Constructing ‘Local Modernity’

As has been set out in the introduction, one of the main contentions of this study is that modernity in Chile has been constructed through political projects of modernisation. There are three implicit theoretical assumptions that underlie this statement. The first is that modernity can be local and that it takes different shapes and forms in different locations. The second is that modernity is a construct, a process that can be mounted and adapted in time. And third, that this construction can take place through elite projects. In this section, these assumptions will be analysed in the light of the leading theories of modernity and modernisation.

The Locality of Modernity

The ‘locality’ of modernity has been a widely discussed theme. Traditionally, modernity has often been understood in universal terms, as simply a period in time: the ‘modern era’. This conceptualisation made the question of the locality of modernity redundant, as it assumed that everything in the era of modernity is modern, as everything in the Middle Ages was medieval (Larraín 2001: 13). The main question was therefore not the nature or functioning of modernity, but rather its starting point (the Enlightenment, the Reformation, or the discovery of Latin America) and possible end (the late twentieth century, with the dawn of so-called post-modernity). As a result, this conceptualisation did not shed much light on the locality of modernity or on its nature (Wittrock 2000: 31-32).

Another traditional approach was ‘institutional’ in nature. It sought to identify a series of historical processes and social institutions that were defined as modern. Only a society that contained a certain number of ‘modern institutions’ could be labelled as modern. The fundamental assumption here was that modernity is the result of a series of historical processes that took place in Western Europe. These processes (like the Industrial Revolution and the rise of liberalism) created institutions that were considered key elements of modernity: mass education, capitalism, democracy, bureaucracy, and so on. For instance, Feher and Heller (1989) argue that modernity is defined by both the period and the region in which capitalism, industrialisation and democracy ascend and reinforce, complement and limit each other mutually.

This ‘institutional approach’ falls short in explaining the progress of modernity in non-European countries, however. In his study on the local construction of modernity in Iran, Ali Mirsepassi (2000) shows that this approach, which he labels the ‘liberal vision of modernity’, and which has been dominant since the writings of Hegel, Weber, and Durkheim, is problematic in three ways. First, it holds a homogeneous view of the Western world, assuming that all Western countries have followed the same historical trajectory. That is, of course, a crude simplification. Even on issues that are considered fundamental for the development of modernity, like the role of the state in society, the consolidation of democracy, and the expansion of a liberal free market economy, substantial differences between Western countries can easily be found in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Wittrock 2000: 33-35). The second, and related,

problem of the liberal view is its homogenising approach to the different Western societies themselves. By defining Western societies as modern, the internal contradictions of modern societies were neglected or ignored. Throughout the nineteenth and at least a major part of the twentieth century, large sections of the European population were excluded from the benefits and/or curses of modernity. As the German sociologist Peter Wagner points out, even European modernity has had a very uneven socio-historical development:

Modernity, so to speak, had very few citizens by 1800, not many by 1900, and still today it is hardly the right word to characterise many current practices (Wagner 1994: 24).

The third, and more important, problem of the liberal vision of modernity lies in its Eurocentrism. By defining European social, political and economic constellations as ‘modern’, the non-European world is converted into modernity’s ‘other’. This ‘other’ can be defined in terms of what it lacks in Western qualities, or can even be viewed as ‘fundamentally hostile to modernity and incompatible with modernisation’ (Mirsepassi 2000: 2, 8). The only way in which modernity can spread outside Europe is by adopting European patterns of behaviour, defining modernisation as a process of catching up. This discourse of modernisation has been dominant throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has been academically supported by the ‘modernisation theories’ that have strongly influenced the development debates since the 1950s. However, the developments in the industrialising countries showed that no simple reproduction of European-style patterns of modernity has taken place.

