorities maintain their control over majorities has constituted the great dilemma of the modem era. Under capitalism, democracy (polyarchy) has been the principal "political formula" for elite rule in the centers of the world system ever since the French Revolution, and the "moral principle" of democracy is embodied in the French revolutionary ideals of "liberty, equality, fraternity." Democracy's legitimizing discourse of "liberty, equality, fraternity" stands in stark contrast to the actual reality of deep, structural, and growing inequality, increased restrictions and diminished prospects as regards life opportunities rather than more liberties and freedoms in life, and an extremist individualism which breaks down all bonds of human solidarity (fraternity). The legitimizing discourse of the emergent capitalist system became the ideals of the French Revolution - liberty, equality, and fraternity - which in turn embody the contradictory nature of democracy under capitalism, whereby formal juridical equality and political rights exist side by side with gross socioeconomic inequalities and a tendency towards extreme concentrations of wealth and real political power. This represents a deep paradox, a fundamental and perhaps irreconcilable contradiction between capitalism, on the one hand, and its political formula and moral principle, on the other - a contradiction which is intensifying exponentially under the global economy.

The ideology of "liberal democracy" emerged in Europe from the seventeenth to the twentieth century as an instrument in the struggle of an emergent capitalist class against two adversaries: the feudal aristocracy, and lower-class masses newly freed from manorial ties but not yet incorporated into a hegemonic capitalist order.43 It developed first to counter the ideology of the old feudal order, and later to legitimize the new capitalist order and incorporate subordinate groups. It involved resurrecting the doctrine of "natural law" of antiquity to substitute the "divine right" of the feudal aristocracy, and then to transform "natural right" into the social contract. The social contract replaced divine right at the level of ideology in parallel with the replacement of fixed economic exchanges of feudalism with market relations of exchange. From divine law or equality before God, natural law and the social contract brought equality before the law, or juridical equality, and transformed the state from divine authority to the protector of juridical equality and guarantor of private property. The ideology of individualism and doctrines of individual liberties countered the feudal corporate ideologies and restrictions on the activities of emergent merchants and industrialists.

The philosophical notion of isolated individuals as the possessors of innate rights and the ideal of free individual development bequeathed by the "Enlightenment" was a powerful ideological weapon against the constraints placed on economic and social life by the feudal aristocracy. The notion of self-contained individuals stemming from the empirical philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries formed the philosophical basis of the juridical equality and individual rights under polyarchic capitalism, and as well, the philosophical basis for the structural-functionalist meta-theory that would later girder the twentieth century theories of modernization and of a "more realistic" definition of democracy. Hobbes's worldview was of a universe made up of atoms having only external relations with one another, which in social theory became isolated individuals externally linked via market exchange and whose behavior is regulated by the state as a sovereign and coercive authority preventing the "war of all against all" and sanctifying the "natural right" of private property.

But this same "Enlightenment," culminating in the ideals of the French Revolution, inspired not just the emergent capitalists but also the lower classes newly freed from feudal bonds. A careful study of the thought of Hobbes, Locke, Burke, J.S. Mill, Tocqueville, Voltaire, Rousseau, and other great "democratic thinkers" of the modem order reveals a central preoccupation not with mass, popular democracy, but with the construction of political systems that would be most propitious to simultaneously containing subordinate classes and achieving working consensus among dominant groups on the basis of the organizing principle of the most "fundamental liberty" of property rights and the freedom of the market. It should be recalled that when Locke spoke of "majority rule" his definition of this majority was limited strictly to property-owners. Locke, like Hobbes, did not advocate political rights for the propertyless. John Adams had noted a decade after the US Revolution that "it is essential to liberty that the rights of the rich be secured; if they are not, they will soon be robbed and become poor, and in turn rob the robbers, and thus neither the liberty or property of any will be regarded."44 According to Adams, "the rich, the well-born and the able" should be manifestly in charge of govemment.45 James Madison argued that the assumption of rule by and for the propertied and the theory of popular sovereignty would become more and more impossible to reconcile. He predicted quite prophetically that capitalism would face a major crisis in the mid-thirties of the twentieth century.

Once the emergent capitalist class had triumphed over the feudal aristocracy, the new challenge became the threat from below. Unlike their predecessors such as Hobbes and Locke, the next generation, among them Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill, turned to the problem of the inherent contradiction in a mass of propertyless and a minority of propertied under a capitalist system whose ideology proclaimed equality and individual liberty. The tension and ambivalence evident in their thought stemmed from the formal equality of exchange relations which masked the real, living inequalities of classes and groups under capitalism. The dilemma for these thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was remarkably similar to the problem Samuel Huntington pointed to in the Trilateral Commission's report, The Crisis of Democracy, of how democracy legitimizes capitalism yet "too much" democracy becomes a "threat" to the capitalist social order. Their social thought centered on how to extend formal political rights, including the vote, to the mass of the propertyless, without destabilizing the system of private property itself, or in the words of political scientist George Novack, "how can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power."46 The intrinsically contradictory nature of democratic thought under capitalism/ in which one side stresses the sanctity of private property (from which flows inequalities in the "social rewards" of wealth, status, and . power) and the other popular sovereignty, has bedeviled theorists of "democratic capitalism" who followed the classical thinkers. As analyzed in chapter 1/ the third generation of "democratic thinkers/" from Joseph Schumpeter and on, clustered in US academia, constructed the new "realistic" definition of democracy in an effort to resolve the inherent tension between capitalism and democracy.

The Machiavellis of the modem order churned out social theories that served as the intellectual and ideological midwife of modem capitalism and yet expressed in themselves the tension between democracy and capitalism. The contradiction has not been reconciled, despite the new "realistic" definition. Every demand for deeper democratization, for popular democracy, touches upon the nerve center of the social order, the material (socioeconomic) distinctions and systematic inequalities among classes and groups. Absolute abstraction of ideal equality is at variance with the fundamental facts of capitalist life, a phenomenon which is becoming patently manifest in the emergent global society. There is a glaring discrepancy between the dominant democratic ideology, with its pretensions of equality, and the persistence and dramatic deepening under global capitalism of inequalities at all levels of social life. A precise identification of this contradiction requires a brief theoretical excursion.

The relationship in theoretical perspective

In chapter 1 it was demonstrated that the organic separation of the political from the social and the economic in the discussion on democracy - rooted theoretically in the structural-functionalist disaggregation of spheres in the social totality and rooted politically in the interests of those who benefit from unjust social and economic structures in an asymmetric world system - is an illusion whose antinomy was exposed through a cursory analysis of the very discourse and premises of those who posit such a separation. The separation of the political and the economic is formal but not organic - illusory in the last instance. However, this separation does find a certain theoretical validity in the nature of capitalism itself, and provides the key to identifying the contradictory nature of democracy under capitalism. The relations between economic and political power can be quite complex and difficult to decipher. As is well known, there is no simple correspondence between economic and political power, and governing political elites may rule politically without necessarily forming the dominant class, or the class which holds economic power. However, this was not the case in pre-capitalist societies, where political and economic power were much more transparent by virtue of their fusion. Through historical analysis which transcends the particular conditions of capitalism and inquires into the nature of the relation between the political and the economic in social formations, we are able to pinpoint the objective contradiction between capitalism and democracy.

Karl Polanyi, Nicos Poulantzas, and Antonio Gramsci have analyzed the formal separation of the economic from the political under the capitalist mode of production. Polanyi, in his classic work The Great Transformation, showed how the transition from pre-capitalist systems to capitalism involves the emergence and extension of markets as the underlying dynamic in the making of the modem order. In precapitalist societies, for Polanyi, economic relations are "embedded" in the social structure, and thus there is a "natural economy" which fuses the economic and the social (including the political). With the spread of capitalism, the central social dynamic is the separation of the economic (market, or exchange) relations from the social fabric, so that the economy is no longer "embedded" in the social order. The market, for Polanyi, becomes determinative of all aspects of social and political life, including a new type of state, in which public (the state) and private (producers for the market) become fused, the former in function of the market, yet remain separated at the formal level.47

Poulantzas extended this analysis in order to arrive at his central tenet: the relative autonomy of the state, and, by extension, the formal and relative autonomy of the political sphere under capitalism. In precapitalist societies, there was a direct correspondence between the economic and the political, e.g. the feudal lord was at once the political authority and the economic authority. The production relations which brought lord and serf together were at once political and economic relations fused in the lord-serf social relation. Recall that the term "state" is derived precisely from "estate", in which the pre-capitalist estate was at once the fused economic and political domain. Under capitalism, the political and economic are completely separate. Capitalist production relations are strictly economic relations between individual agents of production (this is the private, non-political sphere), whereas the state (and the political system) is the site of political relations (political society). The economic domain of the "estate" becomes the "economy," and remains private, although commodified, while the political domain of the "estate" becomes public, that is, the "state." However, to elevate this formal separation into an organic and theoretical severance of the "estate" from the "state," or to sever the "political" in the state and the socioeconomic in society (and, by extension, to posit democracy as a purely political phenomenon, as merely a "system of government") is to fall into an illusion.48

Gramsci developed his theory of the rise of civil society and of hegemony as a form of class domination (consensual domination) exercised from within civil society precisely on the theoretical basis of the separation of the political and the economic (political and civil society) under capitalism. Because their hegemony is firmly entrenched in civil society (the "private" sphere in which economic relations unfold), the dominant classes do not necessarily need to run the state themselves (this explains, for instance, the seventeenth- and nineteenth- century states in England and Germany which were run by landlords and Junkers even as capitalist production relations were unequivocally taking hold in the economy). The state in the Gramscian construct is an enlarged state, encompassing both political society, which is the formal political/public sphere, or what mainstream social science refers to as the state proper (the government and its executive, administrative, and coercive apparatus, and the site of "democracy"), and civil society, which is the private sphere. Thus the political and the economic are separable spheres in a formal (methodological) sense but not in any organic conceptualization.

This separation of the economic from the political for the first time in history under capitalism - that is, the apparent condensation of class domination from a fused economic-political sphere into a more exclusively economic sphere - explains both the emergence of democracy under capitalism and its contradictory status under capitalism. In precapitalist societies or "natural economies," owing to the fusion of the economic and the political, any economic demand of dominated classes was by definition also a political demand, and vice versa. In the capitalist mode of production, economic demands of dominated classes are not necessarily political demands, and so long as consensual mechanisms of domination are at play such demands do not transgress the private sphere. Economic demands are raised in the private sphere, as private affairs, and political demands in the public sphere, as public affairs. Yet formal juridical equality and political liberties, or formal democracy, under capitalism specifically sanctions the placing of demands in both the economic and the political spheres. Under these conditions, democracy in the political realm tends to "overflow" into demands for democratization of social life (the social order), which means questioning the legitimacy of capitalism. The paradoxical situation of formal democracy side by side with systematic social inequalities runs up against the legitimizing ideology of capitalism, which is democracy and its ideals of "liberty, equality, fraternity." The process of capitalist production, allowed to operate unfettered, generates both wealth and social polarity. In turn, syster:natic socioeconomic inequalities generate political demands and social conflict that can rarely be contained without repression. Yet such repression transgresses the norms and the legitimizing ideology of democracy. This repression - however much it is more low-key, selective, and secondary than consensual mechanisms of domination - remains a subterranean but permanent feature of "capitalist democracies" around the world, in both the North and the South, as annual reports of international human-rights monitoring groups make clear year after year. This includes the United States, as sociologist Alan Wolfe, among others, documents and analyzes in his study The Seamy Side of Democracy.49

The fundamental theoretical conclusion is the following: the relation- ship between capitalism and democracy is contradictory because democracy implies placing demands on the political sphere transposed from the economic sphere, which the political sphere cannot manage without transgressing capitalism. The argument that democracy - and, by extension, democratization movements, which were the object of this study - is more a matter of methods than of objectives becomes theoretically unintelligible. Achieving "liberty, equality, fraternity" can only fully be realized with the democratization of social and economic life. The contradiction can ultimately be resolved only in the transformation of the social order itself. Thus democracy is an historical process which began under capitalism but can only be consummated with the supersession of capitalism.

Examining the paradoxical situation in which it was capitalism which first ushered democracy into the world, and yet it is capitalism that blocks the consummation of democracy, was the concern of sociologist Goran Therborn in his pathbreaking article, "The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy." He argued that the relationship between capitalism and democracy "contains two paradoxes - one Marxist and one bourgeois ... How has it come about that, in the major and most advanced capitalist countries, a tiny minority class - the bourgeoisie - rules by means of democratic forms."50 Political scientist George Novack emphasizes the same paradox of political democracy on the basis of "socioeconomic dictatorship."51 As both note, to point to this contradiction is not to exhibit "skepticism about democracy" but to acknowledge theoretically that capitalism and democracy become a contradiction in terms when one moves from a democratic form of political life to a democratic content in social life (in which political life is subsumed), that is, when pondering the elimination of actual rule by an exploiting minority. Democracy is thus real, but limited, under capitalism ("restricted democracy," "limited democracy," "partial democracy," "low-intensity democracy").

The historical emergence of capitalism as a new social system brought with it new political forms distinct from earlier forms of class domination. The requirements for the emergence and development of capitalism were also conducive to polyarchy, e.g., a free labor market, a Weberian rationalization and bureaucratization process, juridical equality, legal social contract, and so on. There is therefore a certain historical "elective affinity" between capitalism and democracy, under certain conditions (to be explored below). What is required is a reexamination of the relationship between capitalism and polyarchy.

The relation between capitalism and polyarchy: elements of a Gramscian model for a research agenda

Much social science investigation into polyarchy in recent decades has been concerned with examining the interrelationships through time between capitalism and "democracy." Ever since Barrington Moore's classic study The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, a central concern in this regard has been to explore the "preconditions" for the emergence of "democracy," and more recently, the conditions under which "democracy" breaks down and is restored.52 Moore managed in his study to link "structural" and "process-oriented" analysis, in which structure informed historical outcomes but issues of process conditioned those outcomes. Subsequent research has generally split into two separate tracks: structural or process-oriented. However, what has been referred to in general as "democracy" should more properly be called polyarchy, since the concept associated with the term polyarchy more accurately describes the new political system which emerged under capitalism: elite minority rule and socioeconomic inequalities alongside formal political freedom and elections involving universal suffrage.

Using the comparative historical method first developed by Weber, Moore investigated different patterns in which the struggle between social classes (in particular, peasantries and aristocracies) interfaced with socioeconomic structures in producing different outcomes or "paths to the modem world." His essential conclusion is that the emergence of a strong and independent bourgeoisie is essential to polyarchy ("no bourgeoisie, no democracy"). His study is masterful, but from beginning to end Moore fuses what are two distinct variables. He is concerned with two outcomes: what accounts for "democracy" versus an outcome of authoritarianism (either its fascist or "totalitarian/ communist" variants); and what accounts for the outcome of economic development, or "modernization." But how historical class struggles lead to specific political systems and how these struggles lead to economic development are two very distinct variables. The failure to make this distinction leads to two related flaws.

First, the underlying process which informs Moore's study is how different classes respond to what he calls the process of "commercialization," or the development of capitalism. Yet this process is taken as a given; there is no attempt to explain the development of capitalism itself. It simply "appears" in history. Since Moore gives commercialization a pivotal causality in the entire process, he would need to incorporate into the analysis an explanation of how and why capitalism emerged and developed. In turn, an analysis of the process of capitalist development is crucial to analyzing the relationship between capitalism and polyarchy. Second, Moore does not incorporate a broader historical-international or world-system perspective into his study. In his chapter on India, for instance, there is scant understanding of colonialism, much less any notion that what brought industrialization to England and backwardness to India are part of the same historical process. The development of some regions of the world and the underdevelopment of others are not separate dynamics which can be treated and compared as autonomous and externally related phenomena, but are tied into the same world-historical dynamic - the emergence of capitalism as a world system.

In their 1992 work Capitalist Development and Democracy, sociologist Dietrich Rueschemeyer and political scientists Evelyne Stephens and John Stephens summarize much of the accumulated research since Moore's 1966 study and offer several new elements.53 Their essential conclusion is that as capitalist development changes the class structure, new working and middle classes, to the extent that they are able to, do away with the landlord class and usher in polyarchy (like Moore, they define "democracy" as a political system meeting three conditions - universal suffrage, free elections, and civil liberties). In this "working class thesis" - first developed by Goran Therborn in his article "The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy" - the working class is the key to polyarchy ("no working class, no democracy"). The two studies combined underscore one essential element (almost tautological) of a Gramscian model: the two classes germane to capitalism, the bourgeoisie and the working class, constitute the essential class base of polyarchy, and the struggle between classes is determinative in political outcomes.54

However, the model established by Rueschemeyer and the Stephens exhibits an underlying flaw similar to Moore's. The triad construct which they say will inform their analysis - the intersection of "class power," "state power," and "transnational structures of power" - leaves out the underlying factor which is determinative in shaping the triad and which would operationalize and make intelligible their model: capital accumulation and capitalist development in the context of the world system. "Transnational power structures," as they define them, do not refer to capital accumulation and class formation on a global scale, but to geo-political competition between European countries and to "dependency" in Latin America, which they reduce to "outside domination." This omission means that the model is unable in the first place to explain what accounts for the development of bourgeois and working classes and for "class power" and "state power:' Their essential explanation for the strength of "democracy" in Europe and its weakness in Latin America is the following: the working class plays the key role in "democratization" and is larger and stronger in the advanced European countries than in Latin America, and thus "democracy" is better established in the advanced countries and weaker in Latin America. But, in turn, how are they to explain the existence of a mass-majority working class in Europe and a small-minority working class in Latin America? This is to be explained precisely in analysis of a process of global capital accumulation in which accumulation (and thus wage labor) is concentrated in the core. It is the development of capitalism that generates classes and their size, structure, and so on.

