Sociological research on Latin American societies has focused on the understanding of the causes and consequences of different patterns of development. In the past decades, this research has been guided by the counterpoint between two different theoretical approaches and the findings generated with their help. In the 1950s and 1960s, the field was dominated by what came to be known as the modernization approach. In the 1970s and 1980s, dependency and world-system theories became prevalent (Klaren and Bossert 1986; Valenzuela and Valenzuela 1978). Each of these paradigms spawned useful lines of research, but eventually they became unsatisfactory, either because some of their assumptions were inconsistent with the facts, or because they were incapable of encompassing important areas of social reality. The field is now ripe for a new conceptual framework, which could incorporate useful aspects of the previous ones. In the past few years, there has been a shift toward a state-centered approach, but it is still unclear whether it will develop into a synthetic paradigm.
THE REGION
The study of Latin American societies is complicated by the heterogeneous nature of the region. The nations that compose Latin America share some common traits, but they also have important differences.
Countries vary in terms of their economy and social structure, their ethnic composition, and their political institutions. The economic differentials are very substantial. The region includes Argentina and Uruguay, whose per capita gross national products (GNPs) are $8,570 and $6,020, respectively, higher than those of the Czech Republic and Hungary but lower than those of Portugal and Greece, the poorer countries in the European Union. At the other extreme, there are countries like Haiti and Honduras, with per capita gross national products (GNPs) of $330 and $700, respectively, which are comparable to those of the Central African Republic and the Congo, respectively (World Bank 1999). Social structures vary accordingly: About 90 percent of the Argentine and Uruguayan population is urban, but the percentages in Haiti and Guatemala are 35 percent and 44 percent (PNUD 1997); manufacturing accounts for about 20 to 25 percent of the GDP of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico (about the same as in France, Germany, and Italy), but the proportion is only 3 percent in Bolivia and 9 percent in Panama, whose levels of industrialization are comparable to those of Cambodia and Bangladesh, respectively. Enrollment ratios in post-secondary education vary from about 40 to 50 percent of the 20 to 24-year-olds in Argentina and Uruguay to about 8 to 9 percent in Honduras or Paraguay (World Bank 1992).
Latin American societies differ widely in their ethnic composition. The three basic components, Iberian settlers and other European immigrants, Indians, and blacks, are found in different proportions and mixes in different societies. Some are relatively homogeneous: most of the Argentine and Uruguayan populations are of European origin (the greater part are the product of transatlantic immigration at the turn of the century), and the population of Haiti is basically African. Other societies, like Mexico, Peru, and Guatemala, have maintained the colonial pattern of ethnic stratification, with mostly ”white” elites ruling over largely Indian citizenries. Most of the population in Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Honduras is the product of miscegenation. Brazil has a very heterogeneous population, with large contingents of all the ethnic groups and their different mixes (Ribeiro 1971; Lambert 1967).
With respect to their political institutions, countries in the region vary as well. Some, like Costa Rica, Chile, and Uruguay, have had long histories of constitutional rule (punctuated, by authoritarian episodes), while others, like Argentina, Brazil, and Peru, have wavered between instability and authoritarianism for much of the postwar period. All over the region, military dictatorships gave way to constitutional governments in the 1980s (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986), and the 1990s has been the decade of democratic consolidation (Huntington 1991; Linz and Stepan 1996). The legitimacy and overall potential for institutionalization of these new governments vary according to the strength of liberal democratic traditions, the subordination of the state apparatus to the government, the vitality of the party system, and the dynamism of the economy. Authoritarian rule and state corporatism are still being dismantled in Mexico, and guerrillas operate in Colombia and Peru. Finally, Cuba is one of the few remaining state socialist polities in the world.
Nevertheless, there are economic, social, and political commonalities, besides the obvious cultural and religious ones. As far as the economy is concerned, and in spite of the variability noted above, Latin American countries share four important traits. First, all these societies belong, in terms of their per capita product, to the low or lower-middle ranks in the world system. Second, all Latin American nations have basically been, and most still are, in spite of the considerable industrialization that took place in the most advanced countries, exporters of commodities and importers of manufacturing products. Third, industrialization, from the Depression of the 1930s up to the recent past, has been based on import-substitution policies. These policies have led to low growth rates, and even outright stagnation, once the domestic markets were saturated, a stage that the most advanced countries in the region reached in the 1970s and 1980s. Fourth, Latin American societies are highly dependent, in most instances because large segments of their economies are under the control of external actors (multinational corporations in particular), and in practically all cases because of their high levels of indebtedness to the advanced industrial countries.