For Latin America, the situation is somewhat more complicated. While the many distinctions between Europe and Latin America are obvious, the latter still constitutes an integral part of the Western world, as it was the product of Spanish and Portuguese colonisation, and a substantial ‘transplantation’ of population from the old continent took place (Ribeiro 1968).17

Scholars such as Wiarda (1992; 2003) have therefore emphasised that Latin America has followed a special trajectory within the Western tradition. As a result, Latin America represents elements of both worlds: on the one hand, it shares the foundations, structures, and expectations of the Western world, and on the other the outcome of development and modernisation in Latin America has always been a different one from the rest of the Western world. For example, the rise of dictatorships in the 1960s and 1970s, and the lack of success of the project of industrialisation which was set in motion in the post-war period, led to a general sense of pessimism regarding the viability of the modern project in the continent. How could the trajectory of modernity in Europe be reproduced at increased speed, if Latin America had wandered along such a different historical path for so long? ‘We, the Latin American peoples’, Octavio Paz lamented, ‘have never really become modern, since unlike the rest of the Western world, we never had a critical era’. Carlos Fuentes added: ‘We are children of the Spanish counter-reformation, a bulwark that was raised against

the expansion of modernity. How then can we be modern?’ (quoted in Brunner 1994: 16). In the end, rather than localising the notion of modernity by explaining its local construction, the institutional approach serves to sentence modernity in Latin America to being a ‘mask’, or a ‘simulacrum’, which has been, in García Canclini’s words:

conjured up by the elites and the state apparatuses, above all those concerned with art and culture, but which for that very reason makes them unrepresentative and unrealistic (García Canclini 1995: 7).

The failure of the ‘institutional approach’ in explaining the trajectory of modernity (and its disqualification of local variants of modernity) outside the industrialised world, has led to the formulation of new, more complex approaches. Even though they maintain many elements of the liberal interpretation, Habermas (1987), Berman (1988) and Giddens (1991) have proposed interpretations of modernity that include the possibility of an authentic experience of modernity outside the Western world. Habermas speaks of modernity as an ‘incomplete project’; it has been built on a one-sided form of rationality, namely instrumental (or purposive) rationality. Habermas emphasises that the crisis of modernity does not lie in modernity itself, but in

the failure to develop and institutionalise all the different dimensions of reason in a balanced way (quoted in Mirsepassi 2000: 3).

By opening up modernity to different forms of rationality, Habermas suggests that there may be more than one historical trajectory to modernity. However, he maintains that modernity is founded in the Enlightenment and cannot be seen separately from European history.

Marshall Berman opens the door even wider, by presenting modernity as a vital experience that is shared worldwide. It is not restricted to a single geographical area, or to one culture:

Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish (Berman 1988: 15).

Modernity springs from processes that originate in the West, like the expansion of the physical sciences, industrialisation, the rise of the nation-state, the bureaucracy, capitalism, and so on. However, this ‘maelstrom’, as Berman calls it, of modernisations creates a daily experience of modernity that is universal:

To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air’ (Berman 1988: 15).18

18 _{Zygmunt Bauman (2000) elaborates on Marx’s metaphor of evaporation by introducing the notion of} ‘liquid modernity’. According to him, the volatile nature of modernity is restricted to its subsystems, but these subsystems themselves are tied together in a highly rigid fashion. The term ‘liquid modernity’ is used to explain the increasing flexibility and fluidity of this new order that modernity itself has created.

Anthony Giddens also argues that modernity is a global experience. Based on institutions (like the nation-state, capitalism, and industrialism), it creates an extreme dynamism in which social practices and behaviour are changed at an unprecedented pace, and with unprecedented scope and profoundness. This extreme dynamism of modernity is a consequence of three fundamental elements that constitute modernity, namely the ‘separation of time and place’, the ‘disembedding of social relations’, and ‘institutional reflexivity’. The first allows for the coordination of actions over distance and time, while the ‘disembedding of social relations’ allows for the use of symbolic tokens, such as money, and expert systems, both of which work on trust. Third, modernity is based on ‘institutional reflexivity’, through which all knowledge is constantly revised and reinterpreted. As a result, certainty of knowledge is replaced by radical doubt, which is, in Giddens’ words, ‘not only disturbing to philosophers, but is existentially troubling for ordinary individuals’ (Giddens 1991: 21, italics in the original).