In contrast, a Gramscian model of the interrelationship over time between capitalism and polyarchy takes as its basis Therborn's essential argument: polyarchy has been the outcome of multiple classes in struggle in the context of the emergence and consolidation of capitalism as a mode of production. "Democracy" (polyarchy) has also shown to be the best mechanism of assuring compromise and stability in situations of disunited ruling classes and competing capitalist fractions and groups. It is thus concerned with relations between dominant and subordinate classes as well as within dominant classes and groups, and is grounded structurally and historically in the process of capitalist production.55 However, the Gramscian model I propose, as a working hypothesis to be developed, goes further in two crucial respects. First, it incorporates the world system and capitalism in its global setting. It posits that the stable exercise of polyarchy as a political form of class domination requires particular conditions of capital accumulation, and those conditions are to be identified through international political economy and world-system analysis. Second, it is absolutely essential to be precise on the terminology used for concepts which form the raw materials of social science. Therefore, the more precise and clearly defined concept of polyarchy must substitute in any analysis the essentially contested concept of democracy. This is not semantics; it is of crucial import to any theoretical discussion and to establishing the validity of empirical relations between variables. The consequences of uncritically using an essentially contested concept is that key political and ideological notions, meanings and assumptions embedded in language, as well as underlying theoretical discourse and levels of analysis, remain implicit and, at times, even unrecognized by social scientists. Implicit assumptions and meanings often guide, and circumscribe, the types of questions and testable hypotheses to be raised and the interpretation given to empirical data, even beyond the conscious intent of the researcher. Using the most precise language possible regarding a concept under study helps make explicit underlying meanings, expose assumptions, and uncover key political and ideological notions. It can even change the entire frame of inquiry. In short, it allows social science to move beyond self-constructed impasses and quandaries such as the debate on the "preconditions" of democracy or the causes of its breakdown and restoration.

Gramsci's concept of hegemony has remarkable explanatory and predictive powers in analyzing the relationship between capitalism and polyarchy. When hegemony by dominant classes has been achieved, coercive mechanisms of social control remain latent, in the background, and instead, consensual mechanisms of social control are at play. Consensual mechanisms of social control correspond roughly to a polyarchic political system. When these consensual mechanisms break down, coercive mechanisms pass from latent to active, under a coercive, or authoritarian, political system. These same consensual mechanisms for the reproduction of a given dominant constellation of social forces ("historical bloc"), involve mechanisms for consensus among dominant groups themselves (e.g., the competing elites of polyarchy), as well as between dominant and subordinate groups. On the surface, Gramsci's notion of hegemonic social order under capitalism is not too different from Dahl's polyarchy, yet for Gramsci, the political structure is grounded, ultimately, in exploitative social relations of production and conflicting class and group interests therein (whereas Dahl sees elites as responsive to the interests of masses and separates the political from the social and economic). Alterations in the structure of production or of power may lead to breakdowns in the mechanisms of social control. Historical periods in which the structure of production undergoes alterations or experiences endemic instability or crises generally involve concomitant shifts in the mechanisms of social control - indeed, this goes far in explaining the "pendular swings" between authoritarianism and polyarchy in Latin America.

"Transitions to democracy" and "democratic breakdowns" in the capitalist epoch of world history, whether seen in the "long historical" perspective or in shorter conjunctural circumstances, should be seen as constructions, breakdowns, and reconstructions of consensual mechanisms of class domination within a given social structure. The research agenda poses the problem as the interrelationship over time between capitalism and the distinct patterns of social control under which it functions. The key question is: under what conditions do consensual mechanisms of class domination become viable and stable, and under what conditions do they exhibit instability and a tendency for breakdown? What are the factors associated with the emergence and maintenance of polyarchy? The conditions in which consensual versus coercive domination may prevail are determined by a complex array of historical and conjunctural factors, and there is a risk of simplification. However, the viability of polyarchy under capitalism has been, above all, a function of three interrelated factors.

The first factor is consensual mechanisms among dominant groups. Political mechanisms must be in place for the resolution of intra-elite disputes. The "breakdown" of polyarchy may result from the inability of these mechanisms to achieve consensual relations among the dominant groups themselves ("breakdown of consensus among elites"). In turn, this "breakdown" is closely tied to the second and third factors. The second factor is demands for popular democratization by subordinate groups. When demands from subordinate groups do not threaten the social order (class domination itself), these demands for democratization help facilitate transitions to, or the consolidation of, polyarchy. This is what took place in the United States and much of Western Europe with the gradual enfranchisement and incorporation of the working classes into the political system. When these demands challenge class domination itself, such as in Spain under the Republic, Chile under Allende, and Haiti under Aristide, the "outcome" is not polyarchy, or relations of consensual domination, but coercive domination or authoritarian political forms (or its opposite, popular revolution). The third factor is the stabilization of a given pattern of capital accumulation. The viability of a given "social structure of accumulation" conditions, and may be determinative of, the first and second factors. Polyarchy is an historical outcome of class struggles that took place around the emergence of capitalism and the formal separation under capitalism of the economic and the political. Specific historical outcomes to the combination of class struggle and the accumulation process, in the context of the emergence of capitalism, produce different forms of state (e.g., republic, constitutional monarchy, etc.) and different political forms (authoritarianism, polyarchy, "Bonapartism," etc.). Polyarchy is one specific political form of the capitalist state, and that form which tends to emerge and/or stabilize under conditions of stable capital accumulation and/ or in the absence of subordinate class challenges which threaten the social order itself.

Polyarchy and the world system

Above I have shown that the contradiction between democracy and capitalism lies theoretically in placing demands in the political sphere transposed from the economic sphere which the political sphere cannot manage without transgressing capitalism. Therefore, polyarchy is maintained so long as the political sphere has the capacity to meet (through a myriad of methods) the demands placed on it transposed from the economic sphere. But this capacity is, in turn, a variable relying on a process of capital accumulation sufficient to offset the social contradictions that capitalism generates. An assessment of the prospects for the stability of polyarchy therefore rests on an assessment for the prospects of capitalism.

Polyarchy is a political system which corresponds more organically to the capitalist economic organization of society at the centers of world accumulation, where production and social relations are "concentric." It should be recalled that the historical emergence of polyarchy in the advanced capitalist core involved a dual transition: in the social order itself from feudalism to capitalism, and in the political sphere from pre-polyarchic political forms (absolute monarchies, etc.) to polyarchy, whereas the recent "transitions" in the Third World have involved no change in the social order, but only in the political structure. Polyarchy as the political system based on consensual domination under the social system of capitalism requires that the process of capital accumulation and the generation of wealth be sufficient to sustain or contain the demands from subordinate groups placed on the system. Therefore, polyarchy exhibits greater stability precisely in the centers of the world system, where wealth is concentrated and the process of capital accumulation most dynamic.

The transplant of polyarchy into peripheral regions, through what I have analyzed as the new political intervention, is an attempt to artificially implant a political "organ." This does not mean that polyarchy will not take hold in the periphery, or that there are no exceptions. But it does mean that polyarchy is considerably more fragile in peripheral countries. It is more vulnerable and less stable precisely because of the much more tenuous nature of capital accumulation in peripheral regions of the world system. Social struggles unfolded in core regions in the context of "endogenous" or "autocentric" patterns of accumulation particular to the centers of world capitalism, whereas the pattern of accumulation tends to be "extraverted" in peripheral regions. The material basis for polyarchic stability is more propitious in the center than in the periphery of the world system.

Perhaps unintentionally, Samuel Huntington stumbled across the relation between polyarchy and location in the world system when he argued that "probably the most striking relationship between economics and politics in world affairs is the correlation between political democracy and economic wealth... Rich countries are democratic countries and with only a few exceptions democratic countries are rich countries."56 Huntington has in fact identified a causal relation, although he has confused the lines of causation. Polyarchy is not the causal factor for the accumulation of wealth. Polyarchy emerged as a political requisite of the emergent capitalist system in Europe, and it was the emergence of capitalism in Europe that provides causal explanation for the current unequal distribution of wealth among center and periphery in the world system. Countries are rich in the world because of their privileged location in a world system based on asymmetries and surplus flows out of some regions and into others, and because capital accumulates and capitalism develops unevenly, with the dynamic centers of accumulation concentrated in the "core" of the world system. The process of capitalist development, shaped by the intersection of local class and social struggles with international political economy and the dynamics of the world system, is the causal variable in the relation between capitalism and polyarchy.

It is precisely when given patterns of capital accumulation in the center countries have broken down that these countries have experienced dramatic jolts in their political systems. These jolts have resulted either in the replacement of consensual by coercive domination (fascism in Germany, Italy, and Japan), or in the sweeping reorganization of the terms of consensual domination - the Keynesian welfare state in most other countries. Those countries which turned to welfare capitalism and thus preserved consensual domination did so on the basis of the successful defense of their position in the world system from the "latecomer" challengers - Germany, Italy, and Japan. The challengers could not fully penetrate the center stage of world capitalism. Meanwhile, those states which have been unable in critical moments of modem world history to remain within the center of the world economy, which have moved outward from the center toward the peripheral zones or into what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the semiperiphery, such as the Mediterranean countries, have also tended to lapse into coercive systems of domination.

As a general rule, those countries which have always been in the periphery, the "Third World proper," have been largely pre-capitalist, or only partially capitalist, in their economic systems and authoritarian in their political systems until the current period of globalization. What I have referred to as "low-intensity democracy" should more aptly be called peripheral polyarchy, a particular regime of political domination corresponding to peripheral capitalism. The tendency towards peripheral polyarchy, corresponding to the emergence of a global economy, appears as a variant of polyarchy which tends to take hold as capitalist production relations fully penetrate and become consolidated in the peripheral, semi-peripheral, and underdeveloped regions of global society. The penetration by transnational capital of the most remote regions of the world is expanding, and generalizing the existence of, the two classes which form the class base of polyarchy - the bourgeoisie and the working class. Yet the balance between consensual and coercive mechanisms in peripheral polyarchy tends to weigh more heavily toward the coercive side, such as in most Latin American nations, or the Philippines, where systematic human rights violations remain a permanent feature of the political landscape, notwithstanding formal polyarchies which include elections, intra-elite competition, and formal constitutional rights.

Globalization as system change: the need for reconceptualizations

The promotion of polyarchy as a transnational project reflecting globalization


I have discussed the promotion of polyarchy as a US policy and simultaneously a policy response to an agenda of a transnational elite. My reasoning is that the United States, or more precisely, dominant groups in the United States, on the eve of the twenty-first century, are assuming a leadership role on behalf of a transnational hegemonic configuration. If my reasoning is correct, the promotion of polyarchy should increasingly become a policy practiced by the transnational elite. This policy initiative was being adopted in the 1990s by other Northern states and by the supranational institutions. In effect, the promotion of polyarchy is a policy initiative which is becoming transnationalized under US leadership.

This process is taking place through the development at two distinct levels of transnational mechanisms for promoting and institutionalizing a polyarchic global political system.57 The first level is that of other Northern countries. These countries have set up their own government-linked "democracy promotion" agencies and launched programs to intervene in the political systems and civil societies of the Third World, in coordination with US programs. By the early 1990s: the British government had established a quasi-private foundation similar to the NED, the Westminster Foundation; the Canadian government had established a similar International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development; Sweden, Japan, and France were expected to develop their own foundations; and several German foundations which had been active in limited "political aid" programs overseas since the 1970s, began to expand these programs and to coordinate them with the NED.58 In 1993, the NED sponsored a "democracy summit" in Washington of officials from "the world's government funded democracy foundations to explore how our work might be coordinated."59 The NED also proposed ongoing "coordinating meetings" and that "the Endowment will develop a database of democracy grant-making that could be accessed by all of the participating foundations, thereby further enhancing possibilities for coordination."60

The second level is that of international forums and of multilateral lending agencies. The UN, the OAS, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the European Community had all established diverse "democracy units" whose functions ranged from electoral observation, technical assistance programs for elections and for "civic groups" in Third World countries, to mechanisms for the application of coordinated international diplomatic pressures against states which threatened to relapse from polyarchic to authoritarian governments.61 In 1991, the UNDP initiated "political institution building activities" and set up an electoral monitoring unit, and the OAS set up a "Unit For Democracy," among other such developments within international organizations.62 Similarly, the multilateral lending agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank proposed making multilateral aid, bilateral aid, and access to international financial markets in general, conditional upon a polyarchic system in the recipient country.63 The importance of the multilateral and supranational institutions in reflecting of the internationalization of the state is discussed below. We can hypothesize a gradual shift in political aid and "democracy promotion" in the twenty-first century away from autonomous agencies such as the NED or the AID and toward centralized core-state organs such as departments of state and foreign ministries, and a concomitant transfer of these activities from core states to supranational organs. Future research should investigate the coordination of the promotion and defense of polyarchy among Northern states and of the use of multilateral and supranational institutions for this purpose, reflective of the transnationalization of policy.
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Re: Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, a

Postby admin » Mon Apr 11, 2016 11:05 am

Part 4 of 4

Towards a transnational hegemony and an internationalized state

The notion of promoting polyarchy as a policy initiated by the United States on behalf of a transnational elite is closely tied to the issue of an emergent transnational configuration. Contrary to predominant views, I believe that the historical pattern of successive "hegemons" has come to an end, and that the hegemonic baton will not be passed from the United States to a new hegemonic nation-state. Pax Americana was the "final frontier" of the old nation-state system and "hegemons" therein. Instead, the baton will be passed in the twenty-first century to a transnational configuration. Precisely because it was the last "hegemon" among the core countries - that is, because the globalization process emerged in the period of worldwide US empire - the United States has taken the lead in developing policies and strategies on behalf of the agenda of the transnational elite. The effort to bring about a transition to global polyarchy is being conducted under the aegis of the United States as the twentieth-eentury "hegemon" and as the world's only post-Cold War "superpower." Examining the foreign policy of the United States as the last "hegemon" gives us an indication of where things are going globally and what types of initiatives respond to the transnational agenda. Put in other words, the "US contingent" of the transnational elite was the first to become thoroughly transnationalized, and is the most transnationalized. What was the monopoly capitalist class fraction in the United States became, through the post-World War II process of internationalization and reconstruction of world order, the first "national contingent" of the transnational elite, and the leadership fraction among that elite. Osvaldo Sunkel and Edmundo F. Fuenzalida capture this dynamic:

Although the immediate origin of transnational capitalism is the oligopolistic corporate sector of the American economy, and the techno-scientific establishment of American society, as well as parts of its government apparatus, its American "national" character has been gradual1y eroded as similar dynamic cores of business, science, technology and government have emerged in the revitalized industrial centres of Europe and Japan, and as their subsidiaries expand and penetrate the underdeveloped countries and even, to a more limited extent, the socialist countries. The original American drive to reorganize capitalism has therefore been transformed, becoming a transnational drive, which is in turn penetrating and affecting American society itself, as wel1as others.64


When this passage was written in 1979, US and European capital had long since thoroughly interpenetrated. The 1980s saw the massive penetration of the US and, to a lesser extent, the European economy by Japan-based capital.65 Gill argues that the 1990s and onward should see the counterpenetration of Japan by United States and Europe-based capitals, thus completing the Northern transnational fusion. As I argued in chapter 1, globalization is also integrating Southern-based elites into the transnational configuration, and US political intervention programs are facilitating that integration by linking civil society and political systems in the South to each other and to Northern counterparts.

My notion of a transnational configuration is quite distinct from that found in much international relations, world systems, and related social science literature. The three paradigms in international relations - liberalism/pluralism, realism, and the class model - have all sustained an internal logic and consistency on the basis of the nationstate and on the international state system as the unit of analysis. With the rise of the global economy and globalization processes, the nationstate is increasingly becoming obsolete as the unit of analysis. The very term "international" is revealing: it means, literally, inter-national, or between nations. The forefathers of liberalism (Smith and Ricardo in particular), the class model (Marx), and realism (Weber and Morgenthau, among others), all analyzed a world in which labor and capital were nation-based and international relations were based on national products. But globalization is undermining the logic of viewing worldwide intercourse as exchanges between nations. Trade between nations is no longer the exchange between individual nations of goods that each has produced; it is merely formal linkage as the surface reflection of integrated participation in a singular global production process. The notion that the nation-state system is an immutable or timeless phenomenon is ahistorical and undialectic. The nation-state is an historically bound phenomenon which emerged in the past 500 years or so, in conjunction with the consolidation of national markets, productive structures, and concomitant states and polities. In the age of the nation-state, these units incubated and circumscribed class formation. Dominant groups and their subordinate adversaries (or allies) exhibited a certain congruence with nation-states and governments, and international arenas involved intersections of territorially organized groups whose social protagonism became expressed in the policies of nation-states.

The global economy is eroding the very material basis for the nationstate, yet social scientists, for the most part, stubbornly cling to outdated notions of international relations as a phenomenon in the social universe whose principal dynamic is interaction between nationstates. This outdated nation-state framework conceives of states and their agencies as the most important actors in the global system and fetishizes inter-state relations. I concur with Sklair's critique of "state-centric approaches": "state-centrists, transnational relations advocates and Marxists of several persuasions, while acknowledging the growing importance of the global system in one form or another, all continue to prioritize the system of nation-states, they all fall back on it to describe what happens in the world, and to explain how and why it happens."66 But I part ways with Sklair in his conceptualization of the state as a territory-bound unit, in contrast to social classes that have become transnational. States should appropriately be conceived as sets of social relations with no theoretical requirement that these sets correspond to a territorial unit. These sets of social relations unfolded within territorial coordinates in an historical period now being superseded by the material and social processes bound up with globalization. Gramsci's concept of the extended state shows the way forward by placing the emphasis fully on to social classes acting in and out of formal state institutions in political societies which need not necessarily be territorially conceived. Political societies are becoming transnationalized as arenas of institutionalized social (class) relations even though governments as territorially bound juridical units remain in place as transmission belts, filtering devices, and targets of "condensation" for dominant and subordinate social classes whose objective identities are not determined by relations to any specific government or to nationally bound material processes.

