Reconfiguring Institutions across Time and Space: Syncretic Responses to Challenges of Political and Economic Transformation

Reconfiguring Institutions Across Time and Space Political Evolution and Institutional Change Bo Rothstein and Sven S...

Author: Rudra Sil | Dennis Galvan

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Reconfiguring Institutions Across Time and Space

Political Evolution and Institutional Change Bo Rothstein and Sven Steinmo, editors Exploring the dynamic relationships among political institutions, attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes, this series is problem-driven and pluralistic in methodology. It examines the evolution of governance, public policy and political economy in different national and historical contexts. It will explore social dilemmas, such as collective action problems, and enhance understanding of how political outcomes result from the interaction among political ideas-including values, beliefs or social norms-institutions, and interests. It will promote cutting-edge work in historical institutionalism, rational choice and game theory, and the processes of institutional change and/or evolutionary models of political history. Restructuring the Welfare State: Political Institutions and Policy Change Edited by Bo Rothstein and Sven Steimo Creating Social Trust in Post-Socialist Transition Edited by János Kornai, Bo Rothstein, and Susan Rose-Ackerman Building a Trustworthy State in Post-Socialist Transition Edited by János Kornai and Susan Rose-Ackerman The Personal and the Political: How Personal Welfare State Experiences Affect Political Trust and Ideology By Staffan Kumlin The Problem of Forming Social Capital:Why Trust? By Francisco Herreros States and Development: Historical Antecedents of Stagnation and Advance Edited by Matthew Lange and Dietrich Rueschemeyer The Politics of Pact-Making: Hungary’s Negotiated Transition to Democracy in Comparative Perspective By John W. Schiemann Post-Communist Economies and Western Trade Discrimination:Are NMEs Our Enemies? By Cynthia M. Horne Corporate Social Responsibility and the Shaping of Global Public Policy By Matthew J. Hirschland Reconfiguring Institutions Across Time and Space: Syncretic Responses to Challenges of Political and Economic Transformation Edited By Dennis Galvan and Rudra Sil

Reconfiguring Institutions Across Time and Space Syncretic Responses to Challenges of Political and Economic Transformation Edited by Dennis Galvan and Rudra Sil

RECONFIGURING INSTITUTIONS ACROSS TIME AND SPACE

© Dennis Galvan and Rudra Sil, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7817–2 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7817–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reconfiguring institutions across time and space : syncretic responses to challenges of political and economic transformation / edited by Dennis Galvan and Rudra sil. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–7817–4 (alk. paper) 1. Social institutions. 2. Social change. 3. Organizational change. 4. Culture and globalization. I. Sil, Rudra, 1967– II. Galvan, Dennis Charles. HM826.R43 2007 306.09172'4—dc22

2006051379

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Ben & Sam and For Analyn,Anna, & Aidan

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Notes on Contributors

xi

List of Abbreviations

xiv Introduction

One

The Dilemma of Institutional Adaptation and the Role of Syncretism Dennis Galvan and Rudra Sil

3

Political Institutions Two

Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Rural Senegal Dennis Galvan

Three Institutional Syncretism and the Chinese Armed Forces Thomas J. Bickford Four

Five

Syncretism in Argentina’s Party System and Peronist Political Culture Pierre Ostiguy (En)Durable Syncretism: Hizballah in the “Space Between” Stacey Philbrick Yadav

33

61

83

114

viii

Contents Economic and Social Institutions

Six

The Dynamics of Institutional Adaptation and the Fruitful Emergence of Managerial Syncretism in Japan Rudra Sil

Seven Legal Syncretism and Family Change in Urban and Rural China Neil J. Diamant Eight

Nine

Ten

Index

Working is Celebrating:The Syncretic Politics of Labor Transformation in Rural Zambia Parakh Hoon Pathways of Institutional Diffusion under Leninism:A Historical Comparison of Romania and Hungary Cheng Chen Brazil’s 1964–67 Economic Stabilization Plan as Institutional Syncretism Christine A. Kearney

139

164

188

205

225 245

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We trace the roots of this volume to an exchange late in our time as graduate students at Berkeley, in which we discovered, somewhat to our surprise, that we were both using a concept each of us thought we had uniquely deployed in our respective projects:“syncretism.” Although we studied different regions and different issue areas, we both found the concept of institutional syncretism an ideal analytic tool for interpreting and comparing the creative transformation of institutions across temporal and spatial divides. Perhaps it was something in the East Bay water or in the atmosphere of Barrows Hall that led us along similar intellectual journeys. More likely it was the inspiration of teachers and mentors like Ernst Haas, Reinhard Bendix, Peter Evans, Andrew Janos, Ken Jowitt, Bob Price, Guiseppe Di Palma, David Leonard, Ruth Berins Collier, and others at Berkeley. Whatever the case, we both found ourselves drawn toward a somewhat Weberian style of thinking about the varied modes and sources of institutional change, and about the creativity and motivations of actors seeking meaning in their respective contexts. Over the course of many years, following many conversations, some distractions and an APSA panel, a larger collective endeavor crystallized featuring a number of new scholars and research projects. In the process, we all benefited from seeing how each of us made use of the notion of syncretism in capturing aspects of institutional change.We also received extremely useful feedback and encouragement from other colleagues, students and friends, in particular, Tadashi Anno, Gerald Berk, Thomas Callaghy, Goran Hyden, Ian Lustick, Craig Parsons, Lloyd Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, James Scott, Sven Steinmo, and Crawford Young, among others. In addition, two anonymous reviewers from Palgrave Macmillan offered invaluable suggestions to improve the final version of the volume.

x

Acknowledgments

We would also like to thank our efficient and professional editors at Palgrave, David Pervin, Heather Van Dusen, Toby Wahl, and Joanna Mericle, for shepherding this volume from acquisition to production with grace, gentleness, and helpful guidance. Both of us want to add a special thanks to our loved ones for their deep reservoirs of patience, support, good humor, and encouragement as we both became absorbed by the challenge of uncovering and understanding the forms of everyday creativity and power behind institutional syncretism. July 2006

Dennis Galvan Eugene, Oregon Rudra Sil Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

NOTES

ON

CONTRIBUTORS

Thomas J. Bickford is Associate Professor of Political Science Department at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh where he has been teaching since 1995. He specializes in the study of Chinese politics and East Asian international security issues. His articles have appeared in such journals as Asian Survey and Problems of Post-Communism. His publications and ongoing research projects include papers and articles on Chinese civil-military relations, Chinese military business activities in the post-Mao era, military development in Asia, Chinese attitudes toward peacekeeping, and Sino-American relations. Cheng Chen is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. Her research and teaching interests include postcommunist politics, nationalism and nation-building, democratization, Chinese politics, and comparative-historical methodology. She has published in journals such as Problems of Post-Communism, Europe-Asia Studies, and East European Politics and Societies. She is also the author of a forthcoming book tentatively titled The Prospects for Liberal Nationalism in Post-Leninist States. Neil J. Diamant is Associate Professor of Asian Law and Society at Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA). He has previously taught in the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and has served as Post-Doctoral Fellow in Contemporary Chinese Politics, Culture, and Society at the Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949–1968 (University of California Press, 2000), co-editor of Engaging the Law in China: State, Society and Possibilities for Justice (Stanford University Press, 2006), as well as articles in Republican China, The China Quarterly, The

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Journal of Conflict Resolution, Politics and Society, and The Law and Society Review. He is currently writing a book on the politics of rights and patriotism in China. Dennis Galvan is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies, and Director of the International Studies Program at the University of Oregon. He received his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 1996. His book on institutional syncretism in rural Senegal, The State Must Be Our Master of Fire: How Peasants Craft Culturally Sustainable Development in Senegal (University of California Press, 2004) won the 2005 Best Book Award from the African Politics Conference Group. His published work on peasant adaptation of property regimes, social capital and democratization, sustainable development, and grassroots patterns of nation-building has appeared in edited volumes and venues such as the Journal of Democracy, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, and Journal of Modern African Studies. His current book explores the role of syncretic institutions in interethnic cooperation in Senegal and in Central Java, Indonesia. Parakh Hoon is Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and works on southern African politics and environments, including the politics of wildlife conservation and agricultural development, and their effects on rural communities. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 2005, and has lived and worked extensively in Botswana, Zambia, and India. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation, comparing the emergence of “syncretic” collective action arrangements and social exchange patterns in Botswana and Zambia. Christine A. Kearney is an assistant professor in the Politics Department at Saint Anselm College. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University in 2001. Her areas of research include: the international political economy of development, Brazilian political economy, the politics of emerging powers, and theories of culture and institutional change. Pierre Ostiguy is Assistant Professor of Political Studies at Bard College, where he also served as chair of the Latin American and Iberian Studies program. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and received his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley. He has published in Spanish, French, and English on Argentine politics and the Southern Cone, focusing on party systems and on populism. He just published an article on the “lefts” in Kirchner’s Argentina (“Gauches péroniste et non-péroniste dans le système de partis argentin”) in the Revue Internationale de Politique Comparée, and an article on the transformation of the Chilean party system and Chilean political stability in the


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post-transition, in Politique et Sociétés. He is the author of two books in Argentina, including the widely published Los Capitanes de la industria. His current research is on Chavismo in Venezuela and historical Peronism under Perón. Rudra Sil is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania where he previously held the Janice and Julian Bers Chair in the Social Sciences. His research interests encompass theories of institutional change, the political economy of development, comparative labor relations, Russian and Asian studies, and methodological and epistemological issues in the social sciences. He is author of Managing “Modernity”:Work, Community, and Authority in LateIndustrializing Japan and Russia (2002). His articles have appeared in such journals as The Journal of Theoretical Politics and Studies in Comparative International Development. He has also coedited several volumes, including Beyond Boundaries? Disciplines, Paradigms and Theoretical Integration in International Studies (with Eileen Doherty) and World Order After Leninism (with Marc Morjé Howard and Vladimir Tismaneanu). His current projects include an article on the philosophical and practical justification for eclectic approaches to international studies (with Peter Katzenstein) as well as a monograph comparing the evolution of labor politics in Russia and other postcommunist states. Stacey Philbrick Yadav is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and currently teaches at Mount Holyoke College. She was recently awarded a fellowship from the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation to complete her project examining th evolution and character of political discourse and Islamist party practices in Lebanon and Yemen.

LIST

OF ABBREVIATIONS

CHAPTER ONE People’s Liberation Army

PLA

CHAPTER THREE Chinese Communist Party Guomindang

CCP GMD

CHAPTER SEVEN Beijing Municipal Archives Chinese Communist Party Chuxiong Prefectural Archives People’s Republic of China Shanghai Municipal Archives Tong County Archives

BMA CCP CXA PRC SMA TCA

CHAPTER NINE New Economic Mechanism

NEM

CHAPTER TEN Economic Commission for Latin America Plano de Ação Econômico do Governo (Plan of Government Economic Action) Re-adjustable Obligation of the National Treasury

ECLA PAEG ORTN

Introduction


CHAPTER

ONE

The Dilemma of Institutional Adaptation and the Role of Syncretism D en n is G al van an d R u d r a Sil

Forced westernization generates both order and entropy: it imposes universal rules without being able to make them work; it enunciates a unification of worlds without unifying meaning. Bertrand Badie (2000: 234) It is the admixture of formal rules, informal norms, and enforcement characteristics that shapes economic performance . . . . Economies that adopt the formal rules of another economy will have very different performance characteristics than the first economy because of different informal norms and enforcement. Douglass North (1998)

Introduction: The Problematic of Institutional Change Forty years ago, Reinhard Bendix (1967) attacked the “invidious distinction between modernity and tradition” upon which then-prevailing approaches to political and economic development were predicated. Around the same time, a number of other scholars began to identify processes through which quintessentially “traditional” social formations

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Dennis Galvan and Rudra Sil

became resilient elements of new strategies and structures in the pursuit of “modern” developmental ends (Riggs 1964; Rudolph and Rudolph 1967; Whitaker 1967). Such studies undermined the spurious dichotomies, analytic universalism, and teleological assumptions of then-prevalent theories of “modernization,” and eventually paved the way for newer approaches to the study of political and economic change. Collectively, these approaches would prove to be far more attentive to the significance of international demonstration effects, path-dependent historical trajectories, variations in institutional design, the role of informal norms and social networks, and the strategic calculations of individual actors. Yet, the end of the cold war, the spread of democratization and economic liberalization, and, after 9/11, muscular notions of induced progress in troubled nations, have all contributed to the resurgence of universalistic scholarship. This new universalism is evident in arguments touting the harmonizing effects of market discipline and capital mobility across national borders (Borio 2004; Bryant 1994; Ohmae 1999; Strange 1998), evolving technologies of communication and production (Mazarr 2002; Womack, Jones, and Roos 1991), the diffusion of democracy and human rights norms (Finnemore and Sikkink 1999; Payne and Samhat 2004), the expanded role of global governance structures (Muldoon 2004), and convergent modes of individual and collective rationality in a supposedly unprecedented “global” age (Albrow 1997; Cerny 1995; Giddens 2000). These newer expressions of analytic universalism emphasize transnational processes of change rather than the parallel evolution of independent systems. Yet, they too rest on teleological foundational assumptions in that they assign a priori epistemological and causal primacy to homogenizing forces of social transformation and uniform logics of social action rather than to sources of variation across space and mechanisms of historical continuity within locales. In the process, the new universalism implicitly or explicitly projects a vision of economic, political, and social harmonization worldwide not fundamentally different from the vision of evolutionary convergence once embedded in modernization theory (Alexander 1995; Sil 2003). Political and economic elites in the developing world, for their part, have themselves contributed to this reification of the universal at the expense of the local and particular. In their search for international status and recognition, they frequently have sought to emulate particularly successful institutional models on the presumption that these can be transplanted across historical and social contexts essentially as they are, hermetically shrouded in abstract purity, disconnected from the

The Dilemma of Institutional Adaptation

5

messiness of national history and local social reality. While this tendency appears to have become more pronounced in the post-cold war era, the temptation to emulate or borrow institutional models from “advanced” referent societies has a long lineage dating back to the nineteenth century (Bendix 1993; Jansen 1979; Westney 1987). However, in contrast to Veblen (1954 [1915]) and others who saw the opportunity of foreign borrowing as one of the situational advantages of backwardness, the concern underlying this volume has to do with the unanticipated consequences wherever new institutions have been crafted by following the simplifying logic of emulation without commensurate attention to the particular social environment in which an imported or imposed institution is being constructed. In this sense, we draw inspiration from the work of James Scott (1998) who has nicely characterized the vast chasms between the “high modernist” aspirations of state elites and the practical knowledge embedded in local communities (metis). Privileging the former at the expense of the latter is an all too common tendency among ambitious elites in late-developing states, and this tendency has all too frequently resulted in the spectacular failure of grand developmental projects. The contributions to this volume expand upon Scott’s observation by generating historically grounded and theoretically sound reasons for questioning the viability of institutions transferred without due consideration to locally embedded and historically transmitted constellations of interests, social norms, collective memories, and practical knowledge. This volume also speaks to the contributions of new historical, economic, and sociological institutionalists who have already articulated the varied mechanisms and distinctive pathways of institutional evolution that have produced multiple equilibria across time and space (Ekiert and Hanson 2003; Friedland and Alford 1991; Hopcroft 1998; Knight 1992; Nee and Ingram 1998; North 1990, 1998; Pierson 2000, 2003; Crouch and Farrell 2004; Rothstein and Steinmo 2002; Schickler 2001; Thelen 2003; Thelen and Steinmo 1992; Zeitlin and Herrigel 2000). The understandings of institutional change contained in these diverse approaches to institutional analysis provide a necessary foundation for the chapters to follow. At the same time, the approach in this volume is distinctive in at least two ways. First, each of the essays, while considering quite different kinds of institutions in different historical and regional settings, is organized around a common problematic that has received only limited attention in the literature on institutional change: the dilemmas of deploying the rules, practices, and design of institutions that have been imported or imposed from external

6


environments in locales where actors are enmeshed in historically embedded complexes of interests, norms, collective memories, social relations, and knowledge structures. Second, in exploring how these dilemmas are manifested and addressed across a wide range of political, economic, and social institutions in different historical and regional contexts, the volume strives to illustrate the analytic power of the concept of “syncretism,” a concept that has demonstrated its value in the study of cultural practices across social contexts and can be fruitfully deployed to analyze common aspects of institutional change not easily captured in existing frameworks. The following section examines the origins of the term syncretism and offers a definition for “institutional syncretism” that may be systematically applied to the study of institutional change in different domains and regions. In the process, we draw attention to important, but often underappreciated, aspects of institutional change in processes of political, economic, and social transformation worldwide. We then consider the epistemological underpinnings of institutional syncretism as an eclectic intellectual construct that transcends more narrowly framed understandings of agency, rationality, and structure in competing approaches to institutional analysis. Finally, we provide a brief overview of how the contributions to this volume makes use of the concept of syncretism in developing original interpretations of quite different kinds of political, economic, and social institutions across time and space. Institutional Syncretism: A Def inition and Hypothesis The term syncretism first appeared in the humanities, originally in the context of tracing how a “pure” endogenous ritual or art form might be exposed to “contamination” by imported symbols or practices (Stewart and Shaw 1994: 1). As fields such as cultural anthropology and comparative religion became more relativistic and context-sensitive, syncretism came to be increasingly viewed in a more positive light as an “inventive and creative process” (Balme 1999: 8), leading to novel combinations of religious beliefs and practices (Stewart and Shaw 1994) or novel linguistic or artistic conventions reflecting foreign influences accompanying colonialism (Balme 1999; Kullick 1992). In this way, the notion of syncretism came to be widely used in the humanities to emphasize the tolerance, creativity, and intellectual vigor required to “cement all the elements together into a new type of tradition and, further, to maintain


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the combination of the erudite and the popular” (Colpe 1987; cf. Balme 1999: 7–8). The use of syncretism in these expressive contexts emphasizes observable processes of change in art forms or religious practice; less emphasis has been placed in this literature on systematic examination of the individual agents, institutional constraints, or historical processes shaping the character and durability of new combinations of belief and practice. In the social sciences, the term syncretism has made its appearance relatively recently, usually to capture the distinctive quality of processes through which actors delicately balance heterogeneous interests (Di Palma 1978), or to characterize ideologies that establish a meaningful relationship “between the diverse substantive rationalities of religious legitimation and religious solidarities and the formal rationality of uniformity of worldview” (Haas 1997: 51). More recently, syncretic change that “grafts onto what exists” has been credited for the successful consolidation and legitimation of nascent democracies (Eckstein 1998: 267) and for the reconciliation of political orders otherwise seen as distinct in terms of evolutionary phases of change (Sabel and Zeitlin 1996: 4). In these treatments, syncretism appears to suggest some sort of synthetic blend among disparate structures, interests, or value systems; but what appears to have been overlooked to some extent are the processes of interpretation, translation, negotiation, and mutual adjustment through which such a synthesis might be constructed, legitimized, and maintained. Our own understanding of syncretism, initially articulated in quite separate studies (Galvan 2004; Sil 2002), combines attention to the complexities of adaptive interpretation with the systematic examination of the conditions under which particular strategies of adaptation produce more viable and meaningful institutional constructs. We thus define institutional syncretism for the purposes of this volume as: a set of interpretive processes through which actors in local settings selectively transform newly imposed or transplanted institutional features (norms, rules—formal and informal—organizational principles, and operational procedures) while adapting portable elements of preexisting social institutions to produce innovative institutional configurations. This understanding of institutional syncretism underscores the need and value of research programs that systematically explore the direction, origins, and intended and unintended consequences of development by increasing our ability to recognize and understand the processes and resilience of local diversification and cross-regional variation. Indeed, a rich literature on institutional evolution has already drawn attention to such processes as “hybridization” (Zeitlin and Herrigel 2000), “institutional layering”

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(Schickler 2001; Thelen 2003), “institutional conversion” (cf. Thelen 2003), and the “reworking,” or “blending” of old and new institutions (Inglot 2003; Stark and Bruszt 1998). While these studies anticipate the fundamental dilemma of institutional adaptation across space, and while they recognize the malleability of institutional structures over time in response to changing social environments, they tend to reify the constituent elements of given institutions while treating local norms and social relations as either rigidly fixed or infinitely malleable. What is frequently left out is the process through which local sociocultural factors—constellations of interests, shared norms, collective memories, and practical knowledge—shape the subjective understandings and creative responses of different groups of actors encountering new institutional environments, and how these understandings and responses are, in turn, affected by the experience of participation in new practices, routines, and authority structures. The manner in which these dialectical processes of simultaneous reinterpretation and mutual adjustment play out, we contend, is highly relevant to understanding and explaining the extent, process, and viability of institutional adaptation in a given context. Thus, our understanding of institutional syncretism views diverse trajectories of institutional adaptation as not simply the hybridization or layering of discrete institutional components, but a contested and negotiated approach to the modification and reinterpretation of both locally embedded norms and practices and the formal rules, routines, and structures characterizing newly imported or imposed institutions. Institutional syncretism may certainly subsume such processes of hybridization and layering, but what is significant here is the creative response of actors in challenging and modifying various roles, practices, and organizational structures associated with a relatively unfamiliar institution borrowed or imposed from abroad. Also of significance is the concomitant modification, reinterpretation, and redeployment of the most relevant preexisting constellations of interests, shared norms, collective memories, and social knowledge by actors with different degrees of attachment to their local communities and different degrees of commitment to their roles in their new institutional settings. As a result of these adaptive processes, an institution ceases to be a variant of an imported or imposed institutional model and becomes an original construction in its own right—a construction that is familiar and meaningful to relevant local actors while still aimed at fulfilling objectives originally associated with the borrowed or imposed institution. Thus, institutional syncretism points to interpretive processes—initiated by elites or other local actors—that can minimize (without necessarily eliminating) the discrepancy between imported and


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local norms, roles, and institutional models. In this way, institutional syncretism provides a means for coping with the intensified pressures to adapt practices originally developed in foreign settings without provoking the crises of legitimation associated with the absence of a sense of historical continuity and cultural distinctiveness on which all communities ultimately rely (Galvan 2004; Sil 2002). Such a conception of institutional syncretism is necessarily general and abstract. Given the emphasis placed on local contexts and specific sets of actors, norms, and interests, it is only in relation to concrete substantive problems that the concept of institutional syncretism can be given a specific operational definition. Nevertheless, the concept is portable in that it can be fruitfully applied to a range of institutions across time and space, with the possibility that empirical observations about these institutions can be cumulated to generate some inferences about the extent, dynamics, and direction of institutional adaptation. In fact, all of the contributions to this volume may be read as an attempt to explore a collective hypothesis: that syncretic institutions, whether deliberately engineered from above or emerging through incrementally altered practices from below, will generate more viable, durable, and legitimate institutions over the long run than would be the case with borrowed or imposed institutions that are transplanted without significant modification of core organizational ideals, routines, structures and practices. This is chiefly because syncretic modes of adaptation reflect the creative intervention of local actors who are themselves motivated by a need to reconcile institutional rules and practices with locally embedded sets of interests, values, and social structures. As a result, syncretic institutions generate a sense of familiarity, consistency, and local authenticity in the eyes of local actors. In the absence of successful syncretism, borrowed or imposed institutions are likely to lack moral or practical significance in the eyes of many individuals, and may well give rise to divergent, potentially conflicting sets of norms and practices in arenas wherever actors happen to enjoy some discretion of their own. Some sense of the significance we attach to the presence or absence of syncretic forms of adaptation is implicitly or partially anticipated in recent studies on such diverse topics as state-formation, democratization, and economic development. Badie (2000), for example, has suggested that much of the political disorder accompanying state formation in nonWestern societies has stemmed from recurrent conflicts between those seeking to directly import models of the state that proved viable in the West and those seeking to offer a competing understanding of statehood founded on principles supposedly derived from distinct histories and cultures. While skeptical of what he calls “reactive” or “revivalist” strategies

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that reject imported institutional forms altogether, Badie calls for greater attention to the innovative process of “creative deviation” to cope with the internal tensions and conflicts spurred by failed universalist efforts to reproduce the image of Western states in diverse non-Western settings. Similarly, in a study of democratic consolidation in Senegal, Shaeffer (1998) demonstrates how existing social norms and imported notions of democracy combined with the intentions, sensibilities, and actions of ordinary Senegalese to produce a distinctively Wolof understanding of demokaraasi. He concludes that “even when democratic ideas are diffused throughout the world, local communities assimilate imported ideas selectively and transform them to fit their own life conditions” (Schaeffer 1998: 146). In the study of property rights and new legal orders in postcommunist Eastern Europe, Stark and Bruszt envision not a teleological march toward freehold, but the emergence of “recombinant” forms of ownership and exchange that result from the creative putting together of new liberal-market forms and Soviet-era models of property (Stark and Bruszt 1998). In treatments of economic development, we find references to the positive consequences of a “synergy” between the economic objectives of firms and nations and preexisting “norms of cooperation and networks of civic engagement among ordinary citizens,” accompanied by the expectation that the social trust fostered by the latter can serve as a valuable resource in enhancing cooperation while reducing transaction costs (Evans 1997: 178; Granovetter 1992). Such a perspective on economic change is also consistent with the emphasis that some new institutionalists place on the logic of “adaptive rather than allocative efficiency” (North 1998: 256) that result from flexible institutional structures being supported by preexisting cognitive maps and informal norms in a given environment. Despite their quite different foci, these treatments of state-formation, democratization, marketization, and economic transformation all anticipate the main dynamic we seek to draw attention to in this volume: that preexisting local norms, networks, and practices—rather than being inevitably opposed to, or transformed by, exposure to external influences—can be reconfigured to provide valuable resources and interpretive templates for achieving new kinds of developmental ends, so long as new institutional constructs introduced to achieve these ends are themselves disaggregated, selectively modified, and reconstituted in distinctive ways across varied social settings. The concept of institutional syncretism as used in the chapters that follow incorporates this fundamental insight and also provides a framework for systematically identifying, distinguishing, and evaluating the


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manner in which very different kinds of institutions are interpreted and adapted in particular social contexts. The authors draw attention to the importance of interpretive, sense-making processes—what Scott (1998) terms “re-complexification”—inherent when local actors respond to new institutional forms in real, experiential contexts, trying to make new routines and practices comprehensible in terms of existing rules, behaviors, and values. In any locality, these ubiquitous processes of sense-making may lead to multiple and divergent understandings of particular institutional principles or practices. Thus, central to our understanding of institutional syncretism is the creative process of transformation, negotiation, and recombination that ultimately yields not merely a variant of an original institutional model but a new design that has been created by actors working with diverse sets of social expectations and cultural repertoires. To be sure, elites have the power and resources to designate official institutional ideologies and practices, and thus can often take the lead in shaping the content of syncretic adaptation, while ordinary people often lack the means to systematically institutionalize their own syncretic formulations beyond very limited local scales. Nevertheless, we recognize that syncretic adaptations undertaken by nonelite actors may subvert, support, or sometimes supplant the more empowered programs of institutional change articulated by elites. It is important to proceed from a particular substantive question concerning a particular institution in a given region, and then to identify the relevant interests, norms, templates, and social relations that influence local actors’ perceptions, interpretations, and evaluations of the particular roles, rules, and practices identified with a newly imported or imposed institution. The Epistemological Significance of Institutional Syncretism As defined, the context-sensitive character of institutional syncretism effectively precludes its use in parsimonious models, elegant general explanations, or definitive predictions. At the same time, the concept of syncretism presumes a common problematic at work whenever institutional forms from one context are imported into another, regardless of the specific regions, time periods, and institution types involved. Thus, the possibility of institutional syncretism can be regarded as a core element of an overarching analytic framework for identifying, problematizing, comparing, and evaluating adaptive processes across social contexts and

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types of institutions. In this sense, the concept does permit one to draw modest inferences and contingent predictions about the sources and effectiveness of different approaches to the consolidation and legitimation of transplanted or imposed institutions across societies. Thus, arguments about institutional syncretism are neither likely to be nested in a unified theoretical framework nor are likely to be axiomatically derived from covering laws or parsimonious models—rather they encourage the construction of middle-range inferences on the basis of “contextualized comparison” (Locke and Thelen 1995) of interpretive processes and institutional outcomes across social contexts and types of institutions. In that sense, institutional syncretism, like recent historical institutionalist work on the welfare state, follows Hall’s (2003) notion of “systematic process analysis,” turning attention away from mechanical and simplistic links between cause-effect dyads toward sensitivity to complex interaction effects among historic structures, interests, processes of preference formation, and the ideas and capacities of creative agents played out over time in particular settings. In view of this modest function, the institutional syncretism approach articulated in this volume does not claim to unify, replace, or subsume contemporary metatheoretical traditions such as historical institutionalism, rational-choice theory, or interpretive analysis. In fact, our approach shares with all of these approaches the view that earlier work on economic, political, and social change was sometimes predicated on false dichotomies, illegitimate teleologies, and a flawed functionalist logic, and that such work neglected to offer a balanced consideration of the role of actors, the significance of historical configurations, and the diversity and functionality of preexisting cultural norms and practices. At the same time, we find that such a balanced consideration also tends to elude the most paradigmatic incarnations of rational-choice analysis, cultural interpretation, and historical institutionalist analysis. The ontologies undergirding each of these approaches essentially privilege some component of social reality over others on the basis of unexamined foundational assumptions (Lichbach 2003; Sil 2000). The result is that complex adaptive processes that contain elements of rational action, cultural framing, and historically-grounded structural constraints are reduced to simplified expressions of a single, all-encompassing explanatory logic that can be applied only by proponents of one research tradition or another. By contrast, the foundations underlying the concept of institutional syncretism may be loosely identified with perspectives considered to be “structurationist” (Giddens 1984; Sewell 1992). This perspective, while abstract


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in its formulation, provides an ontology that permits an open-ended examination of the processes through which agency is evident in the reproduction and transformation of structures over time, and through which material and ideal dimensions of social reality (for example, the distribution of resources and shared normative frameworks) impinge upon each other and constrain individual behavior in everyday social relations. In effect, “structures” represent “mutually sustaining schemas and resources that empower and constrain social action and that tend to be reproduced by that said action. But their reproduction is never automatic . . . because structures are multiple and intersecting, because schemas are transposable, and because resources are polysemic and accumulate unpredictably” (Sewell 1992: 19). Such abstract foundational statements do not yield parsimonious explanatory models (in marked contrast, say, to the methodological individualism underlying game theory); but it is precisely because structurationism refrains from defining categories that incorporate implicit hypotheses about their causal significance (Sewell 1992) that it is able to avoid the a priori reification of agency, culture, or structure, enabling the investigator to explore the relative significance of each of these as variable objects of investigation given the questions and contexts involved (Cohen 1986; Sil 2000). Thus, our understanding of institutional syncretism—while rejecting restrictive assumptions and programmatic assertions associated with some variants of historical institutionalism—shares core historical institutionalist assumptions that institutions represent “middle-level mediations between large-scale processes and the microdynamics of agency and action” (Katznelson 1997: 84) and that differences in the historical origins and emergent configurations of institutions account for consequential variations in norm-governed behavior, preference orderings, and patterns of cooperation and conflict among actors (Katznelson 1997; Rothstein 1998; Thelen and Steinmo 1992). We concur with Rothstein and Steinmo (2002) when they note that a careful, context-sensitive approach to history thickens our understanding of how self-interested agents realize preferences as a result of their structural position, yet are not fully able to transform structures to suit those interests. The historical sensitivity required to trace processes of institutional syncretism can likewise help account for the diverse origins of variation in preferences among those situated within the same institutional context across locales, thus adding the missing link to organizational and cultural approaches to institutions. In this way, the comparative study of syncretic process also shares the basic foundational assumptions of

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pragmatism adopted by some historical institutionalists (cf. Berk and Galvan 2004), emphasizing the situated and creative agency of actors who recognize, develop, and alter preferences as tools to refashion structures, even as their positions within given social and institutional structures informs and shapes their values, goals, and resources. To the extent the approach in this volume differs from some historical institutionalist work to date, this can be accounted for by the types of institutions and the political or economic domains within which they function. Whereas the best-known work in the historical institutionalist tradition tends to focus on national-level actors, social policies, laws, and administrative organizations (as evident, for example, in historical treatments of Latin American regime structures or the European welfare state), our focus on institutional syncretism requires attention to processes of adaptation in different types of institutions operating in different domains, ranging from the national-level (such as the military or a national political party) as well as the locallevel (such as local government bodies or industrial firms). Moreover, much historical institutionalist work in practice tends to either emphasize agency among political, economic, and administrative elites competing for influence in institutional arenas, or among the collective attributes of institutions, such as particular rules or organizational routines. In contrast, the careful consideration of local context in any search for syncretic processes of institutional change requires a broader consideration of a wider range of dialectical social processes linking different categories of actors located at different positions within and outside a given institutional arena. This serves to draw attention to processes of negotiation, sense-making and rule-changing that draw together institutional actors as well as actors defined at the level of individuals and grassroots communities. In this sense, while we wholeheartedly agree with Rothstein and Steinmo that history matters, we do not see this history as pushing “evolutionary development along specific historical paths” (Rothstein and Steinmo, 2002: 16); rather, we see history as mediated by hermeneutic processes whereby the very characterization of that history is part of the story through which a range of complex acts of contestation, negotiation, and sensemaking occur simultaneously and set the stage for diverse evolutionary possibilities along multiple paths. Syncretism, in effect, provides an alternative, localistic, sometimes chaotic mechanism for the study of institutional change, drawing attention not to a highly constrained notion of path dependency but rather to what might be called “path contingency” ( Johnson 2003).


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Our understanding of syncretism also speaks to the methodological individualism undergirding the new economic institutionalism and “thin” versions of rational-choice analysis. These approaches emphasize how particular agents define their material and ideal interests within particular social contexts and how they engage in iterated strategic interactions that can produce both multiple equilibria and “subversions of rationality” that can, in turn, reinforce or undermine preexisting structures (Elster 1983; Kiser 1996; Bates et al. 1998). As North (1990: 101) puts it, the same fundamental change in relative prices can affect two societies differently precisely because “preceding institutional arrangements” in specific contexts generate different patterns of “adaptations at the margins,” adaptations that reflect the different configurations of bargaining power and different subjective models guiding the choices of actors in their respective environments. Our conception of institutional syncretism can be reconciled with these adaptive processes as actors seek to frame their bargaining situation in ways that reflect preexisting subjective understandings of power, risk, costs, and payoffs in a given institutional context. Moreover, our conceptualization of institutional syncretism incorporates individual-level motivational assumptions, but these are broader, more flexible assumptions reflecting the combined influence of concepts found in the new economic institutionalism and in certain strands of organizational psychology. In relation to the former (North 1990; Williamson 1993), institutional syncretism can be viewed as a dynamic mechanism that can produce the familiarity and “social conditioning” necessary for the long-term efficacy of institutions. Without these, transaction costs increase and collective action problems multiply as individuals are less likely to rely on expectations of trust and reciprocity in new environments characterized by cognitive uncertainty (Ensminger 1997). From an organizational psychology perspective, institutional syncretism reflects the tendency of actors to filter new information and simplify complex or unpredictable environments through “mental maps” and “basic social understandings” previously constructed by groups or communities (Arthur 1994; Denzau and North 1994; cf. Pierson 2000: 260). These simplifying constructs can serve to reinforce those elements of a social environment that appear most comprehensible and that produce the least amount of cognitive dissonance. Thus, we conceive of institutional syncretism as a continuous process, with possibilities for further adaptation or refinement through “positive feedback” and “learning processes” (Pierson 2000: 260–1) as triumphant successes or dramatic failures allow institutional elites and other local actors to strengthen, adjust, or reject emergent syncretic formulas.

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In relation to the renewed attention to culture in the new sociological institutionalism, we adopt the position that culture is more of a category than a variable consisting of a large number of subjective elements, some of which are more essential to defining communities and thus less malleable than others. Thus, despite the attention given to the role of shared values and memories among local actors involved in syncretic processes, the use of syncretism as a core construct does not suggest a reified notion of culture as a static determinant of social acceptance and institutional efficacy. Rather, culture is seen as a set of specific and adaptable norms and orientations that can be reshaped and redeployed by individuals in the framing of new institutional practices and new modes of collective action (Archer 1988; Swidler 1986; Zald 1996). Following Young (1994) and Laitin (1986), we recognize that the limited analytic traction of culturally oriented work in comparative politics, from Almond and Verba (1963) to Huntington (1993), stems from unquestioned and sometimes unconscious primordialist assumptions about the origins and transformability of culture. What anthropology has understood, at least since Sahlins (1981), we extend to the study of norms, habits, and values as constitutive elements of institutions. These are plastic social constructs, moldable within limits set by historical precedent, by the structural position of actors, by the resources available to them, and by the interests animating their efforts to rework systems of meaning. The ongoing business of reimagining culture is a crucial site for the transformation of preferences and orientations, in turn setting much of the terms for how people react to and reformulate institutions themselves. Thus, ours is a culturalist approach only in the sense that what is normally understood as culture offers insights into where and how institutions are decomposable and subject to ongoing social construction by various categories of actors who view themselves and their environments through the lens of partially adjustable subjective models and cognitive maps. At the same time, we accord local culture the same analytic weight that we do to the interests of actors, the structure of rules and the distribution of power. In fact, we categorically reject the relegation of local sociocultural factors to stories or contextual circumstances that do not ultimately hold the same epistemological status as universal models of social action, even in the case of “analytic narratives” purportedly aimed at combining local narratives with game-theoretic models (Bates, Greif, Levi, Rosenthal, and Weingast 1998; Kiser 1996; cf. Sil 2000). In our understanding of institutional change, local actors and their subjective orientations toward their institutional environments are viewed as a fundamental and


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ubiquitous aspect of institutional change, even if variations across time and space require the operationalization of the local to be highly specific. Scholars examining political, economic, and social change in different areas of the world have long sensed that the peculiarities of local experience, history, norms, and habits matter, but the concept of institutional syncretism provides a language and a focal point for the systematic exploration of just how fundamentally these shape diverse institutional trajectories. Understood in this way, the comparative study of institutional syncretism allows for the juxtaposition of sufficiently similar narratives to permit comparative analysis and modest inferences, but without the rigid formalism and mandatory methodological individualism that undergird other efforts to link analytic models to local narratives. Such a conception of the material and ideal dimensions of agency and structure speaks to recent calls for the accommodation of “analytical eclecticism” as a complement to research traditions that confer epistemological primacy either to individual-level interests, collective identities, or the distribution of power in institutional arrangements (Katzenstein and Sil 2004; Sil 2000). In such a view, power and interest are as much a part of the conceptualization of institutional change as shared identities and local norms. Indeed, the politics of contestation over culture and historical memory—who is able to define authentic local tradition in terms that are socially acceptable and emotionally compelling—can set the terms for adaptation, rejection, or acceptance of new institutional forms. At the same time, it is important to recognize that individuals’ sense of their preferences and resources are shaped by the lenses through which they view their social environment, with the value attached to particular outcomes influenced by familiarity with particular practices, social structures, and patterns of authority. The very notions of power and interest are mediated by subjective norms and understandings, while, at any given point in time, the renegotiation of meanings attached to institutional practices reflect a particular distribution of power and a particular set of preferences embraced by actors possessing varying degrees of influence and status. Thus, the concept of institutional syncretism essentially draws attention to the interface between the least dogmatic and most sophisticated versions of rationalist, structuralist, and culturalist approaches to institutional change for the limited purpose of gaining analytic purchase on a given problem and a given time- and space- bound context. In so doing, we want to be clear that our intention is not to suggest any kind of unified theoretical synthesis that might “inevitably masquerade as singular objectivities” (Lichbach 2003: 145). In fact, the very

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definition of syncretism suggests that it cannot be operationalized as hard blueprint for characterizing or engineering institutional change; instead it suggests a fluid set of strategies for disaggregation, reinterpretation, and recombination that will be recognizable and comparable across cases of successful institutional adaptation. Thus, our understanding and use of institutional syncretism points to a modest effort to formulate an intellectual construct that can draw attention to processes and mechanisms shaping the interactions between actors’ material and ideal interests, their shared social relations and subjective mental maps, and the distribution of power and authority across different categories of actors within the limited context of assessing the consolidation, legitimacy, and performance of newly imported or imposed institutional models in a given locale. Institutional Syncretism across Time and Space The chapters assembled here reveal how institutions imposed or imported from elsewhere are more capable of marshaling commitment, trust, and sacrifice when they are rendered legible and meaningful through a process of syncretism. The institutions examined range from local democratic institutions, military organizations, and political parties to industrial firms, development strategies, and laws regulating family life. In all cases, the authors use the concept of institutional syncretism in comparable ways to shed light on unanticipated challenges and distinctive dynamics not associated with original institutional models. Specifically, the way the authors use the concept of syncretism draws attention to three frequently underappreciated features of institutional change: (1) how norms and practices embedded in preexisting local institutions, when incongruous with those embedded in imposed or borrowed institutional models, can undermine the efficacy and legitimacy of the latter in the course of development; (2) how preexisting cognitive maps and interpretive frameworks provide communities with distinctive templates through which to reinterpret and reconfigure features of new institutions to make them more recognizable and meaningful; and (3) how these adaptive processes become self-reinforcing mechanisms that yield continuous institutional innovation, preserve the distinctiveness of institutional forms, and limit the prospects for the wholesale replication of modern or global institutional models. Part One of the volume consists of four chapters addressing political institutions of


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various types, and Part Two consists of five chapters addressing a range of economic and social institutions, broadly defined. In the following chapter, Dennis Galvan follows efforts over the last three decades to syncretically modify local-level democratic institutions in one region of rural Senegal. At one level, this chapter’s longitudinal frame permits a quasi-experiment within a geographically bounded case setting: when peasants were able to syncretically adapt elected local councils, these institutions proved more politically legitimate, and more effective with regard to their primary goal (land and natural resource management). When state officials cut short peasant adaptation of the local councils, local people became more likely to resist, ignore, or sabotage the efforts of these councils to manage land and other resources. At a deeper level, Galvan uses this case to show that syncretic adaptation does not entail a singular, uniform reinterpretation of new institutions in terms of a timeless or homogeneous tradition. Rather, syncretism opens the door to political contestation over diverse notions of history and culture, permitting a messy range of versions of creative adaptation. In the Senegalese case, this has resulted in the fractal multiplication of various divergent variations on the rural councils, and over time, variations on the variations. This multiplication of syncretic institutional forms leads to a third layer of analysis, in which Galvan considers a range of social and political selection mechanisms through which a particular syncretic variant may become more widespread than others, and sometimes may emerge as a dominant new institutional form. Chapter three by Thomas Bickford explores how the coherence and adaptability of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China, both as a military organization and an economic actor, is a product of the effective blending of pre-1949 Chinese military traditions and practices with the formally modern organizational features adapted from western (and Soviet) military organizations. Bickford notes that the exportation of the Western model in later developers was not as uniform or complete a process as some scholars argue. He views the PLA as an excellent example of how traditional features of Chinese society not only coexisted with, but were used to interpret and indigenize the rational-legal features of the military. Bickford’s analysis explores how western ideals and principles of military organization were adapted to make the PLA intelligible to a peasant society, and proceeds to characterize the PLA’s military-economic functions as a case of syncretism engineered by communist party elites in their effort to use recognizable prerevolutionary military traditions in combination with the formally modern organizational characteristics of the military. This syncretic approach is

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responsible for distinctive features that, while seemingly contradictory, served the PLA well in making it an authoritative vehicle for social transformation for a period of time. In chapter four, Pierre Ostiguy uses the concept of syncretism in a manner that combines elements of social engineering by institution builders (emphasized in the approaches of Bickford and Sil) with the more interpretive and grassroots recrafting by local actors (emphasized in the approaches of Diamant and Galvan). Ostiguy interprets Argentina’s Peronist party as a locally syncretic deviation from an ideal-typical EuroAmerican model of party organization and mobilization emphasizing the role of class culture in the process of party consolidation. Ostiguy demonstrates how the initial formations of Peronism and anti-Peronism freely borrowed from a nineteenth-century repertoire of antinomies constructed in the period of nation formation, a repertoire that included the dichotomy of civilization and barbarism, opposing attitudes toward caudillo rule, and contrasting views of the relationship to Europe and the hinterland. In the late 1980s, this repertoire also provided the basis for the politically powerful use of Peron and Peronist symbols to legitimize, among the lower sectors, economic policies that effectively reversed those carried out by Peron himself. Thus, Peronism’s syncretic character as a cultural movement not only accounts for its continued resonance with the working class but also for the Peronist party’s success in eliciting working-class support even as its leadership embraced IMF-sponsored, probusiness economic neoliberalism. In chapter five, Stacey Philbrick Yadav examines the evolution of Hizballah (Party of God) from a program of militant resistance to Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon, to a politico-military bloc defending particular Shi’i Muslim interests, to the largest political party in the Lebanese Chamber of Deputies. This transformation has been accompanied by a process of syncretic adaptation involving (1) a reinterpretation of Shi’i principles of governance under guardians schooled in Islamic scriptures (wilayat al-faqih), principles originally imported from Khomeini’s Iran; and (2) a reconfiguration of archetypal political parties founded and organized in formally liberal-democratic settings. Transcending simplistic arguments about whether Islam and democracy are compatible, Yadav’s analysis demonstrates how imported Islamic ideals of governance have been translated into practice to support the organizational and strategic requirements of a modern political party seeking electoral success. At the same time, parliamentary participation has provided a motivation and framework for the movement to integrate transnational Shi’i principles on governance with a nationalist message that resonates


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with its local constituency. Yadav concludes with a look at the difficulties Hizballah has experienced in recent years in maintaining its original syncretic ideology and self-image within changing contexts, suggesting that particular syncretic strategies of institutional adaptation need to be reconstructed and updated over time for an institution to maintain its coherence and efficacy. Part Two shifts the focus to economic and social institutions. In chapter six, Rudra Sil examines the efforts of managerial elites in prewar and postwar Japan to appropriate foreign, largely American, management principles while seeking to build authority in the eyes of a restive workforce. Sil’s analysis focuses on the challenge of forging common understandings between managers, who seek to establish formal rules, principles, and practices on the basis of imported management models, and regular workers whose informal social relations reflect the influence of norms and practices embedded in local communities. To deal with this challenge, prewar managerial elites initially strained to juxtapose a rigid ideology of traditional familism alongside “scientific management” principles imported from the United States, but without gaining the commitment of a workforce increasingly frustrated by the gap between rhetoric and reality. In contrast, postwar elites came upon a syncretic approach that, while not necessarily empowering workers, helped to produce more stable understanding among managers and workers along with a marked increase in productivity and a decrease in labor unrest. This managerial syncretism was reflected in employment practices that simultaneously represented a creative adaptation of existing management doctrines and resonated with preexisting notions of fairness, reciprocity, and collective participation held by ordinary workers. Thus, for Sil, what is replicable about Japanese-style management is not its specific set of organizational structures and practices but the broader attempt at syncretizing portable social legacies with borrowed management models. In chapter seven, Neil Diamant focuses on the dynamics of grassroots syncretism in the story of China’s 1950 Marriage Law. In this case, largely illiterate peasants reinterpreted and used the new law on the basis of preexisting norms and interests embedded in tight-knit patriarchal rural communities. In contrast to previous studies that view the marriage law as a failure among the unsophisticated rural masses, Diamant argues that peasants were more strategic than full-fledged urbanites in creatively using the law’s liberal provisions in terms of their own preexisting assumptions and interests. Resulting judgments undermined the state’s intention of using the law to abolish feudal marriage practices and replace them with modern marriages. Many features of rural life, such as

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access to land, community, and sexual practices were subject to syncretic recombination with some of the modernist premises underlying the law; and ironically, many modern features of urban life, such as higher education, individualism, and separation from community militated against such a concerted effort to engineer family change. In chapter eight, Parakh Hoon, drawing on original fieldwork in rural Zambia, traces syncretic transformations of labor pooling institutions from precolonial times into the present era of structural adjustment. His chapter shows a range of syncretic reformulations of what began as festive beer parties, celebratory gatherings akin to U.S. barn-raising, whereby community members pooled scarce labor at crucial times in the agricultural cycle. As the money economy took hold in the mid-twentieth century, labor pooling became partly commodified, with workers being paid more often in cash than beer. In the last decades of the twentieth century, as structural adjustment brought increased income inequality, rich farmers moved to fully commodified wage labor, while the majority poor found themselves more reliant on what remained of the old labor pooling practices, which become a stigmatic marker of marginalization. However, the material need for shared labor at bottleneck moments in the agricultural cycle remained, resulting in new, syncretic labor pooling systems that tap into and reproduce the logic of hosting a “work party,” but now are undertaken by groups of people with common interests, rather than bonds of kinship or identity. The poor, through churches and clubs, rely heavily on these arrangements, while the state, elite farmers, and international aid and environmental organizations have also tried to set up similar labor pooling associations to get work done or promote new farming techniques, with varying degrees of success. Hoon’s contribution nicely integrates both subaltern and elite efforts to syncretically recraft and deploy new institutional forms in ways that tap into historical patterns of legitimation and social mobilization. In chapter nine, Cheng Chen explores why, in spite of a host of common institutional legacies, some post-Leninist regimes have made more progress toward liberal democracy than others. Drawing upon a comparative study of Hungary and Romania, Chen’s answer focuses on how the core institutions of Leninism, originally constructed in the USSR and imposed in standard fashion across Eastern Europe under Stalin, ultimately evolved along different pathways in different social settings. In Romania, Leninist institutions were modified in a syncretic manner; the original Soviet model of Leninist development was incrementally modified, but at the same time, preexisting institutions and symbols were adapted to support an original Leninist formula that was


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rigorously and consistently implemented over a period of several decades. By contrast, in Hungary, Leninist symbols and practices came to be thinly layered over preexisting formal and informal institutions, taking full advantage of the latitude afforded by Khrushchev’s “many roads to socialism.” Ironically, the syncretic adaptation of Leninist institutions in Romania made the extrication from Leninism far more difficult and generated ambivalent responses from both elites and masses to liberal institutions. The extrication from Leninism was easier in Hungary, where the removal of a layer of Leninist symbols and practices revealed a pre-Leninist economy and society that had been more open to liberal political and economic institutions. Chen’s argument thus draws attention to the possibility that the successful syncretization of one set of institutions can have the unintended consequence of impeding the adaptation of a new set of institutions in the future. Finally, in chapter ten, Christine Kearney examines the role of syncretism in the emergence of the 1964–67 anti-inflation policy reforms that preceded the Brazilian economic miracle of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Conventional wisdom treats these policies as radically monetarist and IMF-inspired, a kind of preview of the neoliberalism to come in later decades. Kearney’s careful historical reading of the reform plans shows how this is an oversimplification that misses the creative adaptation behind the plan. While the 1964–67 plans called for sudden reductions in inflation and wages, the government allowed these targets to slip. It did so because designers of the plan were deliberately trying to come up with a Brazilian solution to inflation that would balance external demands for money supply control with a strong belief among Brazilian elites that the state must aggressively pursue industrial growth as a means to address Brazil’s perceived historic backwardness. Kearney painstakingly disentangles the economic plan and the discourse surrounding it to show how policy instruments like price indexation (which automatically adjusted certain prices to keep pace with inflation) and the plan’s emphasis on gradual, rather than sudden reform, were the direct results of policymakers’ efforts to creatively balance international economic orthodoxy, the structuralist economic theories dominant in Brazil in the 1960s, and a commitment to progress through industrial growth. Kearney shows how institutional syncretism, as opposed to material interest, international power, or ideas-based approaches, provides explanatory payoff in making sense of the emergence of this crucial set of economic policies in Brazil. The differences in outcomes evident across the cases examined here suggests that syncretic processes may either help to adapt and legitimize

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new institutional practices or, left unfinished, may unintentionally widen the gap in the expectations and understandings of different groups of actors. In some instances, as in the case of the truncation of the Senegalese Rural Councils, the prewar Japanese firm, or China’s 1950 Marriage Law, while generic mixtures of old and new, or alien and local, circulated, these did not lead to the evolution of a stable normative consensus between elites and less powerful actors in terms of appropriate standards of behavior in a given institutional context. On the other hand, as in the case of the Chinese PLA, the postwar Japanese enterprise, the Peronist party in Argentina, and some Zambian labor arrangements, we find an emergent syncretism that more effectively fused the functionality and scope of modern institutions with the legitimacy and authenticity that local actors associate with long-established and more familiar norms, practices, and social relationships. Moreover, the emergence of syncretic institutional forms in one environment does not necessarily suggest that coherence, legitimacy, or performance will remain high in the long term. Thus, while the Japanese firm did prove to be a successful model of labor peace and productivity in postwar Japan’s drive for catch-up development, it did not have the flexibility to immediately adapt to the changing requirements of the post-cold war global economy. Similarly, although Romania was more successful than Hungary in engineering the syncretic adaptation of Leninism, this also locked Romania into an institutional framework that made the adoption of liberal reforms more problematic after the fall of Leninism. And, China’s push to become a regional or global power means that the PLA has had to move away from its long-standing strategy of embedding military practices in local socioeconomic relations. These cases suggest that the concept of institutional syncretism must ultimately be treated in a context-sensitive manner, both in regard to examining arguments about how particular institutional models are initially adapted in a given environment, and how emergent syncretic models might or might not prove effective in achieving different types of objectives in changing domestic and international environments. However, despite these different outcomes, the chapters collectively serve to underscore the significance of syncretism as an integral aspect of any theoretical framework that purports to provide a sophisticated mapping of the processes through which institutions borrowed or imposed from elsewhere are adapted in varied local circumstances. The authors challenge the tendency to equate institutional development with evolutionary paths of convergence upon some universal “end of history” (Fukuyama 1992), and they draw inspiration from the growing attention


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to diverse historical pathways and modes of institutional change in pursuing open-ended investigations into the particular sources, dynamics, and implications of institutional design in specific contexts. But the chapters are not intended to simply demonstrate that historical inheritances and local conditions pose an obstacle or counterweight to the uniform reproduction of institutional models and practices across developing societies. Rather, the authors collectively reveal how distinctive historical legacies, specific constellations of material and ideal interests, and particular processes of agency in a given locale, all contribute to a dynamic process of interpretation, legitimation, transformation and, sometimes, failure, of imposed or imported institutional models. The common focus on the extent and implications of syncretic change means that all of the chapters, in spite of their different institutional and regional foci, systematically pay attention to the diverse strategies through which actors redeploy particular combinations of interests, norms, memories, and social knowledge within preexisting local institutions while trying to make sense of and creatively reconfigure newly imported or imposed institutions. In the process, the chapters reveal how the coherence, legitimacy, and long-term viability of a given institution can be profoundly affected by the affinities or discrepancies between the formal rules, procedures, and organizational routines embraced by institutional elites, on the one hand, and the resilient constellations of interests, norms, memories, and social practices reproduced in informal relations among local institutional actors, on the other. References Albrow, Martin. 1997. The Global Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey. 1995. “Modern, Anti, Post and Neo.” New Left Review 210 (March/April): 63–101. Almond, Gabriel A. and Sidney Verba. 1963. The Civic Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Archer, Margaret. 1988. Culture and Agency. New York: Cambridge University Press. Arthur, Brian. 1994. Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Badie, Bertrand. 2000. The Imported State: The Westernization of the Political Order. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Balme, Christopher. 1999. Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and Post-Colonial Drama. New York: Oxford University Press. Bates, Robert. 1974. “Ethnic Competition and Modernization in Contemporary Africa.” Comparative Political Studies 6, 4 ( January): 457–83. Bates, Robert, Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and Barry Weingast. 1998. Analytic Narratives. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Bendix, Reinhard. 1967. “Tradition and Modernity Reconsidered.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 9 (April): 292–346. Bendix, Reinhard. 1993. “Relative Backwardness and Intellectual Mobilization,” in Unsettled Affinities. John Bendix, ed. New Brunswick: Transaction Books. 85–102. Berk, Gerald and Dennis Galvan. 2004. “A Field Guide to Creative Syncretism, or, How and When People Remake Institutions,” paper presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the APSA, Chicago. Borio, Mario et al., eds. 2004. Market Discipline Across Countries and Industries. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. Brinton, Mary and Victor Nee, eds. 1998. The New Institutionalism in Sociology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bryant, Ralph. 1994. “Global Change: Increasing Economic Integration and Eroding Political Sovereignty.” Brookings Review 12, 4 (Fall): 42–45. Cerny, Phillip. 1995. “Globalization and the Changing Logic of Collective Action.” International Organization 49 (Autumn): 595–625. Cohen, Ira. 1986. “The Status of Structuration Theory.” Theory, Culture, and Society 3: 123–134. Colpe, Carsten. 1987. “Syncretism,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion. Mircea Eliade, ed. New York: Macmillan. 218–27. Crouch, Colin and Henry Farrell. 2004. “Breaking the Path of Institutional Development? Alternatives to the New Determinism.” Rationality and Society 16: 1, 5–43. Denzau, Arthur D. and Douglass C. North. 1994. “Shared Mental Models: Ideologies and Institutions.” Kyklos 47, 1: 3–31. Di Palma, Guissepe. 1978. Political Syncretism in Italy: Historical Coalition Strategies and the Present Crisis. Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California. Eckstein, Harry. 1998. “Lessons for the ‘Third Wave’ from the First: An Essay on Democratization,” in Can Democracy Take Root in Post-Soviet Russia? Eckstein, Frederic Fleron, Erik Hoffman, and William Reisinger, eds. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 249–286. Ekiert, Grzegorz and Stephen Hanson. 2003. “Time, Space, and Institutional Change in Central and Eastern Europe,” in Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. Grzegorz Ekiert and Stephen Hanson, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press. 15–48. Elster, Jon. 1983. Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ensminger, Jean. 1997. “Changing Property Rights: Formal and Informal Rights to Land in Africa,” in Frontiers of the New Institutional Economics. John Nye and John Drobak., eds. San Diego: Academic Press. 165–96. Evans, Peter. ed. 1997. State-Society Synergy: Government and Social Capital in Development. Research Series, No. 94. Berkeley: International and Areas Studies, University of California at Berkeley. Finnemore, Martha and Katherine Sikkink. 1999. “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,” in Exploration and Contestation in the Study of World Politics. Peter Katzenstein, Robert Keohane and Stephen Krasner, eds. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. 247–78. Friedland, Roer and Robert Alford. 1991. “Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Walter Powell and Paul DiMaggio, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 232–63. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Galvan, Dennis. 2004. The State Must Be Our Master of Fire: How Peasants Craft Culturally Sustainable Development in Senegal. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Giddens, Anthony. 2000. Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives. New York: Routledge.


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Granovetter, Mark. 1992. “Economic Institutions as Social Constructions: A Framework for Analysis.” Acta Sociologica 35: 3–11. Haas, Ernst B. 1997. Nationalism, Liberalism and Progress: The Rise and Decline of Nationalism. Vol. 1. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hall, Peter. 2003. “Aligning Ontology and Methodology,” in Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press. 373–404. Hopcroft, Rosemary. 1998. “The Importance of the Local: Rural Institutions and Economic Change in Preindustrial England,” in The New Institutionalism in Sociology. Brinton and Nee, eds. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 277–304. Huntington, Samuel. 1993. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs (Summer) 72: 3, 22–49. Inglehart, Ronald. 1997. Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Inglot, Tomasz. 2003. “Historical Legacies, Institutions, and the Politics of Social Policy in Hungary and Poland, 1989–1999,” in Capitalism and Democracy. Ekiert and Hanson, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press. 210–47. Jansen, Marius. 1979. “On Foreign Borrowing,” in Japan: A Comparative Perspective. Albert Craig, ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Johnson, Juliet. 2003. “ ‘Past’ Dependence or Path Contingency? Institutional Design in Postcommunist Financial Systems,” in Capitalism and Democracy. Ekiert and Hanson, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press. 289–316. Katzenstein, Peter and Rudra Sil. 2004. “Rethinking Asian Security: The Case for Analytical Eclecticism,” in Rethinking Security in East Asia: Identity, Power, and Efficiency. J.J. Suh, Peter Katzenstein, and Allen Carlson, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1–33. Katznelson, Ira. 1997. “Structure and Configuration in Comparative Politics,” in Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture and Structure. Mark Lichbach and Alan Zuckerman, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press. 81–112. Kiser, Edgar. 1996. “The Revival of Narrative in Historical Sociology: What Rational Choice Theory Can Contribute.” Politics & Society 24: 249–71. Knight, Jack. 1992. Institutions and Social Conflict. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kullick, Don. 1992. Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self, and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinean Village. New York: Cambridge University Press. Laitin, David. 1986. Hegemony and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lichbach, Mark. 2003. Is Rational Choice Theory All of Social Science? Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Locke, Richard M. and Kathleen Thelen. 1995. “Apples and Oranges Revisited: Contextualized Comparisons and the Study of Comparative Labor Politics.” Politics & Society 23, 3 (September): 337–67. Mazarr, Michael. ed. 2002. Information Technology and World Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Muldoon, James P. 2004. The Architecture of Global Governance. Boulder: Westview. Nee, Victor and Paul Ingram. 1998. “Embeddedness and Beyond: Institutions, Exchange, and Social Structure,” in The New Institutionalism in Sociology. Brinton and Nee, eds. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 19–45. North, Douglass C. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. “Economic Performance through Time,” in Reprint of 1993 Acceptance Speech for the Nobel Prize in Economics. Brinton and Nee, eds. Stockholm, Sweden. Ohmae, Kenichi. 1999. The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy. New York: Harper Perennial.

