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Boaventura de Sousa Santos

The university in the twenty-first century

Towards a democratic and emancipatory university reform
The reaction from universities to demands for reform both from the private
sector and society has been a state of paralysis and resistance in the name of
autonomy and academic freedom. The only way universities can recover from
their crisis legitimacy, writes Boaventura de Sousa Santos, is through radical
democratic restructuring. Countering the brain-drain from poorer to wealthy
nations so far the main result of the transnationalization of education will
only be achieved by embarking on a counter-hegemonic process of
globalization creating genuine equality of access.
In an essay published in the early 1990s, [1] I identified three crises facing the
university at the end of the twentieth century. First, the crisis of hegemony was
the result of contradictions between the traditional functions of the university
and those that had come to be attributed to it throughout the twentieth century.
On the one hand, the production of high culture, critical thinking, and exemplary
scientific and humanistic knowledge, necessary for the training of the elites,
which had been the concern of the university since the European Middle Ages.
On the other, the production of average cultural standards and instrumental
knowledge, useful for the training of the qualified labour force demanded by
capitalist development. The university's inability fully to carry out contradictory
functions led the State and its economic agents to look beyond it for alternative
means to attain these objectives. When it stopped being the only institution of
higher education and research production, the university entered a crisis of
hegemony.
The second crisis was a crisis of legitimacy, provoked by the fact that the
university ceased to be a consensual institution in view of the contradiction
between the hierarchization of specialized knowledge through restrictions of
access and credentialing of competencies, on the one hand, and the social and
political demands for a democratized university and equal opportunity for the
children of the working class, on the other. Finally, the institutional crisis was the
result of the contradiction between the demand for autonomy in the definition of
the university's values and objectives and the growing pressure to hold it to the
same criteria of efficiency, productivity, and social responsibility that private
enterprises face.
In that essay I analysed in some detail each one of the abovementioned crises
and the way they were managed by the university, especially in the central
countries. My analysis was centred on public universities. I showed that, far
from being able to solve its crises, the university, relying on its long institutional
memory and the ambiguities of its administrative profile, tended to manage
them formulaically to avoid their growing out of control. This pattern of action
depended on external pressures (it was reactive), incorporated more or less
acritically external social and institutional logics (it was dependent) and was
blind to medium- or long-range perspectives (it was immediatist).

What has happened in the past two decades? How can we characterize the
situation in which we find ourselves? What are possible responses to the
problems that the university faces today?
The mercantilization of the public university
Despite the fact that the three crises were intimately connected and could only
be confronted jointly and by means of vast reform programs generated both
inside and outside the university, I predicted (and feared) that the institutional
crisis would come to monopolize reformist agendas and proposals. This is in
fact what happened. I also predicted that concentrating on the institutional crisis
could lead to the false resolution of the two other crises, a resolution by default:
the crisis of hegemony, by the university's increasing loss of specificity; the
crisis of legitimacy, by the growing segmentation of the university system and
the growing devaluation of university diplomas, in general. This has also
happened.
Concentrating on the institutional crisis was fatal for the university and was due
to a number of factors, some already evident at the beginning of the 1990s,
while others gained enormous weight as the decade advanced. The institutional
crisis is and has been, for at least two centuries, the weakest link of the public
university, since its scientific and pedagogical autonomy is based on its financial
dependency on the State. While the university and its services were an
unequivocal public good that was up to the State to insure, this dependency
was not problematic, any more than that of the judicial system, for example, in
which the independence of the courts is not lessened by the fact they are being
financed by the State. However, contrary to the judicial system, the moment the
State decided to reduce its political commitment to the universities and to
education in general, converting education into a collective good which,
however public, does not have to be exclusively supported by the State, an
institutional crisis of the public university automatically followed. If it already
existed, it deepened. It can be said that, for the last thirty years, the university's
institutional crisis in the great majority of countries was provoked or induced by
the loss of priority of the university as a public good and by the consequent
financial drought and disinvestment in public universities.
The onset of the institutional crisis by way of the financial crisis, accentuated in
the last twenty years, is a structural phenomenon accompanying the public
university's loss of priority among the public goods produced by the State. The
fact that the financial crisis was the immediate motive of the institutional crisis
does not mean that the causes of the latter can be reduced to the financial
crisis. The analysis of the structural causes will reveal that the prevalence of the
institutional crisis was the result of the impact upon it of the two other unsolved
crises, the crises of hegemony and of legitimacy. And in this domain there have
been, in the last eleven years, new developments in relation to the picture I
described almost two decades ago.
The public university's loss of priority in the State's public policies was, first of
all, the result of the general loss of priority of social policies (education, health,
social security) induced by the model of economic development known as
neoliberalism or neoliberal globalization, which was internationally imposed

beginning in the 1980s. In the public university, it meant that its identified
institutional weaknesses and they were many instead of serving as
justification for a vast politico-pedagogical reform program, were declared
insurmountable and used to justify the generalized opening of the university-aspublic-good to commercial exploitation. Despite political declarations to the
contrary and some reformist gestures, underlying this first collision of the
university with neoliberalism is the idea that the public university is not
reformable (any more than the State) and that the true alternative lies in the
creation of the university market. The savage and deregulated way in which this
market emerged and was developed is proof that there was a deep option in its
favour. And the same option explained the disinvestment in the public university
and massive transferences of human resources that, at times, looked like a
"primitive accumulation" on the part of the private university sector at the cost of
the public sector.
I identify two phases in the process of mercantilization of the public university. In
the first, which goes from the beginning of the 1980s to the middle of the 1990s,
the national university market is expanded and consolidated. In the second,
along with the national market, the transnational market of higher and university
education emerges with great vitality and so much so that, by the end of the
decade, it is transformed by World Bank and the World Trade Organization into
a global solution for the problems of education. In other words, the neoliberal
globalization of the university is under way. This is a new phenomenon.
Certainly, the transnationalization of university exchanges is an ancient process,
dating back to the medieval European universities (not to speak of the early
Islamic universities in Africa). After World War II, it was translated into the
training, at a post-graduate level, of students from peripheral or semi-peripheral
countries in the universities of the central countries and into partnerships
between universities from different countries. In recent years, however, such
transnational relations have advanced to a new level. The new
transnationalization is much vaster than the former one and its logic is, unlike its
predecessor's, exclusively mercantile.
The two defining processes of the decade the State's disinvestment in the
public university and the mercantile globalization of the university are two
sides of the same coin. They are the two pillars of a huge global project of
university politics destined to profoundly change the way the university-as-apublic-good has been produced, transforming it into a vast and vastly profitable
ground for educational capitalism. This mid- to long-range project includes
different levels and forms of the mercantilization of the university. As for the
levels, it is possible to distinguish two. The primary level consists of inducing the
public university to overcome the financial crisis by generating its own
resources, namely through partnerships with industrial capital. On this level, the
public university maintains its autonomy and its institutional specificity,
privatizing part of the services it renders. The second level consists of the
biased elimination of the distinction between public and private universities,
transforming the university as a whole into a business, an entity that not only
produces for the market but which is itself produced as a market, as a market of
university services as diverse as administration, teaching programs and
materials, certification of degrees, teacher training, and teacher and student

evaluation. If it will still make sense to speak of the university as a public good
when this second level is attained is a rhetorical question.
From university knowledge to pluriversity knowledge
The developments of the past two decades have presented the university with
very demanding challenges, especially the public university. The situation is
near collapse in many countries on the periphery and it is difficult in the semiperipheral countries. Although the expansion and transnationalization of the
market for university services has contributed decisively to this situation in
recent years, they are not the only cause. Something more profound occurred
and only this explains why the university, while still the institution par excellence
of scientific knowledge, has lost its hegemony and has been transformed into
an easy target for social criticism. I think that in the past two decades, the
relations between knowledge and society began to change significantly and
these alterations promise to be profound to the point of transforming the way we
conceive of knowledge and of society. As I said, the commercialization of
scientific knowledge is the most visible side of these alterations. However, and
despite their enormity, they are the tip of the iceberg and the transformations
now in progress have contradictory meanings and multiple implications, some of
them epistemological.
University knowledge that is, the scientific knowledge produced in universities
or institutions separate from the universities but which retain a similar university
ethos was, for the whole of the twentieth century, a predominantly disciplinary
knowledge whose autonomy imposed a relatively de-contextualized process of
production in relation to the day-to-day pressures of the societies. According to
the logic of this process, the researchers are the ones who determine what
scientific problems to solve, define their relevance, and establish the
methodologies and rhythms of research. It is a homogeneous and hierarchically
organized knowledge insofar as the agents who participate in its production
share the same goals of producing knowledge, have the same training and the
same scientific culture, and do what they do according to well-defined
organizational hierarchies. It is a knowledge based on the distinction between
scientific research and technological development; the autonomy of the
researcher is translated as a kind of social irresponsibility as far as the results of
the application of knowledge are concerned. Moreover, in the logic of this
process of the production of university knowledge, the distinction between
scientific knowledge and other kinds of knowledge is absolute, as is the relation
between science and society. The university produces knowledge that the
society does or does not apply, an alternative that, although socially relevant, is
indifferent or irrelevant to the knowledge produced.
The university's organization and ethos were created by this kind of knowledge.
It happens that, throughout the past two decades, there were alterations that
destabilized this model of knowledge and pointed to the emergence of another
model. I designate this transition, which Gibbons et al. (1994) described as a
transition from "type1 knowledge" to "type 2 knowledge", as the passage from
university knowledge to pluriversity knowledge.
Contrary to the university knowledge described in the preceding paragraph,

pluriversity knowledge is a contextual knowledge insofar as the organizing

principle of its construction is its application. As this application is extramural,
the initiative for formulating the problems to be solved and the determination of
their criteria of relevance is the result of sharing among researchers and users.
It is a transdisciplinary knowledge that, by its very contextualization, demands a
dialogue or confrontation with other kinds of knowledge, which makes it more
heterogeneous internally and allows it to be more adequately produced in less
perennial and more open systems organized less rigidly and hierarchically. All
the distinctions upon which university knowledge is based are put in question by
pluriversity knowledge but, most basically, it is the relation between science and
society that is in question. Society ceases to be an object of scientific
questioning and becomes itself a subject that questions science.
The tension between these two models of knowledge highlights the extremes of
two ideal types. In reality, the kinds of knowledge produced occupy different
places along the continuum between the two poles, some closer to the
university model, others closer to the pluriversity model. This heterogeneity not
only destabilizes the current institutional specificity of the university, it also
questions its hegemony and legitimacy in such a way as to force it to evaluate
itself by self-contradictory criteria.
Pluriversity knowledge has had its most consistent realization in universityindustry partnerships in the form of mercantile knowledge. But, especially in the
central and semi-peripheral countries, the context of application has been nonmercantile as well cooperative and dependent on the solidarity created by
partnerships among researchers and labour unions, NGOs, social movements,
particularly vulnerable social groups (women, illegal immigrants, the
unemployed, people with chronic illnesses, senior citizens, those afflicted with
HIV/AIDS, etc.), working-class communities, and groups of critical and active
citizens. There is a growing sector of civil society developing a new and more
intense relationship with science and technology, demanding greater
participation in their production and in the evaluation of their impact. In
multiethnic and multinational countries, pluriversity knowledge begins to emerge
from inside the university itself when incoming students from ethnic and other
minority groups understand that their inclusion is a form of exclusion. They are
confronted with the tabula rasa that is made of their cultures and of the
traditional knowledge of their communities. All of this leads scientific knowledge
to confront other kinds of knowledge and demands a higher level of social
responsibility from the institutions that produce it and, consequently, from the
universities. As science becomes more ingrained in the society, the society
becomes more a part of science. The university was created according to a
model of unilateral relations with society and it is this model that underlies its
current institutionalism. Pluriversity knowledge supplants this unilateral notion
with interactivity and interdependence, both processes enormously invigorated
by the technological revolution of information and communication.
In light of these transformations, we can conclude that the university finds itself
in the presence of opposing demands that have the convergent effect of
destabilizing its current institutionalism. On the one hand, the ultra-private
pressure to commodify knowledge displaces the social responsibility of the

university with a focus on producing economically useful and commercially

viable knowledge. On the other hand, an ultra-public social pressure shatters
the restricted public sphere of the university in the name of a much broader
public sphere traversed by much more heterogeneous confrontations and by
much more demanding concepts of social responsibility. This contrast between
ultra-private and ultra-public pressures has not only begun to destabilize the
university's institutionalism, it has also created a profound fracture in the
university's social and cultural identity, a fracture translated as disorientation
and defensive tactics and, above all, as a kind of paralysis covered up by a
defensive attitude, resistant to change in the name of university autonomy and
academic freedom. The instability caused by the impact of these contrasting
pressures creates impasses in which it becomes evident that demands for
larger changes often accompany equally large forms of resistance to change.
Response: The counter-hegemonic globalization of the university
As I have suggested for other areas of social life (Santos 2000; 2002a, 2002b,
2002c, 2003), I think the only efficient and emancipatory way to confront
neoliberal globalization is to oppose it with an alternative, counter-hegemonic
globalization. Counter-hegemonic globalization of the university-as-public-good
means that the national reforms of the public university must reflect a country
project centred on policy choices that consider the country's insertion in
increasingly transnational contexts of knowledge production and distribution.
These will become increasingly polarized between two contradictory processes
of globalization: neoliberal globalization, and counter-hegemonic globalization.
This country project has to be the result of a broad political and social pact
consisting of different sectoral pacts, among them an educational pact in the
terms of which the public university is conceived of as a collective good. The
reform must be focused on responding positively to the social demands for the
radical democratizing of the university, putting an end to the history of exclusion
of social groups and their knowledges for which the university has been
responsible for a long time, starting long before the current phase of capitalist
globalization. From now on, the national and transnational scales of the reform
interpenetrate. Without global articulation, a national solution is impossible.
The counter-hegemonic globalization of the university-as-public-good is, thus, a
demanding political project that, in order to be credible, must overcome two
contradictory but equally rooted prejudices: on the one hand, that the university
can only be reformed by the university community and, on the other, that the
university will never reform itself. These are very powerful prejudices. A brief
examination of the social forces potentially committed to confront them is in
place. The first social force is the public university community itself; that is,
those within it interested in an alternative globalization of the university. The
public university today is a very fractured social field within which contradictory
sectors and interests fight each other. In many countries, especially peripheral
and semi-peripheral ones, such contradictions are still latent. Defensive
positions that maintain the status quo and reject globalization, whether
neoliberal or alternative, predominate. This is a conservative position, not just
because it advocates hewing to the status quo, but mainly because, deprived of
realistic alternatives, it will sooner or later surrender to plans for the neoliberal
globalization of the university. University personnel who denounce this

conservative position and, at the same time, reject the idea that there is no
alternative to neoliberal globalization will be the protagonists of the progressive
reform that I am proposing.
The second social force of such reform is the State itself, whenever it is
successfully pressed to opt for the university's alternative globalization. Without
this option, the national State ends up adopting, more or less unconditionally, or
succumbing, more or less reluctantly, to the pressures of neoliberal
globalization and, in either case, transforming itself into the enemy of the public
university, regardless of any proclamation to the contrary. Given the close, lovehate relationship that the State carried on with the university for the whole of the
twentieth century, the options tend to be dramatized.
Finally, the third social force to carry out the reform are citizens collectively
organized in social groups, labour unions, social movements, non-governmental
organizations and their networks, and local progressive governments interested
in forming cooperative relationships between the university and the social
interests they represent. In contrast to the State, this third social force has had a
historically distant and, at times, even hostile relationship with the university,
precisely because of the latter's elitism and the distance it cultivated for a long
time in relation to the so-called "uncultured" sectors of society. This is a social
force that has to be won through a response to the question of legitimacy, that
is, via non-classist, non-racist, non-sexist and non-ethnocentric access to the
university and by a whole set of initiatives that deepen the university's social
responsibility in line with the pluriversity knowledge mentioned above.
Beyond these three social forces there is, in the semi-peripheral and peripheral
countries, a fourth entity that may be loosely called national capitalism Certainly,
the most dynamic sectors of national capital are transnationalized and,
consequently, part of the neoliberal globalization hostile to the emancipatory
reform of the university. However, in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries,
the process of transnational integration of these sectors is filled with tensions.
Under certain conditions, such tensions may lead these sectors to see an
interest in defending the project of the public university as a public good,
especially in cases where there are no realistic alternatives to the public
university for the production of the kind of technological knowledge needed to
strengthen their insertion in the global economy.
Re-claiming legitimacy
In a situation in which hegemony is irremediably affected, legitimacy is
simultaneously more urgent and more difficult. Thus, the battle for legitimacy is
going to be ever more demanding and university reform must be centred on it.
There are five areas of action in this domain: access, extension, actionresearch, ecology of knowledges, and university/public school partnerships. The
first two are the most conventional but they will have to be profoundly revised;
the third has been practiced in some Latin American and African universities
during periods of greater social responsibility on the part of the university; the
fourth constitutes a decisive innovation in the construction of a post-colonial
university; the fifth is an area of action that had a great presence in the past but
that now has to be totally reinvented.

Access
In the area of access, the greatest frustration of the past two decades was that
the goal of democratic access was not attained. In the majority of countries,
factors of discrimination, whether of class, race, gender, or ethnicity, continued
to make access a mixture of merit and privilege. Instead of democratization,
there was "massification" and afterwards, in the alleged post-massification
period, a strong segmentation of higher education involving practices of
authentic "social dumping" of diplomas and degree-recipients. The most elitist
universities took few initiatives, other than defending their access criteria,
invoking the fact, often true, that the most persistent discrimination occurs on
the way to the university, within primary and secondary education. It is
foreseeable that the transnationalization of higher education services will
aggravate the segmentation phenomenon by transnationalizing it. Some foreign
providers direct their offers to the best students coming from the best (often, the
most elitist) secondary schools or having graduated from the best national
universities. In a transnationalized system, the best universities, occupying the
top national rungs in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries, will become the
bottom rungs of the global ladder. Of the four kinds of transnationalized
services, foreign consumption is one of those most responsible for the new
"brain drain," particularly evident in India, but also present in some African
countries, like Kenya and Ghana.
Among the master ideas that should guide the matter of access, I discern the
following:
First, in countries where discrimination of university access is largely based on
blockages at the primary and secondary instructional levels, progressive
university reform, in contrast to the World Bank's recipes, must give incentives
to the university to promote active partnerships, in the areas of science and
technology, with public schools.
Second, the public university must remain free with maintenance scholarships,
rather than loans, going to students from subaltern classes. If it is not controlled,
the indebtedness of university students will become a time bomb: a population
encumbered by the certainty of a debt that can take twenty years to pay is being
thrown into an increasingly uncertain labour market. Scholarships should be
granted which include the possibility of student jobs in university activities both
on and off campus, a rare practice specially in peripheral and semi-peripheral
countries. For example, undergraduate and graduate students could volunteer
some hours each week as tutors in public schools, helping pupils and, if
necessary, teachers.
Third, in multinational and multicultural societies, racial and ethnic
discrimination should be confronted with programs of affirmative action focused
both on access and attendance, especially during the first years when the dropout rates are often high. Needless to say, racial and ethnic discrimination occurs
in conjunction with class discrimination, but cannot be reduced to the latter; it
must be the object of specific measures. In India, caste discrimination is the

object of affirmative action, despite acting in conjunction with class and gender
discrimination. In South Africa, racial discrimination is the object of affirmative
action, despite acting in conjunction with class discrimination. As happens in
these two countries, anti-discrimination action in the university must be carried
out in conjunction with anti-discrimination measures in other spheres, like
access to public employment and to the labour market in general. In this way
the university will be linked to a progressive national project and bearing
witness to it.
Fourth, the critical evaluation of access and its obstacles like the rest of the
discussion on the areas of extension and ecology of knowledges must
explicitly confront the colonial character of the modern university. In the past,
the university not only participated in the social exclusion of so-called "inferior"
races and ethnicities, but also theorized about their inferiority, an inferiority
extended to the knowledge produced by the excluded groups in the name of the
epistemological priority conferred upon science. The task to democratize
access is thus particularly demanding because it questions the university as a
whole, not just who attends it but what kind of knowledge is transmitted to those
who attend it.
Extension
The area of extension is going to have a very special meaning in the near
future. At a moment when global capitalism intends to functionalize the
university and, in fact, transform it into a vast extension agency at its service an
emancipatory reform of the public university must confer a new centrality to the
activities of extension and conceive of them as an alternative to global
capitalism, attributing to the universities an active participation in the
construction of social cohesion, in the deepening of the democracy, in the
struggle against social exclusion and environmental degradation, in the defence
of cultural diversity. The extension involves a vast area of service-provision for a
variety of recipients: working-class social groups and organizations, social
movements, local or regional communities, local governments, the public sector,
and the private sector. Apart from providing services to well-defined recipients,
there is also an entirely different area of service-provision that has the society in
general as its recipient: the promotion of scientific and technical culture and the
study of the arts and literature as tools to empower citizenship and deepen
democracy.
In order for extension to fulfil this role it must avoid being directed toward
money-making activities for the sole purpose of gathering non-state resources.
In this case, we are faced with a discrete (or not so discrete) privatization of the
public university. On the contrary, the extension activities I have in mind are
designed to address the problems of social exclusion and discrimination in such
a way as to give voice to the excluded and discriminated social groups.
Action-research
Action-research and the ecology of knowledges are areas of university
legitimacy that transcend extension since they act both at the level of extension

and at the level of research and training. Action-research consists of the

participative definition and execution of research projects involving workingclass and, in general, subaltern communities and social organizations grappling
with problems whose solution can benefit from the results of the research. The
social interests are tied to the scientific interests of the researchers and so the
production of scientific knowledge is directly linked to the satisfaction of the
needs of social groups lacking the resources to have access to specialized
technical knowledge through the market. Action-research has a long tradition in
Latin America, but it has never been a university priority. Just as with extension
activities, the new centrality of action-research is due to the fact that the
neoliberal transnationalization of higher education is transforming the university
into a global institution of action-research at the service of global capitalism.
Here too, the battle against this functionalism is only made possible by
constructing a social alternative that focus on the university's social utility and
defines it in a counter-hegemonic way.
Ecology of knowledges
The ecology of knowledges is a more advanced form of action-research. It
implies an epistemological revolution in the ways research and training has
have been conventionally carried out at the university.[2] The ecology of
knowledges is a kind of counter-extension or extension in reverse, that is from
outside to inside the university. It consists of the promotion of dialogues
between scientific and humanistic knowledge produced by the university, on the
one side, and the lay or popular knowledges that circulate in society produced
by common people, both in urban and rural settings, originating in Western and
non-Western cultures (indigenous, African, Eastern, etc.), on the other. Along
with the technological euphoria, there is also today a lack of epistemological
confidence in science that derives from the growing visibility of the perverse
consequences of some kinds of scientific progress and the fact that many of
modern science's social promises have not been fulfilled. It is beginning to be
socially perceptible that the university, by specializing in scientific knowledge
and considering it the only kind of valid knowledge, has actively contributed to
the disqualification and destruction of much potentially invaluable non-scientific
knowledge, thus causing the marginalization of social groups to whom these
kinds of knowledge were the only ones available, and causing as well, more
generally, the impoverishment of human experience and diversity. So social
injustice contains cognitive injustice at its core. This is particularly obvious on
the global scale, where peripheral countries, rich in non-scientific wisdom, but
poor in scientific knowledge, have seen the latter, in the form of economic
science, destroy their ways of sociability, their economies, their indigenous and
rural communities, and their environments.
Towards a new institutionalism
The institutional domain is a key area of the public university's democratic and
emancipatory reform. I previously noted that the virulence and salience of the
institutional crisis reside in its being a condensation of the deepening crises of
hegemony and legitimacy. This is why I have focused up to now on these two
crises. It is my opinion that university reform must be centred on the matter of
legitimacy. In fact, the loss of hegemony seems irremediable, not only because

of the emergence of many alternative institutions, but also because of the

growing internal segmentation in the university network, both at the national and
global levels. The university today is not the unique organization it was and its
heterogeneity makes it even more difficult to identify the uniqueness of its
character. The processes of globalization make this heterogeneity more visible
and intensify it. What remains of the university's hegemony is the existence of a
public space where the debate and the criticism of society can, in the long run,
happen with fewer restrictions than in the rest of society. This core of hegemony
is too irrelevant in today's capitalist societies to sustain the university's
legitimacy. This is why institutional reform has to be centred on the latter.
The institutional reform I propose here intends to strengthen the public
university's legitimacy in the context of the neoliberal globalization of education
and envisions supporting the possibility of an alternative globalization. Its
principal areas can be summed up in the following ideas: network, internal and
external democratizing, and participative evaluation.
Network
The first idea is that of a national network of public universities upon which a
global network can be developed. In almost every country, there are university
associations, but such associations do not come close to constituting a network.
In the majority of cases, they are merely pressure groups collectively
demanding benefits that are appropriated individually. In another direction
entirely, I propose that the university's public good begin to be produced in
networks, meaning that none of the nodes in the network can insure by itself
alone all the functions into which this public good is translated, be it knowledge
production, undergraduate and graduate training, extension, action-research or
ecology of knowledges. This implies an institutional revolution. Universities were
institutionally designed to function as autonomous and self-sufficient entities.
The culture of university autonomy and of academic freedom, although
defended publicly in the name of the university against outside forces, has been
frequently used inside the university system to pit university against university.
Competition for ranking exacerbates separation and, because it takes place
without any compensatory measures, it deepens the existing inequalities,
making the top of the pyramid even sharper and the overall segmentation and
heterogeneity more profound. Building a public network implies the sharing of
resources and equipment, the internal mobility of teachers and students and
minimal standardization of course plans, of school year organization, of systems
of evaluation. None of this has to eliminate the specificities of each university's
response to the local or regional context in which it is located. On the contrary,
maintaining such specificity gives each individual university more value within
the network[3]. The network, while creating more polyvalence and
decentralization, strengthens the public university network as a whole. It is not
about making excellent universities share their resources in such a way that
their excellence would be put at risk. Rather, it is about multiplying the number
of excellent universities, offering each the possibility of developing its niche
potential with the help of the rest.
The organization of universities within the network must be directed to promote

internal articulation in the four areas of legitimacy: access, extension, actionresearch, and ecology of knowledges.
Internal and external democratizing
Apart from the creation of the network, the new institutionalism must work
toward the deepening of the university's internal and external democracy. When
we discuss university democratization, we are usually thinking about ending
forms of discrimination that limit access. But there are other dimensions.
Recently, the university's external democratization has become a highly
debated theme. The idea of external democratization gets conflated with the
idea of the university's social responsibility, since what is being discussed is the
creation of an organic political link between the university and society that ends
the isolation that has demonized the university, in recent years, as a corporative
manifestation of elitism, an ivory tower and so forth. The appeal for external
democracy is ambiguous because it is made by social groups with contradictory
interests. On the one hand, the call comes from an educational market that
invokes the university's democratic deficit to justify the market's need for greater
access to it, something that is only possible if the university is privatized.
External democratization implies the university's new relation with the world of
business and its ultimate transformation into a business. On the other hand, the
call for external democratization comes from progressive social forces that are
behind the transformations occurring in the passage from the university model
to the pluriversity model; it comes especially from the allies of historically
excluded groups which today demand that the public university become
responsible to their long neglected interests. The pluriversity model, in
assuming the contextualization of knowledge and the participation of citizens or
communities as users or even co-producers of knowledge, requires that such
contextualization and participation be subject to rules which will guarantee the
transparency of the relations between the university and its social environment
and legitimatize the decisions made in the ambit of such relations.
This second appeal for external democracy aims to neutralize the first, the call
for privatizing the university. The appeal for privatization had an enormous
impact on the universities of many countries in the last decade, to the point
where university researchers have lost much of the control they had over
research agendas. The most obvious case is the way research priorities are
defined today in the field of health, where diseases that affect the majority of the
world's population (malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS) are not given research
priority. From the moment the regulatory mechanisms of the scientific
community begin to be dependent on the centres of economic power, only
external bottom-up democratic pressure can insure that matters with little
commercial interest but great social impact make their way into research
agendas.
Participative evaluation
Finally, the new institutionalism entails a new system of evaluation that includes
each of the universities and the university network as a whole. Mechanisms of
self-evaluation and hetero-evaluation should be adopted for both cases.

Evaluation criteria should be congruent with the aforementioned goals of the

reform and applied through techno-democratic or participative tools rather than
through technocratic ones. The latter are today strongly recommended by
transnational educational capital. They entail quantitative external evaluations,
both of teaching and rersearch, leaving out the fulfilment of any other functions,
namely extension and, of course, research-action and ecology of knowledges.
In the case of research, evaluation is focused on what is most easily accounted
for by bibliometric techniques that differentiate publication types and locations
and measure the impact of the publications by the number of citations. Little
evaluation has been done of the less easily quantifiable areas of extension and,
when it occurs, it tends to privilege university-industry relations and to centre on
quantitative criteria like the number of patents, for example.
The fixation of criteria through mechanisms of internal and external democracy
is fundamental since they define the social value of the different university
activities. The university should not promote single models of professorial
activity but, rather, differentiated models that value the specific competencies of
different groups of professors. This allows the university to increase its social
returns and to introduce internal incentives for new activities that serve as a
shield against the unilateral pressure of the mercantile incentives. The
participative evaluation models facilitate the emergence of sufficiently robust
internal evaluation criteria to measure up to the external criteria. The principles
of self-management, self-regulation, and self-discipline allow the evaluative
processes to serve as processes of political apprenticeship. These principles
are the only guarantee that participative self-evaluation will not turn into
narcissistic self-contemplation or an exchange of evaluative favours.
Conclusion: No surrender
The university in the twenty-first century will certainly be less hegemonic but no
less necessary than it was in previous centuries. Its specificity as a public good
resides in its being the institution that links the present to the medium and long
term through the kinds of knowledge and training it produces and by the
privileged public space it establishes, dedicated to open and critical discussion.
For these two reasons, it is a collective good without strong allies. Many people
are not interested in the long term and others have sufficient power to be wary
of those who dare to suspect them or criticize their interests.
The public university is, thus, a permanently threatened public good, which is
not to say that the threat comes only from the outside; it comes from the inside
as well. I am more than ever aware that a university socially ostracized for its
elitism and corporate tendencies, and paralysed by the inability to question itself
in the same way it questions society, is easy prey for the proselytes of
neoliberal globalization. This is why the emergence of a university market first,
a national market and now a global one by making the public university's
vulnerabilities more evident, constitutes such a profound threat to the public
good it produces or ought to produce.
The conjunction between factors of internal threat and factors of external threat
is quite obvious in evaluating the university's capacity for long-term thinking,
perhaps its most distinctive characteristic. Those who work in today's university

know that university tasks are predominately short-term, dictated by budget

emergencies, inter-departmental competition, professorial tenure, and so forth.
The management of such emergencies allows for the flourishing of types of
conducts and professionals that would have little merit or relevance were it
possible and urgent to focus on long-term questions. This emergency-ridden
state of affairs, which is surely due to a plurality of factors, must also be seen as
a sign that powerful outside social actors are influencing the university. What is
the social return on long-term thinking, on using the public spaces for critical
thinking or even the production of knowledge apart from what the market
demands? In the World Bank's way of thinking, the answer is obvious: none. If it
existed, it would be dangerous and, if not dangerous, unsustainable in semiperipheral and peripheral countries, since it would have to compete with the
central countries that have supposedly unequivocal comparative advantages in
this domain. If this global and external logic did not find such fertile ground for
local and internal appropriation, it would certainly not be so dangerous.
The university is a public good intimately connected to the country's project. The
political and cultural meaning of this project and its viability depend on a
nation's ability to negotiate, in a qualified way, its universities' insertion into the
new transnational fields. In the case of the university and of education in
general, this qualification is the condition necessary for not making the
negotiation an act of surrender and thus marking the end of the university as we
know it. The only way to avoid surrender is to create conditions for a
cooperative university in solidarity with its own global role.
This is a shortened and updated version of a text first presented in Brasilia on 5
April 2004.
References
Asmal, K. 2003. "Implications of the General Agreement on Trade in Services
(GATS) on Higher Education." Kagisano Issue (October 3): 47-53.
Chau, M. 2003. "A Universidade Pblica Sob Nova Perspectiva." Opening
conference of the 26th annual meeting of ANPED, Poo de Caldas, Minas
Gerais, Brazil, October 5.
Gibbons, M., C. Limoges, H. Nowotny, S. Schwartzman, P. Scott, and M. Trow.
1994. The New Production of Knowledge. London: Sage.
Hirtt, N. 2003. Au Nord Comme au Sud, L'Offensive des Marches sur
L'Universit." Alternatives Sud, X(3): 9-31.
Knight, J. 2003. "Trade in Higher Education Services: The Implications of
GATS." Kagisano Issue 3: 5-37.
Mehta, L. 2001. "The World Bank and Its Emerging Knowledge Empire. Human
Organization 60 (2): 189-96.
Santos, Boaventura S. 1994. Pela Mo de Alice: O Social e Poltico na
Transio Ps-moderna. Oporto: Afrontamento.
Santos, Boaventura S. 1995. Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and
Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition. New York: Routledge.
Santos, Boaventura S. 2000. A Critica da Razo Indolente: Contra o
Desperdcio da Experincia. Oporto: Afrontamento.

World Bank. 2002. World Bank Higher Education in Brazil: Challenges and
Options. New York: World Bank.