Utilizing the concepts of nation-state analysis can be highly misleading and illusory. For instance, the old units of analysis such as national trade deficits and current account balances acquire an entirely different meaning once it is pointed out that the vast majority of world trade is currently conducted as "intra-firm trade," that is, as trade between different branches of a few hundred oligopolistic transnational corporations. What is meant by intra-firm trade is when a single global corporation operates numerous branches and subsidiaries across the globe, each with specialized operations and output. Therefore, what appears as trade between "nations" is actually movements between different branches and units of global corporations that have no single national headquarters. Robert Gilpin has estimated that such intra-firm trade now accounts for some 60 percent of US imports.67 The World Bank estimated that by the early 1980s, intra-firm trade within the largest 350 transnational corporations contributed about 40 percent of global trade.68 Seen through the lenses of the nation-state system, the much talked about "us trade deficit" is characterized as a situation in which the United States imports more goods from other countries than it exports to other countries. But this is a meaningless construct. In reality the trade deficit has nothing to do with nation-state exchanges, but is a consequence of the operation of totally mobile transnational capital between the ever more porous borders of nation-states across the globe. This intra-firm trade belies liberal notions that a world market is operating in which price and market mechanisms allocate resources and regulate output. When the same agent - the global corporation - acts as buyer and seller, there is no market and there is no price mechanism, as Adam Smith himself would argue. What we have is a centrally planned global economy, or what Barnet and Muller refer to as a "post-market global economy," in which neither markets nor states are the agents of planning. Planning is done by transnational capital which has taken the institutional form of an oligopolist cluster of global corporations. To be sure, trade and current account deficits are not irrelevant, but they must be seen in a different light, not as indicators of national economies competing with each other but as factors which upset macro-economic indicators in individual national territories and therefore impede the cross-border operations of transnational capital. The point is that a correct understanding of intra-firm trade and a centrally planned global economy demonstrates how inappropriate and misleading the old nation-state framework of analysis can be.

On the basis of the logic of a competitive nation-state system, much international relations, world-system, and Marxist literature has searched for signs of a "new hegemon," for a continuation of the historical succession of "hegemons," from the United Provinces to the United Kingdom and the United States. Among the predictions are the emergence of a Japanese- or Chinese-centered Asian hegemony; a Pacific Basin hegemonic bloc incorporating the United States and Japan (the "Nichibie economy"); a split in the centers of world capitalism into three rival blocs and their respective peripheral and semi-peripheral spheres (North America and its Western Hemispheric sphere, Western Europe and its Eastern European and African spheres, and Japan and its Asian sphere), and so on. These different scenarios of a new "hegemon" or "hegemonic bloc" among regional rivals are all predicated on important phenomena in the global economy. The problem lies in how to interpret empirical data, and the pitfall is in looking for a new "hegemon" based on the outdated notion that a competitive nation-state system is the backdrop to international relations. For instance, the "three competing blocs" prognosis correctly notes that each bloc is developing its own trade, investment, and currency patterns. It makes reference in this regard to widely circulated World Investment reports for 1991 and 1992 by the United Nations' Centre on transnational corporations.69 Those reports concluded that investment patterns by transnational corporations (TNCs) were driving the evolution of the world economy, and that three "clusters" based in the United States, Japan, and the European community had each developed as a "pole" around which a handful of "developing" countries were grouped. But what the "three competing blocs" prognosis fails to note is that, in turn, each "cluster" is thoroughly interpenetrated by the other two. The United Nations' reports, in fact, stressed that the three regional structures formed an integrated global "Triad." This in turn is based on the thorough interpenetration of capital among the world's top TNCs, such that countries in the South tend to become integrated vertically into one of three regional poles, while in turn the Triad members themselves exhibit horizontal integration In effect, therefore, regional accumulation patterns do not signify conflicts between regions or core-country "blocs" but rather certain spatial distinctions complementary to increasingly integrated transnational capital which is managed by a thoroughly transnationalized and now-hegemonic elite.

For both realists and world system analysts, hegemony is inextricably tied up with state power, and state power is conceived in terms of the nation-state. Clinging to the logic of a competing nation-state system as the basis for international relations leads analysts to search for hegemony in some type of nation-state configuration in the new world order. I propose that class power and state power (conceived of in terms of nation-states), while still related, needs to be entirely redefined, and that the emergence of a new historical bloc, global in scope and based on the hegemony of transnational capital, constitutes a new formulation of class hegemony in which the relation between political and civil society needs to be reconceived in a cross- or transnational setting. From a Gramscian viewpoint, this is logical: the extended state which incorporates civil and political society and upon which hegemony is constructed needs in no way to be correlated, theoretically, with territory, or with the nation-state. (Even Weber's definition of the state as that institution which holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a given territory loses its logic under globalization, since global economic and social forces may exercise veto power or superimpose their power over any "direct" state power exercised in the Weberian sense - see below.) Stephen Gill's views come closest to my own. On the basis of the leadership role played by the United States in the emergent transnational configuration, Gill argues that "American hegemony" is not coming to an end but is undergoing redefinition. In my view, Gill has correctly identified the leadership role of the United States for the transnational elite, but is confusing "US" hegemony with the hegemony of a transnational class configuration, on the basis of his realist retention of the notion that, even in the age of global society, analysis in international relations is still centered around nation-states and their roles.

I submit the following as a theoretical proposition for future exploration. A transnational hegemonic configuration is conceptualized on the basis of the transcendence of the competitive nation-state framework, yet not on the transcendence of capitalism as a world system. This emergent configuration may be conceived in social (class), institutional, and spatial terms. The social composition of the configuration is of class fractions drawn from the different countries and regions of the three clusters and increasingly fused into a transnational elite and a privileged stratum underneath this elite comprising 20 percent of the world's population. The institutional embodiment of this configuration is the lNCs which are driving the global economy and society, taken together with emergent supranational institutions, which incorporate junior managers in the South and senior managers in the North. Spatially, the configuration takes shape as vertical and horizontal integration around the Triad identified by the United Nations' Centre on Transnational Corporations. A "transnational managerial class" at the apex of the global class structure provides leadership and direction to such a new "historical bloc." The reason why such a configuration is conceived as hegemonic, in the Gramscian sense, is because it exercises structural dominance and also its ideology of neo-liberalism and polyarchy has become internalized as legitimate and "natural" at the level of international discourse and among broad sectors of the global population.

To be sure, the organic unification of a transnational elite which leaves behind any national identity or consciousness should not be exaggerated. There are tensions and contradictory impulses which checker all historical processes. The view that a transnational elite has become hegemonic, is consolidating its class domination under the global economy, and is constructing a new "historical bloc" needs to be tempered. There are well-known arguments regarding competition between nationally based capitalist fractions in countries of the North whose interests remain tied to the nation-state, as well as national economic and political elites in the South whose interests lie in local accumulation and development. State managers or "proximate policymakers" in center countries are often drawn from the ranks of the transnational elite (members of the Trilateral Commission have occupied the key posts in every US administration since the Carter presidency). As state managers, they respond to the agenda of the transnational elite. But they must simultaneously sustain legitimacy among nation-based electorates in fulfillment of the state's legitimacy function. This can produce confusing and contradictory behavior on the part of policymakers.70 What is unfolding is a gradual process which requires a long-historical view. The supersession of the nation- state system will be drawn out over a lengthy period and checkered by all kinds of social conflicts played out along national lines and as clashes between nation-states. However, social science should be less concerned with static snapshots than with the dialect of historical movement, with capturing the central dynamics and tendencies in historical processes. The central dynamic of our epoch is globalization, and the central tendency is the ascendance of transnational capital, which brings with it the transnationalization of classes in general. In the longhistorical view, the nation-state system, and all the frames of reference therein, is in its descendance.

One key disjuncture in the transnationalization process which has caused confusion in this regard is the internationalization of productive forces within an institutional system still centered around the nation-state. A full capitalist global society would mean the integration of all national markets into a single international market and division of labor, and the disappearance of all national affiliations of capital. These economic tendencies are already well underway. What is lagging behind are the political and institutional concomitants - the globalization of the entire superstructure of legal, political, and other national institutions, and the internationalization of social consciousness and cultural patterns. Ultimately, a world state would come to supersede nation-states. The globalization process is leading to such an outcome. Whether capitalism breaks down before it becomes a single global system is not known; there are no predetermined outcomes. More important are the following two points: first, predictions or discussion of a world state should be seen in the long-historical context; and, second, the emergence at some point in the future of a world state could come about through a lengthy, tension-ridden, and exceedingly complex process of the internationalization of the state.

This internationalization of the state, lagging behind the globalization of production, has involved the emergence of truly supranational institutions. These supranational institutions of the late twentieth century are gradually supplanting national institutions in policy development and global management. The IMF, the World Bank, and GAIT (now supplanted by the World Trade Organization) are assuming management of the global economy and owe their allegiance not to anyone state but to the transnational elite.71 Within these powerful supranational economic institutions, technical economic criteria corresponding to the objective needs of capital replace, as Robert Gilpin observes, "parochial political and national interests."72 This phenomenon expresses transnational capital's unity of political interests and lack of any national interests. The shift from national to supranational institutions is also evident in supranational political institutions. Such political forums as the Trilateral Commission, the UN, OAS, and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe have acquired new-found and increased importance as political organs responsive to the agenda of the transnational elite, although their functions as components of an "internationalized state" are considerably less developed than those of the supranational economic institutions.

These emergent supranational institutions are representative of new forms of state power in the context of an internationalized state, in which state apparatuses and functions (coercive and administrative mechanisms, etc.) do not necessarily correspond to nation-states. These supranational institutions are incipient reflections of the political integration of core states and their Southern "clusters." It is not that the nation-state will disappear. Rather, important functions of the nation-state are gradually being transferred to supranational economic, social, and political institutions. In the mid-1990s, for instance, US and core-state bilateral foreign aid levels began to drop simultaneously with an increase in financial flows through supranational institutions. Viewing things through the nation-state framework, some interpreted plans to downsize the AID and other autonomous foreign-policy organs, and to centralize them in the State Department, as signs of a "new isolationism" or as consequences of budgetary constraints.73 To the contrary, the decrease in core-state foreign aid reflects the declining importance of "aid" in imposing policy conditionality on the periphery given the structural power of transnational capital to do so. More importantly, such plans reflected an accelerated transnationalization and externalization of states, in which the tendency is for increased core-state centralization and a shift in the functions of core states to supranational institutions. The function of the nation-state is shifting from the formulation of national policies to the administration of policies formulated by the transnational elite acting through supranational institutions. However, hegemony is exercised in these transnational institutions under relations of international asymmetry. These organizations impose their rules on every "national" society in the context of structural inequality in the world system. The more subordinate each nation-state is in the world system, the less ability it has to resist external impositions. Therefore, the emergent internationalized state plays a dual role: reproduction of the relations of transnational class domination, and reproduction of asymmetries in the world system. This raises the issue of world order and its prospects, and puts in a new light the contradictions internal to the project of the transnational elite.

Polyarchy and world order

Globalization presents a contradictory situation. The prospects for world order are enhanced on the basis of a greater worldwide unity of interests, and therefore consensus, among elites, and on the diminished threat that social conflict poses. At the same time, the prospects for world order are threatened by the maturation under globalization of contradictions internal to capitalism.

Because of the very nature of globalization - the new international division of labor and global class structure it is bringing about - there is less tension between senior Northern elites and junior Southern elites than in earlier periods. Globalization has redefined both the relationship between Northern and Southern elites and between elites and popular classes in the South. There is no longer a solid class base among Third World elites for the old populist projects, for calls for a New International Economic Order, and so on. Instead, elites in the South, as local contingents of the transnational elite, are increasingly concerned with creating the best local conditions for transnational capital within the new North-South international division of labor, in which the South provides cheap labor for the labor-intensive phases of transnational production. Fulfilling this function requires, in essence, prostituting a population. Making a national labor force attractive, and thereby "marketable," means assuring the lowest possible wages and the highest level of docility on the part of labor. State administrators therefore increasingly act as the pimps of global capitalism. As David Mulford, Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs in the Bush administration, put it: "The countries that do not make themselves more attractive will not get investors' attention. This is like a girl trying to get a boyfriend. She has to go out, have her hair done up, wear makeup ... "74 The impulse to prostitute popular majorities, besides positing competition instead of cooperation as the basis of human interaction, is conducive to highly authoritarian and antidemocratic social relations even under formal polyarchic systems.

Meanwhile, elected offices and public institutions under polyarchic systems are not controlled by mass constituencies. But they are subject to minimal public pressure and scrutiny. However, international agencies are secretive, anti-democratic, and dictatorial in the imposition of their policies, with absolutely no accountability to the mass publics to which under polyarchic systems states are ostensibly accountable. New institutions required for the management of globalized production have come into being, conceived here as components of an internationalized state, but they are even less democratic and less accountable than nation-states. These institutions have usurped the functions of economic management from the public sphere (governments) and transferred them to their own private, and almost secretive, spheres. This means that individual states, not the supranational institutions of transnational capital, must bear the problems of legitimacy crises and social protest generated by the processes of neo-liberal adjustment and integration into the world economy. This phenomenon is, in turn, linked to the general decline in the legitimacy of the nationstate. Both states and political parties not only face mounting crises of legitimacy but are increasingly unable to deal with problems of social decay, cultural alienation, and political crises that accompany the rise of global "poverty amidst plenty."

I noted above the contradiction between growing socioeconomic inequalities on a world scale and stability. The relation between a global polyarchic political system and world order, which is not synonymous with social stability, needs to be reexamined. By world order I do not mean the absence of conflict, but stable patterns of social relations around a global production process. Do the large-scale upheavals and political turmoil around the world of the 1980s and the 1990s point to a period of protracted worldwide conflict that could threaten global accumulation, or rather to the rough bumps and instability associated with an uncertain period of transition toward a consolidated global social structure of accumulation which manages to achieve a certain world order? History has shown that it would be foolish to underestimate the resilience of capitalism as a social system or its ability to develop mechanisms which attenuate the contradictions internal to it. For instance, will some form of "global Keynesianism" come to stabilize global capitalism in the same way as national Keynesianism stabilized national capitalism half a century ago? A more pertinent and pointed issue is not whether capitalism itself will survive in the foreseeable future, but whether polyarchy will remain tenable as a political system of capitalism. The question is equally pertinent for polyarchy in the periphery as it is for the center regions of the world system.

The dramatic worldwide increase in poverty and in inequalities within and between nations makes clear that polyarchy as the legitimizing political system of global capitalism is not matched by any material basis to sustain relations of consensual domination in global society. A generalized reversion to such authoritarian systems as dictatorship and fascism, in the North or the South, should certainly not be ruled out. However, for a number of reasons, the more likely scenario in the emergent global society is a situation of increasingly hierarchical and authoritarian social relations permeating every aspect of life, from public institutions such as school systems and government bureaucracies, to workplaces in office and administrative headquarters and direct sites of material production. We can expect an ever-widening gap between the maintenance of the formal structures of polyarchy, such as regular elections and a functioning constitution, and authoritarianism in everyday life deriving from the increasing powerlessness of people to control or even exert any influence over the conditions of social life.

We are already witnessing such "social authoritarianism." The brand of polyarchy which is becoming universalized is not the more "liberal" version traditionally associated with the developed capitalist nations but the more "authoritarian" and exclusionary version associated with "peripheral polyarchy." A situation of anomie is becoming endemic in life around the world on the eve of the twenty-first century: pandemics of crime and drugs, crises of "governability," the disintegration of family and community bonds, widespread personal alienation and despondence, and so on. The type of hegemonic order we are witnessing in this "brave new world" of global capitalism is, without doubt, what some Gramscians might refer to as "hegemony based on fraud," in which a rapacious global elite is thrusting humanity into deeper levels of material degradation and cultural decadence,75 Under such conditions, there are no guarantees for the personal security of any member of society, even that 20 percent of the world's population that forms the privileged stratum under the global economy. The United States seems to be the model, not the exception. While the United States "promotes democracy" around the world, Amnesty International released annual reports in the early 1990s documenting a growing pattern of systematic human rights violations inside the United States,76 The US prison population doubled between 1960 and 1980, and then tripled between 1980 and 1990.77 Robert Reich reports that private security guards constituted a full 2.6 percent of the US workforce in 1990, double the percentage in 1970, and outnumbered public police officers.78 He describes a situation of "fortress cities" and "social class apartheid" which is nearly identical to patterns found in most Third World countries. In Latin America, meanwhile, the number of those living below the poverty line increased 44 percent between 1980 and 1990, from 136 million to 196 million, representing nearly one-half of Latin America's population.79 In that same period, 90,000 people were "disappeared" by government and security forces. A frightening new phenomenon appeared in the capitals of nearly every Latin American country: "social cleansing," or the systematic killing, sometimes by official security forces but mostly by shadowy private paramilitary groups and security guards tied to the wealthy, of indigent people pushed by economic forces beyond their control to the margins of society.80 And this was the decade of "transitions to democracy" in Latin America. Will "social cleansing" become a standard feature of the new world order?

The historical relation between nation-states and capital is being transformed through globalization. But transnational capital still requires the state (a nee-liberal state) for the three functions of macroeconomic stability, the provision of infrastructure, and assuring an environment of political stability and social peace. It is this last function which threatens polyarchy. As social tensions and political polarization mount in the face of global inequalities, states are likely to turn to diverse forms of repression. However, we are more likely to see new types of repression under "peripheral polyarchy" than a reversion to outright dictatorship or fascism. This is to be explained in part by the very nature of the global economy, which redefines spatial and social organization and human settlement. The disaggregation and atomization of individuals brought about by the fragmentation of the production process means that subordinate groups are no longer aggregated into large production units. Intersubjectivities tend to be linked via communications (symbols) rather than by physical association. The nature of repression is thus modified. The isolation of individuals and groups tends to impede traditional forms of collective action and make unnecessary the old forms of mass repression. For instance, in the "social apartheid" which is now found in much of the United States, those who are excluded from the benefits of global capitalism are segregated into urban zones. The social control of those locked into these socially and economically depressed zones involves containment rather than repressive incorporation. This containment function is conducted more easily by small-scale police units and sophisticated technologies of control rather than by crude weapons of repression. [81]

There is a huge pool of humanity that has become alienated from the means of production but not incorporated as wage labor into the capitalist production process, encompassing hundreds of millions, if not billions, of supernumeraries on a global scale. These "supernumeraries" appear to be of no direct use to capital, and pose a potential massive threat to the stability of global capitalist society. How to prevent poverty and marginalization from fueling revolt, particularly organized revolt, is a major challenge for the transnational elite, made easier, but certainly not resolved, by two intertwined factors. One is the existence of solid polyarchic structures of incorporation, which lead to political disaggregation and apathy, rather than authoritarianism, which can lead to political aggregation and mobilization against visible targets such as dictatorships. The other is the dominant culture imposed by the transnational elite, what Sklair calls the "cultureideology of consumerism," or the cultural component in his model of transnational practices, which "proclaims, literally, that the meaning of life is to be found in the things that we possess." 82 Escalating global inequalities mean that only a shrinking minority of humanity can actually consume. But the "culture-ideology of consumerism," disseminated through omnipresent symbols and images made possible by advanced communications technologies, is a powerful message that imbues mass consciousness at the global level. Its manifest function is to market goods and make profits, but its latent political function is to channel mass aspirations into individualist consumer desires and to psychologically disaggregate intersubjectivities. Induced wants, even though they will never be met for the vast majority, serve the purpose of social control by depoliticizing social behavior and preempting collective action aimed at social change, through fixation on the search for individual consumption. Personal survival, and whatever is required to achieve it, is legitimized over collective well-being. Social bonds of pre-alienation (pre-capitalist bonds) dissolve but new bonds are not forged among marginalized supernumeraries. Social disaggregation makes control of these teeming masses easier since the prospects of development of a counter-hegemonic alternative are more difficult on the basis of marginalization (see below). One outcome of the social polarization and other contradictions of global capitalism that should not be ruled out is general mass apathy and random violence within marginalized communities which do not pose any fundamental threat, in the foreseeable future, to the stability of the new world capitalist order.