There are many differences among Latin American social structures and political institutions, but all these societies except Haiti originated as Spanish and Portuguese colonies. The pillars of the original institutional matrix were the organization of the economy around the large agrarian property, a highly centralized political system in which representative features were weak, and a cultural system centered in the church, and in which the toleration of pluralism was extremely low (Lambert 1967; Veliz 1980). This institutional core disintegrated as a consequence of the economic and social changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: New social actors were formed, and old ones were transformed by urbanization, industrialization, and the expansion of education, and also by the irruption of external economic, political, and cultural forces. Further, in some societies there were substantial changes in the composition of the population. However, the common origins still account for important similarities in the historical trajectories of the countries of the region.
In the realm of politics, commonalities are also evident in the post-independence period, especially after the Great Depression of the 1930s. At that time, liberal-democratic regimes, most of which had not integrated the lower classes into the political system, collapsed throughout the region.
In the following decades, most Latin American countries wavered between unstable democracy and nondemocratic forms of rule. South America has been especially prone to two of these: populist-corporatist regimes and bureaucratic military dictatorships (Malloy 1977; Pike and Stritch 1974; Stepan 1978; O’Donnell 1973, 1988). Many South American polities evolved cyclically in that period: populist-corporatist regimes (such as those headed by Juan Peron in Argentina and Getulio Vargas in Brazil) were frequent from World War II to the 1960s; military regimes and their coercive counterparts in society, guerrilla warfare and terrorism, predominated in the 1960s and 1970s (in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Peru); and democratization has swept the area in the 1980s.
MODERNIZATION THEORY
Modernization perspectives shared two core assumptions that distinguished them from dependency and world-system theories. The first was that the central variables for understanding the development of a society are internal to the society; the second, that development is an evolutionary process, whose main characteristics are common to all societies. These commonalities underlie different approaches, which can be classified in terms of the variables they have considered central for the analysis of development, because of their primary causal weight, and in terms of the nature of the evolutionary process societies were supposed to undergo.
A first approach, sometimes of Parsonian or anthropological inspiration, privileged the value system, or culture, as the basic part of society, in the sense that values were expected to determine the basic traits of the economy or the polity. Change in values or culture appeared then as a key dimension in the process of transition from ”traditionality” to ”modernity.” Examples of this perspective are Seymour Martin Lipset’s analysis of entrepreneurship in Latin America (1967) and Howard Wiarda’s argument about the influence of the corporatist Iberian tradition on the political evolution of Latin American societies (1973).
The second approach was structural, in the sense that it viewed the social or economic structures as the determining part of society, and that it saw changes in these structures as the central aspect of the process of development. The most elaborate versions of this perspective were inspired in Durkheim and in the most structural version of Parsonian theory: They regarded the degree of integration of society as the key characteristic of the social order and focused on the processes of differentiation and integration as the keys for the understanding of development, still conceptualized in terms of the ”traditionality-mo-dernity” continuum. Gino Germani’s model of Latin American modernization in terms of the counterpoint between mobilization and integration is a good example of this perspective (1962, 1981; see also Kahl 1976). The typology of stages of economic development made popular by the influential Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) of the United Nations (Rodriguez 1980), shared these presuppositions.
These approaches spawned important types of sociological research in the 1950s and 1960s, but reality showed that the assumptions behind the evolutionary paradigm were problematic. Toward the end of the 1960s, it became clear that the predictions derived from the model of the traditionality-modernity continuum in relation to the social structure and the political system were inconsistent with the facts. In the social structure, the expansion of capitalist agriculture and the development of industry in societies with large peasantries did not lead to the dissolution of ”traditional,” or precapitalist, rural social relations. Its survival (Stavenhagen 1970; Cotler 1970) and the emergence of what came to be known as ”dualis-tic,” or structurally heterogeneous, societies meant that the patterns of social development of Latin America were not replicating those of the western European countries that were considered as the universally valid models of modernization.