[1]

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, "From the idea of the university to the

university of ideas", in Pela Mo de Alice: o Social e o Poltico na PsModernidade, 1994.
[2]
I analyse this epistemological revolution in great detail in Santos,
1995 and 2000.
[3]
For example, in Brazil, I have become aware of extremely rich
experiences in the extension services of Northern and Northeastern universities
that are totally unknown or undervalued in the Central and Southern
universities. And I am certain that the reverse happens too.
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-06-29-santos-en.html

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Beyond abyssal thinking
From global lines to ecologies of knowledges
Modern Western thinking continues to operate along abyssal lines that divide
the human from the sub-human, argues Boaventura de Sousa Santos in a
fundamental article. The "Western" side of this line is ruled by a dichotomy of
regulation and emancipation, and the other by appropriation and violence. The
only way to capture the full measure of what is going on, writes Santos, is a
gigantic decentring effort. The struggle for global social justice must be a
struggle for global cognitive justice as well. In order to succeed, this struggle
requires a new kind of thinking, a post-abyssal thinking.
Modern Western thinking is an abyssal thinking.[1] It consists of a system of
visible and invisible distinctions, the invisible ones being the foundation of the
visible ones. The invisible distinctions are established through radical lines that
divide social reality into two realms, the realm of "this side of the line" and the
realm of "the other side of the line". The division is such that "the other side of
the line" vanishes as reality becomes nonexistent, and is indeed produced as
nonexistent. Nonexistent means not existing in any relevant or comprehensible
way of being.[2] Whatever is produced as nonexistent is radically excluded
because it lies beyond the realm of what the accepted conception of inclusion
considers to be its other. What most fundamentally characterizes abyssal
thinking is thus the impossibility of the co-presence of the two sides of the line.
To the extent that it prevails, this side of the line only prevails by exhausting the
field of relevant reality. Beyond it, there is only nonexistence, invisibility, nondialectical absence.
To give an example based on my own work, I have characterized Western
modernity as a socio-political paradigm founded on the tension between social
regulation and social emancipation.[3] This is the visible distinction that founds
all modern conflicts, both in terms of substantive issues and in terms of
procedures. But underneath this distinction there is another, invisible one, upon

which the visible one is founded. This invisible one is the distinction between
metropolitan societies and colonial territories. Indeed, the
regulation/emancipation dichotomy only applies to metropolitan societies. It
would be unthinkable to apply it to colonial territories. The
regulation/emancipation dichotomy has no conceivable place in such territories.
There, another dichotomy would apply, the dichotomy between
appropriation/violence, which, in turn, would be inconceivable if applied on this
side of the line. Because the colonial territories were unthinkable as sites for the
unfolding of the paradigm of regulation/emancipation, the fact that the latter did
not apply to them did not compromise the paradigm's universality.
Modern abyssal thinking excels in making distinctions and in radicalizing them.
However, no matter how radical such distinctions are and how dramatic the
consequences of being on either side of such distinctions may be, they have in
common the fact that they belong to this side of the line and combine to make
invisible the abyssal line upon which they are grounded. The intensely visible
distinctions structuring social reality on this side of the line are grounded on the
invisibility of the distinction between this side of the line and the other side.
Modern knowledge and modern law represent the most accomplished
manifestations of abyssal thinking. They account for the two major global lines
of modern times, which, though being different and operating differently, are
mutually dependent. Each one creates a sub-system of visible and invisible
distinctions in such a way that the invisible ones become the foundation of the
visible ones. In the field of knowledge, abyssal thinking consists in granting to
modern science the monopoly of the universal distinction between true and
false, to the detriment of two alternative bodies of knowledge: philosophy and
theology. The exclusionary character of this monopoly is at the core of the
modern epistemological disputes between scientific and nonscientific forms of
truth. Since the universal validity of a scientific truth is admittedly always very
relative, given the fact that it can only be ascertained in relation to certain kinds
of objects under certain circumstances and established by certain methods,
how does it relate to other possible truths which may even claim a higher status
but which cannot be established according to scientific methods, such as
reason as philosophical truth or faith as religious truth? [4] These tensions
between science, philosophy, and theology have thus become highly visible but,
as I contend, they all take place on this side of the line. Their visibility is
premised upon the invisibility of forms of knowledge that cannot be fitted into
any of these ways of knowing. I mean popular, lay, plebeian, peasant, or
indigenous knowledges on the other side of the line. They vanish as relevant or
commensurable knowledges because they are beyond truth and falsehood. It is
unimaginable to apply to them not only the scientific true/false distinction, but
also the scientifically unascertainable truths of philosophy and theology that
constitute all the acceptable knowledge on this side of the line. [5] On the other
side of the line, there is no real knowledge; there are beliefs, opinions, intuitive
or subjective understandings, which, at the most, may become objects or raw
materials for scientific enquiry. Thus, the visible line that separates science from
its modern others is grounded on the abyssal invisible line that separates
science, philosophy, and theology, on one side, from, on the other, knowledges
rendered incommensurable and incomprehensible for meeting neither the

demands of scientific methods of truth nor those of their acknowledged

contesters in the realm of philosophy and theology.
In the field of modern law, this side of the line is determined by what counts as
legal or illegal according to official state or international law. The legal and the
illegal are the only two relevant forms of existence before the law and, for that
reason, the distinction between the two is a universal distinction. This central
dichotomy leaves out a whole social territory where the dichotomy would be
unthinkable as an organizing principle, that is, the territory of the lawless, the alegal, the non-legal, and even the legal or illegal according to non-officially
recognized law.[6] Thus, the invisible abyssal line that separates the realm of
law from the realm of non-law grounds the visible dichotomy between the legal
and the illegal which organizes, on this side of the line, the realm of law.
In each of the two great domains science and law the divisions carried out
by the global lines are abyssal to the extent that they effectively eliminate
whatever realities are on the other side of the line. This radical denial of copresence grounds the affirmation of the radical difference that, on this side of
the line, separates true and false, legal and illegal. The other side of the line
comprises a vast set of discarded experiences, made invisible both as agencies
and as agents, and with no fixed territorial location. In fact, as I've suggested,
originally there was a territorial location and historically it coincided with a
specific social territory: the colonial zone.[7] Whatever could not be thought of
as either true or false, legal or illegal, was most distinctly occurring in the
colonial zone. In this respect, modern law seems to have some historical
precedence over science in the creation of abyssal thinking. Indeed, contrary to
conventional legal wisdom, it was the global legal line separating the Old World
from the New World that made possible the emergence of modern law and, in
particular, of modern international law in the Old World, on this side of the line.
[8]
The first modern global line was probably the Treaty of Tordesillas between
Portugal and Spain (1494),[9] but the truly abyssal lines emerge in the midsixteenth century with the amity lines.[10] The abyssal character of the lines
manifests itself in the elaborate cartographic work invested in their definition, in
the extreme precision demanded from cartographers, globe makers, and pilots,
and in the vigilant policing and harsh punishment of violations. In its modern
constitution, the colonial does not represent the legal or illegal, but rather the
lawless. The then-popular maxim "Beyond the equator there are no sins" is
echoed in the famous passage of Pascal's Penses written in the midseventeenth century: "Three degrees of latitude upset the whole jurisprudence
and one meridian determines what is true... It is a funny sort of justice whose
limits are marked by a river; true on this side of the Pyrenees, false on the
other" (1966: 46).
From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, the legal and the political debate
among the European states concerning the New World is focused on the global
legal line, that is, on the determination of the colonial, not on the internal
ordering of the colonial. On the contrary, the colonial is the state of nature
where civil society's institutions have no place. Hobbes explicitly refers to the
"savage people in many places of America" as the exemplars of the state of
nature (1985 [1651]: 187), and Locke thinks likewise when he writes in Of Civil

Government: "In the beginning all the world was America" (1946 [1690]: 49).
The colonial is thus the blind spot upon which the modern conceptions of
knowledge and law are built. The theories of the social contract of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are as important for what they say as for
what they silence. What they say is that modern individuals, that is, metropolitan
men, enter the social contract in order to abandon the state of nature and to
form civil society.[11] What they don't say is that a massive world region of the
state of nature is thereby being created, a state of nature to which millions of
human beings are condemned and left without any possibility of escaping via
the creation of a civil society.
Western modernity, rather than meaning the abandonment of the state of nature
and the passage to civil society, means the coexistence of both civil society and
the state of nature, separated by an abyssal line whereby the hegemonic eye,
located in civil society, ceases to see and indeed declares as nonexistent the
state of nature. The present being created on the other side of the line is made
invisible by its being reconceptualized as the irreversible past of this side of the
line. The hegemonic contact converts simultaneity into non-contemporaneity. It
makes up pasts to make room for a single homogenous future. Therefore, the
fact that the legal principles in force in civil society, on this side of the line, do
not apply on the other side of the line does not in any way compromise their
universality.
The same abyssal cartography is constitutive of modern knowledge. Again, the
colonial zone is, par excellence, the realm of incomprehensible beliefs and
behaviours which in no way can be considered knowledge, whether true or
false. The other side of the line harbours only incomprehensible magical or
idolatrous practices. The utter strangeness of such practices led to denying the
very human nature of the agents of such practices. On the basis of their refined
conceptions of humanity and human dignity, the humanists reached the
conclusion that the savages were sub-human. Do the Indians have a soul? was
the question. When Pope Paul III answered affirmatively in his bull Sublimis
Deus of 1537, he did so by conceiving of the indigenous people's soul as an
empty receptacle, an anima nullius, very much like the terra nullius.[12]
On the basis of these legal and epistemological abyssal conceptions, the
universality of the tension between regulation and emancipation, applying on
this side of the line, is not contradicted by the tension between appropriation
and violence applying on the other side of the line. Appropriation and violence
take different forms in the abyssal legal line and in the abyssal epistemological
line. But, in general, appropriation involves incorporation, co-optation, and
assimilation, whereas violence involves physical, material, cultural, and human
destruction. It goes without saying that appropriation and violence are deeply
intertwined. In the realm of knowledge, appropriation ranges from the use of
locals as guides[13] and the use of local myths and ceremonies as instruments
of conversion, to the pillage of indigenous knowledge of biodiversity, while
violence ranges from prohibition of the use of native languages in public spaces
and the forcible adoption of Christian names, to conversion and the destruction
of ceremonial sites and symbols, and to all forms of racial and cultural
discrimination. As regards law, the tension between appropriation and violence

is particularly complex because of its direct relation with the extraction of value:
slave trade and forced labour, instrumental use of customary law and authority
in indirect rule, pillage of natural resources, massive displacement of
populations, wars and unequal treatises, different forms of apartheid and forced
assimilation, etc. While the logic of regulation/emancipation is unthinkable
without the matricial distinction between the law of persons and the law of
things, the logic of appropriation/violence only recognizes the law of things, of
both human and non-human things. The almost ideal typical version of such law
is the law of the "Congo Free State" under King Leopold II of Belgium. [14]
There is, therefore, a dual modern cartography: a legal cartography and an
epistemological cartography. The other side of the abyssal line is the realm
beyond legality and illegality (of lawlessness), beyond truth and falsehood (of
incomprehensible beliefs, idolatry, magic). [15] These forms of radical negation
together result in a radical absence, the absence of humanity, modern subhumanity. The exclusion is thus both radical and nonexistent, as sub-humans
are not conceivably candidates for social inclusion. [16] Modern humanity is not
conceivable without modern sub-humanity.[17] The negation of one part of
humanity is sacrificial, in that it is the condition of the affirmation of that other
part of humanity which considers itself as universal. [18]
My argument in this paper is that this is as true today as in the colonial period.
Modern Western thinking continues to operate along abyssal lines that divide
the human from the sub-human in such a way that human principles are not
compromised by inhuman practices. The colonies provided a model of radical
exclusion that prevails in modern Western thinking and practice today as it did
during the colonial cycle. Today as then, both the creation and the negation of
the other side of the line is constitutive of hegemonic principles and practices.
Today as then, the impossibility of co-presence between the two sides of the
line runs supreme. Today as then, the legal and political civility on this side of
the line is premised upon the existence of utter incivility on the other side of the
line. Guantnamo is today one of the most grotesque manifestations of abyssal
legal thinking, the creation of the other side of the line as a non-area in legal
and political terms, an unthinkable ground for the rule of law, human rights, and
democracy.[19] But it would be an error to consider it exceptional. There are
many other Guantnamos, from Iraq to Palestine and Darfur. More than that,
there are millions of Guantnamos in sexual and racial discrimination both in
the public and the private sphere, in the savage zones of the mega-cities, in
ghettos, in sweatshops, in prisons, in the new forms of slavery, in the black
market of human organs, in child labour and prostitution.
I argue, first, that the tension between regulation and emancipation continues to
coexist with the tension between appropriation and violence in such a way that
the universality of the first tension is not contradicted by the existence of the
second one; second, that abyssal lines continue to structure modern knowledge
and modern law; and, third, that these two abyssal lines are constitutive of
Western-based political and cultural relations and interactions in the modern
world system. In sum, I argue that the metaphorical cartography of the global
lines has outlived the literal cartography of the amity lines that separated the
Old from the New World. Global social injustice is, therefore, intimately linked to

global cognitive injustice. The struggle for global social justice must, therefore,
be a struggle for global cognitive justice as well. In order to succeed, this
struggle requires a new kind of thinking, a post-abyssal thinking.
The abyssal divide between regulation/emancipation and
appropriation/violence
The permanence of abyssal global lines throughout the modern period does not
mean that they have remained fixed. Historically, the global lines dividing the
two sides have been shifting. But at any given historical moment, they are fixed
and their position is heavily surveyed and guarded, very much like the amity
lines. In the last sixty years, the global lines suffered two tectonic shake-ups.
The first one took place with the anti-colonial struggles and the processes of
independence.[20] The other side of the line rose against radical exclusion as
the peoples that had been subjected to the appropriation/violence paradigm got
organized and claimed the right to be included in the regulation/emancipation
paradigm (Fanon, 1963, 1967; Nkrumah, 1965; Cabral, 1979; Gandhi, 1951,
1956). For a time, the appropriation/violence paradigm seemed to have come to
an end, and so did the abyssal division between this side of the line and the
other side of the line. Each one of the two global lines (the epistemological and
the juridical) seemed to be moving according to its own logic, but both of them
in the same direction: their movements seemed to converge in the shrinking
and ultimately the elimination of the other side of the line. However, this is not
what happened, as shown by dependency theory, modern world system theory,
and postcolonial studies.[21]
In this paper, I focus on the second tectonic shake-up of the abyssal global
lines. It has been under way since the 1970s and 1980s and it goes in the
opposite direction. This time, the global lines are moving again, but in such a
way that the other side of the line seems to be expanding, while this side of the
line is shrinking. The logic of appropriation/violence has been gaining strength
to the detriment of the logic of regulation/emancipation. This has occurred to
such an extent that the domain of regulation/emancipation is not only shrinking
but becoming internally contaminated by the logic of appropriation/violence.
The complexity of this movement is difficult to unravel as it unfolds before our
eyes, and our eyes cannot help being on this side of the line and seeing from
the inside out. To capture the full measure of what is going on requires a
gigantic decentring effort. No single scholar can do it alone, as an individual.
Drawing on a collective effort to develop an epistemology of the South, [22] I
surmise that this movement is made of a main movement and a subaltern
counter-movement. The main movement I call the return of the colonial and the
return of the colonizer, and the counter-movement I call subaltern
cosmopolitanism.
First, the return of the colonial and the return of the colonizer. The colonial is
here a metaphor for those who perceive their life experiences as taking place
on the other side of the line and rebel against it. The return of the colonial is the
abyssal response to what is perceived as the threatening intrusion of the
colonial in metropolitan societies. Such a return takes three main forms: the
terrorist,[23] the undocumented migrant worker,[24] and the refugee.[25] In

different ways, each carries along with her the abyssal global line that defines
radical exclusion and legal non-existence. For instance, in many of their
provisions, the new wave of anti-terrorism and immigration laws follows the
regulatory logic of the appropriation/violence paradigm. [26] The return of the
colonial does not necessarily require that she be physically present in
metropolitan societies. It suffices that she have a relevant connection with them.
In the case of the terrorist, such connection may be established by the secret
services. In the case of the undocumented migrant worker, it will suffice that she
be hired by one of hundreds of thousands of sweatshops operating in the
Global South[27] sub-contracted by metropolitan multinational corporations. In
the case of refugees, the relevant connection is established by their request to
obtain refugee status in a given metropolitan society.
The colonial that returns is indeed a new abyssal colonial. This time, the
colonial returns not just in the former colonial territories but also in metropolitan
societies. She is now intruding or trespassing on the metropolitan spaces that
were demarcated from the beginning of Western modernity as this side of the
line and, moreover, she shows a level of mobility immensely superior to the
mobility of runaway slaves.[28] Under these circumstances, the abyssal
metropolitan sees herself trapped in a shrinking space and reacts by redrawing
the abyssal line. From her perspective, the new colonial resistance cannot but
be met with the ordering logic of appropriation/violence. The time of a neat
divide between the Old and the New World, between the metropolitan and the
colonial, is over. The line must be drawn at as close a range as is necessary to
guarantee security. What used to be unequivocally this side of the line is now a
messy territory cut through by a meandering abyssal line. The Israeli
segregation wall in Palestine[29] and the category of the "unlawful enemy
combatant"[30] are probably the most adequate metaphors of the new abyssal
line and the messy cartography it leads to.
A messy cartography cannot but lead to messy practices.
Regulation/emancipation is becoming increasingly disfigured by the growing
pressure and presence in its midst of appropriation/violence. However, neither
the pressure nor the disfiguring can be fully acknowledged, precisely because
the other side of the line was from the beginning incomprehensible as a subhuman territory.[31] In many different ways, the terrorist and the undocumented
migrant worker illustrate both the pressure of the appropriation/violence logic
and the inability of abyssal thinking to acknowledge such pressure as
something foreign to regulation/emancipation. It is increasingly evident that the
anti-terrorist legislation, now being promulgated in many different countries
following the UN Security Council Resolution [32] and under strong pressure
from US diplomacy, hollows out the civil and political content of basic
constitutional rights and guarantees. As all this occurs without a formal
suspension of such rights and guarantees, we are witnessing the emergence of
a new state form, the state of exception, which, contrary to the old forms of
state of siege or state of emergency, restricts democratic rights under the guise
of safeguarding or even expanding them.[33]
More broadly, it appears that Western modernity can only spread globally to the
extent that it violates all the principles upon which it has historically grounded

the legitimacy of the regulation/emancipation paradigm on this side of the line.

Human rights are thus violated in order to be defended, democracy is destroyed
to safeguard democracy, life is eliminated to preserve life. Abyssal lines are
being drawn both in a literal and a metaphorical sense. In the literal sense,
these are the lines that define borders as fences [34] and killing fields, divide the
cities between civilized zones (more and more, gated communities) [35] and
savage zones, and prisons between legal confinement sites and sites of brutal
and lawless destruction of life.[36]
The other leg of the current main movement is the return of the colonizer. It
involves resuscitating the forms of colonial ordering in both metropolitan
societies, this time governing the life of common citizens, and in the societies
once subjected to European colonialism. This is most notably the case of what I
call the new indirect rule.[37] It is emerging as the state withdraws from social
regulation and as public services are privatized. Powerful non-state actors
thereby gain control over the lives and well-being of vast populations, be it the
control of healthcare, land, potable water, seeds, forests, or the quality of the
environment. The political obligation binding the legal subject to the Rechtstaat,
the modern constitutional state, that has prevailed on this side of the line, is
being replaced by privatized, depoliticized contractual obligations under which
the weaker party is more or less at the mercy of the stronger one. This latter
form of ordering bears some disturbing resemblances to the ordering of
appropriation/violence that prevailed on the other side of the line. I have
described this situation as the rise of social fascism, a social regime of
extremely unequal power relations which grant to the stronger party a veto
power over the life and livelihood of the weaker party.
Elsewhere I identify five forms of social fascism.[38] Here I refer to three of
them, the ones that more clearly reflect the pressure of the
appropriation/violence logic upon the regulation/emancipation logic. The first
one is the fascism of social apartheid. I mean the social segregation of the
excluded through an urban cartography which distinguishes between "savage"
and "civilized" zones. The urban savage zones are the zones of Hobbes' state
of nature, the zones of internal civil war as in many mega-cities throughout the
Global South. The civilized zones are the zones of the social contract that see
themselves more and more threatened by the savage zones. In order to defend
themselves, they turn themselves into neo-feudal castles, the fortified enclaves
that are characteristic of the new forms of urban segregation (private cities,
enclosed condos, gated communities, as I mentioned above). The division into
savage and civilized zones is becoming a general criterion of sociability, a new
hegemonic time-space that crosses all social, economic, political, and cultural
relations, and is, therefore, common to state and non-state action.
The second form is contractual fascism. It occurs in the situations in which the
power inequalities between the parties in the civil contract are such that the
weaker party, rendered vulnerable for having no alternative, accepts the
conditions imposed by the stronger party, however costly and despotic they may
be. The neoliberal project of turning the labour contract into a civil law contract
like any other foreshadows a situation of contractual fascism. As mentioned
above, this form of fascism occurs frequently today in situations of privatization

of public services, such as healthcare, welfare, utilities, etc. [39] In such cases,
the social contract that presided over the production of public services in the
welfare state and the developmentalist state is reduced to the individual
contract between consumers and providers of privatized services. In light of the
often glaring deficiencies of public regulation, this reduction entails the
elimination from the contractual ambit of decisive aspects of the protection of
consumers, which, for this reason, become extra-contractual. By claiming extracontractual prerogatives, the privatized services agencies take over the
functions of social regulation earlier exercised by the state. The state, whether
implicitly or explicitly, subcontracts these agencies for carrying out these
functions and, by so doing without the effective participation or control of the
citizens, becomes complicit with the production of contractual fascism.
The third form of social fascism is territorial fascism. It occurs whenever social
actors with strong patrimonial or military capital dispute the control of the state
over the territories in which they act, or neutralize that control by co-opting or
coercing the state institutions and exercising social regulation upon the
inhabitants of the territory, without their participation and against their interests.
In most cases, these are the new colonial territories inside states that almost
always were once subjected to European colonialism. Under different forms, the
original land grabbing as a prerogative of conquest and the subsequent
"privatization" of the colonies are at work in the reproduction of territorial
fascism and, more generally, in the relationships between terratenientes and
landless peasants. Civilian populations living in armed conflict zones are also
submitted to territorial fascism.[40]
Social fascism is a new form of the state of nature and it proliferates in the
shadow of the social contract in two ways: post-contractualism and precontractualism. Post-contractualism is the process by means of which social
groups and social interests which up until now were included in the social
contract are excluded from the latter without any prospect of returning: workers
and popular classes are being expelled from the social contract through the
elimination of social and economic rights, thereby becoming discardable
populations. Pre-contractualism consists in blocking access to citizenship to
social groups that before considered themselves candidates for citizenship and
had the reasonable expectation of acceding to it: for instance, the urban youth
living in the ghettos of mega-cities in the Global North and in the Global South.
[41]

As a social regime, social fascism may coexist with liberal political democracy.
Rather than sacrificing democracy to the demands of global capitalism, it
trivializes democracy to such a degree that it is no longer necessary, or even
convenient, to sacrifice democracy to promote capitalism. It is, therefore, a
pluralistic fascism, that is to say, a form of fascism that never existed. Indeed, it
is my contention that we may be entering a period in which societies are
politically democratic and socially fascistic.
The new forms of indirect rule also comprise the second great transformation of
property and property law in the modern era. Property, and specifically the
property of the New World territories, was, as I mentioned in the beginning, the

key issue underlying the establishment of modern, abyssal, global lines. The
first transformation took place when the property over things was expanded,
with capitalism, into a property over the means of production. As Karl Renner
(1965) describes so well, the owner of the machines became the owner of the
workers operating the machines. The control over things became a control over
people. Of course, Renner overlooked the fact that in the colonies this
transformation did not occur, since the control over people was the original form
of the control over things, the latter including both human and non-human
things. The second great transformation of property takes place, way beyond
production, when the property of services becomes a form of control of people
that need them to survive. The new indirect rule gives rise to a form of
decentralized despotism, to use Mamdani's characterization of African colonial
rule (Mamdani, 1996: ch. 2). Decentralized despotism does not clash with
liberal democracy, it rather makes it increasingly irrelevant for the quality of life
of increasingly larger populations.
Under conditions of the new indirect rule, rather than regulating social conflict
among citizens, modern abyssal thinking is called upon to suppress social
conflict and ratify lawlessness on this side of the line, as had always happened
on the other side. Under the pressure of the logic of appropriation/violence, the
very concept of modern law the universally valid norm emanating from the
state and coercively imposed by it if necessary is thereby changing. As an
illustration of the conceptual changes under way, a new type of law is emerging
which is euphemistically called soft law.[42] Presented as the most benevolent
manifestation of a regulation/emancipation ordering, it carries with it the logic of
appropriation/violence whenever very unequal power relations are involved. It
consists of law with which compliance is voluntary. Not surprisingly, it is being
used, among other social domains, in the field of capital/labour relations, and its
most accomplished version is the codes of conduct whose adoption is being
recommended to the metropolitan multinationals entering outsourcing contracts
with "their" sweatshops around the world. [43] The plasticity of soft law bears
intriguing resemblances to colonial law, whose application depended on the
whims of the colonizer more than on anything else. [44] The social relations they
regulate are, if not a new state of nature, a twilight zone between the state of
nature and civil society, where social fascism proliferates and flourishes.
In sum, modern abyssal thinking, which, on this side of the line, has been called
upon to order the relationships among citizens and between them and the state,
is now, in the social domains bearing greater pressure from the logic of
appropriation/violence, called upon to deal with citizens as non-citizens, and
with non-citizens as dangerous colonial savages. As social fascism coexists
with liberal democracy, the state of exception coexists with constitutional
normalcy, civil society coexists with the state of nature, indirect rule coexists
with the rule of law. Far from being a perversion of some original normal rule,
this is the original design of modern epistemology and legality, even if the
abyssal line that from the very beginning has distinguished the metropolitan
from the colonial has been displaced, turning the colonial into an internal
dimension of the metropolitan.
Subaltern cosmopolitanism

In light of what I have just said, it seems that, if not actively resisted against,
abyssal thinking will go on reproducing itself, no matter how exclusionary and
destructive the practices it gives rise to are. Political resistance thus needs to be
premised upon epistemological resistance. As I said in the beginning, there is
no global social justice without global cognitive justice. This means that the
critical task ahead cannot be limited to generating alternatives. Indeed, it
requires an alternative thinking of alternatives. A new post-abyssal thinking is
thus called for. Is it possible? Are there any conditions that, if adequately
valued, might give it a chance? This enquiry explains why I pay special attention
to the counter-movement I mentioned above as resulting from the shake-up of
the abyssal global lines since the 1970s and 1980s: what I called subaltern
cosmopolitanism.[45]
It bears a real promise in spite of its rather embryonic character at the present
time. Indeed, to capture it, it is necessary to embark on what I call a sociology of
emergences (Santos, 2004). The latter consists in the symbolic amplification of
signs, clues, and latent tendencies that, however inchoate and fragmented,
point to new constellations of meaning as regards both the understanding and
the transformation of the world. Subaltern cosmopolitanism manifests itself in
the initiatives and movements that constitute counter-hegemonic globalization.
It consists of the vast set of networks, initiatives, organizations, and movements
that fight against the economic, social, political, and cultural exclusion
generated by the most recent incarnation of global capitalism, known as
neoliberal globalization (Santos, 2006b, 2006c). Since social exclusion is
always the product of unequal power relations, theses initiatives, movements,
and struggles are animated by a redistributive ethos in its broadest sense,
involving redistribution of material, social, political, cultural, and symbolic
resources and thus based both on the principle of equality and on the principle
of recognition of difference. Since the beginning of the new century, the World
Social Forum has been the most accomplished expression of counterhegemonic globalization and subaltern cosmopolitanism. [46] And among the
movements that have been participating in the World Social Forum, the
indigenous movements are, in my view, those whose conceptions and practices
represent the most convincing emergence of post-abyssal thinking. This fact is
most auspicious for the possibility of post-abyssal thinking, as the indigenous
people were the paradigmatic inhabitants of the other side of the line, that idealtypical playground for appropriation and violence.
The novelty of subaltern cosmopolitanism lies, above all, in its deep sense of
incompleteness without, however, aiming at completeness. On the one hand, it
defends the fact that the understanding of the world by far exceeds the Western
understanding of the world and that therefore our knowledge of globalization is
much less global than globalization itself. On the other hand, it defends the fact
that the more non-Western understandings of the world are identified as it
becomes more evident that there are still many others to be identified and that
hybrid understandings, mixing Western and non-Western components, are
virtually infinite. Post-abyssal thinking stems thus from the idea that the diversity
of the world is inexhaustible and that such diversity still lacks an adequate
epistemology. In other words, the epistemological diversity of the world does not
yet have a form.

In the following, I will present a general outline of post-abyssal thinking. I

concentrate on its epistemological dimensions, leaving aside its legal
dimensions.[47]
Post-abyssal thinking as ecological thinking
Post-abyssal thinking starts from the recognition that social exclusion in its
broadest sense takes very different forms according to whether it is determined
by an abyssal or by a non-abyssal line, and that as long as abyssally defined
exclusion persists, no really progressive post-capitalist alternative is possible.
During a probably long transitional period, confronting abyssal exclusion will be
a precondition to addressing in an effective way the many forms of non-abyssal
exclusion that have divided the modern world on this side of the line. A postabyssal conception of Marxism (in itself, a good exemplar of abyssal thinking)
will claim that the emancipation of workers must be fought for in conjunction
with the emancipation of all the discardable populations of the Global South,
which are oppressed but not directly exploited by global capitalism. It will also
claim that the rights of citizens are not secured as long as non-citizens go on
being treated as sub-humans.[48]
The recognition of the persistence of abyssal thinking is thus the conditio sine
qua non to start thinking and acting beyond it. Without such recognition, critical
thinking will remain a derivative thinking that will go on reproducing the abyssal
lines, no matter how anti-abyssal it will proclaim itself. Post-abyssal thinking, on
the contrary, is a non-derivative thinking; it involves a radical break with modern
Western ways of thinking and acting. In our time, to think in non-derivative
terms means to think from the perspective of the other side of the line, precisely
because the other side of the line has been the realm of the unthinkable in
Western modernity. The rise of the appropriation/violence ordering inside the
regulation/emancipation ordering can only be tackled if we situate our
epistemological perspective on the social experience of the other side of the
line, that is, the non-imperial Global South, conceived of as the metaphor of the
systemic and unjust human suffering caused by global capitalism and
colonialism (Santos, 1995: 506-519). Post-abyssal thinking can thus be
summarized as learning from the South through an epistemology of the South.
It confronts the monoculture of modern science with the ecology of knowledges.
It is an ecology because it is based on the recognition of the plurality of
heterogeneous knowledges (one of them being modern science) and on the
sustained and dynamic interconnections between them without compromising
their autonomy. The ecology of knowledges is founded on the idea that
knowledge is inter-knowledge.
1. POST-ABYSSAL THINKING AND CO-PRESENCE
The first condition for post-abyssal thinking is radical co-presence. Radical copresence means that practices and agents on both sides of the line are
contemporary in equal terms. Radical co-presence implies equating simultaneity
with contemporaneity, which can only be accomplished if the linear conception
of time is abandoned.[49] Only in this way will it be possible to go beyond Hegel
(1970), for whom to be a member of historical humankind that is, to be on this
side of the line meant to be a Greek and not a barbarian in the fifth century

BC, a Roman citizen and not a Greek in the first centuries of our era, a Christian
and not a Jew in the Middle Ages, a European and not a savage of the New
World in the sixteenth century, and, in the nineteenth century, a European
(including the displaced European of North America) and not an Asian, frozen in
history, or an African, not even part of history. Moreover, radical co-presence
also presupposes the abolition of war, which, next to intolerance, is the most
radical negation of co-presence.
2. ECOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGES AND THE INEXHAUSTIBLE DIVERSITY
OF WORLD EXPERIENCE
As an ecology of knowledges, post-abyssal thinking is premised upon the idea
of the epistemological diversity of the world, the recognition of the existence of a
plurality of knowledges beyond scientific knowledge. [50] This implies renouncing
any general epistemology. Throughout the world, not only are there very diverse
forms of knowledge of matter, society, life and spirit, but also many and very
diverse concepts of what counts as knowledge and the criteria that may be
used to validate it. In the transitional period we are entering, in which abyssal
versions of totality and unity of knowledge still resist, we probably need a
residual general epistemological requirement to move along: a general
epistemology of the impossibility of a general epistemology.
3. KNOWLEDGES AND IGNORANCES
The cultural context within which the ecology of knowledges is emerging is
ambiguous. On the one hand, the idea of the socio-cultural diversity of the world
has been gaining acceptance in the last three decades, which should favour the
recognition of epistemological diversity and plurality as one of its dimensions.
On the other hand, if all epistemologies share the cultural premises of their
times, perhaps still one of the best established premises of abyssal thinking
today is the belief in science as the only valid and exact form of knowledge.
Ortega y Gasset (1942) proposes a radical distinction between beliefs and
ideas, taking the latter to mean science or philosophy. The distinction lies in the
fact that beliefs are an integral part of our identity and subjectivity, whereas
ideas are exterior to us. Whilst our ideas originate from uncertainties and
remain associated with them, beliefs originate in the absence of doubt.
Essentially, it is a distinction between being and having: we are what we
believe, but we have ideas. A characteristic feature of our time is the fact that
modern science belongs both to the realm of ideas and the realm of beliefs.
Belief in science greatly exceeds anything scientific ideas enable us to realize.
Therefore, the relative loss of epistemological confidence in science that
pervaded the entire second half of the twentieth century was paralleled by a
rising popular belief in science. The relationship between beliefs and ideas as
related to science is no longer a relationship between two distinct entities but
rather a relationship between two ways of socially experiencing science. This
duality means that recognition of cultural diversity in the world does not
necessarily signify recognition of the epistemological diversity in the world.
In this context, the ecology of knowledges is basically a counter-epistemology.
The basic impetus behind its emergence is the result of two factors. The first of
these is the new political emergence of peoples and worldviews on the other
side of the line as partners of the global resistance to capitalism: i.e. counter-

hegemonic globalization. In geopolitical terms, these are societies on the

periphery of the modern world system where the belief in modern science is
more tenuous, where the links between modern science and the designs of
colonial and imperial domination are more visible, and where other nonscientific and non-Western forms of knowledge prevail in everyday practices.
The second factor is the unprecedented proliferation of alternatives, which,
however, cannot be brought together under the umbrella of a single global
alternative. Counter-hegemonic globalization excels in the absence of such an
alternative. The ecology of knowledges aims to provide epistemological
consistency for pluralistic, propositional thinking.
In the ecology of knowledges, both knowledges and ignorances intersect. As
there is no unity of knowledge, there is no unity of ignorance either. Forms of
ignorance are as heterogeneous and interdependent as forms of knowledge.
Given this interdependence, gaining certain forms of knowledge may involve
forgetting others and, in the end, becoming ignorant of them. In other words, in
the ecology of knowledges, ignorance is not necessarily the original state or
starting point. It may be a point of arrival. It may be the result of the forgetting or
unlearning implicit in the reciprocal learning process. Thus, in a learning
process governed by the ecology of knowledges, it is crucial to compare the
knowledge that is being learned with the knowledge that is thereby being
forgotten or unlearned. Ignorance is only a disqualifying condition when what is
being learned is more valuable than what is being forgotten. The utopia of interknowledge is learning other knowledges without forgetting one's own. This is
the idea of prudence that underlies the ecology of knowledges.
This invites a deeper reflection on the difference between science as a
monopolistic knowledge and science as part of an ecology of knowledges.
Modern science as part of an ecology of knowledges
As a product of abyssal thinking, scientific knowledge is not socially distributed
in an equitable manner, nor could it be, as it was originally designed to convert
this side of the line into the subject of knowledge and the other side into an
object of knowledge. The real-world interventions it favours tend to be those
which cater to the social groups that have greater access to scientific
knowledge. As long as abyssal lines go on being drawn, the struggle for
cognitive justice will not be successful if it is based solely on the idea of a more
equal distribution of scientific knowledge. Apart from the fact that an equitable
distribution is impossible under conditions of capitalism and colonialism,
scientific knowledge has intrinsic limits in relation to the types of real-world
intervention it makes possible.
As a post-abyssal epistemology, the ecology of knowledges, while forging
credibility for non-scientific knowledge, does not imply discrediting scientific
knowledge. It simply implies its counter-hegemonic use. Such use consists, on
the one hand, in exploring the internal plurality of science, that is, alternative
scientific practices that have been made visible by feminist [51] and postcolonial
epistemologies[52] and, on the other hand, in promoting the interaction and
interdependence between scientific and non-scientific knowledges.

One of the basic premises of the ecology of knowledges is that all knowledges
have internal and external limits. The internal limits are related to the restrictions
on the real-world interventions imposed by each form of knowledge, while the
external limits result from the recognition of alternative interventions made
possible by other forms of knowledge. By definition, hegemonic forms of
knowledge only recognize internal limits; therefore, the exploration of both
internal and external limits of modern science can only be achieved as part of a
counter-hegemonic conception of science. This is why the counter-hegemonic
use of science cannot be restricted to science alone. It only makes sense within
an ecology of knowledges.
For an ecology of knowledges, knowledge-as-intervention-in-reality is the
measure of realism, not knowledge-as-a-representation-of-reality. The credibility
of cognitive construction is measured by the type of intervention in the world
that it affords or prevents. Since any assessment of this intervention always
combines the cognitive with the ethical-political, the ecology of knowledges
makes a distinction between analytical objectivity and ethical-political neutrality.
Nowadays, no one questions the overall value of the real-world interventions
made possible by the technological productivity of modern science. But this
should not prevent us from recognizing the value of other real-world
interventions made possible by other forms of knowledge. In many areas of
social life, modern science has demonstrated an unquestionable superiority in
relation to other forms of knowledge. There are, however, other interventions in
the real world that are valuable to us today in which modern science has played
no part. There is, for example, the preservation of biodiversity made possible by
rural and indigenous forms of knowledge, which, paradoxically, are under threat
from the increasing science-ridden interventions (Santos, Nunes, and Meneses,
2007). And should we not be amazed by the wealth of knowledges that have
been preserved, the ways of life, symbolic universes, and wisdoms for survival
in hostile conditions that are based entirely on oral tradition? Doesn't the fact
that none of this would have been possible through science tell us something
about science?
Herein lies the impulse for egalitarian and simultaneous co-presence and for
incompleteness. Since no single type of knowledge can account for all possible
interventions in the world, all of them are incomplete in different ways.
Incompleteness cannot be eradicated because any complete description of
varieties of knowledge would necessarily not include the type of knowledge
responsible for the description. There is no knowledge that is not known by
someone for some purpose. All forms of knowledge uphold practices and
constitute subjects. All knowledges are testimonies since what they know of
reality (their active dimension) is always reflected back in what they reveal
about the subject of this knowledge (their subjective dimension). In questioning
the subject/object distinction, the sciences of complexity take this phenomenon
into account, but only in relation to scientific practices. The ecology of
knowledges expands the testimonial character of knowledges to embrace also
the relations between scientific and non-scientific knowledge, thereby
expanding the range of inter-subjectivity, as inter-knowledge is the correlate of
inter-subjectivity and vice-versa.

