Decentring the West: The Idea of Democracy and the Struggle for Hegemony by Viatcheslav Morozov

Author:Viatcheslav Morozov [Morozov, Viatcheslav]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, Social Policy, Political Ideologies, General
ISBN: 9781409449706
Google: KBdvLwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 17396332
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-01-15T08:02:53+00:00

1 Characteristically, a documentary about the movement was named ‘Zapatistas’ Word Against Injustice’ (Palabras Zapatistas contra la injusticia 2003).

Chapter 6

Democracy and Counter-Hegemony in Latin America: The Cases of Bolivia and Venezuela

João Marcelo E. Maia and Maurício Santoro

The process of large scale institutional change, which started in South America during the mid-1990s, challenged both the so called ‘neoliberal wave’ of economic reforms and the liberal discourse on democracy. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the region’s governments and social movements explored new institutional arrangements, framed by alternative perspectives which sought to critically reassess and ‘decentre’ Western concepts of political and economic liberalism. This chapter examines these new discourses on democracy, focusing on the cases of Bolivia and Venezuela. While our primary empirical focus is on the constitutional texts, we also analyse other materials, such as official speeches and the texts of international agreements. We chose Bolivia and Venezuela as our cases because their political experiences in challenging liberal democracy have been the most radical in contemporary Latin America. Therefore, these two countries must be the first on the list of cases to be explored in search of potential counter-hegemonic alternatives emergent in this part of the world. As we aim to contribute to current theoretical discussions on democracy and postcoloniality, our method of discourse analysis provides a broader vision of the concepts and categories that are shared by different political actors both in Bolivia and in Venezuela.

This chapter is divided into three sections. The first deals with the Bolivian case. We present a brief summary of Bolivia’s modern political history, focusing on the struggle for control of natural resources and on the debate over the indigenous people’s identity. This is followed by a textual analysis of Bolivia’s Constitution, with a view to explaining how the official discourse depicts the significance of democracy and entangles it with the political struggles around indigenous identities. The second section turns to the Venezuelan case and follows the same path: we sum up the country’s recent political history, and then study Bolivarian discourses on democracy and national identity. Finally, the third section analyses one of the most important counter-hegemonic initiatives launched by the Venezuelan government – the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América, ALBA). Founded in December 2004 by Venezuela and Cuba, ALBA is an international cooperation agreement that challenges alleged US imperialism in the region by bringing together Latin American countries that want to distance themselves from the neoliberal order. We conclude by evaluating both the liberating potential and the limitations of these particular versions of the Latin American counter-hegemonic discourse on democracy.

We argue that in these recently adopted constitutional texts, there is ample evidence of emerging counter-hegemonic approaches to democracy, especially those regarding the definition of representation, the rights of indigenous people, as well as social and economic rights. Our reading of these discourses follows postcolonial theorization of discourses and identities, in as much as we treat these counter-hegemonic discourses neither as

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