Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 20 страница
Piñera was central to the ‘Seven Modernizations’, which launched in 1979 to fundamentally recast political expectations by reconstituting social reproduction as a private responsibility.134 This goal enabled neoliberals and conservative Catholics to form a ‘defensive front against the uncontrollable “collectivization” of the economy’ and its demoralisation of Chilean society.135 Health, education and social security were privatised, and the social and economic rights agenda that Santa Cruz had struggled to realise was reversed. The (non-market-compatible) universal provision of welfare was abandoned, replaced by technical criteria that directed limited assistance to the poorest households. These reforms obscured the political relation between poverty, wealth and inequality (stressed by Marxism and dependency theory) and sought to destroy collective and class identities. Modernisation also entailed the ‘improvement’ and capitalisation of the land. Pinochet promulgated decrees expropriating the Mapuche nation’s collective ownership of land and incorporating ‘vast areas of “undeveloped” native forests in southern Chile into the global economic market’.136 Rather than laissez-faire, the consolidation of land-ownership in the hands of forestry giants and large land-owners was fostered by tax incentives and subsidies to logging companies.137 Although the means differed, the goal of this modernisation process remained the same as that embraced by the Chicago Boys: depoliticising Chilean society, destroying non-market sources of social reproduction, and producing responsible, entrepreneurial subjects.
The reconciliation of neoliberalism with Christianity that underpinned this agenda was promoted in the right-wing journal PEC (Politics, Economics, Culture), which published Röpke’s essays on the topic and was responsible for introducing the term ‘neo-liberalismo’ into Chile.138 Drawing on his German colleague Walter Eucken, who remained in Germany under the Nazis, Röpke argued that the widespread politicisation of a ‘totalitarian’ system deprives people of ‘the freedom of moral decision essential to Christianity’.139 Röpke argued that the experience of Nazism made clear to both Catholics and Protestants that they must build an anti-totalitarian society and economy ‘which would express both Christian and liberal ideas’.140 Against both the ‘doctrinaire ideology of modern democracy’ and laissez-faire, Röpke upheld an idea of freedom that ‘guarantees the rights of the person, limits the action of the State’ and secures the rights of families, minorities and religious groups. A précis for liberalism, he argues, could be written drawing only on the writings of the Roman statesman Cicero and the medieval Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas, in whom we find the ‘venerable patrimony of the personalist philosophy’ that was crystallised in the political philosophy of the Catholic Church.141 The social goal of the Church, Röpke argued, was to dissipate class struggle and rescue the economy from ‘an omnivorous collectivism’ – which was ‘exactly what the representatives of neo-liberalism hold’.142
|
|
|
Hayek’s own approach to religion was pragmatic; he believed ‘most people need it’ because religion fosters submission to the principles and traditions on which civilisation depends.143 This focus on securing submission provided a bridge between neoliberal defences of the market and Catholic anti-totalitarianism. While the agnostic Hayek came to see the value of religion, and particularly Christianity, in securing a market order, he also helped to convince Chilean conservatives that depoliticising civil society and protecting ‘natural’ hierarchies, the Church and the family required a competitive market order.
Jaime Guzmán, who drafted the junta’s 1974 Declaration of Principles, had been interested in using law to depoliticise Chilean society since his early days as president of the Catholic University Law School’s Student Union. As a student, Guzmán led the ultraconservative Catholic gremialista student group, which united with the Chicago Boys in 1967 to oppose a student revolt demanding democratic selection of the university hierarchy.144 Guzmán – then a devotee of the fascist corporatism of Franco’s Spanish dictatorship and the reactionary anti-liberal Catholic tradition of Juan Donoso Cortés and Joseph de Maistre – was never a friend of democracy. In Chile, that tradition was represented by Jaime Eyzaguirre and Osvaldo Lira, the latter of whom was an early disciple of Jacques Maritain, who contributed to the early stages of the UDHR, and who Lira described as ‘one of the greatest neo-Scholastic figures’.145 For this conservative corporatist tradition, the person was enmeshed in intermediate institutions that were threatened by the intrusions of those Lira termed the ‘ignorant, uncultivated and unintelligent’ masses.146 Guzmán’s Declaration of Principles reflected this tradition by defining the role of social power as ‘securing the independence and depoliticisation of all intermediate societies between individuals and the state’.147 It was this goal, and a common ‘totalitarian’ adversary, that facilitated Guzmán’s reconciliation of conservative Catholicism with neoliberalism. The ultimate outcome was Chile’s 1980 ‘Constitution of Liberty’. In indicting the lawlessness of the junta, human rights NGOs missed the central place given to law and rights in its attempt to tear up the political foundations of Chilean society.