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Payne, Rodgers and Nayef Samhat. 2004. Democratizing Global Politics: Discourse Norms, International Regimes, and Political Community. Albany, NY: Suny Press. Pierson, Paul. 2000. “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics.” American Political Science Review 94, 2 ( June): 251–67. Pierson, Paul. 2003. “Big, Slow-moving, and . . . Invisible: Macrosocial Processes in the Study of Comparative Politics,” in Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press. 177–207. Riggs, Fred. 1964. Administration in Developing Societies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Rothstein, Bo. 1998. Just Institutions Matter: The Moral and Political Logic of the Universal Welfare State. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rothstein, Bo and Sven Steinmo. 2002. Restructuring the Welfare State: Political Institutions and Policy Change. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan. Rudolph, Lloyd and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. 1967. The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sabel, Charles F. and Jonathan Zeitlin. 1996. World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Schaeffer, Frederic C. 1998. Democracy in Translation: Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Schickler, Eric. 2001. Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Scott, James. 1998. Seeing Like the State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sewell, William. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98: 1–29. Sil, Rudra. 2000. “The Foundations of Eclecticism: The Epistemological Status of Agency, Culture, and Structure in Social Theory.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 12, 3 ( July): 353–87. ———. Managing ‘Modernity’: Work, Community, and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2003. “Globalization, the State, and Industrial Relations: Common Challenges, Divergent Transitions,” in The Nation-State in Question. Paul, T.V. John Ikenberry, G. and John A. Hall, eds. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 260–88. Stark, David and Laszlo Bruszt. 1998. Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, Charles and Rosalind Shaw. 1994. Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis. London: Routledge. Strange, Susan. 1998. Mad Money: When Markets Outgrow Governments. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological. Review 47: 273–86. Thelen, Kathleen. 2003. “How Institutions Evolve: Insights from Comparative Historical Analysis,” in Comparative Historical Analysis. Mahoney and Rueschemeyer, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press. 208–240. Thelen, Kathleen and Sven Steinmo. 1992. “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” in Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis. Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen and Frank Longstreth, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1–32. Veblen, Thorstein. 1954 [1915]. Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution. New York: Viking Press.


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Westney, D. Eleanor. 1987. Imitation and Innovation: The Transfer of Western Organizational Patterns to Meiji Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Whitaker, C. Sylvester. 1967. “A Dysrhythmic Process of Political Change.” World Politics 19, 2 ( January): 190–217. Williamson, Oliver. 1993. “Transaction Cost Economics and Organization Theory.” Industrial and Corporate Change 2: 107–156. Womack, James, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos. 1991. The Machine that Changed the World. New York: Harper Perennial. Young, Crawford. 1994. “The Dialectics of Cultural Pluralism: Concept and Reality,” in The Rising Tide of Cultural Pluralism: The Nation-State at Bay? Crawford Young, ed. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 3–35. Zald, Meyer N. 1996. “Culture, Ideology, and Strategic Framing,” in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements. D. McAdam, J.D. McCarthy and M.N. Zald, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press. 261–74. Zeitlin, Jonathan and Gary Herrigel. eds. 2000. Americanization and Its Limits: Reworking U.S. Technology and Management in Post-War Europe and Japan. New York: Oxford University Press.


Part One Political Institutions


CHAPTER

TWO

Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Rural Senegal* D e n n is G al van

Institutional syncretism—a creative process of taking apart component elements of institutions from more than one origin for the purpose of putting together new, recombinant institutional structures—helps account for the relatively rare instances when democratic governance becomes consolidated, legitimate, and effective in postcolonial societies. This chapter follows efforts to syncretically modify local-level democratic institutions in one region of rural Senegal over the last three decades. The analysis proceeds in three steps or layers. First, the extended time span makes possible a quasi-experiment within this geographically bounded case setting: when local councils were syncretically adapted and were permitted to operate syncretically, they proved more politically legitimate and more effective at land and natural resource management. When efforts at syncretic adaptation of these local councils were cut short, actors found them less legitimate, and became more likely to resist, ignore, or sabotage the efforts of these councils to manage land and other resources. Second, syncretic adaptation has not meant a singular reinterpretation of democratic local councils in light of a unitary historical memory or notion of tradition. Rather, syncretism opens the door to creative, messy, and diverse forms of agency, resulting in the fractal multiplication of various, divergent riffs on the Rural Councils, and riffs on the riffs. Finally, the multiplicity of institutional possibilities leads us to consider how this

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diversity of new syncretic institutional forms may eventually yield more widespread and sometimes dominant institutional results via identifiable mechanisms of selection and promulgation. On Syncretism and Democratization The syncretic institutional change discussed here is a form of popular response to the sometimes dogmatic promulgation of modern organizations, practices, and social relations in pre-modern settings. It can produce innovative, adapted institutions that meet the demands of rapid change while seeming culturally authentic and worthy of personal sacrifice to ordinary actors. As explored here, institutional syncretism is one possible result of grassroot actors using what Scott (1998) calls practical-experiential or metis knowledge to critique and sometimes resist the institutional designs which flow from projects of high modernist state simplification. But wait: resist democratization? Should we think of democracy as an institutional imposition designed to make society more legible to state power? In many ex-colonial places and with regard to certain manifestations of third wave democratization, this can indeed be so, although the logic runs against the grain of liberal conventional wisdom. Evoking Scott here makes sense because democratization tends to assume that either democracy will work best in places that are already sociologically individualistic, ontologically materialist, and utilitarian-rationalist in epistemology, or democracy will help refashion these elements of social and cultural infrastructure in the image of western liberal modernity. Thus, early comparativist work on the politics of developing areas thought mostly in terms of static congruence between democratic institutions and the values, norms, and informal rules of a society (Almond and Coleman 1960; Almond and Verba 1963; Eckstein 1966). Without the right cultural mix to promote reasonable, interest-based participation, one was stuck in Mexico, or in more recent works, Southern Italy. Later, the literature on transitions became curious about the link between the stability of new democratic regimes and a vibrant civil society (Diamond 1999), tolerant and inclusive political culture (Tessler 2002; Shin and Wells, 2005; Inglehart and Welzel 2002), and bridging social capital (Putnam 2000). Sometimes these have been cast as quasi-primordial outgrowths of slow-moving historical processes (history made you either Tuscany or Sicily, à la Putnam 1993), sometimes the story is that the right rules and incentives can make culture and social structure more congruent

Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Senegal 35 with democracy (Sicily can become Tuscany in our lifetimes, if we set the institutional dials right, à la Diamond 1999). Assuming that change can take place, we find that the story of change, in the democratization literature, is fundamentally deterministic, unilinear, and high modernist—echoing Scott. It is usually framed in terms of one of two models, both of which produce spotty empirical results and cling to a mechanistic and stultifying dualism regarding structure and agency. The first model, in brief, says that the world’s many and diverse Sicilies will eventually be forced to become Tuscanies because Marx, Durkheim, Parsons, and Tom Friedman cannot all be wrong in arguing that there is a structural inevitability and a patterned predictability to how technological change, specialization of labor, and urban mixing break down diverse old ways of life into individualism, materialism, and utilitarianism. Once free market production, secular education, and a spirit of legal rationalism penetrate sufficiently into Senegal, Suriname, and the Central Asian ‘stans, they too will exhibit the cultural bases for polyarchy. Or it can all be done more quickly, by getting the institutions right because, at heart, people respond in patterned and predictable ways when the incentives are clear and they have the information they need. Under these circumstances, they will see the logic of putting aside old loyalties to patron, kin, or religion, and come together on the basis of fairly uniform understandings of interest, paving the way for the formation of bridging social capital, a strong civil society, and polyarchy. The motor of change here is a foundational assumption that individual materialist rationality is either an underlying human universal, or so intrinsically attractive and transformative that its mere appearance as an organizing social principle is enough to render its many alternatives and competitors plainly obsolete, illegitimate, and instrumentally useless. Both of these stories would be more appealing if they were empirically accurate in the ex-colonial world, but they are not. We find a number of settings where institutions that embody or promote secularism, legalrationalism and pluralism have been more or less “right” for some time (Turkey, India, Senegal, for example), but it is simply fantastical to assume that this has engendered wholesale transformation of ordinary people in these places into individualistic citizens who calculate political participation and build crosscutting social networks on the basis of material interest. Across the developing world, democratic institutional reform coexists with a flourishing, rather than a diminishing, of religious politics (Turkey, Indonesia), patron-clientelism (Venezuela, Philippines), strong economies of affection (Senegal, Mexico), reification of neotraditional

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notions of ethnic community (BJP in India, ex-Yugoslavia), in part, as a direct reaction against the dank stench of secularism and the cold draft of alienation many sense in the presence of liberal democratic institutions. Moreover, these models of how democracy can take root (by social “evolution” or by creating the right incentives) are limited by the assumption that institutional structures and principles (a liberal constitutional order, universal human rights) are somehow separate from social practices and culture and, thus, the former can exercise influence over, and transform the latter. Sometimes, in moments of high social scientific ecstasy, this is said to take place through something called penetration. But the two—rules and organizations versus people and their practices, values, and agency—exist separate from one another only in the fantasy of reified social theoretic models. In actual practice, they are mutually constitutive of one another in at least two ways. First, to stay with the dominant metaphor, they interpenetrate all the time, in a kind of constant, hermaphroditic (and, perhaps for the analyst, unsatisfying) sexuality in which the ongoing reproduction of the rules and organizations of, say, polyarchy depends on and happens because real people continue to believe in and act according to norms like impersonalism, universal equality, turn taking, and sharing. The reverse of course is true—those norms and associated behaviors become experientially real as practiced in a context of boundaries, rules, and incentives, which in turn do alter the social reproduction of values and habits (Dewey 2002; Bourdieu 1977). Second, any movement in one arena results in not-necessarilyintended motion in the other arena. Because actors are aware in practical terms that rules and structures influence what they want and think, and that what they want can or could help shape rules beyond them, they invariably evoke the former (rules/structures) when they evaluate or adjust the latter (wants/values) and vice versa. For anyone, elite or not, to seriously consider reforming rules embedded in and constituted through people’s values and preferences they must treat the values and preferences as both usable instruments in the transformation of rules and as objects of potential transformation themselves. The same holds true in reverse. Thus, on one side, to reify organizations and rules as having some agency of their own in an organic or imperative process of changing, on the other side, values, habits, and preferences, is to fundamentally miss the real-world, nondualistic, constitutive nature of agency, which operates on both the experiential manifestation of structure (rules in use) and the organizing architectural schemas of agency (values, norms, habits) in one single, everyday and unitary motion.

Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Senegal 37 This brings us to syncretism as an alternative framework for making sense of institutional change, especially change in the subject at hand in this chapter, new, local-level democratic institutions in non-Western settings. Syncretism is described as the transformations that result from everyday agency in which actors simultaneously tinker with both new and old rules and values as integral steps in practical problem solving. Syncretism opens a conceptual window on new processes and players of interest as we try to follow what happens after elections and participation are introduced in new settings. These new structures and rules enormously multiply the sites for tinkering, for institutional creativity, producing both variations on democracy and variations on political and social norms. Syncretism suggests that local level democratization, even within one small developing country like Senegal, opens hundreds, thousands of laboratories for what Unger (1998) calls “democratic experimentalism.” Seen this way, syncretism dislodges the study of democratization in the developing world from the limbo space in between Parosnian pattern variables. Strengthening democracy need not result from “hardening” the state or other social-theoretic Viagras designed to enhance “transformative penetration.” The experimental laboratories for syncretism opened by grassroots democratization revitalize theoretically informed, close-to-the-case, fieldwork-based analyses (old “Area Studies” style), designed to make sense of a new (or newly discovered) range of empirical variation. If there are so many sites for reworking and reinventing both democratic structure as well as local social relations and culture, what results from these? Which instances of reworking and reinventing produce outcomes of interest, if we actually agree on what these might be? Which produce stability, legitimacy, empowerment, and effective institutions of local governance designed to authoritatively manage resources in a way that enhances social participation and responsiveness? Put another way, which syncretic adaptations of local democracy finally give the ex-colonial state the social foundations it has congenitally lacked—an ability to command voluntary sacrifice from society, thus addressing the key problem long diagnosed by Hyden (1983), of a state “floating above society?” The remainder of this chapter draws on an extended analysis of popular responses to democratically elected local councils in one region of Senegal to argue that when institutions operate syncretically, they become more legitimate and developmentally effective. That said, the dynamics of syncretism are complex because they open the door to local level contestation over the nature of tradition and memory, and therefore the possibilities, shape, and direction of adaptive change. As a result, analysts of institutional

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change as well as those normatively concerned with the fate of democracy (especially in non-Western postcolonial settings), need to seriously examine the discursive resources of neotraditional claims, the material interests behind them, and the mechanisms and processes through which actors render their preferred versions of meaning, memory, and syncretic adaptation widespread and sometimes dominant. This is relatively ignored research terrain, especially for political scientists. But the more seriously we take the role of agency and local context in institutional change, the more we must develop tools for the systematic analysis of political conflict over cultural memory, and the role of such memory in crafting and recrafting institutional structures. Syncretism and Senegal’s Rural Councils Senegal’s 1972 Rural Council reform established elected local government bodies intended to manage a host of local governance issues, with special attention, in places like the Siin region, to land tenure relations and land disputes.1 Conflicts over land boundaries, inheritance, and land use had ironically expanded in the aftermath of land reform some years earlier. The 1964 Law of the National Domain had sought, in classic African socialist fashion, to “restore” perceived-traditional egalitarian access to land by instituting a “land for those who farm it” legal principle. Under this law, regardless of local practices, norms and institutions, if a farmer tilled a field for at least two growing seasons that farmer could lay legal claim to the field. Somewhat unexpectedly, this did not result everywhere in the unproblematic “restoration” of “traditional” tenure regimes, but instead destabilized existing practices rooted in complex local system of tenure control, adjudication, and resource management. In places like the Siin region, the late 1960s saw confusion over use rights and resource management, as well as significant reduction in yield of cash and staple crops (peanuts and millet, respectively). As a result, the Rural Councils were established to address the new complexities of modernizing land use and local governance. (Abelin 1979; Niang 1982). The hope behind the Rural Councils was that a body of locally elected officials would interpret and apply a broad national legal principle (the land for those who farm it) in locally specific, meaningful, and adapted ways. Inadvertently, the state was raising expectations for democratic institutional syncretism. Left alone, Rural Councils in the Siin region have sometimes fulfilled this promise, blending customary and modern legal principles, treating land use management and adjudication

Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Senegal 39 in holistic fashion, and replicating in an altered form the style of governance long associated with customary rain priests/land custodians. However, this is not always the case; more often than not, representatives of the territorial administration centered in the capital city (Dakar) intervene in the work of the Rural Councils, override their “misunderstandings” of the law, “tutor” them in the professional norms of public administration, encourage them to stay out of questions for which they have neither mandate nor technical competence. As the state trains Rural Councilors to be modern, functionally specific, Weberian legalrational bureaucrats, it truncates the interpretive, creative, institutionally syncretic efforts of the Rural Councils. Local people notice the difference and consider the Rural Councils legitimate and acceptable when they interpret the law and operate syncretically as neotraditional, holistic resource managers. When the Rural Councils interpret the law in narrow terms and work as functionally specific bureaucrats, they lose legitimacy and become less effective. At a preliminary level, the Rural Council story offers a quasiexperimental series of “cases” which show that the more they govern using the logic of syncretic adaptation, the more constituents find them legitimate (worthy of material sacrifice) and the more effective their decision making. But there is more to the story than this preliminary and positivist interpretation reveals. Syncretic transformation of the Rural Councils is not unitary but fractal; the democratic nature of the councils multiplies possibilities for stakeholders to conceive and foster branching, divergent, sometimes incompatible interpretations of how to render these institutions locally meaningful and adapted. Thus, a second layer of analysis tracks the most significant of these fractal versions of syncretic possibility. Finally, given the multiplicity of adaptive possibilities and the state’s intervention in the name of the ordered clarity of techne, against the messiness of metis, the final outcome with regard to the Rural Councils remains unclear. This suggests a third layer; when, how, and under what circumstances might a syncretic institutional adaptation take hold, and achieve a degree of social promulgation through which the syncretic form emerges as a new institutionalized order. First Layer: Syncretism, Legitimacy and Effectiveness The history of the Siin’s Rural Councils provides a series of quasi-cases of syncretic adaptation and truncation by the centralized state. The cases

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do not represent temporal phases,2 but rather constitute a series of sometimes contemporaneous episodes differentiated by the degree to which the Rural Councils function as holistic land and resource managers evocative of their historic predecessors or as functionally specific implementers of uniform state policy. Given the ubiquity of syncretic adaptation (see discussion of second and third layers below), this depends on the degree to which representatives of the centralized state grant autonomy to, or neglect and ignore, the Rural Councils. Efforts to resolve two local land use conflicts reveal this contrast clearly. The first conflict, Ndokh v. Njujuf, concerned a large group of fields historically shared by farmers from two communities, Njujuf (a neighborhood of a large and historically dominant village, Tukar) and the smaller, satellite community Ndokh (established about a century earlier by migrants from Tukar). For many decades prior to independence, access to the fields between these two communities had been managed by a customary political leader/resource manager/shaman/adjudicatory authority from Njujuf known as a laman (sometimes referred to by an older title, “master of fire”).3 These masters of fire once managed access to land, determined how much space would be planted in subsistence and cash crops (millet and peanuts, respectively), controlled field rotation, and set aside fallow areas. During the growing season, they coordinated the pasturing of livestock on fallow fields to both keep cows and goats from trampling crops, and made sure that livestock manure helped re-fertilize the soil. This system was destabilized and slowly collapsed after the 1964 land reform whose explicit tenure rule (two years use equals title) replaced the locally adapted, authoritative system of resource management of the Siin, personified by the masters of fire. The Ndokh vs Njujuf conflict underscored the resulting coordination dilemmas. As masters of fire no longer set aside fallow space and pasture land for use by both communities, the more numerous and higher-status Njujuf farmers (with access to pasture land elsewhere) planted as much millet as possible in the area once shared with Ndokh. Ndokh farmers (who did not have access to pasture elsewhere) depended on the area once shared with Njujuf for pasturing their animals during the growing season. Tensions grew over many years. If the Rural Councils really were to replace the old masters of fire in form and function, this was precisely the kind of dilemma they needed to be able to address. They proved unable to deal with the problem, and in the end, violence broke out between the two communities, and the gendarmerie had to be called in from a distant administrative center to jail some of the combatants.

Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Senegal 41 Directed by the Sub-Prefect (state-appointed local representative of the central territorial administration), Rural Councilors tackled this problem as functionally specific bureaucrats. Over several growing seasons, they ensured that farmers from Ndokh and Njujuf had proper title to the lands they were using. They asked the state agricultural extension agent to place picket-style fences around the small and dispersed pasture lands controlled by the Ndokh farmers. But these microplots were so small that Ndokh livestock wandered onto Njujuf millet fields, trampling some plants. In the worst year of the conflict Njujuf farmers tore out all the fences, attacked their Ndokh kinsmen, restrained only by the arrival of the police. The case suggests that, regardless of democratic election and alleged local legitimation, the Rural Councils fail when they cannot replicate, at least in part, the kind of holistic resource management characteristic of the masters of fire. In circumstances in which the Rural Councils have no chance to syncretically incorporate elements of their institutional predecessor, they are severely constrained in their ability to meaningfully address local conflicts, intervene substantively in local tenure issues, and thus, garner legitimacy and the capacity to function authoritatively. By contrast, a second conflict shows the Rural Councils operating more syncretically, with a much more effective outcome. The conflict emanated from the unexpected death of LF,4 a prominent farmer in the Tukar neighborhood of Ngangarlame. LF left behind several children, none of them old enough to farm their father’s fields. His widow moved with the youngsters back to the house of her father, MM, who claimed LF’s fields on behalf of the children. But LF’s nephew, DF, asserted that he and his brother should inherit the fields in question, because for many years they had helped farm them alongside the deceased LF (DF 1993). It is a rather frequent kind of land conflict in this region, and in rural Africa as a whole (Berry 1993), in which a variety of distinct rule-systems regarding the inheritance of property overlap, enabling claimants to evoke local customary, Islamic, or official state rules for who should control property after the death of the owner. By the strict rules of the 1964 land law, DF and his brothers, having farmed the fields in question for more than two years, could make a reasonable claim to take control of them. Yet local inheritance practice makes plain that the fields of the father should pass to the sons, and since the sons in question were too young, someone should hold the field “in trust” for the children until they became old enough to use them. Since the children had moved with their mother to their grandfather MM’s household, MM could reasonably argue that he should be the

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trustee of the fields. Although, as MM was quick to point out, if he became the trustee, after two years of farming the fields held for the children, he could legally lay claim to them as his own under state law. A local member of the Rural Council, DN, eventually intervened to broker a solution, whereby a portion of the fields deemed sufficient to provide for the subsistence of the children and their mother was entrusted to MM, with the remainder going to DF. All parties voluntarily consented to this decision, while grumbling about results they all considered suboptimal. More importantly, there was consensus that the problem had been resolved in a procedurally correct way; the Rural Councilor, DN, who was also a relative of the parties (no one could say exactly how he was anyone’s relative, but this did not seem to matter) had stepped in and struck “the right balance between the law of the land reform law and the law of cosaan [local custom, practice and religion].” What made this “correct” was not that it went through the normal processes of review and decision making of the Rural Council as a whole—this never happened. Rather, in the words of litigant MM, “we decided this among ourselves, informally.” As DF noted in agreement, “it is always better to solve things like this in a friendly way without bringing the ‘king’ into matters” (DF 1993). Rural Councilor DN underscored this point, even though he himself is a state official; “I am a Rural Councilor, but when there’s a problem in the village, I prefer to fix it as a traditional authority, not as a Rural Councilor. This is because people prefer that problems should be solved in friendship, between them, and that both sides should be satisfied” (DN 1993). Whereas in the case of Ndokh v Njujuf, the Rural Council followed instructions from above and behaved as a procedurally narrow, functionally specific, land title-granting agency, in DF v. MM, a single Rural Councilor acted in a more syncretic fashion, taking it upon himself to imagine, create, and apply a blend of new state law and the law of cosaan, or local custom. In doing so, the Rural Councilor acted like a neomaster of fire, a socially proximate, embedded local authority who broadened rather than narrowed disputes. In so doing, this Rural Councilor incrementally recrafted his office. He did not limit himself to the narrow and technical details of the 1964 land reform legislation, which, importantly, is mute on what should be done about inheritance, let alone what should be done about heirs too young to use their inheritance. DN, recrafting his office as neo-master of fire, stepped into the heart of the problem, and arranged a compromise that reconciled claims under two essentially competing legal orders.

Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Senegal 43 As we see in Ndokh v. Njujuf, DF v. MM, and other cases, the Rural Councils do their job effectively when they do it syncretically. Cases like Ndokh v. Njujuf, in which the Rural Councils intervene in a narrow, procedurally modern, functionally specific way, are more frequent than examples of syncretism like DF v. MM. Indeed, 24 of 32 land disputes examined in the rainy season 1992–93 in this region follow the pattern of Ndokh V. Njujuf. In the vast majority of cases, when the Rural Councils avoid or are unable to find syncretic modes of intervening, their decisions meet with resistance, avoidance, or circumvention. In the more rare instances when they are allowed to govern syncretically and transcend a state-imposed, narrow, functionally specific definition of their role, their decisions stick, conflicts are resolved, and perhaps most critically, the Rural Councils gain popular legitimacy.

Second Layer: The Fractal Nature of Syncretism Syncretism makes a difference in terms of the effectiveness of the Rural Councils in their primary resource management and adjudicatory functions. But there are many syncretic interpretations of what the Rural Councils are, how they ought to function, what rules they should follow, and how these bodies might use syncretism to deepen their legitimacy. Syncretism, fundamentally about creativity, also results in a degree of unpredictability. Syncretic interpretation and adaptation of the Rural Councils does not follow one linear, unitary pattern of recrafting or local sense-making, because local notions of tradition do not conform to one static, idealized historical memory, and because material interests of those who direct syncretic adaptation are not themselves uniform. The multiplicity of notions of traditionality and the diversity of interests render syncretism a fractal process of transformation. As more actors do the imaginative recrafting of the bricoleur, more variants and riffs on the Rural Council model emerge, some branching off the core, initial Rural Council structure and goals, others branching off the branches. Syncretism, then, is the process for “digesting” Scott’s techne, the tool with which local actors exercise the revenge and restoration of the unmanageable complexity of metis. One can read the tension between holistic and functionally specific understandings of the Rural Councils as a starting point for this discussion of multiplicity. Rural Councils in the Siin often interpret the law and

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their mandate in fairly narrow and literal terms, meeting with a very limited but identifiable degree of popular support from a small fraction of the population.5 This represents a zero point, an interpretation of these new institutions devoid of syncretic adaptation, but a distinct interpretation, a variant among the many variants, nonetheless. In most circumstances, the vast majority of those6 who deal with, work in, or comment on the Rural Councils in the Siin region, have some type of syncretic vision of how they should operate. Typically, respondents expect local democracy to mean that their representatives will think and act holistically about land use, agro-pastoral practice, spirituality, the dynamics of family expansion and contraction, and most critically, the webbing of social relations among extended families and communities, of which land tenure relations are a material expression. Sometimes this takes the form of a direct appeal for the Rural Councilors to be neo-masters of fire. A great many agree with the observation of PG who notes “the new system [land reform and Rural Councils] has ruined human relations. We would be better off if the new king, you know the Rural Councilors, would conform to the old ways of the laman [master of fire]” (PG, interview, 2003). For many, the central expectation for a syncretic version of the Rural Councils is that they should uphold a local practice known as land pawning, just as masters of fire did in their time. A brief sketch of land pawning, itself a syncretic institution that emerged in the early twentieth century,7 provides helpful background. The colonial regime saw individuation of property relations and a free market in alienable land as essential to making the Serer efficient peanut producers. Serer farmers resisted privatization and alienability largely because these changes would break the tie between masters of fire and the crucial ancestral spirits, with devastating results, many still believe, for agricultural productivity. Rather than accept what outsiders considered land tenure modernization or reactively defend local tradition, Serer farmers in the early twentieth century concocted land pawning, a new, syncretic institution of exchange. Someone who controlled a field (master of fire or his designate) would grant revocable use rights in a piece of land to an individual who needed the space in exchange for a one-time lump sum cash payment. When the original field proprietor (or his heir) wanted to reclaim the field, the field taker would accept back the cash payment, without interest, and return the field. Pawning blended the free market’s flexibility and on-demand reallocation of the crucial element of agricultural capital (land) with a Serer ontology of “traditional” property relations. Pawning worked, permitting the Serer to intensify their agricultural

Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Senegal 45 system when they needed to grow peanuts for cash. In spite of commodification and pressures for individuation, pawning also ensured (and depended on) the economic, political, and social centrality of the institution of the master of fire.8 Thus, the first and most widespread syncretic variant on the Rural Councils—be the new master of fire—centers on the Rural Councils upholding the right to pawn land. This required a high level of social proximity and meant that Rural Councilors would have to interpret the land reform law of 1964 loosely and imaginatively. Pawning as an institution was fundamentally inimical to the law’s insistence that anyone who farmed a field for two or more growing seasons should have title to it. So Rural Councils in the Siin, as neo-masters of fire, sometimes chose to highlight another emphasis in the land reform law: “putting land to maximum productive use” (this language appears in the law’s preamble). On this basis, they would uphold a long-term pawn as long as the pawned land was not left idle for more than one growing season. This represented a clever subversion of the “two years of use equals title” principle, pit in this syncretic move against the “productive use” theme, and turned inside out to let the Rural Councils claim they upheld the land reform law if they made sure land did not lie idle for two growing seasons. This is a clear process of syncretism; actors assess the elements of the institution, decompose, or take apart the elements, and rearrange them in a new way that addresses their particular needs and can solve particular problems in a way that results in the emergence of a new version of the institution itself. A second fractal version of syncretic adaptation of the Rural Councils emphasizes holism less and simply seeks to understand and incorporate the Rural Councils within existing patterns of familial authority and social reciprocity. For example, litigant NT, in an inheritance dispute with his uncle AKN, reports that he went to Rural Councilor MK only because MK is a relative. Unlike the case of DF v. MM above, neither litigant NT nor Rural Councilor MK expects MK to balance local custom and national law. MK and the Rural Councils are useful to NT simply because of kinship ties. Rural Councilor AG, who worked on the Njujuf-Ndokh conflict described above, reflects this sense of how embedded norms of reciprocity are the key to the effectiveness of his office: You must follow what people ask you to do. I’m beginning to get old, like the elders. If I refuse what they ask me to do, they may refuse me when I need something, and that would ruin society. (AG, 2003 interview)

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Rural Councilors, in this second syncretic variant, are not understood in terms of procedure, upholding impersonal law, or impartiality. Nor are they precisely framed in terms of the law of cosaan (Serer custom) or the principles and practices associated with masters of fire. This syncretic variant in some sense reflects a “post-master of fire” social and institutional reality, in which the older authorities, long displaced, are no longer a basis for comparison or place to look for usable institutional raw materials in the reconstitution of the Rural Councils. For some, the new Rural Councils should be understood not as neo-masters of fire, but as quasi-kin with whom one might engage in reciprocal and personalistic long-term exchange. But familism and embeddedness themselves are not understood in a singular and unitary fashion in the Siin. A third syncretic variant regarding the Rural Councils centers on gerontocracy—on the importance of the new authorities taking on the socially proximate style of “the elders.” Whereas many respondents idealize the old master of fire system, some, perhaps with less precise historical memories, focus on “elders” as an alternate, local, familiar category of legitimate authority. A number of litigants on both sides of the Njujuf v. Ndokh conflict, mentioned above, hold this view. LD, from Njujuf argues: The Rural Council needed to do things as the elders did . . . The elders from here would have regrouped everyone and would have come up with a solution, would have found a way to help them out: we’re all relatives here. (LD, 1993 interview) His distant relative from Ndokh, BY, hold similar views: In the past, it would have been the elders of the village who would have divided up the land and settled the conflict. The way the ancestors did things in the past would have been preferable to how it was handled now. (BY, 1993 interview) FF, a litigant in a different conflict who actually used the land reform law to gain control of pawned fields, echoes the same point: “Yes, it would have been better to take this to the elders or some other ‘friendly’ authority, and not take it to the Rural Council” (FF, 1993 interview). Idealization of elders resembles nostalgia for the masters of fire: they are seen as proximate, embedded in social relations, cognizant of the family dynamics and personal needs of interested parties. As MG notes “the elders, we live together with them, they are relatives of mine. But

Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Senegal 47 the Rural Councilor, he does not live here. He may not even be a relative of mine, he may live here, yet he asks me to do things for him” (MG, 2003 interview). In this “Rural Councils as generic elders” syncretic variant, there is some evidence of decreased proceduralism and increased arbitrariness. For example, in the village of Mem, upon the death of one NT, the village chief and several of his relations took control of fields that were left behind for his young children and widow, AG (same problem, different outcome as in DF v. MM, above). Hearing of this, the President of the Rural Council and several other Rural Councilors intervened in the case, declaring that the village chief had no authority to make this arrangement without Rural Council approval. The conflict was eventually settled in an informal agreement among the Rural Council officials and the local leaders of Mem by allocating a few of the fields in question to the President of the Rural Council and his allies on the Council on the grounds that “they too are community elders, and the elders should be responsible for the fields of orphans” (DS 1993). A sub-branch of the syncretic variant “Rural Councils as elders” makes the definition of “elder” a bit more precise. In the Siin, veterans of World War II9 have occupied distinctive social positions, in part because they came back alive after being “taken” by Europeans. They also returned speaking better French than most (including many of their children), and returned versed in “matters of keit.” From the Arabic word for paper (keitun), in the Siin keit refers to the functioning of bureaucracy, the world of paperwork, reports, of the official state. In part, because the World War II veterans were moving into “elder” status at about the same time that the Rural Councils were set up, they occupied many of the first seats on these Councils. Most observers had originally expected that members of master of fire lineages would move into Rural Council positions, thus facilitating the first syncretic variant discussed above, “Rural Councils as masters of fire.” But it has been more common for World War II veterans, few of them of master of fire or other aristocratic background, to take these positions. While few explicitly designate these individuals as more legitimate or appropriate candidates for positions of authority because they are veterans, there is much discussion of their literacy, ability to work with the administration, and familiarity with “matters of keit.” In this syncretic variant, Rural Council legitimacy depends on a combination of deference to generic elders and meritocratic criteria (administrative competence) personified in the form of a small cluster of veterans from World War II. While this variant (Rural Councils as elders with

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administrative skills) is helpful in making sense of who has come to dominate these bodies, social response to them is more a function of the other variants mentioned above: the expectation that the Councils will behave as neo-masters of fire, as kin embedded in relations of reciprocity, or as socially proximate generic elders. The final syncretic variant, “Rural Councils as kin representatives” centers on nonliberal notions of representation and thus has the most direct relevance beyond Senegal for the syncretic adaptation of democracy itself in non-Western societies. As democratically elected officials, Rural Councilors should, in theory, represent the interests of all their constituents, regardless of familial or other relationships. This is not how the Rural Councils actually work in practice. As we have seen, syncretic adaptation of the Councils centers on drawing them “down,” on making them more socially proximate and embedded. In a part of the world where social organization is built around extended family networks, where practices of generalized reciprocity still play an explicit role in cementing social relations, making the Rural Councils more local, more Serer, means making them more personalistic in a way that directly contradicts principles of impersonal and egalitarian citizenship so important to liberal democratic representation. Syncretically adapted Rural Councils cannot effectively represent everyone in the same fair, even, and identity-blind way because these Councils in fact function as repositories of personal connection with the state, and of hope that benefits might flow from the state through personalistic networks of kinship. The Rural Council proves responsive and useful for litigant NT, in the example above, because his uncle is a Councilor, not in spite of this fact. Liberal impersonalism, while a lofty ideal, is not how Serer peasants relate to the Rural Councils, nor how most people in Senegal relate to the state on an everyday basis. One can access the state and have hope in its effectiveness, usefulness, fairness and possibilities for “good governance” not because the state is impersonalistic and treats everyone the same way (it does not; does it consistently do that anywhere?). Rather, what makes the Rural Councils and the state accessible, useful, and legitimate is the fact that someone I know, who might be a relative (note that they do not have to be a relative) occupies an office I can access through a personalistic bond. In the West, we call this corruption, or more precisely nepotism, an appellation that makes at least rhetorical sense when liberal norms of impersonalism and egalitarianism permeate political ideology, political culture, and the official discourse of public institutions (this may seem a bit idealized, however, if one is African-American in the United States,

Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Senegal 49 or Muslim in France). Setting Western liberal sincerity/hypocrisy aside for the moment, in the Siin, Senegal and many non-Western settings, public rhetoric and institutional practice are marked less fully and univocally by liberal-individualism. As Ekeh (1975) and many others have observed, liberal or “civic” rhetoric, rules, and norms coexist alongside those that emphasize the social priority of extended family networks, surname, matrilineal family affiliation, caste and other purportedly ascriptive characteristics. Clearly in the non-West, and to an important degree in the West, there is a gap between social practice that can be decidedly nonliberal, and liberal institutional rhetoric and rules. Nepotism—uncles helping their nephews before they help their nonnephews—is an analytically useful concept if the only institutional possibilities one is willing to imagine entail the smooth functioning of liberal democratic structures serving fully individuated and egalitarian societies. Yet we know we can do better than this lack of analytic imagination. In the Siin region, social reality includes this final variant of syncretic adaptation: Rural Councilors function not as the elected representatives of a body of rights-equal citizens united only by the geographical accident of administrative boundary drawing. They often function as quasi-corporatist representatives of amorphous extended kinship blocs. They function according to the principle “nephews first, nonkin get what’s left.” This is a significant part of what is politically moral in the region, and so no one should be surprised that no amount of ranting or excoriation from administrative agents (Prefects and Sub-Prefects, or in wider terms, Ministers of Interior or World Bank officials) does much to change this reality. But this “kin representation” syncretic variant opens possibilities for achieving the functional goals, if not the institutional formalities, of liberal democracy because the definition of kinship itself in this zone is fluid and subject to reinterpretation. As we have seen above, litigants are often comfortable working with a particular Rural Councilor whom they claim as a kinsman, even though neither the litigant, nor the official can explain or seems to know how they are related to each other. Given the complexities of overlapping patrilineal and matrilineal descent systems, the degree of intermarriage, and the ambiguity of use of concepts like cousin, uncle, or aunt, the key to rendering this syncretic variant more representative is not to eradicate nepotism, but to make sure that those who might be locked out of kin representation have access to the symbolic resources they might need to make credible claims of kinship toward their elected local representatives. As Amselle (1990) has shown for the social

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construction and fluidity of ethnicity in West Africa, Tamari (1997) has demonstrated for caste, and Fouéré (2005) suggests for joking kinships, African social categories deemed “hard,” extant, primordial, and objectively given in reality are quite fluid and subject to everyday negotiation and transformation. Political scientists need to pay attention to, and make use of this poststructuralist anthropological insight in thinking about institutions like democracy. Understandings of what it means to be kin are loose, metaphorical and malleable enough that making credible claims to be a “nephew,” “cousin,” or other kind of relative of a public official are not difficult to imagine. From another point of view, a low status caste like griots (praise singers/musicians/oral historians), especially likely to be marginalized by kin representation, might re-present the historic sense of mutual obligation and duty that once bound those of low and high caste in the old order. Griots and others of low caste (blacksmiths, potters, weavers, woodworkers), willing to “come out” regarding their status, would be able to make kin-like claims against Rural Councilors to fulfill their duties as members of a high status group, who could be shamed into addressing the needs of those of lower caste in addition to addressing the needs of their nephews. Here again, meaningful bonds of kinship could be mobilized as a basis for widening the circle of “constituents” who can make representational claims on the basis of kinship imagery and norms, rather than on the basis of impersonalistic citizenship norms. In practice in the Siin, this syncretic variant operates as part of a fusion of multiple logics of representation, clearing multiple pathways for ordinary citizens to access and make demands of their elected representatives: both the ideal of impersonal egalitarian citizenship embedded in liberal representation and the expectation that a public servant has obligations to kin (however metaphorical) and to kin-like subordinates in a status hierarchy. Rural Councilors in the Siin understand both of these discourses, and respond to each of them depending on the circumstances. These five versions of syncretically adapted Rural Councils—as neomasters of fire, as kin in reciprocity networks, as generic elders, as elders with administrative skills (WWII veterans), and as corporatist kin-representatives—emerge, submerge, proliferate, and dissipate as ordinary people in the Siin try to make sense of and engage the Rural Councils for practical purposes. The various adaptations do not make for phases or an evolution of responses, underscoring the messy, nonlinear nature of the creativity behind syncretism. Various actors engaged in particular struggles and conflicts at distinct moments imagine, interpret,

Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Senegal 51 and sometimes alter the Rural Councils in ways that can, at times, advance their specific and practical goals. The transformations underscore the fluidity of creative adaptation: even as the state tries, in its haphazard, ill-funded, unsustained manner to rein in the Rural Councils, people find ways to decompose them, to play with them, sometimes to make them into something else, however ephemerally. Along the way, this entails the decomposition of local institutions and culture, or perhaps more precisely, actors rummaging through the rubble of already dislocated and dismembered local histories, rules, norms, and expectations, long displaced by colonialism, commodification, and the pressures of the postcolonial political economy and partial nation-building project. It is true that the Serer of Siin live in the very debris field of Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History” with all sorts of progressive “developmental” initiatives erected like tent cities or tilt-up prefabs on the ruins. But it is also true that in the midst of this apparent mess, we find creative agency, we find people rummaging through the detritus and refashioning the tents and tilt-ups to construct, in however ramshackle a form, new institutional arrangements to address on-the-spot needs and problems. Thus, what the story of syncretic adaptation of the Rural Councils lacks in narrative direction or closure it makes up for as a rich site for the unfolding of creative and transformative agency. Third Layer: Which Syncretism, if any? Selection Mechanisms and Promulgation And then what? Clearly, the final outcome with regard to the Rural Councils remains uncertain and ambivalent. Serer farmers have come up with at least five versions of a syncretically transformed Rural Council. As an analyst concerned with the fact of institutional decomposability and the nature and possibilities of creative agency, these alone are important observations, critical to the extent that the literature on institutional change is undernourished in its handling of agency.10 But if one cares about the Rural Councils, or democratic governance, or the outcomes of institutional change, one needs to deal with questions of the reproduction of institutional forms and what renders new forms well-known, widely supported and uniform across space and time (in short, the question of institutionalization). From a syncretic point of view, institutionalization happens when a particular syncretic variant becomes widely known, promulgated or adhered to over a particular

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geographical space and time span. That promulgated institutional form itself becomes a starting point for future syncretic variation, further decomposition, and recombination, in an ongoing, iterative process. From the range of syncretic variants always in circulation (such as the five versions of the Rural Councils discussed above), some may achieve wider circulation through at least four possible processes that might be understood as selection mechanisms. First, a syncretic variant may reach a degree of institutionalization through a market-like process that depends on the emergence of “performance track records” over time. The land pawning example of the early twentieth century discussed above might fit this model. A new syncretic institutional variant (pawning) proves useful in solving a particular problem characteristic of a particular conjuncture (pressure to put more land to use to grow cash crops), and its success attracts imitation. This model, characteristic of North’s thinking on institutional change (1981), seems to either beg the question of the actual selection mechanism, or implicitly label it individual level calculation of potential benefit. This mechanism, while theoretically parsimonious, bears little resemblance to observed practice in the Siin. A second selection mechanism may be the establishment and maintenance of discursive hegemony that defines and constrains possible choices in such a way that a particular syncretic variant becomes the only natural or right way to think about responding to new circumstances. Thus, land pawning becomes the only reasonable option because the cosmology that legitimates masters of fire (with its emphasis on their unique capacity to commune with the ancestral spirits that ensure soil fertility) is hegemonic. Likewise, it was probably the case with regard to the Rural Councils in their early days that this same hegemony made the first syncretic variant (Rural Councils as neo-masters of fire), the most sensible way of thinking of them in the early years of their existence. If hegemony might be the process of “selecting” one syncretic variant among many, it opens the door to a third alternative selection process: social dialogue and learning. In some instances, especially when hegemony is weak or breaking down, actors may come together to realize that they are confronted with a multiplicity of options (syncretic variants or possibilities), see their consequences, weigh them together, and in so doing alter their starting positions, interests, or goals, and perhaps generate new syncretic options as a result of talking things through and learning. However, this Habermasian ideal of reflexive, transformative communication is also hard to find in the experience of Serer farmers dealing with the Rural Councils or land tenure change.

Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Senegal 53 However, the Serer experience suggests a fourth possible selection mechanism, a variant on this social dialogue and learning model that emphasizes the cold realities of structure and eschews intentionality. The overriding empirical reality in the story of what happens to the Rural Councils in the Siin region is intervention of state agents (particularly Prefects and Sub-Prefects) to enforce a narrow interpretation of law and an insistence on functional specificity of the Rural Councils, against the neo-master of fire, more holistic option. If there is dialogue and learning, it has to take place in reaction to and against the state, working to destroy the old discursive hegemony of the master of fire system. Moreover, if dialogue and learning occur, they do not actually take place in contexts of conscious discussion of alternatives, in meetings, or even at those places and times in this society in which people get together, talk at length and informally conduct “business”—afternoon teas, or baptisms, weddings, and funerals. My own interviews and participant observation suggest this is an overly deliberate and intentional way of thinking about the origins of creativity that suggests more planning and engineering, as well as more agency, than really exists. Instead, the emergence of syncretic variants of the Rural Councils flows from an uncoordinated series of trial and error efforts to make sense of and use the Rural Councils by disparate actors who are themselves nevertheless embedded in reasonably close-knit networks of communication and learning. An example of getting what you want from the Rural Councils by reminding them of their role as kin representatives circulates quickly, and enters the catalog of shared experiences of how to manage these new institutions. Against this backdrop, certain possibilities emerge and become more resonant. Through repeated practice that is never rationally chosen nor discursively enshrined, fairly regular pathways of behavior emerge and come to pattern, for a time and in a limited geographical context, the process of syncretic adaptation of institutions. There are two key points about institutionalization that flow from this fourth model of selection/promulgation (“structurally constrained, unintentional social learning,” which the classical pragmatists would call deliberation). First, creative agency from below may generate nondurable patterns of behavior for a given time in a given space. These need not endure or be sustainable to be important for the institutionalization of a particular syncretic form. In the case of the Rural Councils, various styles or forms of kinship matter a great deal in responses to the Rural Councils, and might culminate in a notion of kin representation. Second, for real institutionalization to take place, the work of the

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planner/policy maker (or institutional “engineer”) and the work done at the grassroots (by the institutional “ramshackler”) must align in some mutually reinforcing manner. Kin representation offers an ideal, unrequited illustration. For many years, the ramshacklers in the Siin region have been building something like kin representation as a new way of interpreting elections and democracy and their interaction with the state. The possibility of promulgation is latent in the dynamics of structurally constrained, unintentional social learning. Yet the next move toward institutionalization has been and remains in the hands of state and international planners and policy makers to recognize and make some engineered institutional use of this latent, grassroots, socially resonant mode of legitimation. But this brings us right back to the standard tragedy of development schemes and other civilizing missions in Africa and similar ex-colonial regions: engineers and ramshacklers, the designers of formal institutions and those who incrementally and syncretically transform them from below, are out of synch, do not or will not communicate. In postcolonial regions marked by a considerable degree of elite Westernization and concomitant shame over things traditional and neotraditional (Senegal is the exemplar; South Korea might be the antiexemplar), the engineers will not look in the direction of the ramshacklers, will not take seriously the institutional reworking and creativity coming from the latter. The tragedy is that this modernist hubris decouples planners and policy makers, the state and international aid organization, from the very dynamics of innovation, creative problem solving, locally adapted solutions—and most critically, legitimation—so urgently needed to render programs of institutional restructuring like development or democratization meaningful, useful, and politically inclusive of those in whose name these transformations are purportedly undertaken. Conclusion The implication of this case study, and of the exploration of institutional syncretism in general, is that analysts and policy makers need to accept three fundamental changes in how we design and make sense of institutions that are purported to be vectors of developmental or desirable social change. First, syncretism demands an adjustment of scale. Following the logic of Scott (1998), one-size-fits-all solutions in market reform, governance, or human rights promotion are destined to fail because they do not harness ramshackle, grassroots creative adaptation. Policymakers and analysts must thus develop design, implementation, and tracking tools to see and understand the diversity of new institutional forms that proliferate at the most local of levels. Second, syncretism demands a rehabilitation of methods once associated with political ethnography, updated to take into account the

Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Senegal 55 dynamics of social constructivism. Operating at very local, microscales, syncretism requires those who design and assess policy to understand myriad local histories, cultures, and memories of institutions. This will entail a massive new undertaking of political ethnographic analysis (which can and should employ large numbers of already trained but underemployed local social scientists). But this new political ethnography cannot be rooted in old fantasies about tribe and “tradition”: it must take into account the understanding—now well developed in most human sciences beyond the study of politics and economics—that what we call tradition, indigeneity, cultural memory, the customs of a people, are all in flux, subject to reinvention, reformulation, and therefore quite meaningful political contestation over the content of memory and its relevance in the present day. Thus, the political ethnography demanded by the analysis of institutional syncretism cannot look for static, unchanging, or uniform “traditional cultures” into which new institutions become embedded in some organic, transplant-the-seedling-into-new-soil inapt metaphor. It instead requires a dynamic analysis of competing versions of historical memory of culture and tradition, mobilized by actors with identifiable interests and social-structural position, to advance particular claims or goals. This opens the door to a new, microlevel political science of the small-scale forms of contestation over culture, symbol, and myth, the deployments of these structures of neotradition in political struggle, and the ways in which these sometimes coherent systems of meaning enmesh actors and in turn help shape, constrain, and structure actors’ own identities and interests. Finally, syncretism demands deep and meaningful decentralization. The kinds of reforms associated with the Rural Councils in Senegal beginning in 1972, or with the higher-level Regional Councils inaugurated in the mid-1990s are not enough. Most critically, they fail to devolve real budgetary authority, and real administrative power to the new decentralized structures (Dickovick 2005). Delivering on the real promise of decentralization means giving local-level bodies the power to interpret national legal and policy principles in ways that make cultural sense in local contexts. Only by granting this power to adapt and syncretically transform the institutions of development, governance and representation will Ekeh’s (1975) “official public” bridge the longstanding legitimacy gap that divides it from what he called the “primordial public.”The syncretic transformation of institutions offers the best chance to rebuild a link between postcolonial society and state, and thus tap the much discussed but ever elusive mobilizational potential of “traditional” social relations.

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* For helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this chapter, I am grateful to Jean-Baptiste Faye, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, Lloyd Rudolph, Goran Hyden, Gerald Berk, and participants in the University of Chicago Comparative Politics Workshop. None of these gracious individuals bear responsibility for any of my remaining errors or omissions. 1. This chapter draws on field research conducted since 1986 in thirty villages in the preindependence Serer kingdom known as Siin, now situated in the arrondisements of Niakhar and Tattaguine (Fatick Region). 2. This interpretation extends an earlier presentation of these findings. Galvan (2004) hints at the idea of multiple interpretations of historical memory, and therefore multiple adaptations of new and old institutions, but does not fully develop the relationship among creativity of action, antidualism, and the fractal nature of syncretism. 3. The original master of fire was, according to dominant local historical memory, a “pioneer” migrant who first settled the area, lighting a brush-clearing fire to open space for building houses and farming. He did this, local cosmology insists, with the help of key ancestral and allied spirit-beings ( pangool ), with whom he and his descendants maintain good relations. In return, these pangool ensure the fertility of the soil, regularity of rains, and viability of agriculture. For further background, see Galvan (2004), chapters 2 and 4; Lericollais (1972). 4. I use initials to protect the anonymity of respondents interviewed about land tenure disputes in the Siin region in 1992–93, and again during follow up research in 1995, 2002, 2003, and 2005. 5. In a survey of 727 randomly selected farmers in and around Tukar, 19.4 percent of respondents favored the narrow interpretation of the land law, such that Rural Councils should not permit land pawns. 6. As noted above, 80.6 percent of 727 farmers surveyed in the region would like the Rural Councils to uphold the right to pawn. Moreover, 71.3 percent of respondents in the same survey would refuse to sell a piece of land if the Rural Council authorized it but authorities associated with the master of fire were opposed to such a sale. In 209 open-ended interviews conducted, as I followed 32 land disputes in the region, only 8 respondents (3.8 percent) could be unequivocally characterized as preferring that the Rural Councils more closely conform to the law as written in Dakar and interpreted by the local representatives of the territorial administration (Prefets and Sous-Prefets). 7. See Galvan (2004), chapter 4. 8. For a complete discussion of this form of land pawning as institutional syncretism, see Galvan (1997). 9. Veterans of both world wars were generically known as tirailleurs senegalaises, a label originating in the special Senegalese role as footsoldiers of French imperial expansion in Africa (See Lunn 1999). While the observations here might apply to World War I veterans, I encountered none who had survived to the period of my research. 10. The literature on institutions has been characterized by some concern for “founding” periods of openness (Collier and Collier 1991), forms of temporal or structural determinism (Pierson 2000), a kind of overdetermined agency (Bates et al. 1998), or suggestive metaphors like “layering” or “intercurrence” (Thelen 2002; Orren and Skowronek 1994). There has been some effort to establish the idea that pathways for change may remain multiple and open to further transformation even after founding periods (Crouch and Farrell 2004), but the literature is dominated by either structuralist sensibilities or versions of agency rooted in exaggerations of omnipotence and omniscience of individual choice. More recent work on post-Word War II reconstruction and institutional imposition in Germany and Japan (Zeitlin and Herrigel 2000) and on local adaptive responses to the imposition of free market property norms in Eastern European (Stark and Bruszt 1998) hint at a more robust theory of agency in ongoing circumstances of potential institutional change. See Berk and Galvan (2006) for a more complete effort to ground institutional change in creative agency.

Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Senegal 57 References Abelin, Phillipe. 1979. “Domaine national et développement au Sénégal,” Bulletin de l’IFAN 41: 3. Almond, Gabriel A. and Sidney Verba. 1963. The Civic Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Almond, Gabriel A. and James Coleman. 1960. The Politics of the Developing Areas. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Alvarez, Sonia, Evelina Dagnino and Arturo Escobar. 1998. Politics of Culture, Cultures of Politics. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Amselle, Jean-Loup. 1990. Logiques Métisses: Anthropologie de l’Identité en Afrique et Ailleurs. Paris: Payot. Ba, Thierno Aliou. 1985. “Les centres d’expansion rurale du Sénégal entre la dynamique paysanne et les structures d’Etat. Médiation ou frein pour un développement autogestionnaire?” Mondes et Développement 13, 52: 621–31. Bates, Robert, et al. 1998. Analytic Narratives. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bates, Robert. 1988. “Contra Contractarianism: Some Reflections on the New Institutionalism.” Politics and Society 16: 387–401. Becker, Charles. 1984. Traditions Villageois du Siin. Dakar: CNRS-LA. Becker, Charles, Mamadou Diouf, and Mohamed Mbodj. 1987. “L’Evolution Demographique Regionale du Sénégal et du Bassin Arachidier (Sine-Saloum) au Vingtième Siècle, 1904–1976,” in African Population and Capitalism: Historical Perspectives. Dennis D. Cordell and Joel W. Gregory, eds. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Bendix, Reinhard. 1967 “Tradition and Modernity Reconsidered.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 9 (April): 292–346. Berk, Gerald and Dennis Galvan. 2006. “Syncretism and Institutional Change Across Time, Space and Hierarchies.” Paper presented at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the APSA, Philadelphia. Berry, Sara. 1993. No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977 [1972]. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bryant, Christopher G.A. and David Jary. 1991. Giddens’ Theory of Structuration: A Critical Appreciation. London: Routledge. Callaghy, Thomas M. 1984. The State-Society Struggle: Zaire in Comparative Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press. Carter, Gwendolyn. 1966. National Unity and Regionalism in Eight African States. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Collier, Ruth Berins and David Collier. 1991. Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement and Regime Dynamics in Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Crouch, Colin and Henry Farrell. 2004. “Breaking the Path of Institutional Development? Alternatives to the New Determinism.” Rationality and Society. 16:1, 5–43. Dewey, John, 2002. Human Nature and Conduct. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Diamond, Larry. 1999. Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dickovick, J. Tyler. 2005. “The Measure and Mismeasure of Decentralization: Subnational Autonomy in Senegal and South Africa.” Journal of Modern African Studies 43:2, 183–210. Dupire, Margeurite. 1994. Sagesse Sereer: Essais sur la Pensee Sereer Ndut. Paris: Karthala. Eckstein, Harry. 1966. Division and Cohesion in Democracy: A Study of Norway. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eckstein, Harry, 1998. “A Culturalist Theory of Political Change.” American Political Science Review. September, 82: 789–804.

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Ekeh, Peter. 1975. “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 17(1): 91–112. Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fouéré, Marie-Aude. 2005. “Les métamorphoses des ‘relations à plaisanteries’: Un nouvel enjeu politique dans la construction des États-nations.” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines. 178. 389–430. Fukuyama, Francis. 1995. Trust: Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. New York: Free Press. Galvan, Dennis. 1997. “The Market Meets Sacred Fire: Land Pawning as Institutional Syncretism in Inter-War Senegal.” African Economic History 25: 9–41. Galvan, Dennis. 2004. The State Must Be Our Master of Fire: How Peasants Craft Culturally Sustainable Development in Senegal. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gastellu, Jean-Marc. 1981. L’égalitarianisme économique des Serer du Sénégal (series: Travaux et Documents). Paris: ORSTOM. Giddens, Anthony. 1976. New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretive Sociologies. New York: Basic Books. Guigou, Brigitte. 1993. “Les Changements du Système Familial et Matrimonial: Les Serere du Sine (Senegal) (La Souplesse du Système Patrimonial Lignager),” unpublished Doctorat Nouveau régime. Université de Lille III. Hall, Peter. 1993. “Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State.” Comparative Politics (April): 275–96. Herrigel, David. 2000. “American Occupation, Market Order and Democracy,” in Americanization and Its Limits. Herrigel and Zeitlin, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herskovitz, M.J. 1959. Continuity and Change in African Cultures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hyden, Goran. 1983. No Shortcuts to Progress: African Development Management in Perspective. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Inglehart, Ronald and Christian Welzel. 2002. “Political Culture and Democracy,” in New Directions in Comparative Politics. Howard J. Wiarda, ed. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press. Kaplan, Robert D. 2000. The Coming Anarchy: Shattering The Dreams of the Post Cold War. New York: Random House. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lericollais, André. 1972. “Sob: Étude geographique d’un terroir sérèr (Senegal),” published as volume 7 of ORSTOM Atlas des Structures Agraires au Sud du Sahara. Paris: Mouton and Co. Lunn, Joe. 1999. Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann March, James and Johan Olsen. 1989. Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics. New York: Free Press. Niang, Mamadou. 1982. “Réflexions sur la réforme foncière Sénégalaise de 1964,” in Enjeux fonciers en Afrique Noir. E. Le Bris, E. LeRoy and F Leimdorfer, eds. Paris: Karthala. 219–27. North, Douglas. 1981. Structure and Change in Economic History. New York: Norton. Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Orren, Karen and Stephen Skowronek. 1994. “Beyond the Iconongraphy of Order: Notes for a New Institutionalism,” in The Dynamics of American Politics. Larry Dodd and Calvin Jillison, eds. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 311–30. Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pierson, Paul. 2000. “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence and the Study of Politics.” American Political Science Review 94:2 ( June ): 251–67. Price, Robert M. 1975. Society and Bureaucracy in Contemporary Ghana. Berkeley: U.C. Press.

Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Senegal 59 Putnam, Robert. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Putnam, Robert. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Riggs, Fred. 1964. Administration in Developing Countries: A Theory of Prismatic Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Rudolph, Lloyd and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. 1967. The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scott, James. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shin, Don Chull and Jason Wells, 2005. “Is Democracy the Only Game in Town?” Journal of Democracy. 16:2(April): 88–9. Sikkink, Kathryn. 1991. Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Stark, David and Lazslo Bruzst. 1998. Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tamari, Tal. 1997. Les Castes de L’Afrique Occidentale: Artisans et Musiciens Endogames. Nanterre, France: Societé d’Ethnologie. Tessler, Mark, 2002. “Do Islamic Orientations Influence Attitudes Toward Democracy in the Arab World? Evidence from Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Algeria.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 43: 3–5, 229–49. Thelen, Kathleen, 2002. “How Institutions Evolve: Insights from Comparative Historical Analysis,” in Comparative Historical Analysis. Mahoney and Reuschemeyer, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 208–240. Unger, Roberto. 1998. Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative. London: Verso. Watts, Michael, 1992. “Capitalisms, Crises and Cultures I: Notes Toward a Totality of Fragments,” in Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms And Symbolic Discontent. Michael Watts and Alan Pred, eds. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 1–18. Whitaker, C.S. 1967. “A Dysrhythmic Process of Political Change.” World Politics 19, 2 ( January): 190–217. Young, Crawford. 1994. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven: Yale University Press. Zakaria, Fareed. 1997. “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy.” Foreign Affairs Nov/Dec97, 76, 6: 22.

Interviews by Author AG, Rural Councilor, interview, arrodisement of Niakhar, May 28, 2003. AMD, Water and Forests service representative, interview, arrondisement of Niakhar, August 25, 1993 and February 11, 2002. BMS, CER chief, interview, arrondisement of Niakhar, August 13, 1993. BN, village chief, arrondisement of Niakhar, August 21, 1998. BY, farmer, dispute interview, arrondisement of Niakhar, July 7, 1993 and July 21, 2005. CN, farmer, dispute interview, arrondisement of Niakhar, September 18, 1993. DF, farmer, dispute interview, arrondisement of Niakhar, September 15, 1993. DN, Rural Councilor, arrondisement of Niakhar, October 19, 1993 and August 3, 2005. DS, farmer, dispute interview, arrondisement of Niakhar, September 16, 1993 and February 17, 2002.

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ED, farmer, dispute interview, arrondisement of Niakhar, July 25, 1993. FF, farmer, dispute interview, arrondisement of Niakhar, August 29, 1993 and July 18, 1995. IT, farmer, dispute interview, arrondisement of Niakhar, August 25, 1993 and July 16, 2005. LD, farmer, dispute interview, arrondisement of Niakhar, March 3, 1993 and July 19, 1995. MG, farmer, dispute interview, arrondisement of Niakhar, May 17, 2003. PG, farmer, dispute interview, arrondisement of Niakhar, May 27, 2003. TF, farmer, dispute interview, arrondisement of Niakhar, July 6, 1993 and August 14, 2005.