In a regime of ecology of knowledges, the quest for inter-subjectivity is as

important as it is complex. Since different knowledge practices take place on
different spatial scales and according to different durations and rhythms, intersubjectivity entails also the disposition to know and act in different scales (interscalarity) and articulate different durations (inter-temporality). Most subaltern
experiences of resistance are local or have been made local and therefore
irrelevant or nonexistent by abyssal modern knowledge, the sole generator of
global experiences. However, since the resistance against abyssal lines must
take place on a global scale, it is imperative to develop some kind of articulation
among subaltern experiences through local-global linkages. In order to
succeed, the ecology of knowledges must be transcalar (Santos, 2001a).
Moreover, the coexistence of different temporalities or durations in different
knowledge practices demands an expansion of the temporal frame. While
modern technologies have tended to favour the time frame and duration of state
action, both as public administration and as political entity (the electoral cycle,
for instance), the subaltern experiences of the Global South have been forced
to respond both to the shortest duration of immediate needs of survival and to
the long duration of capitalism and colonialism. But even in subaltern struggles,
very different durations may be present. As an example, the same struggle for
land in Latin America by impoverished peasants may include either the duration
of the modern state, when, for example, in Brazil, the Movement of the Landless
(MST) struggles for the agrarian reform; or the duration of the slave trade, when
the Afro-descendant peoples struggle to recover the Quilombos, the land of the
runaway slaves, their ancestors; or still a longer duration, the duration of
colonialism, when the indigenous people struggle to recover their historical
territories taken away from them by the conquistadores.
Ecology of knowledges, hierarchy, and pragmatics
The ecology of knowledges does not conceive of knowledges in abstraction; it
conceives of them as knowledge practices and the interventions they enable or
impede in the real world. An epistemological pragmatics is above all justified
because the life experiences of the oppressed are primarily made intelligible to
them through an epistemology of consequences. In their life world,
consequences are first, causes are second.
The ecology of knowledges is based on the pragmatic idea that it is necessary
to reassess the concrete interventions in society and in nature which the
different knowledges can offer. It focuses on relationships between knowledges
and on the hierarchies that are generated between them, since no concrete
practice would be possible without such hierarchies. However, rather than
subscribing to a single, universal, and abstract hierarchy among knowledges,
the ecology of knowledges favours context-dependent hierarchies, in light of the
concrete outcomes intended or achieved by different knowledge practices.
Concrete hierarchies emerge from the relative value of alternative real-world
interventions. Complementarity or contradictions may exist between the
different types of intervention.[53] Whenever there are real-world interventions
that may, in theory, be implemented by different knowledge systems, the
concrete choice of the form of knowledge must be informed by the principle of
precaution which, in the context of the ecology of knowledges, must be

formulated as follows: preference must be given to the form of knowledge that

guarantees the greatest level of participation to the social groups involved in its
design, execution, and control and in the benefits of the intervention.
An example will illustrate the dangers in replacing one type of knowledge with
another based on abstract hierarchies. In the 1960s, thousand-year-old
irrigation systems in the rice fields of Bali were replaced by scientific irrigation
systems promoted by the partisans of the Green Revolution. These traditional
irrigation systems were based on ancestral, religious knowledge and were
managed by the priests of a Hindu-Buddhist temple dedicated to Dewi-Danu,
the goddess of the lake. They were replaced precisely because they were
considered to be based on magic or superstition, the "rice cult", as they were
derogatorily called. It so happened that their replacement had disastrous results
in rice yields, with crops declining more than 50 per cent. The results were so
disastrous indeed that the scientific systems of irrigation had to be abandoned
and the traditional system restored (Lansing, 1987; Lansing, 1991; Lansing and
Kremer, 1993).
This case also illustrates the importance of the precaution principle in dealing
with the issue of possible complementarity or contradiction among different
types of knowledges. In the case of the Bali irrigation systems, the presumed
incompatibility between the two knowledge systems (the religious and the
scientific), both concerned with the same intervention (irrigating the rice fields),
resulted from an incorrect assessment (bad science) based on the abstract
superiority of scientific knowledge. Thirty years after the disastrous technoscientific intervention, computer modelling an area of the new sciences
showed that the water management sequences used by the priests of the DewiDanu goddess were more efficient than any other conceivable system, scientific
or otherwise (Lansing and Kremer, 1993).
Ecology of knowledges, incommensurability, and translation
From the perspective of Northern abyssal epistemologies, policing the
boundaries of relevant knowledge is by far more decisive than arguing over
internal differences. As a consequence, a massive epistemicide has been under
way for the past five centuries, whereby an immense wealth of cognitive
experiences has been wasted. To recuperate some of these experiences, the
ecology of knowledges resorts to intercultural translation, its most characteristic
post-abyssal feature. Embedded in different Western and non-Western cultures,
such experiences use not only different languages but also different categories,
symbolic universes, and aspirations for a better life.
The profound differences among knowledges bring up the issue of
incommensurability, an issue used by abyssal epistemology to discredit the very
possibility of the ecology of knowledges. An illustration will help. Is it possible to
establish a dialogue between Western and African philosophy? Thus posed, the
answer cannot but be a positive one; they have in common the fact that they
are both philosophies.[54] Yet for many Western and African philosophers, it is
not possible to refer to an African philosophy because there is only one
philosophy, whose universality is not tarnished by the fact that until now it has
been mainly developed in the West. In Africa, this is the position taken by the

modernist philosophers, as they are called. For other African philosophers, the
traditionalist philosophers, there is an African philosophy which, since it is
embedded in African culture, is incompatible with Western philosophy, and
should therefore follow its own autonomous line of development. [55]
Between these two positions there are those who defend that there are not one
but many philosophies and believe that mutual dialogue and enrichment is
possible. They are the ones who often have to confront the problems of
incommensurability, incompatibility, or reciprocal unintelligibility. They think,
however, that incommensurability does not necessarily impede communication
and may even lead to unsuspected forms of complementarity. It all depends on
the use of adequate procedures of intercultural translation. Through translation,
it becomes possible to identify common concerns, complementary approaches,
and, of course, also intractable contradictions.[56]
An example will illustrate what is at stake. The Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi
Wiredu claims that in the culture and language of the Akan, the ethnic group to
which he belongs, it is not possible to translate the Cartesian precept cogito
ergo sum (1990, 1996). This is because there are no words to express this idea.
"Thinking", in Akan, means "measuring something", which does not make sense
coupled with the idea of being. Moreover, the "being" of sum is also very difficult
to explain because the closest equivalent is something like "I am there".
According to Wiredu, the locative "there" "would be suicidal from the point of
view of both the epistemology and the metaphysics of the cogito". In other
words, language enables certain ideas to be explained and not others. This
does not mean, however, that the relationship between African and Western
philosophy has to end there. As Wiredu has tried to show, it is possible to
develop autonomous arguments on the basis of African philosophy, not only
concerning the reason why it cannot express cogito ergo sum, but also
concerning the many alternative ideas it can express which Western philosophy
cannot.[57]
Ecology of knowledges, mythos, and clinamen
The ecology of knowledges does not only occur on the level of the logos, but
also on the level of mythos. The idea of emergence or Bloch's "Not Yet" is
essential here (Bloch, 1995: 241).[58] The intensification of commitment results
from an enabling reading of objective tendencies, to boost an auspicious but
fragile potential, from a deeper understanding of human possibilities based on
knowledges that, unlike scientific knowledge, favour interior rather than exterior
force, or the natura naturans rather than the natura naturata.[59] Through these
knowledges, it is possible to nurture an enhanced value or concept of
commitment that is incomprehensible to the positivistic and functionalist
mechanisms of modern science. From such nurturing will develop a new
capacity for wonder and indignation, capable of grounding a new, nonconformist, destabilizing, and indeed rebellious theory and practice.
What is at stake is the creation of an active forecast based on the richness of
the non-canonic diversity of the world and of a degree of spontaneity based on
the refusal to deduce the potential from the actual. In this way, constituted
powers cease to be a destiny and can be realistically confronted with

constituting powers. The issue is, then, to defamiliarize the canonic tradition of
monocultures of knowledge, politics, and law, without stopping there, as if such
defamiliarization were the only possible familiarity. The ecology of knowledges
is a destabilizing epistemology to the extent that it engages in a radical critique
of the politics of the possible without yielding to an impossible politics. Central to
the ecology of knowledges is not the distinction between structure and agency,
as is the case with the social sciences, but rather the distinction between
conformist action and what I propose to call action-with-clinamen.[60]
Conformist action is the routinized, reproductive, repetitive practice which
reduces realism to what exists and just because it exists. For my notion of
action-with-clinamen, I borrow from Epicurus and Lucretius the concept of
clinamen, understood as the inexplicable "quiddam" that upsets the relations of
cause and effect, that is to say, the swerving capacity attributed by Epicurus to
Democritus's atoms. The clinamen is what makes the atoms cease to appear
inert and rather be seen as invested with a power of inclination, a creative
power, that is, a power of spontaneous movement (Epicurus, 1926; Lucretius,
1950).[61] Unlike what happens in revolutionary action, the creativity of actionwith-clinamen is not based on a dramatic break but rather on a slight swerve or
deviation whose cumulative effects render possible the complex and creative
combinations among atoms, hence also among living beings and social groups.
[62]

The clinamen does not refuse the past; on the contrary, it assumes and
redeems the past by the way it swerves from it. Its potential for post-abyssal
thinking lies in its capacity to cross the abyssal lines. The occurrence of actionwith-clinamen is in itself inexplicable. The role of an ecology of knowledges in
this regard will be merely to identify the conditions that maximize the probability
of such an occurrence and, at the same time, define the horizon of possibilities
within which the swerving will "operate."
The ecology of knowledges is as much constituted by a destabilizing collective
or individual subjectivity as it is constitutive of it. That is, a subjectivity endowed
with a special capacity, energy, and will to act with clinamen. The social
construction of such a subjectivity must entail experimenting with eccentric or
marginal forms of sociability or subjectivity inside and outside Western
modernity, those forms that have refused to be defined according to abyssal
criteria.
CONCLUSION
The epistemological construction of an ecology of knowledges is no easy task.
As a conclusion I propose a research programme. Three main clusters of
questions may be identified. They relate to the identification of knowledges, to
the procedures for relating them to each other, and to the nature and
assessment of real-world interventions made possible by them. The first enquiry
gives rise to a series of questions that have been ignored by modern Northern
epistemologies. From what perspective can the different knowledges be
identified? How can scientific knowledge be distinguished from non-scientific
knowledge? How can we distinguish between the various non-scientific
knowledges? How can we distinguish non-Western knowledge from Western
knowledge? If there are various Western knowledges and various non-Western

knowledges, how do we distinguish between them? What do hybrid

knowledges, mixing Western and non-Western components, look like?
The second area of enquiry gives rise to the following questions. What types of
relationships are possible between the different knowledges? How can we
distinguish between incommensurability, incompatibility contradiction, and
complementarity? Where does the will to translate come from? Who are the
translators? How should we choose translation partners and issues? How can
we form shared decisions and distinguish them from imposed ones? How can
we make sure that intercultural translation does not become the newest version
of abyssal thinking, a soft version of imperialism and colonialism?
The third enquiry is related to the nature and assessment of real-world
interventions. How can we identify the perspective of the oppressed in realworld interventions or in any resistance to them? How can we translate this
perspective into knowledge practices? In the search for alternatives to
domination and oppression, how can we distinguish between alternatives to the
system of oppression and domination and alternatives within the system or,
more specifically, how do we distinguish between alternatives to capitalism and
alternatives within capitalism? In sum, how can we fight against the abyssal
lines using conceptual and political instruments that don't reproduce them? And
finally, a question of special interest to educators: what would be the impact of a
post-abyssal conception of knowledge (as an ecology of knowledges) upon our
educational institutions and research centres?
None of these questions have definitive answers. But the effort to try to answer
them definitely a collective, civilizational effort is probably the only way to
confront the new and most insidious version of abyssal thinking identified in this
paper: the constant rise of the paradigm of appropriation/violence inside the
paradigm of regulation/emancipation.
It is in the nature of the ecology of knowledges to establish itself through
constant questioning and incomplete answers. This is what makes it a prudent
knowledge. The ecology of knowledges enables us to have a much broader
vision of what we do not know, as well as of what we do know, and also to be
aware that what we do not know is our own ignorance, not a general ignorance.
The epistemological vigilance required by the ecology of knowledges transforms
post-abyssal thinking into a deeply self-reflective undertaking. It requires that
post-abyssal thinkers and actors see themselves in a context similar to the one
in which St. Augustine found himself in writing his Confessions and expressed
eloquently in this way: quaestio mihi factus sum, "I have converted myself into a
question for myself". The difference now is that personal confession of past
mistakes is not the issue, but rather solidary participation in the construction of
a personal and collective future, without ever being sure that past mistakes will
not be repeated.
This paper was originally presented at the Fernand Braudel Center, University
of New York at Binghamton, on 24 October 2006. It was subsequently

presented in revised versions at the University of Glasgow, University of

Victoria, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. I would like to thank Gavin
Anderson, Alison Phipps, Emilios Christodoulidis, David Schneiderman, Claire
Cutler, Upendra Baxi, Len Kaplan, Marc Galanter, Neil Komesar, Joseph
Thome, Javier Couso, Jeremy Webber, Rebecca Johnson, James Tully, and
John Harrington for their comments. Maria Paula Meneses, besides
commenting on the paper, assisted me in the research for which I am very
thankful. This paper would not be possible without the inspiration deriving from
endless conversations on Western thinking with Maria Irene Ramalho, who also
prepared the English version.
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[1]

I do not claim that modern Western thinking is the only historical form
of abyssal thinking. On the contrary, it is highly probable that there are, or have
been, forms of abyssal thinking outside the West. This paper does not claim to
characterize the latter. It merely maintains that, whether abyssal or not, nonWestern forms of thinking have been treated in an abyssal way by modern
Western thinking. This is to say that I do not engage here with either premodern Western thinking or the marginal or subordinate versions of modern
Western thinking which have opposed the hegemonic version, the only one I am
concerned with.
[2]
On the sociology of absences as a critique of the production of
nonexistent reality by hegemonic thinking, see Santos 2004, 2006b, and 2006c.
[3]
This tension is the other side of the modern discrepancy between
current experiences and expectations about the future, also expressed in the
positivistic motto of "order and progress". The pillar of social regulation is
constituted by the principle of the state, the principle of the market, and the
principle of the community, while the pillar of emancipation consists of three
logics of rationality: the aesthetic-expressive rationality of the arts and literature,
the cognitive-instrumental rationality of science and technology, and the moralpractical rationality of ethics and the rule of law (Santos, 1995: 2). See also
Santos 2002a.
[4]
Although in very distinct ways, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche
were the philosophers that more profoundly analyzed, and lived, the antinomies
contained in this question. More recently, mention must be made of Karl
Jaspers (1952, 1986, 1995) and Stephen Toulmin (2001).
[5]
For an overview of recent debates on the relationships between
science and other knowledges, see Santos, Nunes, and Meneses, 2007. See
also Santos, 1995: 7-55.
[6]
In Santos 2002a, I analyze in great detail the nature of modern law
and the topic of legal pluralism (the co-existence of more than one legal system
in the same geopolitical space).
[7]
In this paper, I take for granted the intimate link between capitalism
and colonialism. See, among others, Williams, 1994 (originally published in

1944); Arendt, 1951; Fanon, 1967; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972; Wallerstein,
1974; Dussel, 1992; Mignolo, 1995; and Quijano, 2000.
[8]
Imperialism is thus constitutive of the modern state. Unlike what the
conventional theories of international law affirm, the latter is not a product of the
pre-existing modern state. The modern state and international law, national
constitutionalism, and global constitutionalism are the product of the same
historical imperial process. See Koskenniemi, 2002; Anghie, 2005; Tully,
forthcoming.
[9]
The definition of abyssal lines occurs gradually. According to Carl
Schmitt (2003: 91), the cartographic lines of the fifteenth century (the rayas,
Tordesillas) still presupposed a global spiritual order in force on both sides of
the division the medieval respublica Christina, symbolized by the Pope. This
explains the difficulties confronting Francisco Vitoria, the great Spanish
theologian and jurist of the sixteenth century, in justifying the land occupation in
the Americas. Vitoria asks if the discovery is sufficient title for juridical
possession of the land. His response is very complex, not just because it is
formulated in late Aristotelian style, but mainly because Vitoria does not see any
convincing response that is not premised upon the superior power of the
Europeans. This fact, however, does not confer any moral or statutory right over
the occupied land. According to Vitoria, not even the superior civilization of the
Europeans suffices as the fundamental basis of a moral right. For Vitoria, the
conquest could only be sufficient grounds for a reversible right to land, a jura
contraria, as he says. That is, the question of the relationship between conquest
and right to land must be asked in the reverse: if the Native Americans had
discovered and conquered the Europeans, would they have a right to occupy
the land as well? Vitoria's justification of land occupation is still embedded in the
medieval Christian order, in the mission ascribed to the Spanish and
Portuguese kings by the Pope, and in the concept of just war. See Carl Schmitt,
2003: 101-125. See also Anghie, 2005: 13-31. Vitoria's laborious argumentation
reflects the extent to which the crown was at the time much more concerned
with legitimating property rights than sovereignty over the New World. See also
Pagden, 1990: 15.
[10]
From the sixteenth century onwards, cartographic lines, the so-called
amity lines the first one of which may have emerged as a result of the 1559
Cateau-Cambresis Treaty between Spain and France dropped the idea of a
common global order and established an abyssal duality between the territories
on this side of the line and those on the other side. On this side of the line,
truce, peace, and friendship apply; on the other side of the line, the law of the
strongest, violence, and plunder. Whatever occurs on the other side of the line
is not subject to the same ethical or juridical principles applying on this side of
the line. It cannot, therefore, give rise to the kinds of conflicts which the violation
of such principles originates. This duality allowed, for instance, the Catholic king
of France to have an alliance with the Catholic king of Spain on this side of the
line, and, at the same time, to have an alliance with the pirates that were
attacking the Spanish ships on the other side of the line.
[11]
On the different conceptions of the social contract, see Santos,
2002a: 30-39.
[12]
According to the bull, "the Indians are truly men and [...] they are not
only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according to our
information, they desire exceedingly to receive it". Sublimis Deus is available at

www.papalencyclicals.net/Paul03/p3subli.htm, accessed on 22 September

2006.
[13]
As in the famous case of Ibn Majid, an experienced pilot who showed
Vasco da Gama the maritime way from Mombassa to India (Ahmad, 1971).
Other examples can be found in Burnett, 2002.
[14]
Different views on this "private colony" and on King Leopold can be
read in Emerson, 1979; Hochschild, 1999; Dumoulin, 2005; and Hasian, 2002:
89-112.
[15]
The deep duality of abyssal thinking and the incommensurability
between the terms of the duality was enforced by well-policed monopolies of
knowledge and law with a powerful institutional base universities, research
centres, scientific communities, law schools, and legal professions and the
sophisticated linguistic technology of science and jurisprudence.
[16]
The supposed externality of the other side of the line is, in effect, the
consequence of its doubly belonging to abyssal thinking: as foundation and as
negation of the foundation.
[17]
Fanon denounced this negation of humanity with unsurpassing
lucidity (Fanon, 1963, 1967). The radicalism of the negation grounds Fanon's
defence of violence as an intrinsic dimension of the anti-colonial revolt. The
contrast between Fanon and Gandhi in this regard, even though they both
shared the same struggle, must be the object of careful reflection, particularly
because they are two of the most important thinkers-activists of the last century.
See Federici, 1994; and Kebede, 2001.
[18]
This founding negation allows all that is possible to become the
possibility of everything, on the one hand, and, on the other, the exalting
creativity of abyssal thinking to trivialize the price of its destructivity so easily.
[19]
On Guantnamo and related issues, see, among many others,
McCormack, 2004; Amann, 2004a, 2004b; Human Rights Watch, 2004; Sadat,
2005; Steyn, 2004; Borelli, 2005; Dickinson, 2005; and Van Bergen and
Valentine, 2006.
[20]
On the eve of World War II, colonies and ex-colonies covered about
85 per cent of the land surface of the globe.
[21]
The multiple origins and the subsequent variations of these debates
can be traced in Memmi, 1965; Dos Santos, 1971; Cardoso and Faletto, 1969;
Frank, 1969; Rodney, 1972; Wallerstein, 1974, 2004; Bambirra, 1978; Dussell,
1995; Escobar, 1995; Chew and Denemark, 1996; Spivak, 1999; Csaire, 2000;
Mignolo, 2000; Grosfoguel, 2000; Afzal-Khan and Sheshadri-Crooks, 2000;
Mbembe, 2001; and Dean and Levi, 2003.
[22]
Between 1999 and 2002 I carried out a research project entitled
"Reinventing Social Emancipation: Toward New Manifestos", which involved
sixty social scientists in six countries (Brazil, Colombia, India, Mozambique,
Portugal, and South Africa). The main results will be published in five volumes,
of which three are already out: Santos, 2005, 2006a, and 2007. For the
epistemological implications of this project, see Santos, 2003 (forthcoming in
English by Lexington Books) and Santos, 2004. For the connections between
this project and the World Social Forum, see Santos, 2006c.
[23]
Among many others, see Harris, 2003; Kanstroom, 2003; Sekhon,
2003; C. Graham, 2005; N. Graham, 2005; Scheppele, 2004a, 2004b, 2006;
and Guiora, 2005.

[24]

See Miller, 2002; De Genova, 2002; Kanstroom, 2004; Hansen and

Stepputat, 2004; Wishnie, 2004; Taylor, 2004; Silverstein, 2005; Passel, 2005;
and Sassen, 1999. For the extreme Right view on this topic, see Buchanan,
2006.
[25]
Based on Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). Akram (2000) identifies
a new form of stereotyping, which she calls neo-Orientalism, affecting
metropolitan evaluation of asylum and refugee claims by people coming from
the Arab or Muslim world. See also Akram, 1999. Menefee, 2004; Bauer, 2004;
Cianciarulo, 2005; and Akram and Karmely, 2005.
[26]
On the implications of the new wave of anti-terrorism and immigration
laws, see the articles cited in footnotes 23, 24, and 25, and Immigrant Rights
Clinic, 2001; Chang, 2001; Whitehead and Aden, 2002; Zelman, 2002; Lobel,
2002; Roach, 2002 (focusing on the Canadian case); Van de Linde, et al., 2002
(focusing on some European countries); Miller, 2002; Emerton, 2004 (focusing
on Australia); Boyne, 2004 (focusing on Germany); Krishnan, 2004 (focusing on
India); Barr, 2004; and N. Graham, 2005.
[27]
Here I refer to the peripheral and semi-peripheral regions and
countries of the modern world system, which were to be called, after the
Second World War, the Third World (Santos, 1995: 506-519).
[28]
See, for instance, David, 1924; and Tushnet, 1981: 169-188.
[29]
See International Court of Justice, 2005.
[30]
See Drmann, 2003; Harris, 2003; Kanstroom, 2003; Human Rights
Watch, 2004; and Gill and Sliedregt, 2005.
[31]
As an illustration, legal professionals are called upon to
accommodate the pressure by re-managing conventional doctrine, changing
interpretation rules, and redefining the scope of principles and the hierarchies
among them. A telling example is the debate on the constitutionality of torture
between Alan Dershowitz and his critics. See Dershowitz, 2002, 2003a, 2003b;
Posner 2002; Kreimer, 2003; and Strauss, 2004.
[32]
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1566. This anti-terrorism
resolution was adopted on 8 October 2004, following UN Security Council
Resolution 1373, which was adopted as a response to the September 11
terrorist attacks on the US. For a detailed analysis of the process of adoption of
resolution 1566, see Saul, 2005.
[33]
I use the concept of state of exception to express a legal-political
condition in which the erosion of civil and political rights occurs below the radar
of the Constitution, that is, without formal suspension of those rights, as
happens when the state of emergency is declared. See Scheppele, 2004b; and
Agamben, 2004.
[34]
A good example of the abyssal legal logic underlying the construction
of a fence separating the US southern border from Mexico is in Glon, 2005.
[35]
See Blakely and Snyder, 1999; Low, 2003; Atkinson and Blandy,
2005; and Coy, 2006.
[36]
See Amann, 2004a, 2004b; Brown, 2005. A new report by the
European Parliamentary Temporary Committee on illegal CIA activity in Europe
(November 2006) shows how European governments acted as the willing
facilitators of CIA abuses, such as secret detention and rendition to torture. This
lawless investigative field involved 1245 overflights and stopovers by CIA
planes in Europe (some of them involving prisoner transfers) and the creation of

secret detention centres in Poland, Romania, and probably also in Bulgaria,

Ukraine, Macedonia, and Kosovo.
[37]
Indirect rule was a form of European colonial policy largely practiced
in the former Bristish colonies, where the traditional, local power structure, or at
least part of it, was incorporated into the colonial state administration. See
Lugard, 1929; Perham, 1934; Malinowski, 1945; Furnivall, 1948; Morris and
Read, 1972; and Mamdani, 1996, 1999.
[38]
I analyze in detail the emergence of social fascism as a consequence
of the breakdown of the logic of the social contract in Santos, 2002b: 447-458.
[39]
One of the most dramatic examples is the privatization of water and
the social consequences therefrom. See Bond, 2000, and Buhlungu et al, 2006
(for the case of South Africa); Oliveira Filho, 2002 (for the case of Brazil);
Olivera, 2005, and Flores, 2005 (for the case of Bolivia); Bauer, 1998 (for the
case of Chile); Trawick, 2003 (for the case of Peru); and Castro, 2006 (for the
case of Mexico). Dealing with two or more cases, Donahue and Johnston, 1998;
Balany et al, 2005; Conca, 2005; Lopes, 2005. See also Klare, 2001; Hall,
Lobina, and de la Motte, 2005.
[40]
For the case of Colombia, see Santos and Garcia Villegas, 2001.
[41]
An early and eloquent analysis of this phenomenon can be read in
Wilson, 1987.
[42]
A vast literature has developed over the last few years that theorizes
and empirically studies novel forms of governing the economy that rely on
collaboration among non-state actors (firms, civic organizations, NGOs, unions,
and so on) rather than on top-down state regulation. In spite of the variety of
labels under which social scientists and legal scholars have pursued this
approach, the emphasis is on softness rather than hardness, on voluntary
compliance rather than imposition: "responsive regulation" (Ayres and
Braithwaite, 1992), "post-regulatory law" (Teubner, 1986), "soft law" (Snyder,
1993, 2002; Trubek and Mosher 2003; Trubek and Trubek, 2005; Morth, 2004),
"democratic experimentalism" (Dorf and Sabel, 1998; Unger 1996),
"collaborative governance" (Freeman, 1997), "outsourced regulation" (O'Rourke
2003), or simply "governance" (MacNeil, Sargent, and Swan 2000; Nye and
Donahue 2000). For a critique, see Santos and Rodriguez-Garavito, 2005: 1-26;
Santos, 2005: 29-63: Rodriguez-Garavito, 2005: 64-91.
[43]
See Rodriguez-Garavito, 2005, and the bibliography cited there.
[44]
This type of law is euphemistically called soft because it is soft on
those whose entrepreneurial behaviour it is supposed to regulate (employers)
and hard on those suffering the consequences of non-compliance (workers).
[45]
The current debates on cosmopolitanism do not concern me here. In
its long history, cosmopolitanism has meant universalism, tolerance, patriotism,
world citizenship, a worldwide community of human beings, global culture, etc.,
etc. More often than not, when this concept has been used either as a
scientific tool to describe reality or as an instrument in political struggles the
unconditional inclusiveness of its abstract formulation has been used to pursue
the exclusionary interests of a particular social group. In a sense,
cosmopolitanism has been the privilege of those that can afford it. The way I
revisit this concept entails the identification of groups whose aspirations are
denied or made invisible by the hegemonic use of the concept but may be
served by an alternative use of it. Paraphrasing Stuart Hall, who raised a similar

question in relation to the concept of identity (1996), I ask: who needs

cosmopolitanism? The answer is simple: whoever is a victim of intolerance and
discrimination needs tolerance; whoever is denied basic human dignity needs a
community of human beings; whoever is a non-citizen needs world citizenship
in any given community or nation. In sum, those socially excluded, victims of the
hegemonic conception of cosmopolitanism, need a different type of
cosmopolitanism. Subaltern cosmopolitanism is therefore an oppositional
variety. Just as neoliberal globalization does not recognize any alternative form
of globalization, so also cosmopolitanism without adjectives denies its own
particularity. Subaltern, oppositional cosmopolitanism is the cultural and political
form of counter-hegemonic globalization. It is the name of the emancipatory
projects whose claims and criteria of social inclusion reach beyond the horizons
of global capitalism. Others, with similar concerns, have also adjectivized
cosmopolitanism: rooted cosmopolitanism (Cohen, 1992), cosmopolitan
patriotism (Appiah, 1998), vernacular cosmopolitanism (Bhabha, 1996; Diouf,
2000), cosmopolitan ethnicity (Werbner, 2002), or working-class
cosmopolitanism (Wrebner, 1999). On different conceptions of cosmopolitanism,
see Breckeridge et al (eds.), 2002.
[46]
On the cosmopolitan dimension of the World Social Forum, see
Nisula and Sehm-Patomki, 2002; Fisher and Ponniah, 2003; Sen, Anand,
Escobar, and Waterman, 2004; Polet, 2004; Santos, 2006c; and Teivainen,
forthcoming.
[47]
For my previous critical engagement with modern epistemology, see
Santos, 1992; 1995: 7-55; 2001a; 2003; 2004. See also Santos, Nunes, and
Meneses, 2007.
[48]
Gandhi is arguably the thinker-activist of modern times who thought
and acted more consistently in non-abyssal terms. Having lived and
experienced with extreme intensity the radical exclusions typical of abyssal
thinking, Gandhi does not swerve from his goal of building a new form of
universality capable of liberating both the oppressor and the victim. As Ashis
Nandy correctly insists: "The Gandhian vision defies the temptation to equal the
oppressor in violence and to regain one's self-esteem as a competitor within the
same system. The vision builds on an identification with the oppressed which
excludes the fantasy of the superiority of the oppressor's lifestyle, so deeply
embedded in the consciousness of those who claim to speak on behalf of the
victims of history" (1987: 35).
[49]
If, hypothetically, an African peasant and an officer of the World Bank
doing a rapid rural appraisal meet in the African countryside, according to
abyssal thinking, they meet simultaneously (pleonasm intended) but they are
non-contemporaneous; on the contrary, according to post-abyssal thinking, the
meeting is both simultaneous and takes place between two contemporaneous
individuals.
[50]
This recognition of diversity and differentiation is one of the main
components of the Weltanschauung through which we imagine the twenty-first
century. This Weltanschauung is radically different from the one adopted by the
core countries at the start of the previous century. The epistemological
imagination at the beginning of the twentieth century was dominated by the idea
of unity. This was the cultural context that influenced the theoretical options of A.
Einstein (Holton, 1998). The premise of world unity and the explanation
provided for it presided over all the assumptions on which his research was

based simplicity, symmetry, Newtonian causality, completeness, continuum

and partly explains his refusal to accept quantum mechanics. According to
Holton, the idea of unity prevailed within the cultural context of the time,
particularly in Germany. It was an idea that achieved its most brilliant
expression in Goethe's concept of the organic unity of humanity and nature and
the articulated, interconnected wholeness of all the elements of nature. It was
this same idea that in 1912 led scientists and philosophers to produce a
manifesto for the creation of a new society which aimed to develop a set of
unifying ideas and united concepts to be applied to all branches of knowledge
(Holton, 1998: 26).
[51]
Feminist epistemologies have been central to the critique of the
"classical" dualisms of modernity, such as nature/culture, subject/object,
human/nonhuman, and the naturalization of hierarchies of class, sex/gender,
and race. For some relevant contributions to feminist critiques of science, see
Keller, 1985; Harding, 1986, 1998, 2003; Schiebinger, 1989, 1999; Haraway,
1992, 1997; Soper, 1995; Fausto-Sterling, 2000; and Gardey and Lowy, 2000.
Creager, Lunbeck, and Schiebinger, 2001, offer a useful overview, even if
focused on the Global North.
[52]
Among many others, see Alvares, 1992; Dussel, 1995; Santos, 1995,
2003, and 2007; Guha and Martinez-Alier, 1997; Visvanathan, 1997; Ela, 1998;
Prakash, 1999; Quijano, 2000; Mignolo, 2000; Mbembe, 2001; and Masolo,
2003.
[53]
The prevalence of cognitive judgements in carrying out any given
knowledge practice does not clash with the prevalence of ethical-political
judgements in deciding in favour of the type of real intervention that that specific
knowledge makes possible to the detriment of alternative interventions made
possible by alternative knowledges.
[54]
And the same argument may be used in relation to a dialogue
between religions.
[55]
On this subject, see Eze, 1997; Karp and Masolo, 2000; Hountondji,
2002; Coetzee and Roux, 2002; and Brown, 2004.
[56]
In this area, the problems are often associated with language, and
language is, in fact, a key instrument in bringing about an ecology of
knowledges. As a result, translation must operate on two levels, the linguistic
and the cultural level. Cultural translation will be one of the most challenging
tasks facing philosophers, social scientists, and social activists in the twentyfirst century. I deal with this issue in more detail in Santos, 2004 and 2006b.
[57]
See Wiredu, 1997, and a discussion of his work in Osha, 1999.
[58]
On the sociology of emergences, see Santos, 2004.
[59]
From a different perspective, the ecology of knowledges seeks the
same complementarity that in the Renaissance Paracelsus (1493-1541)
distinguished between "Archeus", the elemental will in the seed and the body,
and "Vulcanus", the natural strength of matter. See Paracelsus, 1989: 33, and
the whole text on the "microcosmos and macrocosmos"(1989: 17-67). See also
Parcelsus, 1967.
[60]
I develop this concept in Santos, 1998.
[61]
The concept of clinamen was made current in literary theory by
Harold Bloom. It is one the revisionary ratios Bloom proposes in The Anxiety of
Influence to account for poetic creativity as what he calls "poetic misprision" or

"poetic misreading": "A poet swerves away from his precursor, by so reading his
precursor's poem as to execute a clinamen in relation to it" (Bloom, 1973: 14).
[62]
As Lucretius says, the swerve is per paucum nec plus quam
minimum (Epicurus, 1926: intro. by Frederic Manning, XXXIV).
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2003-11-03-santos-en.html

Leonardo Avritzer; Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Towards widening the democratic canon

What are the historic roots, social preconditions, and future chances for the
participatory democracy movements of the recent years? In this text, an
introduction to a book containing case studies of recent democratic movements
in Brazil, Columbia, Mozambique, Portugal and India, Boaventura de Sousa
Santos and Leonardo Avritzer aim to shed light on the future developments of
democratic nation states in the 21st century.
Participatory democracy, they argue, can act as social emancipatory
movements, since they work for more social alternatives than the ones imposed
by the states and economic conditions. Moreover, they serve to redefine more
inclusive social identities, as well as acting as truly transnational democratic
units.
Yet if the purpose of such participatory democracy movements is the reinvention
of social emancipation, can they really bridge the gap between governmental
and financial constraints, economic imperatives and the dynamics of grassroots
activism? And in what ways are participatory social movements susceptible to
misconduct and corruption?
Introduction
When recently asked what had been the most important event of the 20 th
century, Amartya Sen immediately replied: the emergence of democracy (1999:
3). With a more pessimistic view of the 20th century, Immanuel Wallerstein also
recently questioned how democracy had changed from a revolutionary
aspiration in the 19th century to a universally adopted, though empty, slogan in
the 20th century (2001: 1). What these two positions have in common, despite
significant differences, is the assumption that democracy has played a central
role in politics during the 20th century. Whether it continues to do so in the
century we have now entered remains to be seen.
The 20th century was, in fact, one of intense dispute about the question of
democracy. This dispute, which took place at the end of both world wars and
throughout the period of the cold war, involved two main debates. In the first half
of the century, the debate was centred on whether democracy was desirable
(Weber, 1919; Schmitt, 1926; Kelsen, 1929; Michels, 1949; Schumpeter, 1942).
[1]
If, on the one hand, this debate was resolved in favour of the desirability of
democracy as a form of government, on the other, the proposal which became
hegemonic at the end of the two world wars implied a restriction of broad forms
of participation and sovereignty in favour of a consensus on electoral processes
to form governments (Schumpeter, 1942). This was the hegemonic form of

democratic practice in the post-war period, particularly in countries that became

democratic after the second wave of democratization.
A second debate permeated the discussion on democracy in the post-World
War II period. This debate was about the structural conditions of democracy
(Moore, 1966; O'Donnell, 1973; Przeworski, 1985) and also about the
compatibility of democracy and capitalism (Wood, 1996).[2] Barrington Moore
generated this debate in the 1960s by presenting a typology according to which
countries with or without democratic leanings could be identified. For Moore,
there was a set of structural characteristics that explained the low democratic
density in the second half of the 20th century: the role of the state in the process
of modernization and its relation with the agrarian classes; the relation between
the agrarian and urban sectors and the level of rupture provoked by the
peasants in the course of the modernization process (Moore, 1996). Moore's
objective was to explain why most countries were not and could not become
democratic without a change in existing conditions.
Meanwhile, a second issue was linked with the debate about the structural
requirements of democracy-the issue of the redistributive virtualities of
democracy. The debate about this issue stemmed from the assumption that as
certain countries won the battle for democracy, along with the form of
government they began to enjoy a certain distributive propensity characterized
by the arrival of social democracy to power (Przeworski, 1985). There would be,
therefore, a tension between capitalism and democracy, which, once resolved in
favour of democracy, would place limits on property and imply distributive gains
for underprivileged social sectors. Marxists, in their turn, understood that this
solution demanded a total reformulation of democracy, given that in capitalist
societies it was not possible to democratize the fundamental relation between
capital and labour on which material production was based. As a result of this,
in the scope of this debate, alternative models to liberal democracy were
discussed: participatory democracy, popular democracy in the countries of
Eastern Europe, developmental democracy in countries which had recently
gained independence.
The discussion on democracy in the last decade of the 20 th century changed the
terms of the post-war debate. The extension of the hegemonic liberal model to
the south of Europe, still in the 1970s, and later to Latin America and Eastern
Europe (O'Donnell and Schmitter, 1986) made Moore's and Przeworski's
analyses outdated. The perspectives on democracy in the second half of the
20th century, with their discussions of the structural impediments of democracy,
seem somewhat irrelevant, given that dozens of countries have begun the
process of democratization. There are enormous differences both in the role
played by the rural classes and in the processes of urbanization in these
countries. Amartya Sen is among those who celebrate the loss of credibility of
the idea of structural conditions when he states that the question is not whether
a given country is prepared for democracy, but rather to begin from the
assumption that any country prepares itself through democracy (1994: 4).
Furthermore, with the dismantling of the Welfare State and with the reduction of
social policies in the 1980s, the analyses of the irreversible distributive effects of
democracy by authors such as Przeworski or Lipset seemed to be unconfirmed.

