The Chilean Political Process by Manuel Antonio Garretón

Author:Manuel Antonio Garretón [Garretón, Manuel Antonio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780044970699
Google: 5RGjDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 8283254
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Australia
Published: 2019-07-16T03:54:13+00:00

The Failure of Military Dictatorships and Their Legacy

The military dictatorships of the Southern Cone end or move inexorably toward their end as a result of a double failure. The first failure is their inability to resolve any important national problems, such as economic stagnation, external dependency, unemployment, growing inequality, misery, and disintegrating social relations. In those countries where a modernizing impulse previously existed, it has not extended throughout society as a whole, greatly aggravating internal polarization. But this failure in terms of national project also creates a failure in terms of a class or hegemonic project. These military regimes have actually failed in terms of their own parameters and dimensions. They have succeeded neither in decisively dismantling the preceding society nor in establishing a new political order as the culmination of the transformations introduced in society. In one form or another, politics have survived, and the old organizations and actors have achieved some degree of continuity with those emerging during the military regime. Thus the armed forces end up retiring to make way for relatively classical and familiar political forms.

But the failure of both the reactive dimension and the foundational dimension—the entire historical project of these regimes—does not mean that the societies involved have not suffered changes and transformations. Nor does the transition toward democratic regimes imply that there is nothing new under the sun or that everything picks up where it left off before the dictatorship. On the contrary, these regimes leave a profound imprint on societies that have been transformed and to some degree have ceased being what they were before.

This attempt at reestablishing the capitalist order is a problematic process that sets up for the dominant coalition what might be called a spiral of parameters. The first parameter is disorganizing the opposition forces as part of the process of taking power. The second step consists of introducing structural transformations in certain spheres of society that generate new forms of social relations. The third is expanding these new forms of social relations into society as a whole so as to ensure their survival. The fourth is consolidating and maintaining this new system of social relations through a consensual political order that establishes accepted rules for resolving limited conflicts within the new system.

Thus the transformation of society attempted by the project of reestablishing the capitalist order through the authoritarian regime attains different levels of accomplishments. One level consists of structural changes, the products of altering the development model, which are especially visible in the differential weight of economic factors in the agrarian structure and elsewhere.22 Accompanying the changes in the development model are social transformations in various spheres. These transformations involve change at the institutional level itself that is expressed in both the political sphere and civil society. But this second level is not a mere reflection of the first, a simple adaptation to the requirements of a model of accumulation that can be explained in terms of the current phase of world capitalism. Although many of the institutional

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