CHAPTER

THREE

Institutional Syncretism and the Chinese Armed Forces Thomas J. Bickford

Introduction Modern armed forces are, as Weber famously noted, the very essence of rational-legal organization (Weber 1958). They are state institutions, fully financed by the state and exist for a highly specialized purpose: the application of organized violence in defense of the state and in pursuit of the state’s interests. The military represents a formally separate sphere of operations from the more generalized civilian functions performed by the state. Organization, recruitment of personnel, promotion, etc, are primarily determined by the specific tasks assigned to the military. Indeed, military organizations are often viewed as being so driven by the functional requirements of the profession that they do not reflect the internal social or cultural conditions of any particular country ( Rosen 1996). This stands in marked contrast to the armies of many preindustrial societies, including that of China, where the ideology, organization, and activities of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—while clearly influenced by models of military organization in the West (and the Soviet Union)—came to reflect distinctive social understandings and practices. Of particular significance is the fact that military personnel were engaged in many nonmilitary activities including economic pursuits. From its establishment in 1927 until 1998 when it was ordered to divest itself of its enterprises, the PLA consistently had a wide-ranging

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economic as well as military role. The PLA has been involved in agriculture, mining, industry, trade, and services. Its factories were involved in the manufacture of hundreds of different kinds of military and civilian products. And it played a role in many national construction programs such as railway expansion and other infrastructure projects. This extra-military activity represents a significant departure from standard military practice in professionalized Western (and Soviet) armies wherein the sole function of the armed forces has been to provide security for the state. Certainly, there have been cases of military units participating in nonmilitary activities clandestinely or informally; but the PLA’s overt and widespread involvement in economic production activities represents a more radical departure from the ideal-typical model of modern military organization as approximated by the armed forces of the West. While the extended period of guerrilla warfare certainly made it necessary for many PLA units to undertake agricultural and production activities to support themselves, this does not explain the widespread legitimacy and continuity of the PLA’s involvement in economic activities nearly five decades after the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949. This chapter argues that the significance of these economic activities lie in their contribution to the process through which universalistic institutional practices were adapted or reconstructed to be meaningful and intelligible in terms of the more long-standing norms, expectations and interests of local actors. That is, rather than treat the PLA’s economic activities as either inconsequential or as a peculiar holdover from the period of guerrilla warfare, these activities are interpreted as a case of institutional syncretism in which Chinese communist elites selectively transformed the features or the western military model (norms, rules, organizational and operational features) while adapting elements of preexisting social institutions (military economic production) to provide new institutional configurations. Syncretism in the context of the PLA was not merely the ad hoc result of resilient preexisting practices surviving within a modern military organization. Neither were the specific features of the PLA an inevitable product of the ubiquitous tensions that accompany the borrowing of institutions nor were they mere hybridization of traditional and modern institutional components. The PLA’s distinctive characteristics emerged as a result of a deliberate attempt by communist party elites to selectively combine and reinterpret traditional organizational frameworks with the formally modern organizational characteristics of the military that justifies the political authority of the elites and serves as an ideological and

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organizational vehicle for social transformation. That is, the PLA’s unusual features were the result of a conscious and deliberate strategy of institutional borrowing, or “syncretism from above.” The result was a new construction in its own right; one that suited the tasks and goals of CCP elites. While the traditional features of the PLA helped make it intelligible to Chinese peasants, those same features were used in new ways to help enter and transform Chinese society. While the PLA shares many modern features with Western and Soviet bloc forces, it was also adapted to a particular context within Chinese politics. The PLA makes a good case study of institutional syncretism in practice not merely because the concept can help partially explain some of the peculiar and resilient features of the military in China, but also because military organizations represent a good “hard” test for the concept. That is, because military organizations are generally thought to be the most likely candidates for organizational emulation and convergence given the universal character of the imperative they are intended to fulfill, the unfolding of syncretic processes within a military organization such as the PLA can add to the robustness of syncretism as an interpretive idea and analytic tool in institutionalist treatments of development processes. I begin with an examination of the standard view that modern militaries are among the institutions most universally prone to convergence in terms of their organizational structures, routines, and practices. Second, I review the origins and transformation of the Chinese military under various dynasties and the republican period, noting the growing influence of Western models of the professional military. I then trace the origins and development of the PLA enterprise system during the civil war period (1927–49). Next, I examine how the emergent peculiarities of the PLA evolved during the course of Maoist nation building (1949–78), explaining the resilience of many of the PLA’s distinctive features as the product of a deliberate syncretist approach adopted by key leaders in the CCP. Finally, as all institutional formulas are only functional so long as the environment permits, I turn to the problems the PLA has encountered within the context of post-Mao reforms (1978–98), tracing the growing pressures that led to the divestment of the PLA from its economic enterprises and the passing of its economic role. The Military as a Modern Institution Few, if any, state institutions lend themselves to the claim of universalism as readily as do the contemporary armed forces. Military establishments

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everywhere tend to share the same basic patterns of organization and structure. They are hierarchical with similar rank systems, stress merit in promotion and are organized rationally and impersonally. Officer education and training are often very similar in content across cultures. Clausewitz and Sun Zi are studied in both Europe and Asia. Less certainly, some have argued for a tendency for a common military ethos among officers (Huntington 1957; Janowitz 1971). Variations do exist, but these are limited primarily by factors such as geography, nature of the enemy, and available technology. This tendency toward homogeneity is the product of the military revolution between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries that began in Europe and then spread to the rest of the world. In the past, military organizations were as varied as the societies they defended and tended to strongly reflect indigenous social structures (Andreski 1954, Rosen 1996). The institution of serfdom, for example, had a profound impact on traditional Tsarist military organization and policy (Keep 1985; Fuller 1992). Ibn Khaldun, to cite a well-known example, noted the connection between nomad social structure and military capacity of pastoral Arab societies (Ibn Khaldun 1971). The social structure of feudal Europe produced a type of warrior that was primarily concerned with individual honor and had little or no sense of rational discipline or organization (Weber 1958). As one author put it, “warfare was not a national or territorial matter so much as it was the temporary coalescence of individuals trained, for the most part by themselves, in the art of war” (Downing 1992: 56). While military historians disagree about the exact timing and sequence of the military revolution in Europe, (Black 1991; Parker 1996) the broad outline seems fairly clear. Incessant warfare in Europe put a premium on innovation. New weapons in the form of firearms, artillery, and fortification design brought about new innovations in tactics and military organization. Armies became larger, more centrally organized, and more functionally specialized. As armies became larger and more complex, it became increasingly necessary to train troops together on a constant basis leading to the establishment of standing armies and the necessary bureaucracy to support and maintain them. Training became standardized and soldiers were increasingly isolated from civilian life so that they could concentrate on military preparation. The increasing complexity of military affairs placed increasingly greater demands on officer education eventually leading to the establishment of military academies. In an era of constant threat and competition, successful innovations were quickly disseminated and copied.


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More sophisticated armies required more money and therefore the need for the state to take on the costs of financing and supplying standing armies. The state’s financial and coercive capacities increased, which in turn allowed the state to pay for yet larger armies. To make the task of supply more efficient, standardization of equipment, uniforms and pay grades were introduced. Armies and navies were firmly tied to the state, which provided pay, housing, pensions, and other benefits. As Tilly has observed, “the state made war and war made the state” (Tilly 1985). Other forms of military activity such as privateers became obsolete and disappeared (Downing 1992). By the nineteenth century, the trend toward one basic type of military organization was becoming universal. European and American armies were similarly organized and equipped. The increasingly technological nature of warfare required troops that underwent constant training and that could be maintained in the field at all times rather than engaging in nonmilitary activities such as agriculture or industrial production. The need for highly knowledgeable officers and Non-commissioned Officers (NCOs) required increasingly sophisticated education and training. An officer’s life became increasingly devoted to his profession and development of his skill (Huntington 1957). Western military organization was highly rational and merit based, almost a Weberian ideal. The West’s superior technology, organization, and training enabled Western armies to easily defeat their opponents elsewhere in the world. All non-European societies either were defeated by the new military forces of the Europeans or tried to adapt their methods and organization ( Ralston 1990). The military revolution and related historical literature thus tends to emphasize a fairly unilinear military development leading to a “best practices” type of universal military organization. This theme is reflected in other military literatures. For example, the neorealists acknowledge that there may be many differences in military practices, organization, and belief, but argue that in the long run the nature of international competition will force countries to adopt a common set of military practices or face defeat (Posen 1984; Waltz 1979). Many of the leading works on civil-military relations in Leninist regimes (Kolkowicz 1967; Joffe 1967; Jencks 1982; Joffe 1987) are quite explicit in the understanding that the requirements of military technology and organization lead to universal norms of military practice and behavior. For these analysts, the armed forces of party-states are in the end, variations of the western, professional military, not an alternative case. Of course, no one argues that this trend toward universal military practices is automatic or without severe problems. There is a very rich

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literature that examines the problems of importing western military structures into non-Western societies. Perhaps best known is Huntington’s treatment of “praetorianism,” the political involvement of the military, as a product of incomplete modernization (Huntington 1968). Ralston has argued that it is not enough to simply “import the European army.” Successful military modernization requires other changes in society as well (Ralston 1990). Still others have argued that loyalty to preexisting social and political structures undermines effective military power (David 1991; Rosen 1996). What these and other analyses have in common is a tendency to assume that partial or imperfect adoption of Western military organization and practices means less effective, even dysfunctional armed forces. Furthermore, these studies treat traditional elements as holdovers simply coexisting alongside formal imported military frameworks. This is not the case with the PLA which consciously and fruitfully revived traditional military economic practices. As will be evident in the following discussion, the PLA’s involvement in economic production emerged neither as the inevitable product of cultural forces, nor as a historical accident; it was the result of deliberate choice by communist party elites who fused some traditional norms with those of the modern military to create something unique. This syncretic blend of traditional and modern elements was consciously intended to enable the indigenization of the military so that its role and status would be socially recognizable and acceptable to segments in the Chinese communist movement as well as to a predominantly rural Chinese society. The Chinese Military and its Economic Activities in Historical Perspective The concept of soldiers engaging in economic activity is a very old one in China. Throughout much of the Chinese dynastic period, the armed forces were expected to be partially, if not fully, self-supporting. Periods when the traditional Chinese state bore the full cost of maintaining its armed forces were unusual and were quite ruinous due to the inherent inability of the Chinese state to raise sufficient revenues. It has been estimated that in the eleventh century, for example, the cost of maintaining a mercenary army took up some 80 percent of central government revenue (Hsiao 1978). In this respect China resembles most other traditional empires, many of which had considerable difficulty in raising enough revenue to pay for the cost of a standing army. Therefore, most governments pursued policies aimed at reducing central government


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costs and promoting military self-sufficiency whenever possible. The feudal system of Western Europe is the most obvious case of the state relying on society’s own resources to fund the armed forces but there are many other variations. Tsarist Russia, the Byzantine empire, and Elizabethan England offer other examples of military economic practices similar to those found in Chinese history. (Mulvenon 2001) Within China, efforts to relieve the central government from the full burden of defense spending have taken several forms. In the Sui-Tang period (AD 589–907), for example, the central government distributed land to peasant households and granted tax exemptions in return for which the peasants were supposed to provide manpower for the armies as well as cover the cost of their equipment out of their own agricultural production. The Yuan (1279–1368), Ming (1368–1644), and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties all tried, at least initially, to rely on hereditary military families that needed to engage in economic activity for self-support. For the purposes of this chapter the most important system was the tuntian system, which first came into use at the end of the Han dynasty in the third century AD. In the tuntian system soldiers were sent to frontier regions to open up government-controlled land in wilderness areas for agricultural production. Not only were the soldiers supposed to be self-sufficient, their activities improved the local economy attracting peasant immigration and development of the border regions. It was this system that was explicitly adopted as a starting point for the PLA enterprise system (Song and Gu 1986; Selden 1995). We will return to this point later. For most of Chinese history, the imperial state was able to provide for defense based on military organizations that engaged in some form of economic activity for self-support and which was closely integrated with Chinese society. However, by the mid-nineteenth century the Chinese state was increasingly under threat both internally and externally. The woeful inadequacy of China’s existing forces to meet these threats put pressure on the Qing government to abandon its traditional approaches to defense and develop forces modeled on Western organization, using Western equipment and trained to Western standards. By the 1880s, the Qing government had largely abandoned its efforts to reinvigorate its existing military forces and had begun to create a new army and navy. The so-called “New Armies” were organized along Western lines and funded (albeit inadequately) and supplied by the state. No outside economic activity was allowed or desired. The traditional Confucian military exam system was abandoned and officers were trained in newly established Western style military academies that were staffed by

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European officers. Traditional forces continued to exist but were essentially allowed to atrophy. Units that engaged in economic activity for self-support had largely disappeared by the first decade of the twentieth century. While the Qing government was never fully capable of realizing its military modernization plans, there was a clear trend toward attempting to adopt Western organization and practice. Trends in modernization continued into the Republican period (1912–49) especially under Chiang Kai-shek who relied heavily on German military advisors in the 1930s. While the Soviet Union did have some influence, the Guomindang (GMD) had political commissars in their armed forces in the 1920s. Republican China was primarily influenced by Western military practice and organization. While the GMD’s efforts to build effective military institutions under Sun Yat-sen and later Chiang Kai-shek fell short of expectations, there was no attempt to include or revive preexisting forms of Chinese military organization at least among government forces. Chinese military writers of the late Qing and Republican periods were nearly unanimous in regarding the European mass conscript army as the model for a new China (Powell 1955; Ralston 1990; Tien 1992; McCord 1993). The European model was not just an example of “best practices” it was regarded as an essential part of Chinese modernization. This, however, takes us back to the original problem posed at the beginning of this chapter. If, as many scholars argue, there is a tendency toward a universal form of military organization, and the Chinese state was adopting Western norms of military organization in the last years of the Qing dynasty and early Republican period, why did the PLA create, retain, and even expand its enterprises? It is highly anachronistic and it is at odds with predominating theories of military development and civil-military relations. The Creation of the PLA Enterprise System: Before 1949 The need to push for modern western style armies coincided with the period when central resources in Qing China were under the greatest strain. In fact, no Chinese military force—Qing, warlord, GMD, or communist ever had the full financial capability to meet their military needs, and chronic economic problems were a constant feature of Chinese military policy from the 1880s to 1949. All Chinese armies had to find other means to finance themselves. For many commanders this meant


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raiding provincial treasuries or imposing unofficial taxies on the population or even outright theft. A notable exception was the independent warlord Feng Yuxiang who involved his troops in a variety of activities including public works, business activities, and even boosting public morality. His actions were motivated by a combination of nationalism, Confucian moralism and the need to raise revenue to carry on his campaigns against other warlords. A couple of years prior to the founding of the CCP, these actions had demonstrated that they could create considerable goodwill toward the army that practiced them (Sheridan 1966). Feng’s use of soldiers to perform good works resonated with traditional Confucian beliefs that the armed power of the state derived in large part form the unanimous support of the people and that the use of military power should not be divorced from the social good (Lewis 1990). Feng Yuxiang had already shown that political as well as economic gains could be made by using a traditional answer to the problem of lack of funds. Thus the idea that there was a moral obligation to help the peasantry and that the use of traditional military economic practices were a valid and viable response to economic difficulty was part of the cultural universe of ideas available to Chinese communist leaders. Many of the PLA’s leaders, including Mao, Zhu De, and Peng Dehuai, lacked any formal military training in western style military academies. For them military education consisted of traditional Chinese stories and novels about the military past; a past that included an economic role for the military. In addition, Chinese communists consciously rejected a wholesale adoption of western military organization, which they regarded as bourgeois and taking the “purely military view.” As Jencks has pointed out, the PLA did make the transition from guerilla force to conventional army in the 1930s and 1940s ( Jencks 1982) but the CCP rejected the idea of a military that was purely functional in design. They adopted some aspects of the Soviet model, especially commissars and the basic party-army model. But they also rejected some Soviet advice as inconsistent with conditions in China. In attempting to come up with their own military solutions, they very consciously drew upon traditional Chinese experiences adapting them to their needs. They drew on Chinese strategic culture for ideas on tactics and strategy ( Johnston 1995) and they could look to traditional Chinese military economic practices to support themselves. The PLA was to be a unique combination of pre-twentieth-century Chinese military practices, western organization, and Soviet party-army. This was organizationally and ideologically different from Chinese military tradition, a new kind of force that also involved practices familiar to many Chinese peasants.

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What was needed was a set model with which to base their strategy on. As noted above, the tuntian system, known to anyone with a basic knowledge of Chinese history was deliberately chosen. Chinese Communist leaders were thus using an old model, readily understood by the peasants, that tapped into peasant notions of how armies should be, and that furthered the communists’ own transformational agenda. To understand why the CCP found the tuntian system so attractive as a model, it is necessary to examine the conditions under which the CCP and its armed wing, the PLA had to operate in its struggle for power. First, for most of the period of guerrilla war between 1927 and 1949, the CCP was cut off from outside sources of military and economic aid. There was no direct access to the Soviet Union, units of the PLA often fought in isolation from each other for long periods of time, and except for the 1937–41 period in the Second United Front against Japan, the GMD routinely tried to blockade areas under Communist control. The PLA was thus forced to rely on what it could capture from its enemies, obtain from the Chinese peasantry, or create by its own efforts to get the daily necessities it needed to conduct its war effort. The PLA had to be at least partly self-reliant as a simple matter of survival. Second, from the beginning the PLA was supposed to be an army of the people. Therefore, there was a need to obtain food, clothing, shoes, and other essentials in a way that minimized the burden on the local population if the army was to indeed develop a strong relationship with the peasantry. Promoting self-sufficiency among military units was one way to achieve this and stood in stark contrast with the GMD and warlord armies that were mostly financed through excessive taxation (often collected years in advance), confiscation, and outright extortion (for that matter, the Soviet army was also predatory during the Russian civil war as it frequently confiscated grain from the peasants; trying to minimize the economic burden on the peasantry in wartime was not necessarily an obvious choice for a Leninist army). In fact, the economic burdens of the GMD on peasants were a constant theme of the CCP propaganda effort to enlist peasant support. Third, not only could military production ease the burden on those local populations whose political support was needed, it could also help the local economy. This could be done by bringing in more land into agricultural production and thus improving the local food supply, by providing employment to locals, by producing more goods such as cloth, by smuggling surplus production across enemy lines to sell elsewhere and by helping local farmers with planting, harvesting and so on. Thus the tuntian system not only presented an easily implemented


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solution to the PLA’s supply problems, it also created political and economic opportunities to build support among, and coalitions with, China’s peasants. Mao, at one point argued that troops need only engage in production for three months and could fight for nine months. Such an army, he said, would not depend on government or the people for their pay, and “If in our Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies . . . every one is not only able to fight and do mass work, but is also skilled in production, we need not fear any difficulty and shall be, in the words of Mencius, ‘invincible under the sun’ ” (Mao 1956, Vol. 4, p. 149). The Chinese Communists used the military as a production force far more extensively than anyone else, and they were the only ones to use military production as an instrument of political and social transformation. The tuntian system was ideally suited for their purposes. But it was not simply the revival of an old idea. It was an adaptation blended with the more modern elements of the military to suit their own needs and purposes. The resulting hybrid makes for a clear example of institutional syncretism neither strictly modern nor traditional but a new and different blend. The PLA first began to engage in farming in 1928 opening up a small patch of wasteland to agricultural production. The next year saw a major expansion of military farms in cooperation with local peasants that proved to be very successful in improving food supplies. The PLA also began to promote industrial production and established its first munitions factory in the Jiangxi Soviet base in 1931. By the time the Communists had consolidated their base at Yan’an in 1937, PLA production had become well established as an essential part of the PLA’s mission and organization. Agriculture and agricultural products were the most common form of production with land usually being either rented from the peasants or wasteland opened up by the PLA itself. Factories were usually small, involving 30–40 people but could have as many as several hundred workers. The types of products produced were simple and required very little technology. Types of products produced included grain, meat, beans, cotton, wool, soap, oil, paper, clothing, shoes, firearms, ammunition, and land mines. Most of the personnel were connected with the military or under military supervision, and enterprises existed at the division, brigade, and regimental levels. Just as PLA units were under the joint command of an officer and a political commissar, the enterprises were under the joint administration of a manager and a political commissar and political work was considered an important part of PLA enterprise life. In addition to the PLA’s farms and factories, members of the PLA were expected to help peasants with

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planting, harvesting, irrigation, and other projects. Production was not to interfere with fighting capacity of the PLA or the training of its troops. Some units were virtually self-sufficient. One unit, the 359th brigade, was to become a model for the entire CCP during the 1943 Production Movement that sought to build up the economic capacity of its base areas. Indeed, the experiences of the 359th brigade at Nanniwan have become an enduring symbol of the positive aspects of military economic production and its impact on the PLA’s subsequent history cannot be overestimated (Mulvenon 2001). How successful PLA production work was as a policy is difficult to determine with any precision. Certainly it was not enough to make the PLA completely self-sufficient as the peasants continued to provide the PLA with material goods throughout the revolutionary war period. On the other hand, PLA production certainly did reduce the burden on peasants in base areas from what it would have been. PLA production was also not without its problems. The quality of goods was quite low. Corruption seemed to have been a recurring problem and production certainly took away from training. Nevertheless, Mao and other Communist leaders were greatly pleased with the results of PLA production. Production works was credited with being a major component in improving relations between the army and the masses. This was not just a matter of PLA production, but the political mass work that went along with it, including helping peasants, conducting literacy and political classes in the evenings, strengthening local party branches, recruiting for the Communist Youth League, and working closely with the CCP’s local government organization. Some veteran cadres argue that the political work of PLA enterprises was absolutely vital and inseparable from economic work just as political work and fighting were inseparable. The PLA was often the first representative of the Party in newly liberated areas, its mass work, organization of government, and ability to meet its own needs was often crucial to creating a positive image for the Party. It was, therefore, a wedge to help get the Party into the village and in and implement its new social and economic policies. The PLA as both economic and military force became an essential component of Mao’s political thinking, and was to remain part of his development strategy after the founding of the People’s Republic. In other words, an old idea from traditional China had become transformed into an intrinsic part of the new regime’s ideology and an important element in dealing with the still chronic problem of China’s economic backwardness and need to develop.


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The PLA Enterprise System 1949–78: Expansion and Modernization With the seizure of state power in 1949, it might have been expected that the PLA enterprise system be dismantled. With control of the country, the state could have taken the full responsibility of funding the PLA and the PLA could have concentrated exclusively on internal security and national defense issues. However, while a national defense industry was established under the State Council and the bulk of the PLA’s expenses were paid out of the national budget, the PLA enterprise system was not only retained, it was expanded and modernized. There are several reasons why the PLA remained an economic force after 1949. First, there was the experience of the Korean War. The Chinese economy had barely begun to recover from decades of conflict when China found itself actively engaged in combat with U.S. forces. Furthermore, Soviet military aid was insufficient to meet the PLA’s needs. Their system of farms and factories played an important role in keeping Chinese forces in Korea supplied with food, clothing, and ammunition. The Korean War therefore, tended to validate the retention of PLA enterprises as part of an overall military program. Second, even before the Korean War, the decision was being made to retain these enterprises to limit the burden of defense on the national budget. The new socialist state was faced with a variety of demands on its scarce resources. There were still pockets of resistance in many areas, the PLA now needed to start modernizing its ground forces and build an air force and navy; both potentially expensive tasks, and above all else, the country needed to direct scarce resources toward rebuilding and development. Anything that could limit costs and free up funds for development was desirable. Demobilization was one tactic, continuing to engage in production was another. Accordingly, new enterprises were set up in the spirit of self-reliance and promoting prosperity. Farms were, by far, the most common form of enterprise though the PLA also operated a wide variety of factories making products of immediate need for the armed forces (uniforms, food, medicine, repairs etc.). Third, Mao’s development strategy emphasized the continued use of the military as an economic, social, and political shock force well suited to the goals of economic development, nation building, and social transformation (Adelman 1982). The use of the military for nonmilitary goals had now become an entrenched part of the thinking of the Chinese elite. A preference for maintaining these enterprises was now part of the

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Party’s ideology, perhaps even more compelling; it had become part of the myth that the PLA was the people’s army. The PLA was to do more than help pay its way. It was supposed to be an example of revolutionary virtue, a school for spreading literacy, socialist culture and values, as well as political and economic knowledge. The PLA was also to supply economic shock troops for national construction projects. Members of the PLA, in other words, were supposed to be the ultimate in deployable cadres. This was most evident during the first few years of the new regime when the PLA played a key role in land reform, helped in the national literacy campaign, started national reconstruction, and helped to organize party branches and mass organizations in the newly liberated areas. But it is also represented in the creation of specialized military units whose function was primarily economic. These included the railway construction troops, a special unit for prospecting gold and uranium, and the Production and Construction Corps. The Production and Construction Corps were paramilitary units that combined border patrol and minor security functions with economic development and farming along China’s borders. They were stationed in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang (along the Ussuri and Amur rivers). They were clear descendants of the soldier-colonists of the past, especially in Xinjiang. However, unlike the PLA enterprises these specialized units spent part of their existence under civilian control and by 1983, all had been either disbanded or completely turned over to civilian authorities. In general, the retention of military economic activity suited the needs of the Maoist leadership. The existence of these enterprises did not interfere with the development of the PLA’s combat abilities. Throughout the Maoist period the PLA continued to develop functionally specialized branches of the armed services, acquiring air, naval, armored, and nuclear units. It that sense the PLA made a formal transition from a guerilla army to a modern armed force with all the appropriate technological branches of service. Nor did economic activity have much of an impact on training and military preparedness as most of the economic activity was conducted by specialized economic units or military dependents leaving only token activity for most military personnel. In fact, economic activity may have enhanced military preparedness to the extent that it made it easier to station units in hardto-supply, remote areas (Adelman 1982). From an economic point of view, there is little evidence to suggest that PLA enterprises made a significant contribution to economic growth but they did serve the


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purpose of relieving some of the burden on state military spending. This allowed the regime to divert scarce resources into other projects in an effort to foster economic development. Politically, it tied the PLA firmly to its origins as a revolutionary army and committed the military to supporting the Party’s program of social development and transformation. The image of the PLA as working to serve the people was a powerful political symbol that the regime could use to mobilize and motivate the general population (Adelman 1982). From this point of view, PLA production was highly functional and, therefore, it was legitimated and reinforced as an economic policy. Thus we see a second phase of PLA enterprises as a form of institutional syncretism. Institutional syncretism is a dynamic ongoing phenomenon. Initially, Chinese communist elites needed a way to improve their self-reliance and gain the support of local peasant populations. Involving the PLA in production met these needs by developing a steady source of supply using methods that were historically familiar to peasants. It also gave the PLA a moral advantage by tapping into expectations of appropriate behavior from military leaders. This facilitated party attempts to engage in social transformation and recruitment of peasants during the guerilla war period. In the period of Maoist state building, elite priorities shifted, as did the social and political context. Institutional syncretism shifted in the sense that the PLA’s economic activities were adapted to fit with the party’s new goals and the PLA’s transformation from guerilla army to an army of a party-state. The PLA became a more conventional military with new combat services and weaponry. In that sense it became more like Western armies. Yet, it maintained and regularized its economic activities; this time to fit in both economically and politically with the developmental goals of the Maoist regime. The Chinese decision to maintain and build on the PLA’s nonmilitary role represents a significant departure from the Soviet model of civil-military relations, and in fact the PLA quite specifically rejected much of the advice of Soviet advisors that would have moved the PLA in a more purely military direction. Economic Reform and Pressures on the PLA Enterprise System, 1978–98 In the early 1980s, as part of the government’s overall program of promoting rapid economic growth, the military was given a very low priority. Despite a reduction in military manpower by some one million

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men, the PLA found itself facing shortages in many basic supplies causing problems and hardship in many units. The response from the Party leadership was to develop and expand the PLA enterprise system in such a way as to make for the shortfall in funds from the state. The PLA had many small and medium enterprises; the rationale was that it should rely on them to produce what was needed. However, there was a significant difference from the Maoist state-building period. The PLA was no longer expected to be partly self-reliant by producing its own food, uniforms, shoes, and other basic military necessities. It was expected to take part in the larger civilian economy and to take into account market conditions and consumer demand and thereby increase revenues (Zhang 1989). That is, the PLA’s economic activities were to extend to the growing marketization of the Chinese economy under Deng Xiaoping. The PLA was to be driven by profits and the search for new markets in the domestic economy and in foreign trade. At a superficial level this is similar to the 1930s, when PLA enterprises produced civilian as well as military goods and semi-market conditions prevailed in the Chinese countryside. However, in the past, PLA enterprises had a strong ideological component. Their economic activity was supposed to provide a moral example of military activity to reduce the burdens on the masses and to send a revolutionary message. This was not the case after 1978, when military activity became more utilitarian. PLA enterprises responded to the new semi-market conditions in China in a number of ways. Some responses were fairly straightforward. Farms could sell surplus food in the newly developing markets for agricultural products following the decollectivization of agriculture. The PLA also had an extensive network of hotels originally meant to accommodate traveling officials, which could be opened to the public and turn a profit. Factories that made uniforms could also make civilian clothing. The PLA was also able to take advantage of land under its control to promote real estate services. Its medical facilities could provide a wide variety of pharmaceuticals. The PLA’s monopoly on the bandwidth needed for cellular phones gave it access to the burgeoning Chinese telecommunications market. PLA enterprises were also able to take advantage of the fact that they were now allowed to form horizontal links with each other and civilian enterprises, including foreign firms. This offered considerable opportunities for expansion for PLA enterprises both domestically and overseas. Most of the funds raised went to improve the standard of living of members of the PLA, and went toward things like better food, importing medical equipment for military hospitals, karaoke bars, and recreational facilities for officers and men.


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PLA economic activity expanded rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s. The PLA was able to take advantage of its cheap labor pool, tax advantages, and unused infrastructure to make quick gains. Its service and agricultural sectors needed little capital investment to turn a profit once the marketization of the Chinese economy made profit-seeking possible. Starting from a relatively low level, the PLA’s system of farms and factories were a multi-billion dollar economic empire by mid-1990s (Mulvenon 2001). Furthermore, these enterprises were successful in meeting the stated goal of improving the living standard of military personnel. Despite the fact that many were not profitable, PLA enterprises did make a significant net contribution to the military’s budget. They helped improve food and facilities for military personnel and provided employment for military dependents. This helped the party leadership to divert more resources away from the military and toward a variety of development goals. PLA enterprises were adapted to fit a new set of elite goals within a new social-political context. In the case of the PLA, institutional syncretism goes through three evolutionary stages that match the primary goals of the Communist Party: revolution, Maoist statebuilding, and post-Mao economic development. In each case the nature of PLA syncretism changes, from revolutionary vanguard, to component of state-building, to “PLA, Inc.” However, in the long run military economic activity proved to be far more problematic in the 1980s and 1990s than in the past and by the end of the 1990s it was clear that the PLA’s economic role was extremely dysfunctional and the PLA was forced to divest itself of most of these enterprises. The growth of a money economy and consumerism was a spur to corrupt behavior throughout China. The 1980s and 1990s saw a significant increase in corruption cases within the military. Both individuals and entire military units routinely tried to hide their profits from higher military authorities. Military units in coastal areas took to illegal activities such as smuggling that reportedly rose to epic proportions by the 1990s. Central cohesion of the armed forces was weakened as the enterprises of different units competed against each other for profit. Friction developed between civilian and military businesses. Some combat units spent too much time in search of profit and not enough time on training. Too much devotion to expanding business and profit undermined discipline and central authority. Despite these types of problems, the majority of Chinese leaders initially preferred to find ways to reform the PLA’s economic activities rather than abandon the military’s economic functions. Accordingly a number of reforms were tried in order to more successfully adapt the

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enterprise system to the conditions and tasks. These reforms included better auditing and supervision, consolidating PLA businesses, banning some forms of economic activity, moral exhortations to abstain from corrupt behavior, organizational changes that tried to separate ownership of military enterprises from management, and reduction of the scope of activity. These reform attempts were spread out over some 15 years but failed to successfully tackle the highly dysfunctional problems created by the new entrepreneurial activities of “PLA, Inc.” By 1998, the decision was made to eliminate military business activities1 and the PLA is no longer directly involved in economic activity in any significant way (Bickford 1999; Mulvenon 2001). Chinese elites were unsuccessful in adapting the PLA enterprise system to the new situation. They were unable to find a mechanism that could maintain the modernistic aspects of the military as a combat organization and the economic characteristics of the PLA from the past. A major part of the problem is that ideology and practice no longer fit together. In the past, messages of heroic traditions, sacrifice, selfreliance, and contributing to the country’s development combined with a conventional, modern, military organization worked well together. In the 1980s and 1990s, military propaganda still invoked the PLA’s heroic past, its traditions of hard work, self-sacrifice, and its need to contribute to economic development by subordinating its needs to those of the country’s economic development. But that message does not fit with the pursuit of profit or the sight of officers driving a Mercedes. Rather than being able to use the syncretic nature of the PLA to reach out to the population as a vehicle for Chinese elites, the policies of the 1980s and 1990s alienated people from the PLA and damaged the reputation and effectiveness of the military. This is not to argue that institutional syncretism is limited to a particular time or context. It is conceivable that Chinese leaders might have been able to successfully adapt PLA economic functions as a means of promoting the transition to a market economy. It might have become a vehicle for educating and enlisting support for new economic policies and accepting changing norms. But that is not the case. What the last two decades strongly suggest is that elite-driven institutional syncretism can and does evolve and change but that continuous successful adaptation is by no means guaranteed. In this case, a once highly functional syncretist adaptation had become dysfunctional as the social and political context changed. For a while, the military-economic structure of the PLA reflected an effective syncretic formulation that brought increasing dividends in the particular context of building “socialism with Chinese characteristics”; but these increasing


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dividends also made this particular syncretic formulation progressively more entrenched and unmalleable while the broader social environment and the regime’s objectives underwent a dramatic transformation. In effect, the result might be viewed as a problem of “decreasing returns”2 in a path-dependent process; Chinese leaders were simply unable to develop a new institutional structure that could meet the new tasks and problems at a new critical juncture while continuing to embody some of the more established and familiar norms of the past. Nor does this mean that the PLA can necessarily be regarded now as making the transition to a fully western, professional, modern army as predicted by much of the literature cited in section two above. There is as yet no clear consensus among Chinese military and civilian leaders as to what type of institutional arrangements and practices should exist in military affairs. The future evolution of the Chinese military as an institution remains unclear as of the time of writing. Conclusion This chapter has argued that the PLA’s economic activities are best understood as indicative of a deliberate strategy of institutional syncretism pursued by Chinese communist elites. The PLA shares many of the characteristics of a modern professional army; yet, for a period of over seven decades, the PLA was encouraged to incorporate and popularize a practice that many would associate with traditional Chinese understandings of military service. This created a new institutional framework that helped the PLA to become a social transforming and state building force distinct from both Western and traditional Chinese militaries. Institutional syncretism offers an analytical concept that can help shed light on the question of why communist elites would deliberately choose to revive and then integrate pre-twentieth-century practices within a modern army designed to raise China’s power and prestige in the international arena. The fact that the PLA grew and thrived as a unified and highly respected institution in Chinese society also suggests that there may be economic and, especially, political benefits associated with the systematic and selective recrystallization of portable preexisting norms and practices in the process of modifying borrowed modern institutional practices. Institutional syncretism also provides a means of maintaining conceptual consistency across three distinct periods in Chinese political development. Institutional syncretism in this particular case can be used to deepen our understanding of the role of the PLA in

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social transformation, state building, and post-Mao economic strategy. Ultimately, the PLA’s economic activity became highly dysfunctional to both the military and the goals of the CCP elites. Once the syncretic innovation of PLA economic activity no longer had a useful role for elites, it was shut down and post-Deng political elites are pursuing new strategies and polices with regard to the military and society. The argument also shows that military institutions can indeed provide evidence for syncretism. This strongly indicates that theories of military modernization that are based on western models are not necessarily appropriate for late developers; that standard civil-military arguments that professional armies always develop in one direction and that the logic of modern warfare impels armed forces toward a universal form of organization need to be reevaluated. There may be many other cases where institutional syncretism will prove an extremely useful tool for analyzing the development of military institutions in non-Western societies. Finally, the military as an institution, because of its nature and function, is a very good critical test for the utility of the concept of syncretism given the fact that even an institution as ubiquitous as the modern military, despite the invariable function it must perform in a competitive international environment, evinces significant and consequential peculiarities in the process of being adapted to diverse contexts. Thus, the above interpretation of the PLA not only offers a partial explanation for some of its peculiar features, but also underscores the analytic utility and heuristic value of the concept of syncretism in thinking more carefully and systematically about the relationship between imported institutions and indigenous norms and practices in development processes. Notes 1. Over 6,000 enterprises were eliminated or transferred to civilian use in 1999. As of the time of writing, the PLA still retains some farms, hotels, and a few other businesses but these are just a fraction of what the PLA had in the past and the remainder are slowly being phased out. 2. This is a reference to Pierson’s (2000) use of “increasing returns” arguments in linking pathdependency and historical institutionalism to economic theory.

References Adelman, Jonathon R. 1982. Communist Armies in Politics Boulder: Westview Press. Andreski, Stanislav. 1968. Military Organization and Society Berkeley: University of California Press. Bickford, Thomas J. 1999. “The Business Operations of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.” Problems of Post-Communism 46, 6 (November–December): 28–37.


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Black, Jeremy A. 1991. Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society, 1550–1800. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Crouch, Harold. 1988. The Army and Politics in Indonesia. Revised edition, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. David, Steven R. 1991. Changing Sides: Alignment and Realignment in the Third World Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Downing, Brian M. 1992. The Military Revolution and Political Change. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fuller, William C. 1992. Strategy and Power in Russia 1600–1914. New York: Free Press. Hsiao, Ch’i Ch’ing. 1978. The Military Establishment of the Yuan Dynasty. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Huntington, Samuel P.1957. The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of civil-Military Relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1968. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ibn Khaldun. 1971. The Muqqaddimah an Introduction to History. Franz Rosenthal, trans. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Janowitz, Morris. 1971. The Professional Soldier. New York: The Free Press. Jencks, Harlan W. 1982. From Muskets to Missiles: Politics and Professionalism in the Chinese Army, 1945–1981. Boulder: Westview Press. Joffe, Ellis. 1967. Party and Army: Professionalism and Political Control in the Chinese Officer Corps. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Joffe, Ellis. 1987. The Chinese Army After Mao. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Keep, John L.H. 1985. Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462–1874. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kolkowicz, Roman. 1967. The Soviet Military and the Communist Party. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Johnston, Alastair Iain. 1995. Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lewis, Mark Edward. 1990. Sanctioned Violence in Early China. Albany: Suny Press. McCord, Edward A. 1993. The Power of the Gun: The Emergence of Modern Chinese Warlordism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mao Zedong. 1956. Selected Writings of Mao Tse-tung. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Mulvenon, James C. 2001. Soldiers of Fortune: The Rise of the Military-Business Complex in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, 1978–1998. Armonck, New York: ME Sharpe. Parker, Geoffrey. 1996. The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Posen, Barry. 1984. The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain and Germany Between the World Wars. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Powell, Ralph L. 1955. The Rise of Chinese Military Power, 1895–1912. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ralston, David B. 1990. Importing the European Army: The Introduction of European Military Techniques and Institutions into the Extra-European World, 1600–1914. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rogers, Clifford J. ed. 1995. The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe. Boulder: Westview Press. Rosen, Stephen Peter. 1996. Societies and Military Power: India and its Armies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Selden, Mark. 1995. China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited. Armonk, New York: ME Sharpe.

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Sheridan, James E. 1966. Chinese Warlord: The Career of Feng Yu-hsiang. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Song Zhenfeng and Ku Guisheng. 1986. Guofang jingjixue gailun (Outline of national defense economic studies). Changsha, Hunan: Nanchang Renmin Press. Tien, Chen-ya. 1992. Chinese Military Thought: Ancient and Modern. Ontario: Mosiac Press. Tilly, Charles. 1985. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Peter Evans et al., eds., Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 169–91. Weber, Max. 1958. “The Meaning of Discipline,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans. and ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Zhang Zhenlong. Jundui Shengchan jingying guanli ( management of military production). Beijing: People’s Army Liberation Press.

CHAPTER

FOUR

Syncretism in Argentina’s Party System and Peronist Political Culture Pie rre O s tigu y

Introduction Party systems, and the parties composing them, both express and channel differences in society. Using the Argentine party system and what can loosely be called the Peronist “party”1 as outcomes, this chapter enhances our understanding of two syncretic processes, triggered in part by the logic of political competition: first and foremost, the— polemical—naming of what became the central cleavage in Argentine politics; and second, a particular type of mass party organization and structure of authority that became legitimized and somewhat routinized in the process. Certainly, “Peronism” incorporated and came to represent the popular sectors not in terms of a widespread ideology, as in Western Europe, nor through a bureaucratized social-democratic, socialist, or communist party. Instead, the popular sectors were incorporated and the Argentine party system defined in terms of historical templates and of a locally powerful structuring myth that originally took hold in the course of nation-building. Indirectly, this chapter also provides an account of the intriguing construction of Argentine national identity, the tensions within it, and of nationalisms in that country. Local myths, transformed politically into ideological weapons, played a key role in defining what Peronism came to stand for sociopolitically.

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As Peronism and anti-Peronism came to embrace the local repertoire of antinomies of nineteenth-century Argentina, twentieth-century class politics took a strongly syncretic turn in Argentina. The political cleavage and party system became partly framed in terms of the Argentine dichotomy of “civilization and barbarism”—or what I have elsewhere called much more precisely the “High” and the “Low” in politics (Ostiguy 1998). This chapter highlights two syncretic outcomes. First and most significantly, intermittent but remarkably persistent invocations of the mythic and iconographic repertoire of opponents of nineteenth-century Federalism played a major role from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s in defining the core political cleavage around which the Argentine party system is built. Second, Peronism, in its different militant organizations for power (party, unions, etc.) became an institution whose internal norms of operation clearly recalled the personalistic, culturally-popular, and deliberately concrete relationship that had also earlier united the Federal caudillos and their gaucho followers. This so-called inheritance has been highlighted by anti-Peronists and Peronists alike. Finally, the chapter argues that the syncretic nature of the institution of Peronism, including in terms of what it stands for politically, contributed to its success in carrying out high-modern tasks, from state-building and welfare-state construction to neoliberal privatization.2 These two aspects also helped it achieve a high level of popularity and legitimacy both in the hinterland and among the urban popular sectors. To explore the syncretic nature of the Peronist “party” and the modern Argentine party system, this chapter first situates the Argentine case in the literature on institutionalization and syncretism. It then presents key mid- to late-nineteenth-century historical myths and cultural templates used much later to define the central political cleavage institutionalized in the party system. The bulk of the chapter traces from there the emergence and crystallization of a syncretically-defined party system, using four important phases of Argentine political history: (1) national integration of the immigrants; (2) the Peronist regime (1944–55); (3) oppositional Peronism (1955–75); and, much later, (4) the Menem era.3 This examination shows that local history provides not only essential ideological tools for political competition, but also cognitive and normative frames, through which political cleavages institutionalized in a party system are defined and popular and effective institutional forms of political leadership established.

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Institutionalization as Infusion with Values (But Which Ones?) Syncretism is a subtype of institutionalization that does not conform to the original model of the institution, whether the latter is imposed, imported from the metropolis, or globally in vogue. Institutional syncretism always involves a process of reinterpretation, as syncretism is about local actions deforming and thus reforming an institutional design in order to make an institution more “local.” Institutional syncretism thus allows for the redeployment of elements of local history and perceived tradition in reconfiguring institutions (Galvan and Sil 2007). With regard to institutionalization, a theoretical point of departure often mentioned is Philip Selznick’s definition: to institutionalize is to infuse an organization with value (1957: 17); his test for infusion is expendability. The organization becomes meaningful in and of itself, that is, it becomes meaningful for the subjectivity of the actors involved in it, beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand. The organization comes to symbolize a group’s aspirations, a sense of identity (ibid: 19). The most highlighted component in Selznick’s definition of institutionalization has been the expendability argument, with clear Weberian overtones. Similarly, for Huntington, institutionalization is the process by which organizations and procedures acquire value and stability (1968: 12). Unfortunately, the scholarly debate after Selznick not only narrowed, but also impoverished his concept of institutionalization. The argument became focused exclusively on stability: that is, the importance of survival or adaptation of the organization for its members; the lack of expendability of the organization beyond the task at hand; or the stability of the rules of the game. “To infuse with value” became synonymous with “to value,” “to give importance to.” But “to infuse with value” also has another meaning. Moving from Weber’s sociology of organization toward a more anthropological approach, we may also ask, to infuse an organization with what values? Particular conditions may indeed infuse organizations with quite peculiar values. In fact, for Selznick “organizations do not so much create value as embody them. As this occurs, the organization becomes increasingly institutionalized” (1957: 20). According to him, “the character [of the organization] will be shaped by values already existent in the community at large”; “internal struggle for power becomes a channel through which external environmental forces make themselves felt” (ibid). “Infusion” here takes on its full meaning.

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March and Olson add a necessary destabilizing element to Selznick’s “culturalist”—and possibly deterministic—view, one that is particularly relevant for defining Argentina’s main political cleavage and understanding what Peronism came to stand for. They question the common assumption that institutions face the challenge of adapting to exogenously created environments, even arguing “institutions create their own environment in part” (1989:46).4 In the mid-1940s, in Argentina, the political definition of the newly emerging Peronism was largely shaped by the actions and political rhetoric of the many opponents of Perón (later called anti-Peronists). They themselves were of course reacting to Perón’s type of political authority and to the character of his newly found followers. March and Olsen provide a second important contribution, bridging the agency in interaction and the culture characterizing the environment: “the development of preferences and beliefs under conditions of ambiguity [tends to] strengthen preexisting structures of related values and cognitions. Understandings of events and their value are connected to previous understandings . . . and to social linkages of friendship and trust” (1989:41). Frequency of interactions (following Deutsch 1953) and degrees of trust produce solid institutional bonds. Perón was able to clearly beat his political rivals, including traditional leftist politicians on those two fronts, among Argentina’s popular sectors on those two fronts. This victory initiated the much-celebrated loyalty of the popular sectors to Peronist leaders. Certainly, trust is independent neither from culturally-shared understandings (be they class, national, or religious), nor from the political use of elements of local history. So while one must clearly recognize that informal patterns of institutionalization are real and operative (Levitsky 1998a: 86–7), our own interest lies with such dependent variables as the institutions’ effectiveness (including their working adaptation to their particular social environment), their legitimacy, and the political support for them. A foundational hypothesis of institutional syncretism is that formal and especially informal patterns that are syntonic (harmonized) with the cultural norms of the group working in or served by the organization produce institutions with a high degree of legitimacy. While syncretic institutions are likely to score higher on meaningfulness and legitimacy than imported or imposed ones, the impact on effectiveness is less clear. If the latter is positive, syncretic institutions are then more likely to be self-sustaining than other more universally recognizable ones. The gap between formal rules and actual practices is particularly salient in the case of the Peronist party. Levitsky (1998a; 1998b) calls this


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“informal institutionalization.” These informal rules, while often jarring for foreigners, may however be culturally in tune with Peronism’s concrete milieu. Certainly, culture, including political culture, can be as rooted in class differences as in ethnicity, nationality, religion, or other socially differentiating factor. Many factors such as material interests, political incentives, or a basic lack of law enforcement may spur members of an organization to act in ways markedly at odds with formal rules and procedures, and with what most members or customers of the organization would prefer or like. One must thus avoid culturalist tautologies. A way to determine whether such behavior is normatively deviant or, rather, culturally syntonic is to look at the emotional attitudes—love, indifference, sad resignation, hate—of the organization’s “customers” toward it. In the case of the P.J., it is clear that most of the popular-sector P.J. voters feel a strong emotional-passionate attachment to Peronism, despite the P.J.’s reputation for corruption, disregard for the rule of the law (or, at least, its spirit) and for its own formal procedures. The personalization of political rapport, the lack of separation between the public and private spheres, the ethic of loyalty, of so-called (feminine) caring and (masculine) pelotas and ability to lead, have all contributed quite positively to the attachment of subordinate social sectors to the Peronist party (see also Auyero 1999). Furthermore, these characteristics of the P.J. correspond well to the class culture of poor urban dwellers and people from the more traditional hinterland in Argentina. Peronism, while often improper and somewhat deviant in the eyes of most foreigners, enjoys high levels of legitimacy for, and emotional support from, its followers. For most of its history, Peronism has been, on the one hand, so different from the norm that most observers have been reticent to consider it a political party in organizational form or in terms of broad ideology. But, on the other hand, it most certainly appears to be (socio)culturally syntonic in terms of its concrete traits, as well as highly effective, politically. Barbarism and Civilization: The Tortuous Path from Gauchos and Caudillos to Workers and Perón The starting point in syncretism is always the local and, at times, its past. Global models and institutions that are diffused world-wide, whether through importation or imposition, usually require little descriptive explanation. Liked or not, they are expected, claiming to be “normal.” Institutional syncretism is about (re-)combining the idiosyncratic and less

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known (outside of the local arena and area specialists) with the more widely known. For this reason, the lonely pampa of Argentine “Founding Father” Domingo Sarmiento5 is a good starting point for our topic. Argentina has been considered simultaneously a society of diverse origins that achieved a remarkable success in national integration—through the school system, military service, and civic-patriotic indoctrination— and a society marked by irreconcilable dichotomies, including a dichotomous view of national identity itself. From an anthropological standpoint, Argentina’s history seems strongly marked by both intense unifying rituals and moments of Durkheimian “collective effervescence” (world cup soccer championships, the eclipse of reason regarding Maradona, the Malvinas war, etc.) and by a very extensive series of—largely interchangeable—organizing antinomies. Moreover, these series of antinomies largely function according to what Laclau and Mouffe would call a logic of equivalence, that is, as interchangeable, even though they are semantically quite different. They have also proven more pervasive in Argentina than the “totemic” or Durkheimian moments. The most dominant of these antinomies has been, I would argue, “civilization and barbarism.” This dichotomy figured centrally, first, in the project of nation-building and was transferred, much later, to the social question. It is therefore impossible to understand most of Argentina’s politics without referring to this pervasive, structuring myth.6 The mass adoption of this myth structuring the party system occurred in two key causal moments: first, in an intense electoral competition associated with the incorporation of the working class (Collier and Collier 1991) and emergence of a new leader from outside the party system; second and one decade later, with his exile and the electoral prohibition of his political party, allowing—paradoxically and for militant purposes—a syncretic fusion with earlier oppositional nationalist constructs of the 1930s. But in order to understand these local myths, then used as ideological weapons (and normative frames) that ended up defining both Argentina’s party system and, in a rather syncretic way, the Peronist political culture, this section therefore introduces (1) the historical base of the core nineteenth-century myths, including the importance of Federalism; (2) the iconographic figures of the caudillo and of the gaucho; (3) the militant “memory-myth” of the montoneras. History Mythified The first president of what would later be called Argentina, Bernardino Rivadavia, was also the first in a long list of Argentine leaders to attempt


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to import Western Europe in South America. Rivadavia had traveled extensively in Europe, where “he grew to admire the English political system, became enamored of Jeremy Bentham . . . and acquired the high tastes and pretensions of a French dandy” (Shumway 1991: 82). Furthermore, in contrast to the commanders who had fought the wars of independence, Rivadavia was little in touch with the country’s populace. His “unitary republican” dream inspired the educated, Buenos-Aires-based, pro-free-trade, Europhile and republican Unitarios political movement, thus defining one side of Argentina’s enduring political and socio-cultural dichotomy. Rivadavia and the Unitarios’ vision of a unified, centrally governed Argentina also deeply antagonized the provinces. Thus, a full century and a half later, Rivadavia and his heirs would be accused of aping Europe and its republican institutions; of being disconnected from the nation’s “true” popular sectors; and of selling the motherland to (North-Western) Europe through free-trade policies. His position fragile and his project never hegemonic, Rivadavia lost power in 1827. Anarchy then crept in. By 1832, all of what eventually became Argentina was clearly under the rule of strongmen, the Federal caudillos, arch-enemies of the Rivadavian project (many of whose supporters went into exile). Federal caudillismo emerged as the dominant form of “institutional” authority for the full next two decades. Simplifying, caudillos were strongmen on horses, experts in fighting, closer culturally to the estancia labor and who could command the allegiance of the populace through a combination of locally-valued virtues, military leadership, and somewhat arbitrary repression.7 Caudillos were a rural-pastoral phenomenon and, in sharp contrast to the European-looking Rivadavians, were explicitly native in culture. The historical caudillos were all on one side of the political cleavage of the time: they were Federales and were opposed to the Unitarios’ centralizing and modernizing project. The most combative and colorful of the Federal caudillos, clearly supported by the subordinate strata, came from the poorest, driest, and what many would consider most backward regions of the north-western hinterland. But by far, the most powerful caudillo of the Confederation was the conservative and relatively popular Juan Manuel de Rosas, who ruled the province of Buenos Aires with an iron hand and in a personalistic way for more than 20 years between 1829 and 1852 and also to a certain extent resisted the imperialist encroachments of Britain and France on the Rio de la Plata. The original Spanish meaning of the term caudillo, according to Halperin, was that of leader of an armed retinue (1999: 19). But for the

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Unitarios heirs of the republican project, the term caudillo came to mean simply “tyrant,” ruling in an arbitrary way. The Unitarios also used the term to stigmatize the leaders removing increasingly large parts of the territory from the authority of the government seated in Buenos Aires. For them, the caudillismo was “contaminated by the primitivism found in the remote regions where it was influential” (ibid). Certainly, the historical myth of the caudillo later played a central role in the polemical labeling process that occurred much after their demise, particularly with Peronism. At the height of this Federal caudillista period, one of the most prominent Founding Fathers of the Argentine nation—as it was to distinctly emerge—began writing and acting. Domingo Sarmiento believed in progress, in the superiority of European civilization and people, of urbanity over rural life, and in the need for formal education to reform the people. He is the author of the “manifesto” that arguably became the most important book ever written in Argentina: “Civilization and Barbarism; Life of Facundo Quiroga and the Physical Aspect, Customs, and Habits of the Argentine Republic.”8 Sarmiento depicted the “monstrosities” of an important local caudillo of the remote hinterland, Facundo Quiroga.9 For Sarmiento, the cause of this so-called barbarism lay in the geography and sparse settlement of the vast, bare plains of the pampas. “Separate families [were] scattered over an immense surface” (1974: 15) where, Sarmiento wrote, “society has altogether disappeared” and “a dearth of all the amenities of life induces all the externals of barbarism” (ibid: 16). Sarmiento explained that, “from these characteristics arises in the life of the Argentine people the reign of brute force, the supremacy of the strongest, the absolute and irresponsible authority of the rulers, the administration of justice without formalities or discussion” (1974: 9). In short, the structuring antinomy of Argentina during the mid-nineteenth century and again one century later, civilization and barbarism, was coined by Sarmiento. One hundred and fifty years later, the very distorted Facundo Quiroga painted in Sarmiento’s manifesto would become the reference point of the Peronist president of Argentina, Carlos Menem. Juan Manuel de Rosas was defeated in 1852. Argentina’s liberal republican constitution was drafted in 1853. And a project of nationbuilding largely influenced by Unitario intellectuals gradually became the hegemonic reality in Argentina by the early 1880s. It is during this process that Sarmiento achieved the status of a Founding Father of this new Argentine nation. He had also become president of the Republic (1868–74). Like the intellectual Bartolome Mitre just before him, he faced several rebellions by Federal caudillos of the northwestern hinterland,


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supported by local gauchos, resisting this state-building project. Sarmiento called this struggle a combat between “the poncho and the frock-coat.” The Federal caudillos were annihilated during the 1860s, thus, it could be said, disappearing from Argentine history. The Gaucho The obsession that came back to haunt twentieth-century Argentine politics had two related elements: the Federal caudillo and, yet more importantly, the gaucho. The gaucho was a rough freeman of mixed Spanish and Indian descent. He roamed over the immense and tree-less plains of the pampa, always on his horse, killing wild cattle for food, living a very rustic life. He was expert with his knife (facón), lasso, and boleadoras; later, with what most call progress, he came to subsist on or beyond the frontier, often living outside the law. The mythical gaucho was courageous, loyal in his friendships, fearless in combat, undisciplined, frank, and generous. By the 1880s, the enclosure of the pampa, land speculation, the disappearance of wild cattle, railroad construction, and new settlements, as well as intense persecution by the forces of order, had turned the free gaucho into an historical relic. Sarmiento, himself from the hinterland and knowing the gauchos well, provided a different slant on the same subject, inserting it in his “civilization and barbarism” framework: [In] the town inhabited by natives of the country . . . dirty and ragged children live, with a menagerie of dogs; there, men lie in utter idleness; neglect and poverty prevails everywhere; a table and some baskets are the only furniture of wretched huts remarkable for their general aspect of barbarism and carelessness. . . . Sir Walter Scott [writes]: “The vast plains are inhabited only by Christian savages known as Guachos [sic] whose furniture is chiefly composed of horses’ skulls, whose food is raw beans and water, and whose favorite pastime is running horses to death.” (Sarmiento 1974: 11–12) Sarmiento contrasts this “native-barbarian” situation to the civilization of the cities, where “elegance of style, articles of luxury, dress-coats and frock-coats, with other European garments, occupy their appropriate place” (ibid: 13). His interpretation, more than any historical reality itself, was crucial in providing the interpretive schema for twentiethcentury politics.

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The myth of the gaucho, despite some superficial similarities, is very different from that of the cowboy of the American West. The cowboy was part of the—admittedly very rough—civilization that advanced westward across the continent. The gauchos, in contrast, had been established for generations (usually dating to the colonial period) in the land where they lived, to the point of being halfway like an indigenous group—and as such, resistant to what scholars call the nineteenthcentury liberal project.10 In the Argentine pampa there was no myth of independent cowboys as heroes on the side of progress, on an advancing frontier, taming the wilderness. Instead, the pampa was viewed as an immense desert that was a “very bad medium of transmission . . . for civilization” (Sarmiento 1974: 6), and in which gauchos were seen as part of the wilderness rather than as conquerors of nature. Both the cowboy and the gaucho do stand for masculinity. However, the cowboy’s masculinity, unlike the gaucho’s, was part of a triumphant project, even though—or in fact because—he was generally the employee of a rancher. By contrast, the gaucho came closer to being a desperado, albeit one with a sense of honor, pride, and ethics. The gaucho in Argentina, like the Indian in the United States, was the victim of the advance of law, the force of law, and civilization. The gaucho’s songs are therefore laments of suffering and defeated bravery. Civilization, in Argentina, was not understood as a technical and technological mastering of nature, as in the United States, but as diffusion of urban, refined manners and the development of “culture” (letters, arts, thought), as in the European metropolis. The transformation of the gaucho into a symbol of rebellion against established authority would occur only later, in the second half of the century, with the spread of barbed wire, confiscation of lands by speculating large landowners, and forced military service. According to Cymermam (1992: 36), a “holy alliance” arose between the landowner, the sheriff, and the justice of the peace. This holy alliance transformed the free and independent gaucho into an outlaw, forced to use violence to defend his life. The figure of the gaucho mythified into a cultural icon of native resistance to a malevolent legitimate authority, in subsequent gaucho poetry and gaucho novels, was inspired by this period. The most famous of these works is the epic poem El Gaucho Martin Fierro.11 Forced to be an outlaw and easily provoked, he would drink excessively in pulperias [bars/general stores], get into fights, and gamble more than he had, thereby adding to his troubles with the representatives of authority. Taken away from his family, the figure became notably nomadic and


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rambling. In practice, the gauchos not forced into marginality would become peons, that is, salaried (uneducated) laborers for the large cattle ranchers. It is thus not surprising that the gaucho would become a relevant figure, even 70 years later, for urban day laborers in Argentina. Paradoxically, the gaucho would become, at the same time, a symbol of authentic Argentine nationality. The unfortunate but brave gaucho could find hopes of social and political redemption through a caudillo, as occurred with the dreaded montoneras of the 1860s and, as popular wisdom would later have it, with “Perón” in the 1940s. The “Dreaded Alliance”: The Montoneras The consummate image of barbarism, from the standpoint of the socalled civilizers, was very precisely the alliance of Federal caudillos with a large following of rough, horseback-riding gauchos, exemplified historically by the fearsome and epic montoneras. The montoneras were hordes of Federal horsemen, made up of unkempt, unruly, lower-class, and fierce gauchos with lances, fighting under the leadership of a provincial caudillo in an uneven battle against Buenos Aires’ centralizing Unitarios. The two most famous historical montoneras of the 1860s, both defeated, were led by the direct successors of Quiroga, the caudillos “Chacho” Peñaloza and Felipe Varela. These rebellions were perceived as serious sociopolitical and sociocultural threats to the authorities of the new country. The form, style, and even political platform of the political leadership of “el Chacho” Peñaloza and Varela among the gauchos share significant similarities with later Peronist practices among the popular sectors, as many Peronist leaders themselves explicitly claimed. The montoneras, undoubtedly unruly and violent, were, as Orgambide writes (1999: 350), “a political option, the determination to transgress the constituted order when this order is considered unjust.” As part of the national repertoire (re-)popularized in the early 1960s, the famous Peronist leftist-nationalist guerilla fighting for “the people and Perón” in the 1970s, took the name of Montoneros. De la Fuente (1999: 337) emphasizes “el Chacho maintained an important presence in the daily life of the gauchos, whom he [also] assisted in moments of material need.” Certainly, this is one of the traits that would later most distinguish Peronist politicians in the lower-class neighborhoods of modern Argentina. El Chacho went well beyond what might be called personalized clientelism, socializing with his potential followers and even playing cards with them. Practices of

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Peronist governor Eduardo Duhalde, in the lower-class neighborhoods of the Greater Buenos Aires, were described to me by local informants in exactly the same terms (including the card playing). There was indeed a noticeable familiarity in the interpersonal treatment; observers are often struck by the fact that humble Peronists call the Peronist governor “el negro” or the presidential candidate for Peronism in 1989 “little Charly.” Even in the nineteenth century, the political division between Federales and Unitarios, associated mainly to the urban-rural dimension, also had a significant “class” dimension. Varela distinctly worked alongside “the plebs . . . having meetings with the federal chiefs and all the chusma [rabble], where they shout publicly against the liberals” (Orgambide 1999: 350). The loyalty was also not exclusively personalistic. The federal party would continue to capture the gauchos’ loyalty even after Peñaloza’s death, as the Peronist party later did after the death of General Perón. The Syncretic Uses of the Myths These defining political-cultural tropes and myths of Argentine history were recaptured and deployed particularly during the political incorporation of the popular sectors, the realignment of the party system, and the formation of Peronism—as outcomes. The process diachronically unfolds during four key moments: (1) national identity building in a context of high ethnic diversity during the pre-Peronist period, in which syncretism occurred outside of the political arena; (2) the period of Juan Perón’s regime; (3) the crystallization or “fusion” of a given Peronist identity after the fall of Perón in 1955; and much later, (4) the redeployment of the “equivalent” antinomies once again under the Peronist President Carlos Menem. Antinomies and Syncretism in the Creation of National Identity: Popular Syncretism Outside of the Party System, 1913–43 In less than 30 years, between 1880 and 1910, Argentina was radically transformed. The population of Argentina in 1914 bore little resemblance to that of 1884, particularly in Buenos Aires, whether in sheer size, ethnic composition, geographical origins, or local historical consciousness. This radical transformation was a fulfillment of the old Rivadavian dream, and more specifically, of Sarmiento’s plea to “civilize” Argentina through Europeanization and urbanization. More specifically


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still, the transformation also marked the fulfillment of Alberdi’s dictum “to govern is to settle.” The political position that appeared so vulnerable under the rule of the Federal caudillos in the early to mid-nineteenth century had now become not only hegemonic but had wiped out—or so it seemed—the so-called barbaric past described above. At the turn of the century, Argentina and Uruguay were the two countries in the world with the largest proportions of immigrants, larger than of the United States at the time. In 1914, half of all individuals living in the capital (Buenos Aires) were foreigners. In 1895, a quarter of the country’s population was foreign born; one generation later in 1914, 30 percent was still foreign born (Solberg 1970:36). However, in contrast to Sarmiento and Alberdi’s vision, most of these European immigrants came from Southern and Eastern Europe, not from Northwestern Europe. The actual Europeans who landed in Buenos Aires were very different from the educated diplomats and businesspeople whom Rivadavia and later Sarmiento had met in England, France, and the United States. The difference was apparent not only in class origins and cultural traits, but also politically. Many of these Spanish and Northern-Italian laborers were anarchist. Labor conflicts and violence were high in Argentine cities in the first third of the twentieth century. Moreover, most European immigrants seemed much more interested in making a “quick buck” than spreading the benefits of European civilization. Many of these immigrants were also single men, leading to social situations that still echo in the lyrics of the uniquely Rio de la Plata tango. In the 1910s, a few dissimilar, prestigious intellectuals, who may be labeled nationalist (other prefer “hispanicist”), started to express concerns about what they considered a degenerating state of affairs. They worried that the immigrants were debasing the language12 and corrupting the “soul” of the country. The problem, however, is that it proved rather difficult to define what, precisely, was the “soul” of Argentina, prior to this massive wave of immigration. Nineteenth-century Argentina presented nationalist intellectuals with, on the one hand, the seemingly barbaric and primitive gauchos and caudillos whom the ruling elite had finally eliminated, and, on the other hand, a Europeanizing project that had become reality—although perhaps not the one hoped for. In 1913, a respected intellectual, Leopoldo Lugones (a socialist youth who had turned to militant nationalism during his years living in Paris), delivered a highly publicized and well-attended speech, where he exalted the gaucho as the bearer of the Argentinian identity and “essence.” Around the same time, Ricardo Rojas, a master of literature

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and a gifted educator from the hinterland, came to the defense of the earlier so-called barbarism, as an important and non-barbaric part of Argentine history that should be imparted to the children of the new immigrants. As Rojas wrote: This barbarism, so defamed by our historians, was the most authentic fruit of our territory and of our character. The montonera were nothing but the independence armies fighting in the hinterland; and almost all of the caudillos who led them had served as apprentices in the war against the monarchists. If intellectuals were starting to question Sarmiento’s liberal, old antinomy, a much more creative syncretic and intriguing cultural process subsequently took place at the very popular level, with the national passion for soccer. The game, as is well known, was originally imported by the British in the 1880s. From its origins in Argentina in the 1880s to 1912, soccer was a British-dominated sport. Gradually, however, immigrants of Southern-European origins became increasingly involved in it. Between 1913 and 1929, popular wisdom noticed a fundamental difference of style between the play of the British and that of the Latins—and entirely new category. The former were said to be phlegmatic, solid, methodic; they were disciplined, organized, playing in teams that worked like an oiled machine. The latter, by contrast, were restless, showy, undisciplined; they were informal, quick, generous. Others described the British style as “cold” and “mathematical,” and the Rio Platense style as “hot” and “improvised.” In a popular metamorphosis, however, the Latin style became defined as a “creole” and “gaucho” style of playing the popular sport, while the British and their style remained impermeably “foreign.” For Archetti: . . . The “creole” was founded by the sons of “Latin” immigrants. The sons of English immigrants were never conceived of as “creole”, they did not become “creole” through playing soccer. Genealogical reasoning was replaced by a reasoning based on style. Styles, in turn, are based on ethnic differences conceptualized as difference of character and as mode of structuring feelings and bodily practices. (ibid: 430) The Latin European immigrant ways and the nineteenth-century creole American ones thus merged, by virtue of their equivalence as opposites of the British.