Thus, the discussion about the structural meaning of democracy was reopened,
particularly for the so-called developing countries or countries of the South.
As the debate on the structural meaning of democracy changed its terms, a
second question also surfaced: the problem of the form of democracy and its
variations. This question received its most influential answer in the elitist
solution proposed by Joseph Schumpeter, according to whom the general
question of constructing democracy should be seen from the perspective of the
problems faced in the construction of democracy in Europe during the period
between the wars. What might be referred to as the hegemonic conception of
democracy is based on this response. The main elements of this conception of
democracy are the much emphasized contradiction between mobilization and
institutionalization (Huntington, 1968; Germani, 1971); the valorization of
political apathy (Downs, 1956), an idea stressed by Schumpeter, for whom
common citizens possessed neither ability nor interest in politics, other than to
choose leaders to make decisions for them (1942: 269); the concentration of the
debate on democracy on the electoral designs of democracies (Lijphart, 1984);
the treatment of pluralism as a form of sectarian incorporation and dispute
between elites (Dahl, 1956; 1971); and the minimalist solution to the problem of
participation via the discussion of scales and complexity (Bobbio, 1986; Dahl,
1991). None of these elements, which can be seen as constituting elements of
the hegemonic conception of democracy, can adequately address the problem
of the quality of democracy that resurfaced with the so-called "the third wave of
democratization." The more the classic formula of low intensity democracy is
insisted upon, the less the paradox of the extension of democracy having
brought with it an enormous degradation of democratic practices can be
explained. Moreover, the global expansion of liberal democracy coincided with a
serious crisis in the core countries where it had been most consolidated, a crisis
which became known as the crisis of double pathology: the pathology of
participation, especially in view of the dramatic increase in levels of abstention;
and the pathology of representation-the fact that citizens feel themselves less
and less represented by those they have elected. At the same time, the end of
the cold war and the intensification of the processes of globalization implied a
re-evaluation of the problem of the homogeneity of democratic practice.
The variation in democratic practice is viewed with great interest in the current
debate on democracy, changing the very adjectives used in the political debate
of the cold war period-popular democracies versus liberal democracies. At the
same time, and paradoxically, the process of globalization (Santos, 2002) has
given rise to a new emphasis on local democracy and on the variations of the
democratic form within the national state, allowing the recovery of participatory
traditions in countries such as Brazil, India, Mozambique and South Africa, just
to mention the countries studied in this project. We may, therefore, point to a
triple crisis of traditional democratic explanation. There is, in the first place, a
crisis of the structural framework of the explanation of democratic possibility
(Moore, 1966); in the second place, a crisis in the homogenizing explanation
about the form of democracy which emerged as a result of the debates during
the period between the wars (Schumpeter, 1942); and in the third place, a new
tendency to examine local democracy and the possibility of variation within
national states based on the recuperation of participatory traditions that had

been suppressed in the process of constructing homogenous national identities

(Anderson, 1991).
In this introduction, we intend to move one step beyond and show that the
democratic debate throughout the 20th century got stuck on two complementary
forms of hegemony: [3] a first form of hegemony based on the assumption that
the solution of the European debate of the period between the wars would have
meant the abandonment of the role of social mobilization and collective action in
the construction of democracy (Huntington, 1969); and a second form of
hegemony which assumed that an elitist solution to the debate on democracy,
with the consequent over-valorization of the role of the mechanisms of
representation, could have become hegemonic without linking these
mechanisms to societal mechanisms of participation (Manin, 1997). In both
cases, the hegemonic form of democracy (the elitist representative democracy)
proposes to extend to the rest of the world the model of liberal representative
democracy that prevails in the societies of the northern hemisphere, ignoring
the experiments and discussions coming from the countries of the southern
hemisphere in the debate on democracy. Starting from a reconstruction of the
debate on democracy in the second half of the 20 th century, we aim to propose
a counterhegemonic course for the debate on democracy, redeeming what was
implied in the debate of that period.
The hegemonic conception of democracy in the second half of the 20 th
century
The debate on democracy in the first half of the 20 th century was marked by the
confrontation between two conceptions of the world and their relation with the
process of western modernization. On one hand, the conception that C.B.
Macpherson baptized as "liberal democracy" (Macpherson, 1966), and on the
other a Marxist conception of democracy that took self-determination in the
world of labour as the centre of the process of the exercise of sovereignty on
the part of citizens understood as individual producers (Pateman, 1970). From
this confrontation stemmed the hegemonic conceptions within democratic
theory that came to prevail in the second half of the 20 th century. These
conceptions are related to the answer given to three questions: that of the
relation between procedure and form; that of the role of bureaucracy in
democratic life; and the inevitability of representation in large-scale
democracies. Let us examine each of the answers to these questions in detail.
The question of democracy as form and not content was the response given by
the hegemonic democratic theory to the critique made by Marxist theory (Marx,
1871; Lenin, 1917). Hans Kelsen formulated this question in neo-Kantian terms,
still in the first half of the 20th century. According to him, the main point was to
criticize the idea that democracy could correspond to a precise set of values
and a single form of political organization:
Whoever considers absolute truth and absolute values inaccessible to
human knowledge must consider possible not only their own opinion but
also the opinion of others. Thus, relativism is the conception of the world
assumed by the idea of democracy (...) Democracy offers each political
conviction the same possibility to express itself and to seek the will of men
through free competition. Thus, the dialectic procedure adopted by the

popular assembly or parliament in the creation of norms, a procedure which

develops through speeches and replies, came to be known as democratic.
(Kelsen, 1929: 105-6)
In its initial formulation, Kelsian proceduralism sought to articulate moral
relativism with methods for the solution of disagreements, methods that
included parliament, as well as more direct forms of expression (Kelsen, 1929:
142). This moral relativism implied the reduction of the problem of legitimacy to
the problem of legality, a reduction that Kelsen took from an incorrect reading of
Weber. In the period between the wars and immediately after, Joseph
Schumpeter and Norberto Bobbio transformed the proceduralist element of the
Kelsian doctrine of democracy into a form of democratic elitism.
Schumpeter begins his reflection with the same element that would generate
Bobbio's political reflection: the questioning of the idea of a strong popular
sovereignty associated with a content of society proposed by Marxist doctrine.
In his classic book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter criticizes
this element by posing the question of whether it is possible for the people to
govern. His reply is clear and involves a development of the procedural
argument. According to him, we cannot think of popular sovereignty as a
rational positioning on a given question by the population as a whole or by each
individual. Therefore, the procedural element of democracy is no longer the way
in which the process of decision-making refers to popular sovereignty, but
precisely the opposite: "a political method, that is, a certain type of institutional
arrangement to arrive at political and administrative decisions" (Schumpeter,
1942: 242). In this way, Schumpeter turns the procedural concern with the rules
of decision-making into a method for the constitution of governments. The
motive for excluding participation from this process is not a part of the
procedural argument, but rather of a theory of mass society that Schumpeter
smuggles into the procedural discussion.[4]
Norberto Bobbio takes the next step in transforming proceduralism into rules for
the formation of the representative government. For him, democracy is
constituted by a set of rules for the constitution of majorities, among which it is
worth emphasizing the principle of one person one vote and the absence of
economic, social, religious and ethnic distinctions among the electorate
(Bobbio, 1979). Thus, it is important to recognize that the first route of
affirmation of the hegemonic conception of democracy in the post-war period
leads from the valorization of pluralism to the reduction of sovereignty, and then
from a broad discussion on the rules of the democratic game to the
identification of democracy with the rules of the electoral process. At no time in
the route that goes from Kelsen to Schumpeter to Bobbio is it clear why
proceduralism does not admit enlarged forms of democracy.[5] On the contrary,
the reduction of proceduralism to a process of elections of elites appears to be
an ad hoc postulate of the hegemonic theory of democracy. This postulate
cannot provide a convincing answer to two major questions: the question of
knowing whether elections exhaust the procedures of authorization on the part
of citizens and the question of knowing whether the procedures of
representation exhaust the question of the representation of difference. We will
return to these two issues later when we discuss the new forms of participatory
proceduralism which have emerged in the countries of the South.

A second discussion was central in the consolidation of the hegemonic

conception of democracy: the way in which bureaucracy and its indispensability
were brought to the centre of democratic theory. This discussion also refers to
the period between the wars and to the debate between liberalism and Marxist
theory. Max Weber began this line of questioning of the classical theory of
democracy by positing, within the debate on democracy at the beginning of the
century, the inevitability of the loss of control over the process of political and
economic decision-making by citizens and its growing control by forms of
bureaucratic organization. The main reason why Rousseau's conception of
participatory management did not prevail was the emergence of complex forms
of state administration, which led to the consolidation of specialized
bureaucracies in most of the arenas managed by the modern state. For Weber,
"the separation of the worker from the material means of production,
destruction, administration, academic research and finance in general is the
common base of the modern State, in its political, cultural and military spheres"
(Weber, 1978, II: 1394). Weber's position, which is in direct dialogue with the
formulations of Marx in The Civil War in France, is an attempt to show that the
rise of bureaucracy does not derive from the class organization of capitalist
society, nor is it a phenomenon restricted to the sphere of material production.
For Weber, bureaucracy is linked to the rise and development of the modern
state, and the separation of workers and the means of production constitutes a
general and wide-ranging phenomenon that involves not only workers, but also
the military, scientific researchers and all individuals engaged in complex
activities in the economy and the state. Weber, however, did not intend to
associate sociological realism with political desirability. On the contrary, for him
the phenomenon of complexity posed problems to the functioning of democracy
insofar as it created a tension between growing sovereignty (the control of
governments by the governed) and decreasing sovereignty (the control of the
governed by bureaucracy). It is from here that stems Weber's pessimism in the
face of the double emergence of the "iron cage" of the "administered world" and
of the danger of emotional actions which might instigate new charismatic
powers.
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, the discussion about complexity
and the inevitability of bureaucracy became more intense as the functions of the
state also increased with the institution of the welfare state in European
countries (Esping-Anderson, 1990; Shonfield, 1984). With the growth of state
functions linked to social welfare, the discussion about the desirability of the
growth of bureaucracy changed in tone and acquired a positive connotation (the
exception being the work of Michel Foucault). In the field of democratic theory,
Norberto Bobbio was, once again, the author who synthesized the change of
perspective in relation to the Weberian mistrust of the increase of the capacity
of control of bureaucracy over the modern individual. For Bobbio,
As societies moved from a household economy to a market economy, from
a market economy to a protected, regulated and planned economy, political
problems which require technical skills increased. Technical problems
demand, in turn, experts, specialists (...) Technocracy and democracy are
antithetical: if the protagonist of industrial society is the specialist, it is
impossible that it could be the common citizen. (Bobbio, 1986: 33-34)

In other words, Bobbio radicalizes the Weberian argument by stating that the
citizen, by opting for mass consumer society and the welfare state, knows that
he is giving up control over political and economic activities in favour of private
and public bureaucracies. However, one question does not seem to be resolved
by the theorists who defend the substitution of the mechanisms of the exercise
of sovereignty by citizens for the increase of bureaucratic control over politics:
the scepticism about the capability of bureaucratic forms of management to deal
with creativity and to absorb the information involved in public management
(Domingues, 1997; Fung, 2002). The bureaucratic forms described by Weber
and Bobbio are monocratic in the way they manage administrative personnel
and in the way they advocate a homogenizing solution for each problem
confronted in each jurisdiction. That is to say, the traditional conception of
bureaucratic management advocates a homogeneous solution for each
problem, at each level of administrative management within an administrative
jurisdiction. However, administrative problems require increasingly plural
solutions, in which the coordination of distinct groups and different solutions
occur within the same jurisdiction (Sabel, 1997). Thus, the knowledge held by
social actors becomes a central element not appropriable by bureaucracies for
the solution of management problems. At the same time, it becomes
increasingly clear that centralized bureaucracies are not able to aggregate or
deal with all the information required for the carrying out of complex policies in
social, environmental and cultural areas (Sabel et al, 1999). This is the reason
for the reinsertion of the so-called "participatory arrangements" in the debate on
democracy.
The third element of the hegemonic conception of democracy is the idea that
representation constitutes the only possible solution to the problem of
authorization in large-scale democracies. Among the authors of the post-war
period, it was Robert Dahl who defended this position most emphatically:
the smaller the democratic unit, the greater the potential for citizen
participation, and the lesser the need for citizens to delegate government
decisions to their representatives. The larger the unit, the greater is the
capacity to deal with problems that are relevant for citizens, and the greater
the need for citizens to delegate decisions to their representatives. (Dahl,
1998: 110)
The justification for representation by the hegemonic theory of democracy rests
on the question of authorization. Two main pillars support the argument of
authorization: the first is related to the problem of the consensus of the
representatives and came up, within classical democratic theory, in opposition
to the forms of rotation in the decision-making process that characterizes direct
democracy (Manin, 1997). According to this conception, the direct
administration of the ancient city-states or Italian republics involved a lack of
authorization, which was substituted by the idea of equal rights to occupy
political decision-making posts. As the idea of consensus emerged within the
debates on a rational theory of politics, the apportioning peculiar to the
republican forms of decision-making no longer made sense and was substituted
by the idea of consensus[6], that is, by some rational mechanism of
authorization.
The second form of justification of the question of representation leads to Stuart

Mill and the question of the ability of the forms of representation to express the
distribution of opinions at the level of society. For Mill, the assembly constitutes
a miniature of the electorate, and every representative assembly is capable of
expressing the dominant tendencies of the electorate. Such an approach led the
hegemonic conception of democracy to focus on the role of electoral systems in
the representation of the electorate (Lipjart, 1984). By linking the problem of
representation exclusively to the problem of scales, the hegemonic conception
of democracy ignores the fact that representation involves at least three
dimensions: authorization, identity and accountability (the last of these was
introduced into the debate on democracy very recently). If it is true that
authorization via representation facilitates the exercise of democracy on a large
scale, as Dahl argues, it is also true that representation makes the solution of
the other two questions difficult: that of accountability and that of the
representation of multiple identities. Representation through the method of
decision-making by the majority does not guarantee that minority identities will
be adequately represented in parliament. By diluting accountability in a process
of re-presentation of the representative within a block of questions,
representation also complicates the disaggregation of the process of
accountability (Arato, 2000; Przeworski et al., 1999: 32). Thus, we arrive at a
third limit of the hegemonic theory of democracy: the difficulty of representing
specific agendas and identities. We will return to this point in the final part of this
introduction.
We can see, therefore, that the hegemonic theory of democracy, at the moment
at which the debate on democracy is reopened with the end of the cold war and
the widening of the process of globalization, finds itself facing a set of
unresolved questions that lead to the debate between representative
democracy and participatory democracy. These are particularly pointed
questions in those countries in which a greater ethnic diversity exists; among
those groups that find it more difficult to have their rights recognized (Benhabib,
1996; Young, 2000); and in countries in which the question of the diversity of
interests collides with the particularism of economic elites (Bron, 1994). In the
following section, we will seek to recover what we refer to as a "non-hegemonic
conception of democracy," and attempt to show how the problems mentioned in
this section can be articulated from a different point of view.
Non-hegemonic conceptions of democracy in the second half of the 20 th
century
The post-war period did not only witness the formation and consolidation of
democratic elitism, but also the emergence of a set of alternative conceptions
that might be referred to as counterhegemonic. The majority of these
conceptions did not break with Kelsian proceduralism. They maintained the
procedural response to the problem of democracy, linking procedure with a way
of life and perceiving democracy as a way of perfecting human relations.
According to this conception, which can be found in the work of authors such as
Lefort, Castoriadis and Habermas, in the northern countries, (Lefort, 1986;
Castoriadis, 1986; Habermas, 1984; Habermas, 1995) and Lechner, Nun and
Bron in the southern countries (Lechner, 1988; Bron, 1994; Nun, 2000),
democracy is an organizing grammar of society and of the relation between the
state and society:

democracy reveals itself to be, in this way, historic society par excellence,
the society that by its form gathers and preserves indetermination, in
marked contrast to totalitarianism which, constructing itself under the sign of
the creation of the new man, in reality acts against this indetermination.
(Lefort, 1986: 31)
We can see, therefore, that the concern at the origin of non-hegemonic
conceptions of democracy is the same that is at the origin of the hegemonic
conception, but receives a different response. It has to do with the negation of
substantive conceptions of reason and the homogenizing forms of organization
of society, recognizing human plurality. Nonetheless, the recognition of human
plurality comes about not only from the suspension of the idea of the common
good, as Schumpeter, Downs and Bobbio propose, but also from two distinct
criteria: the emphasis on the creation of a new social and cultural grammar and
the understanding of social innovation articulated with institutional innovation,
that is, with the search for a new democratic institutionality. We will go on to
develop both these aspects next.
The problem of democracy in non-hegemonic conceptions is closely linked to
the recognition that democracy does not constitute a mere accident or a simple
work of institutional engineering. Democracy is a new historic grammar. Thus,
the issue is not, as in Barrington Moore, that of thinking through the structural
determinations for the constitution of this new grammar. Rather, it is that of
understanding that democracy is a socio-historical form, and that such forms
are not determined by any kind of natural laws. Exploring this vein, Castoriadis
provides us with elements to think through the critique of the hegemonic
conception of democracy: "Some think today that democracy or rational
investigation are self-evident, thus naively projecting the exceptional situation of
their own society on to the whole of history" (Castoriadis, 1986: 274).
Democracy, in this sense, always implies a break with established traditions,
and, therefore, the attempt to institute new determinations, new norms and new
laws. This is the indetermination produced by the democratic grammar, rather
than only the indetermination of not knowing who will be the new holder of a
position of power.[7] Thinking about democracy as a positive rupture in the
trajectory of a society implies approaching the cultural elements of this society.
Once again, a space is opened to discuss proceduralism and its societal
dimensions. Within counterhegemonic theories, Jrgen Habermas was the
author who opened the discussion on proceduralism as a societal practice and
not as a method of constituting governments. Habermas expanded
proceduralism, reintroducing the societal dimension originally emphasized by
Kelsen, by proposing two elements in the contemporary debate on democracy:
in the first place, a condition of publicness capable of generating a societal
grammar. For Habermas, the public sphere constitutes a place in which
individuals-women, blacks, workers, racial minorities-can problematize in
public[8] a condition of inequality in the private sphere. The public actions of
individuals allow them to question their exclusion from political arrangements
through a principle of societal deliberation that Habermas refers to as principle
D: "Only those action-norms are valid which count on the assent of all the
individuals that participate in a rational discourse" (Habermas, 1995).
Postulating a principle of wide deliberation, Habermas reintroduces societal and
participatory proceduralism into the discussion on democracy, introducing a new
element in the route that leads from Kelsen to Schumpeter and Bobbio.

According to this conception, proceduralism has its origin in the plurality of the
ways of life in contemporary societies. Politics, in order to be plural, must count
on the assent of these actors in rational processes of discussion and
deliberation. Therefore, democratic proceduralism cannot be, as Bobbio
supposes, a method of authorizing governments. It must be, as Joshua Cohen
shows us, a form of collective exercise of political power based on a free
process of presentation of reasons among equals (Cohen, 1997: 412). In this
way, the recuperation of an argumentative discourse (Santos, 2000), associated
with the basic fact of pluralism and the different experiences, is part of the
reconnection of proceduralism and participation. Thus, the procedures of
aggregation that characterize representative democracy are seen to be patently
insufficient, and the experiments of participatory proceduralism of the southern
countries appear in evidence, such as participatory budgeting in Brazil or the
experiment of the Panchayats in India.
There is still an extremely important issue to be discussed, which is the role of
social movements in the institutionalization of cultural diversity. This issue,
which was already anticipated in the critique of hegemonic theory by Lefort and
Castoriadis, appeared more clearly in the debate on democracy from the theory
of social movements. Starting with Williams (1981), for whom culture constitutes
a dimension of all institutions-economic, social and political-various authors
within the field of the theory of social movements began to bring up the fact that
politics involves a dispute about a complex of cultural significations. This
discussion led to a widening of the field of politics in which there occurred a
dispute on the re-signification of practices (Alvarez, Dagnino and Escobar,
1998). Social movements would be inserted into movements for the widening of
politics, for the transformation of dominant practices, for the expansion of
citizenship and for the insertion of social actors excluded from politics. The
literature on the re-signification of democratic practices had a particularly strong
impact on democratic discussion in Latin America, where it was associated with
the transformation of societal grammar. Lechner states, in relation to the current
processes of democratization, that
In Latin America, the current revalorization of the formal procedures and
institutions of democracy cannot be supported by established habits and
recognized norms. It is not a question of restoring regulative norms, but of
creating norms which constitute political activity: the transition demands the
elaboration of a new grammar. (Lechner, 1988: 32)
Thus, in the case of various countries of the South, redemocratization did not
involve facing the challenge of the structural limits of democracy, as the
discussion on democracy in the 1960s supposed. By inserting new actors into
the political stage, what democratization did was to instigate a dispute on the
meaning of democracy and on the constitution of a new social grammar. Giving
rise to this type of dispute, the extension of democracy that began in southern
Europe in the 1970s and in Latin America in the 1980s brought up again, in the
agenda of the discussion on democracy, the three questions discussed above.
In the first place, it posed again the question of the relation between procedure
and societal participation. Due to the strong participation of social movements in
the processes of democratization in the countries of the South, especially in
Latin America (Escobar and Alvarez, 1992; Alvarez, Dagnino and Escobar,

1998; Doimo, 1995; Jelin and Herschberg, 1996; Avritzer, 2002), the problem of
the constitution of a social grammar capable of changing gender, race and
ethnic relations, as well as the private appropriation of public resources, placed
in the order of the day the problem of the need of a new social grammar and a
new form of relation between the state and society. This grammar implied the
introduction of experimentalism in the very sphere of the state transforming the
state into an absolutely new social movement (Santos, 1998: 59-74).
In the second place, the accent on social participation also led to a redefinition
of the appropriateness of the non-participatory and bureaucratic solution at the
local level, posing once again the problem of scale within the debate on
democracy. The success of most of the participatory experiments in the recently
democratized countries of the South is related to the ability of the social actors
to transfer practices and information from the social level to the administrative
level. At the same time, the institutional innovations that appear to be successful
in countries of the South are related to what Castoriadis calls the establishment
of a new eidos, i.e. a new political order based on the creativity of social actors.
In the third place, there is the problem of the relation between representation
and cultural and social diversity. As the number of actors involved in politics
grows, and the ethnic and cultural diversity of social actors and the interests
involved in political arrangements increase, Stuart Mill's argument on
representation becomes less convincing. The most socially vulnerable groups,
the less favoured social sectors, and ethnic minorities are not able to have their
interests represented in the political system with the same ease as the majority
or more economically prosperous sectors. Forms of relativizing representation
(Young, 200) or of articulating representative democracy and participatory
democracy (Santos, 1998) seem to offer more hope for the defence of subaltern
interests and identities. For these reasons, participatory democracy is
considered in this research project to be one of the five great social and political
fields where, at the beginning of the new century, social emancipation is being
reinvented. In the next section we will present a synthesis of the case studies of
this project.
Participatory democracy in the South in the 21st century
The reinvention of participatory democracy in the countries of the South is
intimately related to the recent processes of democratization that those
countries underwent. We are dealing, therefore, with countries that, according
to the hegemonic logic of the post-World War II period, were not part of the socalled democratic field. Despite the fact that World War II ended with the defeat
of fascism, that system of government prevailed in the south of Europe until the
1970s, namely in Portugal where it lasted for 48 years. Until 1975, Mozambique
lived under the colonial yoke, and South Africa, until the end of the 1980s, under
an apartheid regime. Brazil and Colombia were, even though very ambiguously,
for some time within the democratic field: Brazil alternating between
authoritarian and democratic periods until 1985, and Colombia living in a
democracy truncated by successive states of emergency and civil war since the
1960s. The exception is India, the only one of the countries studied that
remained democratic throughout the whole period, only interrupted by the
declaration of a state of emergency in 1977. Even so, it was only with the so-

called "third wave of democratization" that participatory experiments like that of

Kerala became possible.
All the countries included in this project have undergone processes of transition
or democratic expansion from the 1970s. Portugal was one of the countries in
which the so-called third wave of democratization began. Brazil and South
Africa were reached by this wave in the 1980s and 1990s, the same happening
in Mozambique, after having gone through a revolutionary and socialist stage in
the first decade after independence. Colombia took a different route. It did not
have an authoritarian military regime, unlike what happened in most Latin
American countries, and it made, at the beginning of the 1990s, a great effort of
social negotiation, which resulted in a new Constitution and a law of citizen
participation. Among the countries of the South, India may be considered the
one with the greatest democratic continuity, although some of the important
processes of participatory democracy in the country are linked to
decentralization and differentiated traditions of participation at a local level,
which have been recently recuperated.
In all cases, along with the expansion of democracy or its restoration, there was
also a process of redefining its cultural meaning or established social grammar.
Thus, all the cases of participatory democracy studied began with an attempt to
dispute the meaning of certain political practices, with an attempt to expand the
social grammar and incorporate new actors and new issues into politics. In the
case of Portugal, Arriscado and Serra show how, during the revolutionary crisis
the country underwent after the collapse of the authoritarian regime, the SAAL
redefined the idea of rights to housing and living conditions, creating the socalled "right to place." During the Brazilian process of democratization and the
constitution of community actors, there emerged in a similar way the idea of
"the right to have rights" (Sader, 1988; Dagnino, 1994) as part of the redefinition
of new social actors. The same redefinition is detectable in many of the cases
referred to in this volume: in the case of the march of the cocaleros (coca
farmers and pickers) in Colombia, Ramirez shows that the struggle against the
fumigation of the coca crops expresses an attempt on the part of the peasants
in the Amazon region to demand, in a context of external violence, the
recognition of an alternative identity to the one constructed by the state.
Considered as drug traffickers and guerrilla sympathizers by the state, these
peasants demand to be recognized as independent social actors and citizens of
the country and of Putumayo, identifying their condition of citizens with a
voluntary policy of coca eradication being negotiated with the Colombian
government. Clemencia Ramirez shows how this movement implied associating
citizenship with a definition of belonging. By demanding this recognition, the
movement sought "to achieve a representation vis--vis the State as a
differentiated group with its own voice to decide jointly on policies concerning
the welfare of the inhabitants of Putumayo." Also relating to Colombia, Uribe's
study shows how the inhabitants of San Jos de Apartad, by creating the
status of a "community of peace," demand the legitimacy of a selfrepresentation alternative to that conferred on them by both the state and
violent actors (guerrilla and paramilitary). In her turn, Osrio shows the different
negotiation strategies of Mozambican women with a view to their insertion into
the male-dominated political game. In the context of a post-colonial state which

seeks to define externally an identity of the "modern" woman, there emerges

the social construction of a female identity leading to "a differentiated
appropriation of the ends of political action," even when men and women are
part of the same political organizations. The same concept of identity can be
seen in the cases of India and South Africa. D.L. Sheth shows how the
hegemony of the model of liberal democracy in India did not prevent the
emergence of social movements energized by participatory ideals and
principles of social solidarity interpreted in the light of a Ghandian concept of
self-government (swaraj). Buhlungu shows the strength of the new forms of
solidarity and identity that emerged at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the
1990s stemming from the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, in which two
strong collective actors played important parts: the civic movement and the
labour union movement.
Thus, it is possible to demonstrate that, apart from many differences between
the various political processes analyzed, there is something which unites them,
a common trait which is related to the counterhegemonic theory of democracy:
the actors who established the experiments in participatory democracy put in
question an identity that had been externally attributed to them by the colonial
state, or by an authoritarian and discriminatory state. Claiming rights to housing
(Portugal), rights to locally distributed public goods (Brazil), rights to participate
and demand the recognition of difference (Colombia, India, South Africa and
Mozambique) implies questioning a social and state grammar of exclusion and
proposing a more inclusive alternative.
What is at stake in these processes is the constitution of a participatory and
inclusive ideal as part of projects of liberation from colonialism (in India, South
Africa and Mozambique) or of democratization (Portugal, Brazil and Colombia).
India had an independence movement that was highly influenced by the
philosophy and practice of Ghandi, which included the affirmation of an
autonomous project for the country. As Sheth states, such a liberation
movement, in its Ghandian dimensions, as well as its socialist and communist
dimensions, implied a broad project of incorporation of the Indian masses-a
movement which came together in a Constitution that was understood not only
as a document of political organization, but also as "an agenda for the social
and political transformation of an independent India." This agenda emphatically
included the idea of the participation and political inclusion of poor and
marginalized tribal castes. Buhlungu shows us a similar agenda in the case of
South Africa, given that the struggle against apartheid was inspired by a
participatory ideal which simultaneously postulated the equality of citizens and
the recognition of difference. For Buhlungu, "every struggle, as well as the
vision of freedom or liberation that inspires it, always contains a promise of a
decentralized or participatory kind of democracy which is inclusive rather than
exclusive." In the case of Mozambique, the institutionalization of liberal
democracy occurred in the aftermath of a revolutionary experiment dominated
by the ideals of participation, although, in practice, often curtailed by
revolutionary authoritarianism and sexist domination. Thus, a common trait in
post-colonial movements is the importance of participatory democracy. It is
important because, as Castoriadis states, it creates an imaginary post-colonial
normativity in which democracy, as a project of social inclusion and cultural

innovation, is put forward as an attempt to institute a new democratic

sovereignty.
Likewise, the recent processes of democratization also incorporate the element
of the institution of participation. In the case of Brazil, during the process of
democratization, community movements in various regions of the country, and
particularly in the city of Porto Alegre, claimed the right to participate in
decision-making at the local level:
Participating means directly influencing and controlling decisions [...] If the
country is at a new stage, it is possible and necessary that the community
movement advances and has a direct influence, presenting proposals
discussed and defined by the movement on the [public] budget. (UAMPA,
1986; Silva, 2001: 122)
This participatory drive came to bear fruit, among others, in the participatory
budgeting experiments analyzed by Santos and by Avritzer. In the case of
Portugal, the revolutionary crisis created a sui generis political situation that
Santos (1990), taking as a reference point the situation in Russia in the period
immediately prior to the October Revolution, characterized as a "duality of
impotence," a situation of state paralysis brought about by a void, caused as
much by bourgeois power as workers' power. It was in this void that the
experiments in popular participation flourished, independent or even hostile to
the state in some cases, or negotiating with the state in other cases, such as
that of the SAAL experiment analysed by Arriscado and Serra. In the case of
Colombia, the negotiation that led to the Constitution of 1991 generated a broad
process of participation that led to greater political involvement and visibility of
certain social actors. Among them, the indigenous movement that had been
fighting for its recognition for some time must be emphasized. Uprimny and
Villegas analyze the way this recognition was achieved at the level of the
Constitutional Court, and in the third volume of this collection the indigenous
issue will be dealt with in more detail.
The vulnerabilities and ambiguities of participation
In the previous section we sought to show that the processes of liberation and
the processes of democratization seem to share a common element: the
perception of the possibility of innovation understood as the wide participation of
different types of social actors in decision-making. In general, these processes
imply the inclusion of issues up until then ignored by the political system, the
redefinition of identities and affiliations and the increase in participation, namely
at the local level.
These processes tend to be the object of intense political debate. As we have
seen, capitalist societies, especially in the core countries, consolidated a
hegemonic conception of democracy (that of liberal democracy) with which they
sought to stabilize the controlled tension between democracy and capitalism.
This stabilization occurred in two ways: by giving priority to the accumulation of
capital over social redistribution;[9] and by restricting participation by citizens, as
much individual as collective, with the aim of not "overloading" the democratic
regime with social demands that could put in danger the priority of accumulation
over redistribution. The fear of "democratic overload" presided over the

transformations that, from the beginning of the 1980s, occurred in hegemonic

democratic theory and practice in the core countries, being then exported to the
semiperiphery and periphery of the world system. The idea of "democratic
overload" had been formulated in 1975 in a report of the Trilateral Commission
prepared by Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki (1975). They argued that the
overload was caused by the political inclusion of social groups excluded in the
past, and by the "excessive" demands made by these groups on democracy.
Thus, we can understand why at the moment when, via decolonization or
democratization, the problem of the extension of democracy to the countries of
the South was raised for the first time, the hegemonic conception of democracy
theorized the question of the new grammar of social inclusion as an excess of
demands. In the light of this, it is easy to conclude that the processes of
democratic intensification that we have been discussing tend to be strongly
contested by exclusionary elites or "metropolitan elites," as Sheth refers to
them. Because they go against hegemonic interests and conceptions, these
processes are often fought head on or adulterated by co-optation or integration.
In this resides the vulnerability and ambiguity of participation, present in a
number of the cases analyzed in this volume.
The institutional fragility of participation is very clear in the case of Portugal,
since the participatory movement concerning housing was questioned as soon
as the short period of the revolutionary crisis was over. According to Arriscado
and Serra, "over the years, the 'official' memory of the Revolution has sought to
erase all the episodes which, in some way, pointed towards the possibility of an
alternative way of organizing society or of involving citizens in the political
process."
In the case of South Africa, Buhlungu shows how, as the democratic, postapartheid regime was institutionalized, the state, the political system and the
ANC itself, which had activated the whole social movement in the 1980s, came
to discourage and even demobilize popular participation, which had been so
important in the toppling of apartheid, under the pretext that representative
democracy, now established, guaranteed the adequate representation of the
various social interests.
The vulnerability of participation to adulteration, whether by co-optation by overincluded social groups, or by integration in institutional contexts that erase its
democratic potential, as well as its potential for transforming power relations, is
well illustrated in several cases analyzed here. In Portugal, the forms in which
citizens can participate in urban or territorial planning analyzed by Isabel Guerra
reveal to what extent participation can be turned into a process of social control
organized from the top down, where hegemonic interests and actors find a new
way of prevailing over subordinated interests and actors with less political or
organizational capital. To prevent this danger, Guerra proposes the integration
of these forms of participation into broader processes of social negotiation in
which the different interests are adequately represented, a proposal that she
entitles "from a managerial democracy to a project democracy."
The Colombian cases presented here equally illustrate the vulnerability and
ambiguity of participation. Uprimny and Villegas show how the 1991