Another outcome might be local and regional conflicts which bring prolonged suffering to millions of people yet, paradoxically, do not undermine world order itself. This is because capital and its circuits are so mobile that productive phases can shift almost instantaneously from one geographic location to another without interrupting the global accumulation process. (The exception is conflict located in regions which contain indispensable natural resources, such as the Middle East. In these areas, transnational capital can apply massive direct coercive power to attain its interests, as was seen in the 1991 Gulf War.) Side by side with a tendency toward a transition from authoritarianism to polyarchy is a generalized pattern of political instability in diverse locations around the world. Such instability ranges from civil wars in the former Yugoslavia and in numerous African countries, to simmering social conflict in Latin America and Asia, endemic civil disturbances, sometimes low-key and sometimes high profile, in Los Angeles, Paris, Bonn and most metropolises of the Northern countries, and diverse forms of fundamentalism, localism, nationalism, and racial and ethnic conflict. The disproportionate concentration of people of color among supernumeraries in the North, and the turn to religious and ethnic loyalties in the North and South in the face of uncertain survival and insecurities posed by global capitalism bodes a period of heightened racial and ethnic conflict in global society. However, the question is whether such local and regional conflicts pose any threat to global order. In many respects, the world has become "safer" for local and regional conflicts as a result of the end of the Cold War and the reduction of the nuclear threat to a minimum. I would submit that one major structural phenomenon, theoretically conceived, that accounted for a good part of the conflicts in the early 1990s (although certainly not the only one) was the disjuncture mentioned above, and that it was rooted in the nature of the globalization process, the transition between the historic functions of the nation-state in maintaining the internal unity, cohesion and reproduction of each social formation, and the emergence of supranational structures, still in the process of consolidation, conceived as internationalized state apparatuses. The decline of the capacity of individual nation-states to control processes within their own borders and to maintain the unity of national formations left major social, political, economic, cultural, and ideological vacuums which were not filled by the emergent transnational elite and its international state apparatuses.

Another consequence of globalization is the possible heightened conflict between nation-states and transnational capital, in instances where these states become arenas disputed by different classes, class fractions, and groups. But as the case studies made clear, and Gill and Law argue, the structural power of capital is such that it is superimposed on the "direct power" of states. Even states that attempt to respond to the needs of popular majorities, such as the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the Aristide government in Haiti, are deeply constrained in what they can actually do. Transnational capital controls global resources and gateways to world markets.

Prospects of popular democracy and a counter-hegemonic bloc

Since it is not for us to create a plan for the future that will hold for all time, all the more surely what we contemporaries have to do is the uncompromising critical evaluation of all that exists, uncompromising in the sense that our criticism fears neither its own results nor the conflict with the powers that be.

-- Karl Marx

There are many contradictions internal to the agenda of the transnational elite. But the existence of these contradictions does not mean that this elite will not succeed in implementing its project and consolidating its hegemony. Contradictions always exist within a given set of historical social arrangements. This is the law of dialectics as applied to the social universe. It is not the mere existence of contradictions which determines whether or not these social arrangements are sustained. Global capitalism may result in worldwide "poverty amidst plenty," in a predatory degeneration of civilization. However, there are no automatic resolutions to such a crisis. Human misery and world order are not necessarily incompatible. That global capitalism is generating social crises for billions of people does not at all mean that capitalism will automatically be superseded. A popular resolution to the social crises of global capitalism does not lie in discovering any "laws" of social development. Historical outcomes are not predetermined. The social evolutionary overtones of Marxist and other "meta-theories" are useful insofar as they help identify general tendencies in historical processes, indicate possible outcomes, and provide analytical constructs for making sense out of reality. There is nothing to indicate, for instance, that the crisis of global capitalism, rather than leading to its supersession by socialism, will not end up in the breakdown of civilization and the destruction of our species, or indeed, of our planet. The "subject" side in the relation between subject and object is not predetermined in any way and authoritative predictions for the future are of little value.

In fact, much of Antonio Gramsci's thought and political activity was aimed at countering economistic and deterministic notions of an inevitable breakdown and supersession of capitalism. Gramsci's polemic with the political and intellectual colleagues of his day, including those in the Second International, was that the supersession of capitalism by socialism involves the dialectic between social structure and human agency (or between "structure and superstructure"). His concept of hegemony weighed heavily on the human agency side, on subjective factors, and the role of subjectivities. For the supersession of capitalism, the social order has to experience an "organic crisis," not just a structural crisis of capitalism but a correlating "superstructural" crisis, or political-ideological crisis predicated on the breakdown of the dominant classes' hegemony and the development of "counter-hegemony" among subordinate classes and groups. A counter-hegemonic bloc would have to articulate a viable alternative for organizing society. This alternative would have to achieve ideological hegemony, that is, it would have to be seen by popular majorities as both viable and necessary. The form and emergence of a popular counter-hegemonic bloc in global society is entirely unclear at this time, but we can advance several observations.

A counter-hegemonic bloc requires the development of concrete programmatic alternatives to neo-liberalism. But these alternatives must go beyond national projects. The global economy places enormous constraints on popular democratic transformations in anyone country. Governments in the new global society may be captured by national coalitions in which popular sectors are heavily represented. The contradictions of neo-liberalism open up new possibilities as well as enormous challenges for a popular alternative. Without their own viable socioeconomic model, popular sectors run the risk of political stagnation under the hegemony of the transnational elite, or even worse, being reduced, if they come to occupy governments, to administering the social crises of nee-liberalism with a consequent loss of legitimacy. Under such a scenario, the hegemonic view that there is no popular alternative to unbridled global capitalism becomes reinforced. But a popular project as a viable alternative for each country inserted into global society is far from elaborated.

These issues and a host of questions they raise are best left for future research. However, there is a theoretical point to be made here. In the age of the global economy into which all nations are inexorably drawn, the notion developed by Nicos Poulantzas of the distinction between legal or formal ownership and "economic ownership" of the means of production becomes crucial in conceptualizing power. Poulantzas referred to economic ownership as "the power to assign the means of production to given uses and so to dispose of the products obtained," in distinction to formal legal ownership or possession of the means of production.83 In this regard, we have seen that even if peasants in Nicaragua have formal ownership of their land, transnational capital operating at the level of the global economy has the structural power to decide how and under what terms those means of production are actually put to use. Similarly, the debt crisis, as analyzed in the chapter on Chile, plays the same role in assigning to transnational capital "economic ownership" of the means of production in debtor countries, in the sense meant by Poulantzas, even when formal, legal ownership remains in the hands of local groups. The challenge, therefore, is how to counter the structural power, at the transnational level, of transnational capital.

Any counter-hegemonic bloc would, of necessity, have to be a transnational bloc linking popular majorities across national borders and advancing a concrete, viable program for the organization of global society. One of the consequences of globalization is a redefinition of the relations between nations and classes. The frame of reference for classes is no longer the nation-state. Global class structures tend to become superimposed on national class structures, and both dominant and subordinate classes are involved in global class formation.84 The "race to the bottom" - the worldwide downward leveling of living conditions and the gradual equalization of life conditions in North and South - creates fertile objective conditions for the development of transnational intersubjectivies, solidarities, and political projects. The communications revolution has facilitated global elite coordination but it can also assist global coordination among popular classes. A class-conscious transnational elite is already a political actor on the world stage - a "class-for-itself." Will subordinate classes become "transnationalized," not only structurally, but in developing a consciousness of transnationality and a global political protagonism? Will they become global popular "classes-for-themselves"? There were some signs in the early 1990s that this was beginning to occur. Popular political parties and social movements in the South began to establish diverse cross-national linkages and a general awareness of the need for concerted transnational action. Discussions were not limited to exchanging national experiences, but addressed developing forms of transnational coordination of national strategies, actions, and programs.85 Ironically, the new forms of US intervention act as "integrative mechanisms" for both dominant and subordinate groups in the South. However, this nascent tendency should not be exaggerated. National identities and nationalisms as ideologies will persist for generations to come, as will the nation-state as the concrete and practical arena of social struggle. Transnational political protagonism among subordinate classes means developing transnational consciousness and protagonism at the mass, grassroots level - a transnationalized participatory democracy - well beyond the old "internationalism" of political leaders and bureaucrats.

A counter-hegemonic project would not entail resisting globalization - alas, we cannot simply demand that historical processes be halted to conform to our wishes, and we would do better to understand how we may influence and redirect those processes - but rather trying to convert it into a globalization from below. Such a process from the bottom up would have to address the deep racial! ethnic dimensions of global inequality, resting on the premise that, although racism and ethnic and religious conflicts rest on real material fears among groups that survival is under threat, they take on cultural, ideological and political dynamics of their own which must be challenged and countered in the programs and the practice of counter-hegemony. A counter-hegemonic project would have to be thoroughly imbued with a gender equality approach, in practice and in content. It would also require alternative forms of democratic practice within popular organizations (trade unions, the "new social movements", etc.), within political parties, and - wherever the formal state apparatus is captured, through elections or other means - within state institutions. These new egalitarian practices must eschew traditional hierarchical and authoritarian forms of social intercourse and bureaucratic authority relations, and must overcome personality cults, centralized decision-making, and other such traditional practices. The flow of authority and decision-making in new social and political practices within any counter-hegemonic bloc must be from the bottom up, not from the top down, as alluded to in the model of popular democracy.

A counter-hegemonic bloc would have to counterpose the legitimizing discourse of polyarchy to that of popular democracy. As we have seen with particular clarity in the cases of Haiti and Nicaragua, and also in Chile and the Philippines, the struggle between dominant and subordinate groups is played out, in part, around the issue of what is legitimate and what is illegitimate in a polyarchic political system. Capitalism and democracy are ultimately contradictory and theoretically incompatible. But to what extent any popular democratization can take place within the constraints of polyarchic political systems is not clear. Robert Barros poses this dilemma as one of a "Gordian knot: How can institutions designed to minimize the extent of post-authoritarian transformations both be strengthened and at the same time subverted? In other words, how can a popular movement strengthen democracy so as to avoid another collapse into military rule, while simultaneously challenging the exclusionary mechanisms of specific democratic institutions?"86 As we saw with crystal clarity in the case of Haiti, there is no easy undoing of this Gordian knot. However, the construction of counter-hegemony would include challenging the conceptual status polyarchy currently enjoys as the hegemonic definition of democracy. In this regard, a counter-hegemonic bloc would require the full development of a theory of popular democracy.

Polyarchy in the emergent global society has as little to do with democracy as "socialism" in the former Soviet bloc had to do with socialism. V. I. Lenin argued that "the victory of socialism is impossible without the realization of democracy."87 The reverse is equally true: the victory of democracy is impossible without the realization of socialism. A democratic socialism founded on a popular democracy may be humanity's "last, best," and perhaps only, hope. Under the global economy the world's productive resources are controlled by an ever smaller circle of human beings. It is estimated that by the year 2000, some 400 transnational corporations will own about two-thirds of the fixed assets of the planet.88 This makes transnational corporations, the institutional agents of transnational capital, more powerful than any government in the world. With the world's resources controlled by a few hundred such global corporations, the life-blood and the very fate of humanity is in the hands of transnational capital, which holds the power to make life and death decisions for millions of human beings. Such tremendous concentrations of economic power lead to tremendous concentrations of political power at a global level. Any discussion of "democracy" under such conditions becomes meaningless. It should be recalled that capital organizes production not in order to meet human needs (create use values) but in order to generate profit (realize exchange values). The way in which the overwhelming majority of humanity's resources is used is decided not on the basis of humanity's needs but on the basis of the drive for profit by transnational corporations. The burning challenge of our time is how to wrest such enormous power away from transnational capital and its agent, the transnational elite. This challenge amounts to no more or less than how to democratize global society.

It is fitting by way of conclusion to point to another element any counter-hegemonic popular bloc would require: its own organic intellectuals. Social phenomena are always, and inevitably, many times more complex than our explanations. Analytical constructs (such as the present study) are simplifications of reality that facilitate our understanding and also guide our social action. Yet erecting analytical constructs is very much a form of social action. It is social action in the world that makes history and constantly transforms reality, thus providing social science with the raw material of its trade. Social scientists, in order to truly understand reality, must participate in its transformation. And participate we do. The question is: for whom are we doing the thinking? We who claim the mantle of social science run the risk of becoming the new mandarins of an anti-democratic global society founded on injustice and inequality. Truth, in Gramsci's view, is always revolutionary. This is because to arrive at the truth we must act; truth compels actions.
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Re: Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, a

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Notes

Introduction. From East-West to North-South: US intervention in the "new world order"


1 Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon, 1966), p. 523.

2 Department of State, Policy Planning Study (PPS) 23 Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1948, vol. I (part 2), February 24, 1948, p. 23.

3 Carl Gershman, "Fostering Democracy Abroad: The Role of the National Endowment for Democracy, " speech delivered to the American Political Science Foundation Convention, August 29, 1986.

4 A summary of the book's argument may be found in William I. Robinson,  "Globalization, the World System, and 'Democracy Promotion' in U.S. Foreign Policy, " Theory and Society 25 (1996).

5 William I. Robinson, A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era (Boulder: Westview, 1992).

6 See, e.g., Joshua Mavavchik, Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America's Destiny (Washington, D.C.: The AEI Press, 1992);Ralph M. Goldman and William A. Douglas, Promoting Democracy: Opportunities and Issues (New York: Praeger,  1988); Brad Roberts (ed.), The New Democracies: Global Change and U.S. Policy (Cambridge, Mass./Washington D.C.: MIT Press/Washington Quarterly,  1990); Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education,  National Research Council, The Transition to Democracy: Proceedings of a Workshop (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1991).

7 See, e.g., Abraham Lowenthal (ed.), Exporting Democracy: The United States and Latin America, Themes and Issues (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Howard J. Wiarda, The Democratic Revolution in Latin America: History, Politics and U.S. Policy (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990); Tony Smith, America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the 20th Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

8 Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?, " The National Interest, no. 16 (Summer 1989), 3-18.

1 From "straight power concepts" to "persuasion" in US foreign policy

1 Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 51.

2 Michael Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975), pp. 20, 21.

3 Literature on the makings of the post-World War II order is extensive. See,  among others, Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review, 1977); Stephen E. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy, 1938-1980, 7th edn. (New York: Penguin, 1993); Thomas J. McCormick, America's Half Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989);William Appleman Williams, America Confronts a Revolutionary World (New York: Morrow, 1976).

4 National Security Council, Memorandum NSC-68 (April 7, 1950), Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1950, vol. I, pp. 252, 263, 272.

5 Some of the symptoms were the Cuban revolution, the fall of the South Vietnamese regime, mass protests against the authoritarian states in the Philippines, South Korea, and elsewhere in Asia, the collapse of Portuguese colonialism in Africa, a surge of mass popular movements in South America and elsewhere, and the Iranian, Grenadian, and Nicaraguan revolutions.

6 For example, Lars Schoultz asserts that US policy towards Latin America seeks stability, a condition required for the satisfaction of geopolitical,  economic and military concerns (the three "national security" concerns): "This basic causal linkage - instability in Latin America causes a threat to United States security - is the cognitive bedrock of United States policy toward Latin America." National Security and United States Policy toward Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 38.

7 The "communist threat, " it could be convincingly argued, has, until the end of the Cold War, merely been the term employed to brand those regimes which attempted to alter existing arrangements. Many destabilization campaigns, such as that against Panama or Jamaica, did not target communism. And US intervention in Latin America predates the birth of communist movements internationally.

8 Lloyd C. Gardner, "The Evolution of the Interventionist Impulse, " in Peter J. Schraeder (ed.), Intervention in the 1980s: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Third World (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1989).

9 Most importantly, see Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1970) and The Capitalist World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review, 1974), is a classic statement from this framework as seen from the South. L. S. Stavrianos, Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age (New York: William Morrow, 1981), provides an encyclopedic world historical account from the world system framework. A summary of the literature is provided in Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).

10 Throughout this book, the term fraction is used to denote segments within classes determined by their relation to social production and the class as a whole, whereas I occasionally use the term faction in an entirely different sense, to denote clusters that are drawn together in pursuit of shared political objectives within diverse specific settings (e.g., factions within a political party, a social movement, a cabinet, or ministry) and may involve people from various social classes, strata, and groups.

11 Antonio Gramsci, Selections From Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 12.

12 Robert W. Cox is perhaps the pathbreaker in a Gramscian model of international relations. See his "Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory, " Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10 (1981), no. 2, 126-155; "Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method, " Millennium, 12 (1983), no. 2, 162-175; and Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

An important exception to the focus on intra-core rather than coreperiphery and/or global relations is Enrico Augelli and Craig Murphy,  America's Quest for Supremacy and the Third World, A Gramscian Analysis (London: Pinter, 1988), although they, along with Cox, retain a primary emphasis on global intra-elite relations.

See also, Ker Van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (London: Verso, 1984); Stephen R. Gill and David Law, "Global Hegemony and the Structural Power of Capital, " International Studies Quarterly,  33 (1989), no. 4, 475-499; Stephen R. Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Stephen R. Gill (ed.), Gramsci, Historical Materialism, and International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). This latter volume launched an interdisciplinary research agenda into a Gramscian model of international relations.

