Foundations of the American Century
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Ricardo Lagos offered a diagnosis of how Chile had reached its crisis point, arguing that social scientists were themselves to blame, indulging in “ideological debate,” identifying their institutions with political parties, hollowing out pluralism, and leaving academics vulnerable. The coup had forced a change and brought greater clarity: “In Chile, many social scientists are now trying to join up with people to whom they were previously opposed, in order to save the disciplines.” The issue was, to Lagos, “how to maintain certain persons (leftists) who are not politicized but who want to remain in Chile.”140 Osvaldo Sunkel also noted that research does not stop with the closing of an institution—it could continue anywhere, just as academic refugees from Europe had managed in the 1930s. Peter Bell summed it up: they were no longer “institution building” but trying to maintain “social science in and of itself.”141 As William Carmichael noted at the end of one conference session, Ford investments in Latin American social science were historically so strong that they would, of themselves, generate new outcomes in regard to postcoup Chile. There were indeed grounds for optimism, even as military repression gained force.142
In the concluding session of the OLAC conference, Lagos made a plea for Ford to focus on its core mission: “Ford’s business is ideas,” he noted. Ford should fund work that leads to theoretical insights that, in the long run, will “resolve the problems of the poor.” Latin American social scientists had, for example, developed dependency theory and should continue to be funded to create “new explanatory concepts and paradigms rather than frittering away limited resources on problems like rural poverty.”143 “The creation of a scientific community… could be an end in itself for the Foundation,” one Ford official (Peter Cleaves) argued.144
Ultimately, Ford’s strategy for postcoup Chile contained elements of all three viewpoints advanced, though not in equal measure. The “bureaucratic” perspective of Dye, Bell, and Carmichael, dovetailing with Lagos, Sunkel, and, incidentally, Foxley’s preferences, predominated: Ford programs continued in Chile to protect “their” intellectual assets for future use. The social scientists—Silvert and Manitzas—successfully initiated a deeper analysis of what Ford stood for and should do. And, as Cleaves is cited above as saying, in the end Ford was all about building and maintaining knowledge networks—indeed, it was “an end in itself for the Foundation.”
Nita Manitzas provides a summary of Ford’s programs for independent and refugee scholars after 1976 when, in addition to the $265,000 granted to CIEPLAN, Ford allotted $343,000 to preserving a measure of “critical, constructive, intellectual ‘space’ and dialogue in a stringently authoritarian setting.”145 Manitzas argues that Ford’s main concerns were to prevent a “lost generation” of scholars by preserving the scholars most closely associated with Ford in the past who might develop alternative paths for future development. This was no charitable exercise, she argued: funded scholars and groups had to conform to “international standards” of research and demonstrate “relevance” to the “realities and trajectory of the Southern Cone.”146 $206,000 flowed to Chilean researchers to those ends, collectively helping to “strengthen the infrastructure for the local social science community.”147 The fact that Ford funding was used to leverage other organizations’ support demonstrated the “multiplier effect” of the foundation’s work. To Manitzas, research quality by 1980 was “far better than it was before the rash of military coups” in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, but this was mainly attributable to the fact that only the hardiest, most committed, and patriotic of social scientists were still active.148
Another report, by Elizabeth Fox (assisted by Manitzas), stressed that private research centers were trying to develop ways of “bringing together… economic efficiency… with social equality,”149 an early indication of the rejection of Chile’s historical statism and the embrace of a sort of “social” neoliberalism.150 That Chilean scholars were unusually susceptible to external influences was also noted: they suffered from “excessive dependence… on international financing… [because] the staff… must constantly be ‘selling’ projects in order to survive.”151 It was not only Ford, however, that was funding research in Chile: the American Enterprise Institute was donating funds to the Corporacion de Estudios Publicos, which was directed by Pinochet’s daughter, to justify “a new technified democracy.” CIEPLAN, however, operated on a “dissident model,” or what Silva calls a “dissident technocracy,”152 networking with MIT and others to disseminate inside and outside Chile research critical of the military’s economic policies.153 Indeed, CIEPLAN was extraordinarily productive: by 1980, Foxley’s organization had produced a series of thirty-two essays, twenty-three technical notes, twenty-one short articles, nine books, and a number of articles in the press. They had held numerous seminars in specific policy areas including education, health, housing, military doctrine, inflation, and unemployment. CIEPLAN members were on the advisory boards of CLACSO, the American SSRC, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, among others. CIEPLAN was actively trying to address the military regime’s claim that the economy would fall apart should there be a return to civilian government. CIEPLAN implicitly accepted the basic thrust of the military’s formulation, however, and worked to show “how this [economic] disequilibrium can be managed in the short and mid-term.”154 According to the economist and CIEPLAN member