Constitution incorporated excluded and oppressed forces such as

representatives of demobilized guerrilla groups, indigenous peoples and
religious minorities, thus diminishing the influence of the liberal and
conservative parties, which, up until then, had dominated the political stage in
Colombia:
In this pluralistic framework, the diagnosis of many of the delegates [to the
Constituent Assembly] was that exclusion, the lack of participation, and
weakness in protecting human rights were the basic causes of the
Colombian crisis. This explains some of the ideological orientations of the
1991 Constitution: the broadening of participation mechanisms, the
imposition of the duties of promoting social justice and equality upon the
state, and the incorporation of a meaningful bill of rights, as well as new
judicial mechanisms for their protection.
However, the authors show how a contradiction pervaded, from the beginning,
the attempt to create a new institutional order, as both the government and the
opposition assumed positions that worked against the pacification of the political
arena and the expansion of participation and rights. The study of Uprimny and
Villegas concentrates specifically on the Constitutional Court created in 1992.
For the authors, the case of the Colombian Constitutional Court shows how, in a
situation of the demobilization of citizens, the demand for equality and justice
can shift from the political field to the judicial field:
Colombians' disenchantment with politics has led certain sectors to demand
answers from the judiciary to problems that, in principle, should be debated
and resolved by means of citizens' participation in the political sphere. This
phenomenon is not exclusive to Colombia (Santos et al, 1995), but in this
country the weakness of the mechanisms for political representation runs
deep, a fact that has enabled the Court to assume a more prominent role.
Thus, in the case of Colombia, we have a double dimension. One the one hand,
as the authors point out, Colombia has a tradition of weak social movements.
On the other hand, many of the actors that dominated the Constituent Assembly
became weak in the following years. Thus, Colombia appears as a case of the
vulnerability of participation, revealing the ambiguous impact of a strong
judiciary on social movements.
The vulnerability of participation in a scenario of conflict between social
grammars is addressed by Maria Teresa Uribe, in a dramatic text in which she
demonstrates the contradiction between participation, pacification of political
space, and civil war. She focuses on the case of the community of peace of San
Jos de Apartad, whose inhabitants decided to adopt "a strategy of unarmed
civil resistance against the war in order to defend their right to remain on their
lands and in their homes, signing a public pact of non-collaboration with any
armed actors, including the Colombian State." Situated in a banana-growing
area of Colombia, a sanctuary for guerrillas in the country, San Jos de
Apartad has a strategic geographical position in the Colombian conflict. The
pact called Comunidade de Paz (Community of Peace) was announced in May
1997 with the help of the local diocese, the Intercongregational Commission for
Justice and Peace and various NGOs. The strong international support to the
declaration of the Comunidade de Paz obliged the paramilitaries to respect its
neutrality.[10] Nonetheless, at the end of two years, the fragile balance of power

came apart. After the first incursion of paramilitaries in April 1999, there followed
various incursions of the guerrilla forces. Until 2000, 83 people were killed in
San Jos de Apartad. Thus, the case of Colombia reveals the
interdependence of the deepening of democracy and the need for the
constitution of a new social grammar based on pacification, which implies
political negotiations beyond a local scale.
Although to a lesser extent, this same complexity of participation can be
detected in Mozambique in the case study analyzed by Osrio. Thus, according
to the author, women's occupation of political space can be as much a
contribution to the challenge of male domination as a consolidation of it. The
case of Mozambique demonstrates that, in situations in which democracy does
not involve a renegotiation of a more pluralist grammar, expressed by the
increase in female participation, the social grammar itself comes into conflict
with the working mechanisms of the political model. The author identifies three
strategies adopted by women in relation to political participation: the adaptation
to existing hierarchies and, therefore, to male superiority; the adoption of the
masculine model as universal, using the weapon of formal equality to further
women's power; and the vindication of an alternative model capable of
subverting the dichotomies on which male power is based. Osrio's analysis
leads to a reflection on the vulnerabilities of democracy. For her,
the exercise of democracy, in the context of globally legitimated systems,
fails to satisfy the demands of new groups, as is the case of women (...)
[This case implies] the need for a more plural and transversal action in the
different spaces of production of the political.
Thus, the author shows that, even in situations where the increase of
participation exists, this increase, to become emancipatory, needs to be
adjusted to the attempt to recreate political forms. The complex question of the
ambiguity of participation is exemplarily treated by Paoli in her discussion of the
case of Brazil, a country in which there are as many positive as negative
experiments in participation for us to reflect on. Paoli emphasizes the continuity
of practices of participation in the period between the process of
democratization and the present. According to her,
The practices of participatory deliberation in Brazil have been, from the
beginning, linked to the political visibility of the new social movements and
the redefinition of the practices of the labour movement in the 1970s and
1980s. They were understood through a renewed theory of social conflict
that pointed to forms of popular participation and various struggles for
autonomous representation in the process of distribution of public goods
and the formulation of public policies.
However, the case analyzed by her-the social activism of entrepreneurs against
social exclusion-shows how the ideal of the participation of civil society can be
co-opted by hegemonic sectors with the aim of controlling the dismantling of
public policies, taking advantage of the situation in order to accomplish an
operation of "social marketing." As she states,
We can see, on the one hand, the innovative potential that responsible
entrepreneurial mobilization can have in overcoming poverty and providing
opportunities for the poor. On the other hand, it is clear that this mobilization

turns a blind eye to policies that deepen social exclusion and politically
disorient Brazilian society itself, apart from advantageously occupying, in
terms of its particular interests, the very space that it opens as civil action
for a public.
Paoli shows specifically, in the case of the Foundations of Entrepreneurial
Philanthropy (Fundaes de Filantropia Empresarial) in Brazil, the attempt to
appropriate a discourse around the notion of the public. While the social effects
of their policies should be emphasized, these foundations tend to reduce the
idea of the public to two categories: that of consumers and that of employees of
the enterprise itself. The author shows, in this way, the dangers of the
appropriation of the discourse of participatory democracy for proposals that do
not imply much more than their reduction to mercantile categories. [11]
We can now systematize some of the characteristics of the cases in which
participation does not manage to come into being at the end of a process of
decolonization or democratization. There are at least four different cases we
can think of: in the first place, the Portuguese case, in which the forms of
participation were disqualified at the end of a process of dispute for the
hegemony of democratic form, a process in which the conservative forces
managed to impose their model. We can think of Colombia as a second case, in
which the forms of participation did not lose their legitimacy, but could not be
established as an alternative model due to the reaction of conservative sectors.
The case of Mozambique seems to be different. On the one hand, it is true that
the practices of participation in Mozambique did not lose their legitimacy either.
Here the need is for a pluralization of the political grammar itself, so that the
plurality of society may be assimilated by democracy. And finally, we have the
case of Brazil, in which the forms of participation can be part of a process of cooptation, as appears to be the case of the notion of the public used by
entrepreneurial philanthropic associations, although they represent a
fundamental innovation capable of generating counterhegemonic models of
democracy as we will go on to show in the next section.
The potentialities of participation
In the light of the cases studied, Brazil and India are the cases in which the
potentialities of participatory democracy are most clearly manifested. In his text
on participatory budgeting, Leonardo Avritzer shows the way in which the
Brazilian Constituent Assembly increased the influence of various social actors
in political institutions as a result of new participatory arrangements.
Article 14 of the 1988 Constitution guaranteed "popular initiative" in
legislative processes. Article 29, on the organization of cities, required the
participation of popular association representatives in the process of city
planning. Other articles establish the participation of civic associations in
the implementation of health and social welfare policies.
Thus, the Constitution was able to incorporate new cultural elements, which had
emerged at the level of society, into the emerging institutionality, opening up
space for the practice of participatory democracy.
Santos and Avritzer show how, among the various forms of participation that
emerged in post-authoritarian Brazil, participatory budgeting acquired particular
pre-eminence. The authors show how, in the case of Brazil, the motivation for

participation is part of a common inheritance of the process of democratization

that led democratic social actors, especially those from the community
movement, to debate the meaning of the term participation. In the case of the
city of Porto Alegre, this debate was linked to the opening of actual areas of
participation by political society, in particular by the Workers' Party. This led to
the emergence of effective forms of combination of elements of participatory
and representative democracy, through the intention of the administrations of
the Workers' Party to articulate the representative mandate with effective forms
of deliberation at the local level.
Participatory budgeting emerges from this intention, which, according to Santos,
is manifested in three of its main characteristics: (1) participation is open to all
citizens without any special status whatsoever being attributed to any
organization, including community organizations; (2) the combination of direct
and representative democracy creates an institutional dynamic that attributes to
the participants themselves the definition of the internal rules; and (3) the
allocation of the resources for investments is based on the combination of
general and technical criteria, that is, the decisions and rules established by the
participants are made compatible with the technical and legal demands of
governmental action, also respecting financial limits. [12] According to Avritzer,
these general principles are translated into three forms of participatory
institutionality. In the first place, there are regional assemblies in which the
participation is individual, open to all members of the community, and the rules
of deliberation and decision-making are defined by the participants themselves.
In the second place, there is a distributive principle capable of rectifying preexistent inequalities in relation to the distribution of public goods. In the case of
participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre and also in Belo Horizonte, this
distributive principle is manifested in the so-called "tables of needs," whose
elaboration precedes the process of deliberation itself. In the third place, there
is a mechanism for dovetailing the process of participation and deliberation with
the public administration, a process that involves, in the case of Porto Alegre,
the functioning of a council that can deliberate on the budget and negotiate
priorities with the local mayoralty.
We have, therefore, in the case of Brazil, a successful first form of combination
of elements of representative democracy and participatory democracy. This
combination occurs on three levels: on the local level, citizens participate in a
process of negotiation and deliberation on priorities concerning the distribution
of public goods. This process expresses an aspect that has already been
emphasized in this text-the need for democracy to be articulated with a new
social grammar. In the case of participatory budgeting (PB), this grammar has
two elements: the fair distribution of public goods and the democratic
negotiation of the access to these goods among the social actors themselves.
The regional assemblies, the lists of prior access to public goods and the PB
Council express this dimension that we designate above as participatory
proceduralism, a process of expanded participation involving a broad public
debate on the rules of participation, deliberation and distribution.
Participatory budgeting shows some of the potential of the expansion of
participatory democracy. In the case of Porto Alegre, the participation of the

population has increased practically every year, while in Belo Horizonte, apart
from a little more variation, there has also been an increase. It is equally
important to underline that participatory budgeting in Brazil has grown
significantly. Between 1997 and 2000 there were 140 municipal administrations
that adopted participatory budgeting, the vast majority (127) in cities of up to
500,000 inhabitants. In about half of the cases (71), these administrations were
linked to the Workers' Party (PT) (Grazia, 2001). The extension of participatory
budgeting to all the regions of Brazil, in addition to other political proposals,
shows the potential of the extension of successful experiments in participatory
democracy.
In the case of India, the potential of participatory democracy is equally visible.
Sheth discusses how the political and participatory actions that were organized
from the beginning of the 1960s "existed as fragments of the earlier political and
social movements-movements which had their origins in the Freedom
movement [...] They worked in small, stagnant spaces available to them on the
periphery of electoral and party politics. But within three decades of
Independence new social and political spaces opened up for them."
Nonetheless, Sheth equally emphasizes that these forms of participatory
democracy, because they do not follow the model of liberal democracy, are
considered by metropolitan elites and the middle classes to be suspect and
vehicles of negative anti-development and anti-national values. It is because of
this that the combination of initiatives in participatory democracy with
representative democracy only occurs in specific political contexts, as, for
example, in Kerala-the case studied by Heller and Isaac.
The democratic challenge in India is extremely complex because, in addition to
differences of class, sex, ethnicity, religion and region, differences of caste must
also be taken into consideration. This is then a challenge in the field of the socalled democratization of democracy. The caste system was reproduced within
the Indian political system, and inserted hierarchical relationships and profound
material inequalities into it (Heller, 2000). Sheth shows how the very project of
constructing a shared democracy for all castes and all social groups,
establishing a symbolic reference common to the whole population of the
country, became gradually subordinated to the particularist agenda of political
society.
Two main forms of democratization of the Indian political system can be pointed
to at present. The first is a form of local democracy based on the rupture with a
grammar of exclusion at the level of society itself. This is the form that
democratization has assumed in the province of Kerala. Here, in contrast to
other parts of India, the associational infrastructure does not reproduce the
dominant pattern of religious organizations and castes that reproduce a culture
of inequality.
Kerala has the highest levels of trade-union membership in the country, and
in contrast with the national pattern, the unions also reach workers in the
informal sector (...) Kerala also possesses a wide range of women's,
students' and youth organizations, sponsored by all the parties (...) Just the
mass associations linked to the CPM-affiliated to the Communist Party of
India-have more than 4.7 million members. (Heller, 2000)

We have here, therefore, a first case of a rupture with the restricted forms of
democracy at the local level, a rupture that, in the case of Kerala, occurs in the
first place at the level of civil society, through the constitution of an associational
grammar, and is extended to political society through the system of the
Panchayats. This system was introduced by the Left Democratic Front in 1996
through the launching of the so-called "People's Campaign for Decentralized
Planning." This campaign, now in its fifth year, has achieved a high degree of
devolution of decision-making powers to the Panchayats. "All 1,214 local
governments in Kerala-municipalities and the three rural tiers of district, block
and grama panchayats (the all-India term for village councils)-have been given
new functions and powers of decision-making, and have been granted
discretionary budgeting authority over 40% of the state's developmental
expenditures" (Heller and Isaac, 2002). The transfer of decision-making to the
local level implied a process of qualitative change in participation and
deliberation, involving assemblies in rural areas (grama sabha) in which more
than 2 million people took part, and development seminars (for assessment of
the resources and problems of the area and formulation of a local development
strategy) attended by more than 300,000 delegates, in addition to task forces
involving 100,000 volunteers (Heller and Isaac, 2002). We can, therefore,
perceive an enormous process of participation unleashed by the transfer of the
process of deliberation on the budget to the local level.
A second form of expansion of Indian democracy also related to the mobilization
of the population at a local level is discussed by Sheth. It involves local
movements which organize public hearings and popular courts with the aim of
creating political and social constraints for local governments and thus force
them to act in a more honest and efficient way. Sheth describes one of the most
significant moments of these movements when, in December of 1994-95,
several public hearings (Jan Sunvai) were held in various states which were
attended by journalists. These hearings culminated in a 40-day sit-in (dharna)
which compelled the government to make its accounts public through the
Panchayat Raj.
As much in India as in Brazil, the most significant experiments of change in the
form of democracy have originated in social movements that question practices
of exclusion through actions that generate new norms and new forms of control
of the government by the citizens.
We can point to some similarities and differences between the two cases. In the
first place, the experiments in Porto Alegre and Kerala emerged from a process
of social renovation. In the case of Porto Alegre, as Avritzer points out, the
experiment derived from a proposal of budgetary participation formulated in the
1980s by UAMPA (the Union of Neighbourhood Associations of Porto Alegre),
and in the case of Kerala, as Heller and Isaac point out, from experiments in
participation at the local level conducted by civil society organizations, in
particular by Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (Heller and Isaac, 2002). In the
second place, in both cases, a political party had to take the political decision of
giving up decision-making prerogatives in favour of forms of participation. In
Porto Alegre, the Workers' Party fulfilled this role, and in Kerala it was the
Communist Party of India. In the third place, the proposal of participation

involved the elaboration of complex rules of participation in both cases, as

Santos shows in the case of Porto Alegre, and Heller and Isaac in the case of
Kerala. It is important to underline that these rules-which, in the case of Porto
Alegre, predetermine the distributive character of the PB and establish
incentives to participation for the poor population [13] and, in the case of Kerala,
make public the criteria for beneficiary eligibility and prioritization [14] -will be
fundamental to the success of the form of participation. The two cases that we
can deem successful present two extremely important characteristics: first, they
stem from changes in societal practices introduced by the social actors
themselves; second, they recover local democratic traditions at first ignored by
the hegemonic forms of representative democracy in these countries. Porto
Alegre, in the case of Brazil, and Kerala, in the case of India, express an
attempt to extend democracy based on potentials of the local culture itself.
We can also point out some important contrasts between the two cases. In the
first place, despite the importance of the Workers' Party in the experiment in
participatory budgeting, the party has limited control of the process, and only a
small percentage of participants in the PB are affiliated to it. The control of the
Communist Party of India over the process seems to be greater, which makes it
dependent on an unstable political coalition in a state with a strong Islamic
minority. In the second place, there is an important difference in the form of
transference of prerogatives on the budget: the PB in Porto Alegre and in Belo
Horizonte decentralizes and democratizes only the process of deliberation, and
leaves in the hands of the mayoralty the process of the administrative
implementation of the decisions. In this case, the control of the public
administration is made by the PB Council in Porto Alegre and by COMFORAS
in Belo Horizonte (Avritzer, 2002), thus creating a mechanism of administrative
control which is relatively invulnerable to processes of corruption, given the
excess of public mechanisms and forms of control. In the case of India, the
resources are transferred to the committees themselves, which leads to
accusations of corruption, as Heller and Isaac point out. Finally, everything
seems to indicate that, in the case of Brazil, the PB provides electoral
advantages to those who practice it, such that other parties want to implement
it, while the continuity of the Indian experiment was put in question by the
electoral defeat of the Left Front last year.
Thus, the cases referred to here present contemporary democratic practice with
not only the inconclusiveness of the debate between representation and
participation, but also the need for a new formulation concerning the
combination of these different forms of democracy.
Conclusion
There are more questions raised than answers given in the studies included in
this volume. In this, they remain faithful to the central objective of the project
"Reinventing Social Emancipation" in the context of which they were carried out.
This project sought to draw new horizons for social emancipation, starting from
practices that occur in specific contexts to provide answers to concrete
problems. Therefore, it is not possible to draw from them universal solutions
which would be valid in every context. At best, such practices are driven by wide
aspirations of emancipation which they seek to realize in a partial and limited

way.
Between the realization and the aspiration is the imagination of the possible
beyond what exists. This imagination is composed of questions that constitute
the shape of emancipatory horizons. These are not, then, just any questions,
but questions that result from the excess of aspirations in relation to the
realization of concrete practices. In the specific case of the theme of the project
discussed in this volume-participatory democracy-the horizons are questions
that address the possibility of broadening the democratic canon. Through this
broadening, the hegemonic canon of liberal democracy is contested in its
pretension to universality and exclusivity, thus giving credibility to
counterhegemonic democratic concepts and practices. In what follows, we will
pose some questions and provide answers related to some of these issues.
1. The loss of demodiversity. The comparison between the studies and debates
on democracy in the 1960s and in the last decade leads us easily to the
conclusion that, on the global level, demodiversity has been reduced in the last
thirty years. By demodiversity we mean the peaceful or conflictive coexistence
of different democratic models and practices. In the 1960s, if, on the one hand,
the hegemonic model of democracy, liberal democracy, seemed destined to be
confined, as democratic practice, to a small corner of the world, on the other
hand, outside western Europe and North America, there existed other political
practices that claimed democratic status and did so in the light of autonomous
criteria, distinct from those which sustained liberal democracy. In the meantime,
as these alternative political practices lost strength and credibility, liberal
democracy gradually established itself as the sole and universal model, and its
consecration was consummated by the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund by transforming it into a political condition for the granting of
loans and financial aid.
What this implies, from our point of view, is a loss of demodiversity. The
negativity of this loss resides in two factors. The first has to do with the
justification of democracy. If, as we believe, democracy has an intrinsic value
and not a mere instrumental utility, this value can in no way be assumed as
universal. It is inscribed in a specific cultural context, that of western modernity,
and this context, because it coexists with others in a world that now is
recognized as multicultural, can in no way claim the universality of its values.
We know today that if this claim refuses to give the reasons that sustain it and
to dialogue with others that eventually contest it, it will only be imposed by the
force of circumstances that are alien to it and that, as such, transform it into an
imperial claim. And this imperial temptation is all the more noticeable when the
overwhelming power of neoliberal globalization and of the institutions that, in its
name, impose the adoption of liberal democracy on a global level is more
pronounced. It makes no sense to postulate the universality of the values that
sustain democracy on the basis that there is nothing in other cultures that
opposes them, as Amartya Sen does (1999). Such a convergence cannot be
postulated as a starting point. It has to be, if anything at all, the point of arrival of
an intercultural dialogue in which other cultures can present, not only that which
they are not opposed to, but, above all, that which they propose autonomously.

We support such a cultural dialogue and believe it enriches all who participate
in it. The convergences that result almost always in forms of cultural
hybridization have to be achieved in the practice of argumentation and in the
argumentation of practice. Regarding the practices analyzed in this volume, we
can see this hybridization surface especially in the case studies on India, but it
is present in one way or another in the case studies on Mozambique, Brazil,
South Africa and Colombia.
The loss of demodiversity is negative because of a second factor, which,
although autonomous in relation to the first, is related to it. It has to do with the
distinction between democracy as an ideal and democracy as a practice. This
distinction is central to the hegemonic model of democracy and was introduced
into the debate to justify the low democratic intensity of established political
regimes when compared with the revolutionary democratic ideals of the late 18 th
century and mid-19th century. The universal imposition of the liberal model
exacerbated this distinction to such an extent that actually existing democracy is
frequently so far from the democratic ideal that it does not seem to be more
than a caricature of it. Indeed, this distance is sometimes greater in core
countries than in peripheral countries, although the opposite might appear to be
the case. It is this distance that leads Wallerstein to respond to the question of
what to think of democracy as it has been realized with a reply that Ghandi gave
when asked what he thought of western civilization: "it would be a good idea"
(2001: 10).
This volume describes and analyzes democratic practices and aspirations
which, in the different countries integrated in this project, seek to have the
democratic aspiration taken seriously, refusing to accept as democratic
practices that are a caricature of democracy, and above all refusing to accept as
a fatality the low democratic intensity to which the hegemonic model subjected
the participation of citizens in political life. In a very distinct manner, these
practices seek to intensify and deepen democracy, whether by asserting the
legitimacy of participatory democracy, or by exerting pressure on institutions of
representative democracy in order to make them more inclusive, or even by
seeking denser forms of complementarity between participatory democracy and
representative democracy.
2. The local and the global. We have emphasized the idea that the hegemonic
model of democracy has been hostile to the active participation of citizens in
political life and, when it has accepted it, has confined it to a local level. This is
the well-known question of scales. Later in this conclusion we will return to the
issue, showing the counterhegemonic answer to this question, based on which
it is possible to construct dense complementarities between participatory
democracy and representative democracy and, therefore, between local scales
and national scales.
At this moment, we would like to refer to the possible transnational articulations
between different local experiments in participatory democracy or between
those local experiments and transnational movements and organizations
interested in the promotion of participatory democracy. Counterhegemonic
globalization is based on these articulations, which allow the creation of the

counterhegemonic local, the local which is the other side of the

counterhegemonic global. These articulations give credibility to and strengthen
local practices by the simple fact of transforming them into links of wider
networks and movements with a greater power for transformation. In addition,
such articulations make possible reciprocal and continuous learning, which we
believe is essential for the success of democratic practices that are energized
by the possibility of high-intensity democracy. Because we chose in this project
to analyze local experiments in the deepening of democracy, the articulation
between the local and the global emerges in these conclusions as a question to
which we cannot give an immediate answer, but which we deem fundamental to
answer in the future. Even so, some of the cases suggest, at least implicitly, this
articulation. In the case of the community of peace of San Jos de Apartad,
this articulation is explicit. Uribe shows the importance of the network of
transnational solidarity in making visible, on a national and international level,
the struggle for peace in this Colombian community. In the case of participatory
budgeting, we know that similar experiments have been appearing in a number
of Brazilian cities and in other countries of Latin America, that the most recent
experiments have benefited from previous ones, and that there are even
networks of cities, namely in the context of the Mercosur, whose aim is to
discuss the different experiments and models of participatory democracy, their
limits and their potentialities. The strength of counterhegemonic globalization as
regards the widening and deepening of democracy largely depends on the
widening and deepening of national, regional, continental or global networks of
local practices.
3. The dangers of perversion and co-optation. We have seen how the 19th
century revolutionary aspirations of democratic participation were gradually
reduced to forms of low-intensity democracy in the course of the 20 th century. In
this process, the objectives of social inclusion and the recognition of differences
became perverted and were converted into their opposite. The practices of
participatory democracy are in no way immune to the danger of perversion and
adulteration. These practices, which seek to expand the political canon and, by
doing so, expand the public space and the social debates and demands which
constitute it, may also be co-opted by hegemonic interests and actors with the
aim of legitimizing social exclusion and the repression of difference. The texts
by Paoli and Guerra refer to this danger.
But perversion can occur in many different ways: by the bureaucratization of
participation, by the reintroduction of clientelism in new guises, by sectarian
instrumentalization, by the exclusion of subordinate interests through the
silencing or manipulation of participatory institutions. These dangers can only
be prevented by constant learning and self-reflection, from which incentives to
new ways of deepening democracy can be drawn. In the field of participatory
democracy, more than any other, democracy is an unlimited principle, and the
tasks of democratization can only be sustained when they themselves are
defined by increasingly demanding democratic processes.
4. Participatory democracy and representative democracy. This is perhaps the
question to which the studies collected in this volume provide the most answers,
and for that reason we dedicate the most space to it. The solution given by the

hegemonic theory of democracy to the problem of the relation between

representative democracy and participatory democracy-the solution of scales-is
not adequate because it leaves untouched the problem of social grammars, and
offers a simplistic answer, which is exclusively geographic, to the problem of the
combination of participation and representation.
The experiments studied in this project offer an alternative answer to the
democratic problem. They show that the ability to deal with cultural and
administrative complexity is not increased with an increase in scale. They also
show, above all, that there is a process of cultural pluralization and recognition
of new identities[15] which leads, as a consequence, to profound redefinitions of
democratic practice, and these redefinitions are beyond the aggregative
process specific to representative democracy.
In our opinion, there are two possible forms of combination of participatory
democracy and representative democracy: coexistence and complementarity.
The first implies the coexistence, on various levels, of the different forms of
proceduralism, administrative organization and variation in institutional design.
Representative democracy at the national level (exclusive power as regards the
constitution of governments; the acceptance of a vertical bureaucratic form as
the sole form of public administration) coexists with participatory democracy at
the local level, accentuating certain participatory characteristics which already
exist in some democracies in core countries (Mansbridge, 1990).
The second form of combination, which we refer to as complementarity, implies
a more profound articulation between representative democracy and
participatory democracy. It presupposes the recognition by the government that
participatory proceduralism, the public forms of monitoring governments and the
processes of public deliberation can substitute part of the process of
representation and deliberation as conceived of in the hegemonic model of
democracy. Contrary to what this model seeks to achieve, the objective is to
associate with the process of strengthening local democracy forms of cultural
renovation related to a new political institutionality which reintroduces the
questions of cultural plurality and the necessity of social inclusion into the
democratic agenda. As much in the case of Brazil as in the case of India, the
participatory arrangements enable the articulation between argumentation and
distributive justice and the transfer of prerogatives from the national level to the
local level, and from political society to the participatory arrangements
themselves. Representative democracy is summoned to integrate proposals of
cultural recognition and social inclusion into the political-electoral debate.
The concept of complementarity is different from that of coexistence because,
as we have seen in the cases of Brazil and India, it implies a decision by
political society to expand participation at the local level through the transfer
and/or devolution of decision-making prerogatives at first held by governments.
Thus, both in the case of participatory budgeting in Brazil and the Panchayats in
India, regional assemblies or the decision by councillors stem from the option
taken by political society to articulate participation and representation.
It seems obvious that the first form of articulation between participatory

democracy and representative democracy (coexistence) prevails in the core

countries, while the second (complementarity) begins to emerge in
semiperipheral and peripheral countries. If such is the case, it is possible to
conclude that the deepening of democracy does not necessarily occur as a
result of the same characteristics present in the core countries where
democracy was first introduced and consolidated. The characteristics that
enabled democratic originality may not be necessarily the same characteristics
that enable its expanded and deepened reproduction. For this reason, the
problem of cultural innovation and institutional experimentalism becomes even
more urgent. If such a perspective is correct, the new democracies must
change themselves into absolutely new social movements, in the sense that the
state must change itself into a space of distributive and cultural
experimentation. It is in the originality of the new forms of institutional
experimentation that the emancipatory potentials still present in contemporary
societies may be found. In order to be realized, these potentials need to be
related to a society that accepts the renegotiation of the rules of its sociability,
believing that social greatness resides in the ability to invent and not imitate.
Theses to strengthen participatory democracy
We will conclude this introduction with three theses that seek to strengthen
participatory democracy.
1st thesis: The strengthening of demodiversity. This thesis implies the
recognition that there is no reason for democracy to assume a single form. On
the contrary, multiculturalism and the recent experiments in participation point in
the direction of widened public deliberation and an increase in participation. The
first important element of participatory democracy would be the deepening of
the cases in which the political system gives up decision-making prerogatives in
favour of participatory models.
2nd thesis. The strengthening of the counterhegemonic articulation between the
local and the global. New democratic experiments need the support of
transnational democratic actors in the cases in which democracy is weak, as
became clear in the case of Colombia. At the same time, alternative, successful
experiments such as that of Porto Alegre and the Panchayats in India need to
be expanded in order to offer alternatives to the hegemonic model. Therefore,
the counterhegemonic shift from the local to the global level is fundamental for
the strengthening of participatory democracy.
3rd thesis. The widening of democratic experimentalism. The above text shows
that the successful new experiments sprang from new social grammars in which
the format of participation was acquired experimentally. It is necessary for the
cultural, racial and distributive pluralization of democracy that experiments are
multiplied in all these directions.
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[1]

This debate began in the 19th century. Up until then, it was generally
assumed that democracy was dangerous, and, thus, undesirable. Its danger lay
in attributing power of government to those most ill-equipped to exercise it: the
great mass of the population, who were illiterate, ignorant and socially and
politically inferior (Williams, 1976: 82; Macpherson, 1972).
[2]
Like almost every debate about democracy, this one was anticipated
by Rousseau, when he stated in that a society could only be democratic when
there was no one so poor as to be compelled to sell themselves, and no one so
rich as to be able to buy someone.
[3]
We understand the concept of "hegemony" to be the economic,
political, moral and intellectual ability to establish a dominant direction in the
form of approaching a given question, in this case the question of democracy.

We also understand that every hegemonic process produces a

counterhegemonic process in which economic, political and moral alternatives
are developed. In the case of the current debate on democracy, this implies a
hegemonic and counterhegemonic conception of democracy. For the concept of
hegemony see Gramsci (1973).
[4]
The Schumpterian doctrine of democracy adopts wholesale the
argument of the manipulation of individuals in mass societies. For Schumpeter,
individuals in politics yield to irrational and extra-rational impulses and behave
in an almost infantile manner when making decisions (Schumpeter, 1942: 257).
He never sought to differentiate between large-scale mass mobilizations and
forms of collective action, which makes his argument about the manipulation of
the masses in politics extremely fragile. For a critique, see Melucci (1996) and
Avritzer (1996). The vulnerability of the Schumpeterian argument did not stop it
from being widely used by the hegemonic conceptions of democracy.
[5]
Bobbio analyzes, in a different way from Schumpeter, the reasons
why the participation of individuals in politics became undesirable. For him, the
central element that discourages participation is the increase in the social
complexity of contemporary democracies (Bobbio, 1986). The argument of
complexity as well as its limitations will be discussed later.
[6]
It is possible, nonetheless, to see that the explanation of the question
of consensus by the hegemonic theory of democracy leaves much to be desired
(Manin, 1997). For hegemonic theory, the problem of consensus becomes
relevant only in the act of constituting governments. However, the act of
constituting governments is an act of aggregating majorities, and rarely leads to
consensus in relation to the identity and accountability of the governing body.
Thus, if the explanation for abandoning the system of rotation of administrative
positions seems to be correct, it by no means leads to the recognition of the
superiority of the forms of representation in relation to the forms of participation.
It only points to the necessity of a different basis for participation-in this case,
consensus in relation to the rules of participation.
[7]
Among the authors of the hegemonic field, Adam Przeworski was the
one who most emphasized the problem of the indetermination of results in
democracy. For him, "democracy is a process of submitting all interests to the
competition of institutionalised uncertainty" (Przeworski, 1984: 37). However, for
Przeworski, institutionalised uncertainty is the uncertainty of whoever occupies
positions of power in a situation of democratization and whether this result can
be turned around or not. The concept of democracy with which we are working
here implies a higher level of indetermination in as far as it involves the
possibility of inventing a new democratic grammar.
[8]
The position of Habermas, however, tends to focus on a proposal of
democracy for certain social groups and countries of the North. Criticized for the
limitations of his concept of the public sphere (Fraser, 1995; Santos, 1995;
Avritzer, 2002), Habermas seems to have only made an effort to integrate social
actors from northern countries (see Habermas, 1992).
[9]
For some authors, this priority is inscribed in the very matrix of the
paradigm of western modernity, with its emphasis on the idea of progress based
on infinite economic growth. It is because of this that it occurred, although in
distinct ways, as much in capitalist societies, as in the socialist societies of
Eastern Europe (Marramao, 1995).

[10]

On this question, see also Sader, in the present volume of this

collection.

[11]

On this question, see also Sader, 2002.

On this question, see also Sader, 2002.
[13]
See Santos in the present volume of this collection
[14]
See Heller and Isaac in the present volume of this collection
[15]
The theme of identities and the principle of the recognition of
difference are treated in detail in the third volume of this collection.
[12]

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Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Learning from Genoa

Four Lessons in Globalization
Boaventura de Sousa Santos sees two different kinds of globalization that now
have to enter into a dialouge. As counter-hegemonic globalization grows, the
responsibility of its protagonists increases.
The lessons we learn from the recent events in Genoa during the G-8 meeting
are fourfold. We shall keep them in mind at the Second World Social Forum in
Porto Alegre in February 2002.First lesson: this kind of globalization is not
sustainable.The most important report of the G-8 meeting was prepared by
people who were not even there, that is to say, by the Ministers of Finance of
the seven richest countries. This report, entitled "The Debt Relief and Beyond,"
clearly reveals the insurmountable contradiction between neo-liberal economy
and the welfare of the majority of the world population. Duly acknowledging that
welfare depends today on relieving the poorest countries of their debt, the
report proclaims the success of the initiative in the case of 23 countries and
insists that, in the short run, debt sustainability will depend on the greater
integration of these countries in the world trade. However, the report itself
confirms that the participation of less developed countries in the world trade
decreased during the last decade, and that they got poorer as a result. Since no
radical changes are proposed in the document to improve this state of affairs,
there could be no greater hypocrisy: what has been recognized as their problem
is imposed upon half of the world population as their solution. Hypocrisy
reaches its outrageous peak in the case of the pandemics that afflict less
developed countries (HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis). After admitting that
these diseases will kill 15 million a year, the document maintains that the
production of more inexpensive drugs must be procured without violation of the
intellectual property rights of pharmaceutical multinationals.
The contradictions of this model are insurmountable because the liberalization
of exchanges without conditions is like a boxing bout between a heavyweight
and a featherweight. If Mali controlled the international price of cotton, its debt
would not be, as it currently is once again, "unsustainable." If Mozambique had
been allowed to resist the imposition of the World Bank to eliminate the tariffs
on raw cashew exports, it would not have destroyed its cashew processing
industry. There would be less famine in the world if the less developed countries

were allowed to protect their economic activities from the voracity displayed by
the 200 larger multinationals, which hold twenty-eight percent of global trade but
only one percent of global employment. If countries indebted in dollars could
fight the devaluation of their currency, their debts would not increase by way of
such devaluation. The balance of trade of less developed countries would not
deteriorate so drastically if their products were not subjected to the
protectionism of rich countries (the mother of all the hypocrisies of neoliberalism) and compelled to compete with highly subsidized products.Second
lesson: an alternative globalization is under way. As neo-liberalism drops its
mask, a global public opinion is beginning to emerge. It is based on national
governments being held hostage today to large economic interests, and
democracy disguising this dependency by being reasonably efficacious in areas
that do not interfere with such interests. Without forms of effective democratic
political control at the local, national, and global level, the incessant search for
profit creates disparities between the rich and the poor that are ethically
repugnant, and induces irreversible damage to the environment. Under an
economic model based on a sacrosanct respect for private property, the
inordinate lack of public control of the world's wealth lies in the fact that 50 of
the 100 major world GNP's do not belong to countries but rather to
multinationals. This model of (non-)civilization has feet of clay and can be
fought, its strength residing mainly in the apathy and conformism it provokes in
us. This global public opinion is beginning to give rise to hundreds of thousands
of non-governmental organizations and transnational advocacy networks that
gradually organize resistance to hegemonic globalization and formulate different
kinds of alternatives. Although these alternatives may conflict in their diversity,
one thing they have in common: The idea that human dignity is indivisible and
can only thrive in harmony with nature and in a society that does not reduce
values to market prices.Third lesson: the dialogue between the two kinds of
globalization is pressing and must not be postponed. Global capitalism represented by the governments of rich countries and the multilateral financial
and trade agencies they control - believed it would have it easy after the fall of
the Berlin Wall. On the contrary, it is now obliged to erect barriers of concrete
and steel so that its representatives may continue to take the decisions it
demands. The violence of the system feeds on the violence of some minority
groups that fight it. Above all, the system feeds on the its own failure to
recognize the alternative form of globalization put forward by all those who have
solidarity with the interests of the many millions of people that have been
excluded from meetings and fall victim to their decisions. The dialogue,
therefore, is urgent. Cynical rhetoric of empty concessions must give way to a
global social contract guaranteed by a new and equally global democratic
political framework. The dialogue will be difficult and no doubt confrontational,
but it is unavoidable.Fourth lesson: it is a long way from Genoa 2001 to Porto
Alegre 2002. As counter-hegemonic globalization grows, the responsibility of its
protagonists increases. This responsibility will be assessed on three levels:
organization, performance, and objectives. In every case, the tasks are highly
demanding. The energy of the movement for an alternative globalization resides
in its internal diversity and multiple objectives. Diversity will continue - if for no
other reason, then because the movement includes no group or organization
capable of co-opting or eliminating it to its own advantage. Nonetheless, as far
as organization is concerned, the means of co-ordination must be improved and

its democratic character guaranteed. Regarding performance, the movement

must distinguish between condemnable violence that must be repelled, and
acceptable illegality that must be supported whenever legal means are
insufficient or not available. At the same time as it brings about the deregulation
of every country's economy, global capitalism imposes a new legality that
renders illegal, for example, the protection of the rights of workers or the
environment. Every important democratic movement began in illegal activities
(rallies and unauthorized strikes, direct action, civil disobedience). A theory of
nonviolent democratic illegality is called for. Finally, regarding objectives, a
distinction must be made between first steps and horizons. Right now, first
steps are fairly well defined and ready to encourage the first and most difficult
moments of the dialogue between forms of globalization: effective pardon of the
debt; Tobin taxes; democratization of the decision processes of multilateral
trade agencies; submission to referenda of the most important decisions
concerning the liberalization of trade; inclusion of human rights, especially labor
and environmental rights, in new trade negotiations (particularly within the
World Trade Organization). Moreover, these first steps must be articulated with
a wider civilizational horizon, the horizon of a better world. Lest the current
system, unjust as it is, be replaced by another one, rendered even more unjust
by the perversion of counter-hegemonic objectives. These are the urgent tasks
on the agenda of Porto Alegre.
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2002-08-22-santos-en.html

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

The Processes of Globalisation

What is the current state of globalisation, how are we to understand the
processes involved and where will a globalised world system lead us? These
are some of the questions Boaventura de Sousa Santos aims to elucidate in a
thorough and wide ranging essay.
Arguing that our current globalisation is indeed something unparalleled in
history, Santos discusses the unequal economic and political realities between
North and South which globalisation enforces. Globalisation is to be understood
as a non-linear process marked by contradictory yet parallel discourses and
varying levels of intensity and speed. Even states however have to adopt as the
supremacy of the nation state is eroded, giving way to new transnational
alliances and the convergence of the judicial systems as the supreme regulator
of a globalised economy. Will all these processes usher into a new model of
social development, or will this lead to the crisis of the world system as others
fear?
1. Introduction

In the last three decades transnational interactions have intensified dramatically,

from the globalisation of production systems and financial transfers to the
worldwide dissemination of information and images through the media, or the

mass movements of people, whether as tourists or migrant workers or refugees.