Even though Giddens opens the door for locally mediated experiences of modernity, he retains the liberal argument that modernity is fundamentally a Western project, which started in post-feudal Europe, but spread on a global scale during the twentieth century. Modernity, he states, ‘can be understood as roughly equivalent to ‘the industrialised world’, so long as it is recognised that industrialism is not its only institutional dimension’ (1991: 15; 1990: 174-178). Like Habermas, he maintains the notion that modernity is one universal process, even though it may be experienced differently in different locations.

A more radical line of ‘localising’ modernity (in the sense of conceiving it to be a locally constructed phenomenon, not a global one) is followed by sociologists such as Peter Wagner and Göran Therborn, who argue that there exist different historical trajectories towards modernity in different parts of the world. Wagner contends that in the twentieth century, the United States, Western Europe and the Soviet Union constitute the three ‘actually existing modernities’ (Wagner 1994: 13). Therborn argues that there are four trajectories: a European one, in which modernity was endogenous, one of the ‘new world’ (spanning both North and South America), where the trajectory of modernity mirrored the examples of Britain and the Iberian peninsula respectively, a colonial one (consisting of North-Africa and the South Pacific), where local resistance to modernity was crushed by the European colonial forces, and that of countries that have known an ‘externally induced modernisation’, which modernised under the pressure of subjugation by European powers. Jorge Larraín discerns five trajectories, separating the North American path towards modernity from the Latin American one (2000: 19-24). The question of the existence of three, four, or five trajectories, however, is indicative of the weakness of this approach: to attempt to create clusters of countries with disparate histories and experiences easily leads to a homogenising approach. Additionally, the focus on the period of the first encounter with modernity, the confrontation with the European colonial powers, runs the risk of leading to predetermination. This is not to say that in general there exist no shared trajectories between countries, but only to the degree that the substantial differences between

societies, for instance between neighbouring countries like Chile and Bolivia, are taken into account. Furthermore, these authors still maintain the notion of one fundamental model of modernity, and even though the trajectories around the world may be different, they will eventually unite in one global modernity. Larraín, for instance, argues that the various existing trajectories towards modernity will eventually converge into one global modernity:

No doubt, modernity was born in Europe and Europe became a necessary point of reference for the processes of modernisation in the rest of the world, but modernity has followed different routes in Japan and South East Asia, in North America and Australia, in Africa, and in Latin America. Thus, at least five routes to modernity can be distinguished which diverge, especially at the beginning, but which, as globalisation expands, start to converge (Larraín 2000: 19).

Even though this approach allows for authentic non-European forms of modernity, the element of convergence still echoes a classical view of modernity, assuming that Western patterns of modernity will eventually become globally dominant. Furthermore, they pay relatively little attention to the underlying processes that mediate the construction of a localised trajectory towards modernity.

Another approach focuses on the nature of modernity outside the industrialised world. Brunner (1994a), for instance, emphasises the different modalities that it can take in the context of developing countries like Chile. He stresses the mixed and complex ways in which models of modernity can create options and possibilities of action in societies. Democratic modernity offers series of ‘contexts of choice’, through which individuals can exercise their liberties. Instead, the main alternative, socialist modernity (in the sense of the ‘Socialist alternative’ of the real existing socialisms), offers ‘contexts of hierarchy’, based on the Communist party, the state and bureaucracy. The model that was introduced by Pinochet in Chile is a mix of the two models, limiting the context of choice strictly to the economic realm and emphasising hierarchy in all others (1994: 19-22). Brunner also argues that modernity creates different ‘cultural modalities’ in which complex patterns of cultural activities can be exercised. Using two axes of ‘individual’ to ‘group’ and ‘autonomy’ to ‘hierarchy’, he creates maps of modernity in which the manifold forms and experiences of modernity are charted. As a result, Brunner is able to show that while ideally modernity may have a democratic and liberal face, mixtures of modern modalities may come into existence in which other more authoritarian and collective elements are dominant. As a result, modernity in Latin America may well take shapes different from those in other parts of the world, and still be modern (1994b: 30).