Political processes in the 1960s and early 1970s were also paradoxical in relation to this theory: Lipset’s thesis that liberal democracy was a correlate of development (as measured by variables such as income, urbanization, industrialization, and education) ([1960] 1981, pp. 27-63) seemed to be contradicted by the fact that it was precisely the most ”modern” countries (Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile) that were the most prone to instability and authoritarianism. On the basis of this propensity, Guillermo O’Donnell (1973) argued that, in the peculiar situation of Latin American industrialization, countries of this type were the most likely candidates for bureaucratic authoritarianism. This proposition was itself questioned from different perspectives (see Collier 1979), but the lack of correlation between development and democracy seemed nevertheless obvious at that time. Later, the wave of democratization that swept Latin America in the 1980s and the revolutions of1989-1990 in eastern Europe would indicate that the relationship proposed by Lipset does exist, even though it does not seem to be linear.
DEPENDENCY AND WORLD-SYSTEM THEORIES
Approaches based on dependency and world-system theories were the contemporary elaboration of themes found in Marxism, the theory of imperialism in particular (Lenin 1968; Luxemburg 1968). They were based on two propositions that sharply contradicted the assumptions of modernization theory. The first was that internal characteristics of a society, such as its level of development or the nature of its political system, are determined by the society’s position in the international system. The second assumption was a corollary of the first: Since the main causes of development are external, there is no reason to expect that all societies will follow the same evolutionary trajectory. On the contrary: The world system is organized into a more dynamic, developed, and powerful core, and a more passive, backward, and dependent periphery. Beyond these commonalities, there were differences between the dependency and world-system approaches.
Dependency theory, which in itself was a Latin American product, emphasized the radical distinction between core and periphery, and it took dependent societies as its unit of analysis. Its focus was on the mechanisms it claimed were responsible for the preservation of underdevelopment, the transfer of economic surplus to the center via trade and investment in particular (Cardoso and Faletto 1979; Frank 1969, 1972). Wallerstein’s world-system approach (1974), on the other hand, singled out the world economy as the unit of analysis, and it explored the functions of different types of society (core, semiperiphery, and periphery) in that system.
These theories have generated, since the late 1960s, important pieces of research. Fernando H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto’s comparative analysis of Latin American societies (1979) showed how different positions in the world economy generated different class structures and different patterns of development (see also Kahl 1976). Peter Evans (1979), in a study of Brazil, showed how the peculiarities of the country’s development were shaped by the interaction among the state, foreign capital, and the domestic bourgeoisie. Gary Gereffi (1983) explored the consequences of dependency in a key industry. From a world-system perspective, Alejandro Portes and his colleagues (1981, 1985, 1989) conducted important studies of the labor flows in the world economy, and of the articulation between the formal and informal economies.
These approaches improved our understanding of Latin American development in two ways. First, by focusing on the effects of external factors and processes (those in the economy in particular, but the political and cultural ones as well), dependency and world-system perspectives corrected the assumption characteristic of modernization theory that societies could be studied in relative isolation. Second, since these theories constructed models of the world economy that were either pericentric (Doyle 1986), as in dependency theory; or that emphasized the analysis of peripheral and semiperipheral social structures alongside that of the core, as in world-system theory, they balanced the emphasis on core structures and processes characteristic of most preexisting studies of imperialism, which tended to ignore the institutions and dynamism of the periphery.
However, the basic tenets of dependency and world-system theories have also led in some cases (but not in the best research spawned by these perspectives) to simplistic assumptions, in particular to a tendency to consider internal structures and processes, especially the political and cultural ones, as transmission belts for external economic and political forces. The pendulum swung to the other extreme: from the neglect of external economic and political determinants of social change, characteristic of modernization theory, to a disregard for internal factors.
TOWARD A NEW PARADIGM
In the late 1980s the basic assumptions of dependency and world-system theories also became problematic. In the first place, research on the role of the state in the development process led to its reconceptualization as an autonomous actor (see Evans et al. 1985; Evans 1995; and Waisman 1987 for a Latin American case). This challenged the conceptions characteristic of most approaches close to the Marxist tradition—dependency and world-system theories included—which tended to see the state, claims of ”relative autonomy” notwithstanding, as basically an instrument of either domestic ruling classes or foreign forces. Second, there was a rediscovery of social movements in the region (a consequence that the redemocratization processes of the 1980s could not fail to produce). More often than in the past, agency came to be seen as relatively independent in relation to its structural and institutional context (see the essays in Eckstein [1989], for instance), a conceptualization that differs sharply from the structuralist assumption inherent in dependency and world-system perspectives. Finally, the proposition according to which the central determinants of the development of Latin American countries are external has also been challenged (Waisman 1987; Zeitlin 1984). In the 1990s there is a growing consensus, as there was in the 1970s, that existing paradigms do not encompass our current understanding of Latin American development.