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A key to this merged identity was class. While the British in Argentina learned soccer at school, the “creole kid” (pibe criollo), in reality a “kid” of working-class Southern-European origin,13 was said to learn soccer in the “cattle ranch” (potrero), that is, in the vacant spots of the outskirts (arrabal) on the periphery of the growing city. Like the gaucho, he was said to learn without any teacher and “in liberty.” In the potrero, the kid invented the creole style, according to a leading soccer magazine. Just like the nineteenth-century gauchos, the more uneducated and poorer (immigrant) segments of society became understood as more “local,” more “native,” while the more educated sectors, who also benefited from the institutions of school and state, were depicted as either foreign or foreignizing. As important as the fictitious descent of the Latin poor from the creole gauchos are thus the common attributes of poverty and (“natural”) lack of education, then associated with informal local ways. In this syncretic merging, there were certainly concrete empirical affinities between the arrabal or orilla (the urban outskirts) and the pampa with its historical-mythical gaucho. The two, for example, were so-tospeak spaces of liberty in the open air, with no formal rules and no educators, where ragged but free poor people could run loose, improvising without interference. But equally important, both also stood in opposition to the urban, the “civilized,” the educated, the industrial, and the British. In short, they had the same structural positioning. This border area (orilla) between the pampa and the city was the meeting ground for the ex-gaucho and the Southern European immigrant, both often wielding the knife as their working tool, of humble social origins, and under-schooled. For Sarlo (1993: 21): The orillero was the inhabitant of those neighbourhoods, usually considered coarse and often violent, who preserved many of the customs and attitudes of his recent rural past. The orillero worked in semi-rural and semi-urban enterprises such as the slaughterhouse, where many of the skills of the rural workhand were needed and employed. He knew how to use a knife, like his forefather the gaucho. . . . The archetypal orillero belongs to the criollo cultural tradition, prior to the arrival of Italian and other European immigrants. But, as Borges . . . admitted, the sons of the Italian immigrants who managed to become integrated into criollo culture could also aspire to being compadritos. (ibid) The liminal orilla or arrabal is probably one of the spaces that gave rise to the most distinctively Argentine (national) creations: tango in music, the

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distinctively Argentine soccer style in sports, and Peronism in politics. Each, in its own way, should be understood as a distinctively syncretic product. Moreover, these three syncretic arrabalero products stood for transgression, or lack of respect for the standard institutionalized practices of “proper” modernity: marriage (as transgressed or bypassed in tango), professionalism in sports (as transgressed in, or opposed by, the Argentine soccer style), and institutional party politics (as transgressed or bypassed in Peronism). In all three instances, the arrabal cultural product would move to literally invade and seemingly aggress the respectable center, later becoming among Argentina’s best-known creations. Prieto (1988), much after Lugones and Rojas, highlighted the importance of gauchesca literature, especially Martin Fierro, in the molding of Argentines’ self-imaginary. Sarlo (1993: 37) notes that Martin Fierro was “quoted frequently, not only by members of the criollo population, but also by immigrants who took the gaucho as a symbol of the nationality they were trying to understand and assimilate into.” But at the same time, there was still a hegemonic rejection of the Federal caudillos, and most particularly of “the tyrant” Rosas. This rejection was going to change—and even become inverted, militantly so—with the rise of the highly significant, intellectual oppositional movement called “historical revisionism.” Historical revisionism, although it could be traced to an earlier date, acquired its name and blossomed in the climate of the 1930s. In many ways, the reemergence, in mass politics, of Sarmiento’s old myths and antimonies is a product of the reaction of historical revisionism. Born outside of the university, it claimed that the official, liberal historiography of the country was a “falsified history”14 consisting of politically-motivated lies. Challenging the hegemonic version of Argentine history then conveyed in every school textbook, the revisionists focused on, reclaimed, and worshiped the caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, a tyrant according to the official history. Revisionists praised Rosas for defending the country against— undoubtedly real—imperialist British and French designs. Revisionists also presented him as a truly autochthonous figure who bridged the gap between elite and masses, despite the hostility of the foreignizing intelligentsia and their European supporters. Historical revisionism then spread to the defense of the later montoneras, and also sympathized with Argentina’s earlier colonial Hispanic Catholic heritage. But the historical revisionists had neither mass support nor political party backing. Revisionism contributed significantly to Argentina’s political development in several respects. First, revisionism as a militant intellectual movement made it easier to adopt “novel” (or forgotten) models of


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political action, institutional behavior, and modes of legitimacy. Second, as pointed out by Halperin (1970) and Svampa (1994), revisionism succeeded in recasting the Argentine liberal elite as the grand historical adversary of efforts to create a “truly national,” native project of political, economic, and cultural development. Finally, their reframing of Argentine history dramatically resurrected Sarmiento’s old dichotomy of civilization and barbarism. The respected intellectual Manuel Gálvez, to randomly name one revisionist, fully adopted Sarmiento’s dichotomy but inverted its normative polarity. Referring to the nineteenth century, he wrote in 1940, “The forty years of our barbarism was nothing else but the rebellion of the American spirit against the European spirit. The former was represented by the Federals and was spontaneous, democratic, popular, and barbaric.” In contrast, he added, “the Unitarios were Frenchified, artificial, rhetorical, aristocratic, and civilized.” The militant historical revisionists agreed—but from the other side of the fence— with Sarmiento’s characterizations of Argentina: there were apparently indeed “two Argentinas,” each irreconcilable with the other. But their feat in the 1930s and early 1940s was to reverse Sarmiento’s normative evaluation of his two poles.

The Great Transformation: The Rise of Peronism as a Political Mass Movement and the New Party System, 1943–55 Despite the vast resources that Perón and his state-interventionist regime had at their disposal (and used) to influence public opinion, manipulate symbols, and attempt to shape people’s thinking, Perón, his party, and his regime did very little to promote a syncretic understanding of his leadership or form of rule as caudillero. In contrast to the instrumentalists who view symbols as a resource manipulated by state rulers for power purposes, the syncretic process and outcome described here was not primarily a product of manipulation from above. But the inverse perspective of popular adaptation from below, of “popular bricolage,” is also equally erroneous here. Competition for power, particularly in the heated electoral contest of 1945–46, the first free election in almost 20 years in Argentina, played an important role in triggering the syncretic process on a large scale and in the political realm. Prior to 1945, syncretism along the lines described here had already occurred on a mass level, but outside of the political realm. A significant reassessment of collective myths had also happened in the realm of ideas, but without any mass support or party backing.

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An essential first task is to discard the easy and always tempting thesis of “manipulation from above.” The historical reference points of Perón for himself were most certainly not the Federal caudillos. When Perón nationalized the railroads, removing them from British control, he renamed the main lines General Sarmiento, General Mitre, General Belgrano, and General Roca. These founding figures of Argentina are all clear icons of the canonic liberal history of Argentina. They are all on the same pro-“civilization” side of the Sarmientinian divide15 and all were abhorred by the historical revisionists. Perón cared very little, if at all, about the historiographic debate about nineteenth-century Argentina. He was unquestionably a modernist and a modernizer who sought to urgently address the social question and who found inspiration in corporatist schemes, social planning, and nationalist ideologies. The reintroduction of the nineteenth-century Sarmientinian antinomy of civilization and barbarism into public political debate, with the profound impact it was going to have, was clearly the product of the antiPerón forces. Anti-Peronism, to a large extent, created Peronism, at least in terms of what it came to stand for politically. Anti-Peronism named and labeled Argentina’s central political cleavage, but without successfully mastering the normative dimension of this labeling operation. During the electoral campaign of 1945–46 and thereafter, the figure of the gaucho was used, positively, by each side against its adversary. Where they parted was with respect to the Federal caudillos, and especially Rosas. While the enemies of Perón had called him “nazi-fascist,” by the 1950s this invective had died a natural death. However, invectives rooted in caudillo imagery would prove an unexpected—and eventually undesired—success. The wide anti-Perón opposition (the Radicales, Socialists, Progressive Democrats, Conservatives, and Communists) not only claimed to represent the republican-progressive tradition (e.g., the gigantic pictures of Rivadavia, Sarmiento, Alberdi, and Moreno in the immense “March for the constitution and liberty”). They also equated Perón to the antithesis of the Founding Fathers, the Federal caudillo Rosas. In the heat of the electoral campaign, the opposition equated Perón, on the anniversary day of Rosas’ military defeat at Caseros and in the heat of the electrol campaign, the opposition equated Perón with Rosas, in order to bring back into the public arena the nineteenthcentury notion of “tyranny” (Svampa 1994: 256). A Socialist politician stated: “We come here to celebrate the anniversary of Caseros with the conviction that Rosas, defeated on the 3rd of February of 1852, has reappeared in Argentina on the 3rd of February of 1946” (ibid). This perspective was not limited to the left. The conservative newspaper


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La Prensa wrote, “The two fronts of this struggle that we have to wage today are the same as those [of] 1852; they are the two divergent lines that started [back in] 1810 . . . the first [is] democratic, progressive, orienting . . . the other one is . . . reactionary, demagogical” (ibid: 256). For the anti-Perón liberal-democratic forces, “barbarism” and Rosismo were not only matters of political tyranny, or authoritarian rule. The opposition, throughout the heated electoral campaign, its defeat, and the subsequent plebiscitarian authoritarian state, was fully aware that Perón enjoyed the support of the lower sectors. “Barbarism from above,” as in tyranny, was therefore joined by a “barbarism from below,” in a now fully Sarmientinian way. The (authoritarian, “Federal”, Rosista) “tyrant” Perón was now followed, it was described, by “drunken hordes of lumpen-proletarians.” Perón, through his social policies beneficial to the working class, had indeed gained substantial working-class and lowerclass support. Many workers had defected from the socialist, Communist, and Radical parties, while other younger workers had had little opportunity to previously develop a partisan political identity. Perón himself, however, remained largely impervious to this interpretation and adversarial labeling. He instead adopted a straightforward nationalist discourse. During the electoral campaign of 1946, for example, he denounced the liberal-democratic opposition as being in league with the U.S. ambassador, and the intellectual elite as being in league with, or belonging to, the oligarchy.16 In fact, it was only after the fall of Perón in 1955, that the Peronist side of the party system would adopt this adversarial labeling, reversing in a militant way its normative valuation. Certainly, both sides of the party system made use of the gaucho imagery. However, the same cannot be said with regard to manners, mode of behavior, and speech. During the electoral campaign of 1946, the socialist newspaper La Vanguardia ran a cartoon of a gaucho facing a small Juan Perón with a swastika and telling him that [on the day of the election] “We’ll settle scores.”17 But neither Tamborini or Mosca, the presidential and vice-presidential opposition candidates who ran against Perón, came close with their stiff manner and formal discourse to the gaucho demeanor or mode of speaking. In contrast, Jazmin Hortensio Quijano, one of the very few Radicales who defected to Perón and who ran as Perón’s vicepresidential candidate, is described by Luna (1969: 170–71) as “somebody who could have been a jordanista caudillo, on horseback, [a] ‘lover of creole maids’ (“chinitero”) . . . with large a moustache giving him an anachronistic aspect,” someone given to “coughing and spitting on the nearest carpet.” I have dealt at length elsewhere (1998; see also James 1988: 21–24) with Perón’s specific class-cultural mode of relating to his popular-sector

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electorate through his language (e.g. the use of slang in public political discourse), demeanor (e.g. the now famous removing of his coat), display of cultural tastes (e.g. his fondness of boxing), relation with the then soapopera actress Eva Duarte, and so on. I focus here on the complementary dimension of his use of gaucho manners and self-presentation in public. Perón knew how to adapt culturally and in public to the creole traditions of the hinterland. In Salta, he talked about Güemes, the independence hero of the Northwest frontier and agrarian populist (as well as anti-Buenos Aires) caudillo with gaucho support, and of criolla tradition, while men on horseback dressed as gauchos took part in the rally. In another rally, he denounced the oligarchy for buying arms, but declared that the purchase “would be of no use to them, because in order to handle arms, you have to be a real man, and the oligarchs are not men.”18 In Tandil, Perón and Evita arrived at the rally in a barouche pulled by four horses and surrounded by horsemen dressed in the gaucho way.19 He also made abundant usage of criollo sayings. A major, fundamental innovation of Perónism was to incorporate and politicize, over time, the syncretic popular culture described above, which had emerged during the 1920s and 1930s and which was certainly not rural. Although over the years the two main political parties would often change positions on the left-right axis, the anchoring of the Peronism in local popular culture would remain unparalleled up to the present. This process, however, was not only an instrumentalist manipulation from above. A stronger argument, yet, is that this popular culture also strongly affected the inner workings and the type of political appeal of the Peronist party itself. That is, a political cultural process occurred in which a very particularly popular culture, itself linked to a set of symbols and attributes already discussed above, influenced the party institution (understood as a mode of informally institutionalized behavior), both internally and at the interface between the party institution and the voters. Thus, first, a cultural syncretic process occurred in the early to midtwentieth century, where the Latin and the creole merged as a product of their structurally similar cultural opposition to the English. Second, this novel popular culture then subsumed the newly-formed, uninstitutionalized, not very ideological, but very class-based Peronist “party.” Or rather, syncretism occurred between the two. The concrete attributes of this mélange were combined with the “regular,” “normal,” European model of how mass political parties (and the state) should function as institutions. The process had an impact on both what Peronism meant and on its institutional and organization workings that can be described as informal, culturally popular, nonprocedural, and more macho (daring) or caudillista. The outcome of this process has made


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the Peronist party somewhat disturbing to European eyes and attractive to its own popular-sector electorate. During the Peronist regime of 1945–55, paradoxically, the intellectual movement of historical revisionism, with few exceptions within it, became almost extinct. Although it would be easy to blame the antiintellectualism of the Perón era for this dwarfing of revisionism, the reasons for this quasi-death are more complex. Some revisionists, like Palacio, became Peronist deputies; others, like the more traditionalist Irazusta, felt uneasy with this eruption of the masses and moved to a discreet opposition (Halperin 1970: 34–5). It seemed that the political raison d’être of this historiographic intellectual movement—it opposition to liberal, “foreignizing” dominance—had died with the appearance and triumph of Perón. But after the violent coup that overthrew Perón in 1955, forced him into exile, and sought to eradicate every single trace of his regime, historical revisionism rose from its ashes and, for the very first time, acquired a mass audience—even achieving the status of a certain popular common sense.

The Syncretic Outcome, 1955–76: Peronist Latins as Gauchos; Peronist Leadership as Caudillismo; and the Montoneros Peronist Guerrillas During the more than two decades that followed the fall and exile of Perón, all the threads that have been mentioned so far and that have already come to form a discernable pattern, acquired, as an ensemble, a solidity and explicit—that is ideological—formulation. Paradoxically, Sarmientian “barbarism” became appealing ideologically among the middle-class, protesting students in the late 1960s. In 1955, Perón lost power and was forced into exile, while the military that overthrew him, with widespread middle-class support, embarked on a massive de-Peronization of the country. For many Argentine intellectuals on the side of “civilization” and republican liberty, post-1955 meant the end of tyranny and the eventual return of Argentina to the “normalcy” of civilized nations. However, the country was more than ever divided along class lines—even more so than in 1945. The combination of these two aspects made for a dangerous situation, particularly in terms of identity formation and struggle over meaning. While Perón himself, in exile, remained silent as always on this historiographic dispute, the revisionist interpretation of both Argentine

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history and present found an increasing prominence in local Peronist publications. Thus, “the effort of historical revision found for the first time the . . . support of a vast political movement” (Halperin 1970: 41–2). The terms of Sarmiento’s orthodoxy were therefore adopted by both sides of the political cleavage, but with violently opposed normative connotations. Second, while “civilization,” since after Rosas, had always had the upper hand in Argentine history, now, at a time when universal suffrage had become the norm, the “barbaric” side enjoyed a numerically-based political advantage. The forces of “civilization” had clearly identified in 1945 with the liberal democratic opposition to Perón, under the mistaken assumption of numerical superiority and in line with their view of what they considered the somewhat normal evolution of Argentina since 1880. Now the “civilized” pole was forced to rely on the political prohibition of Peronism, in order to “normalize” the country. Therefore, it soon found itself in an uneasy and somewhat cooperative relation with the increasingly assertive military, which was in charge of enacting the ban on Peronism. In the meantime, the popular and so-tospeak autochthonizing Peronist forces increasingly resorted to violence to assert their right to participate, vote, and take over governmental power. In this context, in the late 1950s—and not at the foundation of Perón’s movement—an important ideological crisis occurred within the political left. Many leftist scholars and intellectuals decided, with this turn of events, to side with the working class on class grounds; they thus moved toward the proscribed Peronism, and more specifically toward historical revisionism. In fact, the prolific nature of the second wave of historical revisionism was largely a product of these newly converted leftist intellectuals, the founders of what became known as “the national left.” Their attention spread much beyond the figure of Rosas and now covered the whole span of Argentine history. The rebellious federal montoneras of gauchos and caudillos were also rediscovered and praised. Pro-Buenos Aires intellectuals dependent on fashionable European ideas were vehemently condemned. National liberation was on the agenda, and this liberation could only be achieved by relying on the popular sectors, which were seen as authentically national, criollo, and inheritors of the gauchos. Rootedness in the specifically Argentine, in the local, in the criollo and/or local working class was an important leitmotiv for this new and younger left. It was said that, historically, the Argentine popular sectors had only been willing to follow key caudillos, “as seen” in the Federal struggles; therefore, in the present context (1955–73), the clearly caudillista leadership of Perón (in exile) was the only practical political option and, in fact, the most


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“Argentine” form of “institutional” rule. And besides, the workers were with Perón! This political-normative militancy and the links made between the past and the present were not limited to narrow, intellectual circles. Because the Peronist movement was already deeply anchored among the popular sectors, because Peronism was most popular in the remote provinces of the north and least popular in the capital, because this (above) discourse had been made plausible by the criollista attitudes of Perón while in power, and because this discourse was symmetrically equivalent to what Peronism was accused of being (a reembodiment of Federalist tyranny), this historical-revisionist linking of past and present (in terms of causes, actors, style, forms of leadership, and social sectors) sank in deeply at the popular level. Many of those ideas, for example, were popularized in the unidades basicas (or local base units, established mostly in underprivileged neighborhoods) of the Peronist party or movement. Political identities developed out of the conflict, each side taking the gaze of the other as a reference point. During 1966–73 under the military dictatorship, parts of the Peronist youth organized a powerful revolutionary guerrilla movement, whose first aim was to force the military to allow for the return of the General. Not surprisingly, this urban youth Peronist guerrilla organization chose for itself the name of Montoneros. Perón, once allowed back in Argentina, would, as the caudillo of the montoneras, lead his “troops” toward national liberation. Many chants of the Peronist youth were replete with Federal imagery; “Chacho, Facundo; Perón for everybody!” or “The mother loves her sons; the gaucho loves his knife; the oligarch loves money; and the people love Perón.” Argentine politics (including its party system), culture, and society became “mythically” or politically structured by a series of interchangeable antinomies, recalling Laclau and Mouffe’s chains of equivalence. Such superimposed simple structuring dichotomies, which can all be empirically documented and with which I assume the reader is now familiar, may be listed as follows: nationalist/liberal; Peronist/ anti-Peronist; working class/middle-class or oligarchy; hinterland/capital; Southern Europe/North-western Europe (Britain and France); barbarism/civilization; Federal/Unitarios; gaucho/Europe. To these, we can easily continue with: dirty/clean; hot/cold; passion/coldness; guts/brain; instinct/reason; pueblo/law; generous/calculating; local/ foreign; close/far; and, perhaps overall, low/high. This politically-created set of simple dichotomies (in part an ideological construct) allowed the concrete fusion of styles, genres and even

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identities of ethnic groups, on one pole of the divide. Urban workers of Mediterranean origins became descendents of nineteenth-century gauchos; and a centralizing leadership inspired by the mobilizational techniques and the so-called “national” type of “socialism” of Mussolini was transformed—first by his enemies and then by his own backers— into the “second [Federal] tyranny” bringing the national barbarism of extinct hinterland caudillos back to the apex of state power. In the process, the Argentine working class, whether migrants from Southern Europe or from the provinces of the hinterland, became fully national, in part through the use of nineteenth-century templates and elements of local history. Was the above syncretic phenomenon and its praise limited to the fashion of historical revisionism or to the turbulent 1960s? Was it caused by the peculiar situation created by the absence of the leader or, mainly, the ban on Peronism? In fact, the maximum expression of a clearly nineteenth-century Federal caudillismo at the head of a modern party arguably occurred as recently as the 1980s and 1990s. That is, the peak of neo-caudillismo came at a time when historical revisionism had died as an intellectual movement; Peronism was fully legal; the party had made significant efforts to conform organizationally and institutionally to global standards of “party-ness”; and when its leader was very much present in the country.

Peronist President Carlos Menem: The Return of Facundo, “Federalism and Liberation,” and the Federal Justicialist Front After the death of the incontestable leader of the Peronist movement in 1974, the long repression suffered by many factions of Peronism during the harsh military regime of 1976–83, and the first defeat of Peronism in an open and free national election (at the hands of the Radicales) in 1983, Peronism suffered an important leadership crisis. The low point of this crisis was in 1985, when Peronism basically split, with no clear leadership. The a-procedural methods and physical intimidation of the Orthodox leadership threatened to transform caudillismo into thuggery. Even Carlos Menem left the particularly thuggish party congress of December 1984, where gangs of ruffians threatened him, tried to hit him, and spat on him. Menem told the press: “This type of barbarism was triggered by those who use force as the only reason. They are the same who promote violence in soccer.”20 Facing the Orthodox wing, a new faction emerged, calling itself Renewalist. By 1987, the Renewalists had basically taken control of the


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Justicialist Party. The Renewalists wanted to transform the Justicialist party into a so-called normal, reasonably procedural political party, in tune with global models of party management (thus “de-syncretizing” Peronism) and ensure that the party and politicians, instead of union leaders,21 would lead the Peronist movement. Considering the fact that the Renewalists were able to take control of all the commanding positions within the party and to subordinate the unions to the party with regard to political affairs, this effort apparently had every chance of becoming institutionalized. It failed. After the resounding Renewalist victory of 1987 under Cafiero in the national congressional elections, to the great astonishment of the educated sectors of Argentine society, the mass media, and expert analysts, an organizationally weak caudillo leader from the “backward” hinterland challenged Cafiero in an open Peronist primary for the presidential elections of 1989. With the clear support of the popular sectors, both rural and urban, Carlos Menem, who with his huge sideburns was the spitting image of Facundo Quiroga, defeated Cafiero in 1988, and became the Justicialist Party presidential candidate for 1989 as well as the leader of the Peronist movement. Menem very intentionally combined the political style and personal attributes of the “barbaric” and unrestrained Federal nineteenth-century caudillos with the popular-sector class-cultural practices of the 1980s. An intriguing consequence of such situation is that this institutional and ideological syncretism politically helped Menem carry out a high-modernist economic project, in line with the contemporary global economic precepts of the 1990s. Menem’s neoliberal policies were certainly always much less popular among the popular sectors than his political leadership (see Ostiguy 1998: 464–79). At the same time, he was consistently opposed electorally by most of the urban middle and upper-middle classes (ibid)—classes which benefited most from, and were also more supportive of his privatizing, free-market policies. As stated at the beginning, Menem’s federal caudillismo must not be understood as a consequence of rational, instrumental, political calculation. Menem was obsessed with the figure of Facundo long before entering politics in the 1970s, and certainly long before becoming a neoliberal in late 1989. In fact, as most Peronist militants and voters correctly understood, it was Menem’s adoption of a neoliberal, privatizing, globalization credo that was opportunistic, instrumental, and politically calculated (i.e., to “save the country” from the 1989 severe hyperinflation crisis). Most Peronists of the lower sectors were confident, during the first four years of Menem’s presidency, that, to use expressions gathered in interviews, once he had “used the oligarchy,” he would

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“return” to a more “truly Peronist” orientation. His highly personalistic form of rule within the Peronist party and movement, by contrast, was of course never questioned as being non-Peronist. In fact, it was understood by many, both Peronists and anti-Peronists, as a return to real Peronism after the so-called “social-democratic” deviation of Cafiero and the Renewalists. A key point of this chapter, in contrast to the prevailing scholarly wisdom but in line with the observations of one of the main journalistic experts on Menem, Gabriela Cerruti, is that Menem’s main referent on most fronts—political, cultural, identity-wise, and so on—was not Perón, nor even Peronism, but Facundo Quiroga and nineteenth–century Federalism. Biographers of Menem and people close to him highlight his intense personal identification with the figure of the Riojano caudillo.22 What is more, Menem tried to copy the physical appearance of the nineteenth-century caudillo as closely as possible. His very long and brushy sideburns that surprised many foreigners in the 1980s and appeared incomprehensible from a modern fashion standpoint, are simply the reproduction of Quiroga’s equally long and brushy sideburns, that were (somewhat) in fashion in the first half of the nineteenth century among men in positions of authority. According to many of Menem’s friends, he always had a version of Sarmiento’s book Facundo with him. For Cerruti (1993: 16), “Menem created himself in the image of the Facundo depicted by Sarmiento. Menem learned from [this] Facundo, not from Juan Domingo Perón.” According to his ex-wife, Menem also believed in reincarnation and practiced rites to convert himself in the “abode” of the spirit of the caudillo Facundo (ibid). This syncretism, both institutional (from the standpoint of political culture, the combination of caudillismo with modern party organization) and about identity (the combination of nineteenth-century myths with a very different twentieth-century context) was not only genuine for the leader, but also advantageous politically. On political culture, Levitsky has highlighted how “informal institutionalization” proved very practical for adapting the Justicialist Party to the drastic change of economic orientation of the party under Menem (1998b, 1999). Peronist rule, both as an institution or mode of political leadership and in the cultural-symbolic realm, has also proven highly effective with regard to popularity in and of itself, that is to capture popular-sector votes in Argentina. In the Argentine race for the presidency in 1989, faced with criticism from the Radical president Alfonsín, Menem answered in public: “I prefer


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to be a Peronist and Riojano caudillo, and not a social-democratic intellectual!”23 At the largest rally of Menem’s presidential campaign in 1989, attended by close to half a million people and located in the popularsector municipality of La Matanza in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Carlos Menem thus opened his bid for the presidency: Here ends the federal march, which for 7,000 kilometers has united the villages of the fatherland in a message of justice, liberty, peace, progress, and work. And as a man of this federal land, of La Rioja, I feel proud to share this tribune with the Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, remembering previous eras. We are putting in operation an historic friendship between those two great caudillos . . . : Juan Facundo Quiroga and Juan Manuel Rosas, who have fought without rest for the federal country and for the liberation of our people!! These appeals, together with the established Peronist identity (see Ostiguy 1998), proved consequential electorally. Despite the fact that, as one might have expected, neoliberal policies received higher rates of approval as one climbed on the social ladder, throughout his two terms Menem, unquestionably the progenitor of those policies, received a much higher rate of electoral support among the subordinate social strata and in the provinces of the less “Westernized” hinterland, than from the urban middle and upper-middle classes (ibid: 464–79). Conclusion In new and not so new polyarchies, there may be a wide gap between formal rules and actual behavior. Political behavior may be at odds with the “legal and normative distinction between a public and a private sphere” (O’Donnell 1996:181). From the dominant perspective in advanced industrial democracies, such patterns are basically synonymous with corruption, nepotism, and lack of public ethics. Without condoning such a gap, it may be said that in the case of popularly-legitimate forms of political leadership, many of these normatively negative aspects may—or may not (the question remains open)—be a derivative of a particularly popular and effective form or style (and even ethos) of political rule. For lack of a better term, one could use the native label, caudillismo. Certainly, effective caudillismo is and has been a central (and much appreciated) trait of Argentine Peronism. This label, however, actually fully misses the specifically modern, creative, innovative,

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and syncretic side of the institutional pattern. It is perhaps a sign of the value of the historical-mythical component that modern local actors have not attempted to rename the twentieth-century syncretic institutional product more appropriately. We provided an account of the origin of this type of public self-definition and political authority, one that has proven surprisingly lasting and important in the context of modern party politics. But perhaps more importantly, this chapter has sought to contribute to existing understandings of what Sartori and many others call the party system, as it developed in the noncenter society of Argentina. Representation and articulation of differences, both socially real and ideologically constructed, are the essence of party systems, particularly as understood from a cleavage perspective. Understanding socially, politically, and ideologically the cleavage at the core of the party system has proven possible only through an analysis with an important historical and thus, cultural dimension. We have discussed the genesis and nature of an original party system, one side of which is a singularly syncretic product that is enduring and is not structured along the globally widespread left-right divide, however broadly conceived or defined. What appears as a locally specific, idiosyncratic, sociopolitical divide may correspond, in the last instance, to a highly schematized, abstractly simple series of basically interchangeable dichotomies, with an internal logic of their own. These dichotomies have potential relevance and application in the analysis of other sociopolitical cleavages and party systems elsewhere in the world, most particularly in the South. Notes 1. I use the term Peronist “party” to refer not exclusively to the Partido Justicialista (P.J.), but to the larger institutional political grouping self-identified and recognized by others in Argentina as Peronist. Technically, the Peronist party would be (until 2003) the Justicialist Party. The party, however, has always played a minor and nonmonopolistic role in the institution of Peronism. Certainly, during the lifetime of General Perón, that is, up to 1974, there was a consensus in Argentina that Peronism was not a party but a movement, composed of various institutions, all responding to the General. The “movementist” tradition was overwhelming until the early years of transition to democracy, for example, until 1985. The weak P.J., within the very powerful political movement of Peronism, was one such institution, together with the Peronist unions, the Peronist Youth, the Peronist guerrilla (in the 1970s), and so on. In power, Peronism has relied much more on the executive branches of the state to appeal to voters than on the party. While the P.J. in the late 1980s and 1990s became the object of significant scholarly analyses, in the 2000s there are now several Peronist parties, harshly competing against one another at the national level and with different institutional names: the Frente para la Victoria (of Kirchner); the Frente por la Lealtad (of Menem); the Frente Movimiento Popular (of Rodriguez Saa); the Justicialista (in 2005 under Duhalde), and so on. The above anomalies are precisely part of the syncretic outcomes that are the object of this book chapter.


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2. This part of the argument is part of a 15-years dialogue with Steve Levitsky and his research agenda. 3. The very persistence during the current decade—following the economic collapse of 2001–02 and the implosion of the Radical Party (U.C.R.)—of the bidimensional political space (high-low; left-right) that structures Argentina’s party system is discussed and demonstrated in Ostiguy, 2005. 4. Of course, some environments are more exogenous than others. Such was the case, for example, with the world economic crisis in the early 1930s, for all Latin American societies. 5. Domingo Sarmiento (1811–88) played a central, leading role in the cultural and political transformation of what became modern Argentina. He wrote his classic literary political manifesto “Facundo” in 1845, during the rule of the caudillos that followed the independence struggles, and later became president of Argentina in 1968–74, at the time of the creation of a modern Argentine state, nation, and also perhaps national identity. 6. A myth is obviously not the opposite of facts, but a distortion of the real in order to provide meaning to it. To follow Barthes, a myth actually transforms values into historical facts. Every political imaginary certainly has its own mythology, generally constituting a particular national repertoire made up of national heroes, political figures, marking events, that is, an affective (and actively selecting) collective memory. See Barthes (1957: 194–202). 7. On the Federal caudillos, see in particular the excellent works of Lynch (1992) and De la Fuente (2000), covering different phases of the same phenomenon. 8. The book was written during Sarmiento’s voluntary exile in Chile and first published in 1845. The title of the English edition, published in New York in 1868, is also revealing: Life in The Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants; or Civilization and Barbarism. 9. The barbarism of the caudillo Facundo was not for Sarmiento just a lack of European cultural varnish: “Facundo is a type of primitive barbarism. He recognized no form of subjection. His rage was that of a wild beast. . . . In a fit of passion he kicked out the brains of a man with whom he had quarreled at play” (1974: 88). In San Juan, “he soon ordered six hundred lashes [to be given] to a citizen noted for his influence, talent, and wealth, and himself walked by the side of the cart carrying his expiring victim through the streets” (1974: 174). True to his caudillo nature, “his public career was not preceded by the practice of theft. [However,] he was . . . fond of fighting . . . He had a great aversion to respectable men” (1974: 86). Facundo, as a vintage caudillo, knew his gauchos well: “When a gaucho was answering to charges of theft which had been brought against him, Facundo interrupted him with the words, ‘This rogue has begun to lie. Ho, there! A hundred lashes.’ . . . Quiroga said to one present: ‘Look you . . . , when a gaucho moves his foot while talking, it is a sign he is telling lies’ ” (1974: 90). 10. Thanks to my student David McColloch for this interesting comparative insight. 11. Martin Fierro was written in 1872, in gaucho verses (far from standard Spanish), by the Argentine legislator and landowner Jose Hernandez. Hernandez was thus neither lower classes nor a gaucho, but was familiar with the rural life of the province of Buenos Aires. 12. Since then, Argentine Spanish, particularly in its popular form, contains many words in Italian dialects. The Argentine accent is also rhythmically Italian-sounding. 13. One should note the fact that pibe, in the new syncretized expression “pibe criollo,” is conspicuously not a creole, gaucho term. 14. The title of Ernesto Palacio’s influential book, in 1939, was precisely La Historia Falsificada. 15. The idea of divide is used assuming that actors in the 1940s recognized that there was such a divide, something not entirely certain considering the quasi-hegemonic position of the liberal canonic history of Argentina. 16. Perón, in his famous electoral speech of February 12, 1946, accused the “Communist and Socialist parties, [of] hypocritically presenting themselves as pro-workers, to serve capitalist interests.” He ended his speech, “those of you who will vote . . . for the ticket of the oligarchic-communist collusion know that by doing so you will simply give your vote to Mr. Braden [the U.S. ambassador].” 17. La Vanguardia, February 22, 1946, p. 1.

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18. Reproduced in Luna (1969: 439). Earlier on, the pro-Perón newspaper La Epoca had depicted in a cartoon two young oligarchs as “effeminate” and “faggots,” refusing to work manually (La Epoca, October 1, 1945, p. 1). 19. Luna (1969: 459). 20. Quoted in Cerruti (1993: 189–90). 21. See Levitsky (1999: 154–77) on this topic. 22. See Cerruti (1993), including in the passages quoted at the beginning of this article. 23. Quoted in La Prensa, May 9, 1989, p. 4.

References Archetti, Eduardo. 1995. “Estilos y virtudes masculinas en El Grafico: la creacion del imaginario del futbol argentino,” in Desarrollo Economico 35 (October–December): 419–42. ———. 1999. Masculinities: Football, Polo and the Tango in Argentina. Oxford: Berg. Auyero, Javier. 1999. “Performing Evita. A Tale of Two Peronist Women.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 27 ( January): 461–93. Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Cerruti, Gabriela. 1993. El Jefe: Vida y obra de Carlos Saúl Menem. Buenos Aires: Planeta. Collier, Ruth Berins and David Collier. 1991. Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Colllier, Ruth Berins. 1993. “Combining Alternative Perspectives: Internal Trajectories vs. External Influences as Explanations of Latin American Politics in the 1940s.” Comparative Politics 26, 1: 1–30. De la Fuente, Ariel. 1999. “El Chacho, Caudillo de los Llanos,” in Historias de Caudillo Argentinos. J. Lafforgue and T. Halperin Donghi, eds. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara. Delaney, Jeane. 1996. “Making Sense of Modernity: Changing Attitudes toward the Immigrant and the Gaucho in Turn-of-the-Century Argentina.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38, 3: 434–59. Garcia Mellid, Atilio. 1985 [1946]. Montoneras y caudillos en la historia argentina. Buenos Aires: Eudeba. Halperin Donghi. 1970. El revisionismo historico argentino. Buenos Aires: Siglo veintinuno editores. ———. 1999. “Estudio preliminar.” in Historias de caudillos argentinos. Ed. Jorge Lafforgue. Buenos Aires: Extra Alfaguara. Hernandez, Jose. Martin Fierro. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de America Latina. Huntington, Samuel. 1968. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press. James, Daniel. 1987. “17 y 18 de Octubre de 1945: El peronismo, la protesta de masas y la clase obrera argentina.” Desarrollo Económico 107 (October–December): 445–61. ———. 1988. Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class: 1946–1976. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Levitsky, Steven. 1998a. “Institutionalization and Peronism: The Concept, the Case and the Case of Unpacking the Concept.” Party Politics 4, 1: 77–92. ———. 1998b. “Crisis, Party Adaptation and Regime Stability in Argentina: The Case of Peronism, 1989–1995,” in Party Politics 4, 4: 445–70. ———. 2003. Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1981. Political Man. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Luna, Felix. 1969. El 45. Buenos Aires: Hyspamerica. Lynch, John. 1992. Caudillos in Spanish America, 1800–1850. New York: Oxford University Press.


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March, James and Olsen, Johan. 1989. Rediscovering Institutions. New York: The Free Press. McGuire, James. 1997. Peronism without Perón. Stanford: Stanford University Press. O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1996. “Illusions about Consolidation.” Journal of Democracy 7, 2: 34–51. Orgambide, Pedro. 1999. “Varela,” in Historias de caudillos argentinos. Buenos Aires: Extra Alfaguara. Ostiguy, Pierre. 1998. Peronism and Anti-Peronism: Class-Cultural Cleavages and Political Identity in Argentina. PhD dissertation. Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. ———. 2005. “Gauches péroniste et non péroniste dans le système de partis argentin.” Revue Internationale de Politique Comparée 12, 3: 299–330. Prieto, Adolfo. 1988. El discurso criollista en la formacion de la Argentina moderna. BuenosAires: Sudamericana. Rock, David. 1987. Argentina 1516–1987. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sabsay, Fernando. 1997. Ideas y Caudillos. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Ciudad Argentina. Sarlo, Beatriz. 1993. Jorge Luis Borges. London: Verso. Sarmiento, Domingo. [1868] 1974. Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants; or, Civilization and Barbarism. New York: Hafner Press. Sartori, Giovanni. 1976. Parties and Party Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Selznick, Philip. 1957. Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation. White Plains: Row, Peterson and Company. Shumway, Nicolas. 1991. The Invention of Argentina. Berkeley: University of California Press. Solberg, C. 1970. Immigration and Nationalism: Argentina and Chile, 1890–1914. Austin: Texas Press. Svampa, Maristella. 1994. El dilema argentino: Civilizacion o barbarie. Buenos Aires: El Cielo por Asalto.

CHAPTER

FIVE

(En)Durable Syncretism: Hizballah in the “Space Between” S tace y P h il brick Y ad av

[An Islamic Republic] is a major danger for Lebanon because for us it is an imported product from Iran, which has nothing to do with the Lebanese identity, which is completely against the Lebanese understanding.1 With a yellow flag proclaiming its commitment to the Islamic Revolution in Lebanon, Hizballah has controlled the largest bloc in the multisectarian Lebanese parliament since 1992. This “Loyalty to the Resistance” bloc is what has attracted attention to Hizballah’s hybrid politico-military identity, making it a template for understanding other such groups, like the recently-elected Hamas. But by far the most theoretically compelling feature of Hizballah’s duality is instead its simultaneously local and transnational features, embodied in its commitment to a local tradition of representative politics alongside a commitment to an transnational model of clerical authority. Representative institutions have been in place in Lebanon, in one form or another, since the mid-nineteenth century and are a characteristic feature of modern Lebanese politics.2 Hizballah’s decision to engage in parliamentary politics after the end of the 15-year civil war is thus in keeping with a longstanding local tradition. Seemingly at odds with this, however, is Hizballah’s adherence to the principle of wilayat al-faqih, a Shi’i legal principle rooted in contemporary Iran.

(En)Durable Syncretism: Hizballah

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The principle of wilayat al-faqih means the “guardianship of the jurist,” and the faqih is one schooled in Islamic law, qualified to give religious opinions on issues of daily practice based on the texts of the Quran, the Sunna (the sayings and practices attributed to the Prophet Muhammed), the consensus of the (learned) community, and the application of human reason.3 The articulation of this principle is intimately connected to the Islamic Revolution in Iran under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Fusing a particular Iranian theological principle with the local exigencies and institutions of Lebanon is a challenge that fits squarely within this volume’s attention to “a synthetic blend among disparate interests or value systems” (Galvan and Sil, this volume: 3). Politically speaking, it is important to recall that among Shi’i Muslims—themselves the product of an internal schism on the basis of a question of political authority and succession—there exists a kind of philosophical pluralism by which wilayat al-faqih is a comprehensible but not compulsory article of faith. Thus, not all (or even, necessarily, most) Shi’a adhere to this principle. The conceptual antecedent to wilayat al-faqih is the more widely-held belief among the Shi’a that that clerical class (the ulema) could constitute the na’ib al-’amm (deputy general, as a collective body) of the Hidden Imam, the prime source of religious and political legitimacy. This laid the groundwork for the ultimate articulation of Khomeini’s revolutionary principle, making wilayat al-faqih what Moojan Momen called the “obvious next step” (Momen 1985: 195). On the basis of the claim that justice can only be achieved under Islamic governance, Khomeini argued for the establishment of an Islamic state with the Quran and Sunna as its constitution and the shari’a as its law (Khomeini 1981). The adoption of the principle of wilayat al-faqih by a Lebanese political party raises interesting questions about the ability to import such an ideology, and the reconfigurations that may be required by the demands of the local political environment and existing institutions. In doing so, this chapter will focus on, “the complexities of adaptive interpretation,” employed by the party in successfully articulating its syncretic identity (Galvan and Sil, this volume: 3). This chapter will focus in particular on Hizballah’s use of parliamentary participation as an instrument for achieving balance in the articulation of what some have called its “islamo-nationalist” identity (Charara and Domont 2004). While the principle of wilayat al-faqih itself need not be understood only in its Iranian Shi’i form, it is nevertheless a transnational principle unquestionably at odds with the idea of a territorially bounded, religiously heterogeneous nation, and has posed a consistent challenge to Hizballah’s ability to convince Lebanese voters of its national character

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and to thwart accusations of its “non-Lebanese and even anti-Lebanese nature” (Chartouni-Dubarry 1996: 59). Parliamentary participation has thus been an important venue for the assertion of the party’s nationalist message. The institutional configuration of the party as a party is in large part, the productive effect of efforts to reconcile the importation of a particular principle of governance with existing local political loyalties. The discursive transformation of the party’s armed wing, the Islamic Resistance, to a national Resistance in defense of Lebanon—a strategy particularly emboldened by the Israeli “Grapes of Wrath” offensive in 1996—has also been part of this strategy of nationalization. For a period of time in the mid-1990s, these strategies earned the party considerable support, and allayed fears of the party’s commitment of wilayat al-faqih (Salem 1996; Trendle 1996). However, since the Israeli withdrawal in 2000, and the subsequent Syrian withdrawal last year, the Islamic Resistance and the parliamentarians who support it are coming under increasing pressure to prove their loyalty to Lebanon by disarming and removing what some see as the implicit threat that the imported components of their ideology will be enacted through force. While the party has indeed demonstrated mixed signals over the years, these need not be read as evidence of its “Janus face” (Norton 1999), but may be seen as a sign of the struggle to integrate two deeply held convictions. Under increased pressure from outside the party, and without its Syrian patron in Beirut, this uncertainly and failure to fully convince the electorate may pose a distinct challenge to the durability of Hizballah’s syncretic islamo-nationalist identity. When considered through the lens of Hizballah, then, syncretism must be seen as vulnerable, and not always productive of “more viable and meaningful institutional constructs” if held too rigid (Galvan and Sil, this volume: 3). Instead, particular syncretic formulations, which are effective in addressing certain political challenges at a given time and place, may need to reconstructed or updated. The concluding section will thus detail some of the recent changes that have posed the greatest threat to the stability of Hizballah as a syncretic institution and suggest possible future trajectories. Wilayat al-Faqih, Iran, and Hizballah Most accounts focus on the Israeli invasion of 1982 as the principal point of reference for Hizballah’s formation. On the one hand, this is partially consistent with the party’s own representation of itself, but at the same


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time, it posits a kind of sui generis emergence. The accounts that favor such a model tend to focus on external shocks, notably, the arrival of 800 Pasdaran,4 or Iranian Revolutionary Guards, dispatched from Tehran with the goal of training an Islamic Revolutionary militia for the export of Khomeini’s Revolution (Norton 1987 and 1999; Hamzeh 1993; Usher 1997; Saad-Ghorayeb 2002; Jaber 1997; Harik 1996 and 2004). A few scholars note the gradual process by which failures and fissures within the rival Amal Movement, most notably Sheikh Subhi al-Tufayli’s defection and formation of Islamic Amal, produced a structural opening for Iran’s support (Ranstorp 1997; Charara and Domont 2004). While there may be scholarly disagreements about when and how to date the emergence of the party, there can be little doubt that its specific character and objectives were inextricably linked to the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini and his establishment of an Islamic Republic in Iran. From the perspective of institutional syncretism, this chapter will trace the ways in which this foreign import has been (more or less successfully) fused with the particularities of Lebanon, as both polity and society. The Principle of Wilayat al-Faqih and Hizballah Hizballah’s allegiance to the Khomeinist principle of wilayat al-faqih came in a context of increased Shi’i political mobilization in Lebanon in the 1960s and 1970s. The Shi’a, as a community, were politically and economically disenfranchised relative to other groups in Lebanon and under the leadership of Musa al-Sadr, they underwent a period of consciousnessraising in the period of time immediately prior to the outbreak of civil war in 1975 (see, for example, Norton 1987 and Ajami 1986). In this context, Khomeini’s view that political activism, as opposed to the local history of social and political quietism, was an incumbent political act resonated with many of Lebanon’s Shi’a. Hizballah MP Muhammed Raad, head of the Loyalty to the Resistance bloc, notes that, “the victory of the Islamic revolution had a psychological and sectarian influence here and it was welcomed . . .” (Raad 2005). At the same time, Raad recognizes that in the early stages, “there was a strong rejection among the Islamist thinkers who had not yet thought of forming a party, a strong rejection of the principle of wilayat al-faqih, announcing the necessity of defending Lebanon before the Muslims [as a whole]” (Raad 2005). By the time the party published its manifesto in 1985, however, these internal conflicts had been largely resolved, or were otherwise masked.

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The attempt to simultaneously invoke both, national and international tropes of resistance was apparent from the party’s first public step, the publication of the Risala al-Maftuha, or the “Open Letter Addressed by Hizb Allah to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World.”5 To establish its Lebanese face, its publication on February 16, 1985 coincided with the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Lebanese radical cleric Ragheb Harb by Israeli forces. On the back page was an image of the Ayatollah Khomeini ( Jaber 1997: 52). This duality of presentation, with the image of Harb, a prominent Shi’i figure in the resistance to the Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon, though not formally a member of Hizballah, and Khomeni, as “leader jurisprudent” and revolutionary, fit well with Hizballah’s early message as articulated in the Open Letter and other public documents. The claiming of Ragheb Harb’s legacy can be interpreted as a means of integrating a particular religio-political message (wilayat al-faqih) with a national armed struggle, of simultaneously nationalizing and transnationalizing. The content of the Open Letter, however, was more important than packaging. In its public debut, Hizballah set out to accomplish two broad goals. First and foremost, the party professed a desire to come into the open at both a national and international level and introduce its ideas and goals. Second, however, it sought to allay the fears of some Christians (and undoubtedly some Muslims, as well, though this was not necessarily openly acknowledged in the text of the letter) about its view of Lebanon’s future and their role in it. Whereas Khomeini himself is characterized as seeing the world outside of his community of believers to be polluting, Hizballah recognized that such an approach would be incompatible with the sectarian diversity of Lebanon, in which the Shi’a may possess a plurality but will likely never posses a majority. Thus a good portion of the text is devoted to issues of coexistence. Hizballah articulated a set of minimum aspirations, which included “rescuing Lebanon from subservience to either the West or the East, expelling the Zionist occupation from its territories . . . and adopting a system that the people establish of their own free will and choice” (Open Letter: 175). The party further clarified that, “we do not hide our commitment to the rule of Islam and that we urge [all] to choose the Islamic system that alone guarantees justice and dignity for all . . .” (Open Letter: 173). Perhaps the most important feature of the Open Letter for understanding Hizballah’s subsequent decision to participate in party politics following the Taif Accord is the focus on delineating friends and enemies. This distinction is rooted in a discussion of how these friends or


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enemies showed their character in the face of the recent civil violence in Lebanon, particularly from 1975 onward. From this, one can draw an important behavioral and attitudinal conclusion, and it is one that runs throughout the Open Letter and is critical to understanding later party decisions as part of an ideological continuity, rather than a fundamental rupture. If it is the behavior and choices made by certain people or groups of people that lead to their categorization as “friends” or “enemies,” it is possible to move between categories by way of alternative choices and behavior. Working from the Jerusalem Quarterly translation and its derivatives, the historical narrative is disrupted, and the decisions of friends and enemies alike become ascriptive characteristics from which there is no opportunity for exit, making it easier to see Hizballah as a party unable to cope with Lebanon’s multisectarian realities. The discussion of Lebanese Christians and secular Muslims all suggest that Hizballah’s repudiation of them is linked to some very specific and historically embedded decisions. Taken in this light, then, some of the contradictions that scholars see in Hizballah’s later accommodation are in fact the realization of possibilities implicit in the letter itself. Raad himself implicitly acknowledged this when he noted that, “perhaps if we read the Open Letter today, we would re-evaluate some of its issues and categories” (Raad 2005). When asked to elaborate, he added the following: There was a resolute ideological rejection in the Open Letter because evidence . . . of dogmatism was demanded during that period. If it were today, then everyone would know that Hizballah . . . has been an Islamic party, but an open party, a party that welcomes participation, a party that welcomes dialogue with the other, a party that gets to know the other. During the creation of the Open Letter, there was a segment of the Lebanese people that was cooperating with the Israeli occupation. Speaking in all frankness, we couldn’t accommodate their existence at the beginning. (Raad 2005) The idea that these categories are not ascriptive means that the capacity for transformation was embedded within this foundational text. It has allowed Hizballah to adapt to and adopt local institutions in pursuit of its goals, and allowed some goals to themselves be transformed in response to shifting circumstance (tharuuf ), a common theme in Hizballahi discourse.

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Stacey Philbrick Yadav The Importance of Wilayat al-Faqih Today

While the Open Letter most certainly did establish a profoundly local consciousness, it nevertheless also contained a broader understanding of Hizballah’s role in a global movement, evidenced through the role of wilayat al-faqih. Scholars have been of a divided mind on the continuing importance of the concept of wilayat al-faqih in the post-war period, constituting a spectrum of opinion, from staunch rejectionists who see Hizballah’s participation in party politics as a ruse designed to obscure their “real” aims (Kramer 1993) to those who maintain that “the abandonment of all reference to an Iranian-inspired Islamic Republic . . . or the implementation of the Sharia is clear evidence of their willingness to abide by the sectarian rules of the game” (Chartouni-Dubarry 1996). Since the party does continue to make reference to wilayat al-faqih and indeed continues to treat allegiance to the principle as a membership criterion, the latter of these two extremes is not empirically tenable (Saad-Ghorayeb 2002: 65; Qassem 2005: 50–8). Similarly, the other extreme—the belief that Hizballah is simply a imported arm of the Iranian government—obscures the fact that allegiance to the principle of wilayat al-faqih need not be understood as directly equivalent to allegiance to the state of Iran. As Deputy Secretary-General Naim Qassem has recently written, “there is no connection between the internal administration of the Iranian state and Hizballah’s administration. These are two separate bodies, each having its particularities . . . despite the commitment of both to the commands and directions of the Jurist-Theologian, who is custodian of the entire nation of Islam” (Qassem 2005: 57). Thus, while the principle of wilayat al-faqih and its continuing importance in Hizballah discourse is most certainly at odds with the concept of allegiance to a multisectarian and territorial nation state, this should not be conflated with allegiance to Iran. Instead, Qassem claims that, “given that working within a particular country is connected to a given set of circumstances and individuality, it is so that Hizballah’s work concords that Islamic order with the Lebanese national background” (Qassem 2005: 57). While Iran is a clear referent, a point of emulation (or taqlid), Hizballah has undertaken a series of conscious steps in the past 15 years to “localize” a philosophical concept with the capacity to apply outside of the Iranian context. Nationalization and Parliamentary Practice The period between the signing of the Ta’if Accord and the party’s decision to stand for election in 1992 represents one of the most fraught


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periods in its relatively short history. The leadership structure was firmly divided between proponents of parliamentary engagement and those who favored “a state of perpetual jihad against those who opposed their vision of an Islamic Lebanon” (Hamzeh and Dekmejian 1994: 127). Structural realities in Lebanon in the early 1990s, helped to turn the tide of debate within the party, but it is important to note that there was debate within the party’s leadership structure.6 This struggle was not easily resolved, and continues to be a subject of debate within the community, but this liminal stage represented a considerable opening relative to the previous period, if only because Hizballah began to consciously bifurcate its clandestine and open activities (e.g. the Islamic Resistance and the Politburo). Drawing this distinction was a nod to the existing structures of governance, as well as the need to promote the armed struggle in the South, in deference to the positions of the faqih prior to his death. It was the decision that most clearly set Hizballah on its syncretic path. Party leaders recall that the focus then became one of using parliament as an institutional platform through which to increase the “visibility of the Resistance,” and that in 1992, “the most important points and clauses of this program were the protection of the Resistance and its legitimacy” (Al-Berjawi 2005). During this period, however, the party also engaged in both parliamentary and extraparliamentary practices designed to promote its legitimacy outside of the Resistance in ways that could later be used as a check against its alleged “foreignness.”

Social Welfare As Augustus Richard Norton quipped in 1999, “the new Shi’i bourgeoisie does not yearn to live in the Islamic Republic of anything . . .” (Norton 1999: 20). What, then, explains the electoral success of a party whose foundation was so inextricably linked to that goal, and whose closest ally is its penultimate model? Even from the articulation of the Open Letter, Hizballah’s focus has been broader than simply the Shi’i (or even the Muslim) community in Lebanon. But faced with the question of expanding its appeal outside of zones of party loyalty in the South and the Biq’a, Hizballah broadened its appeal to the disenfranchised even more between 1992 and 2000, its period of most pronounced syncretism, through a series of concrete social programs. Indeed, since some have claimed that the electoral success of the 1992 election had “less to do with the resistance or Hizballah’s Islamist ideology than with its prowess in establishing

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a network of social services for the Shi’i poor . . .” maintaining and deepening the scope of these programs was a key priority for the party and built its popularity among Shi’a of all class backgrounds (Usher 1997: 64; Harik 1996: 56). In a context in which one can claim that support is lent and that political loyalty is fungible, Hizballah’s investment in long-term infrastructure building, as opposed to more transparent vote-buying, are interpreted by some, particularly the growing Western-educated professional class, as at attempt to build a party based on principle that transcends the shifting sands of sectarian loyalty and the patronage of the zu’ama (Norton 1999: 7; Jaber 1997: 157).7 And it is important to remember that, While the service orientation is old hat for many western parties, it must be heavily underlined that in Lebanon, unremitting efforts by parties or politicians to serve the public in these ways are almost unheard of. The most citizens can expect is a road paved or some streetlights installed a day or two before the parliamentary elections—and this by exploiting the resources of state agencies. (Harik 2004: 86) This lack of familiarity with service-oriented parties provided Hizballah with a unique opportunity to reach out to alienated segments of the post-war population and to secure for itself a role in the rebuilding of Lebanon. The Lebanese civil war and conflict with Israel led to the near-total collapse of state infrastructure. In the aftermath of the war, economic reconstruction was foremost in the minds of officials and citizens alike,8 and Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri’s Horizon 2000 reconstruction projects involved unsustainable spending and continued to overlook many areas, focusing on Beirut and its environs in an effort to promote investment (Government of Lebanon 1993). This presented Hizballah with a unique opportunity to “subcontract” some of the responsibilities of the state, to its own advantage. This role is part of what has made the party, according to some accounts, “the most effective and efficient political party in the country” (Norton 1999: 2). Judith Harik has noted that what distinguishes Hizballah’s social welfare apparatus from others in Lebanon and the region is that “these services are constantly evolving and that they are offered in a professional atmosphere that would not have been possible without careful planning and special attention to social and public service delivery systems . . .”(Harik 2004: 81–2).