Others have stressed the ‘fragmented’ and ‘hybrid’ nature of modernity in Latin America. Nestor García Canclini, for instance, speaks of ‘hybrid cultures’, which are characterised by the blending of tradition and modernity. Modernity and tradition, which are usually viewed as being antagonistic and non-compatible, often cohabit rather than mutually excluding each other. As García Canclini puts it:

Today we conceive of Latin America as a more complex articulation of traditions and modernities (diverse and unequal), a heterogeneous continent

consisting of countries in each of which coexist multiple logics of development (García Canclini 1995: 9).

Indigenous artisans, for example, continue to produce traditional artefacts in modernity, actually making folklore one of Latin America’s prominent areas of production. On the one hand, this branch of economic activity is geared to the population itself, particularly to the groups which are least integrated into modernity, and on the other it serves the highly modern phenomenon of mass tourism (ibid., pp. 152-170).

In a similar vein, Vivian Schelling describes Latin America as a kaleidoscope, a ‘particularly heterogeneous society and culture’, in which ‘the modern and pre-modern modes of production and ways of life’ are combined (Schelling 2000: 7-8). According to these authors, modernity does not mean the simple destruction of tradition, but the creation of new mixes of both into a particular local blend, which creates particular patterns of ‘being in modernity’. As a result, the possible contradictions existing between ‘European modernity’ and Latin America can no longer be perceived in black- and-white terms:

There are many more opportunities in our future than to choose between McDonalds and Macondo (Canclini 1999: 52).

This approach, which is generally applied to continents as a whole, is also relevant for specific societies. Jorge Larraín, for instance, labels the nature of modernity for the Chilean case as particularly hybrid:

[Modernity] is actively, not passively, incorporated, adapted, and re- contextualised in Chile (…). Chile has a specific way of being in modernity. This is why our modernity is not exactly the same as European modernity: it is a mix, a hybrid, the fruit of a process of mediation which has its proper trajectory; it is neither purely endogenous nor entirely imposed; some have called it subordinated or peripheral (Larraín 2001: 79)

An important contribution of Larraín in explaining the local construction of modernity is his analysis of the specific trajectory which Chile has followed towards modernity. He argues that it has taken place in six different phases, in which an alternation between expansion and crisis of modernity can be identified. During the colonial period, Chile was ‘denied’ modernity by the Spanish crown. After independence, a period of stabilisation was followed by rapid economic expansion and a strong orientation towards Europe. In this period, European theories such as liberalism and positivism were imported and adapted to the local context by Chilean intellectuals. However, the experience of modernity was still confined to a tiny oligarchy. After 1900, modernity entered into crisis, first through the effects of the First World War, and later because of the economic crisis of the 1930s. In this period, the ‘oligarchic modernity’ of the nineteenth century reached its end, leading to the consolidation of the power, in the 1930s, of the middle classes. In response to the economic crisis, a new developmental strategy was set up, in the form of state-led industrialisation. This strategy led, in the 1950s, to a new phase of expansion of modernity, strongly focused on the deepening

and widening of democratic structures, the redistribution of wealth, and the achievement of economic development. After 1970, though, Larraín claims that the expansion of modernity once again was in crisis under the dictatorship, only to resurface after 1990 in the form of neo-liberal modernity. This conceptualisation of a national ‘trajectory towards modernity’ is useful for this study, as it describes the local construction of modernity in a particular society (ibid., pp. 77-137). It also shows, like