|
|
|
A Constitution of Liberty
In 1991, following Guzmán’s assassination on the campus of the Catholic University, Piñera described him as a ‘martyr of the revolution’, adding that they had ‘fought together many battles for liberty, democracy and human rights’.148 If these men were struggling for human rights – and it is worth temporarily suspending disbelief – this was a distinctive notion of human rights for which preserving human dignity required protecting the person (and the market) from the political revolt of the masses. Guzmán, as his biographer Renato Cristi correctly notes, was more than Pinochet’s ‘crown jurist’: ‘When it came to constitutional matters, Guzmán wore the crown.’149 The story of human rights and neoliberalism in Chile is not simply a story of the massive human rights violations that accompanied market reforms, or of the new human rights NGOs that contested the Junta’s violence. It is also the story of the institutionalisation of the conservative vision of neoliberal human rights, whose development I have traced in the previous chapters. Chile was the testing ground for a model of individual rights that aimed to depoliticise civil society and preserve the inequalities of a market order by protecting the market from the intrusions of ‘the masses’.
|
|
|
In June 1976, Guzmán responded to criticisms of the junta’s human rights record by arguing that the ‘theme of human rights is a problem of free, modern states’. Faced with terroristic, international communism, he continued, it is necessary to ‘guarantee the rights of all the persons within a community’, especially the ‘majority who want to live in peace’.150 Guzmán’s understanding of rights gave a neoliberal twist to Schmitt’s assertion that ‘there exists no norm that is applicable to chaos’.151 If a functioning competitive market is the only guarantee of social peace and human rights, Guzmán believed, then it is legitimate to suspend the rights of those who threaten the market order. Far from renouncing law and rights, Guzmán was central to the adoption of a constitution that locked in the junta’s reforms by emphasising a version of freedom ‘intrinsically connected to private property, free enterprise, and individual rights’.152 Like Hayek’s major work, published two decades earlier, Chile’s constitution was called The Constitution of Liberty. Hayek’s biographer Bruce Caldwell has argued that, although Hayek’s books were in Guzmán’s library, ‘relevant testimonies doubt that Guzmán had read them’.153 Yet, in 1987, Guzmán himself attributed his conversion to neoliberalism to his ‘discovery of Hayek’.154 In Hayek’s work, Pinochet’s crown jurist found proposals for a ‘constitution of liberty’ that would protect the market from (democratic) interference.155
In his late works, Hayek argued that the ‘spontaneous order’ of the market required an appropriate legal regime to insulate it from political intervention. While he argued that the rules governing individual conduct themselves evolve through a process of selection, he believed it was at least possible that the rules on which a spontaneous order rests may be designed.156 Rather than a doctrine of laissez-faire that precludes all constructivism, Hayekian neoliberalism aimed to fine-tune rules to secure submission to the overall order.157 When asked in 1978 whether his account of spontaneous order inherently biased outcomes ‘in favour of past discriminations or past inequities’, Hayek responded bluntly: ‘It accepts historical accidents.’158 It was this conservative reverence for ‘spontaneous’ evolution that made Hayek’s thought attractive to Catholic anti-totalitarians in Pinochet’s administration, and to the traditional Chilean right, who were horrified by the ‘levelling’ policies of Allende’s government. Asked about the vigilante killings carried out on behalf of large land-owners seeking to reclaim their expropriated property in the wake of the coup, a Chilean judge showed what was at stake in such respect for ‘historical accidents’. ‘From time immemorial, we sat at the table and the maid didn’t’, he said. ‘People did not want that hierarchy to change.’159 For all his talk of spontaneity, Hayek was convinced that ‘favourable accidents do not just happen. We must prepare for them.’160 In Chile, Hayek saw the miracle of a state that was prepared to use its powers to prepare the terrain for such favourable accidents by constitutionally protecting the market.