The extraordinary range and depth of these transnational interactions have led
some authors to view them as a rupture with previous forms of cross-border
interactions, a new phenomena termed "globalisation" (Featherstone, 1990;
Giddens, 1990; Albrow and King, 1990), "global formation" (Chase-Dunn, 1991),
"global culture" (Appadurai, 1990, 1997; Robertson, 1992), "global system"
(Sklair, 1991), "global modernity'' (Featherstone et al., 1995), "global process"
(Friedman, 1994), "globalisation cultures" (Jameson and Miyoshi, 1998) or
"global cities" (Sassen, 1991, 1994; Fortuna, 1997). Giddens defines
globalisation as "the intensification of worlwide social relations which link distant
localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring
many miles away and vice versa" and accuses sociologists of an undue
attachment to the idea of "society" as a closed system (1990: 64). Similarly,
Featherstone challenges sociology to "both theorize and work out modes of
systematic investigation which can clarify these globalizing processes and
destructive forms of social life which render problematic what has long been
regarded as the basic subject matter for sociology: society conceived almost
exclusively as the bounded nation-state" (1990: 2). For the Lisbon Group,
globalisation is a phase which follows after internationalisation and
multinationalisation since, unlike them, it heralds the end of the national system
as the central nucleus for organized human activities and strategies (Grupo de
Lisboa, 1994).
A review of studies on the processes of globalisation reveals that we are facing
a multifaceted phenomenon containing economic, social, political, cultural,
religious and legal dimensions, all interlinked in complex fashion. Single cause
explanations and monolithic interpretations of the phenomenon therefore
appear inadequate. In addition, the globalisation of the last three decades,
instead of conforming to the modern Western model of globalisation - that is, to
a homogeneous and uniform globalisation - so keenly upheld by Leibniz as well
as Marx, as much in theories of modernization as in theories of dependent
development, seems to combine universality and the elimination of national
borders, on the one hand, with particularity, local diversity, ethnic identity and a
return to communitarian values, on the other. Moreover, it interacts in very
diverse ways with other, parallel transformations in the world system, such as
the dramatic rise in inequality between rich and poor countries and between the
rich and the poor inside each country, overpopulation, environmental disaster,
ethnic conflicts, international mass migration, the emergence of new states and
the collapse or decline of others, the proliferation of civil wars, globally
organized crime, formal democracy as a political condition for international aid,
etc.
Before offering an interpretation of contemporary globalisation, I will briefly
describe its dominant characteristics, from an economic, political and cultural
perspective. I will, in passing, allude to the three most important debates which
it has fostered, formulated in terms of the following questions: 1) is globalisation
a new or an old phenomenon? 2) is globalisation monolithic or does it have both
positive and negative aspects? 3) where does this increasing intensification of
globalisation lead? In the debates surrounding globalisation there is a strong
tendency to reduce it to purely economic dimensions. Without denying the

importance of this, I believe that it is also necessary to pay equal attention to its
social, political and cultural dimensions.
Referring to the dominant characteristics of globalisation may convey the idea
that globalisation is not only a linear process but also a process of consensus.
This is obviously false, as will be demonstrated later. Yet, although false, it
predominates. And, although false, it nonetheless contains a grain of truth.
Globalisation, far from being consensual, is, as we shall see, a vast and intense
area of conflict for various social groups, states and hegemonic interests, on the
one hand, and social groups, states and subordinate interests on the other and
even within the hegemonic camp there are greater or lesser divisions of this.
However, over and above all its internal divisions, the hegemonic camp acts on
the basis of the consensus of its most influential members. It is this consensus
that not only confers on globalisation its dominant characteristics, but also
legitimizes them as the only ones possible or appropriate. Just as in the case
with the concepts that preceded it, such as modernisation and development, the
concept of globalisation contains both a descriptive and a prescriptive
component. Given the breadth of the processes at work, the prescription is, in
fact, a vast set of prescriptions, all anchored in the hegemonic consensus. This
consensus is known as the "neo-liberal consensus" or the "Washington
Consensus", since it was in Washington in the mid eighties that the core states
in the world system subscribed to it, and it covers the future of the world
economy, development policies and, in particular, the role of the state in the
economy.
Not all the dimensions of globalisation were inscribed within this consensus in
the same way, but all were affected by its impact. The neo-liberal consensus
itself is a set of four consensuses, which we shall explore, out of which others
develop and will also be mentioned. This consensus has become relatively
weakened today by virtue of both the rising conflicts within the hegemonic camp
and the resistance which has been led by the subordinate or anti-hegemonic
camp to such an extent that the present period has already been termed the
post-Washington Consensus. However, it is this consensus which has led us to
where we are today and it is therefore the progenitor of the characteristics
which are dominant in globalisation today.
The different consensuses which constitute the neo-liberal consensus share a
main idea which constitutes a meta-consensus. This central idea is that we are
entering into a period in which deep political rifts are disappearing. The
imperialist rivalries between the hegemonic countries, which in the XX century
have provoked two world wars, have disappeared, giving rise to
interdependence between the great powers, cooperation and regional
integration. Nowadays only small wars exist, many of which are of low intensity
and almost always on the periphery of the world system. In any case, the core
countries, through various mechanisms (selective intervention, manipulation of
international aid, control via the external debt) have the means to keep these
focuses for instability under control. Moreover, conflicts between capital and
labour which, due to poor institutionalisation, contributed towards the
emergence of fascism and Nazism, became fully institutionalised in the core
countries after the Second World War. Today, in the post-Fordist era, such

conflicts are becoming relatively de-institutionalised without causing any

instability since, in the meantime, the working class has fragmented and new
class agreements are emerging which are less institutionalised and take place
in less corporate contexts.
The idea that rifts between the different models of social transformation are
disappearing also forms part of this meta-consensus. The first three quarters of
the XX century were dominated by rivalries between two antagonistic models:
revolution and reformism. If, on the one hand, the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the fall of the Berlin Wall meant the end of the revolutionary paradigm, the
crisis in the Welfare State in the central and semi-peripheral countries means
that the reformist paradigm is equally condemned. The East-West conflict has
disappeared and brought in its wake the North-South conflict, which never was
a true conflict and which is nowadays a fertile field for interdependence and
cooperation. In the face of this, social transformation is, from now onwards, no
longer a political question but a technical question. It is nothing more than the
accelerated repetition of the cooperative relationships existing between social
groups and states.
Fukuyama (1992), with his idea of the end of history, conveyed this idea of the
meta-consensus. Huntington (1993) seconded him with his idea of the "clash of
civilisations", claiming that the rifts were now no longer political but civilisational.
It is the absence of political rifts in the modern West that led Huntington to
reinvent them in terms of a rupture between the West, now understood as a
type of civilization, and what he mysteriously termed the "Islamic-Confucionist
connection". This meta-consensus and those which emerge from it underlie the
dominant characteristics of a multifaceted globalisation which will be described
here. From what has been said so far and from the analysis which will follow, it
becomes clear that the dominant characteristics of globalisation are the
characteristics of the dominant or hegemonic globalisation. But later, a crucial
distinction will be made between hegemonic globalisation and anti-hegemonic
globalisation.
2. Economic globalisation and neo-liberalism
At the beginning of the eighties, Frbel, Heinrichs and Kreye (1980) were
probably the first to speak of the emergence of a new international division of
labour, based on the globalisation of production, which had been accomplished
by the multinational companies, gradually converted into central actors in the
new world economy. The main features of this new world economy are as
follows: an economy dominated by the financial system and by investment on a
global scale, flexible and multi-locational production processes, low transport
costs, a revolution in information technology and communications, the
deregulation of national economies, the preeminence of the multilateral financial
agencies, and the emergence of the three major transnational economies: the
American, based in the USA and on the special relations this country maintains
with Canada, Mexico and Latin America; the Japanese, based in Japan and on
its special relations with the four small tigers and the rest of Asia; and the
European, based on the European Union and on its special relations with East
Europe and North Africa.

These transformations have come to traverse the whole world system, although
at unequal levels of intensity, in accordance with the various positions of
countries within the world system. The implications of these transformations for
national economic policies can be summarized in the following trends or
requirements: national economies must open themselves up to the world
market and domestic prices must accommodate themselves to international
prices; priority should be given to the economics of exportation; monetary and
fiscal policies should be guided towards a reduction in inflation and the national
debt and towards vigilance in the balance of payments; rights of private
ownership should be clear and inviolable; the entrepreneurial sector of the state
should be privatized; private decision-making, supported by stable prices,
should dictate national patterns of specialisation; there should be mobility of
resources, investments and profits; state regulation of the economy should be
minimal; social policies should have less priority in the state budget, with a
reduction in the amount of welfare payments so that they are no longer
universally applied but act only as compensatory measures for the social strata
who become obviously more vulnerable as a result of market operations. [1]
Focusing on the urban impact of economic globalisation, Saskia Sassen detects
profound changes in the geography, composition and institutional structure of
the global economy (Sassen, 1994: 10). In terms of the new geography, she
argues that "compared to the 1950s, the 1980s saw a narrowing of the
geography of the global economy and a far stronger East-West axis. This is
evident in the sharp growth of investment and trade within what is often referred
to as the triad: the United States, Western Europe, and Japan"(Sassen,
1994:10). Another characteristic of the new geography is that direct foreign
investment, of which Latin America was for some time the major beneficiary,
has became directed towards East, South and Southeast Asia, where the
annual growth rate rose, on average, by 37% per year between 1985 and 1989.
Moreover, whilst, during the fifties, the major international flow was world trade,
concentrated on raw materials and other commodities and manufactured
resources, from the eighties onwards the gap between the growth rate of
exports and the growth rate of the financial flow rose drastically: after the 198182 crisis and until 1990, direct global foreign investment increased on average
by 29% per year, a historic rise (Sassen, 1994: 14).
Therefore, in terms of institutional structure, Sassen claims that we are now
facing a new international regime, based on the ascendancy of banking and
international services. The multinational companies are now an important
element in institutional structure, together with the global financial markets and
transnational commercial blocks. According to Sassen, all these changes have
contributed to the formation of new strategic locations in the world economy:
export processing zones, offshore financial centres and global cities (Sassen,
1994: 18). One of the most striking transformations produced by neo-liberal
economic globalisation lies in the huge concentration of economic power in the
hands of the multinational companies: of the 100 largest world economies, 47
are multinational companies; 70% of world trade is controlled by 500
multinational companies and 1% of the multinational companies holds 50% of
direct foreign investment (Clarke, 1996).
In short, economic globalisation is sustained by the neo-liberal economic

consensus, whose three main institutional innovations are: drastic restrictions

on state regulation of the economy, new rights of international ownership for
foreign investors, inventors and creators of innovations likely to become
intellectual property (Robinson, 1995: 373) and the subordination of national
states to multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organisation. Given the general
nature of this consensus, its prescriptions have been applied either with
extreme rigour (the iron fist method) or with a degree of flexibility (the velvet
glove method). For example, Asian countries avoided applying them in their
entirety for a long time and some countries, such as India and Malaysia, have
only succeeded in applying them selectively even today.
As we shall see, it is the peripheral and semi-peripheral countries which are
most subject to the impositions of the neo-liberal prescriptions, since these can
be transformed by the multilateral financial agencies into conditions for
renegotiating the external debt via structural readjustment programmes. Yet,
given the rising predominance of financial logic over the real economy, even the
core states, whose public debt has been increasing, are subject to the decisions
of the financial rating agencies, or in other words, those companies
internationally accredited to assess the financial situation of states and the
consequent risks and opportunities which they offer to international investors.
For example, the low marks awarded by the company Moodys to the national
debt of Sweden and Canada in the mid-nineties was decisive in affecting the
cuts to social spending adopted by these countries (Chossudovsky, 1997: 18).
3. Social globalisation and inequality
As far as socio-political relations are concerned, it has been claimed that,
although the modern world system has always been structured by a class
system, a transnational capitalist class has now emerged whose field of social
reproduction is the globe itself, since it easily bypasses national workers
organisations, as well as the externally weak peripheral and semi-peripheral
states in the world system.
The multinational companies are the main institutional form of this transnational
capitalist class and the magnitude of the transformations which they are
creating in the world economy is patent in the fact that more than a third of the
world's industrial product is produced by them, and an even higher percentage
traded amongst them. Although the newness of the structure of the multinational
companies may be questioned, it seems evident that their prevalence in the
world economy and the level and efficiency of the centralized management
which they have acquired distinguish them from earlier forms of international
companies (Becker and Sklar, 1987: 2).
The impact of multinational companies on new class formations and on
inequality on a world scale has been widely debated during recent years. Within
the tradition of dependency theory, Evans was one of the first to analyse the
"triple alliance" between the multinational companies, the local capitalist elite
and what he calls the "state bourgeoisie" as a basis for the dynamics of
industrialization and economic growth of a semi-peripheral country such as
Brazil (Evans, 1979, 1986). Becker and Sklar, who proposed a theory of post-

Imperialism, spoke of an emerging executive bourgeoisie, a new social class

arising from relations between the administrative sector of the state and the
large private or privatized companies. This new class is composed of a local
and an international branch. The local branch, the national bourgeoisie, is a
broad social category which encompasses the entrepreneurial elite, company
directors, high-ranking state officials and influential political and professional
leaders. In spite of their heterogeneity, these different groups constitute a class,
according to the authors, "because its members, despite the diversity of their
parochial interests, share a common situation of socio-economic privilege and a
common class interest in the relations of political power and social control that
are intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production." The international branch, the
international bourgeoisie, is composed of the managers of the multinational
companies and the directors of the international financial institutions (Becker
and Sklar, 1987: 7).
The new social inequalities produced by this class structure have become fully
recognised by the same multinational agencies who have been the leaders of
this model of globalisation, such as the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund. For Evans, the model of industrialisation and growth based on
the "triple alliance" is inherently unjust and only capable of a certain type of
redistribution "from the mass of the population to the state burgeoisie, the
multinationals and the state local capital. The maintenance of the delicate
balance among the three partners militates against any possibility of dealing
seriously with questions of income redistribution in principle" (Evans, 1979:
288). In more recent comparisons between models and patterns of social
inequality in Latin America and East Asia, Evans adds other factors which, in his
opinion, may have contributed to the fact that the Asian model of development
has produced relatively less inequality than the Brazilian one. From amongst
these, what counts in favour of the Asian model is the greater autonomy of the
state, the efficiency of the state bureaucracy, agrarian reform and the existence
of an initial period of protection in relation to the capitalism of the core countries
(1987).[2]
It is evident today that the iniquities of the distribution of the world's wealth have
worsened during recent decades: 54 of the 84 least developed countries saw
their per capita GDP decrease in the 80s; in 14 of them this decrease was
around 35%; according to the 2001 United Nations Development Programme
Report (PNUD, 2001) more than 1.2 billion people (a little less than 1/4 of the
world's population) live in absolute poverty, or, in other words, on an income of
less than a dollar a day, and another 2.8 billion only live on twice this amount
(UNDP, 2001: 9).[3]According to the 1995 World Bank Development Report, the
group of poor countries, in which 85.2% of the world's population live, possess
only 21.5% of the world's income, whilst the group of rich countries,
representing 14.8% of the world population possess 78.5% of the world's
income. An average African family nowadays consumes 20% less than it did 25
years ago. According to the World Bank, the African continent is the only one in
which, between 1970 and 1997, there was a decrease in food production (World
Bank, 1998).
The increase in inequalities has become so accelerated and so great that it is

reasonable to see the last few decades as a revolt on the part of the elites
against the redistribution of wealth, which thus ends the period of a qualified
democratisation of wealth begun after the Second World War. According to the
Human Development Report of the PNUD for 1999, the 20% of the world's
population living in the richest countries possessed, in 1997, 86% of the world's
gross product, whilst the 20% of the world's poorest people held only 1%.
According to the same Report, in relation to 2001, 79% of Internet users are
concentrated in the richest fifth of the world. Inequalities such as these show
how far we are from a truly global information society. The size of the electronic
communication band in So Paulo, one of the global societies, is bigger than
that of the whole of Africa. The size of the user band in the whole of Latin
America is almost the same as that which is available for the city of Seoul
(UNDP, 2001: 3).
In the last thirty years, inequality in the distribution of revenue between
countries has increased dramatically. The difference in revenue between the
five richest and the five poorest was, in 1960, 30 to 1, in 1990, 60 to 1 and, in
1997, 74 to 1. The 200 richest people in the world more than doubled their
wealth between 1994 and 1998. The wealth of the three richest billionaires in
the world exceeded the sum of the gross domestic product of the 48 least
developed countries in the world (UNDP, 2001).
The concentration of wealth produced by neo-liberal globalisation has reached
scandalous proportions in the country which has led the implementation of the
new economic model, the USA. Already by the end of the eighties, according to
data from the Federal Reserve Bank, 1% of North American families held 40%
of the country's wealth and the richest 20% held 80% of the wealth of the
country. According to the Bank, this concentration had no precedent in the
history of the USA and no comparison with any other industrialized country
(Mander, 1996: 11).
In terms of social globalisation, the neo-liberal consensus is what growth and
economic stability use as the basis for a reduction in salary costs, for which it is
necessary to liberalise the labour market by reducing labour costs, outlawing
the indexing of salaries to increases in productivity and adjustments in relation
to the cost of living, and eliminating legislation on minimum wages. The aim is
to prevent "the inflationary impact of salary increases". The contraction of
domestic purchasing power resulting from this policy should be resolved by
searching out foreign markets. The economy is thus desocialised, the concept
of the consumer replaces that of the citizen and the criteria for inclusion is no
longer a right, but a condition of being solvent. The poor are the insolvent
(including those consumers who have overstepped their debt limits). The
measures adopted to fight poverty should preferably be compensatory
measures to lessen, but not eliminate, exclusion, since it is an inevitable (and
therefore justifiable) effect of development based on economic growth and
global competition. This neo-liberal consensus amongst the core countries is
also imposed on peripheral and semi-peripheral countries through control of the
external debt, effected by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Hence these two institutions are considered responsible for the "globalisation of
poverty" (Chossudovsky, 1997). The new globalised poverty is not the result of

any lack of human or material resources, but of unemployment, the destruction

of subsistence economies and the reductions in salary costs on a worldwide
scale.
According to the World Health Organisation, poor countries suffer 90% of the
illnesses which occur in the world, but do not possess more than 10% of the
resources which are spent globally on health; one fifth of the world's population
has no access to modern health services and half of the world's population has
no access to essential medicines. Health is perhaps the area in which the
inequities of the world are revealed most shockingly. According to the latest
United Nations Human Development Report, in 1998, 968 million people had no
access to drinking water and 2.4 billion (a little less than half the world's
population) had no access to basic health care; in 2000, 34 million people were
infected with HIV/AIDS, of whom 24.5 million were in Sub-Saharan Africa
(UNAIDS, 2000: 6); in 1998, 12 million children (under 5 years of age) died
each year of curable illnesses (UNICEF, 2000). The illnesses which affect the
poor populations of the world most are malaria, tuberculosis and diarrhea. [4]
Moreover, nothing could be more shocking in this survey than the worldwide
distribution of spending on health and medical research. For example, only
0.1% of the budget for world medical and pharmaceutical research - around 100
million dollars in 1998 (UNDP, 2001: 3) - is destined to be spent on malaria,
whilst almost all of the 26.4 billion dollars invested in research by the
multinational pharmaceutical companies is destined to be spent on the so-called
"illnesses of the rich countries": cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diseases of
the nervous system, endocrine and metabolism diseases. This is hardly
surprising if we bear in mind the fact that Latin America represents only 4% of
global pharmaceutical sales and Africa 1%. This is also why only 1% of the new
drugs commercially developed by the pharmaceutical companies between 1975
and 1997 were specifically destined for the treatment of the tropical diseases
which affect the Third World (Silverstein, 1999).
In spite of the shocking rise in inequality between poor and rich countries, only
four of the latter fulfill their moral obligation to contribute 0.7% of their Gross
Domestic Product to aid development. Moreover, according to data from the
OECD, this percentage dropped, between 1987 and 1997, from 0.33 to 0.22
(OECD/DAC, 2000). The most perverse factor in international aid programmes
is that they mask other mechanisms for financial transfer, in which the flow is
predominantly from the poorer to the richer countries. This is what happens, for
example, with the external debt. The total value of the external debt in SubSaharan African countries (in millions of dollars) rose between 1980 and 1995
from 84.19 to 226.483; during the same period, as a percentage of the GDP, it
rose from 30.6% to 81.3% and, as a percentage of exports, from 91.7% to
241.7% (World Bank, 1997: 247). At the end of the XX century Africa was
paying 1.31 dollars in external debt for every dollar of international aid which it
received (World Bank, 2000). The International Monetary Fund has basically
functioned as an institution which guarantees that poor countries, many of
which are becoming even poorer and falling further into debt, pay their debts to
rich countries (in the form of states, private banks, and multilateral agencies)
under terms (interest rates, for example) imposed by them. In addition, the
liquid transfer from South to North is assuming many other forms, such as, the

"brain drain" : according to the United Nations, around 100,000 Indian

professionals have emigrated to the USA, representing a 2 billion dollar loss for
India (UNDP, 2001: 5).
4. Political globalisation and the nation state
The new international division of labour, in conjunction with the new "promarket"political economy has also brought important changes to the inter-state
system, the political form of the modern world system. On the one hand, the
hegemonic states, are, either themselves or through the international
institutions they control, (especially the multilateral financial institutions),
constraining the political autonomy and effective sovereignty of the peripheral
and semi-peripheral states with an unprecedented intensity, although the ability
of the latter to resist and negotiate may vary immensely. On the other hand,
there has been an increased tendency towards inter-state political agreements
(the European Union, NAFTA, Mercosul). In the case of the European Union,
these agreements have evolved through forms of joint or shared sovereignty.
Last, but by no means least, the nation state seems to have lost its traditional
centrality as the as the favoured unit for economic, social and political initiatives.
Intensifying interactions across borders and transnational practices have eroded
the ability of the nation state to guide or control the flow of people, goods,
capital or ideas as it did in the past.
Far from being a new phenomenon, the impact of the international context on
the regulation of the nation state is inherent in the modern interstate system and
inscribed in the Treaty of Westphalia itself (1648), which established it. Nor is
the fact that the international context tends to exert a particularly strong
influence over the legal regulation of the economy anything new, as can be
witnessed in the various projects for the standardization and unification of
economic law developed throughout the XX century by specialists in
comparative law and implemented by international organisations and national
governments. As the names of the projects themselves indicate, international
pressure has traditionally been felt in uniformity and standardisation, clearly
illustrated by the pioneering projects of Ernest Rabel at the beginning of the 30s
and by the establishment of the International Institute for the Unification of
Private Law (UNIDROIT), which aimed to unify international contract law and
led, for example, to a uniform law for the drawing up of international sales
contracts (ULFIS, 1964) and a Convention on the international sales of goods
(CISG, 1980) (van der Velden, 1984: 233).
The tradition of globalisation is, for some, even longer.Tilly, for example,
distinguishes between four waves of globalisation in the previous millennium: in
the 13th, 16th and 19th centuries and at the end of the 20th century (1995).
Despite this historical tradition, the current impact of globalisation on state
regulation seems to be a qualitatively new phenomenon for two main reasons.
Firstly, it is a very broad and vast phenomenon which covers a very large area
of state intervention requiring drastic changes to the model of intervention. For
Tilly, what distinguishes the present wave of globalisation from the one which
took place in the XIX century is the fact that the latter contributed towards
strengthening of the powers of the central (Western) states, whilst current
globalisation is weakening the powers of the state. The pressure on states is

now relatively monolithic - the "Washington Consensus" - and under its terms
the market-orientated model of development is the only model compatible with
the new global regime of accumulation, so that it is therefore necessary to
impose structural adjustment policies on a global scale. This central pressure
operates and reinforces itself in conjunction with such phenomena and
developments as the end of the Cold War, the dramatic new innovations in
communications and information technology, the new flexible systems of
production, the emergence of regional blocks, the proclamation of liberal
democracy as a universal political regime, the global imposition of a standard
legal model for the protection of intellectual property, etc.
When compared to previous processes of transnationalisation, the scope of
these pressures becomes particularly evident, since they occur after decades of
intense state regulation of the economy, in the core countries as well as in the
peripheral and semi-peripheral countries. The creation of standard and
institutionalised requirements for the operations of the neo-liberal model of
development therefore involves such wholesale institutionalised and uniform
destruction that it affects not only the role the state plays in the economy, but
also the global legitimacy of the state to organize society.
The second new factor in present day political globalisation is that the
asymmetrical balance of transnational power between the core and the
periphery of the world system i.e., between North and South, is nowadays much
more dramatic than ever before. In fact, the sovereignty of the weakest states is
now directly threatened, not so much by the most powerful states, as had been
the case in the past, but, above all, by the international financial agencies and
other private transnational actors, such as multinational companies. The
pressure is thus supported by a relatively cohesive transnational coalition using
powerful, worldwide resources.
Taking into account the situation in Europe and North America, Bob Jessop
identifies three general trends in the transformation of state power. Firstly, the
denationalisation of the state, a particular stripping down of national state
apparatuses resulting from the fact that both the old and new capacities of the
state are being reorganised, territorially as well as functionally, at both a subnational and a supra-national level. Secondly, the denationalisation of political
regimes, reflected in the transition from the concept of government to that of
governance, or rather from a model of social and economic regulation based on
the central role of the state, to one which is based on partnerships and other
forms of association with governmental, para-governmental and nongovernmental organisations, in which the state apparatus exercises only
coordinating tasks as a primus inter pares. Finally, a tendency towards the
internationalisation of the national state, reflected in the rising strategic impact
of the international context on state activities, which can involve expanding the
field of action of the national state whenever internal circumstances need to be
accommodated to extra-territorial or transnational demands (Jessop, 1995:2).
Although not entirely absorbed by it, it is in the field of economics that the
transnationalisation of state regulation has acquired the greatest saliency. As far
as the peripheral and semi-peripheral countries are concerned, the policies of

"structural adjustment" and of "macroeconomic stabilisation" - imposed as a

condition for the renegotiation of the external debt - cover a huge area of
economic intervention, causing great upheaval in the social contract, in legal
frameworks and in institutional moulds: the liberalisation of markets; the
privatisation of industries and services; the deactivation of regulatory and
licensing agencies; the deregulation of the labour market and the "flexibility" of
salary negotiations; the, at least partial, reduction and privatisation of welfare
services (privatisation of pension schemes, the sharing of social services costs
by the users, more restrictions on eligibility for social assistance, expansion of
the so-called third sector (the private, non-profit making sector), the creation of
markets within the state itself, such as, for example, commercial competition
between public hospitals); less concern over environmental issues; educational
reform directed more towards professional training than building citizenship; etc.
All these demands of the "Washington Consensus" require substantial legal and
institutional changes. Given that these changes take place at the end of a
relatively lengthy period of state intervention in social and economic life
(notwithstanding considerable differences within the world system), the
retraction of the state can only be achieved through strong state intervention.
The state has to intervene in order to no longer intervene, or, in other words, it
has to regulate its own deregulation.
A deeper analysis of the dominant features of political globalisation - which are,
in fact, the features of the dominant political globalisation - leads to the
conclusion that three components of the Washington Consensus underlie it: the
consensus of the weak state, the consensus of liberal democracy and the
consensus of the supremacy of the law and the judicial system.
The consensus of the weak state is, without doubt, the most central and there is
ample proof of this in what has been previously written. It is based on the idea
that the state is the opposite of civil society and potentially its enemy. The neoliberal economy needs a strong civil society and it requires the state to be weak
in order for it to exist. The state inherently oppresses and limits civil society, and
only by reducing its size is it possible to reduce its harmful effects and thus
strengthen civil society. Hence the weak state tends also to be a minimal state.
This idea was originally defended by liberal political theory, but was gradually
abandoned once national capitalism, as a social and political relationship,
demanded greater state intervention. Thus, the idea of the state as the opposite
of civil society was replaced with the idea of the state as the mirror of civil
society. From that point onwards, a strong state became a condition for a strong
civil society. The consensus of the weak state aims to reintroduce the original
liberal idea.
This repositioning has proved to be extremely complex and contradictory and,
perhaps because of this, the consensus of the weak state is, of all the neoliberal consensuses, the most fragile and the one most subject to correction.
This is because the "shrinking" of the state - produced by well-known
mechanisms such as deregulation, privatisation and the reduction of public
services - occurs at the end of a period of around one hundred and fifty years of
continuous regulatory state expansion. Therefore, as previously mentioned,
deregulation implies intense state regulatory activity in order to end former state

regulation and to create the standards and institutions which will preside over
the new model of social regulation. Such activities can only be accomplished by
an effective and relatively strong state. Just as the state has to intervene in
order to stop intervening, only a strong state can efficiently create its own
weakness. This contradiction was responsible for the strategic failure of USAID
and the World Bank in the political reform of the Russian state after the collapse
of communism. The reforms were based on the almost total dismantling of the
Soviet state in the expectation that a weak state would emerge out of the ruins
and, consequently, a strong civil society. To the surprise of the originators, what
actually emerged out of these reforms was a mafia-style government (Hendley,
1995). Perhaps because of this, the consensus of the weak state was the one
which first gave signs of weakness, as the World Bank 1997 report dedicated to
the state clearly shows, in which the idea of state regulation is resurrected and
the main emphasis is on effective state action (World Bank, 1997).
The consensus of liberal democracy aims to give a political shape to the weak
state by once more resorting to liberal political theory which, particularly when it
originated, had defended the necessary convergence of political liberty and
economic liberty, free elections and free markets as two sides of the same coin:
the common good achieved through the actions of utilitarian individuals involved
in competitive exchanges with the minimum of state interference. The global
imposition of this hegemonic consensus has created many problems, not the
least because it is a monolithic model applied to very distinct societies and
circumstances. For this reason, the democratic model adopted as a political
condition for international aid and finance tends to become converted into an
abbreviated version, if not a caricature of liberal democracy. To verify this, it is
enough to compare the politics of the countries subject to World Bank
conditions with the characteristics of liberal democracy as described by David
Held: an elected government; free and fair elections in which each citizen's vote
carries equal weight; suffrage for all citizens regardless of race, religion, class,
sex etc., freedom of conscience, information and expression in all broadlydefined public matters; the right of all adults to oppose the government and
stand for election; freedom and independence of association, understood as the
right to create independent associations, including social movements, interest
groups and political parties (1993: 21). Clearly the irony of this list is that the
real democracies of the hegemonic countries themselves are, if not caricatures,
at the very least, abbreviated versions of this model of liberal democracy.
The consensus of the supremacy of the law and the judicial system is one of the
essential components of the new political form of the state and it is also the one
which best seeks to bind political globalisation to economic globalisation. The
model of development guaranteed by the Washington Consensus demands a
new legal framework suited to the liberalisation of markets, investments and the
financial system. In a model based on privatisation, private initiative and market
supremacy, the principles of order, reliability and trust cannot be commanded by
the state. They can only come from the law and the judicial system, as a set of
independent and universal systems which create standard expectations and
resolve litigation through legal frameworks which are presumed to be
understood by everyone. The preeminence of individual ownership and of
contacts further reinforces the supremacy of the law. In addition, the expansion

of consumerism, which is the driving force behind economic globalisation, is not

possible without the institutionalisation and popularisation of consumer credit
and this is not possible without the creditable threat of sanctions for those who
are unable to pay, which, in turn, is only made possible by the extent to which
an effective judicial system operates.
In terms of the Washington Consensus, the central responsibility of the state is
to create a legal framework and effective conditions within which the legal and
judicial institutions can function to make the routine flow of infinite interactions
possible between citizens, economic agents and the state itself.
Another important theme in the analysis of the political dimensions of
globalisation is the increasing role of supra-state forms of government, or, in
other words, the international political agencies, the multilateral financial
agencies, the supra-national political and economic blocs, the global think
tanks, the different forms of global law (ranging from the new lex mercatoria to
human rights). Again, in this case, the phenomenon is not new, since the
interstate system we have lived under since the 17th century has, particularly
since the 19th century, promoted standard international consensuses which
translate into international organisations. Then, as today, these organisations
have functioned as the common property of the core countries. What is new is
the extent and power of transnational institutionalisation over the last three
decades. This is one of the senses in which the emergence of global
governance (Murphy, 1994) has come to be used. The other sense, which is
more prospective and utopian, relates to the enquiry into the transnational
political institutions which will, in future, correspond to the economic and social
globalisation currently in progress (Falk, 1995; Chase-Dunn et al., 1998). They
refer to the need to think in terms of a "world state" or "world federation" , which
is democratically controlled and whose function is to peacefully resolve conflicts
between states and global agents. Some authors have transposed the structural
conflicts of the previous period onto the new arena of globalisation and imagine
the political counterparts which this will bring into being. Just as the global
capitalist class is attempting to form its own global state with the World Trade
Organisation as its vanguard, so the socialist forces should create a "world
party" to serve the "world socialist community"or "global democratic community"
based on collective rationality, liberty and equality (Chase-Dunn et al., 1998).
5. Cultural globalisation or global culture?
Cultural globalisation has assumed a special relevance with the so-called
"cultural swing" of the eighties, or, in other words, the change of emphasis in the
social sciences from socio-economic phenomena to cultural phenomena. The
"cultural swing" has rekindled the question of causal pre-eminence in the
explanation of social life and, with this, the question of the impact of cultural
globalisation.[5] The question is to determine whether the normative and cultural
dimensions of the process of globalisation play a primary or a secondary role.
Whilst for some they have a secondary role, given that the capitalist world
economy is more integrated into political and military power and market
independence then into a normative and cultural consensus (Chase-Dunn,
1991: 88), for others, political power, cultural domination and institutionalized
values and norms precede market dependence in the development of the world

system and the stability of the interstate system (Meyer, 1987; Bergesen, 1990).
Wallerstein sociological reading of this debate claims that "it is no accident [...]
that there has been so much discussion these past 10 to 15 years about the
problem of culture. It follows upon the decomposition of the nineteenth century
double faith in the economic and political arenas as loci of social progress and
therefore of individual salvation" (Wallerstein, 1991a: 198).
Although the question of the original matrix of globalisation is posed in relation
to each of the dimensions of globalisation, it is in the domain of cultural
globalisation that it is posed more acutely or more frequently. The issue is to
determine whether what is termed globalisation should not be more correctly
termed Westernisation or Americanisation (Ritzer, 1995), since the values,
cultural artifacts and universal symbols which are globalised are Western and,
often, specifically North American, whether individualism, political democracy,
economic rationality, utilitarianism, the supremacy of law, the cinema,
advertising, television, the Internet etc.
In this context, the electronic media, especially television, have become one of
the great issues of the debate. Although the importance of the globalisation of
the media is emphasised by all, not everyone draws the same conclusions from
this. Appadurai, for example, sees in this one of the two factors (the other is
mass migration) responsible for the rupture with the period we have just left
behind (the world of modernisation) and the period we are just entering (the
post-electronic world) (Appadurai, 1997). The new period is distinguished by
"work of the imagination", due to the fact that the imagination has been
transformed into a social and collective fact. It is no longer confined to the
romantic individual and the expressive space of art, myth and ritual but is part of
the everyday life of ordinary citizens (ibid.: 5). The post-electronic imagination,
combined with the dispossession caused by migrations, has enabled the
creation of transnational symbolic universes, "communities of feeling",
prospective identities, shared tastes, pleasures and aspirations, in sum, what
Appadurai calls "public diaspora spheres"(ibid.: 4). From another perspective,
Octvio Ianni speaks of the "electronic principle"- the set of electronic,
informational and cybernetic technologies for information and communication,
with particular reference to television - which have turned themselves into
"architects of the electronic agora in which everybody is represented, reflected,
deflected or disfigured, without the risk of sociability, or of experience" (Ianni,
1998: 17).
This theme acts in conjunction with another equally central one within the
context of cultural globalisation, that of determining to what point globalisation
creates homogeneity. If, for some authors, the specific features of local and
national cultures are at risk (Ritzer, 1995), for others globalisation produces
homogeneity as much as it produces diversity (Robertson and Khondker, 1998).
Institutional similarity, particularly in economic and political domains, coexists
with the affirmation of differences and particularities. For Friedman , cultural and
ethnic fragmentation on the one hand and modernist homogeneity on the other,
are not two opposing perspectives of what is taking place, but rather two trends
which both constitute global reality (Featherstone, 1990: 311). In the same way,
Appadurai emphasizes that the electronic media, far from being the opium of

the people, are actively processed by individuals and by groups, and are fertile
ground for exercises in resistance, selectivity and irony (1997: 7). Appadurai
has come to stress the growing role of the imagination in a social life dominated
by globalisation. It is through imagination that citizens are disciplined and
controlled by states, markets and other dominant interests but it is also through
imagination that citizens develop collective systems of dissidence and new
representations of collective life (1999: 230).
What is not clear in these positions is the elucidation of the social power
relations which preside over the production of both homogeneity and
differentiation. Without this elucidation these two "results" of globalisation are
both put on the same footing, without determining the ties and the hierarchy
between them. This elucidation is particularly useful for a critical analysis of the
process of hybridisation or creolisation which result from the confrontation or
cohabitation of homogenizing trends and particularizing trends (Hall and
McGrew, 1992; Appadurai, 1997: 43).
Another central theme in the discussion of the cultural dimensions of
globalisation - also related to the previous debate - refers to the question of
determining whether, in recent decades, a global culture has emerged
(Featherstone, 1990; Waters, 1995). It has been understood for a long time that
since at least the 16th century a hegemonic ideology of European science,
economics, politics and religion has produced, through cultural imperialism,
some similarities between the different national cultures in the world system.
The question now is to know whether, in addition to this, certain cultural forms
have emerged in recent decades which are transnational in origin or whose
national origins are relatively unimportant in view of the fact that they circulate
throughout the world more or less without roots in any national culture. These
cultural forms are identified by Appadurai as mediascapes and ideoscapes
(1990), by Leslie Sklair (1991) as the consumerist culture-ideology and by
Anthony Smith as a new cultural imperialism (1990). From another perspective,
the theory of international regimes has begun to draw our attention towards the
processes of forming consensuses on a world level and to the emergence of a
normative global order (Keohane and Nye, 1977; Keohane, 1985; Krasner,
1983; Haggard and Simmons, 1987). And, from yet another perspective, the
theory of international structure accentuates the way in which Western culture
has created social actors and significant cultures for the whole world (Thomas
et al., 1987).
The idea of a global culture is clearly one of the main projects of modernity. As
Stephen Toulmin (1990) brilliantly demonstrates, this can be identified from
Leibniz to Hegel and from the 17th century until our own. Sociological attention
given to this idea in the last three decades has, nevertheless, had a specific
empirical base. It is believed that the dramatic intensification of transfrontier
flows of goods, capital, work, people, ideas and information has given rise to
convergences, similarities and hybrids between the different national cultures,
whether they are architectural styles, fashion, eating habits or cultural
consumption. Nevertheless most of the authors maintain that, although
important, these processes are far from leading to a global culture.