A new theoretical synthesis should integrate the valid components of the modernization, dependency, and world-system approaches, and should also allow for the autonomy of the state and the role of agency. A point of departure should be the recognition of three facts. First, the division of the world into core, periphery, and semiperiphery is not sufficient to encompass the diversity of developmental situations and trajectories relevant for the study of the countries of Latin America. It is necessary to construct a typology of more specific kinds of peripheral societies (and of core societies as well: the core-periphery distinction is still too abstract), and to describe more systematically the structural ”tracks” that have crystallized in the region at different stages of development of the world economy.
Second, the different developmental paths followed by Latin American societies have been determined by empirically variable constellations of external and internal processes, and of economic, political, and ideological-cognitive ones. Few propositions that privilege the causal role of specific factors are likely to be generally valid. Rather than seeking propositions of this type, as modernization, dependency, and world-system approaches have tried to do, it would be more productive to map the specific bundles of factors that have influenced developmental outcomes in critical situations. Third, development is a discontinuous process (an instance of punctuated equilibrium, in Stephen D. Krasner’s [1984] words), but we lack a theory of the transition points, that is, of the crossroads where acceleration, stagnation, retrogression, and changes of developmental tracks have taken place. The Latin American experience indicates that these are the points in which major changes in the world system, such as depressions, wars, important technological developments, organizational changes in production or trade, and restructuring of the economic or military balance of power, have interacted with domestic processes economic, political, and cultural processes.
LATIN AMERICA IN THE PAST DECADE: THE DOUBLE TRANSFORMATION
In the past two decades, Latin America has been undergoing two simultaneous transformations: economic liberalization and democratization (Waisman 1998). The pervasive nature of these transitions is indicated by the fact that they have been independent of level of development and of political regime. Most countries in the region, from relatively underdeveloped Bolivia and Paraguay to relatively industrialized Brazil and Argentina, have moved from military rule to liberal democracy in the past decade. As for economic liberalization, it took place in authoritarian Argentina and also in democratic Argentina, in authoritarian Chile and also in democratic Chile, in state-corporatist Mexico, in social-democratic Venezuela and also in social-Christian Venezuela. Like the depressions of the 1870s or the 1930s, this is a critical juncture, a reshaping of domestic economic and political institutions, the regional manifestation of the processes of economic globalization and reconstitution of the world order following the collapse of communism.
Economic liberalization was the result of a constellation of internal and external determinants. In most cases, the former seem to be central, but in any case exogenous factors constituted a powerful set of incentives and constraints pushing countries toward the liberalization road. These external causes can be classified into economic, political, and cultural.
The debt crisis of the 1980s was, for many Latin American countries, the central economic constraint (Felix 1990; Kahler 1986; Nelson 1990; Stallings and Kaufman 1989; Wesson 1988; Wionczek 1987). This crisis forced highly indebted countries to increase and diversify exports, which presupposed a higher rate of investment, and to reduce government spending. These objectives could have been sought with variable mixes of industrial policy (”picking the winners”) and trade liberalization, but the policies of creditors and international lending agencies produced strong incentives for privatization, deregulation, and the opening up of the economy. Saying that the debt crisis has been in the 1980s both a powerful constraint and a substantial incentive for economic liberalization does not mean, of course, that the relationship between crisis and reform was necessary or sufficient. In fact, liberalization had begun in the 1960s and 1970s, as a consequence of perceived export opportunities, of export-oriented foreign investment, or of deliberate attempts by governments to overcome stagnating tendencies in the economy. The difference is that what had been a developmental option in previous decades had now become an imperious necessity.
As for political factors, the end of the Cold War facilitated not only political liberalization, which is more or less obvious, but also large-scale economic reform, especially in democratic settings. First, the collapse of communism led to the organizational and ideological disarmament of the radical left, and this rendered armed subversion less likely. Second, and more important, in the new international conditions the fear, be it realistic or paranoid, of exogenously induced revolution either weakened or disappeared. This fear, often unrealistic, was not only a central determinant of the exclusionary policies carried out by local elites and a reason for American and European support for authoritarian regimes, but it was also a constraint on elite behavior. During the Cold War, important segments of the state and political elites in many countries espoused the view that populist and protectionist economic policies were an antidote to communism, and many believed that the drastic social consequences of the dismantling of autarkic capitalism would be a breeding ground for revolution (Waisman 1987).
