CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

In this book we have analysed socio-political dynamics in Latin America, specifically in Argentina and Brazil, at a particular historical moment, that of the crisis of the left turn. This turn emerged as a way out of the neoliberal crises of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Perhaps one of the ideas of the consensus sustaining this process has been the re-creation of the relationship between state, citizens and democracy. Neoliberalism has disrupted and reinvented the ways in which society is organized and how subjects, individual or collective, participate in it. In a nutshell, the imple- mentation of policies of social and economic exclusion gave rise to a process of dislocation that created wide-ranging problems such as disrupting the rela- tive stability of the economy?crystallized in the difficulties of sustaining the value of the currency?and undermining relatively acceptable levels of integration. The incarnation of neoliberal hegemony in Latin America was a long process that matured in the 1990s when the region as a whole adopted internationally accepted normative ideas about economy, the state and society in the so-called ?Washington Consensus?. This political project discredited economic nationalism and, in fact, any attempt to redistribute resources and regulate market dynamics. Electoral competition erased ideological differ- ences, and the ability to choose between alternative socio-political projects was reduced to weighing disputes over personalities. Critics called this a mo- ment of the only way (discurso único), a metaphorical totalization inasmuch as its power resided in successfully framing alternatives to it as examples of economic barbarism, cultural backwardness and political incorrectness. In this way, the critique of neoliberalism was interwoven with a critique of democracy and the role of the state. During the crisis of the turn to the left, these critiques re-emerged with new actors and discourses about integration and participation, which is why it is important to re-discuss democracy and its meanings.

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