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For the most part, Hizballah’s constituency-building has been conducted through social welfare and advocacy channels that were already in place prior to the decision to engage in electoral politics. The three principal organs of Hizballah’s social welfare program include the Jihad al-Binaa’ (Holy War for Reconstruction, loosely rendered), the Islamic Health Organization, and a local, semi-autonomous branch of the Iranian Relief Committee of Imam Khomeini. All three of these were legally registered with the state’s Ministry of the Interior in 1988 and had been offering services in the years prior. The government extended increasingly broad mandates to these organizations and earmarked funds to be distributed to their programs ( Jaber 1997: 145–68). These programs are carried out with considerable operational assistance from Iran, as well, though commentators stress that the 1990s saw Hizballah develop increasing financial independence from Iran ( Jaber 1997: 150). One of the principal contributions of Hizballah’s social welfare efforts, and one often obscured by media accounts that stress the Shi’i particularism of the party and this financial tie to Iran, is that the infrastructure projects undertaken by Hizballah are open to residents of all confessional backgrounds and party affiliations. While the projects tend to be built in Shi’i neighborhoods, this is more than a theoretical openness, as “doctors working in the [Hizballah] hospitals report that both Muslims and Christians may and do use the medical facilities . . .” (Norton 1999: 3) and many non-Hizballah (and non-Shi’i) families send their children to party-run schools ( Jaber 1997: 164). Expanding these services and increasing the scope of their activities under the aegis of the state has been one of the articulated goals of municipal and national-level electoral platforms, as Hizballah rightly recognizes that it outperforms the state some regards. Since Hizballah defeated Amal for control of the dahiya in 1988, it has engaged in a concerted campaign to secure appropriate sanitation for the residents of its neighborhoods and areas. This campaign has two components—pressure on the state to improve basic services, and the temporary provision of those services in the absence of the state. Out of unfortunate necessity, both components of this campaign continue to be in force 18 years later, though some progress has been made by the Lebanese government. The active component of the campaign has involved daily replenishment of neighborhood reservoirs and the use of a mobile generator to pump water into roof-top cisterns in apartment blocks throughout the neighborhoods (Trendle 1993: 12). It has been estimated that the Hizballah’s mobile tankers distributed daily drinking water to almost 500,000 residents of the dahiya in the mid-1990s

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(Harik 1996: 55). The party also bears partial responsibility for garbage removal in the dahiya. From 1988–93, the party bore the burden alone, and while it formally transferred responsibility to the Department of Sanitation in 1993, the government has been unable to meet the needs of the neighborhood adequately and the party continues to remove more than 300 tons of garbage out of the area per day (Harik 2004: 83). Nor have these efforts been in vain. Results of surveying among the Lebanese Shi’a community show that popular support for Hizballah has been considerably affected by these social welfare programs. Well over half of respondents in a survey of Shi’a neighborhoods in the mid-1990s named Hizballah as “the political party that contributed most to the Shiites’ educational, health, and social needs” (Harik 1996: 56). Perhaps more significantly, the survey illustrated the class composition of Hizballah’s electoral base. The results show that only 44 percent of Hizballah loyalists are from the lower classes, and that party support is drawn from across the socioeconomic spectrum. In this regard, “Shiite fundamentalism appears to attract a following with a class composition not strikingly dissimilar to liberal parties” (Harik 1996: 56). That said, the personal austerity of the Hizballah leadership is something that it consciously uses to attract followers away from the politics of the zu’ama. Amal Saad-Ghorayeb notes that, So ubiquitous is this theme in Hizbu’llah political thought that it has become institutionalized as a norm to which Hizbu’llah officials must adhere. Thus, asceticism is a predominant feature of the lifestyles of Hizb’ullah’s leadership, in accordance with the party’s self-designation as “the first party to oppose deprivation” . . . (Saad-Ghorayeb 2002: 18) This is something that is understood as rare in the recent history of Lebanese politics, and positions the party well to be an advocate not only for the disenfranchised, but also for the dismantling of the corrupt sectarian system whereby elected leaders from poor districts drive Mercedes and keep homes in tony sections of Beirut. The (Islamo-Nationalist) Resistance As mentioned above, the Resistance itself has also functioned as an important instrument of nationalization for Hizballah, particularly in the years between the 1992 election and the 2000 withdrawal, but its meaning(s) to


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the Lebanese electorate is in flux. In many ways, the Resistance itself is the meeting ground in which the two elements of Hizballah’s identity most completely fuse. First the Islamic Resistance, then simply, The Resistance, and now increasingly the National Resistance, Hizballah uses its armed wing to articulate its commitment to the nation, even while some of its actions undermine the territorial integrity of that nation by provoking Israeli actions. On the one hand, during the 1990s, the party was reliant on external (particularly Iranian) support for the supply of the weapons and cash needed to maintain their operations in the occupied South, and relied on both diplomatic and logistical assistance from Syria in transporting those materials. On the other hand, increased Israeli operations in the post-war period, particularly the 1996 Operation Grapes of Wrath, had a bolstering effect on the party’s popularity, even among segments of the population that would ordinarily fall outside of its political or sectarian reach. As one Christian activist put it, I’m not saying I agree—their ideology is very different from anything I wish to aspire to. I’m just saying to me, these guys are a resistance, they’re not terrorists. They don’t shoot us . . . they’re there to defend a territory, and when they can bomb the Israelis, they do. Why not? The Israelis bug everyone else, no one else says anything about it. (Androus 2005) As long as the territory that the Resistance was defending was seen as squarely Lebanese, the fighting itself enjoyed broad legitimacy. But this consciousness is beginning to change. As ’Ali Hamdan, the Foreign Affairs director for rival Amal noted, “if we don’t want [the Israelis] to return, we don’t want to cause problems on the border that will make them return” (Hamdan 2005). As a general rule, Amal does support the Resistance, and Hamdan’s comment may also reflect his feeling that Hizballah is claiming the national glory without recognizing the logistical contributions of others, particularly its supporters in parliament who help to maintain the operational autonomy of the Resistance. It’s like the 400 m relay. People have seen Carl Lewis, and they know him, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t others running the first 300 m. (Hamdan 2005) The Resistance has claimed such popular legitimacy among some sectors of the population that rivals compete to claim it. Critics of the

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party, however, recognize that the relevance of the Resistance is waning, perhaps even posing a risk to the party’s Lebanese identity in the wake of a series of significant external changes. With both the Israelis and the Syrians out of Lebanon, the party’s Iranian connections (both material and philosophical) are once again in the spotlight, exposing the cracks in its syncretic project. External Shocks Hizballah’s ability to successfully fuse local institutional practices with a transnational philosophical commitment like wilayat al-faqih has become more difficult to sustain in the past five years. The party is responsive and efforts have been made to adapt to these new realities. Some of these shifts, however, have come at the expense of its carefully constructed national identity, putting the ultimate success of its syncretism in question. The Israeli Withdrawal The initiation of the Ta’if process and the postwar reconstruction, as discussed in the previous section, required a recalibration of Hizballah’s relationship to Syria and Iran, but more critically, to Lebanon and its citizens of all confessions. Having resolved to participate in a plural political process, Hizballah was nonetheless able to straddle the fence, using the broad popularity of the continued Resistance (among Shi’i and many non-Shi’i alike) to deflect attention from some its more controversial and potentially problematic practices and beliefs, including wilayat al-faqih. The unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the southern Security Zone pressed the party to once again look inward and reach outward. On the first account, the leadership was forced to assess just how much ground it was willing to give away in the process of parliamentary compromise and what it could afford to retain. But more substantially, the party had to determine how to justify itself in nationalist terms in the absence of an enemy within Lebanese borders. The challenge in the immediate postwithdrawal moment, then, was to sustain the relevance of the Resistance—as a national Resistance. This has entailed three principal strategies. First, Hizballah has continued to focus on the Shebba Farms issue, and a number of smaller territorial disputes with Israel, such as the village of Ghajar, or the “Seven Villages” controversy. Second, in the context of the U.S. “War on Terror,”


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Hizballah has made efforts to successfully resurrect anti-American sentiment in some sectors of the population. Finally, and most problematically for the “Lebanonized” face of the party, Hizballah has used its role in successfully bringing about Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon to build a closer relationship (both materially and discursively) with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and has promoted itself regionally as the archetype for successful anti-Israeli action. Following the withdrawal, and with the election of Ariel Sharon as the Prime Minister, Israel adopted a different strategy vis-à-vis Hizballah and the Shebba Farms. Insofar as Israel considers the Farms to be a part of Syria, Hizballah’s actions are considered to occur at the behest of Damascus. In 2001, Israel began to retaliate directly against Syrian targets in response to Hizballah attacks. This response, perhaps contra Israeli intentions, prompted Hizballah to take an even more aggressive posture. In an attempt to stem the possibility of losing favor with its Syrian patron, the Lebanese government announced that the Resistance would now respond to attacks against Lebanese and Syrian targets. In the words of Nabih Berri, who announced the change in his capacity as the Speaker of Parliament (though perhaps also as a symbolic show of unity along the Hizballah-Amal divide), “these are the new rules of the game and the time when Israel can impose its own rules on us is over.” (cited in Harik 2004: 157). This, in effect, rendered irrelevant (for a time) the question of whether the area is Syrian or Lebanese, and enabled the continuation of attacks against the Shebba Farms and Northern Israel within the framework of the previously legitimated and government-backed Resistance. The second strategy for maintaining the relevance of the Resistance has been tied to American policies in the region. As evidenced by the Open Letter, America has always played a significant role in Hizballah’s political cosmology. Israel has fluctuated in party discourse from being the ultimate evil that is propped up by the United States, to being the regional manifestation of the greater evil of America itself. Yet in either case, the logic and rhetoric have consistently stressed motifs of disinheritance and inequality. In many ways these motifs have persisted in the post-Israeli articulation of party identity, focusing mainly on America’s expanding regional role, especially after the events of September 11, 2001 and in the promulgation of United National Security Council Resolutions 1559 and 1595 in 2004 and 2005. A third strategy for enlivening the relevance of the Resistance after Israeli withdrawal has involved building ties with Palestinian organizations in a way that promotes Lebanon’s (read Hizballah’s)

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operational successes. During the year and half between the Israeli withdrawal and the U.S. military advance into the region, the party made overtures of Palestinian solidarity designed to draw out the waning significance of the Resistance, but in a way that further underlying distrust among some of the party’s domestic detractors.9 The Syrian Withdrawal The passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 on September 3, 2004 initiated a period of rapid change for all Lebanese, regardless of party or politics. Based on lobbying from within and outside of Lebanon, and with the full support of the United States and France, the resolution called for two principal objectives, (1) the complete withdrawal of Syrian troops and intelligence forces, with the restoration of Lebanese sovereignty, and (2) the complete disarming of any remaining Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias. Protests began in early fall, but were uncoordinated and largely featured members of the Christian Right, the Druze Progressive Socialist Party, and a small number of Leftists. A series of assassination attempts, threats of violence, and ultimately the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri on February 14, 2005 provided the essential fulcrum in the popular movement for Syrian withdrawal.10 Hizballah’s loyalty to Syria became an issue of public debate, as did the future of the Resistance. These public debates highlighted the existing tension between the components of Hizballah’s syncretic identity—political cooperation and armed resistance—and have left the party at a critical decision. In evaluating the future prospects of Hizballah’s syncretism, it is important to recall three critical moments from 2005 and what they say about the balance of the party’s priorities and possibilities for reform. These include the debates over the 2005 electoral law, negotiated in the wake of the Syrian withdrawal, the debate over the potential disarmament of the Resistance, and Hizballah’s decision to participate in the new cabinet. The Electoral Law and the Elections The Spring 2005, public debate over the restructuring of the electoral law produced a national compromise with which neither Hizballah nor its adversaries in the Christian Right were entirely pleased. Banking on its numerical superiority, the Shi’i community as a whole—including Hizballah, Amal, and the formally unaffiliated


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spiritual guide of the community, Sayyid Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah—favored a system of proportional representation and one national constituency, along with the total deconfessionalization of the electoral process (Fadlallah 2005). By contrast, faced with the diminution of Christian (particularly Maronite) influence that would likely accompany such a system, the majority of the Maronite leadership, including Fadlallah’s spiritual counterpart, Patriarch Boutrous Sfeir, backed some sort of slight alteration of the institutionally confessional status quo. At the far end of the spectrum, Christian leaders like politician/editor Gibran Tueni, himself assassinated later in the year, backed a form of confederation that would grant near-autonomy to the major sectarian groupings (Tueni 2005). Agreeing on a new electoral law was seen by many as a means of reestablishing sovereignty after the Syrian withdrawal, since the three elections held under postwar Syrian “tutelage” were each based on Syrian-backed electoral compromises designed to produce specific balances in parliament. The failure to reach an agreement on the law was deflating to all, representing no change in the confession character of the electoral system, whether toward Hizballah objectives or those of the Christian Right.11 The Disarmament Debate Even before the Syrian withdrawal was complete, national attention was focused on the question of the “arms of the Resistance.”12 In the spring of 2005, editorials, talk shows on television and radio, and university and public symposia were organized around this theme. It also received considerable coverage in the international Arabic media and some Western news sources. The intrinsic link between the durability of an armed Resistance and the Syrian withdrawal was evidenced when headlines on the same day of the withdrawal ran banner headlines asking about the future of “arms of the Resistance.”13 This culminated in Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah’s speech on May 25, 2005, the fifth anniversary of the Israeli withdrawal from the South, in which he went on the offensive and declared that “the Resistance will not surrender its weapons and the hand that reaches for them is an Israeli hand, and we will cut it off ” (al-Intiqad May 25, 2005: 6). The explicit logic of his statements was that, (1) these weapons are used to defend Lebanon, (2) anyone who tries to restrict the weapons of the Resistance is working against the Lebanese public interest, and

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therefore, (3) those in Lebanon who would work against the public interest must be Israelis or their agents. The implicit meaning of the statement was that while Hizballah would formally maintain its openness to dialogue on the arms issue, it would only accept those products of dialogue that would ensure continued militarization of the Resistance. In interviews conducted in the midst of this public debate, party officials were quick to reconcile what seemed to be two, contradictory messages regarding the Resistance’s weapons. On the one hand, Nasrallah had repeatedly declared the party’s openness to dialogue regarding disarmament, and at the same time, he had threatened anyone who tried to “steal” the group’s arms. As Muhammed Raad, head of the parliamentary bloc, explained, “there is no contradiction between the two opinions.” When asked to explain the party’s logic, he added that, In all honesty, these weapons are a problem for Israel, not for Lebanon. So the discussion about the hand that would take the weapons being cut, I mean, all of the Lebanese agree that these weapons—the weapons of the Resistance—are for Lebanon. But among some Lebanese, there is a fear that these weapons will be used domestically . . . . These weapons have become in the view of the Lebanese people the weapons of the resistance to Israel. Accordingly, whoever wants to take the weapons of the Resistance, he’s an Israeli. It’s on this foundation that these two messages speak to one another. (Raad 2005) But to many, this remained an unacceptable threat, and the Syrian withdrawal emboldened Hizballah’s critics to speak out. Even as Saad Hariri and Walid Jumblatt offered their support for the continued operations of the National Resistance and sat in the front row as Nasrallah gave his speech, fault lines in the opposition platform were exposed, and conflict over this issue—temporarily silenced when Hariri and Jumblatt convinced Hizballah and the Phalange (a former civil war adversary and party from the Christian Right) to run on a “national unity” ticket—resumed shortly after the list’s widespread victory in the May/June 2005 elections. In late May, both leaders pledged their commitment to a militarized Resistance, but by the time of the National Dialogue less than one year later, Jumblatt would walk out of the meetings in a row over disarmament. How this debate will ultimately be resolved is unclear.


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The Cabinet and the Hizballah-Amal Boycott Perhaps ironically, the party’s dogged defense of its armed wing was accompanied by the most historic step taken in the direction of complete democratic participation, the decision to participate not only in parliament but also in the new government formed by Prime Minister Signiora. Until this point, Hizballah had always maintained its ability to criticize the government without being held responsible for its failures. As Mustapha ’Ali, a member of the party’s politburo explained: The political game that can be influenced is at the parliamentary level, in the parliament itself. It would not be possible for us to wield the same power and influence in the cabinet. This reflects [the interests of] other political actors.14 Participation in the cabinet was thus seen by many as a show of good faith, a kind of rapprochement with the Bristol group, the core of the Opposition, and with the multitudes who had so recently flocked to Martyrs’ Square—now called Freedom Square—to demand an end to Syrian hegemony during the “Beirut Spring” of 2005. While Hizballah jockeyed aggressively for the Foreign Ministry portfolio, there were strong indications that the United States and Canada, at least, would not deal with a Hizballah Foreign Minister. Since Lebanon’s outward orientation has always been a contentious issue, there was some domestic resistance to such an appointment, as well. In the end, longstanding Hizballah MP Muhammed Fneish was appointed to the Public Works ministry. The government’s decision to appoint Fneish to this specific post stood as a challenge to Hizballah, essentially demanding that they “put up or shut up.” For a party that built much of its domestic reputation on criticizing the chronic government neglect of the Shi’a and their exclusion from elite politics, this would be an opportunity. Fneish would be in charge of the management of the very resources that had sparked riots in the Hizbullahi neighborhood of Hay al-Salloum only a year and half earlier. He would also be responsible for serving a truly national, pan-sectarian community. In the first several months of cabinet participation, this arrangement proceeded somewhat smoothly, but as the election buzz wore off and two underlying issues of tension rose to the surface again, Fneish was in an increasingly difficult position. The two main controversies concerned, (1) the potential internationalization of a tribunal to prosecute those

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implicated in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, and (2) the future of the Resistance as an armed group. Both of these issues ultimately made it very difficult for Hizballah to continue as a part of a coalition Opposition cabinet. While the Opposition list may have needed the support of Hizballah during the May-June elections in order to demonstrate the broad appeal of their agenda, the fissures in that agenda have begun to show in ways that put pressure on Hizballah more than any other Lebanese faction or party. In late 2005, Fneish led a joint Hizballah-Amal boycott of the cabinet. For six weeks, until Prime Minister Signiora announced that the government would not pursue these two thorny issues (for the time being), the government was incapacitated. Once their demands were met, the Hizballah minister brought the boycott to a close. This kind of heavy-handed tactic may have worked once or twice but was not well received locally, and Hizballah’s intransigence on the weapons issue remains an unresolved and contentious issue in a Lebanon looking to finally, and completely, reassert its sovereignty. Conclusions It is in the context of a two-decade process of transformation that Hizballah has managed, with only partial success, to successfully fuse its commitment to the “imported” concept of wilayat al-faqih, with its attendant concern for arm struggle against Israel, with the local institutions and exigencies of Lebanese politics. As the single largest party in the Lebanese parliament in four successive parliamentary elections, its sway over ( portions) of the Lebanese electorate and its finesse in making friends and mending fences has gone a long way in answering the calls that the party is an Iranian construct. Only the hardest of hard-line Christian Rightists now maintain Hizballah’s complete foreignness, and many of those (Christian and Muslim voters) who would otherwise not choose Hizballah are swayed by a lingering support for the Resistance or the party’s wide-scale provision of quality services in the absence of a strong public sector. While surveys show that wilayat al-faqih is not a source of electoral support for Hizballah (Harik 1996), the party has not entirely abandoned its commitment to the principle, nor has it been required to. By developing two sources of appeal that are in no contradiction with the principle (and, in fact, serve it in some ways), the party has been able to have its proverbial cake and eat it, too. But both of these


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sources of support—the Resistance and the party’s network of social provision—are under threat by more recent developments. The successive withdrawal of Israeli and Syrian troops and the restoration of Lebanese sovereignty have led to calls for the disarmament of the Resistance, or its integration into the national Armed Services. Further, the decision to participate in the government without the full deconfessionalization of the electoral system means that the party must now serve a truly national constituency without being assured that this service provision will ultimately pay off at the ballot box in the way that its provision of private services most assuredly did. The future is thus uncertain for this syncretic party. Full national integration would mean abandoning wilayat al-faqih, and full adherence to the principle and some of its attendant prerogatives (particularly regarding Israel) would probably mean the alienation of the Lebanese electorate, Hizballah’s prime source of international legitimacy. Thus, before his assassination in 2005, Gibran Tueni challenged the party: Okay, you want to be a political party? At least begin to use all the same tools that all political parties are using, meaning no weapons, no finance from Iran . . . (Tueni 2005) Whether this challenge is one that Hizballah will be willing, or able, to answer remains to be seen. What is clear is that its current syncretic identity is in a sufficient state of vulnerability that it cannot be maintained. Notes Research for this chapter was conducted in 2004 and 2005 and generously supported by a residential fellowship at the Center for Behavioral Research at the American University in Beirut, as well as a Penfield Fellowship in International Affairs, and research grants from the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics, the Political Science Department, and the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. The author would like to thank the editors, as well as Vikash Yadav, Susanne Abu-Ghaida, Lisa Blaydes, and Larry Rubin for their feedback on this work. 1. Gibran Tueni. Interview with author, May 25, 2005. 2. While the parliament, in its current form, was established by the 1926 constitution, earlier institutional attempts to ensure confessional representation have been a consistent feature of modern Lebanese politics. The Règlement Shakib Effendi of 1843, established a 12-member elected council, with two members from each of the six largest religious communities. The council members were “to be selected at large from the people without restriction to birth and status.” There were a number of challenges to this system, and it was followed by other types of institutional agreements ensuring different levels of representation to communities and individuals,

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including the Règlement Organique of 1861; the French Mandate over Greater Lebanon, established in 1920; the National Pact of 1943; and the Taif Accord of 1989 (Khalaf 2002: 273–303). These are the accepted sources among the Twelver Shi’a, the dominant Shi’i Muslim community in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, and Bahrain. Both Sunni Muslims and other Shi’i sects place emphasis on different sources, though all share a commitment to the Quran and the Sunna, with different standards for establishing the reliability of a given account of the Prophet’s traditions. Accounts of this number vary from a low of 800 to a high of 1,500, with the most compelling accounts positing the initial deployment of 800, pending further approvals from Syria, and eventually reaching a total of 1,500. The majority of published translations of this text draw on a significantly truncated and structurally reorganized version, published in Jerusalem Quarterly 48 in 1988. To date, only Norton’s 1987 translation, appearing as Appendix B in his book on Hizballah’s rival party, Amal, captures the original organization and content with sufficient fidelity. While here I have drawn on both Norton’s translation and the original Arabic text provided by Hizballah’s party office, the page numbers correspond to Norton’s translated appendix. For the recollections of participants in this conference and other internal party debates at this time, see: National Broadcasting Network. 2004. “Lebanon’s Parties: Hizballah.” Beirut: NBN. The zu’ama system (sometimes also called the za’im system) is a semi-feudal system of political patronage that has long dominated Lebanese political life. In each sectarian communities, a zaim or several zu’ama—“notables” who are, in effect, political bosses—would represent clients and provide goods and services in exchange for political loyalties. Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, 164. A majority (53.5 percent) of respondents in the LCPS poll rated the economy the first priority the postwar period, with the next closest answer being “national reconciliation,” with only 18.4 percent. According to party records, in 2000, five percent of the public speeches by Secretary-General Nasrallah were given in venues and on subjects explicitly related to the Palestinian cause. There were only two specifically pro-Palestinian speeches (though the cause was frequently mentioned in other venues), one occurring shortly after the outbreak of what would come to be called the al-Aqsa Intifada in September, and the second at the end of December in honor of the annual International al-Quds Day, an event inaugurated by Khomeini in 1980 and dedicated to eradicating the Israeli presence in Jerusalem. In 2001, the proportion of speeches on the Palestinian issue reached a full 20 percent, exceeded by no other single category. As the al-Aqsa Intifada gained momentum, so did Hizballah’s open affiliation with the cause, culminating in the 2005 announcement that the party was prepared to offer material support to Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Some important occurrences in these months included the assassination-attempt against Opposition leader Marwan Hamade, a series of Christian and Druze/Leftist protests around `Eid al-Istiqlal (Independence Day), and Druze leader Walid Jumblatt’s official announcement that he was joining the Opposition after threats against him from Syria. Because a new law was not accepted by the constitutional deadline (30 days before the election), the 2,000 electoral law stayed in force. As a general rule, media accounts focused on “salah al-muqawama” (the weapons of the Resistance), and not “salah Hizballah” (the weapons of Hizballah). This was particularly true during the election period that coincided with the fifth anniversary of the Israeli withdrawal, and suggests some success in framing the Resistance as a national body. See, for example, Al-Safir, April 26, 2005. Note that one small victory in Hizballah’s struggle to nationalize the Resistance is that these headlines questioned the weapons of the Resistance, not “Hizballah’s” weapons. Mustapha ’Ali. Interview with author, May 28, 2005.


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References Ajami, Fouad. 1986. The Vanished Imam: Musa al-Sadr and the Shi’a of Lebanon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. al-Intiqad. May 25, 2005. p. 6. El-Bizri, Dalal. 1999. Islamistes, Parlementaires et Libanais: Les Interventions à l’Assemlée des élus de la Jama’a Islamiyya et du Hizb Allah (1992–1996). Beirut: Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain. Blanford, Nicholas. 1999. “Long-range Plans for South Lebanon.” The Middle East 292: 10–12. Charara, Walid and Frédéric Domont. 2004. Le Hezbollah: Un Mouvement Islamo Nationaliste. Paris: Librarie Arthème Fayard. Chartouni-Dubarry, May. 1996. “Hizballah: From Militia to Political Party,” in Lebanon on Hold: Implications for Middle East Peace. Rosemary Hollis and Nadim Shehadi, eds. London: Royal Institute for International Affairs. 59–62. Fadlallah, Hassan. 1994. Al-Khiyar al-Akhr: Hizb Allah, al-Sira al-Thatiyya wa al Mawqaf. [The Other Choice: Hizballah, Self-Representation and Position]. Beirut: Dar al-Hadi. Fisk, Robert. 2001. Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Government of Lebanon. 1993. “Horizon 2000 Economic Plan.” Beirut Report 5:180–81. Hamzeh, A. Nizar. 2000. “Lebanon’s Islamists and Local Politics: A New Reality.” Third World Quarterly 21, 5: 739–59. ———. 2005. In the Path of Hizballah. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Hamzeh, Nizar and R. Hrair Dekmejian. 1994. “The Islamic Spectrum of Lebanese Politics.” Beirut Review 7: 115–34. Harik, Judith Palmer. 1996. “Between Islam and the System: Sources and Implications of Popular Support for Lebanon’s Hizballah.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 40, 1: 41–67. ———. 2004. Hezbollah: The Changing Face of Terrorism. London: I.B. Tauris. Hariri, Rafiq. 1993. “Interview with Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.” Beirut Review. 5: 169–80. Hizballah. 1987. “Open Letter to Addressed by Hizb Allah to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World,” in Amal and the Shi’a: Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon. A.R. Norton, Austin, trans. TX: University of Texas Press. 167–87. Hizballah. 1994. “Al-Risala al-Maftuha illati Wajjaha Hizb Allah ila al-Mustad’afin fi Lubnan wa al’Alam,” in Al-Khiyar al-Akhr: Hizb Allah, al-Sira al-Thatiyya wa al-Mawqaf. Beirut: Dar al-Hadi. 187–213. Jaber, Hala. 1997. Hezbollah: Born with a Vengeance. New York: Columbia University Press. El-Khazen, Farid. 1994. Lebanon’s First Postwar Parliamentary Election, 1992: An Imposed Choice. Oxford: Center for Lebanese Studies. Khalaf, Samir. 2002. Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: A History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press. Khomeini, Ruhollah. 1981. Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini. Translated by Hamid Algar. Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press. Kramer, Martin. 1993. “Hizbullah: The Calculus of Jihad,” in Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance. M. Kramer and R.S. Appleby, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 539–56. Lebanese Center for Policy Studies. 1992. “Results of Pre-Election Poll.” Beirut Review 4: 162–5. McEoin, Denis. 1984. “Aspects of Militancy and Quietism in Imami Shi’ism.” Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies 11, 1: 18–27. Momen, Moojan. 1985. An Introduction to Shi’i Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shi’ism. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Norton, Augustus Richard. 1987. Amal and the Shi’a: Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Norton, Augustus Richard. 1998. “Hizballah: From Radicalism to Pragmatism.” Middle East Policy 5, 4: 147–59. ———. 1999. Hizballah of Lebanon: Extemist Ideals vs. Mundane Politics. New York: Council on Foreign Relations. Qassem, Naim. 2005. Hizbullah: The Story from Within. Translated by Dalia Khalil. London: Saqi Press. Ranstorp, Magnus. 1997. Hizb’Allah in Lebanon: The Politics of the Western Hostage Crisis. London: Palgrave. Saad-Ghorayeb, Amal. 2002. Hizb’ullah: Politics and Religion. London: Pluto Press. Salem, Paul. 1996. “In the Wake of ‘Grapes of Wrath’: Meeting the Challenge,” in Lebanon on Hold: Implications for Middle East Peace. Rosemary Hollis and Nadim Shehadi, eds. London: Royal Institute for International Affairs. 75–8. Trendle, Giles. 1993. “The Grass Roots of Success.” The Middle East 220: 12–13. ———. 1996. “Hizballah: Pragmatism and Popular Standing,” In Lebanon on Hold. Hollis and Shehadi, eds. London: Royal Institute for International Affairs. 63–7. Usher, Graham. 1997. “Hizballah, Syria and the Lebanese Elections.” Journal of Palestine Studies 26, 2: 59–67.

Interviews by Author Ali Hamdan, April 29, 2005. Bourj al-Barajneh. Asma Andraous, June 11, 2005. Beirut. Gibran Tueni, May 5, 2005. Beirut. Muhammed Al-Berjawi, May 27, 2005. Beirut. Muhammed Husein Fadlallah, May 17, 2005. Haret Hreik. Muhammed Raad, May 23, 2005. Haret Hreik. Mustapha Ali, May 28, 2005. Haret Hreik. Documentary interviews and footage: “Lebanon’s Parties: Hizballah.” 2004. Beirut: National Broadcasting Network. “Lebanon’s War.” 2005. Doha: Al-Jazeera Network. “The Sects of Lebanon: The Shi’a.” 2002. Beirut: National Broadcasting Network.

Part Two Economic and Social Institutions


CHAPTER

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The Dynamics of Institutional Adaptation and the Fruitful Emergence of Managerial Syncretism in Japan Rudra Sil

Introduction In his classic study of the industrial revolution in Germany, Thorstein Veblen (1954) viewed the opportunity to borrow institutions from more “advanced” referent societies as a key situational advantage of “backwardness.” The point of departure for this chapter is the observation that this advantage can be offset by a range of problems, conflicts, and tensions as local actors attempt to make sense of, and get accustomed to, new sets of rules and practices imported from elsewhere. Especially problematic is the challenge of reconciling the diverse interests and worldviews of different actors who invoke competing sets of historical referents in assigning different meanings to their roles and relationships in new institutional settings. The result is more likely to constitute what Cardoso (1977) once referred to as “the originality of a copy” than the wholesale replication of any one institutional model. This chapter focuses on the case of the large-scale Japanese firm, a particularly important institution in perhaps the most successful nonWestern late-developer in the twentieth century. Japan’s rapid economic growth, both before and after World War II, depended heavily on the production activities of large-scale industrial enterprises, and managerial elites there regularly looked to firms in more advanced

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economies in search of usable managerial doctrines and practices. At the same time, in the course of seeking to improve labor discipline and productivity, Japanese managerial elites regularly searched for a usable past that they could draw upon to buttress their authority and motivate the workforce. In addition, given differences in the approaches of prewar and postwar managers, as well as differences in the responses of workers in each period, the Japanese firm allows for a valuable historical comparison that can speak to the relative merits of different strategies for invoking the past in the course of adapting borrowed institutional models. This analysis focuses on the negotiation of common understandings between two idealized sets of contending actors—managerial elites and the workers they recruit to carry out specific tasks—who are disproportionately influenced by two idealized types of historical influences, one arising from the design and performance of successful firms in a given referent society, and the other from the more familiar norms and practices embedded in local communities of work. The tensions between the two sets of influences are reflected in the discrepancies in expectations and behaviors that crystallize separately within the formal and informal dimensions of the firm, with the latter reflecting the disproportionate influence of local norms and practices on the expectations of a majority of employees.1 I argue that the extent to which these tensions are resolved bears on the extent of factory authority, defined for the purposes of this chapter as the willingness of workers to accept official company objectives, to recognize the right of managers to establish the methods for realizing these objectives, and to cooperate with their peers and supervisors in carrying out assigned tasks. Factory authority does not imply a complete identification with the goals, methods, and worldviews of managers, but simply the willingness of subordinates to accept the right of managers to issue commands and to exercise discretion in ways that do not undermine the goals these commands are intended to realize.2 This chapter seeks to offer a partial explanation for why factory authority proved to be greater in postwar Japan than in prewar Japan. The core of the historical argument lies in distinguishing the postwar approach to institutional adaptation from the approach adopted by managerial elites in prewar Japan (summarized in figure 6.1).3 In the process of establishing the first incorporated businesses in Meiji Japan, the initial focus of business leaders was on uprooting “traditional” attitudes and inculcating “Western learning” among a new managerial elite with little thought to working conditions or labor relations on the shopfloor. By the early twentieth century, in response to indications of poor labor

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discipline and growing unrest, a new generation of managerial elites proactively sought to assert a model of the “family firm” based on the traditional patriarchal household. However, aside from the fact that this model did not serve to capture the diversity or complexity of the largescale firm, the family firm experienced growing tensions as the expectations of membership and cooperation it engendered were not borne out in practices increasingly modeled after Taylorist scientific management principles in the United States. In the postwar era, managerial elites confronted heightened labor militancy in a new legal and institutional environment and responded with important shifts in company ideology, employment practices, and work organization that collectively represented a significant departure from the American model of industrial management. At least as importantly the new employment and production practices were congruent with a new managerial ideology of “human relations” within the “company community,” an understanding that evoked familiar notions of membership and cooperation in past communities but was more flexible and portable than the traditions invoked to support the prewar family firm. This emergent managerial syncretism did not end exploitation, stratification, or labor conflict. As critical perspectives on Japanese labor history note, a majority of the workforce—women and employees of small or subsidiary firms—did not enjoy the terms of employment extended to regular employees of large-scale firms, and even for those employees, frustrations related to the quality of working life have surfaced in the past two decades. However, it is also true that among regular employees in large-scale firms (firms employing more than 1,000 workers), the period from the 1950s through the 1970s was one that witnessed increased acceptance of the system of management as generally legitimate, with decreased turnover and unrest, increased discipline and productivity, and increased satisfaction with workplace conditions and managerial behavior. Thus, examining the postwar Japanese firm in a broader comparative-historical context, it is difficult to ignore the fact that postwar managerial elites, initially confronted with heightened labor conflict, ended up manufacturing a significantly higher degree of factory authority, as even some critical perspectives on labor history acknowledge (Gordon 1993, 1998b).4 One important reason for the shift was the emergence of a syncretic approach to negotiating the competing influences of foreign models and local history. The next two sections provide a stylized account of the evolution of managerial approaches in late-industrializing Japan, focusing on comparable elements in the ideology and organization of the firm in the prewar (1910s–30s) and postwar (1950s–70s) periods. The following section

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considers portable aspects of past communities of work insofar as these were evident in attitudes and expectations of workers in large-scale enterprises, and then reviews the key points of the historical comparisons between the prewar and postwar eras. The conclusion outlines how this argument selectively draws upon existing strands of scholarship on Japanese industry to form an original interpretation, and how this interpretation in turn points to a more general hypothesis about the utility of syncretism in the process of institutional adaptation. Prewar Japanese Firms: From “Western Learning” to the “Family Firm” Although the Meiji Restoration (1868) was a strongly nationalist response to encounters with Western powers in the mid-nineteenth century, the first Meiji leaders were also united by an interest in “Western learning” in their quest to transform old habits and practices deemed to be inimical to the functioning of new institutions that would bring Japan economic prosperity and international recognition. Thus, the aggressive borrowing of Western institutions during the 1870s was part of a highly proactive effort to transform old attitudes and social structures. In the realm of industry, government and business elites vigorously promoted the incorporation of the old merchant stores and provided mechanisms for the former samurai to invest their savings and assets in modern corporations now that their traditional privileges were gone (Hirschmeier 1964; Kinmonth 1974). The Meiji government introduced hundreds of overseas fellowships for top managers and economic bureaucrats to travel abroad to study first-hand Western commerce, industrial technology, and personnel training. The entrepreneurial ideologies that emerged in the 1870s–80s, even though eschewing the economic individualism openly invoked by business elites in England or the United States, emphasized replacing the attitudes and ideals associated with the samurai code and the traditional guild system with new habits and new forms of knowledge appropriate for the operation of a modern firm (Hirschmeier 1964; Marshall 1967). Yet, when it came to the workforce, the government and business elites did not see a need to be especially proactive, believing that the experience of industrial labor itself would be sufficient to pave the way for the emergence of the right attitudes and work habits. While business elites were making ideological appeals to gain social respect for commercial activities, they relied on technical supervisors on the shop


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floor to monitor the performance of work-groups and demonstrated little concern for the motivations or conditions of workers in the factory (Gordon 1985). Problems with absenteeism, discipline, or low productivity on the shop floor were initially interpreted by employers as evidence that individual workers were either irresponsible or still unaccustomed to factory time and discipline. Similarly, complaints about poor working conditions or low wages were viewed as an unavoidable and temporary part of the early stages of industrialization as people left their agrarian communities and flooded into the urban industrial centers. Workers’ ties to families or rural communities were regarded neither as an analogy for labor-management relations, nor as an impediment to acquiring the right skills and attitudes; rather they were viewed as fulfilling their chief function in the new economy: providing a safety-net for impoverished or unemployed workers (Kinzley 1991). Thus, in contrast to the proactive strategy of “Western learning ” directed at the emerging business classes, a laissez-fair approach was followed in relation to workers on the shop floor, with the expectation that whatever problems were in evidence would work themselves out as industrialization took off. However, by the late Meiji period (1880s–1912) increased concerns over political stability and social peace prompted a more concerted approach to managing the workforce. In the process, managerial elites began to look to the increasingly popular national ideology of the “onefamily nation,” which identified traditional kinship relations, along with such Confucian ideals as filial piety and group loyalty, as the model for defining citizenship in the national community (Gluck 1985; Minear 1970). During the late Meiji era, official company ideologies increasingly emphasized the importance of managers and workers forming a unified entity dedicated to the common goal of national strength and international respect. Influential government figures and business leaders increasingly made reference to the “beautiful custom of master-servant relations based firmly on a spirit of sacrifice and compassion,” partly to justify their authority, and partly to justify their opposition to government legislation intended to regulate working conditions (Garon 1987; Gordon 1985, 1998a). Thus, although not yet a full-blown strategy for coping with the particular dilemmas of institutional adaptation, the late Meiji era did witness the first attempts to invent and deploy a set of traditions in order to promote labor peace, productivity, and discipline in the workplace. With the intensification of labor unrest in the Taisho period (1912–26), a more concerted and deliberate project would crystallize for the purpose of invoking models of past social relations to deter adversarial unionism and elicit worker cooperation and commitment. Although

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Japan’s GNP and workforce had increased dramatically after the turn of the century, the end of World War I brought with it a sudden drop in demand and a sharp decline in the real wages of most workers (most vividly manifested in the rice riots of 1918). These difficulties, combined with the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and efforts to expand political participation in the spirit of “Taisho Democracy,” produced a significantly more turbulent environment for industrial managers. The number of independent unions quadrupled, the number of industrial strikes went up ten-fold between 1914 and 1919, and even the more cooperative labor federations (for example, Yuaikai, the Friendship Association) began to act more independently and assertively (Garon 1987; Kinzley 1991). The growing threat of labor unrest and independent unionism prompted the increasingly better educated and experienced managers to search for a more proactive strategy for promoting workplace harmony than they had previously thought necessary. It was in this context that employers and managers began to invoke traditional Japanese familism—rather than the “beautiful custom” of master-apprentice relations—as an explicit model for workplace social relations: within the “one-family nation,” there was now the “one-family company,” a supposedly tightly knit group headed by a benevolent manager dedicated to the well-being of his company, his nation, and his “children.” One ardent advocate of this ideal, Goto Shimpei, lectured to railroad workers: “I preach that all railroad workers should help and encourage one another as though they were members of one family. A family should follow the orders of the family head and, in doing what he expects of them, always act for the honor and benefit of the family” (Marshall 1967: 72). Following the lead of the “National Railways family,” other self-proclaimed “family firms” quickly proliferated throughout Japanese industry, including the “Nihon Steel Pipe family” and the “one mine, one family” in the mining sector (Hazama 1997: 12–13). While some have interpreted the new managerial familism as a real effort to replicate and institutionalize status relations found in Tokugawa-era merchant shops (Hazama 1997), revisionist historians have dismissively characterized it as an “invented tradition” intended to manipulate workers and control the conflicts typical of early industrialization everywhere (Gordon 1998a). But, both perspectives converge on what is the essential point here: that managerial elites were now explicitly attempting to battle for the loyalty and cooperation of workers and, in the process, were consciously invoking models of authority relations derived from familiar collective entities, in this case the traditional household. However, from the point of view of most employees in the family firm, the only aspect of the family analogy that was actually manifested


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on the shop floor turned out to be the parallel between factory discipline and obedience to the household head. In every other respect, the largescale factory hardly resembled the traditional household. The workers hailed from very different regions and social backgrounds, white-collar and blue-collar tasks were sharply distinguished, work was characterized by narrowly specified tasks in separate workshops, and managers were seldom visible on the shop floor. Most significantly, driven by the need to retain the services of employees whose skills were still in scarce supply, and to prevent their participation in unions, managerial elites selectively offered job security, seniority-based wages and generous welfare benefits to a narrow stratum of the workforce (Garon 1987). From the point of view of most full-time workers, however, this practice only served to magnify the long-standing frustrations of most workers, signifying not membership but exclusion from the family firm. That is, the rhetoric of the family firm only appeared to justify the status, authority, and rewards of superiors without concretely institutionalizing their paternalistic obligations to subordinates in the “family” even if they were loyal and diligent. This incongruity between the ideal of the family firm and the reality of the workplace was further intensified by the propagation of Taylorist scientific management practices in the 1920s–30s. By the end of World War I, Japan National Railways, at the same time that it was adopting the family firm ideal, became one of the first companies to incorporate scientific management principles in a comprehensive manner, with the full-blown rationalization of planning and production based on standardized parts, task-specific production schedules, and detailed record keeping (Tsutsui 1998). Throughout Japan, managers increasingly sought to promote a higher degree of specialization with more narrowly defined tasks and more explicit linkages between output and wages. Occupational specialization and work schedules were taken to the level of the individual employee; work-groups that had been the fundamental unit within the hierarchically organized enterprise simply became an aggregate of individual employees, each with specific tasks to perform. Wage practices influenced by Taylorism further accentuated the differences between most workers and the employees earning seniority-based salaries—although even these employees were now being evaluated on the basis of their individual performance (Cole 1979: 109). Most managers rationalized the introduction of Taylorist methods by asserting that the basic thrust of scientific management—with its implications for reducing wasted time and effort and for improving productivity and output—was more or less compatible with the spirit of cooperation and mutual sacrifice associated with the family firm ideal

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(Tsutsui 1998: 68–9). However, in practice, without an organized labor movement to check their power, most managers were content to simply imitate existing scientific management practices, invoking the family firm only in the realm of ideology to deter labor unrest and preserve industrial peace. Although new proposals were floated in the late 1930s for reforming the wage system and extending employment guarantees to all regular employees, the period of wartime mobilization only brought with it a more extensive reliance on piece-rate wages and efficiency-oriented scientific management practices. Ultimately, these contradictions, and the confusion and frustration they engendered for the workforce, were left unexamined as an increasingly militarized Japanese state took over the reigns of industry and deployed its considerable coercive powers to co-opt trade unions, restrict turnover, and improve discipline. Thus, although prewar managerial elites did come to recognize that Japanese industrial relations would have to take into account aspects of Japanese history, they opted to restrict representations of that history to their own official ideology. In doing so, they relied upon an appeal to “tradition” identified solely with the intractable and simplified model of familism. While such general notions as benevolent authority and group loyalty may have resonated with many workers, the family firm model failed to capture the size, diversity, and complexity of the large-scale enterprise and was strained by the heavy borrowing of Taylorist principles of scientific management. Without any countervailing measures to signify reciprocity or common membership within an increasingly differentiated and stratified institution, the net effect was to exacerbate the gap between the formal and informal dimensions of institutional life and to set the stage for a period of intense labor militancy once the coercive apparatus of the militarized Japanese state was taken out of the equation during the postwar Occupation period. The Emergence of Syncretism: Japanese “Human Relations” in Historical Perspective Defeat in World War II became a critical juncture in the evolution of Japanese industrial management, but did not entail a total rejection of the past. Immediately following the end of the war, the Allied Occupation’s banning of prewar nationalist symbols, the removal of the old zaibatsu directors, new labor laws legalizing unions, as well as the growing size and militancy of the labor movement—all led to unprecedented pressures


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on managerial elites to reconsider the foundations of labor relations. However, the fact that the Occupation authorities in 1947–48 turned their attention from remaking Japanese society to guarding against the spread of communism meant that there was an opportunity to devise a new strategy for building factory authority despite the size and assertiveness of the newly empowered trade union movement. It is in the process of negotiating the postwar social compact and addressing anew the question of the “past” that a syncretic managerial formula eventually began to take shape across the large-scale firms in postwar Japan. The influence of foreign management ideals and practices continued to be a part of the story. Just as Taylorism had shaped managerial discourse and practice in prewar Japanese firms, so did the emerging doctrine of “human relations”—most closely identified with Elton Mayo and his followers (Mayo 1945; McGregor 1960)—influence Japanese managers in the 1950s–70s (Tsutsui 1998; Warner 1994). However, in contrast to the direct emulation of scientific management principles in the prewar years, the appropriation of human relations in postwar Japan involved a significantly greater degree of adaptation and refinement. To some extent, this is because the idea of human relations itself was vague and had not been associated with any specific injunctions or principles of management in the United States. But this vagueness also enabled managerial elites in Japan to appropriate the idea in a distinctive manner, linking the postwar drive for productivity to the emergent discourse of “Japanese national character” (Nihonjinron) that took the place of the discredited prewar ideology of the “one-family nation” (Chapman 1991; Yoshino 1992). Within the context of industry, the discourse of national character provided a broader foundation for a peculiarly Japanese conception of human relations which suggested that productivity depended on a distinctively Japanese work ethic that combined a strong sense of reciprocal obligations, interdependence, and above all, common membership and purpose within the company community. In effect, postwar human relations continued to emphasize collective identification and workplace harmony, but in contrast to the prewar managerial emphasis on obedience and employee dependence in the context of familistic paternalism, the postwar paradigm emphasized the virtues of “teamwork,” with a greater emphasis on reciprocity in superior-subordinate relations and a more inclusive definition of membership in the company community (Cole 1979: 249). At least as significant is the fact that this emergent view of human relations was given concrete significance on the shop floor through new employment practices and a more innovative approach to work organization.5 By the mid-1950s, a newly unified conservative leadership,

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supported by moderate elements in business and labor, had been able to engineer a new social compact that involved a commitment from employers and unions to preserve employment levels in large firms even during rationalization, offer livelihood-based wage increases tied partly to seniority and increases in overall productivity, and institutionalize consultation with enterprise unions in setting wage increases and establishing new methods of work organization (Garon and Mochizuki 1993; Gao 1997; Gordon 1993; Kume 1998).6 While these new terms of employment may have originally been the product of a negotiated process, they came to acquire a normative significance that would survive many turning points in political and economic life over the next three decades. It is this normative significance that is of interest here. While many of the large prewar factories had begun to offer longterm employment guarantees to select employees as early as the 1920s, during the 1950s, “lifetime” employment was finally extended to all grades of regular employees, regardless of their skill-sets, educational backgrounds, or the kinds of jobs performed. Although this guarantee was nowhere officially stipulated on employment contracts, permanent employment rapidly became a standard and widespread management practice throughout large-scale firms in postwar Japan. It is significant that even during times of economic turmoil, the rate of employment reduction in Japanese companies was significantly lower than the reduction in the rate of production, especially by comparison to the labor force reductions in Western societies experiencing similar economic difficulties (Kume 1998). During the recession of the mid1970s, when some companies were forced into cutting their payrolls, employers attempted to resolve their difficulties through a wide range of other cost-cutting measures before attempting to lay off any of the regular employees; and as soon as the recession ended the practice of permanent employment was immediately reinstated, and in some cases, even extended to cover new categories of employees (Rohlen 1979). For their part, the vast majority of workers had long sought greater employment security, and they responded to the practice of lifetime employment by electing continued service within the same company in lieu of potentially higher earnings with another company (Cole 1979). Similarly, although the principle of seniority-based wages was already in evidence among a select group of employees in prewar firms, it was only during the 1950s that this principle was systematically institutionalized through standard wage practices. Certainly, militant labor unions played a key role by aggressively pushing for non-output wage bills linked to the livelihood of workers, that is, for equal-pay-for-equal-age


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(Kumazawa 1996). In the end, the postwar settlement reflected a compromise whereby a linkage was established between increased productivity and seniority-based wages; even though the total company wage bill was to correspond to the total output of the firm, the wage increases for individuals consisted mainly of automatic rewards for seniority with only a small percentage of the increase reserved for merit considerations. Moreover, a regularized system of annual wage bargaining (shunto) was established to negotiate regular, systematic increments within a given firm in accordance with limits established in consultation with government and industry leaders. Thus, even if merit-based incentives continued to be invoked to spur productivity (Kumazawa 1996; Price 1997), the new wage practices and wage bargaining process represented a dramatic shift away from management practices during the 1910s–30s and came to acquire a legitimacy that lasted into the 1980s despite changing economic and political circumstances.7 Alongside employment guarantees and the new wage practices, cooperative enterprise unionism became the third distinctive component of the postwar employment system. It is still unclear whether enterprise unions ever gave voice to the independent interests of most workers, but at least in contrast to the prewar years, the unions managed to exert some independent influence in day-to-day production administration, and to a lesser extent, in the aforementioned annual wage bargaining sessions (Allinson 1975; Pempel and Tsunekawa 1979). More importantly, in contrast to the prewar years when privileged white-collar personnel generally stayed out of unions, virtually all employees in a given company, regardless of rank, skill or status, were regarded as equal members of the company union (Levine 1966). Thus, while enterprise unionism may not have provided the basis for meaningful workplace participation or genuine labor incorporation as some have suggested (Nitta 1988; Nakamura 1997), it did serve the purpose of making the company the focus of labor-management relations while creating a greater sense of common purpose among different categories of employees and bringing concrete gains for most workers in exchange for their cooperation.8 Further signifiers of membership in the company community would become apparent in the course of important transformations in work organization. It is true that such concepts as job redesign and quality control (QC) originally appeared in American management discourse during the 1940s–50s, particularly in the work of such management gurus as W. Edwards Deming. However, it is significant, that these ideas had a much more powerful impact in concrete aspects of Japanese work organization than they had in American workplaces, with organizations

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such as the Japan Productivity Center and the Japan Union of Scientists and Engineers systematically linking the new organizational precepts to the distinctive managerial ethos identified with Japanese human relations (Tsutsui 1998). Job redesign pointed to a move away from the individual-centered job descriptions, performance evaluations, and incentive schemes still prevalent among Western firms; instead, there emerged a less specialized division of labor in which job descriptions were left vague, job boundaries became fluid, and job rotation and small group activities became intrinsic components of the production process (Dore 1973; Rohlen 1976). The production process was restructured so as to expand the range and variety of tasks for individual employees and establish collective responsibility among work groups for sets of production tasks (Cole 1979, 1989). The rapid expansion of “off-the-job” training and job rotation schemes further weakened the one-to-one correspondence between individual skill packages and workplace tasks, enabling workers to acquire a range of abilities (including white-collar skills) and a greater sense of involvement in the production process as a whole (Koike 1987). Work practices also incorporated small-groupism, most famously through the widespread use of QC circles. Between 1964 and 1978, the number of QC circles went from just 1,000 to 87,000, incorporating about 80 percent of all workers in firms with more than 5,000 employees (Cole 1979: 137; Koike 1987: 291). While the initiative for the spread of small group activities undoubtedly came from above, it is nonetheless significant that the QC movement in Japan involved a high rate of participation among workers despite employment security, guaranteed wage increases linked to seniority, expanded opportunities for labor mobility, and the reduction in coercive controls in the workplace. The net result of these practices was to make the work group, rather than the individual, the unit of responsibility and evaluation, while small-group activities and the blurring of job boundaries enabled individuals—blue-collar and white-collar alike—to experience a great deal more variety, challenge, and responsibility in their jobs than was previously possible under the Taylorist system of factory administration in the 1920s–30s (Cole 1989; Koike 1994; Sako 1994). Moreover, the retreat from individualized task-specialization dovetailed quite nicely with the postwar managerial ideal of human relations, involving more employees in different aspects of the production process and establishing concrete linkages between individuals and work-groups through which cooperation and teamwork could be given some real meaning. And, significantly,


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long before the concepts of “post-Fordism” or “lean production” had become ingrained in Western managerial discourse, many of the features associated with these terms were already in evidence through Japanese industry, producing a creative linkage between productivity, job diversity, group organization, and the broader ethos associated with Japanese human relations. Thus, the collective significance of these features lay not in the presumed requirements of novel production technologies but in the innovative adaptation of the American fusion of Taylorism and human relations; the Japanese variant of the latter ended up involving a significant retreat from the former while simultaneously meeting the requirements of industrial production and providing a template for rendering emergent practices meaningful and fair in terms of normative templates evident in past communities of work. Historical Legacies and the Uses of History: Prewar and Postwar Firms Compared For the purposes of this chapter, the differences between prewar and postwar Japanese firms lie not in specific management ideologies or practices, but in the particular manner in which managerial elites in each period understood the relevance attached by workers to pre-existing understandings of work and authority (see figure 6.1). Thus, a systematic diachronic comparison requires at least a brief consideration of the nature of work and authority prior to the arrival of the industrial firm in modernizing Japan. Prior to the nineteenth century, agrarian work was almost entirely regulated by the Tokugawa village hamlet (the mura). Like agrarian communities anywhere, the mura was a quintessential corporate entity that distinguished between insiders and outsiders and had a strong sense of shared identity rooted in the concrete contexts of everyday social interaction. Common membership was signified by the right of all households to participate in annual cycles of rituals (quite unlike the Indian village community where particular caste groups were barred from particular kinds of gatherings), and all households had certain rights (e.g. to use common pastures and to claim assistance in times of unusual hardship) as well as certain obligations (e.g. to contribute to the village’s tax obligations and participate in the traditional exchange of free labor among neighbors) as members of the community. At the same time, status and reputation depended not on the individual and his/her achievements but on the rank of the household which, in turn, pointed

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Prewar Japan (1910s–30s) Traditionalism and Emulation with Relatively Low Factory Authority

Postwar Japan (1950s–70s) Managerial Syncretism with Relatively Authority High Factory

• Ideology emphasizes loyalty, obedience,

• “Human relations” brings shift from

and paternalism within the context of the “family firm,” linked to “one-family nation.” • Initially, no employment guarantees or

salaries; later, “permanent employment” and systematic seniority-based wages and benefits, but exclusion of most “regular” workers. • Work organization modeled after

Western factories, with influence of Taylorism in late 1920s; output linked to group earnings, but individualized skills and tasks, and performance evaluations introduced widely. • Social relations extremely hierarchical

and stratified, formally and informally, with authoritarian managers, and sharp divisions in rights, reward structures, and social status; little to symbolize common membership among regular workers.

rigid “family” model to more diffuse collectivism related to teamwork, reciprocity and joint membership. • Post-1955 employment and wage

practices provide informal employment guarantees and seniority-based pay raises and profit-sharing bonuses to all regular employees in large firms. • Work-organization moves away from

Taylorism, with emphasis on collective responsibility for completion of tasks, along with “job enlargement,” and diffusion of skills through QC circle activities and learning through jobrotation. • Social relations: hierarchical authority accompanied by greater sense of common membership; social distance between white-collar and blue-collar workers partially reduced by joint involvement in enterprise union and quality control.

Figure 6.1 Ideology and Organization in the Japanese Firm

to different obligations and duties taken on by households of different ranks. The result may be viewed as a conditional hierarchy in which those with wealth and power received the cooperation and respect of others as long as they displayed the paternalistic benevolence that was expected of them (Smith 1988). This expectation of paternalistic benevolence substituted for more elaborate mechanisms in other peasant communities designed to maintain the subsistence threshold by redistributing risks and resources (for example, in Russia, where land was periodically redistributed according to changing needs and circumstances). While these features of agrarian life did not prevent social conflict or peasant rebellion, it is significant that rural unrest in Tokugawa Japan was usually propelled not by participants’ commitment to some universal sense


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of justice but by their frustrations over unmet expectations of benevolence on the part of prosperous elders in times of difficulty (Scheiner 1998). Not all features of past agrarian communities are relevant to understanding workers’ responses to their experiences in a large-scale factory. Indeed, preindustrial communities and industrial firms vary considerably in their objectives and their levels of technology and organizational complexity. However, what can and did affect labor relations in the course of Japanese industrialization are the particular set of norms and practices that previously regulated the rights and obligations of those in positions of authority, the distribution of responsibilities and rewards among members of a community, and the diffuse sense of unity and common membership that accompanied understandings of membership even in the most stratified communities. Norms and practices that spoke to these general imperatives of collective life are portable across levels of technology and modes of production, and did have an impact on generalized understandings of the rights and duties of individuals occupying different positions in hierarchical structures. This is most clearly evident in the articulation of workers’ demands at various points during the twentieth century: Although labor unrest grew steadily between 1880 and 1920, it is important to note that the claims made by workers were typically couched not as an assertion of their natural rights or as a rejection of the customs of benevolent paternalism touted by managers, but rather as petitions beseeching the latter to honor their obligations as superiors and respect workers’ “right to benevolence” (Smith 1988: 239). During the 1920s, even militant labor union activists recognized that rank-and-file workers were unconcerned with labor codes and were prepared to respond to aspects of the managerial rhetoric that stressed the benevolent treatment of workers in exchange for their obedience; what workers decried was the fact that it was being trumpeted solely as an ideology, with no concrete measures to signify the kind of social exchange suggested by the ideology (Hazama 1997: 65–6; Gordon 1998a: 36). Even in postwar Japan, while Japanese workers were not uniquely loyal or diligent, as some naive portrayals of Japanese industrial culture have suggested (Abegglen 1958), evidence gathered by studies attempting to dispel myths about the uniqueness of Japanese workers’ attitudes indicate that they were significantly more comfortable with notions of benevolent authority and reciprocal obligations, and with highly diffuse, personalized relations with colleagues and superiors than workers elsewhere (Lincoln and Kalleberg 1990: 64–5). None of this suggests that past norms and practices embedded in the mura would determine the attitudes and behaviors of workers for all

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generations, but it does suggest that some of these norms and practices can be, and often were, translated by actors attempting to make sense of their environment and to improve their lot in a previously unfamiliar institutional setting. These observations, however tentative, do suggest that the problem with managerial ideology in prewar Japan was not so much its emphasis on tradition, but rather the specific features of tradition that were emphasized in the workplace and the extent to which these were concretely institutionalized in formal organizational routines and practices. In prewar Japan, the particular definition and articulation of tradition was nowhere near as effective as in the case of postwar Japan. Although prewar managerial elites did come to take labor relations seriously and recognized the potential uses of traditional ideals in the workplace, they ultimately forfeited their opportunity at enhancing their moral authority. In part, this was because prewar managerial ideology relied on a tradition identified solely with the intractable and simplified model of familism, a model that not only failed to capture the size, diversity, and complexity of the large-scale enterprise but also failed to cohere with concrete management practices influenced heavily by the Taylorist model of scientific management. While such general notions as benevolent authority and group loyalty may have resonated with many workers, to lend substance to these notions would have required a standardized set of employment practices that could symbolize common membership and some degree of reciprocity in the obligations of superiors and subordinates. Instead, the family firm model ended up being invoked primarily to proclaim the unconditional authority of superiors, with no countervailing measures to signify reciprocity or common membership within an increasingly differentiated and stratified institution. By contrast, postwar managerial elites—certainly spurred to some extent by increased labor militancy and new legal and institutional reforms imposed by the Allied Occupation—gravitated towards a more refined, leaner view of tradition. This view was nested in the broader cultural discourse of Japanese national character and emphasized a more limited, more flexible, and more adaptable vision of past forms of cooperative work. The Japanese appropriation of the Western concept of human relations, rather than stress obedience and uniformity as in the case of the prewar rendition of the family firm, emphasized the logic of cooperation among distinct units that were related through interdependence, reciprocal obligations, and voluntary membership in the “company community.” This conception of community was consistent with the size, complexity, and objectives of the postwar firm, but it also


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cohered with innovative modifications of new Western managerial doctrines that could be reinterpreted as the recrystallization of more familiar norms and structures (Cole 1979: 24). It is in this sense that the postwar Japanese firm may be considered a successful case of managerial syncretism, producing a distinctive system of industrial management that endured for more than three decades. Conclusion: The Distinctive Logic of Institutional Syncretism The argument offered recognizes the importance of local variations in social norms and relations, but does not assume historical inheritances to be unchanging forces that determine the behavior of actors in particular institutional settings. At the same time, the past is not infinitely malleable, and there are limits to what kinds of appeals to tradition are likely to be fruitful in a given institutional context. In fact, much depends on how different generations of local actors have understood and invoked the past in the course of negotiating stable understandings and constructing coherent systems of authority. The framework articulated here is concerned with how these differential understandings of the past are translated into new institutional settings by actors with different motives, resources, and reference groups. In the particular case of the industrial enterprise, workers recruited from surrounding communities do not enter factories as blank slates upon which roles and identities can be inscribed by their superiors; they enter with their own conceptions, both normative and practical, of how tasks, rewards, and rights to issue commands ought to be distributed and justified, based largely on an intuitive sense of the characteristics that made previous communities of work moral and viable. Managers, for their part, seek to replicate the performance of established successful industrial firms, and also seek to avoid the conflicts and tensions that accompanied early industrialization in the West. How they adapt, interpret, and justify the practices they seek to institutionalize is critical to gauging whether and how workers will learn to regard as legitimate the goals, practices, and authority claims asserted by managers. Given the widely acknowledged success of postwar Japanese firms in engineering high levels of productivity and social peace during the 1950s–70s, it is not surprising that the sources, distinctiveness, and achievements of Japanese industrial management have held a prominent place in debates over management strategies and institutional innovation.