Patricio Meller, the organization attempted to moderate popular demands for a return to state intervention in favor of incrementalism and gradualism. Chile had had enough radical experimentation—from Frei’s revolution in freedom through Allende’s socialism and Pinochet’s shock therapy—and required stable, technocratic governance. Writing in 2007, Meller claimed that CIEPLAN adopted a new approach—“growth with equity”—a variation of the Anglo-American “third way.”155 After the first postmilitary administration took power in 1990, CIEPLAN supplied the Aylwin government with its minister of finance (Foxley), minister of labor (Rene Cortazar), budget director (Pablo Arellano), and research director of the central bank (Ffrench-Davis), among others.156 CIEPLAN recognized the significance of adapting Chile to the new environment of globalization.157 Much later, as president of Chile, Ricardo Lagos adopted the same approach to economic policy.158
In addition to CIEPLAN, Ford funded umbrella organizations, such as the Academy of Christian Humanism (affiliated with the Catholic Church), FLACSO, and VECTOR (Centre for Economic and Social Studies). Those organizations sheltered scholars who had been forced out of the universities. FLACSO’s work in Santiago was provided $383,000 by Ford from 1974 to 1978. The problem, however, with FLACSO was that its projects were rather amorphous, unfocused, and eclectic and therefore unlikely to get much funding from international sources, which wanted to sponsor “empirical ‘problem-solving’ projects.”159 The Academy of Christian Humanism (ACH), established by the Catholic Church in 1975, was an umbrella organization under which marginalized scholars could gather with a degree of protection. VECTOR was the secular equivalent of ACH, sponsoring workshops, seminars, and lectures and publishing working papers and a monthly bulletin. It also focused on the organized-labor movement in Chile. VECTOR, ACH, FLACSO, and CIEPLAN, among others, were divided by political party and religious affiliation but united by opposition to the military, leading them increasingly to organize joint activities.160 Such groupings were fundamental, according to Chilean scholars, in establishing “the communicational, ideological, cultural, and, in part, political infrastructure that enabled later… a whole civil society [to spring] up again with relative force…. Without those ten years of work, the resurgence [of civil society] would probably have been much weaker, narrower, and slower.”161 With strong international networks as well, Puryear notes that Chile’s “dissident intellectuals remained firmly connected to the global academic mainstream.”162
Ford’s postcoup programs—in conjunction with numerous other international agencies—were ultimately successful: they helped to sustain a strong, vibrant, intellectual infr
astructure that combined party, nonparty, and church-based umbrella organizations and active research centers producing “realistic” analyses and critiques of Chilean economy, society, and government. Ford supplied an average of $800,000 per year to Chilean research and other groups throughout the 1980s.163 The elimination of much of the “hard” left and the driving underground or dispersal abroad of most of its leaders by the military regime meant the silencing of Marxist voices in the dialogues within the new or reconstituted knowledge networks Ford and others had sustained throughout the 1970s and 1980s.164 As Osvaldo Sunkel noted in 1993, “the political spectrum… now tends to converge towards central positions [and thereby] attenuate, moderate and reduce controversies, to avoid addressing them.”165 Indeed, these networks—usually headed by Christian Democrats—nurtured and incubated a “moderate” counterhegemonic bloc against military rule that was pragmatic enough to “realize” that much of the military’s economic program could not and should not be reversed,166 nor should the military be prosecuted for human-rights violations that included thousands of killings, torture on a grand scale, and hundreds of thousands imprisoned and exiled.167 Ford’s programs not only created “spaces of liberty”; they also created the spaces within which Chilean thinkers transformed their own self-concepts and concepts of political rule.168 They used the spaces financed by foreign agencies to engage in radical self-criticism, talked across political parties for the first time, and integrated former politicians with strong academic inclinations and educational backgrounds.169 Ricardo Lagos established the Party for Democracy in 1987 while remaining chair of VECTOR, and Alejandro Foxley became even more active in the Christian Democratic Party.170 It was in the crucible of intellectual “realistic” ferment, in the heat of a military regime, that Chile developed a “democratic” Socialist Party that rejected revolution and embraced “representative democracy,” making possible “a unified opposition” movement.171 Without such infrastructural support in those critical years, built upon decades of previous investment in Chilean “human capital,” it is highly unlikely that Chileans would have been able to mobilize and win against the military in the 1989 plebiscite and garner strong support from the international community, particularly the major financial institutions of the neoliberal “Washington consensus.”172
CONCLUSION
