The End of the Embrace? Neoliberalism and Alternatives to Neoliberalism in Latin America

Abstract

This book sets out to explore how Latin America is responding to what Dani Rodrik (2002) aptly described as the most pressing question currently facing the global political economy: “After neoliberalism, what?” We take as our starting point the fact that contemporary Latin American political economy is marked by the crisis of neoliberalism. Two decades of Washington Consensus policies have left legacies of uneven growth, inequity, social conflicts, and lackluster democracy. But the crises that erupted in much of the region with the onset of the twenty-first century were due to more than Latin America’s embrace of the Washington Consensus in the 1980s and 1990s; in a very real way, they were the latest episodes in a drama that has been played out since the 1930s over the state and the direction of the region’s political economy. The challenges of governance and development now, in other words, are rooted in “the disarticulation of the relations between state and society that have characterized the region since the 1930s” (Garretón 2006: 1). Latin America has, in effect, been in search of a stable model of growth and development since the collapse of the oligarchy-dominated model of liberal economics and export agriculture in the 1930s. At the center of the development debate in Latin America is the question of the role and the weight of the state versus the market. For this reason, rethinking regional political economy in Latin America can look like something of a journey back to the future.