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The argument here challenges, but partly borrows from, contending narratives that privilege the role of either culture, power, markets, or technology. Cultural arguments about the sources of postwar Japanese industrial peace (Abegglen 1958; Hazama 1997; Morishima 1982; Rohlen 1976) emphasize the functionality and continuity of paternalistic practices and harmonious social relations dating back to preindustrial households and communities; however, such arguments acknowledge neither significant changes in Japanese managerial practices and employee commitment over time, nor significant episodes of industrial conflict that have occurred at various points throughout the twentieth century. Explanations that focus on the development of labor markets in the course of industrialization (Marsh and Mannari 1976; Taira 1970) or the later evolution of new technologies and production systems (Kenney and Florida 1993; Womack et al. 1990) do well to challenge the explanatory power of cultural uniqueness and to draw attention to certain similarities in employment practices and work organization across societies with similar levels of technology; however, these accounts can account for neither the peculiarity of Japanese employment practices dating back to the 1950s, nor the extremely low rates of separation and turnover compared to many other economies undergoing similar transformations. Critical perspectives (Gordon 1993, 1998a; Ichiro 1976; Kumazawa 1996; Price 1997) challenge both of these views, question the motives of Japanese managers and note the strategic value of exaggerating the degree of industrial harmony; however, these approaches do not offer convincing explanations for the relatively low level of industrial conflict since the 1950s, the steady improvements in working conditions, or increased commitment and productivity demonstrated by workers in the postwar period.9 The interpretation offered on the emergence of postwar managerial syncretism selectively borrows from each of these perspectives while also seeking to identify common observations noted in more nuanced and differentiated treatments of Japanese labor. These include works that emphasize the significance and partial adaptability of cultural and ideological notions across time and space (Cole 1979; Gao 1997; Hofstede 1980; Lincoln and Kalleberg 1990); the relevance of foreign management models and the debates spurred by them (Tsutsui 1998; Warner 1994); the alternative modes for organizing work and managing human resources within similarly productive systems of industrial production (Aoki and Dore 1994; Cole 1979; Dore 1973; Koike 1994; Sako 1994); and the existence of genuine conflict alongside serious efforts to negotiate meaningful compromises and understandings (Allinson 1975; Garon and Mochizuki 1993; Kume 1998; Nakamura 1997; Nitta 1988). Thus,


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the culture of labor is neither seen as a coherent, fixed set of specific norms and attitudes, nor treated as so malleable as to be inconsequential for the character of labor markets and the adoption of new management practices in postwar Japan. At the same time, the emergence of a new managerial approach to reconciling borrowed managerial practices and preexisting local notions of work and community would not have been possible without the intense conflicts between labor and management in the late 1940s over basic material issues such as wages, employment security, and working conditions. While new technologies of production and the requirements of a changing global economy were partly responsible for catapulting the Japanese model of management to international prominence during the 1970s–80s, it should not be forgotten that the most distinctive organizational ideals and practices evident in large-scale Japanese firms and factories were being considered in the 1930s and had already come to be widespread by the late 1950s, long before notions of lean production or post-Fordism had entered managerial discourse in the United States and Europe. In this way, the historical comparisons and argument about managerial syncretism constitute an eclectic treatment of Japanese labor relations. Beyond seeking to negotiate competing strands in Japanese studies, the interpretation developed above also supports the broader argument offered in this volume that, all other things being equal, institutionbuilders are likely to achieve more viable and coherent institutions where they consciously seek to syncretize portable legacies of preexisting communities with the adaptable features of institutional models. The actual content of the strategy may vary across particular contexts, but as a general approach to managing the competing influences of inherited legacies and borrowed models, a syncretist approach holds the most promise for the construction of cohesive, authoritative institutions. The logic that makes the argument about syncretism generalizable across historical and institutional contexts is adapted from Eckstein’s (1966) work which notes the importance of “congruence” across authority patterns in local and national institutions, and the dangers of “strain” when individuals are exposed to conflicting role expectations. I suggest that sharp incongruities between the formal and informal dimensions of institutional life are likely to negatively affect the perceptions of subordinates toward their institutional environments, and consequently, of the authority of superordinates and the legitimacy of the commands they issue. Moreover, as suggested in findings in organizational psychology (Baum 1990; Furnam and Bochner 1986; Hirschhorn 1988), while rewards and sanctions certainly affect the behavior of individuals in a

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firm or organization, there is also a strong sense of anxiety that subordinates might develop in new organizational environments featuring new practices and new structures of authority. This anxiety predisposes them toward reconstructing more familiar and reassuring social practices within the informal dimensions of organizational life, again negatively affecting the pursuit of official organizational agendas. In the context of industrial enterprises in late-developers, this latter dynamic is likely to be even more pronounced among the workforce than is generally the case in bureaucratic organizations for the simple reason that the rapid introduction of new structures of work and authority is likely to heighten anxiety and cognitive dissonance, thereby increasing the payoffs of preserving familiar understandings whenever and wherever possible. This does not in any way suggest that material incentives and sanctions will be irrelevant; it only suggests that workers will be affected by the extent to which the formal system of incentives and sanctions are made intelligible in terms of the more familiar norms and practices that have customarily governed the distribution of tasks, rewards, and obligations in preexisting local communities. Such an argument explicitly challenges views of firms and organizations that assume a singular correspondence between a given technology of production, a particular set of organizational practices, and the standard motivations of subordinates, from Taylor’s own principles of scientific management (1974 [1911]) to theories of industrial convergence (Kerr et al. 1960, Inkeles and Smith 1974) and more recently, models of employment relations linked to the imperatives of lean production and globalization (Womack et al. 1990; Kenney and Florida 1993; Katz and Darbishire 1999). The argument in favor of managerial syncretism builds instead upon a long-standing tradition of industrial sociology that has documented how historical inheritances, political struggles, contending worldviews, and international pressures combine to produce significant variations in the distribution of power, status, rewards, and responsibilities within similar organizations employing similar technologies (Bendix 1974 [1956]; Dore 1973; Rueschemeyer 1986; Sabel 1982; Thomas 1994). The social dynamics accompanying the making of factory authority in Japan suggests that sustainable institution-building in developing societies requires more than the adjustment of positive and negative sanctions for individual subordinates, and more than the deployment of an invented tradition to provide rhetorical support for borrowed practices. It requires an awareness of the social norms and principles that can flow from local communities into the informal realms of newly imported institutions and a willingness to adapt the formal rules and


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procedures to reduce the potential discrepancies ordinary actors will face in responding to competing normative prescriptions and role expectations. This may be a messy and contested process, but it does lie at the heart of the dilemma of institutional adaptation which, in turn, is a core aspect of such sweeping transformative processes as industrialization, modernization, and now, globalization. Notes This chapter borrows from and builds upon an argument initially developed as part of a broader comparative-historical study (Sil 2002). In formulating this version of the argument, I have benefited from comments and suggestions offered by Sheldon Garon, Ian Lustick, Dani Miodownik, Gilbert Rozman, Chuck Weathers, as well as participants of the Workshop on History, Rationality, and Agency in Social Science, sponsored by the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy and the Center for Historical Social Science, Columbia University (April 16, 2002). I am also grateful to Tadashi Anno and Mari Miura for inviting me to present the argument at a seminar of the Sophia University Program Towards Area-Based Global Studies (AGLOS), Tokyo (May 21, 2004). 1. “Formal” practices and ideological precepts are defined by institutional elites so as to establish the responsibilities of their subordinates and elicit their willing compliance in the execution of assigned tasks deemed crucial to the achievement of institutional objectives. The “informal” realm refers to the spontaneously formed norms and understandings among subordinates, often adapted from the wider communities from which the latter are recruited. The importance of the formal-informal distinction has long been acknowledged by organization theorists in the context of articulating the potential difficulties for elites created by subordinates who cannot be continuously supervised and monitored by superiors (Barnard 1938; Burawoy 1979; Mechanic 1962; Selznick 1949; Simon 1957). 2. This definition is adapted from Weber’s (1978: 946) more general understanding of “domination by virtue of authority.” 3. Note that the analysis of the postwar era does not extend beyond 1980, by which time Japanese managerial elites were primarily in the business of exporting a “Japanese model” of management rather than adapting Western models. 4. The chapter will not go into details concerning these trends, as they have been noted in both positive characterizations of postwar Japanese industrial relations (Cole 1979; Kume 1998) as well as more critical treatments (Gordon 1993, 1998b; Kumazawa 1996). See Sil (2002) for a more detailed discussion of the indications of factory authority in prewar and postwar Japan. 5. Given the focus of this article on complex, large-scale enterprises, the discussion of postwar labor relations is necessarily limited to regular full-time employees in large firms. 6. Garon and Mochizuki (1993) point to the protracted strikes at Mitsui’s Miike mines in 1959–60 as evidence that this compromise was not immediately adhered to, but they also note that the eventual resolution of the strike served to strengthen the postwar compact over the next two decades. 7. In any case, in the Japanese context, “merit” typically incorporated such factors as a demonstrated commitment to company goals and the ability to work cooperatively with peers (Gordon 1993). 8. Both positive and critical treatments of postwar labor relations converge on this point. Compare, for example, the interpretations in Levine (1966) and Pempel and Tsunekawa (1979) with those in Gordon (1998b, chapter 8) and Kumazawa (1996, chapter 3).

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9. Fruin (1978) reviews competing approaches to the Japanese firm through the 1970s. For a broader discussion of the various axes of debate in Japanese industrial history, see Sil (2002, Appendix B).

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Marshall, Byron. 1967. Capitalism and Nationalism in Pre-War Japan: The Ideology of the Business Elite: 1868–1941. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mayo, Elton. 1945. The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization. Cambridge: Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University. McGregor, Douglas. 1960. The Human Side of Enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mechanic, David. 1962. “Sources of Power of Lower Participants in Complex Organization.” Administrative Science Quarterly 7, 4 (December): 349–64. Merkle, Judith. 1980. Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press. Minear, Richard. 1970. Japanese Tradition and Western Law: Emperor, State and Law in the Thought of Hozumi Yatsuka. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Morishima, Michio. 1982. Why Has Japan ‘Succeeded’? Western Technology and the Japanese Ethos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nakamura, Keisuke. 1997. “Worker Participation: Collective Bargaining and Joint Consultation,” in Japanese Labour and Management in Transition: Diversity, Flexibility, and Participation. Mari Sako and Hiroki Sato, eds. New York: Routledge. Nitta, Michio. 1988. Nihon no rodosha sanka [Worker Participation in Japan]. Tokyo: Tokyo University Press. Noguchi, Yukio. 1995. 1940-nen taisei: saraba ‘senji keizai’ [The 1940 System: Farewell to a Wartime Economy]. Tokyo: Toyo keizai shimpo. North, Douglas. 1998. “Economic Performance Through Time,” in The New Institutionalism in Sociology. Mary Brinton and Victor Nee, eds. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Reprint of 1993 Acceptance Speech for the Nobel Prize in Economics. Stockholm, Sweden. Ohashi, Isao. 1993. “On the Determinants of Bonuses and Basic Wages in Large Japanese Firms,” in The Business Enterprise in Japan. Kenichi Imai and Ryutaro Komiya, eds. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pempel, T.J. and Kiichi, Tsunekawa. 1979. “Corporatism without Labor? The Japanese Anomaly,” in Trends Toward Corporatist Intermediation. Philippe Schmitter and Gerhard Lehmbruch, eds. Beverly Hills: Sage Publishers. Price, John. 1997. Japan Works: Power and Paradox in Postwar Industrial Relations. Ithaca: ILR Press/Cornell University Press. Rohlen, Thomas. 1976. For Harmony and Strength: Japanese White-Collar Organization in An Anthropological Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1979. “ ‘ermanent Employment’ Faces Recession, Slow Growth, and an Aging Work Force.” Journal of Japanese Studies 5, 2 (Summer): 235–72. Rueschemeyer, Dietrich. 1986. Power and the Division of Labor. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sabel, Charles. 1982. Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sako, Mari. 1994. “Training, Productivity, and Quality Control in Japanese Multinational Corporations,” in The Japanese Firm. Aoki and Dore, eds. New York: Oxford University Press. Scheiner, Irwin. 1998. “The Japanese Village: Imagined, Real, Contested,” in Mirror of Modernity. Stephen Vlasos, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Selznick, Philip. 1949. TVA and Grassroots. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sil, Rudra. 2002. Managing ‘Modernity’: Work, Community, and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Smith, Thomas. 1988. “The Right to Benevolence: Dignity and the Japanese Workers, 1890–1920,” in T. Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization: 1750–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press.


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Taira, Koji. 1970. Economic Development and the Labor Market in Japan. New York: Columbia University Press. Taylor, Frederick. 1974. Compiled Writings. New York: Harper. First published in 1911. Thomas, Robert. 1994. What Machines Can’t Do: Politics and Technology in the Industrial Enterprise. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tsutsui, William. 1998. Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in 20th Century Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Veblen, Thorstein. 1954. Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution. New York: Viking. Vlastos, Stephen. ed. 1998. Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Warner, Malcolm. 1994. “Japanese Culture, Western Management: Tayloriam and Human Resources in Japan.” Organization Studies 15, 4(1994): 509–33. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Womack, J., D. Jones and D. Roos. 1990. The Machine that changed the World. New York: Rawson Macmillan. Yoshino, Kosako. 1992. Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

Legal Syncretism and Family Change in Urban and Rural China Neil J. Diamant

Introduction As China attempts to transform itself into a modern superpower, much attention has focused on its effort to create a “law-based” polity and society befitting its rising international stature (Tanner 1999; Lubman 1996; Potter 1994; O’Brien 1990). United States’ criticism of China’s record on human rights notwithstanding, in China there is widespread consensus that new laws and institutions are essential in its bid to join the ranks of strong, civilized, and modern nations. Even though implementation of these laws is widely acknowledged to be spotty, China clearly intends to create a legal infrastructure congruent with its larger goal of achieving modernity. While the post-Mao legal reforms have attracted much attention, they were not the first time that Chinese governments attempted to graft onto its polity new laws and institutions. Prior to the Communist regime, the Nationalists, as part of major state-building effort, imported foreign laws and adapted foreign institutions to better regulate commerce, taxation, administration, and international relations (Strauss 1998; Kirby 1984). Even the family was no longer exempt from state modernization efforts. Prominent intellectuals and political leaders in the late 1920s and early 1930s advocated transforming the Chinese family into one similar to that in the West, or at least a highly

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commercialized (of the “Kodak moment” sort) and idealized vision of it (Glosser 1995). To Chinese intellectual elites, the connection between modernity, power, and particular family forms was obvious, requiring little explanation; the most powerful nations in the world were Western, and they, unlike China, did not permit or encourage arranged marriages, bigamy, polygamy, concubinage, or the taking of child-brides. This emulative logic resulted in the legislation of new family laws in the early 1930s under the auspices of elites in the Nationalist government (Michael 1962). The Nationalists’ main rival for political power, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), agreed with the basic causal relationship posited between certain types of family forms, modernity, and power, and used laws and new legal institutions to carry out its revolutionary agenda. Among its most ambitious laws, and one that was clearly intended to reshape society along lines that were more congruent with its revolutionary political goals, was the “Marriage Law.” Initially legislated while the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) established a “soviet” in the early 1930s, and later revised when they established control over extensive territory in North China in the late 1930s and 1940s, the Marriage Law became the law of the land in most family matters from 1950 on. It was aggressively enforced nationwide in two campaigns in 1951 and 1953, and then administratively between 1953 and 1966. Calling for the abolishment of the feudal marriage system, the Marriage Law banned arranged marriages, infanticide, intra-family marriage, concubinage, bigamy, and the exchange of money or gifts. It also established a legal age and registration for marriage, among other things. In their place, the party called for marriages to be “democratic,” based on the more modern principals of monogamy, love, free choice in marriage partners, and easier access to divorce (Meijer 1971). The manner in which marriages were contracted was seen as having direct bearing on state power. The unhappy marriages that resulted from extensive community involvement necessarily led to domestic violence, instability, low productivity and morale—hardly the stuff revolutions are made of. Needless to say, the effort to apply the laws of “modern sociology and modern science” to a population as large and complex as China’s, where marriage forms varied widely across class, ethnicity, and region, was a gargantuan task. It was an effort by elites, in the evocative concept of James Scott (1998), to render society more “legible” by simplifying it and ignoring maddening (to state builders), but often socially functional, diversity. This essay addresses the question of whether or not, and the extent to which, states can achieve these goals. I ask, to what extent can states use

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new laws and legal institutions to change the way people interact inside the family, a domain that is often considered private? Moreover, what might we learn about the interplay between state law, which simultaneously simplifies social reality (assuming that arranged marriages are all unwanted) and tries to transform it, and social reality and local understandings of what constitutes the good marriage? Regarding the Chinese case, scholars’ answers to these questions have been unequivocal. Drawing upon modernization theory that equated tradition with patriarchy and oppression, and spatially locating these in rural areas, the literature on the Marriage Law has emphasized the extent to which it was particularly ineffective in changing family dynamics among peasants. The modernist premises of the law were simply too incongruent with patriarchal rural social structure to be effective, in much the same way that the late Harry Eckstein (1961: 5–6) suggested that democracy will be highly unstable in societies in which underlying authority patterns in nongovernment organizations (such as in families) are highly authoritarian. Because the CCP captured power through a peasant revolution, its leaders capitulated to its primary constituency. Absent state legal intervention, “the Party . . . quickly retreated in the face of the inevitable conflict and traditionalist resistance that arose,” led by rural cadres who “could hardly be expected to jeopardize their most important working relationship in the village in order to push for reforms which the government itself was unwilling to support” ( Johnson 1983: 222). As a result, marriages continued to be arranged by parents, divorce was “almost nonexistent” (Honig and Hershatter 1988: 206) and the rural marriage remained basically stable. In short, the Marriage Law was “ill-fated” (Wolf 1985: 20, 25) as a force of change in rural society (also see Friedman et al. 1991; Stacey 1983). The comparative analysis of law in developing and predominantly rural societies confirms these arguments. After the French and Russian revolutions, family laws of the new regimes (legislated in 1792 and 1919 respectively) both resulted in more petitions for divorce, but these were concentrated, and overwhelmingly so, in cities (Philips 1980: 93–4; Madsen 1977: 311; Farnsworth 1985: 254, fn. 121.) and among elites in particular; peasants were barely affected. This outcome repeated itself in Turkey’s “elite” revolution. There, urbanites sued for divorce immediately after Atatürk promulgated the Swiss-inspired Family Code in 1926, but it took almost 30 years before peasants sued for divorce on the basis of the law (Starr 1989: 498). In all these cases, scholars have noted a far better fit between urban/modern (usually these are coterminous) features (higher education, easier access to courts, the absence of tight-knit


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communities, and variegated employment and residential opportunities) and a modernist family law that required people to learn about the law, go to court, separate from their spouse and his family and kinship group find a way to get by afterward. I am unaware of any social science theory that would predict peasants rather than urbanites to be the vanguard of such “progressive” social change. As much as it would seem commonsensical to link greater responsiveness to modern social change with more modern cities, new evidence from archives in urban and rural China demonstrates the exact opposite; in China peasants and rural educated people living on the urban periphery (such as migrant workers, peddlers etc.) were more interested in obtaining divorce, better able to translate these desires into action, and in the end, more successful in obtaining divorce using the Marriage Law than the most modern of the urban population, intellectuals, businessmen, and salaried workers in modern industries. In revolutionary China, lawinduced divorce was inversely related to urban status (Diamant 2000).1 This finding not only challenges much of the literature on state or lawled social change (strong rural communities are frequently associated with strong resistance, not accommodation, to state legal penetration) but also hints that there may be something distinctive about social and legal reform in China. In this chapter, I suggest that the previous literature on the law failed to anticipate such findings, in part, because there was insufficient appreciation of the boundaries and restrictions of Chinese urban modernity (especially concern over elite status, sexual prudishness, and the absence of resources) and of how certain elements within traditional rural society—most importantly land tenure arrangements, community, and cultural practices—were actually highly susceptible to syncretism with some of the key modernist premises of the Marriage Law rather than antagonistic to them. In some cases, syncreticism between parts of the law and particular social practices was conscious and intentional, as local actors purposely used the Marriage Law’s “spirit” and articles to defend themselves against abusive state behavior and to seek out new relationships. However, in many other instances, legal syncretism was unintended, contingent upon political developments and local circumstances. Unlike the case in the Japanese firms discussed in Rudra Sil’s chapter, in China state elites did not deliberately legislate modern laws and create institutions that seamlessly meshed with traditional rural practices, nor did it anticipate how political revolution (such as land reform) would shape how Chinese families would react to the law. This case demonstrates two distinct outcomes to one simplifying, modernist legal

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program: (1) in rural areas, family change resulting from syncretism (intended and unintended) between certain features of rural life and history, the modernist premises of the law, and a sociologically peasant state; (2) in city centers, a near absence of change owing to the absence of such syncretism. The argument here is not that “traditional” Chinese peasants were actually “modern” in the way they used law, or that there is a “modernity in Chinese tradition.” I also do not want to claim that urban Chinese elites were hopelessly traditional in the way they used (or did not use) law. Rather, this analysis calls attention to the usefulness of legal syncretism as a concept that focuses our attention on different degrees and types (such as intentional or unintentional) of congruence between certain elements of state law and certain slices of the cultural, economic and political practices of different segments of society, without the heavy baggage associated with the concepts of tradition or modernity or unwarranted assumptions about how certain cultures or populations may or may not be suitable for modern change. This essay is organized around three features of rural life that were blamed for the absence of rural entrepreneurship vis-à-vis the law, but which actually should be understood as rich sites of potential syncretic transformation. I focus on the impact of rural land tenure arrangements, community, and cultural practices on how the law was interpreted and used in rural areas, and draw comparisons to how elite Chinese urbanites were constrained by these features. I also compare the reaction of Chinese peasants and elites to the Marriage Law to comparable populations in other societies who were also presented with new opportunities and challenges in the form of a new family law. Land Tenure Arrangements One of the most familiar clichés concerning peasants is their close connection to the land. Peasants are often said to be “tied” to it, with all the negative baggage connoted by the verb (in societies that celebrate individual freedom associated with geographical mobility). Owing to their ties to the land, peasants are said to be unable to take advantage of freedoms enjoyed by their much less encumbered urban counterparts, such as mobility, individualization, access to good jobs, and the like. Ties to the land also result in relatively cohesive rural communities (in contrast to urban anomie, disorder etc.), since peasants cannot move very far from their plots. Such cohesiveness is also reflected in stable family relationships. According to Edward Shorter’s The Making of the


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Modern Family (1975: 3–5, 7, 47–8, 96), rural communities are characterized by “massive stability” and divorce is “virtually non-existent,” basically the same conclusion reached about the rural family in China after the end of the 1953 Marriage Law campaign. If this was the case for China as well, we might expect that there too, a modern family law based on modern notions of love and affection would not sit well with traditional village economy. If Chinese peasants are tied to the land like peasants worldwide, where could they go after divorce? Basically nowhere, according to the literature on family and community in China scholarship. “In the new society as in the old society,” argue anthropologists Jack and Sulamith Potter, “women fell between two stools, structurally speaking . . . They literally had nowhere to go after a divorce” (1990: 263). And yet, Chinese peasants divorced; in the early and late 1950s, the number of rural families experiencing divorce was actually greater than urban families. Moreover, this happened at the very same time that individual peasants gained title to their own plots during land reform.2 How can we explain this puzzle? What has been unappreciated in the secondary literatures is the extent to which China has been almost unique in its combination of synchronized implementation of political and social revolution in rural areas, led by a party with the “infrastructural power” (Mann 1993) in rural areas to implement policies, however crudely. In the urban-centered Russian, French, and Turkish revolutions, peasants did not experience a top-down effort to change rural family relations at the very same time the state dramatically altered land tenure arrangements. However, in China, peasants, and young women in particular, were radicalized by politics, and were also provided with what the legal mobilization literature (McCann 1994; Epp 1998) calls the “opportunity structure” and resources to mobilize law to change their family situation. Political campaigns, especially land reform, was, to use Peter Hall’s (1993) useful term, a “policy legacy” that powerfully shaped the outcome of the Marriage Law in rural areas. What happened during land reform in China, and what sort of policy legacies did it pass onto the Marriage Law? First, land reform was usually violent. Millions of landlords were executed after staged trials in which assembled peasants would “speak bitterness” about how they suffered at their hands. Landlords who survived this ordeal usually lost most of their land and other assets. Structurally speaking, the CCP lopped off the top of the pre-1949 rural political hierarchy and replaced it with rural officials from poor and middle peasant background. Village governments, mediation committees, and the like were staffed with (mostly male) individuals who had proven their commitment to the party but who

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otherwise had little social capital (or “face”). Nor did they have much experience dealing with legal issues. Second, land reform was a tremendous equalizer of village wealth. Landless peasants received a plot, as well as some equipment necessary to till it. How land was distributed was equally important. Rather than distributing land on a household basis, every person registered as living in the village received a title and plot in their names. Young women as well as young men were thus beneficiaries of land reform in very concrete ways. Now, and for the first time for many, they had a piece of land they could call their own. The folk understanding of the CCP was of an organization that executes, equalizes social relations and distributes things that poor peasants lacked. Finally, we should not underestimate the shift in consciousness that came with “rising up” against former elites and receiving land. In contrast to the Bolshevik Revolution, where peasants also received land but did so through a top-down decree and without much participation on their part, in China many peasants felt empowered by “speaking bitterness” and humiliating former elites in public, and felt indebted to the party that allowed them to participate so actively. Whereas in the 1950s in the Soviet Union peasants’ “memories of forced collectivization were strong and bitter” (Moore 1954: 53; also see Lewin 1968: 36; Pipes 1994), in China millions of peasants stepped across a psychological barrier that empowered them in their dealing with other community members and the state. The impact of land reform on the implementation of the Marriage Law was profound and manifold. Because land reform was more or less synchronized with the implementation of the Marriage Law, officials and peasants alike interpreted the latter through their experiences with the former. In Yunnan Province, state officials called the Marriage Law campaign a “Marriage Reform campaign.” This subtle shift in language implied a comparable time-line for family reform—and in its conception of time as well. Some figured that if land relations could be speedily reformed through land reform, why not marriage relations as well? One Marriage Law instructor was thus forced to tell local cadres, “Implementing the Marriage Law cannot be accomplished in one or two days. It’s not like land reform that has a deadline” (Chuxiong Prefectural Archives (CXA hereafter), 16–15-B1, pp. 137–8; CXA 16–3-A1, pp. 18–20). Synchronized implementation also led— quite unintentionally—to similar identification of enemies. The Marriage Law, like land reform, would target feudalism, but rather than focus on landlords as the perpetrators of the injustices of the feudal land system, it


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would target the older generation as the representatives of the unjust feudal marriage system. However, nowhere in the Marriage Law, does it state that the law targeted older Chinese. As a result of this unintended “framing” of the law’s intent, in the Shanghai suburbs people argued, “during land reform we reformed land; now we should reform grandparents,” (Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA hereafter) A71–2–1859, p. 84) and in a village in the Beijing suburbs, officials proclaimed, “in this movement grandfathers have turned into landlords!” (Beijing Municipal Archives (BMA hereafter) 84–1–32, p. 41). Mobilization methods followed this language. For instance, in a county in North China, the party executed an old woman for having driven her daughter-in-law to suicide (Tong County Archives (TCA hereafter) 7–1–4, pp. 108–9). Confronted with struggle sessions, imprisonment, and possible execution, elderly Chinese peasants frequently adopted a passive approach to their children’s marital affairs at the same time that young men and women asserted their new rights to freedom by trotting off to district governments and county courts to divorce. For example, in North China, an old woman complained, “Now it’s ‘marriage freedom’ so if my son marries a woman whose already lost her virginity, there’s nothing I can do about it. What’s the point of caring whether she gives him face and is pretty?” (TCA 1–2–31, p. 14). Another government report complained that “some old people now no longer dare try to control their children’s marital affairs. As a result, some youth get married under age, and mistakenly emphasize that this is their right of ‘marriage freedom.” (TCA 1–2–31, p. 10). However, the legacy of land reform was not limited to the selection of targets and methods of struggle; its language also shaped, in unintended ways, marriage criteria. For ordinary peasants and local officials alike, one word fused the two campaigns—fen (distribute or allocate). Because of land reform, peasants conceptualized the CCP as a distributing organization. In a similar vein, peasants and officials alike interpreted the Marriage Law as a state policy calling for the distribution of that other critical “resource” many poor male peasants lacked: women. In a village near Shanghai, for instance, a middle aged man suggested, “Those who can’t afford wives should be assigned one during the Marriage Law campaign” (SMA A71–2–1859, p. 143); in Fujian Province, an official moseyed through his village and wrote down all the names of the bachelors on one side of a page and all the widows and unmarried women on the other side. He then convened a mass meeting of all the bachelors and widows in the village and simply assigned a widow (many of executed landlords) to each bachelor. One elderly woman hobbled over to

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the township government to request that she not be “allocated” to a hunchbacked man (SMA E81–2–1856). To be sure, the concept of “distribution” was more than a metaphor. Peasant women received land, and this gave many of them a valuable bargaining chip in divorce proceedings. Either unable or uninterested in tilling land by themselves, many opted to swap their land for divorce, or else divide their plot into smaller units and give one part away. Statistical evidence from rural China clearly shows that in the early 1950s, divorces peaked during the same years land reform was implemented (CXA 17–3–41, p. 2). According to local officials I interviewed during 1994, this was largely because women received the right to land. This was true of peasants and of rural women who were temporarily residing in cities. Since the latter were still official members of their village communities, they also received land and used it to their advantage in urban courts. This “traditional” resource was unavailable to elite, modern, urban women, whose property was not as easily traded or divvied up. Moreover, women in cities did not experience the sort of violent confrontation that characterized political revolution in the countryside. We should keep in mind that Chinese cities were conquered by the hinterland-based CCP. Unlike the Bolsheviks, the CCP, owing to its rural upbringing, was antagonistic to middle and upper class urbanites; unlike Mao, Lenin and Stalin viscerally despised peasants (Meijer 1968; Pipes 1968). For instance, just prior to the implementation of the Marriage Law in cities, the CCP mounted a campaign (called the Five Antis) that confiscated the property, housing, and wealth of many urban businessmen. When the Marriage Law came along soon afterward, the businessmen interpreted it through the prism of their earlier experiences. In this case, businessmen concluded that the CCP would “confiscate” their wives and concubines, the exact opposite metaphor employed by peasants. However, in neither case was such an interpretation made explicit by law or policy; they were all unintended syncretic outcomes of a particular mode of policy implementation—the rushed campaign—and the synchronized implementation of social and political revolution. As a result, both they and their wives generally avoided state institutions and did not take advantage of new opportunities afforded to them. Given that many urban officials hailed from rural background, elite urbanites were understandably afraid of how they would handle their complicated property arrangements. In contrast, in the countryside, “the state” was essentially “peasant,” so the political and cultural divide separating “state” from “society” was not nearly as large as it was in cosmopolitan urban centers.


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Community Much like peasants’ ties to their land, their embeddedness in relatively tight-knit communities also has been said to militate against their willingness and ability to use modern state laws. Over the centuries, many rural communities developed a myriad of lineage regulations governing marriage and property, mostly reflecting the usual male concerns with patrilineal continuity and power (Fei 1997). The Marriage Law, with its liberal divorce provisions, equitable post-divorce property arrangements, and modernist emphasis on love as a necessary component of happiness in marriage, threatened traditional village customary laws and power structure; if village women could easily divorce and take their property with them, village men would lose two “resources” critical to maintaining patriarchal domination. Indeed, village-level resistance to the Marriage Law has been cited as one of the key causes of its early demise as a force for change in rural China. Such a perspective makes a good deal of sense given social science perspectives on state-building and law in the third world, which tends to portray local, semi-autonomous rural villages, customary practices, and local “strong men” as antagonistic to legal centralization (Migdal 1988). Legal scholars, for their part, have pointed out that in small communities mediation is preferred to adjudication. They argue that people who know each other tend not to sue each other; the use of courts is more common in anonymous cities (Felstiner 1974). David Engel’s (1978) research on the near absence of court use among Thai farmers confirms this view. These views of villages lend empirical support to the more general proposition that that the modern city—as the antithesis of the village—is far more hospitable for law-induced family change. And yet, many Chinese village women (and some men, who represented 10 percent of petitioners) divorced after the promulgation of the Marriage Law, whereas elite urban women, who were allegedly less encumbered by dense social networks, had a more difficult time securing divorce. Below I briefly examine two elements of community that worked to facilitate rural social change, while working against divorce in urban locales. Community and Mediation As noted above, the secondary literature suggests a very close connection between the “density” of social ties and the opportunities to access state institutions. The general theoretical proposition is that where ties are

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dense, there is less access to the state; where ties are thinner, there is greater access. In rural China, where women might be enmeshed in overlapping networks of family, kin, and community, dense ties would seem to work against their ability to access the state’s legal apparatus. In some occasions this was the case, as disgruntled husbands mobilized villages’ political and security establishment to arrest, tie-up, and even rape divorce petitioners (Yunnan Provincial Archives (YNA hereafter) 103–1–45, p. 149). In other instances, however, community might have the exact opposite effect: precisely because village ties were dense everyone knew about each other’s personal weakness and peccadilloes, and this, in turn, made supra-village political and legal institutions the preferred address for people involved in a family dispute. What made such state institutions legitimate in the eyes of ordinary villagers was the replacement of older, “faced” village elites with inexperienced, “face deficient” young men. Even though state elites promoted mediation as a cost and labor-saving method of dispute resolution that was syncretic with what they believed to be “Chinese tradition,” local officials and petitioners alike preferred that an outsider handle domestic disputes in adjudicative forums. Archival sources clearly show that rural officials, precisely because they were embedded in social networks and inexperienced at handling family disputes, pushed divorce cases to courts and other higher-level authorities and thereby facilitated implementation of the Marriage Law, their patriarchal interests (from which the other scholars deduced behavior) notwithstanding. Many local officials recognized the limitations imposed by the local knowledge generated by dense community settings. In a township in Yunnan Province, for instance, two mediators said, “Mediating is just like whipping a mule: You whip the mule and it farts, stinking you up. You try to mediate and everyone will be angry with you.” Another complained, “When you mediate a marriage dispute both sides threaten you, and each other, with murder or suicide. How can we possibly find a solution?” Unable to reconcile the parties, mediators adopted the pragmatic strategy of sending cases to higher-level political institutions. District governments and courts then complained that mediators were sending cases their way, “as soon as there’s a conflict in the village” (CXA 11–4–14B-1, p. 141; CXA 11–4–14B-1, p. 126). In addition to their inexperience handling family disputes, there were other reasons why local officials would send family disputes to higherlevel political authorities. Many local officials had only recently witnessed the raw power of the CCP during land reform, which was, as noted, a mass-mobilizing campaign. When low-level officials learned that the


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party had promulgated a Marriage Law, and that its basic “spirit” was the protection of women’s rights, many feared that if they botched a mediation session and something terrible happened, they would pay a heavy price. Indeed, their concerns were justified, since one well-worn strategy method of revenge in Chinese culture involved an aggrieved person committing suicide on the premises of those who offended them (Wolf 1975). During the Marriage Law, not a few women pretended to commit suicide by jumping into rivers and screaming “I’m drowning, I’m drowning!” even though the water where they jumped in was quite shallow (SMA A71–2–1856, p. 4). According to one report, two of mediators’ main fears were of “committing an error and being criticized,” and “being held responsible if someone dies” (CXA 11–4–14B-1, p. 141; CXA 11–11–14B-1, p. 46). Action flowed from these considerations. Instead of dealing with marriage disputes in the village, they simply told petitioners to “go to court” and let them deal with the hassle. But even if local officials were tempted to get involved in settling villagers’ marital disputes, there is little evidence suggesting that villagers preferred to consult with them anyway. After all, officials’ personal quirks prior to their elevation to “cadre” status were well-known. Evidence shows that young women viewed local officials with contempt. A typical report noted that, “Women are not willing to go to village or township officials for mediation, and are not willing to accept village mediation at all” (CXA 11–11–14B-1, p. 46). From their perspective, it was preferable to go to those institutions that were not only more powerful in the state hierarchy, but also more legitimate because large geographic distances between the village and the state did not allow for the generation of delegitimating local knowledge. Even if they did not completely understand the intention, meaning, and goals of the laws, women in rural China were able to compare the usefulness and reliability of different sorts of political institutions. This comparison led to the conclusion that it was better to go to unfamiliar officials than those who were deeply embedded in their community power structure and value system. Reports from several areas of rural China indicated that higher-level political institutions, not villages and townships, were the main focus of petitioners’ legal strategies. Inundated with lawsuits, court and Women’s Federation reports complained that “women go rushing off to court, travelling for days, just because of a trivial dispute” (CXA 11–11–14B-1, pp. 104–5; SMA C32–2–5, p. 5). Interestingly, recent work on Ming and Qing dynasty legal history demonstrates very similar patterns. Chinese peasants (male and female) often availed themselves of the formal state legal apparatus, as well as local mediation forums, and complaints of excessive rural

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litigiousness were common (Huang 1996; Macauley 1994, 1998).3 Furthermore, comparative research on rural legal culture in Russia, India, and Africa has found very similar tactics; lower-class individuals prefer to seek assistance from upper-levels of the state, even if they were foreigners, as was the case in colonial India and Africa (Galanter 1989: 19–20; Young 1994: 115; Engelstein 1992: 121, 124). Given these similarities in rural legal culture across time and space, we are still left with the puzzle of why rural divorce in these other cases was quite rare. Here again, I would argue that the rural-to-urban nature of the Chinese revolution goes to the heart of the matter; only in China was the state captured by revolutionaries whose primary orientation was rural, not urban, and whose tactics called for mass-mobilization in policy implementation. In China, I would suggest, there was more opportunity for what some scholars have called “state-society synergy” in the implementation of rural social reforms (Evans 1996), even if some of this synergy was largely unintentional. Community and Public Speech Perhaps more so than dense community ties, the absence of modern individualism and “selfhood” have been said to make rural areas unsuitable for modern social change. In the literature, divorce is portrayed as an individual rather than collective act of empowerment, often by a woman in the context of resistance to her husband and/or in-laws. Since the formation of “modern” identity has been coterminous with the development of “modern” cities, it is not surprising that studies of “rural divorce” are rare, to the extent that they exist at all. But here again, we have the same puzzle to explain: how did divorce take place in rural China, where modern influences were less powerful than in urban cores? Below I examine how community, by blurring the divide between public and private, made it easier for peasants to present their domestic conflicts to the state than their urban/modern counterparts. One basic feature of living in a village community—whether in China, India, or small-town America—is the very porous line between private and public. In most small communities, everyone knows everyone else’s personal business, for better (according to the communitarian movement and scholars, such as Robert Putnam, who bemoan the fraying of community ties in the United States) or for worse. Gossip, sexuality, and local politics are often the grist of these interactions. Seen in this sense, this particular slice of village life was highly syncreticizeable with the modernist requirement of the Marriage Law,


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even though there was no intention to blend life and the law in precisely this way. In a clear departure from pre-1949 practices, when informal separations mediated by respected family elders were common, the Marriage Law required that people “go public” with their domestic conflicts to secure a divorce. The question is: how did different sorts of people respond to this demand? Scores of reports from rural China in the 1950s and 1960s reveal peasants’ sometimes-excessive willingness to speak of such matters in the state institutions that administered the law. For instance, in villages near Shanghai, officials were surprised to find fifty peasant women hanging around the local government building debating the merits of other people’s divorce cases. These women thought that it was “perfectly reasonable for many officials to mediate their case in front of them while they are arguing about their problems” (Qingpu Archives [QA hereafter] 48–1–13, pp. 100–2; QA 48–2–31, p. 120). Similar scenes occurred inside courthouses. One court complained that peasants “argue when entering court,” and often hurl explicit, sexually-oriented accusations at one another once inside. To make court proceedings more “civilized,” the court instructed its subordinate units to individualize hearings for plaintiffs if they persisted in discussing their sex lives or spouses’ illicit affairs in front of the judges (CXA 16–27-A1, pp. 36–7). In the Shanghai suburbs, exasperated officials called upon peasants to have “civilized divorces”: “they shouldn’t get into such heated arguments at government offices” (SMA A71–2–1859, p. 96). These reports make clear that peasants did not hesitate to confront officialdom with personal problems, and generally exhibited a feistiness and initiative when dealing with the state and its policies. If this was the case for peasants, what of the elite urbanites in China, those whom the literature has identified as the most likely citizens to seek out modern legal institutions? Like peasants, the Chinese upperclasses usually did not go through formal political or legal institutions to divorce prior to the Communist’s arrival on the scene in 1949. Moreover, many of their marriages were arranged by their parents. They too were confronted by a state that demanded that they go public with their problems. However, unlike peasants (or workers, many of whom were rural migrants), many Chinese urban elites could not cross this private/public divide. For this elite, modern identity required keeping private matters private. Face was at stake; it simply would not do for an intellectual or businessman to be seen screaming at his wife in public, and certainly not in a state forum (Shanghai interview, 1994). Among this group, the thick line between public and private prevented

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many of them from even discussing their difficulties with friends or state agencies. In Shanghai, a Women’s Federation report from 1951 found that, “among the bourgeoisie the women suffer largely from psychological abuse; on the outside everything is tranquil, but inside they are suffering . . . they are quite vain and concerned with face” (XHA, uncatalogued report, pp. 9–10). In a meeting with female teachers in a well-heeled district in the city, Women’s Federation officials complained that it was difficult to help the teachers because they “kept their problems to themselves” (SMA C1–2–611, pp. 37–8). Years passed and the same problems remained. In the early 1960s, one woman, the daughter of a well-off businessman, married a working class husband. When the marriage began to deteriorate, he began to tell other people about their problems. Even after he began to abuse her she was reluctant to involve outside parties: “our sex life was private,” she later wrote, “so how could I tell another person?” Only after her husband threatened to kill her did she pen a letter to the Shanghai Women’s Federation. Among her complaints was that her husband “does not differentiate between private and public” (SMA C31–2–1110, pp.20–2). For these modern urbanites, the state and its modern family law were, in important respects, culturally alien, unsyncreticizeable with their own beliefs and practices, like water and oil. The fact that all involved were Chinese did not matter at all, as the cultural gap between elite and popular attitudes toward such matters was extremely wide. As far as urban elites were concerned, not only were many state institutions controlled by their cultural inferiors, its new Marriage Law demanded that they break down the cultural barriers that allowed them to claim elite urban status in the first place. As a result, many avoided the state altogether. As much as theory would have predicted greater syncretism between the modern law and the aspirations of this modern population, a bottom-up, inductive approach (that is, when we do not deduce behavior from universal assumptions about “interests”4) reveals just the opposite: Chinese urban/modern identity was far less syncreticizeable with the demands and opportunities of the new law than rural/lower class identity and practices. Cultural Practices Divorce cannot be considered in isolation from marriage. How people get together in the first place can shape everyday interactions in marriage, and whether a marriage can last. Such a conception of the


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relationship between marriage and divorce clearly concerned the drafters of the PRC’s Marriage Law. Drawing upon liberal currents in the West, they were convinced that the only sort of marriages that could contribute to society and the state were those based on love and freely-contracted between the parties (Meijer 1971: 63). Arranged marriages were simplistically assumed to have been coerced, unhappy, and in violation of the couple’s desires, and thus incompatible with the basic thrust of the new regime, which emphasized liberation, emancipation, and so forth. The geographic location of such sentiments was also assumed, requiring no investigation; romantic love was a modern emotion, and since modernity was always urban, city-folk were thought to have been more favorably inclined towards this idea than peasants. Peasants care not one whit about love as such, we are told ( Johnson 1983: 117; Potter and Potter 1990: 182–3). Here again, we would have expected far better congruence between the Marriage Law, which advocated love-based marriages, and the predilections and preferences of young urbane elites, than peasants who went about choosing spouses in an entirely no-nonsense, pragmatic matter. As it turns out, intellectuals’ notion that peasants were uniformly conservative about matters of the heart was an untenable simplification, driven more by elite stereotypes and biases against their rural compatriots than first-hand knowledge about them. Mao Zedong, who, in addition to other things, was a first-rate field researcher, investigated rural politics and social life in the 1930s and 1940s, and found not a small amount of sexual promiscuity, particularly among poorer peasants; the wealthier, better-educated elite in rural and urban areas, in contrast, were notably more conservative (Mao 1969, 1990). If the premise of the Marriage Law was that couples should enjoy greater freedom to choose their partner, there was greater natural affinity between the law and everyday sexual practices among poor peasants than among elites. Indeed, upon their investigations of rural family life in the period immediately following the Marriage Law, educated CCP officials often complained about “chaotic,” “careless,” and “rash” sexual relations in the countryside (SMA A71–2–1856, p. 2). What the Marriage Law did was to graft a formal legal language upon these local practices. Extra-marital affairs among peasants were really nothing new, but with their new political language, women were (unintentionally) handed a powerful weapon to justify their love, desire, and pursuit of upward mobility and material gain through marriage (CXA 16–15-B1, p. 89). A Women’s Federation report in rural

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Yunnan—in a area about as far away as one could get from Beijing in the Chinese polity—found that Many peasants misunderstand the Marriage Law. They blindly emphasize that the Marriage Law “liberated” them. This is the case for some women in particular, who have become very unconventional and dissolute in their sexual relations. They have several partners at once, and often switch among them, choosing whichever man appeals to them on that particular day. They also flirt with many men. (YNA 87–1–82, p. 47) Other reports complained that ordinary peasants, as well as members of the CCP, “ ‘do not treat marriage seriously, and rashly marry,’ ‘treat love like a game,’ ‘marry only after knowing each other for a day,’ and use the idea of ‘marriage freedom’ to justify eating, drinking, and then requesting a divorce because of a trivial argument.” Others accepted engagement gifts, married, and then divorced soon afterward, only to move to yet another relationship (CXA 16–3-A1, p. 188; CXA 11–36–14B-1, p. 84; CXA 4–2-A1, p. 166). According to educated elites, the right to divorce should not have been used in this way, but to extricate oneself from an unhappy relationship and forge a happier, more productive and stable one. At the same time that backward peasants were taking advantage of the liberal, modern clauses of the Marriage Law to pursue unorthodox relationships, officials attempting to implement the Marriage Law among the most “urban(e)” population in Shanghai and Beijing often found that educated elites had very little interest in it. In Beijing, for instance, students at a university said, “Marriages arranged by parents or matchmakers are very good; it’s the Chinese tradition; one’s personal problems shouldn’t be the cause of parents’ suicide.”5 Others considered “free-choice love marriages” to be the equivalent to “promiscuity” (DCA 11–7–17, p. 7). Moreover, as marriage is an institution that often serves to reproduce class hierarchy, women in elite families insisted upon marrying a man from high social standing (engineers were the most sought-after prospects), and tended to rely upon their families to arrange their courtship and marriage. As one teacher said, “No one has given me an introduction. How can I look for [a spouse] myself?” (SMA C1–2–611, pp. 37–8; DCA 11–7–17, p. 16). Whereas social networks sometimes worked to facilitate divorce in rural areas, among urban elites such networks had a different effect; individuals who were “embedded” in them had little interest in taking advantage of the Marriage Law, or had a difficult time accessing the state if they so


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desired. The Marriage Law had very limited impact because it was unsyncreticizeable with their conceptualization of identity, status, and beliefs. Conclusion In promulgating the Marriage Law, the Chinese Communists were determined to create a better fit, or congruence, between revolutionary changes in politics and the economy on the one hand, and family structure on the other. Arranged marriages, concubinage, polygamy, and the like were all condemned as feudal remnants that had no place in a revolutionary, socialist society. It was hoped that marriages based on mutual respect, love, and mutual consent would create happier and thus more productive and stable families, all very common state interests. The most difficult battles to enforce the law were expected to be in rural areas, where the degree of nonfit between existing practices and the modern expectations of the law was the greatest. The secondary literature on the Marriage Law concurred, as this seemed to make sense given various theories of modernization, state-building, and law-induced social change. All of these fingered rural areas as bastions of reaction, conservatism, and resistance to expanding states. Comparative historical evidence confirmed this, as did the literature on state-building and law and social change. Looking back at the changes in Chinese rural society after the implementation of the Marriage Law, it is clear that both Chinese marriage reformers (who naturally belonged to the educated elite) and Western social scientists failed to appreciate the extent to which many traditional features of rural life—ranging from land, community, and sexual practices—could blend into a modernist family law in such as way as to make the law a vehicle for change, even as it stirred violent resistance among local politicians and village men. Whether looking at peasants’ using land to bargain for divorce, or leaving villages to go to remote courts, the modern Marriage Law was a force for change in rural society because of its capacity to energize and mobilize certain elements of “tradition.” In many instances, the origins and outcome of this syncretism was unintended—framers of the law did not intend to create laws and institutions that meshed well with local practices and values. Courts and registration bureaus were designated to accept, mediate, and adjudicate family conflicts, but exactly how these cases would be presented to the state—often repeatedly, loudly, with threats, and in groups, for purposes

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unsanctioned by the state—was not part of the plan. However, such behaviour was a staple of peasants’ longstanding methods for getting justice or seeking out revenge. Yet, at the same time, we should not completely discount ordinary people’s ability to intentionally blend traditional practices with modern political language, if and when circumstances and personal desires and interests called for it. This form of “intended syncreticism” was seen most clearly in the women who used the language of the law to justify premarital sex or extramarital affairs, some of which resulted in divorce. This type of local syncretism did not lead to any changes in the law itself—this could only happen at the elite level—but it did change the way officials felt about it (e.g. it was overly empowering women) and how it affected local society. This mode of interaction between state and rural and urban society in China, I suggest, cannot be understood without appreciating one unique feature of its revolution, namely, its rural-to-urban dynamic. The critical juncture of the Chinese revolution—its shift from urban to rural locales in 1927—did not occur in the other cases of revolution to which China is often compared in the macrohistorical studies (Moore 1966; Skocpol 1979) and comparative politics (Pei 1994; Wu 1992). The peasant nature of the Chinese revolution resulted in better synergy between it and traditional rural society. This explains the impact of this modernist law in rural areas, and its relative weakness among elites, whose modern concerns with privacy, class, and the state were unsyncreticizeable with the modern law. What sort of lessons can we draw from China’s experience with family reform as it seeks to reinvent itself as a law-based society, and how might these lessons apply to other states’ seeking to apply the elixir of law to a variety of problems as they attempt to make the transition between command and market economies? First, the Chinese experience highlights the role of unintended consequences in the implementation of new laws. States that seek to apply a uniform legal code—whether a new family or commercial law—upon diverse populations can probably expect some success in altering old practices, but whether the exact nature of these changes can be anticipated in advance, or will even be in accordance with other state goals, is highly debatable. This is particularly true of states whose administrative capacities are not very high, and whose ability to “read” their own societies is limited by the absence of social trust, fairly rigid social hierarchies, technology, or clear lines of communication between the center and peripheral areas. Of course, in this category, is most of what we call the developing world. We should not be so naïve as to expect that the transplantation of new ideas and institutions into new settings will result in the consequences we


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expected, or even some of them, as the disappointing outcome of our massive intervention in Iraq has clearly demonstrated. Second, the Chinese experience offers yet another cautionary tale for elites in developing countries who seek to learn from the Chinese experience in market and legal reform, as well as for those who seek to impose a singular developmental logic upon third world countries. This chapter has argued that the Chinese experience with legal reform (and probably its route to democracy) might indeed be unique, thanks mainly to its rural-based revolution. Surely it is no coincidence that in China peasants and temporary workers, not full-fledged urbanites such as intellectuals and workers in large state-owned enterprises, were the legal entrepreneurs of the 1950s as well as those who first took advantage of the market reforms in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, some China scholars argue that peasants initiated many critical reforms such as decollectivization and the state merely approved what had been accomplished on the ground (Zhou 1996; White 1998). Peasants did not play nearly as important a role in legal reform in the Soviet Union, the country to which China is usually compared in comparative politics, and the rural sector there remains far more backward than its Chinese counterpart. Whether China’s experience with legal reform in the 1950s, or with rural-based economic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, is applicable to other agrarian societies that did not undergo a peasant-based revolution is highly doubtful. As much as the Anglo-American political, economic, and legal experiences sharply diverge with those of Continental Europe and most of the developing world, so too does China’s experience with law offer a contrasting story and cautionary tale to other developing countries undergoing political and economic transition. However, this story’s main lesson is perhaps the most relevant for current efforts to build a more law-based society in China. The economic reforms in China, since the late 1970s, have produced growing disparities of wealth; the seaboard is growing at rates far exceeding the interior; within cities unemployment is widespread due to the industrial restructuring of state-owned firms. Such inequalities and dislocations have resulted in many forms of social conflict such as strikes, slow downs, attacks on government offices, riots, and petitioning state authorities. Faced with such challenges, Chinese elites are attempting to create new rules and institutions to manage such conflicts. But what sort of rules and institutions would work best? For instance, should elites seek to strengthen mediation committees in both rural and urban areas because such committees’ preference for consensus-building and compromise over clear-cut resolutions is supposedly more suited to “Chinese tradition”?

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Officials of the Chinese Bureau of Civil Affairs and the Women’s Federation I interviewed suggested precisely this, a position seconded by Western conflict resolution experts who visited China and were impressed by how “mediation” is syncretic with Confucian Chinese values of seeking “harmony” (Wall and Blum 1991). This chapter, by contrast, argues for a more differentiated, or disaggregated approach. Chinese elites, for their own reasons, prefer mediation over adjudication and have thus advocated strengthening the mediation apparatus nationwide as a way of preventing disputes from spilling over to violence. However, such efforts will surely fail in rural areas (and probably among the urban working classes), as mediation is not particularly syncretic with peasants’ well-honed repertoire of seeking political intervention from above (O’Brien and Li 1995), or of directly petitioning courts for redress. Indeed, interviews with rural officials in China told me quite directly that peasants “like courts” because they promise a relatively fast and clear cut solution to their problem. Mediation, according to peasants, is often an excuse for foot-dragging, and the decisions are not enforceable anyway. Yet, in the imagination of elites (most of whom are urbanites), peasants continue to be a bastion of tradition, and thus prefer mediation. I would suggest that China’s stability hangs in the balance of how this imaginary view of peasant life can be reconciled with reality. Should the state insist on strengthening mediation committees because they are supposedly more syncretic with rural values, peasants will avoid them and find alternative solutions to their problems. Absent regular and fair elections or more syncretic methods of resolving disputes (such as rapidly increasing the number and types of courts operating in rural China), China will surely have difficulty maintaining social and political stability. Notes 1. Calculated on a household basis (by going over household registration data and cross referencing them with reports of divorces in often hand-written village and neighborhood investigation reports) approximately 3–8 percent of rural families experienced a divorce annually between 1949 and 1955, but only 1.5 percent of urban families in comparable years. I should point here that the national divorce statistics in China for this period (and even for today) are extremely unreliable, as those responsible for collecting them often ignored central directives, or else fabricated numbers. Using very local data was a far more reliable method. See Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), chapters 2, 5, 6, for more details. This pattern was confirmed by a leading Chinese sociologist of the family and marriage, Prof. Xu Anqi of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. 2. According to Stacey (1983), this is precisely what prevented successful implementation of the law, since male heads of households needed all the labor they could get to work their plots, and thus resolutely opposed divorce.


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3. Chinese historians Philip C.C. Huang and Kathryn Bernhardt write: “those who assumed that the formal court system of the Qing dealt little with civil matters were simply wrong . . . civil litigation was not just the resort of the rich and powerful, for the courts were accessible even to peasants and the urban poor” (1994, 4–5; emphasis mine). 4. For an excellent example of the difficulty of deducing preferences from seemingly objective material interests see Steven K. Vogel (1999). 5. In China it was fairly common for parents to threaten their children with suicide should they refuse to marry the person they selected for them.

References Bernhardt, Kathyrn. 1994. “Women and the Law: Divorce in Republican China,” in Civil Law in Qing and Republican China. Kathryn Bernhardt and Philip C.C. Huang, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Diamant, Neil J. 2000. Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949–1968. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eckstein, Harry. 1961. A Theory of Stable Democracy. Princeton: Center of International Affairs. Engel, David. 1978. Code and Custom in a Thai Provincial Court: The Interaction of Formal and Informal Systems of Justice Tucson. University of Arizona Press. Engelstein, Laura. 1992. The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Modern in Fin-de Siécle Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Epp, Charles R. 1998. “The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists and Supreme Courts,” in Comparative Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Evans, Peter. 1996. “Introduction: Development Strategies Across the Public-Private Divide.” World Development. 24, 6: 1033–7. Faison, Seth. 1995. “In China, Rapid Social Changes Bring a Surge in the Divorce Rate.” New York Times, August 22. Farnsworth, Beatrice. 1985. “Village Women Experience the Revolution,” in Bolshevik Culture. Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Fei, Chengkang. 1997. Zhongguo de jiafa zugui. Shanghai: Shanghai Shehui kexue yuan chuban she. Fei, Hsiao-Tung (Xiaotong) and Chang Chih-I. 1945. Earthbound China: A Study of Rural Economy in Yunnan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Felstiner, William. 1974 “Influences of Social Organization on Dispute Processing,” Law and Society Review. 9, 1: 63–94. Fitzgerald, John. 1996. Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Friedman, Edward, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, with Kay Ann Johnson. 1991. Chinese Village, Socialist State. New Haven: Yale University Press. Galanter, Marc. 1989. Law and Society in Modern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Glosser, Susan. 1995. “The Business of Family: You Huaigao and the Commercialization of a May Fourth Ideal.” Republican China 20, 2: 80–116. Hall, Peter. 1993. “Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State: The Case of Economic Policymaking in Britain.” Comparative Politics 25, 3: 275–96. Honig, Emily and Gail Hershatter. 1988. Chinese Women in the 1980s. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Huang, Philip C.C. 1996. Civil Justice in China: Representation and Practice in the Qing. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Johnson, Kay Anne. 1983. Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kirby, William. 1984. Germany and Republican China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lewin, Moshe. 1968. Russian Peasants: A Study of Collectivization. New York: W.W. Norton. Lubman, Stanley. ed. 1996. China’s Legal Reforms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macauley, Melissa. 1994. “Civil and Uncivil Disputes in Southeastern Coastal China,” in Civil Law in Qing and Republican China. Kathryn Bernhardt and Philip C.C. Huang, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. ———. 1998. Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Madsen, Bernice. 1977. “Social Services for Women: Problems and Priorities,” in Women in Russia. Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dallin, and Gail Lapidus, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977. Mann. Michael. 1993. The Sources of Social Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mao, Zedong (Tse-Tung). 1969. “An Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” in The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung. Stuart Schram, ed. New York: Praeger. ———. 1990. Report from Xunwu. Trans. Roger Thompson. Stanford: Stanford University Press. McCann, Michael. 1994. Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Meijer, Jan M. 1968. “Town and Country in the Civil War,” in Revolutionary Russia. Richard Pipes. ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Meijer, Marius. 1971. Marriage Law and Policy in the Chinese People’s Republic. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press. Michael, Franz. 1962. “The Role of Law in Traditional, Nationalist and Communist China.” The China Quarterly 9: 138–40. Migdal, Joel. 1988. Strong Societies and Weak States. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Moore, Barrington Jr. 1954. Terror and Progress: USSR. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon. O’Brien, Kevin. 1990. Reform Without Liberation: China’s National People’s Congress and the Politics of Institutional Change. New York: Cambridge University Press. O’Brien, Kevin and Lianjiang Li. 1995. “The Politics of Lodging Complaints in Rural China.” The China Quarterly 143: 756–83. Pei, Minxin. 1994. From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2000. “Rights and Resistance: The Changing Context of the Dissident Movement,” in Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance. Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden, eds. London and New York: Routledge. 20–40. Philips, Roderick. 1980. Family Breakdown in the Late 18th Century France: Divorces in Rouen: 1792–1803. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pipes, Richard. 1968. “The Origins of Bolshevism: The Intellectual Evolution of Young Lenin,” in Revolutionary Russia. Daniel Pipes, ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1994. Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. New York: Knopf. Potter, Pitman. ed. 1994. Domestic Law Reforms in Post-Mao China. Armonk, New York: ME Sharpe. Potter, Sulamith Heins and Jack Potter. 1990. China’s Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Some Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale. Shorter, Edward. 1975. The Making of the Modern Family. New York: Basic Books.


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Stacey, Judith. 1983. Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Starr, June. 1989. “The Role of Turkish Secular Law in Changing the Lives of Rural Muslim Women, 1950–1970.” Law and Society Review 23, 3: 497–523. Strauss, Julia. 1998. Strong Institutions in Weak Polities: State Building in Republican China, 1927–1940. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tanner, Murray Scot. 1999. Politics of Lawmaking in Post-Mao China. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Upham, Frank K. 1987. Law and Social Change in Postwar Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Vogel, Steven K. 1999. “When Interests are not Preferences: The Cautionary Tale of Japanese Consumers.” Comparative Politics 31, 2: 187–207. Wall, James and Michael Blum. 1991. “Community Mediation in the People’s Republic of China.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 35, 1: 3–20. Wei, Jingsheng. 2000. “China’s Road to a Democratic Society,” in China Beyond the Headlines. Timothy B. Weston and Lionel M. Jensen, eds. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. White, Lynn T. 1998. Unstately Power: Volume 1: Local Causes of China’s Economic Reforms. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe. Wolf, Margery. 1975. “Women and Suicide in China,” in Women in Chinese Society. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 111–41. ———. 1985. Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wu, Yushan. 1992. Comparative Economic Transformations: Mainland China, Hungary, the Soviet Union and Taiwan. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Xu, Anqi. 1994. “Zhongguo lihun zhuangtai, tedian ji qushi (The situation, special characteristics, and trends of divorce in China). Xueshu Jikan (Academic Quarterly). 18, 2: 156–65. Young, Crawford. 1994. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven: Yale University Press. Zhou, Kate Xiao. 1996. How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People. Boulder: Westview.