Ford’s programs in Chile were ultimately profoundly successful: they generated networks of scholars linked with political and state organizations and affected the course of Chilean political and economic development. To be sure, Ford was not at all supportive of Pinochet’s military regime—but the foundation was, at least in part (along with the Rockefeller Foundation and ICA/USAID), responsible for the creation of a community of neoliberal economists who were ready with a radical economic plan to root out statism and install the free market as an institution and as a discipline in all areas of life. This is a point upon which Ford officials remained almost completely silent, even when soul searching after the military coup; they did not accept their own responsibility in creating the knowledge communities that put their expertise to use in such radical ways and without regard for human-rights violations. They preferred to view economics as a set of analytic and methodological techniques rather than as an overtly ideological and political force for radical change. Indeed, it may be said that Ford and other American agencies were hardly disturbed by the advent of free-market economics per se: they objected to the complete silence of the neoliberals on the social effects of economic policies (much as they worried about the economic inefficiencies of Allende’s social policies). Yet they seemed more disturbed by Allende than Pinochet: leftist economists received no funding at the University of Chile after 1970, even though Catholic University’s Chicago boys continued to receive funding four years after the military coup, for which they had actively prepared in advance. According to Huneeus, the economic policies and repressive actions of the Pinochet regime were complementary, the latter making considerably easier the implementation of the former.173 In creating a network of centrist research and semipolitical organizations during the Pinochet years, Ford generated the basis of the transformation of a diverse and divided set of academic and political exiles into a powerful centrist force for Chilean reform. Once again, their pre- and postcoup investments overlapped and reinforced one another, creating an opposition cadre of scholars for political and technocratic rule in the 1990s. Three decades of investing in Chilean universities finally paid dividends, as that country’s social scientists and its political class came to accept the “Washington consensus” under conditions of globalization and market discipline.174
In his book on Chile’s intellectual communities, Jeffrey Puryear fully recognizes the power of networks as a technology of (democratic) change. His conclusion is especially noteworthy, particularly from the perspective of the central argument about network power—as an end in itself and as the means of attaining ends otherwise not publicly stated by American philanthropy—advanced in the current study. Puryear argues that it is vital that funding bodies establish “networks even when their precise impact cannot be determined in advance.” Such networks—composed of well-trained scholars, “institutions, standards, colleagues, debate, and international contacts”—were “a stock of high-level human resources” for the time when “democracy returned.” “Sustained investment in creating a stock of talented social scientists can qualitatively change a country’s political culture and its political technocracy.”175
8
AMERICAN POWER AND THE MAJOR FOUNDATIONS IN THE POST–COLD WAR ERA
When the Cold War ended, so did the United States’ principal rationale for its global role, its “military-industrial complex,” and a large number of its national security policies. The “Soviet threat,” the existence of an expansionist and aggressive communism orchestrated from Moscow and threatening world peace and American national existence and security, was no more. American power, which this study suggests had its own expansionist and hegemonic purposes, required a new rationale for continued global engagement. This was particularly important because of insistent demands for a “peace dividend” after the Cold War—“payback” for sacrifices made to retain a massive military budget to fight the Red Threat: social programs to tackle domestic poverty, health care, educational underachievement, spiraling inner-city crime, falling living standards, and increasing social and economic polarization.1
One aspect of a new rationale for U.S. power came in the form of promoting democracy, which, especially after the terror attacks of 9/11, objectively “unified” liberal internationalists, conservative nationalists, and neoconservatives. While democracy promotion is an old idea, it gained new impetus in the form of scientifically established “truth”: democratic peace theory (DPT). This represented a fundamental rhetorical shift in the rationales of U.S. national security: the United States was now promoting democracy as the principal source of global security and peace. Critically, at the same time, DPT encouraged the identification of zones of the world that were anti- or nondemocratic and their categorization as threats: nondemocracies were by definition more warlike, unstable, likely to back terror groups, and to threaten the world by acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The world was now divided between zones of peace and zones of turmoil, the latter requiring pacification through democratization.
DPT effectively contained in it the logic of capitalist globalization, interpreted as it was as the promotion of “market democracies.” DPT, then, was reshaping the contours of the global political order and justifying capitalist globalization: open societies and open markets went hand in hand. However, just as there were “rogue” states threatening the global peace, so were there those excluded from the benefits of capitalist globalization—unable to compete in the market—who were sources of disorder and political instability. They required action from the United States/West, and the role of leading state and interstate agencies, foundations, and other nonstate actors was to humanize globalizati
on’s harsher aspects, much as the Big 3 had been doing for almost a century at home and in the Third World. This was a form of social neoliberalism2 not dissimilar to the post-Pinochet regime in Chile in the 1990s.