13 Thomas R. Dye, Who's Running America?, 4th edn. (Englewood Cliffs,  Prentice Hall, 1986), p. 1.

14 An exhaustive review of relevant political sociology literature is to be found in Robert R. Alford and Roger Friedland, Powers of Theory: Capitalism,  the State, and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  1985). Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) provides a good comparative overview of the liberal, realist, and Marxist perspectives in international relations. Roughly speaking, pluralism in political sociology corresponds to liberalism in international relations, the elitist/managerial model to realism, and the class model to Marxism.

15 In international relations, Steven Krasner's Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) is a basic statement in this regard. Sociologist Theda Skocpol, in her classic States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), also develops this view of the state, and elaborates a "state-centered" theory which shares much with realists as regards international relations.

16 Very briefly, the "instrumentalist" approach focuses on how the capitalist class or other classes with capitalist interests dominate and utilize the state directly via occupying key policy posts in government, lobbying state managers, etc. The "structuralist" approach focuses on underlying structural constraints on state behavior. For a discussion and critique, see, e.g.,  Eric Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

17 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press,  1959); Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1969); G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1967; 2nd edn., 1986); G. William Domhoff, The Higher Circles (New York: Random House, 1970); G. William Domhoff, The Powers that Be (New York: Random House, 1978); Dye, Who's Running America?

There are important differences between these writers, particularly in debate over whether power is deposited in institutions, in social classes, or in elite groupings. However, all these views converge in their distinction to the pluralist theories, according to which no one group dominates in society and the political systems allow all groups to share in the exercise of power. Similarly, they all thoroughly document and analyze the nexus between economic power, hegemony in civil society, and governmental power and policies, i.e., the symbiosis of wealth and power in the United States. My own view is that power is embodied in wealth (the means of production and the social product), and exercised through institutions.

18 Dye borrows the term "proximate policymaker" from Charles E. Lindblom,  The Policy-Making Process (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1968) and then builds on it. See Dye, Who's Running America?, pp. 260-262.

19 See Domhoff, Who Rules America Now?, pp. 82-115.

20 Karl Marx, Preface to "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy", in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978), p. 4.

21 The state is "the entire complex of theoretical and practical activities with which the ruling class not only maintains its dominance, but manages to win the consent of those over whom it rules ... [The state is] political society plus civil society, hegemony armored by coercion." Gramsci,  Prison Notebooks, p. 262.

22 Ibid., p. 244.

23 A concrete example is the following: slavery in pre-Civil War US society was maintained by direct coercion. Slaves did not actually believe that they were sub-human or destined by God to slavery. When not rebelling,  they gave their consent to slavery because the lash and lynching met rebellion. In turn, once hegemony was achieved in US society under modem industrial capitalism, workers gave not just their consent to, but also consensus on, the social relations of capitalist production. As US labor history reveals, workers demanded wage increases not because surplus value is a relation of exploitation which domination sustains, or because higher wages would increase the relative power of the working class vis-avis its class antagonist, but because workers are entitled to a better life which capitalism promises or because higher wages benefit "business" (the capitalist class) by increasing market demand.

24 For a particularly crisp analysis of Gramsci on ideology, see Augelli and Murphy, America's Quest, ch. 1.

25 Works on the global economy are numerous. This section draws on,  among others, the following: Joyce Kolko, Restructuring the World Economy (New York: Pantheon, 1988); J. Caporaso (ed.), Changing International Division of Labor (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1987); Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller, Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974); Arthur MacEwan and William K. Tabb, Instability and Change in the World Economy (New York: Monthly Review, 1989); Tamas Szentes, The Transformation of the World Economy: New Directions and New Interests (London: Zed, 1988); David Gordon, "The Global Economy: New Edifice or Crumbling Foundations?, " New Left Review, no. 168 (Marchi April 1988), 24-64.

26 Gill, American Hegemony.

27 Barnet and Muller, Global Reach, pp. 91-92.

28 Cox, "Social Forces, " 147.

29 Osvaldo Sunkel and Edmundo F. Fuenzalida, "Transnationalization and its National Consequences, " in Jose J. Villamil (ed.), Transnational Capitalism and National Development: New Perspectives on Dependence (Brighton: Harvester, 1979), p. 75.

30 See works by Domhoff cited in note 17.

31 Gill, American Hegemony.

32 Peter Evans, Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State, and Local Capital in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

33 James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin's Press,  1973). This chronic crisis of legitimacy under globalization also explains the growing significance in the new world order of highly visible charismatic figures who substitute concrete political projects or "social pacts" in the legitimization process. 34 Gill and Law, "Global Hegemony, " point out that there is a complementary and contradictory relationship between powers of state and powers of transnational capital. The point, however, needs further theoretical treatment.

35 See, e.g., the articles in "A Market Solution for the Americas?: The Rise of Wealth and Hunger, " NACLA Report on the Americas, 26 (1993), no. 4,  which document the sharp rise in Chile, Costa Rica, and Mexico of poverty, income inequality, the concentration of productive assets, and social polarization in direct correlation to adjustment programs. The example of these three countries is instructive because of the high degree of differentiation among the three and because they are touted as neoliberal "success stories."

36 Stephen R. Gill, "Epistemology, ontology, and the 'Italian school', " in Gill,  (ed.), Gramsci, p. 48.

37 Crozier, et al., Crisis of Democracy, p. 13.

38 Cox, "Gramsci, " p. 171.

39 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957; first published in 1944); Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1975; first published in 1968).

40 Cox, "Gramsci, " pp. 170-172. 41 While space constraints prohibit a discussion, Cox, Augelli and Murphy,  and others discuss the failure of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) but do not link this "failure" to globalization, which countered "national logics" in the South and unified North-South elite interests by absorbing Southern elites into the emergent global transnational elite. The NIEO was less a "failure" than a project which became outdated by globalization. In any event, even if it had resulted in a shift in relative power to the Third World, the NIEO, as articulated by Third World elites,  would not have represented a global hegemony because neither elites in the South nor those in the North with whom they negotiated proposed a shift to consensual domination over subordinate groups in the periphery.

42 Leslie Sklair, Sociology of the Global System: Social Change in Global Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 2.

43 Cited in Irving M. Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1990; first published in 1968), p. 312.

44 Gill and Law, "Global Hegemony, " p. 488.

45 Dye, Who's Running America?, p. 246.

46 Robert W. Cox, "Ideologies and the New International Economic Order: Reflections on Some Recent Literature, " International Organization, 33 (1979), 257-302 at p. 260.

47 The literature on democratization that sprang up in the 1980s and early 1990s is too vast to attempt even a selected bibliography here. Two of the most widely circulated works which my analysis focuses on are: Guillermo O'Donnell, Philip C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (eds.), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, 4 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,  1988); Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset, Democracy in Developing Countries, 4 vols. (Boulder: Lynne Rienner and the National Endowment for Democracy, 1989).

48 This blurring of power-holder and scholar is not just in the abstract. Many people who become prominent in the scholarly community become government officials, and many government officials become members of the scholarly community. See, e.g., discussion by McCormick, America's Half Century, pp. 12-16.

49 The Diamond, et al. volumes were commissioned by the NED (see Annual Reports, 1984-1987). Diamond is co-editor of the NED's quarterly publication,  Journal of Democracy. Linz and Upset are members of the journal's editorial board. Upset is also an Advisory Board member of the American Initiatives Project, set up by the World Without War Council. This council was founded as part of the White House's Office of Public Diplomacy in the early 1980s to disseminate propaganda in the United States and abroad in favor of US foreign policy (see chapter 2). Regarding Upset's participation, see Sara Diamond, "The World Without War Council, " Covert Action Information Bulletin, no. 31 (Winter 1989), p. 61. The O'Donnell,  et al. volumes were sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Center, which was established by Congress, and were funded through congressional appropriations. The point is not that the Woodrow Wilson Center (or any of these scholars) is fraudulent, but that it is one of many think-tanks linked formally and informally to the US state that are crucial components of the policy planning process. These policy planning institutes constitute institutional gateways between academia and the state apparatus.

50 The concrete links, including funding, institutional overlaps, and so forth,  between universities, the government, and the literature, are well documented. On the close relation between the US government and universities in modernization and political culture/development theories, see,  e.g., Alvin So, Social Change and Development: Modernization, Dependency and World-System Theories (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1990), pp. 17-19. As noted above, the government has funded the research, publication,  and dissemination of seminal "democratization" studies. The AID has sponsored many workshops and conferences on "democratization" and "democracy promotion" and brought together scholars and policymakers into overlapping networks out of which flow numerous published works. There are other types of linkage: for example, scholars who publish works that become authoritative were themselves policymakers,  or later return to policymaking posts - one such scholar is Abraham Lowenthal (former ambassador to the OAS), editor of Exporting Democracy and other works. Other studies are published and disseminated with funding from the government or from policy planning institutes; an example is Goldman and Douglas's, Promoting Democracy, funded by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, funded in turn by the AID. And so on.

51 Cited in Ronald H. Chilcote and Joel C. Edelstein, Latin America: Capitalist and Socialist Perspectives of Development and Underdevelopment (Boulder: Westview, 1986), p. 67.

52 Works on modernization and political culture/political development theories are vast. Some of the most prominent are: W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960); Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Boston: Little Brown, 1963); Lucien W. Pye and Sidney Verba (eds.), Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965);Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). See bibliographies in So, Social Change and Development, and Chilcote and Edelstein, Latin America for a fuller listing.

53 Almond and Verba, Civic Culture, p. 67.

54 David Easton, The Political System: An Inquiry Into the State of Political Science (New York: Knopf, 1953); David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: Wiley, 1965).

55 For an excellent critique, see Mark Kesselman, "Order or Movement? The Literature of Political Development as Ideology, " World Politics, October 1973, 139-154.

56 Ibid.

57 As cited in ibid., 139.

58 Alford and Friedland, Powers of Theory, pp. 394-395.

59 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 2nd edn., (New York: Harper and Row, 1947), p. 285.

60 W. B. Gallie, "Essentially Contested Concepts, " Aristotelian Society, no. 56 (1956), 167-198. 61 Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971). Despite its limitations and irrespective of my own disagreement with the pluralist model and the structural-functionalist meta-theoretical framework he employs, Dahl's is an excellent study. Dahl, it should be noted, does not argue, normatively, that polyarchy is "ideal" democracy but the only "realistic" democracy possible in complex modem societies.

62 Samuel P. Huntington, "The Modest Meaning of Democracy, " in Robert A. Pastor, Democracy in the Americas: Stopping the Pendulum (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1989), pp. 12-13.

63 See, for instance, Philip Schmitter and Terry Karl, "What Democracy Is... And Is Not, " Journal of Democracy, 2 (1991), no. 3, 75-88. Similarly,  Diamond, et al., Democracy, state that by democracy they are referring specifically to polyarchy (IV, p. xvi).

64 Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique (Lanham, Md.: University of America Press, 1980), p. 17.

65 Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 269.

66 Huntington, "Modest Meaning, " p. 24.

67 Cited in Alford and Friedland, Powers of Theory, p. 27.

68 Ibid., p. 29.

69 Adam Przeworski, "Some Problems in the Study of Transition to Democracy, " in O'Donnell, et al., Transitions, pp. 56-57.

70 Diamond, et al., Democracy, VI, p. xvi.

71 Huntington, "Modest Meaning, " p. 18.

72 See Diamond, et al., Democracy, IV, pp. 44-47.

73 "The Democracy Initiative, " Agency for International Development,  Department of State, Washington, D.C., December 1990.

74 A full listing of literature referring to popular democracy is impossible here. Moreover, this literature is highly heterogeneous and exhibits distinct theoretical discourses. Antonio Gramsci and Rosa Luxemburg would be the classical thinkers in the Marxist tradition on democracy. For works discussing theoretical and historical issues of liberal capitalist and Marxist concepts, see, among others: Alan Hunt (ed.), Marxism and Democracy (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980); George Novack, Democracy and Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971); David Held, Political Theory and the Modern State: Essays on State, Power, and Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); L. Earl Shaw (ed.), Modern Competing Ideologies (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1973). For discussion on some contemporary attempts to elaborate a theory and model of popular democracy (referred to as such, or as "participatory democracy, " "strong democracy, " "direct democracy, " etc.), see, among others: David Held and Christopher Pollitt (eds.), New Forms of Democracy (London: Sage Publications, 1986); Daniel C. Kramer, Participatory Democracy: Developing Ideals of the Political Left (Cambridge, ' Mass.: Schenkman, 1972); Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Carl Cohen, Democracy (New York: The Free Press, 1971).

75 Ibid.

76 For instance, see Schmitter and Karl, "What Democracy Is, " pp. 81, 84.

77 Miliband, State in Capitalist Society, p. 194.

78 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 176. Cox, in "Gramsci, " first drew attention to the particular passage and explored its significance as regards international relations.

79 Max Weber, "Value Judgements in Social Science, " in W. G. Runciman (ed.), Weber: Selections in Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 89.

80 Mosca, Ruling Class, p. 154.

81 On anti-systemic movements, see Immanuel Wallerstein, "Antisystemic Movements: History and Dilemmas, " in Samir Amin, et al., Transforming the Revolution: Social Movements and the World-system (New York: Monthly Review, 1990).

82 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 210.

83 These arguments are detailed in volume IV of O'Donnell, et al., Transitions,  co-authored by O'Donnell and Schmitter.

84 Ibid., IV, pp. 62-63.

85 For analysis, see William I. Robinson, "Demilitarization in Central America: Beginning of a New Era?, " (2 parts), Central American Update (Albuquerque: Latin American Data Base, University of New Mexico),  January 17 and 24, 1992.

86 Carl Gershman, "The United States and the World Democratic Revolution, " Washington Quarterly, Winter 1989, 127-139.

87 Ibid.

88 James F. Petras and Morris H. Morley, 'The U.S. Imperial State, " in James F. Petras, et al. (eds.), Class, State and Power in the Third World (Montclair,  N.J.: Allanheld, Osmun, 1981).

89 Ibid., pp. 6-7.

90 Ibid., p. 115.

91 Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979),  p.654.

92 See ibid. and also Gill, American Hegemony. It should be noted that the Trilateral Commission's report focused in particular on the "crisis in democracy" in the developed, industrialized countries.

93 Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 53, 55.

94 Gill, American Hegemony, p. 163.

95 Schmitter and Karl, "What Democracy Is, " p. 80.

96 Samuel Huntington, "Will More Countries Become Democratic?" Political Science Quarterly, 99 (1984), no. 2, 206. Huntington's article is basic reading for "democratization" courses in US universities. It involves two propositions which combine vulgar ideology with more empirically testable propositions. The first is that democracy in the Third World declined in the 1960s and 1970s because "Anglo-American influence" had declined,  and it should spread again in the 1980s because that influence was then increasing. The proposition does not hold up empirically: in the post- World War II heyday of US influence abroad, authoritarianism flourished in the Third World because the United States ("Anglo-American influence") actively promoted it and not democracy. Neither does the second proposition, a direct three-way correlation between democracy, free markets, and economic development, hold up to empirical scrutiny. In Huntington's two "premier democracies, " the United States and Britain,  for example, polyarchy evolved side by side with active states that intervened and regulated capital accumulation, not under free-market conditions. And in the Third World the correlation has been between high growth/ development and authoritarian regimes (such as the Asian Tigers,  Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, etc.), not polyarchies, and these regimes all turned to heavy state intervention, not free markets. Huntington also distorts historical facts. Democracy, for him, is defined by near-universal adult suffrage, and the United States is "a 200-year-old democracy." Yet at the time of the founding of the US republic, neither women, nor blacks,  nor Indians, nor other non-white peoples could vote. Nor could propertyless or illiterate white males vote. In 'The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy" (New Left Review, no. 103, 1977, 3-41), sociologist Goran Therborn uses the same measurement as Huntington - near-universal adult suffrage - to place the establishment of democracy in the United States at c. 1970. Given such blatant inconsistencies and false propositions,  it is remarkable that Huntington's article is taken with any seriousness by the academic community.

97 This type of "consensual" power is what Steven Lukes referred to as the third of three dimensions of power in Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan, 1974). The first is the formal decision-making process, in which there is pluralist distribution of power. The second, a hidden dimension, is what Bachrach and Baratz refer to as "non-decision making, " or the confining of the scope of decision-making such that alternative choices are suppressed (Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Both these dimensions locate power within the behavioral realm and involve manifest conflict. The third combines the behavioral and the structural realms,  based on real interests, whether subjectively perceived or not. Power is exercised by keeping potential manifest conflicts over real interests latent. This third dimension of power functions under conditions of consensual,  not coercive, domination.

2 Political operations in US foreign policy

1 Howard Wiarda, The Democratic Revolution in Latin America: History,  Politics, and U.S. Policy (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990), p. 270.

2 Department of State, "Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean: The Promise and the Challenge, " Bureau of Public Affairs, Special Report no. 158, Washington, D.C., March 1987, p. 13.

3 For the distinction between dominant groups and governing groups, see Domhoff Who Rules America? and Poulantzas Political Power.

4 Council on Foreign Relations, 1980s Project: 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); Trilateral Commission: Richard N. Cooper, Karl Kaiser, and Masataka Kosaka,  Towards a Renovated International System, Triangle Papers 14 (New York: The Trilateral Commission, 1977), as cited and discussed in Cox, "Ideologies and the New International Economic Order." See also Domhoff,  Who Rules America?, pp. 88, 112 n8; Lawrence Shoup, The Carter Presidency and Beyond, (Palo Alto: Ramparts Press, 1980); Dye, Who Runs America?, pp. 244-252.

5 See, e.g., Peter J. Schraeder (ed.), Intervention in the 1980s: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Third World (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1989).

6 The Committee of Santa Fe, A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties,  (Santa Fe: Council for Inter-American Security, 1980), p. 5.

7 Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick, "Dictators and Double Standards, " Commentary no. 68 (November 1979), p. 36.

8 Augelli and Murphy, America's Quest for Supremacy.

9 Wiarda, Democratic Revolution, p. 145.

10 See Carnes Lord, "The Psychological Dimension in National Strategy, " in Carnes Lord and Frank R. Barnett (eds.), Political Warfare and Psychological Operations: Rethinking the U.S. Approach (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1988), p. 18. Lord was Director of International Communications and Information Policy on the NSC in the first Reagan administration.