Finally, the international demonstration effects received by the segments of Latin American societies most open to outside influences (economic and political elites, middle classes, and the intelligentsia) have favored, since the early 1980s, both economic and political liberalization. The economic success of capitalist economies and the crisis in the socialist ones, as well as the eastern European revolutions, have conferred an aura of empirical validity on two propositions: first, that capitalism and liberal democracy are both efficacious, while socialism as both an economic and a political formula is not; and second, that a capitalist economy and a democratic polity presuppose each other.
These external factors interacted with endogenous determinants. The most important of these was the realization, by state and political elites, but also by economic and intellectual ones, that autarkic capitalism had run its course, and caused in many countries stagnation or retrogression in the economy and instability and illegitimacy in the polity. It was simply no longer viable as an institutional model.
Autarkic capitalism was carried to its extreme in the countries of the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. The long-term effects of radical import-substituting industrialization could only be stagnation, or at least stagnating tendencies, because industrialization was based on the transfer of resources from the internationally competitive export sector to a manufacturing sector shielded from the world by extraordinarily high levels of protection, both tariff and nontariff (outright prohibitions to import included). Advanced autarkic industrialization led to a situation in which most of the capital and labor in the society was committed to this captive domestic market. The outcome of this massive misallocation of resources could only be, in the long run, stagnation, and even retrogression.
Instability and illegitimacy were the long-term outcome of autarkic industrialization because this pattern of growth eventually produced an explosive combination: a stagnated economy and a society made up of highly mobilized and organized social forces, labor and the intelligentsia in particular. Stagnation led to the mobilization of large segments of the lower classes and the intelligentsia. In some countries, such as those of the Southern Cone in the 1960s and 1970s, truly revolutionary situations, in the Leninist sense of the term, appeared. Eventually, they triggered, or justified, the establishment of authoritarian regimes.
The demise of autarkic capitalism was the result, as was the case with communism, of a revolution from above. In both situations, it was the elites who dismantled the existing regimes, after having reached the conclusion that the stagnation and illegitimacy experienced by their societies were the consequence of existing institutions, and that there was no solution to the economic and political crises within these institutions. In some cases, such as Argentina and Chile, this realization took place when radical import substitution had approached its limits, and produced not only stagnation but also a revolutionary regime in Chile, and guerrillas and food riots in Argentina. In other cases, such as Brazil, the switch is taking place before these consequences appear, largely as a consequence of the demonstration effects of other Latin American countries.
THE CONTRADICTORY LOGICS OF ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION
There are three possible sequences between economic and political liberalization (Bresser Pereira et al. 1993; Haggard and Kaufman 1995; Lijphart and Waisman 1997). To give them Latin American names, they would be the Chilean model, in which privatization, deregulation, and the opening up of the economy preceded democratization; the Venezuelan pattern, in which the liberalization of the economy takes place in the context of political institutions that have been in place for several decades; and finally the Argentine sequence, in which economic liberalization and the consolidation of democracy take place more or less at the same time. The three are fraught with dangers, but the third is the least favorable. The reason is that economic liberalization and the consolidation of democracy are governed by opposing social logics (Liphart and Waisman 1997; Waisman 1998).
Privatization, deregulation, and the opening up of the economy are governed by the logic of differentiation. Their first impact on the society is the increase of social differentiation in both the vertical and the horizontal senses: Polarization between rich and poor as a whole intensifies, and so does polarization between ”winners” and ”losers” within each social class, and also between sectors of the economy and regions of the country.
On the other hand, the consolidation of democracy is governed by the logic of mobilization. The political context of a new democracy renders the mobilization of those affected by economic liberalization more likely, due to the lowering of the costs of political action in relation to what was the case in the predemocratic period. Moreover, new democracies create incentives for political entrepreneurship, for in the new political conditions political and labor activists must secure and organize social and political bases. Economic liberalization presents them with an inventory of grievances that easily translates into a political agenda. Thus, both from below and from above, institutional factors are conducive to the articulation of movements of resistance to economic liberalization.