|
|
|
In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek identified constitutionalism (‘the principle of legal limitation of power by higher principles to Parliament itself’) as the key US contribution to politics.161 This principle of constitutionally limited government, he argued, used ‘inviolable individual rights’ to bind temporary majorities.162 While the United States was founded on a British tradition of liberty, he remarked elsewhere, South America was rooted in the French Revolution and ‘overly influenced by the totalitarian type of ideologies’ of popular sovereignty.163 In a normal situation, Hayek believed that judicial review would be sufficient to prevent government overstepping the margin of freedom provided by the constitution – just as the US Supreme Court had done when, in ‘its most spectacular decision’, it had ‘saved the country from an ill-conceived measure’ by striking down President Roosevelt’s New Deal National Recovery Administration Act.164 In Chile, by contrast, he saw a crisis that could only be averted by a ‘liberal dictator’.165
During the first of his two visits to Chile during the junta’s rule, Hayek spoke with Pinochet about the dangers of ‘unlimited democracy’.166 As Hayek recalls, the general listened carefully, and requested that he send him any materials he had written on the question.167 While the Austrian economist might conceivably have sent a large bundle of his writings, his secretary recalls that he asked her to send the chapter ‘The Model Constitution’ from his three-volume work Law, Legislation and Liberty.168 There, Hayek used the term ‘unlimited democracy’ to refer to the ‘particular form of representative government that now prevails in the Western world’.169 Doubting that a functioning market had ever arisen under such a democracy, he also suggested it was likely that such unlimited democracy would destroy an existing market order.170 ‘The Model Constitution’ also forthrightly defends emergency powers; ‘freedom may have to be temporarily suspended’, Hayek wrote, echoing Carl Schmitt, ‘when those institutions are threatened which are intended to preserve it in the long run’.171
Hayek expanded on these themes in a 1981 interview with the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio. Echoing Schmitt, he argued that, when a government is in a ‘situation of rupture’, it is ‘practically inevitable for someone to have absolute powers’.172 As the market is necessary to preserve freedom, when the market is threatened, society may temporarily be converted into an organisation, and government may rule by decree. He would prefer a ‘liberal dictator’, he told the newspaper, to a ‘democratic government lacking in liberalism’.173 This was not the first time Hayek had expressed sympathy for liberal dictators. In 1978, he singled out Pinochet and the Portuguese dictator Oliveira Salazar as leaders of ‘authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was safer than under many democracies’. In 1962, he sent Salazar a copy of The Constitution of Liberty with a note expressing his hope that it would help the dictator ‘design a constitution which is proof against the abuses of democracy’. Five years later, Hayek praised the regime of Indonesia’s General Suharto – also brought to power by a CIA-backed anti-communist coup – in similar terms.174 In each case, the threat that democracies would interfere with the ‘spontaneous order’ of the market led him to support brutally violent dictatorships that were prepared to take all necessary measures to preserve existing inequalities.
In Chile, Hayek praised the junta for its willingness to run the country ‘without being obsessed with popular commitments or political expectations of any kind’.175 Coercion was justified, he believed, to ‘provide an effective external framework within which self-generating orders can form’.176 The fragile ‘spontaneous order’ of the market required a strong state to protect it from political interference. James Buchanan struck a similar note in his paper ‘Limited or Unlimited Democracy’, presented at the regional Mont Pèlerin Society meeting in Viña del Mar, the Chilean seaside town where the coup was plotted. The Virginia School neoliberal criticised the ‘totalitarian thrust of unlimited democracy’, and stressed that any government (whether a democracy or a ‘junta’) must be strictly limited for the sake of ‘insuring and protecting individual liberties’.177 Contemplating the return to democracy, Baraona, twice minister for the economy during Pinochet’s rule, argued that Chile’s ‘new democracy … will have to be authoritarian, in the sense that the rules needed for the system’s stability cannot be subjected to political processes’. The single proactive role of the state, he contended, would be ‘to enforce market discipline on society’.178 In Chile, constitutionally enshrined rights, including human rights, became tools for enforcing such market discipline.