11 Alfred H. Paddock, Jr., "Military Psychological Operations", in Lord and Barnett (eds.), Political Warfare, p. 45. Paddock is the former Director of Psychological Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

12 Angelo M. Codevilla, "Political Warfare, " in Lord and Barnett (eds.),  Political Warfare, pp. 77-79. Codevilla was a senior staff member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

13 Lord and Barnett (eds.), Political Warfare, introduction, p. xiii.

14 See Doug Sandow, "Economic and Military Aid, " in Schraeder (ed.),  Intervention in the 1980s, p. 63. Note that if US aid channeled through multilateral agencies is included, the figure nearly doubles.

15 NSC-68 described economic aid as "a major instrument in the conduct of United States foreign relations. It is an instrument which can powerfully influence the world environment in ways favorable" to US interests. National Security Council, NSC-68, p. 258. See Augelli and Murphy,  America's Quest for Supremacy, ch. 4, for a Gramscian focus on ideology and foreign aid.

16 For more on low-intensity warfare and its doctrinal emergence, see William I. Robinson and Kent Norsworthy, David and Goliath: the U.S. War Against Nicaragua (New York: Monthly Review, 1987), particularly ch. 1; Michael T. Klare and Peter Kornbluh (eds.), Low Intensity Warfare, Counterinsurgency,  Proinsurgency, and Antiterrorism in the Eighties (New York: Pantheon, 1988); Frank R. Barnett, B. Hugh Tovar and Richard H. Shultz (eds.), Special Operations in U.S. Strategy (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1984);Lord and Barnett (eds.), Political Warfare.

17 Richard H. Shultz, Jr., "Low Intensity Conflict, Future Challenges and Lessons From the Reagan Years, " Survival (International Institute for Strategic Studies), 31 (1989), no. 2; Paddock, "Military Psychological Operations, " p. 50.

18 See the report commissioned by the NSC, Discriminate Deterrence: Report of the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1988), which calls for a shift in primary emphasis towards engagement in the Third World. See also four-part series in New York Times, May 20-23, 1990.

19 Lord, "Psychological Dimension, " p. 20.

20 Princeton Lyman, "An Introduction to Title IX, " Foreign Service Journal,  March 1970, 6-48, pp. 6-8 in particular.

21 Susan George, A Fate Worse Than Debt (London: Penguin Books, 1988),  p.232.

22 Michael A. Samuels and William A. Douglas, "Promoting Democracy, " Washington Quarterly, 4 (1981), no. 3, 52-65, at pp. 52-53.

23 American Political Foundation, "A Commitment to Democracy: A Bipartisan Approach, " Washington, D.C., November 30, 1983. The report was commissioned by the NSC to draft recommendations for developing "democracy promotion" in foreign policy.

24 William A. Douglas, Developing Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Heldref,  1972). Douglas drew heavily on Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies and the other political development literature cited in chapter one.

25 Ibid., pp. 16-22.

26 Ibid., pp. xiii, 43.

27 Gershman, "Fostering Democracy Abroad."

28 Ralph M. Goldman, 'The Democratic Mission: A Brief History, " in Goldman and Douglas (eds.), Promoting Democracy; Ralph M. Goldman,  "Assessing Political Aid for the Endless Campaign, " ibid., p. 253.

29 Goldman, "Democratic Mission, " p. 16.

30 The US Senate's Church Committee estimated that the CIA carried out at least 900 covert operations between 1960 and 1975, but former CIA officer John Stockwell estimated the total number since its founding at up to 20, 000 (interview with the authors in Managua, 1985, cited in Robinson and Norsworthy, David and Goliath, p. 15). Another former CIA officer,  Philip Agee, pointed out that in Indonesia alone, between 500, 000and one million people were killed in the wake of the CIA-orchestrated coup against Sukamo. See Philip Agee, Inside the Company (London: Bantam 1976), p. ix.

31 These defectors included Philip Agee, John Stockwell, Ralph McGehee,  and David MacMichael, among others. The most well known is Agee (see ibid.). See also Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, (New York: Dell, 1974). An excellent summary is William Blum, The CIA, A Forgotten History, (London: Zed, 1986).

32 Samuels and Douglas, "Promoting Democracy, " p. 53.

33 New York Times, June 1, 1986.

34 William E. Colby, "Political Action - In the Open, " Washington Post,  March 14, 1982, 0-8.

35 See John Pike, "Uncloaking Daggers: CIA Spending for Covert Operations, " Covert Action Quarterly, no. 48 (Winter 1994-5), 48-55.

36 Charles W. Kegley, Jr. and Eugene R. Wittkopf, American Foreign Policy: Pattern and Process, 4th edn (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), pp. 252- 253.

37 For background on these early efforts, see Douglas, Developing Democracy,  pp.1 72-177.

38 White House press release, March 29, 1967, cited in Holly Sklar and Chip Berlet, "NED, CIA, and the Orwellian Democracy Project, " in Covert Action Information Bulletin, no. 39 (Winter 1991-2), 10-13 at p. 11.

39 Wiarda, Democratic Revolution, p. 148.

40 General Accounting Office, Events Leading to the Establishment of the National Endowment for Democracy, GAO/NSIAD-84-121, July 6, 1984; Goldman, "Democratic Mission, " pp. 18-22; Wiarda, Democratic Revolution,  pp. 148-149.

41 See Lord, "Psychological Dimension, " p. 14.

42 National Security Action Memo No. 1224, January 18, 1962, as reported by Worth Cooley-Prost, Democracy Intervention in Haiti: The U.S. AID Democracy Enhancement Project (Washington, D.C.: Washington Office on Haiti,  1994), p. 19.

43 By 1989, its budget had climbed to some one billion dollars annually. Intelligence and national security officials continue to rotate in and out of the USIA, the NED and other agencies. For discussion, see Council on Hemispheric Affairs/Inter-Hemispheric Education Resource Center National Endowment for Democracy (NED): A Foreign Policy Branch Gone Awry (Washington, D.C./ Albuquerque: 1990), which provides an excellent account of the creation and modus operandi of the NED.

44 See Robert Parry and Peter Kornbluh, "Iran-Contra's Untold Story, " Foreign Policy, no. 72 (Fall 1988), pp. 5, 9, for background on Raymond. For his relation to North, see Report of the Congressional Committees' Investigation of the Iran-Contra Affair (Washington, D.C.: Govt. Printing Office, 1988), and in particular Raymond's deposition before the Congressional Committees, in Appendix Bof the report (vol. XXII, pp. 1-520). See John Spicer Nichols, "La Prensa: The CIA Connection, " Columbia Journalism Review, 27 (1988), no. 2,  p. 13, for mention of Raymond's NSC role as liaison with NED.

45 Cited in Council on Hemispheric Affairs/Resource Center, National Endowment for Democracy, pp. 12-13.

46 Ibid.; Parry and Kornbluh, "Iran-Contra's".

47 Goldman, "Democratic Mission ... , " p. 21, and Council on Hemispheric Affairs/Resource Center, National Endowment for Democracy.

48 Ronald Reagan, "Promoting Democracy and Peace" June 8, 1982 speech before the British parliament), Current Policy, no. 399, Department of State,  Bureau of Public Affairs, Washington, D.C.

49 New York Times, February 15, 1987.

50 This figure is mentioned by former Secretary of State George Shultz. See "Project Democracy, " statement by Shultz before the Subcommittee on International Operations of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, February 23, 1983, reprinted as Current Policy, no. 456, Department of State,  Bureau of Public Affairs, Washington, D.C.

51 Richard F. Staar (00.), Public Diplomacy: USA versus USSR (Stanford: Hoover Institute, 1986), pp. 297-299. Staar published the unclassified three-page directive, but did not indicate if this version was the full text of the original classified version. The directive contains four aspects, but two,  an International Information Committee and an International Broadcasting Committee, would appear to overlap. See also, New York Times, February 15, 1987.

52 See Peter Kornbluh, Nicaragua: The Price of Intervention (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1987).

53 New York Times, February 15, 1987.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 Raymond D. Gastil, "Aspects of a U.S. Campaign for Democracy, " in Goldman and Douglas (eds.), Promoting Democracy, p. 49.

57 Ibid., pp. 28-29.

58 This figure is arrived at by totalling the amounts of annual Congressional appropriations for the NED, as reported in the NED Annual Reports,  1984-1992.

59 For these details, see Council on Hemispheric Affairs/Resource Center,  National Endowment for Democracy, particularly, pp. 23-39.

60 New York Times, February 15, 1987.

61 Wiarda, Democratic Revolution, pp. 277-278.

62 The boards of directors and principal officers of the NED itself, the core groups, and numerous other pass-throughs, can best be described as diverse groups of "proximate policymakers" and seasoned political operatives. For a detailed breakdown of the structure of interlocking boards of directors see, among others, Council on Hemispheric Affairs/Resource Center, National Endowment for Democracy; Inter- Hemispheric Education Resource Center, The Democracy Offensive (Albuquerque,  1989). Both these publications provide diagrams and flow charts.

63 American Political Foundation, "A Commitment to Democracy."

64 John W. Sewell and Christine E. Contee, "U.S. Foreign Aid in the 1980s: Reordering Priorities, " in Kendall W. Stiles and Tsuneo Akaha (eds.),  International Political Economy: A Reader (New York: HarperCollins, 1991),  particularly p. 318.

65 See Agency for International Development, Department of State, "The Democracy Initiative, " Washington, D.C., December 1990.

66 For details, see "U.S. Electoral Assistance and Democratic Development, " proceedings of a conference sponsored by the Washington Office on Latin America, January 19, 1990, Washington, D.C.

67 Agency for International Development, Department of State, "FY 1990 Democratic Initiatives and Human Rights Program Summary, " Washington,  D.C., 1990.

68 Lord, "Psychological Dimension, " pp. 19-20.

69 See "Reagan's Global Reach, " Columbia Journalism Review, 24 (1985), no. 1,  10-11.

70 Phone interview with Journal of Democracy editorial assistant Susan Brown,  May 27, 1994, and letter from Brown, dated May 27, 1994, who described the journal as "really a magazine of the NED."

71 General Accounting Office, Promoting Democracy: Foreign Affairs and Defense Agencies Funds and Activities - 1991 to 1993 GAO/NSIAD-94-83,  January 1994, p. 3. The report specifies that these figures do not include US contributions to the UN and its peacekeeping activities.

72 These policy outlines were scattered throughout all of Clinton's speeches in his first few months in office. For a summary analysis, see "Clinton y America Latina; Un Nuevo Goviemo y Antiguas Crisis, " Enlace, 2 (1993),  no. 1, pp. 1-3, 5.

73 The quote is from Resource Center, "Democratization: U.s. Governmental Actors, " Democracy Backgrounder (1995), no. 1, 4. The $296 million figure is from General Accounting Office, Promoting Democracy, p. 2. For the increase to $48 million, see "Better Dead Than N.E.D., " The Nation, July 12,  1993, 6. For the administration's long-term proposals, see Larry Diamond,  "An American Foreign Policy for Democracy, " Policy Report (Progressive Policy Institute, Washington, D.C.), no. 11 Ouly 1991), 3.

74 Resource Center, "Democratization, " 4-5.

75 Morton H. Halperin, "Guaranteeing Democracy, " Foreign Policy, no. 91 (Summer 1993), 105-106.

76 For a discussion on "party-building" in intervened countries, see Ralph M. Goldman, "Transnational Parties as Multilateral Civic Educators, " in Goldman and Douglas (eds.), Promoting Democracy.

77 Douglas, Developing Democracy, pp. 128-129.

78 Miliband, State in Capitalist Society, p. 187.

79 Talcott Parsons, "'Voting' and the Equilibrium of the American Political System, " in Parsons (ed.), Sociological Theory and Modern Society (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 244.

80 For a summary of labor's role see Roy Godson, "Labor's Role in Building Democracy, " in Goldman and Douglas (eds.), Promoting Democracy.

81 Cited in Tom Barry and Deb Preusch, AIFLD in Central America: Agents as Organizers (Albuquerque: Inter-Hemispheric Education Resource Center,  1987), p. 31.

82 For a summary of this sectoral approach to political intervention, see Samuels and Douglas, "Promoting Democracy."

83 CIA Directorate of Intelligence, "CIA Views on the Third World Population Issues, " June 11, 1984 (declassified January 1995), 5, reproduced in part in Information Project for Africa, Excessive Force: Power, Politics, and Population Control (Washington, D.C., 1995), pp. 33-34; Neil W. Chamberlain,  Beyond Malthus: Population and Power (New York: Basic Books, 1970),  pp.54-55.

84 Women in Development (WID) literature is prolific. A succinct introduction is Annette Fuentes and Barbara Enrenreich, Women in the Global Factory (Boston: South End, 1983).

85 Samuels and Douglas, "Promoting Democracy, " p. 56.

86 See respective chapters and sections for Nicaragua, Chile, and South Africa. For Cuba, see William I. Robinson, "Pushing Polyarchy: The U.S.- Cuba Case and the Third World, " Third World Quarterly: Journal of Emerging Areas, 16 (1995), no. 4, 631-647.

87 This "multiplier effect" method of political organization developed by U.S. foreign-policy experts in political warfare is recommended in CIA,  AID, and Department of Defense political operations manuals. See Robinson, A Faustian Bargain, pp. 74, 210 n44.

88 Cited in Barry and Preusch, AIFLD in Central America, p. 61.

89 Shultz, "Project Democracy." The following citations are all from Shultz.

90 Gershman, "United States."

91 Blum, The CIA, provides a concise documentation of these post-World War II US electoral interventions.

92 For an account of these types of elections put together in Washington and exported to the target countries as part of war policy, see Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, Demonstration Elections: U.S.-Staged Elections ill the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador (Boston: South End,  1984).

93 Ralph M. Goldman, "The Donor-Recipient Relation in Political Aid Programs, " in Goldman and Douglas (eds.), Promoting Democracy, pp. 59,  66-68.

94 See, e.g., Sharon Beaulaurier, "Profiteers Fuel War in Angola, " Covert Action Quarterly, no. 45 (Summer 1993), 61~5.

95 Colby, "Political Action - In The Open."

96 Wiarda, Democratic Revolution, p. 207. Wiarda was for most of the 1980s a resident scholar of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a policy planning group that worked closely with the US government in Project Democracy and in formulating "democracy promotion" strategies.
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3 The Philippines: "Molded in the image of American democracy"

1 Cited in Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance (Boston: South End, 1987), p. 22. I have made extensive use of this excellent 400-page compendium of official documents, newspaper and magazine articles, excerpts from books on the Philippines and United States-Philippine relations, and original essays by the editors.

2 Cited in Laurence Whitehead, "International Aspects of Democratization, " in Guillermo O'Donnell, Philip C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (eds.), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 7.

3 For a definitive history of the U.S. colonial conquest of the Philippines, see Luzviminda Francisco, "The First Vietnam: The Philippine-American War,  1899-1902, " in The Philippines: End of an Illusion (London: AREAS, 1973),  reprinted, in part, in Schirmer and Shalom, Philippines Reader, pp. 8-20.

4 Ibid., p. 11.

5 CIA, Philippines: General Survey (National Intelligence Survey, NS 99), July 1965, reprinted in Schirmer and Shalom, Philippines Reader. See p. 128 for citation.

6 William J. Pomeroy, The Philippines: Colonialism, Collaboration, and Resistance (New York: International Publishers, 1992), although an American citizen, gives a good insider's account of the "Huk" movement.

7 "A Report to the President by the National Security Council on the Position of the United States with Respect to the Philippines" (November 9, 1950), Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950 (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1976), declassified in 1975, reprinted in part in Schirmer and Shalom, Philippines Reader, pp. 109-110.

8 As cited in Schirmer and Shalom, Philippines Reader, p. 119.

9 For a summary of CIA activities in the Philippines, see Blum, The CIA,  pp. 37-43, and numerous entries in Schirmer and Shalom, Philippines Reader.

10 International Labor Office, Sharing in Development: A Programme of Employment,  Equity and Growth for the Philippines (Geneva: International Labor Organization, 1974), reprinted in ibid., citation on p. 135.

11 Richard J. Kessler, "Marcos and the Americans, " Foreign Policy, no. 63 (Summer 1986), p. 52.

12 US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Korea and the Philippines: November 1972, Committee Print, 93rd Congress, 1st session, February 18,  1973, reprinted in part in Schirmer and Shalom, Philippines Reader, citation on p. 168.

13 As cited in ibid., p. 229.

14 For these details, see ibid., p. 226.

15 Ibid., pp. 226-227.

16 See, e.g., Pomeroy, Philippines; James Putzel, A Captive lAnd: The Politics of Agrarian Reform in the Philippines (New York: Monthly Review, 1992); Gary Hawes, "Theories of Peasant Revolution: A Critique and Contribution from the Philippines, " World Politics, 42 (1990), no. 2, 215-229.

17 A detailed account of this debate and an excellent journalistic record of US policy and US-Philippine relations is Raymond Bonner, Waltzing With a Dictator (New York: Times Books, 1987).

18 Stephen W. Bosworth, October 25, 1984 speech before the Rotary Club of Makati West, Manila, Philippines, reprinted as Current Policy, no. 630,  Bureau of Public Affairs, Department of State, Washington, D.C.

19 The NSC directive is reprinted in Schirmer and Shalom, Philippines Reader,  pp. 322-323.

20 Paul Laxalt, "My Conversation with Ferdinand Marcos, " Policy Review,  no. 37 (Summer 1986), 2-5.

21 The $9 million figure is based on NED annual reports from 1984 to 1990,  but the actual amount is probably much higher, since millions more were sent to the Philippines circuitously via such organizations as the AAFLI and via the CIA and other "national security" related spending, which is classified.

22 The Convenors' Statement is reprinted in Schirmer and Shalom, Philippines Reader, pp. 306-308.

23 Cited in Walden Bello, "Counterinsurgency's Proving Ground: Low Intensity Warfare in the Philippines," in Klare and Kornbluh (eds.), Low Intensity Warfare, p. 169.

24 Far Eastern Economic Review, March 6, 1986.
25 NED Annual Report, 1987, Washington D.C., pp. 9-10. 26 For this background, see Stephen R. Shalom, "Counterinsurgency in the Philippines, " Journal of Contemporary Asia, 7 (1977), no. 2, 153-172. See also Bonner, Waltzing, pp. 40, 368, 376.