These two logics have the potential for inhibiting each other, and consequently for blocking or derailing economic liberalization, or the consolidation of democracy, or both. And yet, economic liberalization and the consolidation of democracy are occurring simultaneously in many Latin American countries, and so far no serious blockage or derailing has occurred as a consequence of the interaction between these processes. In several countries, there is an impressive consensus, involving state and economic elites, and even labor and some of the parties in the left and center that had supported state socialism or economic nationalism in the past.
The reason that, so far, the two opposing logics discussed above have not clashed lies in the operation of three ”cushions” or moderating factors, which inhibit political mobilization. These can be classified into structural, institutional, and cognitive-ideological.
The structural cushion consists simply in the fact that economic liberalization itself weakens and destroys the power bases of the coalitions supporting the old regime (rent-seeking entrepreneurs and unions, and in some cases managers and workers in the public sector) and in general of those hurt by trade liberalization, privatization, and deregulation. On the one hand, these processes of economic transformation generate insecurity and economic deprivation, and thus discontent. On the other, impoverishment and marginalization also reduce social groups’ capacity for organization and mobilization in defense of their interests.
Business elites, both private and public, face the choice between recycling into competitive capitalists and dropping out from the elites. This group is usually differentiated, and its most entrepreneurial elements, and/or those endowed with large amounts of economic and social capital, usually join, or become, the elite in the open economy. Labor is also dualized: Workers in the competitive sectors of the economy, or in sectors insulated from foreign competition (e.g., those producing nontradeable goods) are likely to join the train of economic conversion, and to engage in bargaining-oriented unionism. Sectors weakened by deindustrialization, by the increase of unemployment, and in general by the growth of poverty, on the other hand, are more likely to develop confrontational forms of political action, but in the end their impact is likely to be modest, because of the factors discussed above. In many countries, the weakening of labor actually began before economic liberalization, for impoverishment and the growth of the labor reserve were manifestations of the crisis of the old regime itself.
In the second place, the clash between the two opposing logics discussed above has been inhibited by institutional change. The design or redesign of some of the basic economic and political institutions is in many cases a necessary component and in general an important contributing factor to successful transitions.
Finally, cognitive-ideological factors have both external and internal sources. As I argued above, economic nationalists as well as leftists have been affected by the collapse of communism (and also by the apparent success of the Thatcher-Reagan economic policies), and by a process of political learning, triggered by the experience of the economic and political consequences of the old regime. The cumulative effect of these cognitive processes has been not only the abandonment of autarkic capitalism, but also the acceptance of the liberal model, either under the form of active support, or because of ideological surrender produced by the exhaustion of alternatives.
Given this quasi-consensus, the negative consequences of the economic transformation are not conceptualized by large segments of economic, political, and intellectual elites as necessary or permanent attributes of the emerging institutional model, but to a large extent as the product of the failure of autarkic capitalism. And the new course is not perceived as a leap in the dark, but as a transition, whose undesirable side effects are in any case the inevitable and temporary cost of the only process that can ensure, in the long run, affluence and even a higher measure of equality of opportunity in the society. The most significant leftist and radical arguments, on the other hand, focus on the espousal of social democracy in opposition to the most radical forms of the market economy, often characterized as ”Darwinian” or ”savage” capitalism.
Both the strengthening of civil society and the enhancement of state capacity are necessary conditions not only for the consolidation of democracy but also for the success of the economic transformation.
The typical situation in the countries that are undergoing the double transformation is that the state is shrinking while its effectiveness remains questionable in many areas. At the same time, the corporatist apparatus that was characteristic of autarkic capitalism is being dismantled. Civil society has been weakened by the authoritarian experience, and by the increased social differentiation that follows economic liberalization. The consensus supporting the new course could erode unless the new model is institutionalized, something that cannot happen without a more effective state and a stronger civil society.
This is, thus, an inflection point in the relationship between state and society, a conjuncture that could be conceptualized both a danger and an opportunity. The danger resides in the fact that, in these conditions, the structural, institutional, and cognitive ”cushions” discussed above could gradually lose their effectiveness. The social dislocation produced by economic liberalization would either increase the atomization of the society, and lead to mass anomie; or facilitate ”praetorian” mobilization. The first outcome would entail a deterioration of the already modest quality of the new democracies, while the second would lead to disturbances. In both cases, the legitimacy of the policies of economic transformation would fall precipitously. But this situation also represents and opportunity for social and political agency, whose goal would be the strengthening of civil society and the enhancement of state capacity.