Archives Consulted Beijing Municipal Archives (BMA) Chuxiong Prefectural Archives (CXA) Dongcheng District Archives, Beijing (DCA) Qingpu County Archives (QA) Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA) Xuhui District Archives, Shanghai (XHA) Yunnan Provincial Archives (YNA)

CHAPTER

EIGHT

Working is Celebrating: The Syncretic Politics of Labor Transformation in Rural Zambia Parakh H o o n

Introduction: Shock but No Therapy In the Ngoni villages of Zambia’s Eastern Province, the 1990s was a time of crisis. The decade started with a drought and growing awareness among local farmers that their land had lost its fertility. During the previous decade, Zambia had experienced some of the most sweeping economic liberalization programs in Africa. The attempts at liberalizing the economy had the short-term effect of reducing budget deficits and set in motion the privatization of key state-controlled and often inefficient industries. Yet, recent studies have shown that reducing subsidies and exchange rate liberalization led to massive increases in the costs of production inputs, making them too expensive for most farmers (Gladwin 1991; Sanchez 2002). Saddled by an unsustainable international debt, relying mostly on unstable copper revenues, and constrained by “conditionalities” imposed by piecemeal structural adjustment reforms, Zambia is typical of African countries where development policy reforms have not succeeded in improving the lot of the poor majority. The “shock-therapy” of structural adjustment provided a shock, but little therapy. This chapter deploys the interpretative lens of institutional syncretism to illustrate local responses to these shocks. Specifically, the chapter traces

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patterns of reciprocity and volunteerism embedded in historical and contemporary labor-pooling practices, and illustrates how Ngoni farmers have syncretically recrafted labor practices to accommodate a shift from historic ties of lineage reciprocity to more commodified forms of remuneration that have emerged in the context of neoliberal structural adjustment policies. The chapter argues that these hybrids, neotraditional reciprocal labor arrangements provide the flexibility of “labor markets” while simultaneously functioning as mechanisms of social support. The analysis I present thus, is not only about sale and purchase of labor, but considers the role of politics, power, and culture. By understanding alterations in labor practices, this chapter also contributes to one of the enduring questions of agrarian change in Africa: what happens to precapitalist forms of lineage organization and customary arrangements as they interact with colonial and post colonial structures? In particular, by using the lens of institutional syncretism, we are able to see the transformations and divergent trajectories in what has been called “the classic index of agrarian class formation—the commoditization of labor” (Worby 1995: 2). Institutional syncretism allows us to highlight the historical specificities in institutional forms that remain immanent despite proclamations to the contrary about the teleology and universalism of capitalist integration. Voluntarism, Reciprocity, and Social Control: Negotiating Ngoni Labor Pooling Among the Ngonis, labor pooling (such as festive beer parties and reciprocity work groups) was historically the dominant mechanism for mobilizing labor. Neighbors, friends, and/or kin relations assembled to undertake specific tasks lasting anywhere from a few hours to several days. Through a festive beer party, households and lineages pooled labor for clearing and stumping, hoeing, harvesting of fields, thatching and building houses, and managing local communal resources. The hosts expressed their appreciation by entertaining the participants by brewing beer and/or providing food. Participation in festive beer parties not only helped accomplish agricultural tasks, but also built solidarity and facilitated sharing and celebration. Oral history interviews reveal nostalgia about the moral economy once associated with these practices: I had a big field, and would invite the whole village to come and help. As soon as my neighbors saw me preparing firewood for

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brewing the beer, the news spread like wildfire. Once the neighbors knew, by the end of the day everyone in the village knew that beer was being brewed. ( Jere 2001)1 According to village elders, in these cooperative work parties, kin and community members contributed in a spirit of mutual support, solidarity, and celebration. For Ngoni elders the rationale of labor pooling was based on norms of generalized, non-specific reciprocity, solidarity, and celebrating rather than geared toward maximizing economic efficiency. We used to brew beer and after finishing the work, enjoyed the beer. It was possible that maize would also be given as a reward. (Mphanza 2001) [my emphasis] In the historical memories of Ngoni elders, the solidarity and cooperation surrounding work parties are idealized, giving the impression that rural Africans were egalitarian. Undoubtedly, labor pooling, a key aspect of Ngoni social organization, was embedded in community solidarity and generalized nonspecific reciprocity. However it was also shaped by a strategic dimension of investing in social relations, intertwined with processes of wealth accumulation and social differentiation. Ngoni agrarian practices were marked by beer-for-labor and cattle-for-women patterns of exchange. Beer and cattle exchanges entailed unequal relations between women and men, between commoners and royals, and between Ngoni themselves and non-Ngoni, conquered peoples (Auslander 1997; Barnes 1948). Men tended to appropriate maize or millet that was grown by women, and redistributed the beer for drinking and festive work parties. Elders (senior men) often sponsored and obtained the labor of junior younger men (Pottier 1988). Those who were able to mobilize communal labor enhanced their prestige and displayed their power to the rest of the community. In this way, beer flowed up the social hierarchy, from women to men, and from ordinary people to nobles (Auslander 1997). The nature of labor practices and the mechanisms of control and mobilization gradually underwent a transformation, particularly from the 1920s, as the Ngonis became intertwined with the colonial project. But the change was not without resistance and contestation. Colonial authorities created settlements and introduced new agricultural techniques and methods which were seen as more efficient. The assumption was that production would increase by reforming agricultural practices that in turn would create a progressive yeomanry relying


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on wage labor and capable of furthering colonial development goals. For colonial planners, festive work parties were viewed as wasteful, while individual male wage labor was considered the most efficient way to organize work. In the Ngoni villages, which were geographically closer to neighboring Nyasaland (or present day Malawi) than the “core” copper areas in the north, these changes were not easily accepted. Not everyone sold their crops. For many Ngonis, subsistence food production, embedded in the wider classic “beer-for-labor and cattle-for-women cycle,” was more important than producing cash crops. Over time however, Ngoni elders recalled, the tendency to host work parties declined, especially after the introduction of hybrid crops and agricultural inputs such as fertilizer. These new technologies made the timing of farm operations more precise. With agrarian commercialization, many Ngoni farmers who were beginning to accumulate cash started hiring labor, for example, for preparing fields, weeding, and harvesting. With increased monetization it seemed to the Ngonis that recruiting labor through social networks could no longer be taken for granted: After the harvest, people used to help each other . . . construct and repair houses collectively . . . slaughter an animal, brew beer, and/ or boil maize and share with each other. But then money was introduced . . . we slaughtered for sale. . . In the past helping in the fields and construction of a house was free, but now you have to pay to get help. (Phiri 2001) The difficulty of relying on social networks to mobilize labor resulted from a combination of factors, including changes in agricultural technology, the production of cash crops and in some cases increased opportunities in the copper belt. As kin employers attempted to acquire their material needs within an increasingly monetized and commercialized environment, negotiations around labor relations also revealed social contestation concerning community norms of support. Kin employers were torn between maintaining their status within social networks and desiring better harvests, especially of cash crops, for which labor requirements were more exacting. Dependent family members, who in the past were obliged to show up for work parties, could also excuse themselves and either pursue income opportunities outside the village or demand money from the person trying to organize the work party. By the mid-1950s, beer work parties were viewed as an inefficient method of getting work done. In the Ngoni villages, instead of expecting

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a “reward,” client employees started demanding a “payment.” This semantic shift was indicative of a broader change that culminated in the emergence of individual wage-like labor contracts, known as ganyu. Labor pooling, central to the social organization of the Ngonis, thus historically included elements of community solidarity, and generalized nonspecific reciprocity, as well as a strategic dimension of investing in social relations. Inasmuch as labor pooling through festive beer parties derived its logic from horizontal social ties, through tribute labor, it also served as a mechanism for accumulation and social control by male lineage heads and elders at the top of the social hierarchy. Volunteerism, social solidarity and cooperation, as well as coercion, were constituted through the circulation of and control over beer, cattle, and people. What is salient for the analytics of institutional syncretism is how norms and practices in these preexisting practices came to articulate with colonial and postcolonial institutional impositions, providing a basis for reinterpreting and reconfiguring newer patterns of labor arrangements in the contemporary period. Ganyu Piecework: Individuation of Labor Relations Ganyu is commonly used in Zambia and Malawi to describe work undertaken over a period of days or weeks, for which remuneration is settled in cash or in kind (for example, maize, clothes, shoes, etc.). Ganyu piecework covers a range of labor-intensive activities including preparing fields for the next agricultural season, tree cutting for field extension, clearing land, making ridges, and seeding. The demand of ganyu is highest during the time periods that include planting, weeding, and harvesting. During the dry season, ganyu labor is used for molding bricks, building houses, and digging wells. Ngoni elders remember individualized wage-like ganyu exchanges emerging and becoming more common between the 1950–70s. One respondent, framing the practice as embedded within the Ngoni moral economy, reminisced about notions of fairness involved when hiring ganyu: “If it happened that two people need ganyu, the person hiring used to look at who is in more need” (Miti 2001). Ganyu contractual negotiations were shaped not only by forces of supply and demand, but also by their embeddedness in local informal norms of social obligation and networks. One of the ganyu kin clients reflected this sentiment: “If I wanted to do ganyu, I proposed a price. If the owner knows that I am a poor person, then he could agree. If the person is a friend, I could have also reduced my price because we are friends” (Kaunda 2001).


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The identities of different actors, their personal reputations, and their participation in social networks shaped patterns of ganyu contracts. “We know each other in the village . . . and know who all need ganyu. These are people who do not have their own fields. There are also those who want money at all times, for example, those who want to drink everyday. Then there are those who are poor and needy, and to help them we offer ganyu” ( Jere 2001). By providing ganyu, patrons could be supportive of kin and neighbors whose harvests were not sufficient or who had fallen on difficult times. Ganyu functioned as an insurance mechanism for the marginal to survive within a rapidly monetized economy, and nested in personalized social networks, it also masked and legitimated elite control and social differentiation. By the 1970s, though, ganyu became disembedded from its moral economy foundations. Declining copper prices, coupled with government inefficiencies, deepened the poverty of rural Ngoni farmers. By the mid-1980s, many were unable to regularly acquire agricultural inputs, obtain credit, or have a reliable marketing source. Ganyu also underwent a series of transformations. First, conflict around negotiations of individual ganyu piece-work contracts increased. Both patron employers and kin employees point out that the decision to offer ganyu piecework increasingly did not depend on whether someone was a neighbor or relative. Employers instead came to focus on efficiency and reliability in work performance when hiring someone for ganyu. One wealthier farmer remembers building a shop for which he had hired several people to do ganyu: I now hire ganyu so work can be done quicker and faster. [To hire ganyu] first and foremost, you have to know the reputation of the person performing the work. I would not hire people who were given payments previously and had abandoned their work . . . or, if they are known to take too long and are too slow. (Mphanza 2001) Social relationships and obligations were increasingly ignored as important aspects for hiring ganyu: If it is a relative . . . in fact, I cannot help all relatives. People understand that work has to be done properly otherwise the person will not be rehired. It is critical to get a good harvest, and for me to make a profit. (Tembo 2001)

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In the Ngoni villages, the individuation of production relations that had begun to take place in previous decades was now joined by the scaling down of modes of reciprocity and solidarity. The late 1990s saw chronic food scarcity in the Ngoni villages and as a result few people wanted to perform ganyu work. However, with failed harvests, very few could afford to hire ganyu. Many respondents agreed with this assessment: “Ganyu is difficult to find, they give big areas [to work] for low payments. The work is mostly hard, tiresome and the money given is less” (Banda 2001). By the late 1990s, ganyu was mostly done by those who were unable to meet their livelihood needs. Owing to relatively low yields, maize stocks are typically depleted during three months before harvest for a substantial number of families, forcing them to find ganyu labor or starve. This is also the peak agricultural season, when everyone needs to perform critical tasks on their own fields. Thus, for both patron-employers and kin-employees, the meaning of ganyu has changed. Ganyu is now associated with rising poverty and exclusion. “In the past people used to work together—as a family—until the work was finished. These days everyone is on their own—piaye yekha. To get help, you have to pay. Life has changed. In the past we knew what it means to be a relative. These days even relatives don’t help” (Focus Group 2001). By the late 1990s, farmers without reasonable yields or access to agricultural inputs were more likely to become chronically dependent on ganyu wages. As Esther Ngoma, one of the women elders in Kaluwa village puts it: “Those who are not able to fend for themselves, whether the harvest is good or bad, have to do piece-work” (Ngoma 2001). For marginal families with limited resources and caught in an unstable monetized economy, ganyu had was not a short-term seasonal coping strategy, but a main livelihood strategy. Neotraditional Syncretic Labor Arrangements Labor exchanges during the twentieth century became individualized and impersonalized. However, individuation in production relations and increasing social differentiation did not foreclose the emergence of new reciprocal labor arrangements. Older logics of social organization became the raw materials for the creation of new labor practices in which different actors redeployed their historical memories. The neotraditional labor practices emerge through relationships that simultaneously involve strategically investing in social relationships and cultivating new shared expectations of reciprocity.


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Kalimalima Along with festive work parties, Ngoni communities historically also relied on mutually reciprocated labor. It was not uncommon to find groups ranging from five to fifteen people self-organizing for social and economic tasks. These groups took different forms, sometimes organizing within lineages and extended families, at other times among neighbors and friends that transcend customary boundaries of kinship around which communal and collective life was historically organized. As life changed, people stopped brewing beer and started working on their own. Nowadays a person wants to be self reliant—kazipalili. They thought that it’s better to join hands—which is why kalimalima came about. ( Jere 2001) There are several local meanings that came together to comprise the term kalimalima. The practice is associated with the historic shifting cultivation practices. Kulima means doing (verb) and the action of ploughing. Kalima is a noun and the term for cultivation. Lima means field size that is one fourth of an hectare, kulima could be cultivating as mall plot of land, hence kalimalima. In kalimalima, people worked together in each other’s fields during the planting season, and during the dry season, for example, in fixing houses and/or cutting thatch. In the contemporary period local farmer, youth, and women groups or what are also called “clubs” deploy the imagery and logic of kalimalima for learning new agricultural techniques and building infrastructure such as seed banks for the clubs. Highlighting the benefits of kalimalima, a member of a farmer’s group stated: The very practice of kalimalima has been re-introduced in clubs. When people work as a club, they are doing a form of kalimalima. In the past we used to work as families . . . these days we do these activities as a club. (Zulu 2001) Leaders of local groups use kalimalima to legitimate the functioning of new organizational structures. Michael Mphanza, an office holder of the farmer’s group in Mashaba village, pointed out: In the past we used to work in each other’s fields . . . even in the building of houses . . . as time went on, we helped each other less . . . as people became well-to-do, they could buy their own tools, hire ox-carts to transport their harvest . . . now when these ideas of

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clubs have come, that practice [kalimalima] has been revived. (Mphanza 2001) The chairperson of the Kamila, a farmers club, reflected on the positive benefits of kalimalima: We use kalimalima to teach each other. After learning the technique, we do it collectively from one field to another. A “modern” form of agricultural practice called potholing was introduced through clubs. We then went to implement them in the fields. We formed groups of about ten, depending on proximity to the fields. (Zulu 2001)2 Clubs, farmer groups, and other local-level organizations thus attempt to tap into and harness the mutual reciprocity and support logic of historic practices—kalimalima and festive beer parties. In effect, it is hoped that by relying on the solidarity networks evident in kalimalima, labor can be mobilized for developmental activities such as adoption of improved fallow techniques.3 The post-colonial state and other external actors, in order to develop rural localities, have also tried to make use of kalimalima because it entails a voluntary “mutual” contribution of labor. An elder from Mashaba village pointed out: There was a famine/drought and the government brought relief. The Ministry of Agriculture was the one who introduced this practice. They organized us together into small groups. They provided us with maize to maintain the roads and clean adjoining areas. During that time kalimalima was done by the whole village. (Phiri 2001) In most Ngoni villages, however, one finds that emerging class inequality undermines the use of this neotraditional, syncretic institution as a tool for labor mobilization. Many Ngoni villages now include a central cluster of chronically poor households (with dilapidated houses that do not have fresh thatch), as well as wealthier households (with newer, cleaner, and bigger houses with iron sheets), often located on the outskirts of villages. Those who moved to the outskirts point out that they did so to escape the moral economy, redistributive demands of kin. It was not uncommon to hear individuals in families, living on the outskirts of these villages, say that as a result of their resistance to these


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demands, they had to move out to escape witchcraft and jealousy. In the past the vigavas [village section] used to work together, but today they are almost independent. In the past friends used to be more helpful than relatives, but now it’s each one on their own, with his family. People now live a life of isolation. (Mbuzela 2001) Indeed, many respondents lament the decline in reciprocity and solidarity among extended family. The communality of festive work parties is contrasted and compared to the kazipalile [stand on your own, fend for yourself, help yourself, i.e. “you’ve no mother or father or relatives” to help you] of the present. These days everyone is preaching about it—kazipalile—fight your daily battles yourself. But you can only lead a good life when relatives and friends are cooperative and helpful. (Malata 2001) In particular, older women and men, and female-headed households lament the decline in community reciprocity: People see that your neighbor is growing cash crops, and thus will make a profit. So, if someone needs help these days, we expect to be paid and do not work unless this is the case. (Phiri 2001) Central to class inequality and its impact on labor arrangements, is the Ngoni distinction between piaye yekha [individual initiative] and kazipalili [fend for yourself]. Both imply an individualistic ethic, but the former denotes individual initiative and enterprise, associated with wealthier farmers, while the latter (according to the marginal members of these communities) is the marker of declining social solidarities and trust. For the marginal farmer, kazipalili is a way of describing how they are cast aside, unable to rely on neighbors or kin for social support. Thus, for the economically marginal, kalimalima-in-clubs is only a façade of former practices of labor solidarity, designed to benefit an exclusive membership of elite farmers and those who have been designated as leaders by external NGOs. Thus the poor tend to reject neotraditional evocation of kalimalima-in-clubs by lead farmers, vilifying elite behavior by lamenting patterns of social exclusion and unfair fairness in distribution. For their part, wealthy farmers who have capitalized on new development opportunities are no longer willing to pay for ganyu. However,

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they cannot fully escape local norms and expectations of reciprocity. By deploying kalimalima-in-clubs they attempt to mobilize labor participation in a way that seems to evoke cultural acceptability and historical continuity, often to satisfy the external development actors who fund projects that in fact favor these local elites. Group Ganyu Ngoni respondents note a second neotraditional, syncretic labor arrangement, group ganyu, which has emerged within the last decade. In group ganyu, as opposed to individual ganyu, five to fifteen people work collectively for pay in either on-farm or off-farm activities. Participation in group ganyu is voluntary. The participants are not necessarily kin members or belong to the same lineage, but tend to rely on extra-family relations including friendship or acquaintances. Group ganyu involves not only monetary gain, but also a voluntary sacrifice toward some kind of collective benefit, such as mobilizing funds and resources for local developmental activities. Group ganyu has a developmental function, when it is done with the purpose of raising funds for a communal project, and the group tends to decide on a rate of payment. By contrast, in individual ganyu the employer usually decides the payment for the work performed. Group ganyu is similar to the logic of work parties, and simultaneously also relies on the market-orientation of individual ganyu wage labor. For example, members of churches, football clubs, and women’s sewing clubs do group ganyu to raise funds. For the employers, group ganyu provides an efficient and cost effective source of labor. For example, one farmer who had mobilized labor through group ganyu said: “I hired group ganyu because I wanted to finish ploughing the field before the rains arrived.” However, efficiency is not the only criterion, which makes group ganyu a favored strategy for mobilizing labor, especially for rich farmers. Employers using group ganyu view this labor arrangement as an obligation to contribute toward the development of and help the village. For the poorer client employees, the transfer of money or other material goods through group ganyu is a survival mechanism. Although those who participate in group ganyu may make less money by working as a group, by working in this way they gain greater bargaining power over the terms of the agreement. It also allows them to find more opportunities, especially during the peak rainy season when there is greater demand for labor.


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The identities of those involved in group ganyu are thus not only as wage laborers, but also members of a collectivity. Rich patron employers and impoverished client employees bargain over the terms of labor contracts, but in so doing they are also attempting to recreate an ethos of local community solidarity. It is in these negotiated contracts that we find the functional equivalent of labor market flexibility and efficiency, along with a struggle to maintain social support and horizontal bonds of a network orientation that mitigate labor exploitation and alienation. In the Ngoni communities, where any demonstration of disparity in wealth could lead to strained relations, labor arrangements have been adapted to meet the exigencies of the present. Group ganyu has thus emerged as the modal labor arrangement. In contrast, kalimalima-in-clubs is used by elite farmers as mechanism for voluntary participation in local farmer groups. For the marginal farmers, however, kalimalima-in-clubs is only a façade of an exclusive membership that is evident in the rhetoric of the elites and local NGOs.

Conclusion: Multiple Trajectories of Labor Arrangements In the introduction, the authors propose that the conceptual apparatus of institutional syncretism helps elucidate instances when rules and practices inserted in a particular setting are “re-read” through “pre-existing” culturally embedded and historically constituted understandings. This paper highlights such institutional impositions and local articulations by illustrating the multiple trajectories of labor practices among the Ngonis of Eastern Zambia. The transformation of labor arrangements, when viewed through the lens of institutional syncretism, reveals a series of partially overlapping arrangements rather than a decisive and unidirectional transformation of collective labor pooling into individualized market labor. Distinct precapitalist structures not only may, but often do, strongly persist in the face of new methods of production, thus presenting a fundamental disarticulation in the process of capitalist penetration and wholesale transformation of precapitalist structures during the colonial as well as the contemporary period. During the precolonial and early colonial period, festive work parties were the modal forms of labor relations. These were characterized by horizontal norms of community reciprocity and social support, but were

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also a mechanism for accumulation and social control by Ngoni lineage heads and seniors. Functioning between exchange and reciprocity, labor pooling allowed Ngoni elites to extract labor power through “tribute.” But embedded in horizontal social ties, families, extended kin, and neighbors were also able to help each other through these practices. With agrarian commercialization, the Ngonis began hiring labor, which created social contestation concerning community norms of support. As notions of reward were transformed into payment, work parties were no longer sufficient or efficient for these progressive farmers. However, early ganyu wage-like labor contractual negotiations were shaped not only by the forces of supply and demand but also by local norms of social obligation and networks. During this time, many wealthier Ngoni farmers who were part of these patronage networks could hire kin members for ganyu wage-like labor without calculating the precise costs and benefits. The economic crisis that began in the 1970s became entrenched with the onset of structural adjustment programs. In response, elite Ngoni farmers attempted to disembed ganyu from social norms of reciprocity and fairness. When ganyu piece-work emerged, it was shaped not only by forces of supply and demand but by their embeddedness in local informal norms of social obligation and networks. With the decline in copper prices and reduction of state subsidies and services, fewer developmental resources were delivered to these rural communities. Ganyu became more market oriented, such that labor contracts no longer depended on kinship or friendship. This was especially evident through the late 1980s and early 1990s, as ganyu practices became disembedded from local norms of reciprocity and fairness. However, market liberalization in Zambia, has not supported the strengthening of an entrepreneurial yeoman farmer class, but instead perpetuated a partially proletarianized class of farmers. Today, poorer men with small fields and low yields undertake ganyu piece-work to survive the ongoing economic crisis. Among the Ngonis, individuation in production relations and increase in social differentiation have taken place alongside the emergence of new modes of reciprocity, social solidarity, and collective action—group ganyu and kalimalima-in-clubs. By using the lens of institutional syncretism we can also elaborate on “processes of interpretation, translation, negotiation, and mutual adjustment through which such a synthesis might be constructed, legitimized, and maintained.” (Introduction, this volume). Group ganyu is a local


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adaptation that blends the network-like qualities of festive beer brewing, early colonial kalimalima, and the exchange rationalism of ganyu. The reembedding in the form of group ganyu reduces information uncertainties and transaction costs, while simultaneously enhancing the level of trust between different actors in Ngoni communities. These findings also demonstrate the authors’ claims in the introduction that, “syncretic adaptations undertaken by non-elite actors may subvert, support or sometimes supplant the more empowered programs of institutional change articulated by elites.” For wealthier farmers, group ganyu is a mechanism to showcase their adherence to norms of community reciprocity and solidarity. For those who participate in group ganyu, collective labor pooling allows them to escape the alienation of ganyu, which is now viewed as an exploitative arrangement, undertaken only by those who have no other recourse. The framework of institutional syncretism also reveals processes of negotiation among different actors with “diverse sets of social expectations and cultural repertoires.” This is evident in the attempts by external actors and local elites who (re)deploy the imagery and logic of kalimalima to induce participation in local farmer groups and clubs for learning new agricultural techniques, building infrastructure such as seed banks for the clubs, and cultivating in each others fields. In effect, they hope that by relying on lateral solidarity networks evident in the logic of kalimalima, labor can be mobilized for developmental activities. Farmer groups, however, have had limited ability to mobilize voluntary labor, because labor arrangements have become individualized and commodified as seen in ganyu, while kalimalima-in-clubs is not viewed as legitimate, especially by marginal farmers. Through the lens of syncretism one can thus see that African social formations articulate with imposed western capitalist modes of production in a variety of ways. Older logics of social organization became the raw materials for the creation of new institutional practices. Because of this, the idea that there is one, ideal, unitary path for the evolution of labor exchange, or modernization for that matter, in rural Africa should be rejected. Labor exchange mechanisms neither advance teleologically toward some individualistic free market goal, nor do they regress pathologically toward the economy of affection. In short, they are adapted and result in new syncretic institutions, which if taken into consideration, can be used either positively or negatively by all the actors involved, including rural communities and the external state and NGOs who are involved in planning the lives of rural people.

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Research in Zambia’s Eastern Province was conducted over twelve months from May-August 1998, 1999 and August-December 2001, and was supported by funding from USAID Soils CRSP project, and predoctoral grants from the Center for African Studies, University of Florida and the University of Florida’s Sustainable Livelihoods Working Group. The author would like to thank the editors, as well as Dennis Galvan, Goran Hyden, and Christina Gladwin for their comments and suggestions. 1. To protect the anonymity of respondents, names of Ngoni villager interviewed for oral history and contemporary labor arrangements have been changed. 2. Potholing is a labor intensive conservation farming technique that involves making measured holes in a field to apply fertilizers, manure and seed. The precise delivery and concentration of inputs in holes enhances growth and reduces waste of expensive inputs. 3. The World Agroforestry Center (formerly ICRAF ) tested, refined and introduced a new agricultural technique of improved fallows in Eastern Province. The term “improved” was used to signify a newer and more efficient, practice of fallow where farmers were taught to plant leguminous trees along with their crops. This technique, by fixing nitrogen replenished fertility of the soil, improved soil organic matter and biomass, and eventually increased yields.

References Auslander, Mark. 1997. Fertilizer Has Brought Poison: Crises of Reproduction in Ngoni Society and History. Unpublished dissertation, University of Chicago. Barnes, John A. 1948. The Material Culture of the Fort Jameson Ngono. Zambia: The RhodesLivingston Museum. Barnes, John A. 1954. Politics in a Changing Society: A Political History of the Fort Jameson Ngoni. Cape Town and New York: Published for the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute by Oxford University Press. Bates, Robert H. 1981. Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berry, Sara. 1993. No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bratton, Michael. 1994. “Economic Crisis and Political Realignment in Zambia,” in Economic Change and Political Liberalization in Sub-Saharan Africa. Jennifer A. Widner, ed. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 101–28. Crehan, Kate and Achim Von Oppen. eds. 1994. Planners and History: Negotiating ‘Development’ in rural Zambia. Zambia: Multimedia Publications. Due J. and Christina H. Gladwin. 1991. “Impacts of Structural Adjustment Programs on African Women Farmers and Female-Headed Households.” African Journal of Agricultural Economics 73: 1431–9. Erasmus, C. 1956. “Culture, structure, and process: The occurrence and disappearance of reciprocal farm labor.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 12: 444–69. Galvan, Dennis. 2004. The State Must Be our Master of Fire: How Peasants Craft Culturally Sustainable Development in Senegal. Berkeley. University of California Press. Gladwin, Christina H. ed. 1991. Structural Adjustment and African Women Farmers. Florida: University of Florida Press. Gladwin, Christina H., Lin Cassidy, and Parakh N. Hoon. eds. 2002. “Special issue on Gender and Soil Fertility in Africa.” African Studies Quarterly 6, 1 and 2: [online] URL: http://web.africa. ufl.edu/asq/v6/v6i1a1.htm. Accessed on November 24, 2006.


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Granovetter, Mark and Richard Swedberg. eds. 1992. The Sociology of Economic Life. Boulder: Westview. Hydén, Göran. 1980. Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1983. No Shortcuts to Progress: African Development Management in Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kevane, Michael.1994. “Village Labor Markets in Sheikan District, Sudan.” World Development 22, 6: 839–57. Kopytoff, Ivan. 1987. The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. Momba, Jotham C. 1982. The State Peasant Differentiation and Rural Class Formation in Zambia: Case Study of Mazabuka and Monze Districts. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Toronto. Moore, M.P. 1975. “Cooperative Labour in Peasant Agriculture.” Journal of Peasant Studies 2: 270–91. Moore, Henrietta L. and Megan Vaughan. 1994. Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia 1890–1990. Portsmouth: Heinemman; London: James Currey; Lusaka: University of Zambia Press. Netting, Robert McC., M. Priscilla Stone, and Glenn D. Stone. 1989. “Kofyar Cash-Cropping: Choice and Change in Indigenous Agricultural Development.” Human Ecology 17, 3: 299–331. Polanyi, Karl. 1944, 1957. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Pottier, Johan. 1988. Migrants No More: Settlements and Survival in Mambwe Villages, Zambia. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Sanchez, Pedro. 2002. “Soil Fertility and Hunger in Africa.” Science 29: 2019–20. Scott, James C. 1976. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sil, Rudra. 2002. Managing Modernity: Work Community and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Vail, Leroy. 1977. “Ecology and History: The Example of Eastern Zambia.” Journal of Southern African Studies 3: 129–55. Vaughan, Megan. 1991. Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Worby, Eric. 1995. “What Does Agrarian Wage Labor Signify? Cotton, Commoditization and Social Form in Gokwe, Zimbabwe.” Journal of Peasant Studies 23: 1–29.

Interviews by Author Banda, Caroline. Female headed household interview, Kaluwa Village, Eastern Province, Zambia, December 2, 2001. Chulu, Andrew. Interview, Mashaba village, September 15, 2001. Focus Group interviews. Ntambusha Village, Zambia, November 28, 2001. Jere, Argness. Village Elder, Mishoro village, Eastern Province, Zambia, November 15, 2001. Jere, James. Interview, Lavu Village, Eastern Province, Zambia, October 25, 2001. Kaunda, Donald. Interview, Kaluwa Village, Eastern Province Zambia, December 2, 2001. Malata, Charity. 2001. Interview, Kaluwa village, Eastern Province, Zambia, September 15, 2001. Mbuzela, Lozaliya. Interview, Nthambusha village, Eastern Province, Zambia, November 11, 2001. Miti, Godfrey. Interview, Kaluwa Village, Eastern Province, Zambia, December 2, 2001.

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Mphanza, John. Oral history interview, Kaluwa village, Eastern Province, Zambia, November 15, 2001. Mphanza, Michael. Mashaba Village, Eastern Province, Zambia, October 15, 2001. Mphanza, David. Interview, Mashaba village, Eastern Province, Zambia, September 15, 2001. Ngoma, Dorothy. Interview, Mishoro village, Eastern Province, Zambia, October 21, 2001. Phiri, Cecilia. Female-headed household, interview, Kaluwa village, Eastern Province, Zambia, November 30, 2001. Phiri, Sylvia. Oral history interview, village elder farmer, Lavu village, Eastern Province, Zambia, December 6, 2001. Phiri, Elestina, single mother, interview, Kaluwa village, Eastern Province, Zambia, September 11, 2001. Tembo, Alexander. Interview, Kaluwa Village, Eastern Province, Zambia, October 5, 2001. Zulu, Mike. Interview, Kaluwa village, Eastern Province, Zambia. September 21, 2001.

CHAPTER

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Pathways of Institutional Diffusion under Leninism: A Historical Comparison of Romania and Hungary Cheng Chen

Introduction The Leninist bloc collapsed before the twentieth century drew to an end. This event is usually seen as clear evidence that liberalism has finally achieved global victory. During the early 1990s, there was widespread optimism that the demise of the Leninist bloc would quickly lead to the blossoming of liberal democracy. If this hope had been severely dashed in Russia and most other post-Soviet states, where Leninism had persisted for the longest time and hence left a rather deep-rooted legacy, it certainly seemed quite realistic in most of Eastern Europe where Leninism was originally an alien imposition brought by the “baggage train of the Red Army.” Yet, despite the establishment of formal liberal and democratic institutions and the expansion of western international regimes to incorporate many of these countries, the transition toward a new capitalist liberal democratic order has encountered varying degrees of resistance in post-Leninist Eastern Europe. Very often, politics in Eastern Europe is marred by pervasive illiberal norms and practices and virulent nationalist forces that stubbornly reject the diffusion of transnational institutions. It seems that, across the region, there is still a long way between the adoption of formal liberal institutions in a national setting and forming a national political culture with liberal political ideals and principles as its constituent features.

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As former Leninist states, these Eastern European countries used to share a host of similar political and economic institutions and experienced dramatic post-Leninist regime changes at approximately the same time. Nevertheless, some seem to have done a better job than others in moving away from Leninism and toward liberal democracy. While scholars have offered multiple explanations to this phenomenon (Fish 1998; Hellman 1998; McFaul 2002; Ekiert and Hanson 2003), this chapter adopts a historical institutionalist approach by focusing specifically on the counterintuitive consequences of different pathways of institutional diffusion under Leninism from a single authoritative institutional exemplar in the form of the Soviet Union. Being the very first Leninist regime, the Soviet Union was uniquely positioned to define a Leninist developmental model that it considered universal. In contrast, being a nonindigenous phenomenon, Leninism in Easter Europe had to be transplanted to a wide range of diverse local environments. During the Stalinist era, the Soviet developmental was imposed in standard fashion across Eastern Europe under the Soviet political and military domination. However, over the following decades, the institutional diffusion of Leninism, or the process in which individual Leninist regimes adapted universalist Leninist ideology and practices, turned out to be far from a uniform and monolithic project. In some cases, such as Romania, Leninism was effectively syncretized, and a developmental model derived from the Soviet model and framed in nationalist terms was implemented with rigor and consistency. In other cases, such as Hungary, Leninism was no more than a thin layering over preexisting institutions and more particularistic developmental frameworks. By comparing the two cases of Romania and Hungary, this chapter argues that after the demise of Leninism as a viable developmental strategy, the more thorough syncretization of Leninism actually made the Romanian extrication from Leninism far more difficult and complicated, leaving behind more ambivalent responses from both elites and masses to newly introduced liberal institutions. In comparison, the extrication from Leninism was easier in Hungary, where Leninism was largely nonsyncretized and therefore allowing the building of post-Leninist liberal institutions. The next section elaborates on the theoretical argument by discussing key concepts and the basis for the historical comparison. The sections “The Syncretization of Leninism in Romania” and “The Superficial Layering of Leninism in Hungary” trace the different historical trajectories in which Leninist institutional diffusion took place in Romania and Hungary, respectively. Then, based on empirical evidence of postLeninist politics, the section “After the End of Leninism” highlights the

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lasting effects of syncretization, or the lack thereof, in Romania and Hungary even after the originally transplanted Leninist institutional features ceased to exist. The concluding section summarizes the findings and points out their theoretical and empirical significance. Leninism and Institutional Syncretism Although first developed in Russia and drawing heavily upon classical Marxism, Leninism, like liberalism, was universalist in self-understanding in the sense that its fundamental ideas and principles were supposedly not dependent on their specific socio-historical contexts.1 Theoretically, it was based on Marxism, with historical materialism as its ideological foundation. As an organizational principle, Leninism emphasized the role of the vanguard party as the instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the transitional period to communism with democratic centralism as its central doctrine ( Jowitt 1992). As a strategy of socioeconomic transformation, Leninism offered a particular program of statist development designed to allow economically backward countries to catch up and accelerate the transition to communism without going through fully developed capitalism (Meyer 1957). Based on the premise of the dictatorship of proletariat, Leninism stressed the role of the state in leading economic development and distributing social wealth equally. Internally, it implied a command economy and egalitarianism; externally, it implied economic cohesion within the bloc and isolation from the capitalist world. In this sense, Leninism marked a break from classical Marxism by giving the state a central role in the transition to communism. As the very first Leninist state, the Soviet Union provided the prototype of the Leninist developmental model by adding concrete institutional content to the abstract Marxist-Leninist ideological framework. This model was characterized by heavy industrialization and agricultural collectivization under central planning, assimilation of ethnic minorities, and intra-bloc political and economic solidarity. Subsequently, the Soviet-style state-led developmental framework became the basic model for all other Leninist regimes to emulate. In particular, during the Stalinist era, rigorous “Sovietization,” the initial part of which often being called “satellization,” took place throughout Eastern Europe as a key step in the Soviet effort to build a monolithic image of the Leninist bloc under the leadership of Moscow. The only exception at that time was Yugoslavia, which was under the leadership of a home-grown communist regime that resisted Soviet interference in its domestic affairs.

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Eventually the institutional adaptations of this supposedly universalist Leninist developmental model diverged significantly across the Leninist bloc after the death of Stalin. In his efforts to de-Stalinize, Khrushchev loosened Stalin’s demand for an indivisible Leninist monolith, in which Soviet interests were identified as those of all Leninist regimes, and replaced it with “a mode of organization that tolerated regime individuality in a Soviet-centered Leninist regime world” ( Jowitt 1992: 183). The regime reconciled with Yugoslavia, and formally acknowledged the principle of “many roads to socialism,” that was to serve as the doctrinal basis for granting greater autonomy to the members of the Leninist bloc (Petro and Rubinstein 1997: 71). Therefore, in one way or another, Leninism gradually came to terms with widely differing local circumstances in application. In most of Eastern Europe, where Leninist regimes were “imported” from the Soviet Union and therefore had little or no initial social acceptance, this task became particularly challenging. Generally speaking, there were two broad strategies adopted by these nonindigenous regimes to adapt the Leninist model. One kind of strategy was to design national programs to fit the developmental vision and organizational precepts of Leninism. In regimes that adopted this strategy, the core institutions of Leninism were taken seriously, and Leninism was syncretized more thoroughly via a process in which these institutions were fused with portable elements of preexisting institutions. The other kind of strategy was to bypass defining elements of the Soviet developmental model, such as agricultural collectivization or heavy industrialization, in order to pursue more particularistic developmental paths. In such cases, there was only relatively superficial layering of Leninist symbols and practices on preexisting or indigenous national institutions. Although each Leninist regime adopted specific policies that included elements of the other ideal-type, the broad patterns and trends of the overall strategies as defined by these categories are discernible through empirical studies. While countries like Albania and Romania clearly developed their versions of syncretized Leninism, countries like Hungary and Poland never adopted a coherent Leninist developmental model in a consistent and thorough fashion. What kind of effects would this divergence of strategies have? The importance of institutional syncretism in making the adapted institutions effective in the local context has been noted by many authors in this volume. However, the unintended consequences of institutional syncretism, especially after the imposed or transplanted institutional features cease to exist, also deserve serious attention. After all, there is no reason to assume that every imposed or transplanted institution would last


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forever and not be replaced by a new set of institutions later. Once these transplanted institutions are gone, the local actors very often still have to deal with their legacies, whether they are positive or negative, especially when these institutions had been effectively syncretized in the local context. In the case of post-Leninist states, they are facing an additional challenge, which is the adaptation of a whole new set of institutions that are fundamentally contradictory to the old ones—capitalist liberal democracy. This chapter uses the historical comparison of two neighboring Eastern European countries with externally imposed Leninist regimes— Romania and Hungary—to illustrate the processes and consequences of the institutional adaptation of Leninism. By identifying the surprising ways in which legacies of Leninist rule detached themselves from formal communist institutions and provided a foundation for illiberal postLeninist politics, this chapter shows that institutional syncretism under Leninism, or the lack thereof, directly affected the different responses to liberal institutions in post-Leninist Eastern European states. The more thorough syncretization of Leninism, as in the case of Romania, had produced a more wide-ranging and persistent set of nonliberal or antiliberal political attitudes and orientations, and hence more resistance to post-Leninist liberal institutions. In places where this process was less complete, such as Hungary, the removal of a layer of Leninist symbols and practices was relatively easy, and Leninism’s illiberal legacies have been less pervasive and resilient. Therefore, to fully understand the institutional and cultural constraints faced by post-Leninist Eastern European states in building liberal democracy, it is necessary to examine their different experiences of institutional adaptation under Leninism. The Syncretization of Leninism in Romania Marxism-Leninism had never attracted any sort of mass following in precommunist Romania. Indeed, the initial condition for the institutional adaptation of Leninism in Romania could not have been worse. In its early days, the Romanian Communist Party was small, with its general membership and leadership primarily drawn from ethnic minorities (Gilberg 1990: 44).2 Moreover, Romania was a traditionally agrarian society, and the urban communists were very much alienated from the rural masses. When Leninism was officially imposed in Romania in 1945, the Party further alienated the society by sanctioning the ceding of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union, condoning the most blatant economic exploitation by Soviet troops, and recruiting

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social outcasts to swell its meager ranks (Gilberg 1990: 203). The level of initial social acceptance for Leninism in Romania was therefore extremely low. Thus Leninism was imposed in Romania originally as an entirely alien and antinational ideology. But during the following decades, this unfavorable starting point did not prevent Romanian regime leaders from persistently pursuing a national program based on the Soviet developmental model, even in face of great adversity and setbacks. At the same time, the fact that the Leninist regime itself was externally imposed meant that it would be particularly difficult for the regime to build and maintain its legitimacy by resorting to ideological means that later contributed to the regime’s heavy reliance on selective portable elements of traditional nationalism in ideology-building. Under the leadership of Gheorghiu-Dej, the relationship between Bucharest and Moscow was largely one of subordination and imitation. Since the later 1940s, Romania rapidly implemented a strictly Sovietstyle developmental program that focused on heavy industrialization at the expense of all other sectors. This was despite the fact that Romania was, and had always been, an agrarian and economically underdeveloped country. However, unlike Poland, Hungary, and later Czechoslovakia, Romania perceived the Soviet model of rapid heavy industrialization as a crucial step in building a new Leninist society and the most effective weapon against economic underdevelopment. Just between 1950 and 1965, there was a 748 percent increase in resources allocated to Romanian industry (Verdery 1995: 104). Moreover, the regime’s determination to build Leninism was highlighted by the formidable international obstacles the regime had to overcome in order to persist in its adherence to the Soviet model. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, it became clear that both the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies were planning to make Romania the “permanent vegetable garden” of Comecon through “socialist division of labor” (Zwick 1983: 118).3 Nevertheless, Gheorghiu-Dej refused to respond to Soviet pressure. The regime’s firm commitment to the Leninist model of heavy industrialization further led to political deviation from the Soviet Union that culminated in the so-called “Declaration of Independence,” a public statement issued in April 1964 that marked Romania’s public refusal of Soviet plans and affirmation of its sovereign rights.4 The regime requested the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Romania, and later gave strong hints that certain past events pertaining to boundaries had represented a questionable precedence, clearly referring to the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Northern


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Bukovina (King 1973). This quest for autonomy in the area of foreign policy did muster a broader popular base for Gheorghiu-Dej’s leadership, and by the time Ceaurescu came to power, the fundamental paradox in Romanian foreign policy was already clear: it was the regime leader’s commitment to the Leninist developmental model that turned him into a “national communist.” Gheorghiu-Dej’s successor, Ceaurescu, built on his predecessor’s foundation and went on to syncretize Leninism with a stronger nationalist flavor. From the beginning of the Ceaurescu era, the new leadership injected an element of nationalism into its domestic and foreign policies. But instead of bringing reform and liberalization, Ceaurescu’s nationalist campaign was accompanied by the ever-rigorous pursuit of a national developmental framework derived from the Soviet model, even after the original Soviet model was largely discarded by many of Romania’s Eastern European neighbors. Like his predecessor, Ceaurescu was firmly committed to rapid and thorough industrialization of the country. Moreover, Ceaurescu accelerated the implementation of Stalinist industrialization over the years. In the 1970s and 1980s, the regime implemented such a developmental strategy to a larger extent than anyone else in Eastern Europe. Towards the end of the 1980s, Romania was afflicted with a largely obsolete heavy industrial sector that produced goods that could not be sold on open market except by means of dumping or special trade arrangements (Gilberg 1990: 119). Meanwhile, almost all the other economic sectors remained severely underdeveloped. By this time, even ordinary urban people had noticed that the Soviet Union itself had become more liberalized than Romania. Most importantly, this developmental strategy was being framed by the regime in strong nationalist terms in an effort to build its domestic legitimacy. In her seminal work on national ideology in Romania, Katherine Verdery points out that Ceaurescu’s Romania was unique among many Eastern European countries in adopting a symbolic-ideological mode of control (Verdery 1995: 86).5 Because the nationalist discourse was ideologically powerful before the World War II, the regime sought to build its legitimacy based upon such a discourse by orchestrating intellectual debates over the idea of the Nation. In addition, immediately after he came to power, Ceaurescu asserted Romania’s equality with the Soviet Union by renaming the Romanian Workers’ Party the Romanian Communist Party (RCP), and the People’s Republic of Romania the Romanian Socialist Republic. He also affirmed the continuing existence and the positive role of nations under socialism in various speeches, therefore paving the way for identifying the RCP not just with the

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proletariat but also with the entire nation (Verdery 1995: 117–19). At the same time, Ceaurescu started to exploit selective illiberal elements of traditional Romanian nationalism, such as the Orthodox Church and certain Romanian historical traditions and personalities (Gilberg 1984: 179; Stan and Turcescu 2000: 1468).6 The purpose of this cultural politics was to effectively integrate the communist regime into the country’s national narrative and to bestow the originally alien Leninist institutions a sense of familiarity and authenticity within the Romanian context. The regime’s cultural politics also had its ramifications in minority policy. Through its ruthless suppression and assimilation of ethnic minorities, the regime intended to obliterate minority identities and merge ethnic minorities into one “socialist nation.” In the area of foreign policy, the regime tried to build an image that was independent from the Soviet Union with gestures such as trading with the West, the condemnation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and posing as a diplomatic bridge between the East and the West. These attempts to manipulate nationalist sentiments to appeal to the Romanian population did achieve some success as the regime’s fundamentally detrimental developmental strategy was now cushioned in a sense of local familiarity cultivated by nationalist policies and rhetoric. During this process, pre-Leninist political and economic institutions were dramatically altered, and the regime essentially forged a program of national development that was simultaneously based on, and diverging incrementally from, the original universalist Soviet model. Nevertheless, the hardship Romanian people had to endure over the decades as the result of this developmental strategy turned out to be too much. By the New Year of 1990, the most violent revolution in Eastern Europe ended with the execution of Ceaurescu and his wife. From the beginning, Leninism was perceived as an alien imposition in Romania. Yet, unlike most other Leninist regimes in Eastern Europe, the Romanian regime, especially under Ceaurescu, chose to rely primarily on ideology instead of coercion or material incentives to control the population. The consistent implementation of a national developmental framework derived from the Soviet model was accompanied by a cultural politics, particularly under the Ceaurescu regime that tried to manipulate selective nationalist symbols that shared ideological affinities with Leninism to build regime legitimacy among the population. The regime’s bizarre blend of “national Stalinism” manifested by Ceaurescu’s domestic rule and his independent foreign policy, instead of signalling a genuine commitment to a particularistic and flexible national developmental vision, was the product of a most repressive and ideologically


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dogmatic Leninist regime that grafted certain portable elements of traditional nationalism onto the transplanted Leninist institutions (Tismaneanu 2003).7 As a result, Leninism was syncretized from above in Romania, to a larger extent, than many other Eastern European countries where it was also imposed by the Soviet Union. The Superficial Layering of Leninism in Hungary Like in Romania, the Leninist regime in Hungary was not established as the result of an indigenous Leninist revolution.8 But the imposition of Leninism in Hungary after the World War II was not marked by swift and violent regime transition. Although, given the Soviet presence, the communists could have seized power as soon as the war was over, they decided not to do so under instructions from Stalin in deference to “Western sensitivities” (Gati 1986: 5; 1990: 11).9 The Hungarian communists started the race for power under very difficult circumstances. During the early postwar years, the Party was widely perceived to be a Russian and Jewish party, the torchbearer of a foreign ideology (Molnar 1990: 115, 129). Although there had been some Left support within the Hungarian society, the Soviet domination ironically deprived the Hungarian Communist Party of any claim to legitimacy. Nevertheless, a cautious political strategy, highlighted by their notorious “salami tactics” by which political adversaries were eliminated one by one, changed the balance of forces gradually in favor of the Soviet-backed communists. In 1949, the communists’ single-party rule was enshrined in the constitution of the People’s Republic of Hungary. Because the Party achieved a power monopoly only after several years of competing with other political forces, it made a serious effort to present itself as a party that represented national, instead of just Soviet interests. Even as it eliminated its major political opponents, the Party continued to claim that its objective was “a free, democratic, and independent Hungary” led by a government representing all the democratic forces. The Party thus tried to project the image of a committed partner in a large-scale nationalist project and not just of a Leninist and proletarian party (Molnar 1990: 117). This stance might have been no more than a temporary expedient in the Party’s consolidation of power, but it showed that the Leninist regime in Hungary emphasized particularistic national interests over ideology from the very beginning. Once the Party was in sole control of the country, however, the Rakosi regime set out to “Sovietize” Hungary just like most other

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Eastern European “people’s democracies” did during the Stalinist era. In the economic sphere, industrialization was accompanied by forced collectivization and persecution of the Kulaks in the countryside. The initial success in the industrial sector came at a heavy price. The standard of living dropped sharply, and in 1952 the country found itself on the brink of a famine (Felkay 1989: 44–5). But unlike in Romania, the negative effects of the imposition of the Soviet model combined with the death of Stalin quickly led to changes in the regime’s developmental strategy. In 1956, the so-called “New Course” proposed by Imre Nagy was adopted by the Hungarian regime that raised hopes for a period of liberalization. However, a power struggle resulted between the Stalinists led by Rakosi and the reformists led by Nagy. When the Party became deeply split on the national developmental strategy, it lost its capacity to impose its will on the society, and this opened the door to the popular uprising of 1956 (Lendvai 1988). The speed and intensity with which the events leading to the 1956 uprising took place indicated the strength of the reformists within the Party and the growing nationalist sentiments among the population. The uprising also signalled the dead end of the original Leninist developmental framework in Hungary. Having learned its lesson, the Kadar regime decidedly departed from the Soviet model in search of a unique path to national development. After a period of crackdown and reorganization, the Kadar regime was ready to engage in unprecedented political relaxation and economic liberalism by the early 1960s. Realizing that Rakosi’s use of terror had contributed to the outbreak of the revolution, Kadar began to move in favor of policy of reconciliation and informal co-optation. The 1960s was characterized by Kadar’s famous dictum published in the Party daily paper Nepszabadsag in January 1962, “Whereas the Rakosiites used to say that those who are not with us are against us, we say those who are not against us are with us.” This period set the stage for what was to be known as the “alliance policy.” The main purpose of the policy was to form, at least in spirit, an alliance of Party and non-Party people who could work toward common goals (Tong 1997: 61). Although the Party set strict limits to political reforms and the Party’s leadership was never open to challenge, Leninist ideological concerns were largely pushed into the background for the sake of particularistic developmental goals. The Kadar regime’s limited political objectives resulted in a society that was so depoliticized that the majority of the population was concerned with private pursuits, and even the democratic opposition called for further reforms rather than for systemic transformation (Gati 1986: 160).


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By far the most radical reform of the Warsaw Pact countries, the New Economic Mechanism (NEM) was introduced as a package in 1968. Essentially, the NEM gave a greater role for market forces and nonstate sectors, and created a more decentralized and mixed socialist economy with an unusual focus on agriculture, small-scale industry, and the service sector. The political rationale for the reform was provided by linking the political crisis in 1956, in part, to economic deficiencies under Rakosi, thereby implying the need for economic reform as a requisite of political stability (O’Neil 1998: 38). As a result of the reform, living standards had been continuously improving for most Hungarians. By the late 1970s, the NEM had become the principal, if not the only, source of the regime’s legitimacy (Tokes 1996: 254). The significance of the economic reform under the Kadar regime was that, as a proclaimed Leninist, Kadar noticed the limitations and weaknesses of the original Soviet economic model, and implemented “economic methods borrowed from the capitalist free enterprise system” under the cover of Marxist-Leninist symbols and rhetoric (Felkay 1989: 280). He reasoned that as long as the “means of production” were in socialist ownership, the economy would still be considered fundamentally Leninist. The brief backlash of recentralization in the early 1970s suggested that dogmatic forces still held power within the Party, who increasingly responded to the success of the NEM by questioning whether such reform would ultimately undermine the Leninist regime as a whole. As a result, the economic reforms achieved only temporary and partial success. Ultimately, it was not the lack of political democratization but the stagnation and deterioration of the economic system that fatally undermined the Kadar regime (Tokes 1996: 254). Meanwhile, the minority policy of the Kadar regime was also much more relaxed than that of most other Leninist regimes, including Romania. Since the late 1960s, the predominant feature of Hungary’s minority policy had been to provide an example by a correct and positive minority policy that the country hoped would be followed by its neighbors (Vago 1989: 133).10 Whereas the Romanians were busy assimilating their ethnic Hungarians, since the late 1960s, and even more so later, the Hungarian regime had promoted minority culture and education, encouraging ethnic minorities to assert their ethnic identity and to slow down the process of assimilation. Internationally, the Kadar regime had loyally supported Soviet foreign policy to gain sufficient elbowroom for highly unorthodox reforms at home. The Hungarian population was willing to accept a pro-Soviet foreign policy in return for rising living standards and economic reform combined with a degree

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of liberalization. However, with the advent of Gorbachev, the Kadar regime was no longer able to point to the Soviet threat as an excuse for failing to implement further reforms. From 1988–89, the pro-reform communists peacefully took over the Party leadership, initiated a series of reforms, and became the driving force behind the democratic transition. In October 1989, the Party dissolved itself to establish a new, social democratic party, the Hungarian Socialist Party, thus marking the end of Leninism in Hungary. Like in Romania, Leninism was not an indigenous phenomenon in Hungary. But, instead of consistently adopting a national developmental framework derived from the Soviet model like Romania did, Hungary followed a rather innovative developmental strategy that decidedly departed from the original Soviet model of central planning and heavy industrialization, as exemplified by the famous New Economic Mechanism initiated under Janos Kadar. The economic reforms coupled with limited political liberalization turned a population that was hostile after the 1956 revolution into a cooperative, or at least indifferent, partner. In contrast to its Romanian counterpart, the Hungarian regime based its rule largely on promises of material gains rather than ideology. It never made a consistent effort to fuse core elements of Leninism with particularistic national institutions. By promoting reform as a new basis of legitimacy, the Kadar regime was able to recast itself from the image of a Soviet puppet to that of a pragmatic and even paternalistic leadership. The regime’s retreat from the ideological sphere along with its unorthodox developmental strategy resulted in the rather superficial layering of Leninist symbols and rhetoric over an indigenous and particularistic developmental framework. In other words, Leninism had not been effectively syncretized in the Hungarian context. After the End of Leninism The collapse of the Leninist bloc in 1989 marked the demise of Leninism as a viable developmental strategy in Eastern Europe. For those Eastern European countries that had more or less followed the Soviet developmental model for the past decades, it also marked the beginning of the difficult political and economic transition toward a capitalist liberal democratic order. Since then, very different outcomes have emerged during this transitional process. The so-called “Central Europe,” to which Hungary belongs, has established sustainable liberal democracy and successfully joined the European Union as the first group of post-Leninist states. In comparison, many Balkans states, such as


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Romania, have had a more difficult time steering the post-Leninist transition. This difference has prompted a lot of scholarly debates, and many explanations, including those relying on various historical legacies, postLeninist institutional choices, or even geographical locations, have been offered to account for this variation. Yet, the thoroughness with which the Leninist developmental model was syncretized in Eastern Europe has not been fully examined as an important structural-cultural factor. Historically, neither Romania nor Hungary had much experience with democracy or liberalism (Gati 1990: 4).11 Although quite different from each other, the pre-Leninist culture in both countries had been largely illiberal and highly conservative. During the interwar period and much of the World War II, both Romania and Hungary experienced fascist dictatorships and were allies of the Axis powers.12 In this sense, it is difficult to convincingly argue that one country’s traditional culture is inherently much more liberal than the other. Nevertheless, their respective developmental trajectories diverged greatly under Leninism, and subsequently led to quite different post-Leninist outcomes, as the very success of the syncretic adaptation of Leninist institutions in Romania made Leninism’s extrication far more difficult and complicated, leaving a greater sense of confusion and ambivalence among the Romanian population. More than one decade after the collapse of the Leninist regime, there is still palpable, albeit marginal, nostalgia in Romania for Ceaurescu’s days of equality. As much as all agree that there is no way back to Leninism, the Leninist era and many of the things that it entailed are still appealing to some Romanian people.13 After so many years of living under Leninism, many continue to look to the state for a solution to the country’s economic problems. Since 1989, the conservative ex-Communist, Ion Illiescu, had been elected and reelected three times as the country’s president. His rule was only interrupted in 1996, by the liberal Constantinescu government, which lost in the year 2000 in a landslide, and then again in 2004, when the constitution forbade him from pursuing another term. Meanwhile, nepotism and corruption thrive among the post-Leninist elites that evolved from the Leninist-era nomenklatura, and second economy among ordinary citizens has been rampant. According to both domestic surveys and the World Values Surveys, the values endorsed by Romanians are still more in line with an authoritarian, rural civilization than an industrialized and modern one (Pippidi-Mungiu 1999; Dryzek and Holmes 2002: 195–205). Since the demise of Leninism, Romania has always been considered a slower developer than many other Eastern European post-Leninist states.

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The slow pace of reform and problems such as corruption and poor treatment of ethnic minorities had kept the country off the list of new EU members in May 2004. Although Romania is now a consolidated democracy according to the most recent Freedom House rankings, illiberal norms and practices still permeate the Romanian society and politics. Despite the narrow 2004 presidential win of the centrist Traian Basescu over Illiescu’s political successor Adrian Nastase, the development of a genuinely pluralist democratic political society is still slow in Romania. Illiescu’s party, the Social Democrat Party, formed originally of former communists, remains the largest and the best-organized political party in the parliament. The surprisingly resilient political life of Ion Illiescu himself, who was considered a father figure among many poor and rural people as well as many who had lived under Leninism, and the considerable strength of his political party seem to suggest a large segment of the population’s persistent preference for stability and continuity over radical liberalization. More disturbingly, the Great Romanian Party, an extremist nationalist party under the leadership of a former Ceaurescu court poet, has been able to attract the support of a sizable minority of the Romanian population.14 Romania’s post-Leninist economic record has not been impressive. Despite recent growth, the average wage remains low, and inflation rate remains high. The ongoing economic hardship certainly does not help the country’s prospect for building a stable capitalist liberal democratic order. Although significant progress has been made, illiberal forces are still able to shore up popular support by capitalizing on, and consequently exacerbating, serious political and economic problems. Politically, without much grassroot support, it will remain difficult for liberals to organize and maintain a strong and effective popular base. Nevertheless, luckily for the country, the process of European integration is set to incorporate Romania. In order to meet the EU requirements, Romania will have to continue its political and economic reforms. And if indeed Romania succeeds in joining the EU in 2007, its illiberal political forces will likely be effectively contained and marginalized in the long run. But at least for now, these forces still have plenty of opportunities to exploit the Romanian public’s discontent during a period of difficult transition. Whereas Romania experienced the most violent “bottom-up” revolution in 1989, the “top-down” regime change in Hungary was almost painless. This negotiated revolution, far from being a people’s revolution, as some might suggest, was achieved through agreements made between elites over and above the heads of the people. People power played only a


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minimal role in the process. The first mass involvement in the transition came in the general elections of 1990, which produced a coalition government led by the conservative Hungarian Democratic Forum. The fact that the Communist Party was able to successfully act as the driving force and play a central role in the democratic transition had everything to do with its relatively positive image among the Hungarian population (O’Neil 1998: 51; Swain and Swain 1998: 179),15 which was very much the result of its long-term commitment to a particularistic national developmental framework during the Leninist era. The minimal syncretization of Leninism in Hungary clearly allowed a much less ambivalent response to new liberal institutions compared to Romania. Among the post-Leninist states that are currently undergoing painful political, economic, and social transformations, Hungary is usually considered as one of the relatively successful cases. Political elections have been free and fair. The country enjoys a respectable 4 to 5 percent growth rate, and has attracted by far the largest amount of foreign investment per capita of the former Communist bloc countries. In 1999, Hungary became one of the first Eastern European countries to join NATO. In 2004, it was again among the first to become an EU member. The fact that Leninism was not effectively syncretized in Hungary also allowed the Party to continue to function as a viable political force pursuing liberal policies once Leninism became defunct in Hungary, albeit under a slightly different name. The Party derived much of its legitimacy from its successful policies, especially in the economic sphere, rather than from the Leninist ideology and institutions. And since the Party was not heavily dependent on the Leninist ideology and institutions for survival, it was able to remain largely intact even after completely abandoning its original ideological position upon the demise of Leninism. During the post-Leninist era, the new Hungarian Socialist Party has again demonstrated an amazing ability to renovate itself and to adjust to new environments. Still the largest and best-organized political party in Hungary, the Hungarian Socialist Party remains a formidable force in the political realm. Compared to the Social Democrats in Romania, the supposedly leftist Socialists in Hungary, which are the current governing party after defeating the center-right Fidesz in 2002, champion liberal positions of democracy and free market and pursue economic policies that Margaret Thatcher would approve of.16 Unlike in Romania, there is little disagreement among the major political parties on such issues as integration into Europe and the virtue of free enterprise. Even in the more successful cases like Hungary where the diffusion of liberal institutions have not been seriously hindered by Leninist legacies,

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the post-Leninist transition has been tough. National surveys conducted in Hungary since the early 1990s have found pervasive disaffection resulting from the pace and direction of political and socioeconomic changes (Nelson 1999: 305).17 The bitterness and resentment among parts of the population are best reflected by the fact that every government after 1989, with the exception of the current Socialist government, was booted out after just one term in office. But even the relatively successful Socialist government has been plagued by scandals and problems. In 2006, riots and antigovernment protests broke out on several occasions following the admission by the Socialist prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, that his government lied about the true state of pubic finances before winning the election. Hungary’s recent admission into the EU will not solve all its problems, and may actually exacerbate some. Still, it was a very positive development. The imposition of European norms in political, economic, and environmental spheres is bound to make Hungary a more attractive country for Westerners, and symbolizes the country’s further and deeper integration into the global capitalist-democratic order. Conclusion: Pathways of Institutional Diffusion Being a nonindigenous phenomenon, Leninism in Eastern Europe went through various trajectories to be transplanted to local environments. In the case of Romania, the regime’s great emphasis on ideology, instead of material incentives to control the population and its consistency in following a national developmental framework derived from the Soviet model during the decades of Leninist rule had syncretized Leninism to a larger extent than in most other Eastern European countries. Despite its ultimate failure, this process succeeded during the 1960s in reorienting the politics of the country and the language of Leninism, so that these were seen as serving Romanian rather than Soviet interests (Verdery 1995: 121). For a time, it did produce some support for the regime by blending far-left official ideology with far-right nationalist discourses. Nevertheless, once Leninism was gone as a viable developmental strategy, much of the sense of familiarity that was cultivated during the transplantation of Leninism persisted and led to great ambivalence toward new liberal institutions. While the Leninist regime in Romania, especially under Ceausescu, relied heavily on traditional Romanian nationalism to establish ideological control, the Hungarian regime based its rule more on promises of material gains, taking full advantage of the latitude afforded by Khrushchev’s


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“many roads to socialism.” The first several years of strict Leninist rule was quickly brought to an end by both internal conflicts within the Party and popular discontent. The Soviet intervention in 1956 indicated the Soviet determination to back the Leninist regime by coercive measures. Since then, the Hungarian regime endeavored to project a tolerant and paternalistic image. In exchange for decent living standards, Hungarians were asked for a few concessions: to work honestly for themselves and for the common good, and to accept the supremacy of the Communist Party and the Soviet domination. The regime’s retreat from the ideological sphere coupled with its rather particularistic developmental strategy resulted in only a thin and superficial layering of Leninist symbols and rhetoric over preexisting and indigenous institutions, thus permitting the building of liberal institutions during the post-Leninist era. The historical comparisons presented here show that institutional diffusion can take very different forms, and that these different pathways do shape political outcomes in important ways. In this particular case, this difference is just one among a whole set of institutional and contextual factors that influenced post-Leninist political outcomes. Nevertheless, it provides crucial information on the structural and cultural backgrounds against which post-Leninist transformations play out in specific contexts. Significantly, this study shows that the different ways in which imposed institutions are transplanted can have lasting effects even after these institutions are gone. The counterintuitive finding of this study is that there is a nonlinear and inverse relationship between the post-Leninist and Leninist trajectories of institutional development. Therefore, broadly speaking, institutional syncretism, as much as it makes the transplanted institutions viable and effective in a local context, could well lead to unintended and detrimental consequences over the long run once these institutions cease to exist or are replaced by a new set of institutions. Given the possibility of such an outcome, local actors seeking to adapt a plethora of transnational institutions in today’s increasingly globalized world ought to consider carefully when formulating proper long-term strategies. Notes 1. I am using Galvan and Sil’s definition of institutional syncretism in the introductory chapter of this volume. 2. The RCP was formed in 1921. At that time, the Romanian government’s minority policy was openly nationalistic, which created great tension between the Romanians and the ethnic minorities. Anti-Semitism was also strong. This made any solidarity across ethnic boundaries exceedingly difficult, thus limiting the possibilities of a class-based political movement.