27 NED Annual Report, 1986, Washington, D.C., p. 14.

28 Schirmer and Shalom, Philippines Reader, p. 309.

29 The KABATID worked in coordination with the Asia Foundation, reportedly a CIA front organization. See Marchetti and Marks, The CIA, pp. 150- 151.

30 "KABATID, " NED internal funding proposal for the 1990 fiscal year,  undated, obtained through the FOIA.

31 Letter from KABATID chairperson Dette Pascual to NED program officer Marc Plattner, August 15, 1989, obtained through the FOIA.

32 For instance, KABATID's vice-ehair, Pacita Almario, was a regional chair of NAMFREL, and owns and manages a chain of restaurants in Manila; Secretary-General Frances Gloria runs her family's export firm and was a Manila coordinator of NAMFREL; Assistant Secretary-General Sony Sison is General Manager of Manila Exports, a major exporting firm; Treasurer Rose Yenko, a former NAMFREL leader, is Executive Vice-President of Y Engineering Cooperation and a managing partner in Development Consultants' Network, a major consulting firm for transnational corporations. Trustee member Carmencita Abella is also Executive Vice-President of the Development Academy of the Philippines, a association of national and foreign big-business interests; trustee Lourdes Baua is Services Chief of the Human Resources Division of the government's Department of Trade and Industry; trustee May Fernandez was Director of the Presidential Staff,  Office of the Cabinet Secretary, under President Aquino; and so on. For this biographical data, see "One Page Summary of Proposal, " KABATID funding proposal submitted to the NED for fiscal year 1991, dated February 22, 1990, obtained through the FOIA.

33 See "Program Proposal, " 8, attached to letter from Tony and Tita Dumagsa, Coordinators of Friends of NAMFREL, to Marc Plattner, NED program officer, dated March 31, 1988, obtained through the FOIA.

34 Through a NED-organized program for "government monitoring and public outreach, " KABATID board members set up a "speakers bureau" and became regular featured commentators on television news and radio talk shows, effectively utilizing in this way the mass media. All "these activities have been made possible through grants provided by ... the US National Endowment for Democracy, " noted the KABATID report, "One Page Summary of Proposal, " dated February 22, 1990, obtained through the FOIA.

35 See letter from KABATID Projects Director Gina Pascual to Friends of NAMFREL, dated February 5, 1989, Annex I, "KABATID Foundation,  Inc., Policies and Procedures, " obtained through the FOIA, and "One Page Summary of Proposal."

36 NED Annual Reports, 1986-88, Washington, D.C.

37 NED Annual Report, 1987, Washington, D.C.

38 Enid Eckstein, "What is the AFL-CIO Doing in the Philippines?, " Labor Notes (Detroit), July 1986, p. 1.

39 For a detailed description of the KMU composition, program, and organizational structure, see Kim Scipes, "Aquino's Total War and the KMU, " Z Magazine, January 1990, 116-121. See also Beth Sims, Workers of the World Undermined: American Labor and the Pursuit of U.S. Foreign Policy (Boston,  South End, 1993).

40 NED Annual Reports, 1984-91, Washington, D.C.

41 NED Annual Report, 1984, Washington, D.C., 19.

42 Tim Shorrock and Kathy Selvaggio, "Which Side Are You On, AAFLI?, " The Nation, February 15, 1986, p. 170.

43 See minutes of the March 17, 1989 meeting of the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, D.C., obtained through the FOIA.

44 Phil Bronstein and David Johnston, "U.S. Funding Anti-Left Fight in Philippines, " San Francisco Examiner, July 21, 1985.

45 "Proposal from the FTUI to the NED for 1989 Programs, " December 1988,  Section B, Asia, 29, obtained through the FOIA.

46 Shorrock and Selvaggio, "Which Side Are You On, AAFLI?, " p. 171.

47 "Proposal for 1989 Programs, " Section B, Asia, 30, obtained through the FOIA.

48 "Request to the National Endowment for Democracy for Funds for the Free Trade Union Institute for FY 1988 Programs, " December 16, 1987,  Section B, Asia, 31-32, obtained through the FOIA.

49 Ibid., 30.

50 "Proposal for 1989 programs, " p. 29.

51 Scipes, "Aquino's Total War, " pp. 116-121; Adele Oltman and Dennis Bernstein, "Counterinsurgency in the Philippines, " Covert Action Information Bulletin, no. 29 (Winter 1988), 18-20.

52 See, e.g., Kay Eisenhower, "AFL-CIO Agency Offers Cash to Filipino Union Leader for Vote on U.s. Bases Treaty, " Labor Notes, no. 152 (November 1991), 1-6.

53 For excellent analyses of the complex post-Marcos situation, see Walden Bello and John Gershman, "Democratization and Stabilization in the Philippines, " Critical Sociology, 17 (1990), no. 1, 35-56; James B. Goodno,  The Philippines: Land of Broken Promises (London: Zed, 1991).

54 Benedict J. Kerkvliet and Resil B. Mojares (eds.), From Marcos to Aquino: Local Perspectives on Political Transition in the Philippines (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), p. 5.

55 Cited in Bello and Gershman, "Democratization and Stabilization, " p. 37.

56 Assistance for Democracy Act of 1986, House of Representatives, 99th Congress, 2nd session, Report 99-722, July 30, 1986, Washington, D.C. The package provided balance-of-payments support, budget support, and funds for the dismantling of "crony capitalism, " the introduction of neoliberal economic reform programs, payments on Manila's foreign debt,  and other assistance.

57 Sandra Burton, "Aquino's Philippines: The Center Holds, " Foreign Affairs,  65 (1987), no. 3, 525-537 at p. 533.

58 Agency for International Development, "Philippine Assistance Strategy: U.S. Fiscal Years 1991-1995", Washington D.C., July 1990, p. 1.

59 Bello and Gershman, "Democratization and Stabilization, " p. 45. The two note the example of the January 1988 local elections, when "electoral competition between the traditional elite parties was feverish, but candidates of the leftist Partido ng Bayan, fearing for their lives, dared not run in areas dominated by military-backed vigilante groups, " and that "dissent is indeed possible, but within sharply circumscribed limits. Those .who breach the limits become fair game for death squads and right-wing vigilantes."

60 Carl H. Lande, "Manila's Malaise, " Journal of Democracy, 2 (1991), no. 1, 51.

61 For analyses of low-intensity warfare in the Philippines in the 1980s and the US role, see Bello, "Counterinsurgency's Proving Ground"; Arnel de Guzman and Tito Craige, "Counterinsurgency War in the Philippines and the Role of the United States, " Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 23 (1991), no. 1, 3s-47; Oltman and Bernstein, "Counterinsurgency in the Philippines, " pp. 18-21. Washington reportedly authorized stepped-up clandestine CIA operations against the left in the Philippines, including a $10 million allocation to the NAFP for enhanced intelligence-gathering operations, and an increase in the number of CIA personnel, from 115 to 127, attached to the US embassy in Manila. See Bello, "Counterinsurgency's Proving Ground, " p. 177; Oltman and Bernstein, "Counterinsurgency in the Philippines, " p. 20.

62 For a discussion of these pressures on Aquino, see Bello, "Counterinsurgency's Proving Ground, " pp. 171-174. See chapter 5 on Nicaragua for similar pressures placed on Chamorro.

63 Cited in Bello, "Counterinsurgency's Proving Ground, " p. 174.

64 Putzel, A Captive Land.

65 For these specific statistics, see Michele Douglas, "Unfulfilled Dreams: Philippine Land Reform, " Asia-Pacific Backgrounder (Third World Reports,  Boston), 3 (1990), no. 4, p. 1.

66 NED Annual Report, 1984, Washington, D.C., p. 20.

67 Oltman and Bernstein, "Counterinsurgency in the Philippines, " p. 19.

68 See, e.g., Rigoberta Tiglao, "Agrarian Reform Program Fails in Its Objectives: Repeat Offenders, " Far Eastern Economic Review, September 5, 1991,  16-20.

69 See, for example, Philippines - The Killing Goes On (London/New York: Amnesty International, 1992); Bad Blood - Militia Abuses in Mindanao (New York: Asia Watch, 1992).

70 For instance, see David Timberman, "The Philippines at the Polls, " Journal of Democracy, 3 (1992), no. 4, 119-124.

71 For details, see Agency for International Development, "Philippine Assistance Strategy, " citation on p.76; Doug Cunningham, "U.S. Philippine Relations: Taking a New Turn, " Philippine International Forum, Occasional Article NO.5, Cebu City, Philippines, August 1992.

72 For a discussion on the dilemmas of the Filipino left in the post-Marcos period, see Bello and Gershman, "Democratization and Stabilization, " pp.48-50.

73 Timberman, "The Philippines at the Polls, " pp. 119, 121.

74 Agency for International Development" "Philippine Assistance Strategy, " p.76.

75 Cited in Manila Chronicle, April 8, 1992. For more details, see Cunningham,  "U.S. Philippine Relations."

4 Chile: Ironing out "a fluke of the political system"

1 Cited in Seymour M. Hersh, "The Price of Power: Kissinger, Nixon, and Chile, " Atlantic Monthly, December 1982, 21-58, at p. 35.

2 Ibid., 27.

3 Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979),  p.654.

4 United States Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973 (Washington, D.C., 1975).

5 Michael T. Klare, War Without End (New York: Vintage Books, 1972),  p.280.

6 David Horowitz, "The Alliance for Progress, " in Robert I. Rhodes (ed.),  Imperialism and Underdevelopment: A Reader (New York: Monthly Review,  1970).

7 Nelson Rockefeller, The Rockefeller Report of a United States Presidential Mission for the Western Hemisphere (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969).

8 Crozier, et al., Crisis of Democracy.

9 Commission on United States-Latin American Relations, The Americas in a Changing World (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973).

10 National Bipartisan Commission, The Report of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (New York: Macmillan, 1984). The report was in specific reference to Central America, but was seen as a general policy statement for Latin America.

11 For such arguments, see, e.g., Karen Remmer, Military Rule in Latin America (Boulder: Westview, 1989); Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

12 There is abundant literature on dependency and on the specific 151model. See, among others, Fernando Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Los Angeles: University of California Press,  1979); Guillermo O'Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).A good overview is Ronald H. Chilcote and Joel C. Edelstein, Latin America: Capitalist and Socialist Perspectives of Development and Underdevelopment (Boulder: Westview,  1986).

13 The debt crisis dates back to the 1970s' "global shocks" triggered by the OPEC oil crisis. Behind this crisis was the unprecedented transfer of resources and economic power to international finance capital. OPEC governments and oil company deposits in Western banks led to huge investible bank surpluses that were "recycled" as loans to Latin America. Beneath the surface, the transnationalized fraction of capital, and particularly finance capital, became hegemonic, as money capital became the regulator of the international circuit of production rather than investment capital. On the relation between the 1970sshocks and global restructuring,  see Kolko, Restructuring the World Economy. On the debt crisis, among others, see Arthur MacEwan, Debt and Disorder: International Economic Instability and U.S. Imperial Decline (New York: Monthly Review, 1990); Jackie Roddick (ed.), The Dance of the Millions: Latin America and the Debt Crisis (London: Latin America Bureau, 1988).

14 There was a definite element of intentionality on the part of transnational capital concerning the accumulation of debt and its consequences. Jerome I. Levinson, a former IDB official explained: "The debt crisis afforded an unparalleled opportunity to achieve, in the debtor countries, structural reforms ... The core of these reforms was a commitment on the part of the debtor countries to reduce the role of the public sector as a vehicle for economic and social development and rely more on market forces and private enterprise, domestic and foreign." World Bank official Sir William Ryrie described the debt crisis as "a blessing in disguise." Citations in Doug Henwood, "Impeccable Logic: Trade, Development and Free Markets in the Clinton Era, " NACLA Report on the Americas, 26 (1993),  no. 5, p. 25.

15 Rolando Munck, Latin America: The Transition to Democracy (London: Zed,  1989), pp. 49-52.

16 Eduardo Silva, "Capitalist Coalitions, the State, and Neo-Liberal Economic Restructuring, " World Politics, 45 (1993), no. 4, 526-559; Alex E. Fernandez Jilberto, "Chile: The Laboratory Experiment in International Neo-Liberalism, " in Henk Overbeek, Restructuring Hegemony in the Global Political Economy (Routledge: London and New York, 1993).

17 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 208. In Dependent Development, Evans shows how states legitimize themselves when they serve the needs of general accumulation and lose legitimacy when they begin to act as "states-for-themselves, " whether military or civilian. Thus in Brazil, new elite fractions closely tied to multinational capital began to push in the 1970s for "democratization and de-statization, " meaning polyarchy and neoliberalism. Peter Evans, Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational,  State and Local Capital in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 266, 269, 272, 279.

18 See, e.g., Maurice Zeitlin and Richard Earl Ratcliff, Landlords and Capitalists:

The Dominant Class of Chile (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 19 For these franchise details see William F. Sater, Chile and the United States: Empires in Conflict (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), pp. 129-130, 139. The strength of the polyarchic system led to a relatively nonpolitical military - another factor often mentioned by these observers. But its "constitutional character" should not be confused with its repressive capacity. The Chilean armed forces, like their Latin American counterparts,  have a long tradition of repressing popular sectors, including massacres in 1907, 1921, 1925, 1953, and 1967.

20 Cited in Wiarda, Democratic Revolution, p. 98.

21 Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, 2nd edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 112.

22 US Senate, Covert Action, p. 8.

23 Sater, Chile and the United States, p. 131.

24 US Senate, Covert Action, p. 16

25 Ibid., 14, 18.

26 Sater, Chile and the United States, p. 140.

27 Hersh, "The Price of Power," p. 32.

28 Cited in Alonso Aguilar, Pan-Americanism from Monroe to the Present: A View from the Other Side (New York, Monthly Review, 1986), p. 119.

29 These are AID figures, cited in Cole Blasier, The Hovering Giant: U.S. Responses to Revolutionary Change in Latin America, 1910-1985 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 1985), pp. 263-264.

30 US Senate, Covert Action, p. 9.

31 Sater, Chile and the United States, p. 132.

32 James Petras and Morris Morley, The United States and Chile: Imperialism and the Overthrow of the Allende Government (New York, Monthly Review,  1975), pp. 8-9.

33 Hersh, "The Price of Power, " p. 32.

34 The best source for the UP program is the published official program itself,  Programa de la Unidad Popular (Santiago, 1969), reproduced in English as The Popular Unity Program (New York: North American Congress on Latin America, 1972).

35 Documentation is voluminous. For US government reports, see US Senate,  Covert Action, and US Congress, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to lntel1igence Activities, Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 94th Congress, 1st Session,  November 10, 1975, hereafter referred to as Assassination Report. For an extensively footnoted summary, see Blum, The CIA, particularly pp. 232- 243. See also: Petras and Morley, United States and Chile; Hersh, "The Price of Power." Poul Jensen, The Garotte: The United States and Chile, 1970-1973,  2 vols. (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1988), is probably the single most comprehensive source of information and analysis of US intervention in the Allende period, and includes a critical review of existing literature.

36 US Congress, Assassination Report, p. 23.

37 Hersh, "The Price of Power"; Petras and Morley, United States and Chile,  pp. 40-41.

38 Hersh, "The Price of Power, " p. 57.

39 US Senate, Covert Action, p. 33.

40 For details on Aylwin's "white coup d'etat" strategy, see Sobel, Chile and Allende, pp. 135, 138; Gabriel Smimow, The Revolution Disarmed: Chile 1970-1973 (New York: Monthly Review, 1979), pp. 111-113, 127-128, 152.

41 US Congress, Assassination Report, p. 140.

42 Petras and Morley, United States and Chile, p. 82.

43 AID figures cited in Blasier, Hovering Giant, p. 264.

44 US Senate, Covert Action, p. 38.

45 Petras and Morley, United States and Chile, p. 6.

46 This estimate was officially accepted by the US State Department in February 1974. See Sobel, Chile and Allende, p. 168.

47 New York Times, September 17, 1974, as reproduced in Sobel, Chile and Allende, p. 170.

48 US Senate, Covert Action, p. 47; Blum, The CIA, p. 242.

49 US Congress, Assassination Report, p. 229.

50 Petras and Morley, United States and Chile, p. 14.

51 Ibid., p. 76.

52 A critical analysis of how three distinct variables came together in the Chilean counterrevolution is Smimow, Revolution Disarmed.

53 Smimow, Revolution Disarmed, p. 68. A day after the coup, Frei released a POC communique welcoming the coup in unambiguous terms. For a summary of the POC post-coup positions, see John Dinges, "The Rise of the Opposition, " NACLA Report on the Americas, 17 (1983), no. 5, 16, 26. Even before the coup, key POC leaders, including Frei and Aylwin, had made discreet contact with the military to lobby for a coup. Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), pp. 281, 352 n. 28.

54 See, for instance, Sobel, Chile and Allende, p. 170. Constable and Valenzuela,  Nation of Enemies, pp. 281, 352 n. 28; Dinges, "Rise of the Opposition, " p. 26.

55 Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy: Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). In contrast to Mexico, the UP government never controlled the state per se, only the executive branch within the state (the presidency). The UP coalition was unable to capture a controlling proportion of the legislature, which remained an instrument of the dominant classes, and was never able to control the judicial system,  which also operated as a potent weapon of the elite - particularly since the UP government was committed to abiding by the constitutional framework which authorized the judicial system to rule on what it could and could not do "constitutionally."

56 The Le Monde report is reproduced in Sobel, Chile and Allende, p. 169.

57 Lance Compa, "Laboring for Unity, " NACLA Report on the Americas, 22 (1988), no. 2.

58 For details of the recruitment by the AID of the "Chicago Boys, " see Constable and Valenzuela, Nation of Enemies, pp. 166-168.

59 Arturo Valenzuela, "Chile: Origins, Consolidation, and Breakdown of a Democratic Regime, " in Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset, Democracy in Developing Countries, 4 vols. (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1989), IV, p. 200.

60 Constable and Valenzuela, Nation of Enemies, pp. 166-168.

61 For these statistics, see Sobel, Chile and Allende, p. 190. Regarding CIA technical assistance to DINA, see Constable and Valenzuela, Nation of Enemies, p. 91.