Culture is, by definition, a social process constructed on the intersection

between the universal and the particular. As Wallerstein points out, "defining a
culture is a question of defining frontiers" (1991a: 187). Similarly, Appadurai
states that the cultural is the arena of differences, contrasts and comparisons
(1997: 12). We may even state that that culture is, in its simplest definition, the
struggle against uniformity. The powerful and involved processes of the diffusion
and imposition of culture, imperialistically defined as universal, have been
confronted throughout the world system by multiple and ingenious processes of
cultural resistance, identification and indigenisation. However, the topic of global
culture does have the merit of showing that the political struggle surrounding
cultural homogeneity and uniformity has transcended the territorial configuration
in which it was located from the 19th century until very recently, that is, the
nation state.
In this respect, the nation states have traditionally played a very ambiguous
role. Whilst externally they have been the heralds of cultural diversity and the
authenticity of national culture, internally they have promoted homogeneity and
uniformity, crushing the rich variety of local cultures existing in within national
territories through the power of politics, law, the education system or the media
and, more often than not, through all of them together. This role has been
carried out with very varied intensity and efficiency in the core, peripheral and
semi-peripheral states, and may now be changing as part of the ongoing
transformations to the regulatory capacities of nation states.
Under the conditions of the world capitalist economy and the modern inter-state
system, there seems only to be space for partial global cultures. They are
partial, whether in terms of the aspects of social life which they cover or in terms
of the regions of the world they cover. Smith, for example, speaks of a
European "family of cultures", which consists of wide-reaching and transnational
political and cultural motifs and traditions (such as Roman law, Renaissance
humanism, the rationalism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and democracy),
"which have surfaced in various parts of the continent at different times and in
some cases continue to do so, creating or recreating sentiments of recognition
and kinship among the peoples of Europe" (1990: 187). Seen from outside
Europe, particularly by regions and people intensively colonised by the
Europeans, this family of cultures is the quintessential version of Western
imperialism, in the name of which so much tradition and cultural identity has
been destroyed.
Given the hierarchical nature of the world system, it becomes crucial to identify
the groups, classes, interests and states which define partial cultures as global
cultures, and which, in this way, control the agenda of political domination under
the guise of cultural globalisation. If it is true that the intensification of crossborder contacts and interdependence has opened up new opportunities for the
exercise of tolerance, ecumenism, solidarity and cosmopolitanism, it is no less
true that, at the same time, new forms and manifestations of intolerance,
chauvinism, racism and xenophobia and, in the last instance, imperialism have
also arisen. Partial global cultures can, in this way, have very different
characters, scope and political profiles.

In the current circumstances it is only possible to visualise pluralist or plural

global cultures.[6] This is why the majority of authors assume a prescriptive or
prospective stance when they talk about global culture in the singular. For
Hannerz, cosmopolitianism "includes a stance toward the coexistence of
cultures in the individual experience [...] an orientation, a willingness to engage
with the Other [...] an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness toward
divergent cultural experiences" (1990: 239). Chase-Dunn, in turn, whilst
removing the "standard universalism" of Parsons (1971) from its pedestal as an
essential feature of the world capitalist system currently in force, proposes that
this universalism should be transposed to "a new level of socialist meaning,
albeit with a sensitivity to the virtues of ethnic and national pluralism" (1991:
105; Chase-Dunn et al., 1998). Finally, Wallerstein imagines a world culture only
in a future libertarian-egalitarian world, although even there a space would be
reserved for cultural resistance: the constant creation and recreation of specific
cultural entities "whose object (avowed or not) would be the restoration of the
universal reality of liberty and equality" (1991a: 199).
Within the cultural domain, the neo-liberal consensus is very selective. Cultural
phenomena are only of interest in so far as they transform themselves into
merchandise which can then follow the trail of economic globalisation. Thus the
consensus relates, above all, to technical and legal support for the production
and circulation of the products of the culture industries such as, for example,
communications and information technology and the rights of intellectual
property.
6. The natures of globalisations
References made in previous sections to the dominant facets of what is usually
termed globalisation, in addition to omitting an underlying theory of
globalisation, may well give the false impression that globalisation is a linear
phenomenon, both monolithic and unequivocal. This idea of globalisation,
although false, is prevalent nowadays, and tends to be all the more so for the
globalisation which flows from scientific discourse into political discourse and
thence into everyday language. Apparently transparent and without complexity,
the idea of globalisation masks more than it reveals of what is happening in the
world. And what it masks or hides is, when viewed from a different perspective,
so important that the transparency and simplicity of the idea of globalisation, far
from being innocent, must be considered as an ideological and political device
endowed with specific intentionalities. Two of these intentionalities should be
stressed.
The first is what is known as the determinist fallacy. It consists of inculcating the
idea that globalisation is a spontaneous, automatic, unavoidable and
irreversible process which intensifies and advances according to an inner logic
and dynamism strong enough to impose themselves on any external
interferences. The most circumspect of academics, as well as the ambassadors
of globalisation embrace this fallacy. From amongst the former, I would point out
Manuel Castells, for whom globalisation is the unavoidable result of the
revolution in information technology. According to him, the new economics "is
informational because the productivity and competitiveness of units or agents in
this economy fundamentally depend upon their capacity to generate, process

and apply efficiently knowledge-based information. It is global because the core

activities of production, consumption, and circulation, [...] are organized on a
global scale [...]" (1996: 66). The fallacy consists in transforming the causes of
globalisation into its effects. Globalisation results, in fact, from a set of political
decisions which are identifiable in time and authorship. The Washington
Consensus is a political decision of the core states, as are the decisions of the
states which adopted it with a greater or lesser degree of autonomy and
selectivity. We cannot forget that, to a great extent, and above all on an
economic and political level, hegemonic globalisation is a product of the
decisions of national states. The deregulation of the economy, for example, has
been an eminently political act. The proof of this lies in the diverse responses of
the national states to the political pressures currently emerging out of the
Washington Consensus.[7] The fact that these political decisions have, in
general, converged over a short period of time, and given that many states had
no alternative to decide in a different way, does not eliminate the political nature
of the decisions but merely decentres them and their political process. Equally
political in nature are the reflections on the new forms of state which are
emerging as a result of globalisation, on the new political distribution of national,
international and global practices, and on the new form of public policies
relating to the rising complexity of social, environmental and redistribution
issues.
The second political intentionality of the non-political nature of globalisation is
the fallacy of the disappearance of the South. According to this fallacy,
North/South relations have never constituted a real conflict, but, rather, over a
lengthy period of time the two poles of the relationship have become easily
identifiable, with the North producing manufactured products whilst the South
supplied the raw materials. The situation began to change in the sixties (taking
into account theories of dependency or dependent development) and was
radically transformed from the eighties onwards. Today, whether on a financial
level, or on the level of production or even of consumption, the world has
become integrated into a global economy in which, faced with multiple
interdependencies, it no longer makes sense to distinguish between North and
South and, furthermore, between the core, periphery and semi-periphery of the
world system. The more triumphant the concept of globalisation is, the less
visible the South, or the hierarchies of the world system, become. The idea is
that globalisation has a uniform impact on all the regions of the world and on all
sectors of activity and that its architects, the multinational companies, are
infinitely innovative and have the ability to organise well enough to transform the
new global economy into an unprecedented opportunity.
Even the authors who recognise that globalisation is highly selective, produces
imbalances and has a variable geometry, tend to think that it has destructured
the hierarchies of the previous world economy. The case made by Castells, for
whom globalisation has put an end to the idea of the "South" and even of the
"Third World", is a novelty, given that the differentiation between countries,
within countries and amongst regions is becoming increasingly large (1996: 92,
112). According to him, the latest international division of labour has not
occurred amongst countries but amongst economic agents and distinct
positions in the global economy which compete globally, using the technological

infrastructure of the information economy and the organizational structure of

networks and flows (1996: 147). In this sense it also no longer makes sense to
distinguish between the core, periphery and semi-periphery in the world system.
The new economy is a global economy, as distinct from the world economy.
Whilst the latter is based on the accumulation of capital, obtained throughout
the world, the global economy is able to function as a unit in real time and on a
planetary scale (1996: 92).
Without wishing to diminish the importance of the transformations taking place, I
do however think that Castells takes the image of globalisation as an allpowerful bulldozer, against which there can be no possible resistance, at least
in economic terms, too far. And equally, he takes the idea of the segmentation
of the processes of inclusion-exclusion which are taking place too far. In the first
place, it is Castells himself who recognises that the processes of exclusion can
extend to an entire continent (Africa) and entirely dominate the processes of
inclusion in a subcontinent (Latin America) (1996: 115-136). Secondly, even
admitting that the global economy no longer needs geo-political areas in which
to reproduce itself, the truth is that the external debt continues to be accounted
for in terms of individual countries and it is through this and through the
financialisation of the economic system that the poor countries of the world
have become transformed, from the eighties onwards, into net contributors to
the wealth of the rich countries. In third place, contrary to what may be
understood from the framework drawn up by Castells, the convergence of
countries in the global economy is as significant as their divergence and this is
particularly obvious in the core countries (Drache, 1999: 15). Since salary and
social security policies continue to be defined on a national level, liberalisation
measures taken since the eighties have not significantly reduced the differences
in labour costs in the different countries. Therefore in 1997, the average hourly
rate of pay in Germany (32$ US) was 54% higher than in the USA (17.19$ US).
Even within the European Union, where in recent decades policies of "deep
integration" have been taking place, the differences in productivity and salary
costs have been maintained, with the exception of England, where salary costs
have been reduced by 40% since 1980. Taking West Germany as a term of
reference (100%), productivity in Portugal was, in 1998, 34.5% and salary costs
37.4%. The figures for Spain were 62% and 66.9%, respectively, for England
71.7% and 68% and for Ireland 69.5 e 71.8% (Drache, 1999: 24).
Finally, it is difficult to maintain that the excluding selectivity and fragmentation
of the "new economy" has destroyed the concept of the "South" when, as we
have seen, the disparity in the wealth of the poor and rich countries has risen
constantly in the last twenty or thirty years. It is true that the liberalization of
markets has destructured the processes of inclusion and exclusion in different
countries and regions. However, the most important thing is to analyse the ratio
between inclusion and exclusion in each country. It is this ratio which
determines whether the country belongs to the North or the South and to the
core, periphery or semi-periphery of the world system. The countries in which
integration into the world economy is processed primarily as exclusion are the
countries of the South and the periphery of the world system.
These transformations deserve detailed attention, but there can be no doubt

that only the ideological swings which have occurred in the scientific community
in the North as well as in the South can explain how the iniquities and
imbalances in the world system, despite having increased, have lost their
analytical centrality. Thus, the "end of the South", and the "disappearance of the
Third World" are, above all, a product of changes in the "sociological sensibility"
which must, themselves, become an object of scrutiny. With some authors, the
end of the South or the Third World is not the result of specific analysis of the
South or the Third World but only of the "forgotten" status to which they are
relegated. Globalisation is seen from the point of view of the core countries,
taking into account their experiences. This is particularly the case of the authors
who focus on economic globalisation.[8] Yet culturalist analyses frequently
commit the same error. As an example, the reflexive theories applied to
modernity, globalisation or accumulation (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991; Lash and
Urry, 1996) and, in particular, the idea of Giddens that globalisation is "reflexive
modernisation", forget that the great majority of the world's population are
suffering the consequences of a modernity or a globalisation which is not in the
least reflexive or that the great majority of workers live under regimes of
accumulation which are the polar opposite of reflexive accumulation.
Both the determinist fallacy and the fallacy of the disappearance of the South
have come to lose credibility as globalisation transforms itself into a social and
political area of conflict. If, for some, it is still considered a great triumph of
rationality, innovation and liberty, capable of producing infinite progress and
unlimited abundance, for others it is an anathema, since it brings misery,
marginalisation, and the exclusion of the great majority of the world's population
in its wake, whilst the rhetoric of progress and abundance becomes, in reality,
merely an increasingly select club of privileged members.
In these circumstances, it is not surprising that in recent years various
discourses on globalisation have emerged. Robertson (1998), for example,
distinguishes between four main globalisation discourses. Regional discourse,
such as, for example, the Asian discourse, the Western European discourse or
the Latin American discourse have a civilisational tone, in which globalisation
confronts regional particularities. Within the same region, there may be different
sub-discourses. For example, in France there is a strong tendency to view
globalisation as an "Anglo-American" threat to French society and culture and to
that of the other European countries. Yet, as Robertson remarks, the antiglobalisation of the French can easily be converted into a French globalisation
project. The disciplinary discourse relates to the way in which globalisation is
seen by the different social sciences. The most salient feature of this discourse
is the emphasis given to economic globalisation. Ideological discourse can
intersect with either of these and relates to a political evaluation of the
processes of globalisation. The anti-globalisation discourse opposes proglobalisation discourse and within both it is possible to distinguish left and right
wing positions. Finally there is feminist discourse which, having started off as an
anti-globalisation discourse - favouring the local and attributing male concerns
to the global - is nowadays also a discourse of globalisation and is distinguished
by the emphasis it places on the community aspects of globalisation.
The plurality of discourses on globalisation show that it is imperative to produce

a critical theoretical reflection on globalisation and to do so in such a way as to

capture the complexity of the phenomena it involves and the disparate interests
it confronts. The theoretical proposal which I present here arises from three
apparent contradictions which, in my understanding, confer on the historical
period in which we are living its specifically transitional nature. The first
contradiction is between globalisation and localisation. The present time reveals
itself to us as dominated by a dialectic, at the heart of which the processes of
globalisation occur parallel to the processes of localisation. In fact, as
interdependence and global interactions intensify, social relations in general
seem to be increasingly more dispossessed, opening up the way towards new
rights of choice, which cross borders that until recently were policed by tradition,
nationalism, language or ideology and frequently by a combination of all these
factors. Yet, on the other hand, in apparent contradiction to this trend, new
regional, national and local identities are emerging, constructed around the new
preeminence of the rights to roots. Such local factors, though they refer to real
or imaginary territories as much as to ways of life and social relationships, are
based on face-to-face relationships, on closeness and on interaction.
Territorial localisms are, for example, those favoured by people who, after
centuries of genocide and cultural oppression, have finally reclaimed the right to
self-determination within their ancestral territories, with some measure of
success. This is the case of the indigenous people of Latin America and also
Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Translocalised localisms, in turn, are
promoted by translocalised social groups, such as the Arab immigrants in Paris
or London, the Turkish immigrants in Germany or the Latin American
immigrants in the USA. For these groups territory is the idea of territory, as a
way of life, in terms of closeness, immediacy, belonging, sharing and reciprocity.
Moreover, this repossession, which usually occurs on an inter-state level, can
also occur on a supra-state level. A good example of this is the European
Union, which, whilst deterritorialising social relations between the citizens of the
member states, reterritorialises social relations with other states ("Fortress
Europe").
The second contradiction is between the nation state and the transnational nonstate. The preceding analysis on the different dimensions of the dominant
globalisation showed that one of the most controversial points in debates on
globalisation is the question of the role of the state in the era of globalisation. If,
for some, the state is obsolete and on its way to extinction or, at the least, very
much weakened in its capacity to organise and regulate social life, for others
the state continues to be the central political entity, not only because the erosion
of sovereignty is very selective but, more importantly, because the
institutionalisation of globalisation itself - from the multilateral financial agencies
to the deregulation of the economy - is created by the national states. Each of
these positions captures part of the ongoing process. None of them, however,
does justice to the transformations as a whole because these are, in fact,
contradictory and include processes of state affirmation - to the extent to which
it may be stated that states have never been so important as they are today - as
well as processes of privatization, in which highly important interactions,
networks and transnational flows take place without any significant interference
from the state, in contrast with what had happened in the previous era.

The third contradiction, which is of a political and ideological nature, exists

between those who see in globalisation the finally indisputable and
unconquerable energy of capitalism and those who see in it an new opportunity
to broaden the scale and the nature of transnational solidarity and anti-capitalist
struggle. The former position is, moreover, defended as much by those who
lead globalisation and benefit from it as by those for whom globalisation is the
most recent and most virulent form of external aggression against their way of
life and well-being.
These three contradictions crystallise the most important vectors of the process
of globalisation now taking place. In the light of them, it is easy to see that
disjunctions, parallel occurrences and confrontations are so significant that what
we term globalisation is, in fact, a set of different processes of globalisation and,
in the last instance, of different and sometimes contradictory globalisations.
What we habitually call globalisation is, in fact, different sets of social
relationships, and different sets of social relationships give rise to different
phenomena of globalisation. In these terms there is not, strictly speaking, one
sole entity called globalisation, instead there are globalisations; to be precise,
this term should only ever be used in the plural. Any wider concept should be
process-based and not substantive. In addition, although they are sets of social
relationships, globalisations involve conflicts and, therefore, winners and losers.
Frequently, discourse on globalisation is the history of the winners, recounted
by themselves. In fact, the victory is apparently so absolute that the defeated
vanish totally from the scene. It is therefore wrong to think that the newer and
more intense forms of transnational interactions produced by the processes of
globalisation have eliminated the hierarchies of the world system. Doubtless
they have transformed them profoundly, but this does not mean that they have
eliminated them. On the contrary, empirical evidence suggests the opposite,
pointing to an intensification of hierarchies and inequalities. The contradictions
and disjunctions identified above suggest that we are in a transitional period, in
terms of the three main dimensions: transitional in terms of the hierarchies and
inequalities in the world system, transitional in terms of institutional form and
complementarity amongst institutions; transitional in terms of the scale and
configuration of social and political conflicts.
The theory under construction must therefore take the plurality and
contradictions in the processes of globalisation into account instead of trying to
subsume them into reductionist abstractions. The theory which I am about to
put forward is based on the concept of a world system in transition. It is in
transition because it contains within itself the old world system, undergoing a
process of profound transformation, and a set of emerging realities which may
or may not lead to a new world system, or to another new entity, systematic or
not. It is a question of circumstances which, when captured synchronically,
reveal a complete openness to possible alternative developments. Such
openness is symptomatic of a great instability which configures a bifurcation, in
the Prigoginian sense. It is a situation of great instability and volatile
compromises, in which small alterations can bring about huge transformations.
It is therefore a situation characterised by turbulence and by the explosion of

scales.[9] The theory which I am proposing here aims to take the bifurcation into
account and in so doing cannot, itself, escape becoming a theory open to the
possibilities of chaos.
The world system in transition is formed from three sets of collective practices:
the set of interstate practices, the set of global capitalist practices and the set of
transnational social and cultural practices. The interstate practices correspond
to the role of the states in the modern world system as protagonists of the
international division of labour, at the heart of which is established the hierarchy
of the core, periphery and semi-periphery. The global capitalist practices are the
practices of the economic agents whose spatial-temporal unit for real or
potential action is the planet itself. The transnational social and cultural
practices are the cross-border flows of people and cultures, and of information
and communication. Each of these sets of practices is made up of: a group of
institutions which ensure its reproduction, their compatibility and the stability of
the inequalities which they produce; a form of power which supplies the logic of
the interactions and legitimises the inequalities and the hierarchies; a form of
law which supplies the language of intra-institutional and inter-institutional
relations and the criteria for distinguishing between permitted and prohibited
practices; a structural conflict which condenses the root tensions and
contradictions of the practices in question; and criteria of hierarchy which define
the way in which inequalities of power and the conflicts which they translate into
are crystallized. Finally, although all the practices of the world system in
transition are involved in all the modes of production of globalisation, they are
not all involved in all of them with the same intensity.

Figure no 1 illustrates
the internal composition of each of the components of the different sets of

practices. I will only comment on those which require an explanation. Prior to

this, however, it is necessary to identify what distinguishes the world system in
transition (WSIT) from the modern world system (MWS). In the first place, whilst
the MWS is based on two pillars, the world economy and the interstate system,
the WSIT is based on three pillars, none of which have the consistency of a
system. It is more a question of sets of practices whose internal coherence is
intrinsically problematic. The greatest complexity (and also incoherence) of the
world system in transition lies in the fact that in it the processes of globalisation
extend far beyond states and the economy, and involve social and cultural
practices, which in the MWS are confined only to states and national societies
or their sub-units. Moreover, many of the new transnational cultural practices
are originally transnational or, in other words, constitute themselves free of
reference to any concrete nation or state or, when they do have recourse to
them, do so only to acquire raw material or local infrastructures for the
production of transnationality. Secondly, interactions between the pillars of the
WSIT are much more intense than those of the MWS. In addition, whilst in the
MWS the two pillars have clear and distinct outlines, in the WSIT there is a
constant and intense interpenetration between the different sets of practices, to
such an extent that there are grey areas or hybrids amongst them, in which the
sets assume a particularly composite character. For example, the World Trade
Organisation is a hybrid institution made up of interstate practices and global
capitalist practices, in the same way that flows of migration are a hybrid
institution in which, to varying extents according to different situations, the three
sets of practices are present. Thirdly, even though many of the core institutions
of the MWS remain in the WSIT, they nowadays carry out different functions,
without their centrality necessarily being affected. Thus the state, which in the
MWS ensured the integration of the national economy, society and culture,
nowadays actively contributes towards the disintegration of the economy,
society and culture on a national level in the name of their integration within the
global economy, society and culture.
The processes of globalisation result from the interactions between the three
sets of practices. The tensions and contradictions inside each of the sets and in
the relationships between them arise from forms of power and inequalities in the
distribution of power. The form of power is the unequal exchange in all cases,
but it assumes specific forms in each of the sets which are derived from the
resources, the artifacts and the imaginary which are the object of this unequal
exchange. The depth and intensity of interstate, global and transnational
interactions means that forms of power are exercised as unequal exchanges.
Since it is a matter of exchanges and inequalities may, to a certain extent, be
hidden or manipulated, the registering of interactions in the WSIT often (and
credibly) assumes a register, the horizontal register through central ideas such
as interdependence, complementarity, coordination, cooperation, networking,
etc. In the face of this, conflicts tend to be experienced as diffuse, and it is
sometimes difficult to define what or whom is in conflict. Even so, it is possible
in each set of practices to identify a structural conflict, or, in other words, a
conflict which organises struggles around the resources which are the objects of
unequal exchange. In the case of interstate practices, the conflict is engaged
around relative positions in the hierarchy of the world system, since it is this
which dictates the type of exchanges and levels of inequality. Struggles for

promotion or against relegation and movements within the hierarchy of the

world system which these translate into are long-term processes which at each
given moment can be crystallized into levels of autonomy and dependence. On
the level of global capitalist practices, the struggle lies between the global
capitalist class and the other classes defined on a national level, whether they
are the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie or the working class. Obviously the
levels of inequality of exchange and the mechanisms which produce them are
different, according to the classes which are in confrontation, but in all cases
there is a struggle for the appropriation or valuation of commercial resources,
whether these are labour or knowledge, information or raw materials, credit or
technology. What remains of the national bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie is,
in this transitional phase, a cushion which softens and a smokescreen which
hides the increasingly stark and crude contradiction between global capital and
labour transformed into a global resource.
In the domain of transnational social and cultural practices, unequal exchanges
relate to non-commercial resources whose transnationality is based on local
differences, such as ethnicity, identity, cultures, traditions, a sense of belonging,
the imaginary, rituals and written or oral literature. There are countless social
groups involved in these unequal exchanges and their struggles are engaged
around recognition of the non-mercantile appropriation or valuation of these
resources, or rather, around equality in difference and difference in equality.
The reciprocal interaction and interpenetration of these three sets of practices
means that the three types of conflict and the unequal exchanges which fuel
them, in practice, translate into composite hybrid or dual conflicts, in which, in
different ways, elements of each of the structural conflicts are present. The
importance of this fact lies in what is termed transconflictuality, which consists of
assimilating one type of conflict within another and in experiencing one
particular type of conflict as if it were another. Thus, for example, a conflict
within global capitalist practices can be assimilated into an interstate conflict
and experienced as such by the parties involved in the conflict. In the same
way, an interstate conflict may be assimilated into a conflict of transnational
cultural practices and experienced as such. A transconflituality reveals the
openness and the bifurcation which characterises the WSIT since, at the outset,
it is impossible to know in which direction the transconflituality is orientated.
However, the direction which is finally imposed is decisive, not only in defining
the practical outlines of the conflict, but also its nature and its results.
I suggest that, under the present conditions of the WSIT, the analysis of the
processes of globalisation and the hierarchies which they produce should be
centred on criteria which define the global/local. In addition to the justification
presented above, there is one other criterion which I consider important and
which can be summed up by the term differential voracity of the global/local. In
the MWS, the hierarchy of the core, periphery and semi-periphery was
articulated as a series of dichotomies derived from a variety of forms of unequal
differentiation. Amongst these dichotomies I would highlight:
development/underdevelopment, modern/traditional, superior/inferior,
universal/particular, rational/irrational, industrial/agricultural, urban/rural. Each of
these forms has its own semantic register, intellectual tradition, political

intentionality and projected horizons. What is new in the WSIT is the way in
which the global/local dichotomy has come to absorb all the others, in political
discourse as well as in scientific discourse.
The global and the local are socially produced within the processes of
globalisation. I have distinguished four processes of globalisation produced by
other modes of globalisation. This, now, is my definition of the mode of
production of globalisation: it is a set of unequal exchanges in which a certain
artefact, condition, entity or local identity extends its influence beyond its
national frontiers and, in so doing, develops an ability to designate as local
another rival artifact, condition, entity or identity.
The most important implications of this concept are as follows. Firstly, in terms
of the conditions of the world system in transition, genuine globalisation does
not exist; what we call globalisation is always the successful globalisation of a
particular localism. In other words, there are no global conditions within which
we cannot find local roots, either real or imagined, as a specific cultural
insertion. The second implication is that globalisation presupposes localisation.
The process which creates the global as the dominant position in unequal
exchanges, is the same one which produces the local as the dominated, and
therefore hierarchically inferior, position. In fact we live as much in a local as in
a global world. Therefore, in analytical terms, it would be equally correct if the
present situation and our topics of investigation were defined in terms of
localization instead of globalisation. The reason why the latter term is preferred
is basically because hegemonic scientific discourse tends to favour the history
of the world as told by the conquerors. It is no accident that Benjamin Barber's
book on the tensions in the process of globalisation is called Jihad versus
McWorld (1995) and not MacWorld versus Jihad. There are many examples of
how globalisation presupposes localisation. The English language as a lingua
franca is one. Its propagation as a global language implies the localization of
other, potentially global, languages, particularly French. That is to say that, once
a certain process of globalisation has been identified, its integral meaning and
explanation cannot be obtained without taking into account the adjacent
processes of relocalisation occurring simultaneously or in sequence to it. The
globalisation of the Hollywood star system contributed to the localisation
(ethnicisation) of the Hindu cinema star system. Analogously, the French or
Italian actors of the 60s - from Brigitte Bardot to Alain Delon, or from Marcello
Mastroianni to Sophia Loren - who at the time symbolised the universal style of
acting, seem, when we watch their films again nowadays, provincially
European, if not curiously ethnic. The difference in view lies in the way in which,
since then, the Hollywood style of acting has managed to globalise itself. To
give another example from a totally different area, the more the hamburger or
pizza becomes globalised, the more localised the Portuguese bolo de bacalhau
or the Brazilian feijoada become, in the sense that they are increasingly seen as
typical particularities of Portuguese or Brazilian society.
One of the transformations most frequently associated with the processes of
globalisation is the compression of time and space, or, rather, the social process
by which phenomena accelerate and are spread throughout the world (Harvey,
1989). Although apparently monolithic, this process combines highly

differentiated situations and conditions and, because of this, cannot be

analysed independently of the power relations which respond to the different
forms of temporal and spatial mobility. On the one hand, there is the global
capitalist class, which in reality controls the space-time compression and is
capable of transforming it in its favour. On the other hand, there are the classes
and subordinate groups, such as migrant workers and refugees, who in recent
decades have represented much cross-border traffic, but who do not, in any
way, control the space-time compression. Between the executives of the
multinational companies and the emigrants and refugees, tourists represent a
third mode of production of the compression of space and time.
There are also those who contribute greatly to globalisation but remain,
nevertheless, prisoners in their own local time-space. By cultivating the coca
bush, the peasants of Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, contribute decisively to the
world drug culture, but remain themselves "localised" in their villages and
mountains, as they always have been. So do the Rio slum-dwellers, who are
prisoners of their marginal urban lifestyle, whilst their songs and dances,
particularly the samba, are nowadays part of a globalised music culture.
From yet another perspective, a global competency at times requires a specific
local emphasis. Many tourist locations today have to emphasise their exotic,
vernacular and traditional character in order to make themselves sufficiently
attractive to the global tourism market.
The production of globalisation therefore implies the production of localisation.
Far from dealing with symmetrical productions though, it is through these that
the dominant hierarchy is established in the WSIT. In its terms, the local is
integrated into the global in two possible ways: by exclusion or by subordinate
inclusion. Although in common parlance and in political discourse the term
globalisation conveys an idea of inclusion, the true nature of inclusion for
globalisation, above all in its economic sense, can be extremely limited. Vast
areas of the world's population, above all in Africa, are being globalised
specifically in terms of being excluded by hegemonic globalisation. [10]What
actually characterises the production of globalisation is the fact that its impact
extends to the realities it excludes as much as to the realities it includes. Yet the
decisive factor in the hierarchy produced is not only the context of the inclusion
but also its nature. The local, when included, is done so in a subordinate
fashion, according to a global logic. The local which precedes the processes of
globalisation, or which manages to remain on its margins, has very little to do
with the local which results from the global production of localisation. Moreover,
the first type of local is at the origins of the processes of globalisation whereas
the second type is the result of its operations.
The general mode of production of globalisation can be divided into four modes
of production, which, in my view, give rise to four forms of globalisation. The first
form of globalisation is the globalised localism. It is the process by which a
particular phenomenom is successfully globalised, whether it be the worldwide
activities of the multinational, the transformation of the English language into a
lingua franca, the globalisation of American fast food or popular music or the
worldwide adoption of the same laws of intellectual ownership, patents or

telecommunications aggressively promoted by the USA. In this mode of

production of globalisation, what is globalised is the winner of a struggle for the
appropriation or valuation of resources or the recognition of difference. This
victory translates into the capacity to dictate the terms of integration,
competition and inclusion. In the case of the recognition of difference, the
globalised localism implies the conversion of triumphant victory into a universal
difference and the consequent exclusion or subordinate inclusion of alternative
differences.
I have called the second form of globalisation the localized globalism. It consists
of the specific impact on local conditions produced by transnational practices
and imperatives which arise from globalised localisms. To respond to these
transnational imperatives, local conditions are disintegrated, destructured, and,
eventually, restructured as subordinate inclusion. Such localized globalisms
include: the elimination of neighbouring commerce; the creation of free trade
enclaves or zones; the deforestation and massive destruction of natural
resources in order to pay off the external debt; the use of historic treasures,
religious ceremonies or places, craftsmanship and wildlife for the purposes of
tourism; ecological dumping(the "purchase" by Third World countries of toxic
waste produced in the core capitalist countries in order to manage external
debts); the conversion of subsistence agriculture into agriculture for export as
part of "structural adjustment"; the ethnicisation of the workplace (devaluing of
salaries because the workers belong to an ethnic group considered "inferior" or
"less demanding").
These two modes of production operate in conjunction but should be dealt with
separately since the factors, agents and conflicts which intervene in one or the
other are distinct. The sustained production of globalised localisms and
localized globalisms is increasingly determining the specific hierarchy of
interstate practices. The international division of the production of globalisation
tends to assume the following pattern: core countries specialise in globalised
localisms, whilst peripheral countries only have the choice of localized
globalisms. Semi-peripheral countries are characterized by the co-existence of
both globalised localisms and localised globalisms and by the tensions between
them. The world system in transition is a mesh of localised globalisms and
globalised localisms.
There are two other modes of production of globalisation in addition to these,
which perhaps best define the differences and newness of the WSIT in relation
to the MWS, since they occur within the set of practices which have erupted
with particular force in recent decades - transnational social and cultural
practices - although they also have repercussions on the other sets of practices.
They relate to the globalisation of resistance to globalised localisms and
localized globalisms. I have termed the first of these cosmopolitanism. It
consists of the transnational organised resistance of nation states, regions,
classes and social groups victimised by the unequal exchanges which fuel
globalised localisms and localized globalisms. They take advantage of the
possibilities of transnational interaction created by the world system in
transition, including those resulting from the revolution in information technology
and communications. Resistance consists of transforming unequal exchanges

into exchanges of shared authority, and translates into struggles against

exclusion, subordinate inclusion, dependency, disintegration and relegation.
Cosmopolitan activities include, amongst many others: movements and
organisations within the peripheries of the world system; egalitarian
transnational networks of solidarity between North and South; dialogue between
workers' organisations in countries integrated into the different regional blocs or
between workers in the same multinational company operating in different
countries (the new working class internationalism); international networks of
alternative legal aid; transnational human rights organizations; worldwide
networks of feminist movements; transnational militant anti-capitalist nongovernmental organisations (NGOs); networks of indigenous, ecological or
alternative development movements and associations; literary, artistic and
scientific movements on the periphery of the world system in search of
alternative non-imperialist, anti-hegemonic cultural values, involved in studies
using post-colonial or minority perspectives. The heterogeneity of the
movements and organisations involved is also significant and the conflict
surrounding the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle on 30th.
November 1999 was an eloquent demonstration of what I have termed
cosmopolitanism. This was followed by other demonstrations against the
financial institutions of hegemonic globalisation which took place in Washington,
Montreal, Geneva and Prague. The World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre in
January 2001 was another important manifestation of cosmopolitanism.
The use of the term "cosmopolitanism" to describe resistance practices and
discourses against unequal exchanges in a backward world system may seem
inadequate in the face of its modernist ascendancy, so eloquently described by
Toulmin (1990), as well as in the light of its current use to describe the practices
understood here, whether as globalised localisms or as localised globalisms
(not to mention its use to describe the worldwide range of multinational
companies as "cosmocorp"). I use it, however, to signify that, contrary to
modernist belief (particularly that of the fin de sicle), cosmopolitanism is only
possible in an interstitial way on the margins of the world system in transition as
an anti-hegemonic practice and discourse generated by progressive coalitions
of classes or subordinate social groups and their allies. Cosmopolitanism is, in
fact, a tradition of Western modernity but it is one of the many traditions which
has been suppressed or marginalised by the hegemonic tradition, which in the
past generated European expansionism, colonialism and imperialism, and
which today generates globalised localisms and localized globalisms.
In this context, it is necessary to state one more fine point. Cosmopolitanism
may invoke the belief of Marx in the universality of those who, under capitalism,
have nothing to lose but their chains.[11] Whilst I would not reject such an
invocation, I would insist on the distinction between cosmopolitanism, as I
understand it and the universality of the Marxist working class. In addition to the
working class described by Marx, the oppressed classes in the world today can
be grouped into two more categories, neither of which can be reduced to the
class-which-has-only-its-chains-to-lose category. On the one hand, there are
considerable and influential sectors of the working classes in the core countries,
and even in the semi-peripheral countries, who nowadays have something more
to lose than just chains, even though this "something" might not amount to

much or, rather, might be more symbolic than material. [12] On the other hand,
there are huge populations in the world who have never even had chains, or in
other words, are not sufficiently useful or skilled enough to be directly exploited
by capital and for whom, in consequence, the eventual possibility of such
exploitation would feel like liberation. In all their various forms, the cosmopolitan
coalitions see their struggle as one for emancipation from the dominant classes,
whether they are dominated by mechanisms of oppression or by exploitation.
Maybe because of this, contrary to the Marxist concept, cosmopolitanism does
not imply uniformity and the collapse of differences, autonomies and local
identities. Cosmopolitanism is no more than the fusion of local, progressive
struggles with the aim of maximising their emancipatory potential in loco
through translocal/local connections.
Probably the most important difference between my concept of
cosmopolitanism and the Marxist universality of the oppressed is that the
progressive cosmopolitan coalitions do not necessarily have a class base. They
unite social groups on a non-class basis, the victims, for example, of sexual,
ethnic, racist, religious, ageist discrimination etc. Partly for this reason, the
progressive or anti-hegemonic character of the cosmopolitan coalitions can
never be determined abstractly. On the contrary, it is intrinsically unstable and
problematic. It demands constant self-reflection of those who take part.
Cosmopolitan initiatives conceived of and created with an anti-hegemonic
character can later come to assume hegemonic characteristics, even running
the risk of becoming converted into globalised localisms. It is enough to think of
the local initiatives in participatory democracy, which had to fight for years
against the "absolutism" of representative democracy and the mistrust of the
conservative political elites, both national and international, and which
nowadays are beginning to be recognized and even adopted by the World
Bank, seduced by the efficiency and lack of corruption they have applied to
managing funds and development loans. Self-reflexive vigilance is essential in
order to distinguish between the technocratic concept of participatory
democracy sanctioned by the World Bank and the democratic and progressive
concept of participatory democracy, the embryo of anti-hegemonic globalisation.
[13]
The instability of the progressive or anti-hegemonic character is also
derived from another factor: the different concepts of emancipatory resistance
held by cosmopolitan initiatives in different regions of the world system. For
example, the struggle for minimum standards in working conditions (the socalled labour standards) - a struggle led by trade union organisations and
human rights groups in the more developed countries, aiming for international
solidarity by preventing products produced by labour which does not reach
these required minimum standards from circulating freely on the world market is certainly seen by the organizations which promote it as anti-hegemonic and
emancipatory, since it aims to improve the conditions of the workers' lives.
However, it can be seen by similar organizations in peripheral countries as one
more hegemonic strategy from the North, whose actual effect is to create one
more form of protectionism which favours the rich countries.
The second mode of production of globalisation in which resistance is organised
against globalised localisms and localised globalisms is what I have, with
recourse to international law, termed the common inheritance of humanity. It

concerns transnational struggles to protect and decommodify resources,

entities, artifacts, and environments considered essential for the dignified
survival of humanity, whose sustainability can only be guaranteed on a
planetary scale. In general, the following belong to the common inheritance of
humanity: the environmental struggles, struggles to preserve the Amazon, the
Antarctic, the biodiversity of the ocean depths and the campaigns for the
preservation of outer space, the moon and the other planets also considered
the common inheritance of humanity. All these struggles relate to resources
which, by their very nature, have to be managed by a logic other than that of
unequal exchange, namely international community trusts in the name of
present and future generations.[14]
Both cosmopolitanism and the common inheritance of humanity have
developed greatly in recent decades. Through them a political globalisation has
been constructed which is an alternative to the hegemony developed out of the
need to create a corresponding transnational political obligation which, up to
now, has mutually bound citizens and nation states. A broader political
obligation is, for now, merely conjecture, since a transnational political body
corresponding to the nation state has still to be realised (or even imagined).
However, non-governmental organisations of a progressive transnational
persuasion, alliances between them and local organisations and movements in
different parts of the world and the organisation of campaigns against
hegemonic globalisation (from the Greenpeace campaigns to the Jubilee
Campaign 2000) are all seen as signs of a newly emerging global civil and
political society.
Yet both cosmoplitanism and the common inheritance of humanity have
encountered strong resistance from those who lead hegemonic globalisation
(the globalised localisms and localized globalisms) or those who benefit from it.
The common inheritance of humanity, especially, has been under constant
attack from the hegemonic countries, above all the USA. The conflicts,
resistance, struggles and coalitions surrounding cosmopolitanism and the
common inheritance of humanity demonstrate that what we call globalisation is,
in reality, a set of transnational arenas of struggle. Therefore it is important to
distinguish between globalisation from-the-top-downwards and globalisation
from-the-bottom-upwards, or between hegemonic and anti-hegemonic
globalisation. The globalised localisms and the localized globalisms are
globalisation from-the-top-downwards, or hegemonic globalisation, and
cosmopolitanism and the common inheritance of humanity are globalisations
from-the-bottom-upwards or anti-hegemonic. It is important to bear in mind that
these two types of globalisation do not exist parallel to each other, as if they
were two watertight entities. On the contrary, they are the expression and the
result of struggles engaged within the social space conventionally known as
globalisation which, in reality, is constructed through four modes of production.
Like any other, the concept of globalisation proposed here is not peaceful. [15] In
order to place it better within current debates on globalisation, some fine-tuning
is necessary.
7. Hegemonic and anti-hegemonic globalisation