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3. The plan for the socialist division of labor was officially adopted by Comecon in 1962 in the form of a declaration called “The Basic Principles of the International Division of Labor.” The most important provision was that Comecon should serve as a supranational planning agency for the bloc and all planning decisions should be approved by majority vote. 4. This is “Statement on the Stand of the Romanian Workers Party Concerning the Problems of the World Communist and Working Class Movement” published on April 22, 1964. 5. Verdery defines “symbolic-ideological control” as control that relies on moral imperatives, societal norms, or other ideological appeals. It entails outright exhortations and also attempts to saturate consciousness with certain symbols and ideological premises to which subsequent exhortations may be addressed. 6. This nationalist tendency culminated in a major ideological offensive during 1971 to integrate the regime with Romanian history. 7. Tismaneanu draws the crucial distinction between “national Communism” and “national Stalinism.” Whereas the former was “a critical reaction to Soviet imperialism, hegemonic designs, and rigid ideological orthodoxy” and “generally favored revisionist alternatives to the enshrined Stalinist model,” the latter “systematically opposed any form of liberalism,” and was therefore the opposite of national Communism. Such “national Stalinism” as existed in Romania “clung to a number of presumably universal laws of socialist revolution and treated any ‘deviation’ from these as a betrayal of class principles.” 8. Hungary had a brief encounter with Marxism-Leninism in 1919, when Hungarian communist Bela Kun set up a Soviet republic and rapidly implemented a radical Bolshevik-style program. But Kun’s rise had little to do with the mass appeals of Leninist ideology. Rather, it was mainly due to the support of demoralized soldiers restive over the anticipated loss of historic Hungarian territory after the First World War. The 1919 regime was the by-product of immediate postWorld War I chaos rather than the result of an organized, mass-based Leninist revolution. After Kun’s diplomatic and military failure to reclaim lost territory, a fascist regime led by Admiral Miklos Horthy quickly ousted the Bolshevik government that lasted only for 133 days. 9. Apparently the Soviet Union felt the need to compensate the West for the rapid takeover in Poland, which was the largest and supposedly the most important country in Eastern Europe. 10. Hungary is surrounded by large numbers of geographically-concentrated ethnic Hungarians in neighboring states (more than 3 million). Apart from ethnic Russians, ethnic Hungarians are the greatest minority in Europe. Ethnic Hungarians make up about 10 percent of Slovakia’s population and 7 percent of Romania’s. 11. It has been argued that among pre-Leninist Eastern European countries, only Czechoslovakia and Germany had experienced Western-style democracy with its emphasis on institutionalized pluralism and the merits of diversity. 12. In 1940, General Ion Antonescu imposed a fascist dictatorship in Romania. In 1941, Romania joined the war on the side of the Axis and contributed considerable forces to the German invasion of the Soviet Union. In 1944, King Michael dismissed Antonescu and changed sides after being promised the return of Transylvania by the Ally forces. Hungary was under the control of Admiral Miklos Horthy from 1920–44. The regime was extremely conservative and chauvinistic. In the 1930, the regime was brought into the orbit of the Third Reich. 13. According to the most recent Eurobarometer survey (Autumn 2005) when this chapter was written, of the Romanians who voice an opinion about their political orientation, 32 percent state they have a “left-wing” orientation. This orientation is characteristic of the older people and those with a medium education level in rural areas. See http://europa.eu.int /comm/public_opinion/ archives/eb/eb64/eb64_ro_exec.pdf. Accessed May 2006. 14. During the 2000 presidential election, the leader of Greater Romania Party, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, garnered 33.17 percent of the vote during the run-off. His party also gained control of over one-fifth of the country’s parliament. During the 2004 parliamentary elections, his party still managed to get around 13 percent of the votes.


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15. Public opinion polls showed that as late as 1985, two-thirds of those surveyed were both content with the Party’s work and believed that the Party served their interests. Only from the mid-1980s onward did public opinion surveys reveal significant increases in the numbers of people who felt that the government was unable to resolve the country’s economic problems. 16. The Socialist returned to power in 1994, forming a coalition with the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz). During 1994–98, the SzDSz was most hated by the opposition, being accused of being rootless cosmopolitans, and people who stand for the role of global institutions. Ironically, it is the self-described conservatives who demand a greater role for the state in the economic life and who decry increasing social inequality. Clearly the so-called “Left” has surrendered these powerful issues to its political enemies. 17. According to the Eurobarometer survey in the autumn of 2005, 56 percent of Hungarians say they are satisfied with their lives. This is much lower than the EU average of 80 percent— a result that is consistent with the previous surveys. Significantly, only 19 percent of Hungarians expect a positive change in the economy. See http://europa.eu.int/comm/public_opinion/ archives/eb/eb64/eb64_hu_exec.pdf. Accessed May 2006.

References Dryzek, John S. and Holmes, Leslie. 2002. Post-Communist Democratization: Political Discourses across Thirteen Countries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ekiert, Grzegorz and Hanson, Stephen E. eds. 2003. Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Felkay, Andrew. 1989. Hungary and the USSR, 1956–1988: Kadar’s Political Leadership. New York: Greenwood Press. Fish, Steven M. 1998. “Determinants of Economic Reform in the Post-Communist World.” East European Politics and Societies 12: 31–78. Gati, Charles. 1986. Hungary and the Soviet Bloc. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 1990. The Bloc that Failed: Soviet-East European Relations in Transition. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Gilberg, Trond. 1984. “Religion and Nationalism in Romania,” in Religion and Nationalism in Soviet and East European Politics. Pedro Ramet, ed. Durham: Duke Press Policy Studies, 1984. ———. 1990. Nationalism and Communism in Romania: The Rise and Fall of Ceausescu’s Personal Dictatorship. Boulder: Westview Press. Hellman, Joel. 1998. “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transition.” World Politics 50: 203–34. Jowitt, Ken. 1992. New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kenez, Peter. 1997. “A Sour Mood in Hungary: Letter from Budapest.” The New Leader 80: 8. King, Robert R. 1973. Minorities under Communism: Nationalities as a Source of Tension among Balkan States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lendvai, Paul. 1988. Hungary: The Art of Survival. London: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. McFaul, Michael. 2002. “The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Noncooperative Transitions in the Postcommunist World.” World Politics 54: 212–44. Meyer, Alfred G. 1957. Leninism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Molnar, Miklos. 1990. From Bela Kun to Janos Kadar: Seventy Years of Hungarian Communism. New York: Berg Publishers. Nelson, Daniel. 1999. “Regional Security and Ethnic Minorities,” in Dilemmas of Transition: The Hungarian Experience. Aurel Braun and Zoltan Barany, eds. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

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O’Neil, Patrick H. 1998. Revolution from Within: The Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party and the Collapse of Communism. Cheltenham and Northampton: E. Elgar. Petro, Nicolai N. and Rubinstein, Alvin Z. 1997. Russian Foreign Policy: From Empire to Nation-State. New York: Longman. Pippidi-Mungiu, Alina. 1999. “Political Externa.” Foreign Policy 116: 158–60. Stan, Lavina and Turcescu, Lucian. 2000. “The Romanian Orthodox Church and Post-Communist Democratization.” Europe-Asia Studies 52: 1467–88. Swain, Geoffrey and Swain, Nigel. 1998. Eastern Europe since 1945. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Tismaneanu, Vladimir. 2003. Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tokes, Rudolf L. 1996. Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution: Economic Reform, Social Change, and Political Succession, 1957–1990. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tong, Yanqi. 1997. Transition from State Socialism: Economic and Political Change in Hungary and China. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Vago, Raphael. 1989. The Grandchildren of Trianon: Hungary and the Hungarian Minority in the Communist States. Boulder: East European Monographs. Verdery, Katherine. 1995. National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zwick, Peter. 1983. National Communism. Boulder: Westview Press.

CHAPTER

TEN

Brazil’s 1964–67 Economic Stabilization Plan as Institutional Syncretism Christine A. Kearney

This chapter considers Brazil’s 1964–67 Plano de Ação Econômico do Governo (Plan of Government Economic Action, or PAEG) as an example of institutional syncretism. The PAEG1 was a major episode in Brazil’s economic history and has been much debated among economists both within and outside Brazil (Fishlow 1973; Friedman 1974; Simonsen 1995; Biderman, Cozac and Rego 1996; Mantega and Rego 1999). In comparison with most Brazilian stabilization plans, the PAEG is known as an anomaly because of its perceived austerity and monetarist orthodoxy (Skidmore 1988; Lara Resende 1992; Biderman, Cozac and Rego 1996). At the same time, there is general consensus that the PAEG laid the groundwork for the long period of high economic growth that Brazil experienced in the late 1960s and 1970s (Lara Resende 1992; Biderman, Cozac and Rego 1996). This chapter questions the PAEG’s status as an anomalous case and uses this inquiry to reveal the PAEG as a syncretic institution. The PAEG was far from perfectly orthodox. While influenced by monetarism, the architects of the plan, Finance Minister Octávio Gouvêa de Bulhões and Planning Minister Roberto de Oliveira Campos, deliberately deviated from it by insisting on fighting inflation gradually and by employing indexation. Moreover, these deviations actually connect the PAEG in significant ways to previous Brazilian policies, linking its authors and their government to an ongoing elite debate about Brazil’s identity, embodied in the notion of “progress.”

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For these reasons, the PAEG illustrates well the dynamics of institutional syncretism. While the PAEG was certainly a distinctive and in no way predetermined economic plan, its innovation within an existing Brazilian policy tradition points to a process of “change-with-continuity” or “directed contingency” consistent with institutional syncretism. The PAEG also reveals both a deliberate and unintentional side to institutional syncretism. The Campos-Bulhões team self-consciously adapted “foreign” ideas and devised indexation in a pragmatic effort to solve what they saw as a “Brazilian” problem; they were intentionally syncretic institution builders in this respect, akin to the Japanese managers described by Sil in chapter six. But their creation, namely indexation, grew far beyond their original intentions. A policy they meant to be limited and temporary worked so well, suited Brazilian goals and capacities so closely, that subsequent governments institutionalized it. In this respect, the PAEG illustrates the cumulative, less intentional side of the institutional syncretism dynamic, more characteristic of Galvan’s findings in chapter two. The PAEG as Anomalous Brazilian Stabilization Plan? The PAEG is often understood as anomalous in the history of Brazilian stabilization plans, unusual for its degree of conformity with monetarist “orthodoxy.”2 On closer examination, we will see that this is not the case: the PAEG was less monetarist than is usually imagined. Moreover, in the manner of a syncretic institution, the designers of the PAEG drew upon elements and tendencies within previous stabilization policies as raw materials in devising a new approach in the mid 1960s. Even in the context of a country often characterized as a “world champion” of inflation, the mid 1960s were a difficult time. In April 1964, inflation was high (nearly 100 percent in annual terms), government spending and deficits were out of control, foreign credit and investment had dried up, and economic growth had stalled. Brazil’s President, General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco, had just assumed office after a traumatic coup, and he needed to restore economic confidence as quickly as possible. He appointed an internationally respected economic team with impeccable qualifications—Finance Minister Bulhões and Planning Minister Campos—whose plan (the PAEG) aimed both to stabilize Brazil’s immediate economic

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situation and to lay a solid foundation for future economic growth and development (Skidmore 1988; Campos 2001; PAEG 1964). Of the five official goals of the PAEG, inflation stabilization3 was the most important: Campos and Bulhões themselves emphasized in the PAEG text that “no item in the Government’s Program” required “as much urgency as the containment of the inflationary process.” They thought controlling inflation was a prerequisite for all other goals and “indispensable for the resumption of the rhythm of development” (PAEG 1964: 28). To deal with inflation, Campos and Bulhões’ approach did indeed have elements of monetarism, making it appear, on first glance, a break with existing conventions. In particular, Campos and Bulhões agreed with monetarism that chronic public deficits were an important cause of inflation and that “cleaning up of public finances,” was “an indispensable requirement for the success of any program of monetary stabilization” (PAEG 1964: 29). To achieve this housecleaning, Campos and Bulhões called for various policies that also were in keeping with monetarist prescriptions, in particular setting targets for limiting the growth of the money supply—70 percent for 1964, 30 percent for 1965, and 15 percent for 1966—and controlling government spending (PAEG 1964: 29 and 35). However, we should be cautious, for at least two reasons, about concluding that these very real monetarist design elements in the PAEG represented either a revolution in Brazilian practices or a total shift toward economic orthodoxy. First, monetarist diagnoses and prescriptions in Brazilian stabilization plans were not unique to the PAEG. In fact, its two immediate predecessors, the Trienal Plan4 of 1962–63 and the Plano de Estabilização Monetária or Monetary Stabilization Plan (PEM) of 1958–59,5 both displayed orthodox elements in their designs (Abreu 1992b; Orenstein and Sochaczewski 1992; Campos 2001). Second, the PAEG’s fiscal and monetary austerity was implemented only modestly. Although the plan held the money supply increase to 15 percent in 1966, it missed both its 1964 and 1965 targets, with the 1965 increase (75 percent) more than double that projected by the PAEG (Skidmore 1988: 45; Lara Resende 1992: 219). Likewise, the PAEG aimed for inflation rates of 25 percent in 1965 and 10 percent in 1966, but the actual results were 58 and 38 percent respectively (Simonsen 1995: 17). As Lara Resende (1992: 222) notes, the truly orthodox aspects of the PAEG implementation were limited to the restrictive monetary and credit policy of the first two trimesters of 1966 and to the cuts in government spending and tax increases that occurred between 1964 and 1966.

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These facts of course contradict the general perception that the PAEG was unusually tough (Biderman, Cozac, and Rego 1996; Lara Resende 1992; Campos 2001). Indeed, in addition to anaemic implementation of monetarist austerity, there were three ways in which the PAEG deviated notably from orthodox stabilization. Each of these, discussed at length in the sections which follow, reveals the creative agency at work in the design of the PAEG as an innovative, syncretic institutional solution. First, despite Campos and Bulhões’ objections to some aspects of structuralism,6 the PAEG’s inflation analysis still reflected it to some extent. Second, the PAEG explicitly rejected monetarist shock treatment, opting instead for a gradualist approach to lowering inflation. Finally, the PAEG introduced monetary correction (indexation), a policy that was highly unorthodox and drew criticism from the International Monetary Fund. Echoes of Structuralism In truth, the PAEG’s reputation as an anomalous economic plan may stem from the oversimplified perception that Campos and Bulhões thoroughly rejected structuralism, a dominant way of thinking about development among Brazilian elites in the 1960s. Unlike monetarism, which was rooted in European and North American economic liberalism, structuralism was a Latin American theory, stemming from the work of the Santiago-based United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). Structuralists saw the causes of underdevelopment in poor infrastructure, precapitalist rural structures, and dependence on primary product exports, and thus prescribed correcting these structural barriers through state-led, state-planned industrialization, also known as import-substitution industrialization or ISI (Seers 1962; Hirschman 1963; Prebisch 1970; Bulmer-Thomas 1994). With regard to inflation specifically, structuralists saw it as regrettable but transitory. It was a byproduct of Latin America’s stage of economic development and would pass, as countries overcame their structural problems. Indeed, they thought inflation could even be a positive tool in the drive for industrialization, one the government could use to mobilize savings (Prebisch 1949; Seers 1962; Baer 1962 and 1963; Felix 1962). Campos and Bulhões disagreed with some of these structuralist ideas. They did not, like many structuralists, believe that industrialization could be achieved effectively by sacrificing price stability and a realistic exchange rate. Nor did they think, like many nationalist structuralists, that using foreign capital to promote industrialization was a bad thing.


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Finally, they took a less sanguine view of inflation and agreed with monetarists that the money supply and government deficits were important causes of it (Bielschowski 1995: 242–3; Campos 2001: 626). Yet in spite of these clear deviations from structuralism, Campos and Bulhões’ anti-inflation strategy made creative use of it. The PAEG echoed the structuralist approach in several ways. First, Campos and Bulhões took some care to analyze the underlying causes of Brazil’s chronic public deficits—a main source of inflation in their (and the monetarists’) view—and, in line with structuralism, they identified business-labor competition for state resources as a key factor. They characterized this situation as a profound “inconsistency in distributive policy” resulting from an “incompatibility” between consumption pressures and investment requirements (PAEG 1964: 28, my emphasis). Second, in terms of inflation remedies, the PAEG went beyond monetarist prescriptions of fiscal and monetary controls; it also called for structural reforms of Brazil’s trade, financial, and fiscal systems (PAEG: 28 and 34; Lara Resende 1992: 215). For example, the plan created a new central bank and monetary council to coordinate monetary policy (Skidmore 1988: 30–2 and 60–1). That the PAEG team, and especially Campos, drew explicitly on structuralist ideas is clear, both from the PAEG text and from Campos’ memoirs. However, it is important not to exaggerate the structuralist influence. Although the PAEG actually begins with a defense of state economic planning, one of structuralism’s main policy prescriptions, Campos later repented for this “naïve optimism” with respect to planning, and adopted the anti-state-intervention philosophy of Hayek (Hayek 1944; Campos 2001: 616). Also, as mentioned, both Campos and Bulhões strongly rejected the structuralist notion that “industrialization of underdeveloped economies only [was] possible with a certain level of regulated inflation, while any orthodox anti-inflation treatment would falter due to stagnation” (Campos 2001: 271). Therefore, the PAEG’s designers are best viewed as syncretically borrowing ideas from both structuralism and monetarism. From structuralism, they took the notion of distributive conflict and the idea that institutional reforms were necessary to support and perpetuate the plan’s anti-inflation gains. In line with monetarism, the team accepted that uncontrolled government deficits and loose monetary policies were fueling Brazilian inflation, and therefore fiscal and monetary discipline had to be part of the solution. In short, Campos and Bulhões pragmatically blended these two “foreign” ideologies. However, the truly

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distinctive aspects of PAEG stabilization—gradualism and indexation— were not chiefly inspired by either school of thought. Gradualism Campos and Bulhões’ decision to fight inflation gradually rather than through shock treatment (PAEG 1964: 33) defied the international orthodoxy of the time, and, not surprisingly, they had a difficult time getting the International Monetary Fund to accept it. Their commitment to gradualism, and their justification of it in terms of protecting investment and economic growth, shows both the PAEG’s serious deviation from monetarism and its agreement with the anti-inflation strategies of previous Brazilian governments, all of which emphasized growth over anti-inflation vigilance. It was imperative that Campos and Bulhões secure IMF approval of the PAEG stabilization strategy, because they needed funds for economic development. To obtain them, they had to renegotiate Brazil’s foreign debts, as well as obtain new loans and lines of credit. But then, as now, Brazil’s creditors required an agreement with the IMF before they would negotiate. And as a condition of financial assistance, the IMF, in turn, required implementation of an orthodox stabilization plan. Campos and Bulhões sent negotiators to Washington in July 1964, and they presented the Fund with the PAEG strategy. The Fund objected to the plan’s gradualist approach, its use of indexation, and its lack of “verifiable” quantitative monetary and inflation targets. In the ensuing negotiations, Campos and Bulhões managed remarkably to defend both gradualism and monetary correction, conceding only to the Fund’s quantitative targets requirement (Campos 2001: 612–15). That the IMF accepted gradualism and indexation—both violations of its creed—was probably due to the Brazilian government’s importance as a bulwark against communism, as well as its economic significance and the good reputations internationally of Campos and Bulhões (Skidmore 1988; Lara Resende 1992). However, the significant point, is that the Campos-Bulhões team was willing to fight the Fund and to risk not obtaining a much needed agreement. Campos and Bulhões clearly defied monetarism in this instance. They had concluded that shock treatment was not right for Brazil. Their reasons for choosing gradualism over shock treatment appeared in the PAEG’s published version. Written mostly by Campos (Campos 2001: 607), the principal argument was that the known successful cases of shock treatment internationally, either did not reduce inflation faster


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than the PAEG’s proposed strategy, or they occurred in contexts that were completely different from Brazil’s situation. In support of this latter point, the authors noted that Brazil’s monetary system had not completely collapsed due to hyperinflation; that Brazilian society was not completely disorganized and demoralized by a recent war; and that Brazil would not enjoy generous infusions of foreign aid (PAEG 1964: 33). In short, Brazil in 1964 was not comparable to the interwar European countries on which monetarists based their inflation theory. The type of inflation, the economic conditions and the international support that Brazil had, were nothing like those of the European exemplars. For this reason, shock treatment would only exacerbate inflation in Brazil’s case. Perhaps more significantly, the team explicitly assessed the potential impact of shock treatment on Brazil’s industrialization goals, and concluded that its effect on the government’s ability to promote investment was unacceptable. It should be remembered that the PAEG’s first global objective was “to accelerate the country’s rate of economic development” (PAEG 1964: 15), and for all Brazilian elites at the time, regardless of their economic ideology, industrialization figured prominently in the definition of development (Bielschowski 1995). In fact, the PAEG’s use of gradualism to protect industrialization and growth links it directly to previous stabilization plans, even those authored by structuralists and nationalist developmentalists. Gradualism was the inflation strategy outlined in both the PEM (1958–59) and the Trienal Plan (1962–63), and each justified gradualism with the argument that shock treatment would hurt investment and growth. The PEM occurred in the midst of President Kubitschek’s ambitious industrialization projects that were embodied in his Plano de Metas (Plan of Goals) and were designed to achieve “50 years” of development “in 5.” To preserve Kubitschek’s development plans, including the construction of the new capital, Brasilia, the PEM was gradualist on inflation. It had two stages encompassing more than two years, the first of which was a readjustment period that would allow businesses, workers, and other key actors in the economy to get used to the changes in prices that would occur as inflation abated. The plan envisioned using salary controls, credit controls, hiring limits, and a tight monetary policy to gradually lower inflation over the specified time period (Orenstein and Sochaczewski 1992: 191–4; Sola 1982). One sees a similar pattern with the Trienal Plan a few years later. This example is especially significant since the plan was formulated by economists with whom Campos and Bulhoes disagreed strongly: Celso Furtado (Planning Minister) and San Thiago Dantas (Finance Minister). Furtado

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and Dantas were structuralists or, in Bielschowski’s (1995) schema, nationalist developmentalists. The Trienal Plan emerged for reasons similar to those of the PEM and the PAEG: inflation was increasing rapidly, the deficit was large, and Brazil was facing insolvency if it could not secure external funds and credit. Once again, the IMF’s approval of the plan was pivotal. And, once again, Brazil’s plan called for a gradual method of lowering inflation. The Trienal’s text says that its second goal is “the progressive [i.e. gradual] reduction of inflationary pressure” (Trienal 1962: 17). Like the PEM and the PAEG, the Trienal’s authors also justified gradualism in terms of preserving the economic growth rate, the levels of private investment, and the government’s spending on industry and infrastructure (Trienal 1962: 55–6). So the Trienal’s similarities with the PAEG suggest that gradualism cut across differences in economic and political ideologies. Gradualism in the name of growth, and hence a tolerance for a certain level of inflation, were characteristics that the PAEG shared with its predecessors—characteristics that cut across ideological differences between Brazilian monetarists and structuralists and between civilian and military governments. For all that Campos and Bulhões were more sympathetic to monetarism than their contemporaries, they did not let go of the notion that growth and industrialization had to continue, even at the cost of some inflation. Indeed, twenty percent annual inflation was not considered all that unreasonable, given the growth imperative (Trienal 1962; PAEG 1964; Lara Resende 1992: 227). In addition, the PAEG basically continued with the same industrialization and investment strategy—in terms of priorities and so forth—that both the Kubitschek and Goulart governments had followed (Skidmore 1988: 62–3). However, the PAEG differed from the PEM and the Trienal Plan in that it actually succeeded in lowering inflation. The PAEG did not achieve the inflation targets specified in its text, but it did reduce inflation to the “tolerable” levels described in the last section, and it initiated a trend of maintaining those tolerable levels for many years afterward. These results owed much to the PAEG’s momentous institutional innovation; formal indexation or monetary correction. Indexation resolved the inflation-growth dilemma that at least two previous Brazilian administrations had tried and failed to address. It was an eminently Brazilian solution to a Brazilian problem and points to the institutional creativity at the heart of the PAEG. Indexation Indexation proved to be one of the most consequential Brazilian institutions of the post-World War II period. Introduced in a limited fashion


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and without fanfare—the PAEG mentions it only briefly (PAEG 1964: 79, 63, and 236; Skidmore 1988: 32)—indexation was supposed to be a temporary measure, a way of neutralizing inflation’s negative effects while inflation itself was being gradually lowered. As Campos later explained, because the “defeat” of inflation was going to take some time, the Brazilian economy would need some way of living with inflation’s negative effects in the interim. Specifically, the team would need to ensure that savings were protected and encouraged; that businesses’ assets could be realistically valued; that the practice of postponing the payment of debts was discouraged; and that there would be a voluntary market for government bonds (Campos 2001: 612). They therefore designed their indexation measures around these objectives. Their main instrument of indexation was the ORTN (Readjustable Obligation of the National Treasury), a government bond with a maturity period of one to twenty years, whose value was adjustable every four months for changes in inflation. The Planning Ministry published coefficients that determined these inflation adjustments. The ORTN earned a real interest rate of 6 percent per year, which proved an effective way of “rehabilitating” the “prestige of the federal public debt,” so that the government could raise capital without resorting to the printing press (Simonsen 1995: 32). The government then used variations in the ORTN index to calculate the real value of business assets for tax purposes, as well as to adjust rents, mortgages, and some utility prices for inflation (Simonsen 1995: 4 and 88). The Campos-Bulhões team deliberately limited indexation to these few areas of the economy. They feared that if they allowed indexation in too many spheres they would lose control of the process and cause hyperinflation. To avoid such a situation, they made a special effort to prevent indexation in three areas: salaries, the exchange rate, and checking accounts. Of these three, they especially worked to avoid salary indexation. They thought that the inflationary potential of wage indexation was highest, because it could lead to a price-wage spiral that would be almost impossible to contain (Simonsen 1995: 3–4). Subsequent governments were not as cautious about employing indexation; they expanded it considerably, both in scope and in frequency of adjustment, and in this way the Campos-Bulhões team’s very limited form of monetary correction became a permanent and systemic rather than temporary and partial feature of Brazilian inflation policy. During the Costa e Silva government (1967–69), policymakers instituted indexation of both the exchange rate and salaries, two of the areas that Campos and Bulhões had been careful to avoid. In 1968, for instance, they adopted a system of mini-currency devaluations that

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adjusted the value of the cruzeiro periodically (initially monthly) for differences between the domestic and international inflation rates (Simonsen 1995: 4–5, 58–63, and 77–9). The Médici (1969–74), Geisel (1974–79) and Figueiredo (1980–85) administrations continued this trend so that by the mid-1980s, most financial contracts and instruments, including bank accounts (the Campos-Bulhões team’s third no-go zone), contained monetary correction clauses, based on either the ORTN or one of the other official indexes that sprang up after it. Some of these instruments had inflation adjustment intervals as short as 24 hours (Simonsen 1995). This extension and acceleration of indexation reduced its effectiveness as an anti-inflation measure. In fact, indexation became a mechanism for automatically transferring price increases from time A to time B and for spreading price increases in one area of the economy to virtually all areas of the economy. When Brazil finally began eliminating indexation in 1994, annual inflation was in the thousands of percent (Simonsen 1995: 17). In sum, then, the PAEG’s structuralist echoes, its use of gradualism, and its indexation measures strongly suggest that, like previous Brazilian stabilization plans, the PAEG deviated significantly from monetarist orthodoxy; it was not an anomaly in Brazilian terms. The CamposBulhões team borrowed pragmatically from monetarism (and to a lesser extent, structuralism) in crafting its stabilization plan, but it also continued a gradualist orientation employed by previous Brazilian administrations, and for much the same reasons: the desire to preserve industrialization and growth goals. Thus, there were significant lines of continuity even across different types of political regime and economic ideological orientation–a characteristic of syncretic change. Also significant in this regard is that the PAEG’s key innovation–indexation– emerged from similar continuities in policy goals across administrations. Indexation was a way of making the imperative to stabilize compatible with Brazil’s circumstances and goals. In this effort, then, the CamposBulhões team can be seen as engaging quite deliberately in syncretic policymaking. Policy Traditions and Elite Aspirations The “continuity-within-change” that characterizes the PAEG’s relationship to other Brazilian anti-inflation plans can also be seen at deeper levels. The PAEG’s indexation measures can be viewed as a variation on an existing pattern of using state-managed rather than market-driven


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policy instruments. Moreover, the PAEG’s justification of gradualism in terms of an imperative to continue growing and industrializing, not only ties it to other stabilization efforts, but links Brazilian inflation attitudes in general to a broader elite discourse regarding Brazil’s identity. One of the reasons that indexation worked well and took hold so strongly after its initial introduction is that it was an innovation that fit with already existing policy patterns. Brazil had a history of relying on state-managed rather than market-driven economic strategies and policy instruments. Threads of mercantilism from the colonial period carried on through the more classically liberal period of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. A key example was the government’s coffee support policies ( Topik 1987). Brazilian policy makers were accustomed to using complicated regulatory interventions to achieve economic objectives. Even Campos, who by the end of his life was a selfproclaimed neoliberal, an admirer of Hayek and Friedman, and a vehement critic of the state’s inefficiencies in running the economy, proudly recounted in his memoirs his involvement in creating various regulatory schemes, such as that for the petroleum industry (Campos 2001: 336–8). Indexation, or monetary correction, while new, belonged to this same class of interventionist policy tool. When Campos and Bulhões instituted indexation, they had a choice of methods. At the time, there were laws in force, since 1933, which expressly forbade indexation: the usury law and the gold clause. These laws had, in fact, prevented formal indexation by either the government or private actors, even though informally, Brazilians had for many years been practicing various forms of monetary correction. Thus, when Campos and Bulhões decided to legalize indexation, they could have simply revoked these laws, which would have allowed indexation to develop spontaneously. Private actors could have created their own indexation agreements in a sort of “market” fashion. Instead, they deliberately retained the 1933 laws, and each indexation law was introduced as an exception to the gold clause (Simonsen 1995: 3–4). Over time, the legal framework, the various instruments of indexation, and the bureaucratic structures developed to administer them became Byzantine in their complexity. Mario Henrique Simonsen, who was an aid to Campos at the time of the PAEG, recognized this distinction between types of indexation when he argued in 1995, that the solution for Brazilian inflation was not to prohibit indexation, but rather to deregulate it, because “the indexation which transforms orthodox anti-inflationary policies into an inglorious battle is not the type which develops spontaneously in markets, but that which is determined by the government” (Simonsen 1995: 9).

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Monetary correction, then, was a new variation on an established state-interventionist policy theme. Gradualism too can be seen in this light. The necessity of fighting inflation in a way that preserved the state’s ability to promote rapid industrialization and growth—an argument found in the PAEG, Trienal, and PEM stabilization plans alike— certainly reflects a statist orientation. At the same time, however, it also reflects a broader elite preoccupation with Brazil’s place in world, embodied in the notion of “progress.” Indeed, the developmentalist brake on all Brazilian anti-inflation plans of the time fits with a longerestablished desire to “catch up” to the world’s powerful countries. Brazilians saw Brazil as a country of continental proportions and vast unrealized potential. They had long sought reasons that would explain why Brazil was not among the first rank of countries in the world and indicate what the Brazilian government should do to get there. Industrialization was just the latest in a long line of possible solutions. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, evolutionary theories that privileged race were popular in Brazil. Drawing on the works of Auguste Comte, Charles Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, Brazilian thinkers assessed their country as “backward” in comparison to European societies. For example, followers of positivism calculated that Brazil was located somewhere between Comte’s first two stages of societal development, the “theological” (where the church and military dominate) and the “metaphysical” (characterized by liberal struggles for reform). European societies, by contrast, were already in the “positive” phase, marked by steady and orderly scientific progress (Moog 1969: 48). Indeed, the motto on the Brazilian flag, “order and progress” reflects Brazilians’ aspiration of reaching Comte’s positive stage. To explain their relative “backwardness,” Brazilians drew on social Darwinism, suggesting that the “inferior” genetic make-up of their population was the problem. Most Brazilians, even those of the elite class, had some mixture of European, African, and indigenous Brazilian ancestry. Thus, the Portuguese colonizers’ penchant for miscegenation seemed like the root of Brazil’s problems, and “whitening” of the population (for example by increasing white European immigration to Brazil) was the recommended solution (Ortiz 1986: 13–35; Skidmore 1974; Stepan 1991). In the 1930s, new strands of thought about Brazilian problems emerged to challenge evolutionary theories. Drawing on the work of Marx and Weber, these theories focused instead on socioeconomic organization as the critical factor affecting Brazilian “progress.” Exemplified by writers such as Gilberto Freyre, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, and Caio Prado


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Júnior, these theories shifted the blame for Brazilian backwardness from the population’s inferior genes to the socioeconomic structures installed by Portuguese colonization. In his seminal work, Casa-Grande & Senzala (1933), translated as “Masters and Slaves,” Gilberto Freyre confronted racial theories head on, arguing that miscegenation was a positive rather than a negative influence on Brazilian development. Not only did it create a new race better suited to life in the tropics, but it also harmonized three cultures whose vast differences might otherwise have created a great deal of strife. Moreover, the real cause of Brazilian backwardness, he argued, was the one-crop plantation system established by the Portuguese. This system prevented sufficient production of food crops and livestock, which in turn, led to generations of malnourished Brazilians: Linked to single-crop plantation agriculture are profound evils which have compromised, for generations, the robustness and the efficiency of the Brazilian population, whose unstable health, uncertain capacity for work, apathy, and growth troubles are so often attributed to miscegenation. (Freyre 1977: li) Freye and like-minded scholars7 defined what Brazilian society was lacking as “modern” or “rational” institutions and attitudes (especially toward work). The causes of this deficit were the socioeconomic institutions and values installed by Portuguese colonizers. As for implied solutions, they fell under the general heading of social reform: constructing institutions that were more functional, developing attitudes toward work that were more positive, building a society that was less unequal, and the like. Education would play a major role in this transformation. In the period leading up to the PAEG, new trends in the discourse on Brazilian identity grew out of major international events. The Great Depression and World War II had substantial negative effects on Brazilian trade. This experience created an awareness of Brazil’s vulnerability to shifts in world economic conditions. This awareness was of course, region-wide, centered at ECLA, and it motivated the structuralist and developmentalist thought that was influential in Brazil at the time of the PAEG (Sikkink 1991; Furtado 1959). As discussed, Campos and Bulhões themselves engaged this thinking and incorporated it in their own views on inflation. But more generally, developmentalism also provided systematic analysis of this problem of Brazil’s place in the world that had been occupying Brazilian elites for some time. Developmentalism had a name for Brazil’s condition of “lacking something”: underdevelopment.

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Moreover, underdevelopment had identifiable causes that were derived from apparently sound economic theory: market imperfections and bottlenecks. Finally, it provided remedies—remedies that Brazilians were well equipped to implement. State-led industrialization, with its centralized planning, investment, and management, fit easily with traditional modes of Brazilian governance, and it drew on many of the same skills. Nearly all Brazilian elites of the period, including Roberto Campos, accepted its tenets to some degree. Developmentalism had all the necessary “hooks” on which to hang longstanding Brazilian national concerns and aspirations. With the advent of developmentalism, then, the barrier to Brazilian progress came to be defined as underdevelopment. Its causes were located in the structure of the international and domestic economy, and its solution was thought to be some form of state-directed industrialization. Thus, the PAEG’s attachment to the industrialization and growth projects can be understood as linked to developmentalism, which, in its turn, is part of the longer term Brazilian preoccupation with “progress” and “backwardness.” Conclusions: The PAEG and Institutional Syncretism This chapter has used the PAEG stabilization plan of 1964–66 as an entry point to studying Brazilian inflation policy of the era and its connections to broader Brazilian policy traditions and societal goals. The PAEG was not an anomalous Brazilian case in terms of monetarist design—it was a pragmatic, syncretic blend of monetarism, structuralism and Brazilian innovations like indexation. Although the PAEG’s austerity was implemented, to a greater degree, than in previous stabilization plans, and its authors had greater sympathy with orthodox economic liberalism, it had important and revealing continuities with previous stabilization efforts. Most importantly, the PAEG’s key institutional innovation, indexation, was rooted in a problem that Brazilian policymakers had been puzzling over for some time, and it belonged to a class of state-interventionist policy instruments that Brazilian policymakers were accustomed to using. At the same time, both indexation and gradualism satisfied a deeper Brazilian elite commitment to progress. In fact these latter characteristics are central to understanding why pure monetarism did not find advocates in Brazil, as well as why indexation took hold so strongly in 1964, and expanded so rapidly thereafter.


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The institutional syncretism approach highlighted in this book is especially well suited for understanding this PAEG story. By expecting institutional change to be both partial and historically rooted, it focuses attention on both the “newer” and the more established elements of any “new” policy. Indeed it expects even the most “anomalous” or “revolutionary” of a country’s policy packages to have significant continuities with previous efforts in that arena. The PAEG stabilization certainly conforms to these expectations. Indexation embodies “change-with-continuity” especially well, showing the explanatory payoff that the institutional syncretism approach offers. By understanding that a country’s innovative policy changes do not come out of nowhere, nor do they necessarily occur by importing wholesale some “foreign” idea, institutional syncretism helps explain the emergence of indexation in the 1964 Brazilian situation. That is, it at least suggests to the analyst that such an innovation is likely not only to solve a particular problem but to do so in accordance with existing goals and policy “skills” (Swidler 1986; Kearney 2001). A second and related advantage of the institutional syncretism frame is that it recognizes the causal importance of both “agents” and “structures” (Sewell 1992), directing analytical attention to the ways that these sources of change mutually interact and affect one another. In the case of the Brazilian PAEG, we see this dynamic illustrated in the CamposBulhões team’s requirement to act within extant political, ideological, and institutional contexts, both domestic and international. These constraints meant that there were some goals and actions that were more possible than others. Finally, the institutional syncretism approach has the virtue of complementing theoretical approaches that use interests (Bates 1981; Frieden 1991), international power (Waltz 1979; Wallerstein 1979), and ideas (Haas 1992; Hall 1989 and 1997) as central explanatory variables. Each of these approaches makes explanatory contributions to the PAEG story, but the institutional syncretism frame enhances them. For example, an interests or domestic politics approach to the PAEG highlights the fact that even in a military regime, stabilization and shock treatment can be politically costly. Therefore, the PAEG’s gradualism could be viewed simply as a reasonable desire on the part of a new government to avoid the political fallout of shock therapy. President Castelo Branco’s government in April 1964 was by no means entirely secure. The president himself did not have full dictatorial powers; Brazil’s democratic institutions had been curtailed but not eliminated; and the interests of many different powerful groups had to be considered in any

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economic decision (Skidmore 1988: 18–21 and 27–9). In fact, when Campos was appointed, he is reported to have said to Castelo Branco, “You will dismiss me in forty-eight hours. You won’t accept my ideas. An objective of mine will be to fight inflation” (Dulles 1980: 19). He doubted that Castelo Branco would withstand pressure to abandon stabilization once the required sacrifices started to hurt important groups. And indeed the PAEG did arouse opposition—and not only from labor and the disempowered political left. Business leaders complained about credit rationing, and even groups within the military objected to spending cuts and the wage policy (Morley 1971; Furtado 1972; Fishlow 1973; Skidmore 1988; Campos 2001). Castelo Branco’s commitment to the PAEG stabilization and his fortitude in the face of criticism (Dulles 1980) were important in making the PAEG’s modest inflation achievements possible. The achievements were modest, in turn, largely because of the usual pressures on the Brazilian government to provide every thing for every one: credit to businesses, price support to agriculture, patronage to supporters, and big projects to the military. In short, politics and interests certainly affected the PAEG story. International power explanations and ideas explanations also contribute to an understanding of the PAEG. The Campos-Bulhões team was certainly limited to some extent by the need to satisfy the IMF. The addition of quantitative targets to the PAEG was in fact imposed by the IMF, as already discussed. At the same time, Brazil’s international position was such that Campos and Bulhões were able to persuade the IMF technocrats to accept the PAEG’s gradualism and indexation. If Brazil defaulted, many financial institutions would suffer. In addition, Brazil was an attractive investment location, and the United States wished to support the Castelo Branco regime because it was committed to fighting leftist insurgencies (Skidmore 1988). Thus international factors created both opportunities and constraints for the PAEG team. Finally, with regard to the importance of ideas, Campos and Bulhões’ membership in the international financial epistemic community (Haas 1992) was significant to the PAEG’s design and to its acceptance by the IMF. They were well known and well respected economists, which allowed them to bargain successfully for ideas they felt suited Brazil’s situation. Despite these conventional theories’ considerable explanatory contributions, the institutional syncretism approach still adds significant value. To the political insight that an uncertain new government would want to avoid shock therapy, institutional syncretism adds how Castelo Branco’s team would avoid it—that is, in a way that fit with established policy goals and instruments. To the international power approach’s insight that


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states’ policies are limited by their position in the overall balance of power in the system, the institutional syncretism approach adds a way of exploring how real actors negotiate the constraints of a power situation—that is, by compromising on some issues, and using their personal reputations and their country’s significance to achieve others. To the epistemic community insight that Campos and Bulhões would draw on elements of international inflation theories, the institutional syncretism approach adds an understanding of why they chose the mix of policies for the PAEG that they did—that is, they measured monetarist and structuralist theories against Brazilian circumstances and overall development goals. This latter point brings us, finally, to the contributions that the PAEG case makes to an understanding of institutional syncretism. These are many, but the case illustrates especially well the point that syncretic institutional change comes about not only through a decision accumulation process, but also because of deliberate crafting by specific individuals. In other words, leadership and vision can matter enormously in the process. At the same time, the case suggests strongly that the very syncretic— rather than wholly “imported”—nature of the institutions resulting from this process can also be due to deliberate blending by such individuals, rather than the result of a failed attempt to implement a foreign idea. Campos and Bulhões self-consciously and intentionally mined international inflation theory, itself the legacy of previous economic success experiences, for ideas that would be useful for Brazil’s inflation situation. They did so in a manner that would be comprehensible in light of an ongoing Brazilian elite discourse about “backwardness” and “progress.” Notes 1. Unless otherwise noted, “PAEG” will be used in this chapter to denote the plan’s stabilization dimension only. 2. Monetarism was/is the dominant theory of inflation in international financial circles. It associates inflation with excessive growth of the money supply, often due to uncontrolled government deficits. To reduce inflation, it calls for controlling money supply growth, as well as cutting deficits, devaluing the currency and implementing other measures to get prices “right.” Because it recommends doing these things quickly, it is often called “shock therapy” (Friedman 1956; Bulmer-Thomas 1994). Brazil has a long tradition of flouting this approach (Armijo 1996; Kearney 2001). 3. I use the term stabilization in its narrow sense to mean the control of inflation. 4. Plano Trienal de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social or Three-Year Plan of Economic and Social Development. 5. Plano de Estabilização Monetária or Plan of Monetary Stabilization. 6. An alternate theory of inflation discussed below. 7. See for example Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1995) and Caio Prado Júnior (1987).

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Christine A. Kearney References

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INDEX

Alberdi, Juan Bautista, 95, 100 Allied Occupation, 146–7, 154 Almond, Gabriel, 16, 34 Al-Sadr, Musa, 117 Amal, Lebanon, 117, 123, 125, 127, 128, 131–2 Anti-Americanism, 127 Argentina Historical base of myths, 87–94 Syncretic uses of myths: 1913–43, 94–9; 1943–55, 99–103; 1955–76, 103–6; Menem era, 106–9 Badie, Betrand, 3, 9–10 Basescu, Traian, 218 Bendix, Reinhard, 3 Benjamin, Walter, 51 Bentham, Jeremy, 89 Berri, Nabih, 127 Bessarabia, 209, 210 Bolshevik Revolution, 144, 170 Bolsheviks, 172 Brazil Combining elements of structuralism and monetarism, 228–30: Gradualism versus shock treatment, 230–2; Indexation as syncretic variation, 232–4 Plan of Government Economic Action (PAEG), 225–44: Background of, 226–8

Understandings of progress, 234–8, 240–1 Bukovina, Northern, 209, 210–11 Bulhoes, Octavio Gouvea de, 225–35, 237, 239–41 Bruszt, Laszlo, 10 Campos, Roberto de Oliveira, 225–35, 237–41 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 139 Castelo Branco, Humberto, 226, 239, 240 Ceaurescu, Nicolae, 220 Chinese Bureau of Civil Affairs, 184 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 19, 62, 63, 66, 69–70, 72, 77, 80, 165, 166, 169–72, 174, 179, 180 Chinese revolution, 72, 74–7, 165–70, 172, 176, 181–4 In comparative perspective, 172 Rural to urban dynamic, 172, 176, 182–3 Civil society (see also social capital), 34, 35 Clausewitz, Carl von, 64 Clientelism, 35, 93 192–3 Cognitive dissonance, 15, 158 Cognitive maps, 10, 16, 18 Collective action, 15, 16, 200 Colonialism, 6, 44, 51, 92, 98, 176, 190–2, 199–201, 235

246

Index

Comecon, 210, 222n Communism (see also Chinese Communist Party, Hungarian Communist Party, Romanian Communist Party), 147, 207, 222n, 230 Comte, Auguste, 236 Confucianism, 67, 69, 143, 184 Constantinescu, Emil, 217 Constructivism, 16, 55 Cooperative enterprise unions, Japan, 148, 149, 152 Cooperative labor federations, Japan, 144 Corruption, 48, 72, 77, 87, 109, 217, 218 Costa e Silva, Artur da, 233 Cultural interpretation, 6, 12, 13, 16–17, 86, 156 Culture, 16–17, 19, 34, 36, 37, 48, 51, 55, 69, 74, 83, 86–7, 88, 89, 92, 97, 102, 105, 108, 153, 156–7, 168, 175–6, 189, 205, 217, 237 Definition of, 16 Czechoslovakia, 210, 212, 222 Dahiya (Lebanon), 123–4 Dantas, San Thiago, 231–2 Darwin, Charles, 236 Deming, William Edwards, 149 Democracy, 4, 7, 9–10, 18, 19, 20, 22, 33–8, 41, 44, 48–51, 54, 101, 104, 108–9, 110n, 131, 144, 166, 183, 205–7, 209, 213–220, 222n, 223n, 239 Deng Xiaoping, 76, 80 Development (see also industrialization), 3–5, 7, 9–10, 14, 18, 22, 24, 37, 51, 54–5, 63, 67, 72–5, 77–8, 80, 99, 176, 183, 188, 191, 196, 198, 200–1, 206–8, 210, 212–221, 227–8, 230–2, 236–8, 241 Duarte, Eva, 102 Durkheim, Emil, 35, 88 Eckstein, Harry, 7, 157, 166 Economies of affection, 35

Ethnic diversity, 36, 87, 94, 96, 106, 118, 165, 207, 209, 212, 215, 218, 221n, 222n Ethnography, 54–5, 112 European Union, 216, 218, 220 Familism In Japan (see also one-family nation, family firm), 21, 144, 146, 154 In Senegal, 46 Family firm, Japan (see also familism, onefamily nation), 141–2, 144–6, 152, 154 Feng Yuxiang, 69 Fierro, Martin, 92, 98 Figueiredo, João Baptista, 234 Fneish, Muhammed, 131–2 Freedom House, 218 Freyre, Gilberto, 236–7 Friedman, Thomas, 35 Fukuyama, Francis, 24 Furtado, Celso, 231 Galvez, Manuel, 99 Ganyu (see also Zambia, labor relations), 192–4, 197–201 Geisel, Ernesto, 234 Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe, 210–11 Globalization, 107, 158, 159 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 216 Goulart, João, 232 Great Romanian Party, 218 Group ganyu (see also Zambia, labor relations), 198–201 Gyurcsany, Ferenc, 220 Hall, Peter, 12, 169 Hamas, 114, 127, 134n Hamdan, ’Ali, 125, 136 Harb, Ragheb, 118 Hariri, Rafiq, 122, 128, 130, 132 Hizballah, 20–1 And armed resistance, 124–6, 129–30 And electoral politics, 120–1, 128–9, 131–3 And social welfare, 121–4

Index Formation and background, 116–20 Responses to Israeli Withdrawal, 126–8 Responses to Syrian Withdrawal, 128–9 Holanda, Sérgio Buarque de, 236 Human relations, 44, 141, 146–151, 152, 154 Hungarian Communist Party, 213, 219, 221 Hungarian Socialist Party, 216, 219 Hungary (see also Leninism), 22–4, 205–10, 213–221 1956 uprising, 214, 215, 216, 221 Experience with Leninism, 213–16 Post-Leninist era, 216–20 Huntington, Samuel, 16, 66, 85 Hyden, Goran, 37, 202n Illiescu, Ion, 217–18 Industrialization (see also development), 141, 143, 153, 155–6, 159, 207–8, 210–11, 214, 216–17, 228–9, 231–2, 234–6, 238 Institutionalism, 5, 10, 12–15, 16, 63, 80n, 206 Institutional syncretism, definition, 7 International Monetary Fund, 20, 23, 228, 230, 240 Iran, 20, 114–17, 120, 123, 125–6, 132, 133, 134n Iranian Revolution, 114–17 Iraq, 134n, 183 Islam, 20, 41, 114–20, 121, 125, 127, 134n Islamic Health Organization, 123 Islamic Resistance (see also National Resistance, Resistance), 116, 121, 125 Israel, 20, 116, 118–19, 122, 125–30, 132–3, 134n Operation Grapes of Wrath, 116, 125, 136 Withdrawal from Lebanon, 116, 124, 126–8, 129, 133, 134n

247

Japanese firm Postwar, 146–151 Prewar, 142–6 Prewar/postwar firms compared, 151–5 Japan National Railway, 144, 145 Jerusalem Quarterly, 119, 134n Jihad, 123, 123, 127, 134n Jihad al-Binaa’, 123 Jumblatt, Walid, 130, 134n Kadar, Janos, 214–16 kalimalima in clubs (see also Zambia, labor relations), 197–201 Khaldun, Ibn, 64 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 20, 115, 117–18, 123, 134n Khrushchev, Nikita, 23, 208, 220 Korea, South, 54 Korean War, 73 Kubitschek, Juscelino, 231–2 Laclau, Ernesto, 88, 105 Labor militancy/labor strikes, Japan, 141, 146, 148, 153–4, 159n Land pawning, 44–6, 52, 56n Land tenure and land use management In China, 166–72 In Senegal (see rural councils) Law of the National Domain (1964), Senegal, 38 Lean production, 151, 157, 158 Learning, social, 15, 52–4 Legacies, 21, 22, 25, 151, 157, 169, 209, 217, 219 Lenin, Vladimir, 172 Leninism (see also Hungary, Romania), 22–4, 205–23 As Soviet model of development, 206–9 Collapse of, 216–20 Superficial layering of in Hungary, 213–16 Syncretization of in Romania, 209–213

248

Index

Legal rationalism, 35 Legitimacy, 9, 18–19, 24–5, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 46–7, 52, 55, 62, 75, 84, 86–7, 92, 99, 109, 115, 121, 125, 127, 133, 141, 149, 155, 157, 174–5, 193, 195, 201, 210–12, 213, 215–16, 219 Liberalism/Neoliberalism, 4, 10, 20, 22–4, 34, 36, 48–50, 84, 90, 92, 94, 96, 98–101, 103–5, 107, 109, 111n, 124, 179, 188–9, 200, 205–7, 209, 211, 214, 216–221, 222n, 223n, 228, 235–6, 238 Lifetime/permanent employment, Japan, 148, 152 Lugones, Leopoldo, 95, 98 Mao Zedong, 63, 72, 77, 80, 164, 179 Marriage Law, China And community, 173–8 And cultural practices, 178–81 And rural land tenure arrangements, 168–72 Defined, 165 In comparative perspective, 166–7 Lessons from, 182–4 Marx, Karl, 236 Marxism, 207, 109, 215, 222n Master of fire, Senegal, 40, 42, 44–7, 53, 56n Mayo, Elton, 147 Meiji Era, Japan, 140, 142–3 Menem, Carlos, 84, 90, 94, 106–9, 110n Methodological individualism, 13, 15, 17 Metis, 5, 34, 39, 43 Military, as modern institution, 19, 63–6 Ming Dynasty, China, 67, 175 Mitre, Bartolome, 90, 100 Modernity, 3–5, 18, 34, 54, 98, 100, 164–5, 167–8, 237 Modernization theory, 4, 166, 181 Monetarism, 23, 225–32, 234, 238, 241n Moreno, Perito, 100 Mouffe, Chantal, 88, 105 Muhammed, 115

mura, Japan, 142, 151, 153 Mussolini, Benito, 106 Nagy, Imre, 214 Nasrallah, Sayyid Hassan, 129–30, 134n Nastase, Adrian, 218 Nationalism, 20, 69, 83, 88, 93, 95, 100–1, 115–16, 124, 126, 142, 146, 205–6, 210–14, 218, 220, 221n, 222n, 228, 231 National Resistance (see also Islamic Resistance, Resistance), 125, 130 NATO, 219 Nepszabadsag, Hungary, 214 New Economic Mechanism, Hungary, 215, 216 Nihonjinron, Japan, 147 Njujuf-Ndokh conflict, Senegal (see also land use conflicts), 40–3, 45–6 Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 197, 199, 202 North, Douglass, 3, 15, 52 “One-family nation,” Japan (see also familism, family firm), 143, 144, 147 Open Letter by Hizb Allah to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World, 118–20, 127 Organizational psychology, 15, 157 Palestinian Islamic Jihad, 127 Parsons, Talcott, 35 Paternalism, 145, 147, 152–3, 156, 216 Path dependency, 14, 80n Patriarchy, 21, 141, 166, 173–4 Peñaloza, “Chacho”, 93–4, 105 Peng Dehuai, 69 Perón, Eva, 102 Perón, Juan, 86–7, 93, 94, 100–5, 108, 110n, 111n, 112n People’s Liberation Army, China, 19 In historical perspective, 66–8 Enterprise System pre-1949, 68–72 Enterprise System 1949–78, 73–5 Enterprise System 1978–98, 75–9

Index Peronism, Argentina, 20, 83–4, 86–7, 90, 94, 99–109 And Anti-Peronism, 20, 84, 86, 100–1, 105, 108, 113 Popular attitudes toward, 87 Plan of Government Economic Action (PAEG) (see under Brazil) Prado Junior, Caio, 236, 241n Qing Dynasty, China, 67–8, 175, 185n Quality control circles (QC), Japan, 149–50, 152 Quiroga, Facunda, 90, 93, 107–9, 111n Quran, 115, 134n Raad, Muhammed, 117, 119, 130, 136 Rakosi, Matyas, 213–15 Rational choice theory, 12, 15, 17 Readjustable Obligation of the National Treasury (ORTN), Brazil, 233–4 Reciprocity, 15, 21, 45–6, 48, 50, 146, 147, 152, 153–4, 189–90, 192, 194, 196–201 Relief Committee of Imam Khomeini, 123 Resistance (see also Islamic Resistance, National Resistance), 121, 124–7, 130, 132, 134n Rivadavia, Bernardino, 89, 94–5, 100 Rojas, Ricardo, 95–6, 98 Romania (see also Leninism), 22–4, 205–24 Experience with Leninism, 209–13 Post-Leninist era, 216–20 Romanian Communist Party, 209 Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 89–90, 98, 100, 104, 109 Rothstein, Bo, 13–14 Rural councils (Senegal), 19, 33–60 And institutional change, 51–5 Background of, 38–9 Legitimacy and effectiveness, 39–43 Syncretic adaptation, of, 43–51: as “neo-masters of fire,” 43–5; as kin

249

in reciprocity networks, 45–6; as generic elders, 46–7; as elders with administrative skills, 47–8; as corporatist kin-representatives, 48–50 Russia, 67, 70, 144, 152, 166, 169, 176, 205, 207, 213, 222n Bolsevik Revolution, 144, 152, 166, 169 Sarmiento, Domingo, 88, 90–1, 94–6, 99–100, 104, 108, 111n Sartori, Giovanni, 110 Scientific management (see also Taylorism), 21, 141, 145–7, 154 Scott, James, 5, 11, 34–5, 43, 54, 165 Secularism, 35–6, 119 Selznick, Philip, 85–6, 159n Senegal (see under Rural Councils) Seniority based wages, Japan, 148–9 Sharia, 115, 120 Sharon, Ariel, 127 Shimpei, Goto, 144 Shock therapy, 239–40, 241n Signiora, Fouad, 131–2 Simonsen, Mario Henrique, 225, 227, 233–5 Social capital (see also civil society), 34–5, 170 Social Democrat Party, Romania, 218–19 Soviet Union (see also Russia), 22, 68, 70, 170, 183, 206–11, 213, 222n As development model (see also Leninism), 206–9 As military model, 69–70 Sovietization, 207, 213 Spencer, Herbert, 236 Stalin, Joseph, 22, 213, 214 Stalinism, 206–7, 211–12, 214, 222n Stark, David, 10 State formation, 9–10 State-building, 76–7, 84, 91, 164, 173, 181 Steinmo, Sven, 13–14 Structural adjustment, 22, 23, 188–9, 200, 225–41

250

Index

Structurationism, 12–13 Sunna, 115, 134 Sun Zi, 64 Syria, 116, 125–31, 133, 134n Withdrawal from Lebanon, 116, 126, 128–30, 133 Taisho era, Japan, 143–4 Taylorism (see also scientific management), 141, 145–7, 150–2, 154, 158 Thatcher, Margaret, 219 Tilly, Charles, 65 Tokugawa Era, Japan, 144, 151–2 Transaction costs, 10, 15, 201 Tueni, Gibran, 129, 133, 133n, 136 Unions, Japanese, 143–9, 152–3 United States, 21, 22, 48, 73, 92, 95, 101, 111n, 126–8, 131, 141, 142, 147, 157, 164, 176, 240 Varela, Felipe, 93–4 Veblen, Thorstein, 5, 139 Verba, Sidney, 16 Wage bargaining (shunto), Japan, 149 Warsaw Pact, 215

Weber, Max, 39, 61, 65, 85, 159n, 236 Westermization/Western learning, 3, 10, 34, 54, 61–3, 65–9, 79–80, 109, 140, 142–3, 152, 154–5, 159n, 164, 179, 201, 205, 222n Wilayat al-faqih, 20, 114–18, 120, 126, 132–3 Women’s Federation, China, 178–9, 184 World Values Surveys, 217 World War I, 56n, 144, 222n World War II, 47, 50, 139, 146, 211, 213, 217, 232, 237 Young, Crawford, 16 Zaibatsu (see also Japanese firm), 146 Zambia, labor relations Group contracted labor (see also “group ganyu”), 198–9 Syncretic labor arrangements, 194–9: Mutually reciprocated labor (see also “kalimalima in clubs”), 195–98 Traditional labor arrangements, 189–94 Zhu De, 69

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