Men Are Born Free and Equal, in Dignity and Rights
The junta’s blend of conservative Catholicism and neoliberalism found its definitive expression in the country’s 1980 constitution, which combined a Catholic stress on dignity, freedom of conscience, the protected status of the Church and the centrality of the family as ‘the basic core of society’, with commitments to private enterprise, ‘choice’, market competition and human rights. Incongruously for a constitution introduced by a torturous dictatorship, its first article was: ‘Men are born free and equal, in dignity and rights.’179 Approved in a plebiscite that was officially described as ‘free, secret and informed’, but which was held in a climate of intense repression in which no electoral rolls existed and a blank vote was counted as ‘yes’, the constitution provided the blueprint for the junta’s ‘protected democracy’. Americas Watch – formed as an off-shoot of what became Human Rights Watch to head off claims that the organisation was a US Cold War front – concluded it was ‘not in a position to determine’ what the result would have been under fair voting procedures. Even ‘Pinochet’s critics’, it suggested, ‘have acknowledged that in 1980 the government had an unusually high degree of support in part because the economy was doing very well’. Americas Watch recounted that many had pointed to ‘the trauma of the 1970–73 period as having helped General Pinochet secure approval for the constitution’.180
The claim that the economy was ‘doing very well’ at the time of the plebiscite tells us more about the class politics of this US-based human rights organisation than about Chile’s economy. Gallup polls prior to the plebiscite showed very high levels of satisfaction with Pinochet’s regime among the upper class, 58.8 per cent of whom (as against only 33.2 per cent of the middle class) described the worst possible outcome of a no vote as a ‘return to the year 1973’.181 In 1980, real wages were still only 88.5 per cent of their 1970 level, and unemployment and inequality had both spiralled. Those for whom the economy was ‘doing very well’ were a small, wealthy minority.182 In tracing support for the plebiscite to the ‘trauma’ of Allende’s rule, Americas Watch echoed the views of this minority and of the major producers’ organisations, which published manifestos in El Mercurio warning of a return to Allende’s chaos if the plebiscite failed.
If, in 2016, Chile still shared with Mexico the dubious honour of being the most unequal country in the world, this was in no small part a product of the success of the Pinochet regime in consolidating its economic agenda through constitutional means.183 It is through this lens that we should view debates about the status of the human rights defined in the constitution. Defenders of the constitution note that it enshrined more rights than the constitution it replaced, while critics have tended to dismiss these rights as window-dressing that entrenched the arbitrary power of Pinochet and the military.184 For Americas Watch, the move to establish a new constitution that limited sovereignty by ‘respect for the essential rights originating from human nature’ (Article 5) was a flawed but positive step. From the perspective this book has advanced, human rights were not mere window-dressing. Rather, the Pinochet constitution embodied the realisation, which the neoliberals had achieved as early as the 1940s, that the institutionalisation of human rights could prevent political interference with the inequalities of the competitive market, and depoliticise civil society.
This is most obviously true of Article 24, which proclaims the ‘right of ownership in its diverse aspects over all classes of corporeal and incorporeal property’, including ‘rights of private citizens over waters’; or Article 22, which outlaws discrimination in favour of state companies. On closer inspection, even what first appear to be social and economic rights (to health, education and social security) are actually rights of private enterprise to compete in offering relevant services on the same terms as the state. The right to education, for instance, gives parents the ‘preferential right and duty to educate their children’, and private companies free rein in establishing education providers. The result of these education rights, as their architect Piñera celebrates on his website today, has been the ‘prevalence of private education’ in Chile.185 Such rights were based on a blend of neoliberal market ideology with the Catholic principle of ‘subsidiarity, which entailed that the state would fulfil only those functions that could not be fulfilled by intermediate institutions or the private sector.186 Consequently, the constitution stipulated that educational and other intermediate institutions should be free of politics, and introduced penalties for those who violated this stricture. Going further, it declared it unconstitutional to use or incite political violence or ‘advocate the establishment of a totalitarian system’.
Дата добавления: 2021-01-21; просмотров: 77; Мы поможем в написании вашей работы! |
Мы поможем в написании ваших работ!