62 Petras and Morley, United States and Chile, p. ix.

63 Sater, Chile and the United States, p. 191; Constable and Valenzuela, Nation of Enemies, p. 172.

64 Sater, Chile and the United States, pp. 191, 195.

65 Ibid., p. 194.

66 Congressional Record, Senate, 99th Congress, 1st Session, vol. 131, no. 141,  October 25, 1985, p. 13763.

67 An excellent summary of the 1985-1988 shift is Martha Lyn Doggett,  "Washington's Not-So-Quiet Diplomacy, " NACLA Report on the Americas,  22 (1988), no. 2, 29-38.

68 For details, see ibid.; Constable and Valenzuela, Nation of Enemies, p. 290. They point out that Barnes, in addition, visibly kept at arm's length from the leftist and popular opposition.

69 Sater, Chile and the United States, p. 201.

70 Elliot Abrams, "Latin America and the Caribbean: The Paths to Democracy, " June 30, 1987 address before the Washington World Affairs Council, Washington, D.C., reprinted by the Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, Current Policy, no. 982 Guly 1987).

71 Sater, Chile and the United States, p. 200.

72 This strategy is outlined, among other places, in a slew of "working papers" and policy proposals funded by the NED (see below for details on this NED involvement), among them: Genaro Arriagada, Negociacion politica y movilizacion social: la critica de las protestas (Santiago: Centro del Estudios de Desarrollo, 1987); Ignacio Balbontin, Movilizacion social, control social de los conflictos y negociacion politica (Santiago: Centro del Estudios de Desarrollo, 1987); Heman Pozo, Partidos politicos y organizaciones poblacionales: una relacion problematica (Santiago: FLACSO, 1986); Philip Oxhorn,  Democracia y participacion popular: organizaciones poblacionales en la futura democratica chilena (Santiago: FLACSO, 1986). The strategy is also discussed by one of its architects and activists, Genaro Arriagada, Pinochet: The Politics of Power (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), esp. pp. 70-78. Arriagada was a top POC leader.

73 New York Times, December 2, 1984.

74 Sater, Chile and the United States, p. 200.

75 Ibid., p. 201.

76 Ibid., p. 203.

77 For these details, see Fernando Villagran, "Me or Chaos, " NACLA Report on the Americas, 22 (1988), no. 2, 14-20; Arriagada, Pinochet, pp. 69-70.

78 A useful review of the origins, strategies, leadership and thinking of twenty-two of the Chilean political parties is the compendium edited by Patricio Tupper, 88/89: Opciones politicas en Chile: La voz de los partidos politicos, movimientos y corrientes de opinion. Lideres, ideas y programs (Santiago: Ediciones Colchagua, 1987).

79 Washington condemned the FPMR's "terrorism" and assisted in counterinsurgency efforts by providing the junta with intelligence information. See Arriagada, Pinochet, p. 77.

80 See, e.g., Department of State, Office of Democratic Initiatives, Latin American Caribbean Bureau, "Evaluation of Voter Education Program in Chile Inter-American Institute of Human Rights - CIVITAS, " final report,  LAC grant number 0591-G-S5-8005-00, Agency for International Development,  Washington, D.C., February 1989, p. iii.

81 Doggett, "Washington's Not-So-Quiet Diplomacy, " p. 36.

82 Arriagada, Pinochet, p. 69; Dinges, "Rise of the Opposition, " pp. 18-20; Congressional Record, Senate, 99th Congress, 1st Session, vol. 131, no. 141,  October 22, 1985, p. 13763.

83 Arriagada, Pinochet, pp. 75-78. The specific citation is on p. 78.

84 See Villagran, "Me or Chaos, " for details on the polls. See NED Annual Report, 1988, for details on the NRI funding.

85 Arriagada, Pinochet, p. 68.

86 For these NED spending figures, see Annual Reports, 1984-1991. For 001 funding, see Doggett, "Washington's Not-So-Quiet Diplomacy, " pp. 34-35.

87 Sobel, Chile and Allende, pp. 43, 47-48. Boeninger was rector of the University of Chile during the Allende years.

88 Regarding this strategy, and POC leaders' roles, see Paul H. Ooeker, Lost Illusions: Latin America's Struggle for Democracy, as Recounted by its Leaders (La Jolla/New York: Institute of the Americas/Markus Wiener Publishers,  1990), pp. 21-23, 35-36, 39, 44; Constable and Valenzuela, Nation of Enemies, p. 284.

89 NED Annual Reports, 1986-1991. Two of the studies to come out of the FLAC50-NED programs were: Heraldo Munoz and Carlos Portales, Una amistad esquiva: Las relaciones de Estados Unidos y Chile (Santiago: FLACSO/ PROSPEL-CERC, 1987); Eduardo Boeninger, et al., Estados Unidos y Chile hacia 1987 (Santiago: FLACSO, 1987). Munoz, Portales, Boeninger, and other contributors to these studies were all closely associated with the POC, with one or another NED, or AID-funded programs and/or with the elite transition strategy in general. Portales went on to become Deputy Minister of Foreign Relations in the Aylwin government. Boeninger went on to become Aylwin's chief advisor.

90 The study group published a subsequent report, by Mark Falcoff, Arturo Valenzuela, and Susan Kaufman Purcell, Chile: Prospects for Democracy (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988). See p. 79 for a list of the study group members. Domhoff, Who Rules America Now?, pp. 85-88,  notes that Council "study groups" are central components of the US foreign policymaking process, the creation of a study group signals that some new policy initiative is underway, and the results of these study groups generally guide policymakers.

91 NED Summary, "Development of Democracy Project, " dated February 19,  1985, obtained through the FOIA.

92 NED Annual Report, 1986, pp. 31-32. Constable and Valenzuela noted that "the emerging opposition parties and press were relying on them [the US-funded think-tanks] for expertise. Under Edgardo Boeninger, the Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo (CEO) became a meeting ground" and clearing-house for the opposition. Nation of Enemies, p. 253.

93 Sobel, Chile and Allende, pp. 47-48; Smirnow, Revolution Disarmed, p. 142; Constable and Valenzuela, Nation of Enemies, p. 255.

94 NED Annual Report, 1986, 31.

95 For summaries on Freedom House, see Council on Hemispheric Affairs/ Resource Center, National Endowment for Democracy, pp. 67-69; Freedom House, Groupwatch series (Albuquerque: The Resource Center, 1989).

96 NED Annual Reports, 1986-1991. For the specific citations, see 1987 report, p. 50.

97 The five parties were the right-wing National Unity Movement and the centrist Christian Democratic, Social Democrat, Christian Humanist, and Radical parties. See NED Summary, "Editorial Fund for the Dissemination of Democratic Thought in Chile, " one-page project summary (undated),  obtained through the FOIA.

98 See, e.g., NED Annual Reports, 1988 and 1989.

99 Valenzuela, "Chile: Origins, Consolidation, and Breakdown, " particularly pp.186-187.

100 See, e.g., Heman Larrain F., Governabilidad en Chile luego del regimen militar (Santiago: Centro de Estudios del Desarrollo, August 1987); Manuel Antonio Garreton M., En busca de la democracia perdida (Santiago: Centro de Estudios del Desarrollo, August 1985); Arriagada, Negociacion politica; Balbontin, Movilizacion social; Pozo, Partidos politicos; Oxhorn, Democracia y participacion.

101 NED Annual Reports, 1989, p. 31; 1990, p. 38. See also Edgardo Boeninger,  "Lessons from the Past: Hopes for the Future, " Journal of Democracy, 1 (1990), no. 2, 13-17.

102 "Delphi International Services, National Endowment for Democracy,  Grant with Delphi for the Implementation of the Project with Participa, " final activities report, grant number 89-50.1, April-December, 1989, dated February 28, 1990, obtained through the FOIA.

103 NED Annual Reports, 1984-1990.

104 For details on the CIA Institute and its revival by the NED, see Wiarda,  Democratic Revolution, p. 106. For the founding of the School in Venezuela,  see NED Annual Report, 1984, p. 32.

105 See National Democratic Institute, Chile's Democratic Transition (Washington D.C., 1988); NED Annual Report, 1985, pp. 5, 16.

106 New York Times, January 27, 1986; Doggett, "Washington's Not-So-Quiet Diplomacy."

107 Constable and Valenzuela, Nation of Enemies, p. 289.

108 See, for example, Mark Falcoff, "Chile: A Cognitive Map, " in Falcoff, et al.,  Chile: Prospects for Democracy.

109 NED Annual Report, 1984, p. 34.

110 NED Annual Report, 1986, p. 33.

111 NED Annual Report, 1986, p. 32.

112 See, e.g., NED Annual Report, 1989, p. 30.

113 See, e.g., NED Annual Report, 1987, pp. 50-51.

114 NDI, Chile's Transition, pp. 5-6.

115 NED Annual Report, 1987, p. 50; NDI, Chile's Transition, p. 6.

116 Ibid., p. 7.

117 NED Summary, "Committee for Free Elections (Chile), " undated, obtained through the FOIA.

118 NED Annual Reports, 1987-1989.

119 NED Summary, "Committee for Free Elections: FY 1987 Evaluation, " obtained through the FOIA.

120 New York Times, November 18, 1988. Frank Hartwig was the NOlcontracted polling analyst.

121 For these details, see the following NED Summaries: "Supplement for Participa (Chile), " undated; "Candidate Forums in Chile: A Nonpartisan Voter Education Service"; "Delphi International Services, National Endowment for Democracy, Grant with Delphi for the Implementation of the Project with Participa, final activities report, grant number 89-50.1, April- December, 1989, " dated February 28, 1990, all obtained through the FOIA.

122 See Fred Landis, "C.I.A. Psychological Warfare Operations: Case Studies in Chile, Jamaica, and Nicaragua, " Science for the People, January-February 1982, 6-37.

123 See NED Annual Reports, 1988-1990; NED Summary "LA Epoca Newspaper, " undated, apparently 1989, obtained through the FOIA.

124 For an overview, see Peter Wino, "U.S. Electoral Aid in Chile: Reflections on a Success Story, " paper presented at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) conference, U.S. Electoral Assistance and Democratic Development, Washington, D.C., January 19, 1990. The precise figures are $2.7 million provided by the NED (NED Annual Report, 1988), and $1.2 million provided by the AID through the Democratic Initiatives Office. See Agency for International Development, FY 1990 Democratic Initiatives and Human Rights Program Summary (Washington, D.C, 1989), p. 12.

125 For background on CAPEL, see Robinson, Faustian Bargain, pp. 98-99.

126 For these details, see NED Annual Reports, 1987-1990; NED Summary,  "Candidate Forums in Chile: A Nonpartisan Voter Education Service, " 1989, obtained through the FOIA.

127 This was said by Frank Greer, "Media Consultant" for NDI, in testimony before the Bipartisan Commission for Free and Fair Elections in Nicaragua, " May 9, 1989, Washington, D.C I attended the Commission's hearings.

128 Ooeker, Lost Illusions, p. 48.

129 For documentation and analysis of the electoral results see Cesar N. Caviedes, Elections in Chile: The Road Toward Redemocratization (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1991).

130 For self-congratulatory discussion on the success of the elite strategy see Joseph S. Tulchin and Augusto Varas (eds.), From Dictatorship to Democracy: Rebuilding Political Consensus in Chile (Washington, D.C/Boulder: Woodrow Wilson Center /Lynne Rienner, 1991).

131 New York Times, October 16, 1973, reprinted in Sobel, Chile and Allende,  p.153.

132 NED Summary, "Democratic Action in Slum Areas ('Poblaciones')", May 1985, obtained through the FOIA.

133 "Center for Youth Development (FY 1987) Evaluation, " NED summary document on its youth program in Chile, September 9, 1988, obtained through the FOIA.

134 For Quintero's background, see Robinson, Faustian Bargain, p. 51.

135 Constable and Valenzuela, Nation of Enemies, p. 226.

136 "National Endowment for Democracy: Grant with Delphi For the Implementation of the Project with Accion Vecinal y Comunitaria, " final report,  grant number 88-513-E-Q39-22.0, March 1988-February 1989, dated August 31, 1989, obtained through the FOIA.

137 "Proyecto de Apoyo, Formacion y Asistencia Tecnica a Dirigentes y Organizaciones Poblacionales de Inspiracion Democratica (Renovacion), " document submitted on AVEC letterhead to the NED along with a cover letter from Sergio Wilson Petit to NED official Katty Kauffman, dated February 8, 1988, obtained through the FOIA.

138 "National Endowment for Democracy: Grant with Delphi, " 31 August 1989.

139 Ibid.

140 "The Delphi International Group, National Endowment for Democracy,  Grant with Delphi for Accion Vecinal Y Comunitaria (AVEC), " quarterly report, grant no. 88-513-E-039-22.0, October 1988-December 1988, dated March 15, 1989, obtained through the FOIA.

141 The FI1J1 received some $1 million between 1984 and 1990 for its Chile programs. NED Annual Reports, 1984-1990. To this must be added several million dollars more in regional Latin American FI1J1 programs in which Chilean trade unions were involved, as well as millions of dollars more which the Chilean unions received, not through the FI1J1, but through other AFL-CIO channels.

142 Villagran, "Me or Chaos, " p. 17.

143 See, e.g., Compa, "Laboring for Unity, " pp. 21-28; Smimow, Revolution Disarmed, pp. 28-29, 82-85.

144 See, e.g., Compa, "Laboring for Unity, " pp. 24, 25; Smimow, Revolution Disarmed, pp. 82-85.

145 See, e.g., Compa, "Laboring for Unity, " p. 27. Constable and Valenzuela,  Nation of Enemies, pp. 228-229, report that the AFL-CIO's AIFLD sent a delegation to Chile in 1978 to meet with Pinochet. The delegation told Pinochet that radical unionism would get the upper hand if the regime did not allow the Group of Ten to operate freely. Pinochet obliged.

146 See, e.g., Dinges, "Rise of the Opposition, " pp. 21-23.

147 NED Annual Report, 1984, p. 16.

148 NED Annual Report, 1984, p. 16; 1985, p. 14.

149 Compa, "Laboring for Unity, " p. 27.

150 For these NED-FTUI funding cycles, see NED Annual Reports, 1984-1992.

151 See, e.g., "Quarterly Report to the National Endowment for Democracy from the Free Trade Union Institute, AFL-CIO, " 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quarters, 1988 and 1989; NED Summary "Democratic Labor and the Chilean Transition to Democracy, " undated (contents indicate it was drafted after the October 1988 plebiscite and before the December 1989 national elections), obtained through the FOIA.

152 Free Trade Union Institute, "Request to the National Endowment for Democracy for Funds for the Free Trade Union Institute, FY 1990, " March 5, 1990, obtained through the FOIA.

153 "Quarterly Report to the National Endowment for Democracy from the Free Trade Union Institute, AFL-ClO, Regarding Activities and Expenditures Undertaken Pursuant to Grants Made in FY '88, FY '89 and FY '90,  First Quarter 1990 January 1, 1990 through March 31, 1990), " dated April 30, 1990, p. 26, obtained through the FOIA.

154 "Center for Youth Development (FY 1987) Evaluation," September 9, 1988.

155 NED Summary, "Formation of Youth Leaders for Democracy, " July 12,  1984, obtained through the FOIA.

156 NED Summary, "Center for Youth Development, " undated (contents indicate it was drafted in early 1988), obtained through the FOIA.

157 Letter from Miguel Salazar to Katty Kauffman of the National Endowment for Democracy, on CDJ letterhead, March 29, 1988, obtained through the FOIA.

158 NED Annual Report, 1986, p. 33.

159 Ibid., p. 33.

160 "Funcionamiento de la Nueva Institucionalidad Democratica, Proyecto 'CEL', " summary document by Sergio Molina on CEL activities and future plans, submitted to the NED with a cover letter on Delphi letterhead,  November 30, 1989, obtained through the FOIA.

161 See, e.g., NED Annual Reports, 1990-1992.

162 Cathy Schneider, "The Underside of the Miracle, " NACLA Report on the Americas, 26 (1993), no. 4, 18-19.

163 See, e.g., Paul E. Sigmund, The United States and Democracy in Chile (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

164 Boeninger, "Lessons from the Past, " p. 13. Boeninger asserts that, in the seventeen years of dictatorship, "The Chilean Left learned the hard way - through exile, torture, and proscription - to appreciate political freedoms ... Never again will democracy be threatened from the left of our political spectrum" (p. 14). Given Boeninger's apparent historical amnesia,  it should be recalled that it was not the Chilean left that departed from the "democratic" rules, but the Chilean center, including his own POC, the right and the United States.

165 Cited in James Petras and Steve Vieux, "The Chilean 'Economic Miracle': An Empirical Critique, " Critical Sociology, 17 (1990), no. 2, 56-72, quote from p. 70. I draw on this excellent article in the following section. For succinct critique of the "miracle, " see also Duncan Green, "Chile: The First Latin American Tiger?, " NACLA Report on the Americas, 28 (1994), no. 1,  12-16.

166 See, e.g., Thomas Klubock, "And Justice When?, " NACLA Report on the Americas, 24 (1991), no. 5, 6-7.

167 Petras and Vieux, "Chilean 'Economic Miracle', " p. 66.

168 Ibid.

169 ECLAC report released in Santiago, Chile, on October 23, 1990,  reported in Agence France Presse news dispatch from Santiago, October 13, 1990.

170 Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, p. 138.

171 Petras and Vieux, "Chilean 'Economic Miracle', " p. 64.

172 Ibid., pp. 58-59.

173 Ibid.

174 Pedro Vuskovic Bravo, "Chile: Mito y Realidad de un Milagro, " Pensamiento Propio, no. 85 (October 1991), 7-11.

175 Petras and Vieux, "Chilean 'Economic Miracle', " pp. 60-61.

176 Ibid., pp. 62-63.

177 Green, "Chile: The First Latin American Tiger?"

178 Arturo Valenzuela and Pamela Constable, "Chile after Pinochet: Democracy Restored, " Journal of Democracy, 1 (1990), no. 2, p. 6.

179 Petras and Vieux, "Chilean 'Economic Miracle', " p. 59.

180 See Vuskovic Bravo, "Chile: Mito y Realidad, " p. 9.

181 Boeninger, "Lessons from the Past, " p. 15.

182 Petras and Vieux, "Chilean 'Economic Miracle', " p. 70.
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