One of the current debates revolves around the question of determining

whether there are one or several globalisations. For the great majority of
authors there is only one globalisation, neo-liberal capitalist globalisation, and it
does not, therefore, make sense to distinguish between hegemonic and antihegemonic globalisation. As there is only one globalisation, resistance to it
cannot be anything but a self-assumed localism. According to Jerry Mander,
economic globalisation has a cast iron logic which is doubly destructive. Not
only does it fail to improve the standard of living of the vast majority of the
world's population (on the contrary, it contributes towards worsening it), but it is
not even sustainable in the medium term (1996:18). Even today the majority of
the world's population maintain relatively traditional economies, many are not
"poor" and a large percentage of those who are, were made so by the politics of
the neo-liberal economy. In the face of this, the most effective resistance to
globalisation lies in the promotion of local and community economies, the smallscale economies which are diverse, self-sustaining and linked to exterior forces
but not dependent on them. According to this concept, in an economy and a
culture which is becoming increasingly dispossessed, the response to its evils
can only be reterritorialisation, the rediscovery of a sense of place and
community, which implies the rediscovery or invention of local productive
activities.
This position has been translated into the identification, creation and promotion
of innumerable local initiatives throughout the world. Consequently the group of
proposals which, in general, can be termed localization is nowadays very fertile.
What I understand by localization is the set of initiatives which aim to create or
maintain small-scale social areas, which are community-based and operate
through face-to-face relationships, orientated towards self-sustainability and
maintained by a cooperative and participatory logic. Localisation projects
include small family farming initiatives (Berry, 1996; Inhoff, 1996), small-scale
local commerce (Norberg-Hodge, 1996), local systems of exchange using local
currencies (Meeker-Lowry, 1996) and participatory forms of local selfgovernment (Kumar, 1996; Morris, 1996). Many of these initiatives or proposals
are based on the idea that culture, community and the economy are
incorporated and rooted in concrete geographical locations that require constant
vigilance and protection. This is what is known as bio-regionalism (Sale, 1996).
The initiatives and proposals of localization do not necessarily imply
isolationism. They do imply, of course, protection measures against the
predatory investors of neo-liberal globalisation. This is the "new protectionism":
the maximising of local commerce within local, diverse and self-sustaining
economies, and the minimizing of long-distance commerce (Hines e Lang,
1996: 490).[16] The new protectionism is derived from the idea that the global
economy, far from having eliminated the old protectionism, is, itself, a
protectionist tactic on the part of the multinational companies and international
banks against the ability of local communities to preserve their own, and
nature's, sustainability.
The paradigm of localization does not necessarily imply a rejection of global or
translocal resistance. It does, however, stress the promotion of local social
initiatives. This is the position of Norberg-Hodge (1996), for whom it is

necessary to distinguish between strategies to put a brake on the uncontrolled

expansion of globalisation and strategies which promote real solutions for real
populations. The former must be led by translocal initiatives, namely through
multilateral treaties which allow national states to protect their population and
environment from the excesses of free trade. The latter, in contrast,
undoubtedly the most important, can only be led by multiple local small-scale
initiatives as diverse as the cultures, contexts and environments in which they
take place. It is not a matter of thinking in terms of isolated efforts and then of
institutions which offer large-scale promotion of small-scale initiatives.
This is the position which comes closest to the one resulting from the concept of
a polarisation between hegemonic and anti-hegemonic globalisation proposed
here. The difference lies in the relative emphasis placed on the various
resistance strategies that present themselves. In my opinion, it is erroneous to
give priority either to local or global strategies. One of the big traps of neoliberal globalisation lies in symbolically accentuating the distinction between the
local and the global and, at the same time, destroying it through the real
mechanisms of the economy. This symbolic emphasis is destined to
delegitimise all obstacles to the incessant expansion of neo-liberal gobalisation,
by lumping them all together under the title of local and mobilizing negative
connotations against them through the powerful mechanisms of ideological
indoctrination which it has at its disposal. In terms of the transnational
processes, from the economic to the cultural, the local and the global are
increasingly becoming the two sides of the same coin, as I have previously
stressed.
In this context, anti-hegemonic globalisation is as important as anti-hegemonic
localisation. The initiatives, organizations and movements which I have listed
above as pertaining to cosmopolitanism and the common inheritance of
humanity, have a transnational vocation but, even so, they remain anchored in
concrete locations and concrete local struggles. The transnational advocacy of
human rights aims to defend them in concrete locations in the world where they
are violated, just as the transnational advocacy of ecology aims to put an end to
concrete local or translocal acts of destruction of the environment. There are
forms of struggle which are orientated more towards the creation of networks
amongst locales, but obviously they are not sustainable if they are not based on
local struggles or are not sustained by them.
Transnational alliances between workers' unions in the same multinational
company operating in different countries aim to improve the living conditions in
each workplace, thus lending greater strength and efficiency to local workers'
struggles. It is in this sense that we should understand Chase-Dunn's proposal
(1998), in terms of the political globalisation of popular movements in order to
create a global democratic and collectively rational system.
The global occurs locally. It is necessary to ensure that the anti-hegemonic
locale also occurs globally. In order to do this it is not enough to promote the
small-scale on a large-scale. It is necessary, as I have proposed elsewhere
(Santos, 1999), to develop a theory of translation which can create an
intelligible reciprocity between different local struggles, deepen what they have

in common in order to promote an interest in translocal alliances and foster their

ability to thrive and prosper.
In the light of the characterisation of the world system in transition which I have
proposed above, cosmopolitanism and the common inheritance of humanity
constitute anti-hegemonic globalisation by the extent to which they fight to
transform unequal exchanges into exchanges of shared authority. This
transformation has to occur in all the sets of practices, but will assume a distinct
form in each one of them. In the field of interstate practices, the transformation
has to occur simultaneously at the level of the state and at the level of the
interstate system. At state level, it is a matter of transforming the low intensity
democracy which predominates today, to a high intensity democracy.[17] On the
level of the interstate system, it is a matter of promoting the construction of
mechanisms for democratic control through concepts such as post-national
citizenship and that of the public transnational sphere.
In the area of global capitalist practices the anti-hegemonic transformation
consists of the globalisation of struggles to enable the democratic distribution of
wealth, or rather distribution based on individual and collective rights of
citizenship, applied transnationally.
Finally, in the field of transnational social and cultural practices the antihegemonic transformation consists of the construction of an emancipatory
multiculturalism, or, in other words, the democratic construction of reciprocal
rules of recognition between distinct identities and cultures. This recognition
may result in multiple forms of sharing - such as dual identities, hybrid identities,
inter-identity and trans-identity - but they must all be orientated towards the
following trans-cultural and trans-identity guideline: we have the right to be
equal when difference makes us inferior and the right to be different when
equality removes our identity.
8. Hegemonic globalisation and the post-Washington Consensus
Distinguishing between hegemonic and anti-hegemonic globalisation implies
presuming the internal coherence of each of these. This, however, is a
problematic presumption, at least in the transitional period we are living through.
I have already pointed out that anti-hegemonic globalisation, although reducible
to two modes of production of globalisation - cosmopolitanism and the common
inheritance of humanity - is internally very fragmented, in that it mainly takes the
form of local initiatives to resist hegemonic globalisation. Such initiatives are
rooted in a spirit of place, in the specific nature of contexts, actors and the
horizons of locally constituted life. They do not speak the language of
globalisation, or even globally intelligible languages. What makes them into antihegemonic globalisation is, on the one hand, their proliferation, being spread a
little everywhere, whilst still remaining local responses to global pressures - the
local is produced globally - and, on the other hand, the translocal articulations
which it is possible to establish between them, or between them and the
transnational organisations and movements which share at least some of their
objectives.
In terms of hegemonic globalisation, the reciprocal processes of globalised

localisms and localized globalisms allow us to anticipate greater homogeneity

and internal coherence. This is particularly the case with economic
globalisation. Here it is possible to identify a series of characteristics which
seem to be present globally: the prevalence of market principles over state
principles; the financialisation of the world economy; the total subordination of
the interests of labour to the interests of capital; the unconditional protagonism
of the multinational companies; the territorial recomposition of economies and
the consequent loss of status for national spaces and the institutions which had
previously configured them, namely the nation states; a new dialogue between
politics and the economy in which national agreements (above all those which
establish types and levels of solidarity) are eliminated and replaced by
agreements with global actors and national globalised actors.
These general characteristics do not, however, prevail in a homogenous fashion
throughout the planet. On the contrary, they are articulated in differential ways
under different national and local conditions, whether these are the historical
trajectory of national capitalism, the class structure, the level of technological
development, the level of institutionalisation of social conflicts and, above all, of
labour/capital conflicts, the training and qualification systems for the labour
force, or the networks of public institutions which are based on a concrete form
of articulation between politics and economics. In terms of the latter, the new
institutional economy (North, 1990; Reis, 1998) has come to emphasise the
central role of constitutional order, the set of institutions and institutionalised
agreements which guarantee mechanisms for resolving conflicts, and the levels
of tolerance in the face of inequalities and imbalances which, in general, define
what is preferable, permitted or prohibited (Boyer, 1998: 12). Each constitutional
order has its own historical background and it is this which determines the
specific nature of local or national response to these global pressures. This
specific response ensures that, in terms of social and institutional relations,
there is not one single capitalism, but several.
Capitalism, as a mode of production, has thus evolved historically through
different families of trajectories. Boyer distinguishes four trajectories which
constitute the four main configurations of contemporary capitalism: the
mercantile capitalism of the USA, England, Canada, New Zealand and
Australia; the meso-corporative capitalism of Japan; the social democratic
capitalism of Sweden, Austria, Finland, Norway and Denmark and, to a lesser
degree, Germany; the state capitalism of France, Italy and Spain (Boyer, 1996,
1998). This typology is restricted to the economies of the core countries, thus
remaining outside the majority of the real capitalisms of Asia, Latin America,
Central Europe and South and West Africa. Its usefulness lies in showing the
variety of forms of capitalism and the differential way in which each one is
inserted into global transformations.
In mercantile capitalism the market is the central institution; its insufficiencies
are transformed by regulatory agencies, individual interests and competition
dominate in all spheres of society, social relations, the market and labour are
regulated by private law, the labour markets are extremely flexible, total priority
is given to technological innovation, promoted by different types of incentives
and protected by the laws of patents and intellectual ownership, and great

social inequalities are tolerated, as well as under-investment in public welfare or

collective consumerism (public transport, education, health, etc.).
Japanese meso-corporative capitalism is led by the large company; it is at the
heart of this that the main economic adjustments are obtained, through the
banks which hold it and the network of affiliated companies which control it,
public regulation acts strictly in coordination with the large companies, there is a
duality between "regular" workers and "irregular" workers, with the dividing line
being entry or non-entry into the career structure within the internal market of
the large company, general levels of education are high, with the companies
providing professional training, and the stability of inequalities is accepted.
Social-democratic capitalism is based on a social pact between social partners,
the organisations representing bosses, workers and the state, and on mutually
advantageous agreements which guarantee compatibility between competitive
gains, innovation and productivity, on the one hand, and salary increases and
improvements in living standards on the other, on the prevalence of social
justice, on high investments in education, on the organisation of the labour
market in such a way as to minimize flexibility and promote qualification as a
response to rising competition and technological innovation, on a high level of
social protection against risks and on the minimizing of social inequalities.
Finally, state capitalism is based on the centrality of state intervention as a
coordinating principle in the face of the weakness of the market ideology and
the organisations of social partners; there is a public system of education for the
production of public and private entrepreneurial elites, weak professional
training, the labour market is highly regulated, public scientific research
articulates poorly with the private sector, and there is a high level of social
protection. Although Portugal continues to be a semi-peripheral society, the
capitalist institutionalisation which predominates indicates a form of state
capitalism. Total consolidation of this model seems to be blocked in our country
by clearly defined contradictory, though unequal, pressures, which, paradoxical
as it may appear, are exercised by the state itself: on the one hand the
pressures of social democratic capitalism and, on the other hand, the far
stronger pressures of mercantile capitalism. In this chaotic process of transition
there are still traces of meso-corporative capitalism, above all in the close
articulation between the state and the financial groups and between the state
and the large public and private companies which are undergoing a phase of
internationalisation.
Faced with the coexistence of these four major types of capitalism (and
certainly with other types present in other regions of the world), the existence of
a hegemonic economic globalisation may be questioned. In the end, each of
these types of capitalism constitutes a regime of accumulation and a means of
regulation endowed with stability, in which complementarity and compatibility
amongst institutions is great. In this way, the institutional fabric contains the
ability to anticipate possible destabilising threats. The truth, however, is that the
regimes of accumulation and the modes of regulation are historically dynamic
entities; periods of stability are followed by periods of destabilisation, sometimes
induced by their own previous successes. From the eighties onwards, we have

come to witness great turbulence in the different types of capitalism. This

turbulence is not, however, chaotic and some driving forces can be detected
within it. It is these driving forces which create the hegemonic character of
economic globalisation.
In general, and in terms of the definition of globalisation proposed above, it can
be said that evolution consists of the globalisation of mercantile capitalism and
the consequent localisation of meso-corporative, social democratic and state
capitalisms. Localisation implies destructuring and adaptation. The driving
forces which guide one or the other of these are as follows: agreements
between capital and labour are made more vulnerable by their new insertion
into the international economy (free markets and the global demand for direct
investment); the security of social relationships becomes the rigidity of the
salaried relationship; the priority given to financial markets blocks the
distribution of revenue and demands a reduction in public spending on social
needs; the transformation of labour into a global resource is achieved in such a
way as to allow it to coexist with salary and price differentiations; the increased
mobility of capital ensures that taxes cease to be liable on intangible income
(above all, labour); the role played by social policies in redistribution is
decreasing and, in consequence, social inequalities are rising; social protection
is subject to the pressures of privatisation, particularly in the area of retirement
pensions, given the interest taken in them by the financial markets; state activity
is intensified nowadays in the sense of motivating investment, innovation and
exports; the entrepreneurial sector of the state, if not totally eliminated, is
heavily reduced; the impoverishment of vulnerable social groups and the
emphasizing of social inequalities are considered inevitable effects of a
prosperous economy only to be lessened by compensatory measures if these
do not disturb the functioning of market mechanisms.
This, then, is the profile of hegemonic globalisation, particularly in its economic
and political forms. Its identification has to do with the scales of analysis. On a
grand scale (an analysis which covers a small area in great detail), such a
hegemony is only easy to detect when its size overcomes all national and local
particularities and the specific natures of the responses, resistances and
adaptations to external pressures. By contrast, on a small scale (an analysis
which covers large areas in less detail), only the major globalising tendencies
are visible, to the point where national or regional differentiation of their impact
and resistance to them appear negligible. It is on this level that the authors who
treat globalisation as an unprecedented phenomenon, as much in structure as
in intensity, are situated. For them, it is also inadequate to speak of hegemonic
globalisation, since, as I have already noted, there is only one irreducible
globalization and it therefore makes little sense to speak of hegemony, much
less anti-hegemony. It is on the medium scale that it becomes possible to
identify hegemonic global phenomena which, in the one hand, are articulated in
multiple forms and under local, national and regional conditions, and, on the
other hand, confront local, national and global resistances which may by
characterized as anti-hegemonic.
The choice of scale of levels is thus crucial and may be determined as much by
analytical as by politically strategic reasons or even by a combination of both.

For example, in order to visualise the conflicts between the great driving forces
of global capitalism it has been considered adequate to choose a scale of
analysis which distinguishes three great regional blocs, interlinked by multiple
dependencies and rivalries: the American, the European and the Japanese
(Stallings and Streeck, 1995;Castells, 1996: 108). Each of these blocs has a
center, the USA, the European Union and Japan respectively, a semi-periphery
and a periphery. In terms of this scale, the two types of capitalism discussed
above, social democratic and state capitalism, appear fused into one. In fact the
European Union today has an internal and an international political economy
and in its name the different European capitalisms are engaged in their battles
with North American capitalism through the international forums, namely the
World Trade Organisation.
A medium scale analysis is, therefore, the one which best clarifies the conflicts
and social struggles which take place on a world scale and the articulation
between their local, national and world dimensions. It is also the one which
enables us to identify any fractures at the heart of hegemony. The driving forces
previously referred to as being the nucleus of hegemonic globalisation translate
into different institutional, economic, social, political and cultural sets in
conjunction with each of the four types of capitalism or each of the three
regional blocs. These fractures are, today, often the entry point for local-global
anti-capitalist and anti-hegemonic social struggles.
The rifts between mercantile capitalism and social democratic or state
capitalism, between the neo-liberal model of social security and the European
social model, or even within the neo-liberal model itself, as well as revealing the
fractures within hegemonic globalisation, also create an impulse towards the
formulation of new syntheses from amongst the ruptures and, through these,
the reconstitution of hegemony. It is in this way that the "third way", theorised by
Giddens (1999), should be understood.
9. Levels of intensity of globalisation
The last fine point concerning the concept of globalisation defended in this text
relates to the levels of intensity of globalisation. Globalisation was defined as
sets of social relationships which translate into the intensification of
transnational interactions, whether they are transnational interstate practices,
capitalist practices or social and cultural practices. The inequalities of power
within these relationships (the unequal exchanges) are affirmed by the way in
which the dominant entities or phenomena release themselves from their
original contexts or local spaces and rhythms and, correspondingly, by the way
in which, after disintegration and destructuring has taken place, they reposition
themselves in their original contexts and local spaces and rhythms. In this dual
process, both the dominant (globalised) entities or phenomena and the
dominated (localised) ones undergo internal transformations. Even the North
American hamburger had to suffer small changes to free itself from its original
background (the North American Midwest) and conquer the world and the same
happened to the laws of intellectual ownership, popular music and the
Hollywood cinema. Yet whilst the transformations in dominant phenomena are
expansive and aim to broaden scope, space and rhythms, the transformations
of the dominated phenomena are retractive, disintegratory and destructuring;

their scope and rhythms which were local for endogenous reasons and rarely
represented themselves as local, were relocalised for exogenous reasons and
came to be represented as local. Dispossession, release from the local and
expansive transformation on the one hand and reterritorialisation, local
repositioning and disintegrating and retractive transformation, on the other
hand, are two sides of the same coin, namely globalisation.
These processes occur in very distinct ways. When we speak of globalisation
we are normally thinking of very intense and rapid processes of dispossession
and reterritorialisation and the consequent very dramatic transformations of
expansion and retraction. In these cases it is relatively easy to explain these
processes by a limited set of clearly defined causes. The truth, however, is that
the processes of globalisation do not always occur in this way. Sometimes they
are slower, more diffuse and more ambiguous and their causes are less well
defined. Clearly it is always possible to stipulate that in this case what we are
observing are not processes of globalisation. It is precisely this that the authors
who are most enthusiastic about globalisation tend to do, as well as those who
see in it something unprecedented, both in nature and intensity.[18] I believe,
however, that this is not the best analytical strategy since, contrary to intentions,
it reduces the scope and nature of the ongoing processes of globalisation. I
therefore propose a distinction between high intensity globalisation for the rapid,
intense and relatively monocausal processes of globalisation and low intensity
globalisation for the slow, diffuse and causally more ambiguous processes. One
example will help identify the terms of this distinction. I have chosen, from
amongst many other possibilities, one of the Washington consensuses: the
supremacy of law and the legal resolution of litigation as part of the model of
market-led development. In the mid eighties, cases involving public figures who
were powerful individuals or well known in economic or political spheres began
to appear in the courts of various European countries. These cases, almost all
of which involved criminal offences (corruption, fraud, falsification of
documents), gave the courts unprecedented public visibility and political
leadership. With the exception of the Supreme Court in the USA, since the
forties the courts of the core countries - and also in semi-peripheral and
peripheral countries - had led a quiet life. Reactive, rather than proactive,
settling cases between individuals which rarely reached the attention of the
public and never intervening in social conflicts, the law courts - their activities,
their rules and their agents - remained unknown to the general public. This state
of affairs started to change in the eighties as the courts rapidly began to hit the
front pages of the newspapers, their activities became the object of media
curiosity and magistrates became public figures.
This phenomenon occurred for example in Italy, in France, in Spain and in
Portugal and in each country it had specific and similar causes. The parallel and
simultaneous occurrence of the same phenomenon in different countries does
not make it a global phenomenon, except for the fact that the endogenous
causes, which differed from country to country, shared structural affinities or
aspects of remote, common and transnational causes. This in fact seems to
have been the case. Despite the national differences, which are always
significant, we can detect in the new judicial protagonism, certain common
factors. In the first place, there are the consequences of the confrontation

between the state and market principles in the management of social life
resulting from privatisation and deregulation of the economy, the devaluing of
the public services, the crisis in republican values, the new protagonism of
private law and the emergence of powerful social actors to whom the
prerogative of social regulation, previously held by the state, has been
transferred. All this has created a new promiscuity between economic and
political power which has allowed the elites to circulate freely and sometimes,
pendularly, from one to the other. This promiscuity, combined with the
weakening of the idea of public welfare or the common good has eventually
translated into a new legacy or privatisation of the state, which often resorts to
illegality in order to accomplish its aims. It has been white-collar crime and
corruption in general which has brought fame to the courts.
Secondly, the increasing conversion of hegemonic capitalist globalisation into
something irreversible and insurmountable, combined with signs of crisis in
communist regimes has led to a diminishing of the great political rifts. Whereas
before they had enabled a political resolution of political conflicts, they are now
no longer able to achieve this and so they become less sharp, more fragmented
and more personalised, to the point where they can be transformed into legal
conflicts. This process is called the politics of depoliticisation or the legalisation
of politics. Thirdly, this legalisation of politics, which was originally a symptom of
the crisis in democracy, is now fuelled by it. Democratic legitimacy, which before
had been based exclusively on the elected political organs, parliament and the
executive, has been, to a certain extent, transferred to the courts.
This phenomenon which, in addition to the countries already mentioned, has
also started to occur over the past decade in many other Western European,
Latin American and Asian countries.[19] and the same relationship between
local causes (endogenous and specific) and remote causes (common and
transnational) can be detected, although with some adjustments. For this
reason, I consider that we are facing a phenomenon of low intensity
globalisation.
Very different from this process is the one which, in the same area of justice and
the law, has come to be promoted by the core countries through their agencies
of international cooperation and assistance and by the World Bank the IMF and
the Interamerican Development Bank, with the aim of promoting deep-rooted
legal and judicial reforms in semi-peripheral and peripheral countries to enable
the creation of a legal and judicial institutionality which is efficient and adapted
to the new model of development, based on market priorities and mercantile
relationships between citizens and economic agents. Massive donations and
loans have been channelled into meeting this objective in a way which is
unprecedented in comparison with the cooperation, modernization and
development policies of the sixties and seventies. Just as in the globalisation
process described above, here, also, a policy based on the supremacy of the
law and the law courts is being implemented and, through this, the same public
visibility of the courts, the judicialisation of politics and the consequent
politicization of the judicial is emerging. However, in contrast with the previous
process, this process is very rapid and intense, and springs from the impulse of
dominant exogenous factors which are well-defined and easily reducible to

global hegemonic politics interested in creating, on a global level, an

institutionality which facilitates the limited expansion of global capitalism. [20]
This is high intensity globalisation.
The usefulness of this distinction lies in the way in which it enables us to clarify
the unequal power relations which underlie the different modes of production of
globalisation and which are, therefore, central to the concept of globalisation
proposed here. Low intensity globalisation tends to dominate in situations in
which exchanges are less unequal, or, rather, in which differences of power
(between the countries, interests, actors or practices underlying the alternative
concepts of globalisation) are small. In contrast, high-density globalisation tends
to dominate in situations in which exchanges are very unequal and the
differences in power are great.
10. Where are we heading?
The intensification of economic, political and cultural transnational interactions
in the last three decades has assumed such proportions that it is legitimate to
raise the question of whether this is ushering in a new period and a new model
of social development. The precise nature of this period and this model is at the
centre of current debates on the character of the ongoing transformations in
capitalist societies and in the world capitalist system as a whole. I have claimed
that the present day period is one of transition, which I have called the period of
the world system in transition. It combines characteristics of the modern world
system itself with others which indicate other systematic or extra-systematic
realities. It is not a matter of the mere juxtaposition of modern and emerging
characteristics, since this combination alters the internal logic of one or the
other. The world system in transition is very complex because it is formed from
three major sets of practices - interstate practices, global capitalist practices
and transnational social and cultural practices - which are profoundly
interlinked, according to indeterminate dynamics. It is, therefore, a period which
is very open and indefinite, a period of bifurcation whose future transformations
are impossible to foretell. The nature of the world system in transition itself is
problematic and the possible order is the order of disorder. Even given that a
new system will follow on from this current period of transition, it is not possible
to establish any predetermined relationship between the order that will sustain it
and the chaotic order of the present period or the non-chaotic order which
preceded and sustained the modern world system for five centuries before. In
these circumstances, it is not surprising that the current period is the object of
several contradictory readings.
There are two main alternative readings of the present changes to the world
system in transition and the paths forward which it suggests: the paradigmatic
reading and the subparadigmatic reading.
The paradigmatic reading claims that the end of the sixties and the beginning of
the seventies marked a period of paradigmatic transition in the world system, a
period of final crisis from which a new social paradigm will emerge. One of the
most controversial paradigmatic readings is that proposed by Wallerstein and
his collaborators.[21] According to this author, the modern world system entered
into a period of systematic crisis which began in 1967 and will last until the mid

21st century. In his terms, the period between 1967 and 1973 was crucial
because it marked a triple conjunction of breaking points in the world system: a)
the breaking point in a long Kondratief curve (1945-1995?); b) the breaking
point in the hegemony of the USA over the world system (1873-2025?); c) the
breaking point in the modern world system (1450-2100?).
Wallerstein warns that the proofs which support this triple rupture are more solid
in a) than in b) and in b) more than in c), which is understandable since the
putative full stop of the cycles is successively further away in the future each
time. According to him, world economic expansion is leading to the extreme
commodification of social life and to extreme polarisation (social as well as
quantitative) and, as a consequence, is reaching its maximum limit of
adjustment and adaptation and will soon exhaust "its capacity to maintain the
rhythmic cycles which are its heartbeat" (1991a: 134). The collapse of
mechanisms of structural adjustment opens up a vast terrain for social
experimentation and for real historical choices which are very difficult to predict.
In effect, the modern social sciences have proved to be of little use here, unless
they subject themselves to a radical revision and insert themselves within a
wider field of enquiry. Wallerstein terms such questioning utopianistic (as
distinct from utopian), i.e., "the science of utopian utopias, that is, the attempt to
clarify the real historical alternatives that are before us when a historical system
enters into its crisis phase, and to assess at that moment of extreme
fluctuations the pluses and minuses of alternative strategies" (1991a: 270).
From a very different, though converging perspective, Arrighi invites us to
reconsider Schumpeter'spredictions for the future of capitalism and, as a basis
for this, poses the Schumpeterian question: will capitalism survive its own
success? (Arrighi, 1994: 325; Arrighi and Silver, 1999). Some 50 years ago,
Schumpeter formulated the thesis that the present and prospective performance
of the capitalist system is such that it refutes the idea that collapse of this
system will occur due to economic failure, but that, in turn, this very success
corrupts the social institutions protecting the system, thus inevitably creating the
conditions under which it will not be able to survive, which strongly points at
socialism as its apparent heir (Schumpeter, 1976: 61). Schumpeter was thus
very sceptical of the future of capitalism and Arrighi claims that history may
prove him right, since the next half a century may very well confirm
Schumpeter's idea, not only that capitalism was very well capable of yet another
successful turn, but also that each such new turn brings about new conditions
under which the survival of capitalism itself proves increasingly difficult (Arrighi,
1994: 325). In their more recent work, Arrighi and Silver emphasise the role
played by the expansion of the financial system in the final crises of previous
hegemonic orders (Dutch and British). The current financialisation of the global
economy points towards a final crisis in the latest and most recent hegemony,
that of the USA. This phenomenon is not, therefore, new but what is radically
new is its combination with the proliferation and rising power of the multinational
companies and the way in which they interfere with the power of national states.
It is this combination which will come to sustain a paradigmatic transition (1999:
271-289). The subparadigmatic reading sees the present period as an important
process of structural adjustment, in which capitalism does not appear to show a
lack of resources or adequate imagination. The adjustment is significant

because it implies the transition from one regime of accumulation to another, or

from one mode of regulation ("Fordism") to another (still to be named; "postFordism"), sustained by the theories of regulation. [22] According to some
authors, the present period of transition enables us to discover the limits of
theories of regulation and the concepts which they convert into everyday
language as the concepts of "regimes of accumulation" and "modes of
regulation" (McMichael and Myhre, 1990;Boyer, 1996, 1998). The theories of
regulation, at least those which are most in circulation, took the nation state as
the unit of economic analysis, which probably made sense in terms of the
historical period of capitalist development in the core countries in which these
theories were formulated. Today, however, the national regulation of the
economy is in ruins and out of these ruins a form of transnational regulation is
emerging, a "global salaried relationship", based paradoxically on the increasing
fragmentation of the labour markets which is dramatically transforming the
regulatory role of the nation state, forcing a withdrawal of state protection for
national currency, labour and commodities markets and requiring a profound
reorganization of the state. In fact, it may be that a new political form is being
forged: the "transnational state."
As is to be expected, all this is questionable and is being questioned. As we
have seen previously, the real dimension of the weakening of the regulatory
functions of the nation state is today one of the core debates in sociology and
political economics. The only fact unquestioned is that such functions have
changed (or are changing) dramatically, and in a way which questions the
traditional dualism between national and international regulation.
Within the subparadigmatic reading of the current period of capitalist
development there is, however, some consensus on the following questions.
Given the antagonistic nature of capitalist social relations, the routine
reproduction and sustained expansion of the accumulation of capital is
inherently problematic. For this to be obtained, it is presupposed that there is a)
a dynamic correspondence between a determined pattern of production and a
determined pattern of consumption (i.e. a regime of accumulation) and b) an
institutional set of norms, institutions, organisations and social pacts which
ensure the reproduction of an entire field of social relations on which the regime
of accumulation is based (i.e. a mode of regulation). There may be crises of the
regime of accumulation and crises within the regime of accumulation and the
same may happen with the mode of regulation. Since the sixties the core
countries have been experiencing a dual crisis in the regime of accumulation
and the mode of regulation. The regulatory role of the nation state tends to
become more decisive in the crises of rather than the crises within, but the way
in which it is exercised depends heavily on the international context, the
integration of the national economy into the international division of labour and
the specific institutional capacities and resources of the State to articulate,
under hostile crisis conditions, strategies of accumulation together with
hegemonic strategies and strategies of trust.[23]
The paradigmatic reading is much broader than the subparadigmatic reading,
as much in its substantive affirmations as in the extent of its time-space. In its
terms, the crisis of the regime of accumulation and the mode of regulation are

mere symptoms of a much deeper crisis: a crisis of civilization or epoch. The

"solutions" to the subparadigmatic crises are the product of the system's
mechanisms of structural adjustment; given that these are irreversibly corroded,
such "solutions" will increasingly prove more provisional and unsatisfactory. The
subparadigmatic reading is, at best, relatively agnostic with regard to
paradigmatic predictions and considers that, as these are long term, they are no
more than conjecture. It also holds that, if the past has anything at all to teach
us, it is that up to now capitalism has successfully resolved its crises and
always within a short space of time.
The confrontation between paradigmatic and subparadigmatic readings has two
main registers, the analytical and the political-ideological. The analytical
register, as we have just seen, is the most consistent formulation in the debate
on whether globalisation is a new or an old phenomenon. Since it is assumed
that what is new today is always the harbinger of what is new tomorrow, the
authors who consider globalisation a new phenomena are the same as those
who follow paradigmatic readings, whilst the authors who consider globalisation
to be an old phenomenon, whether renewed or not, are the same as those who
follow subparadigmatic readings.[24]
Yet this confrontation also has a political-ideological register, since different
perspectives on the nature, range and political-ideological orientation of the
ongoing transformations are at stake and therefore, also, the actions and
struggles which will either promote or combat them.
These two readings are, in fact, the two fundamental arguments relating to
political action within the turbulent conditions of our times. The paradigmatic
arguments appeal to collective actors who favour transformatory action whilst
the subparadigmatic arguments appeal to collective actors who favour
adaptation. It is a matter of two types-ideas of collective actors. Some social
actors (group, classes, organisations) support only one of the arguments, but
many of them subscribe to one or the other depending on the time or the issue,
without proclaiming exclusive or irreversible loyalty to either. Some actors may
experience the globalisation of the economy in a subparadigmatic way and the
globalisation of culture in a paradigmatic way, whilst others may conceive of the
reverse. Moreover, some may conceive of as economic the same processes of
globalisation which others consider cultural or political.
The actors who favour a paradigmatic reading tend to be more apocalyptic in
evaluating the fears, risks, dangers and collapses of our times and to be more
ambitious in relation to the historical possibilities and choices which reveal
themselves. The process of globalisation may be thus seen either as highly
destructive of balances and irreplaceable identities or as the beginnings of a
new era of global, or even cosmic, solidarity.
On the other hand, for the actors who favour the subparadigmatic reading, the
present global transformations in the economy, politics and culture, despite their
indisputable relevance, are neither forging a new utopia nor a catastrophe. They
simply express the temporary turbulence and partial chaos which normally
accompany any change to routine systems.

The coexistence of paradigmatic and subparadigmatic interpretations is

probably the most distinctive characteristic of our times. And indeed is not this
the characteristic of all periods of paradigmatic transition? The turbulence which
for some is inevitable and controllable is seen by others as heralding radical
ruptures. Amongst the latter, there are some who see uncontrollable dangers
where others see opportunities for unsuspected emancipation. My analysis of
the present time, my preference for transformatory actions and, in general, my
sensibility - and this is the exact word to use - incline me to think that
paradigmatic readings, rather than subparadigmatic readings, interpret our
situation better at the start of the new millennium. [25]
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[1]

See Stallings (1992: 3). At the end of the eighties, 80% of international
commerce in the USA was dominated by North American or foreign
multinationals and more than a third of North American international business
was, in fact, inter-company i.e., was carried out between different,
geographically separate, units of the same company. In addition, nowadays,
almost all direct foreign investment and a large part of the technological
transfers are effected by multinational companies (Sassen , 1994: 14).
[2]
For a similar argument, see also Wade (1990, 1996) and Whitley
(1992).
[3]
According to the same report, 46% of the world's population living in
absolute poverty live in Sub-Saharan Africa, 40% in South Asia and 15% in the

Far East, Pacific region and Latin America. However, the proportion of people
living in absolute poverty dropped between 1993 and 1998 from 29% to 24%
(UNDP, 2001: 22). See also Kennedy (1993: 193-228) and Chossudovsky
(1997). According to Maizels (1992) exports of primary resources from the Third
World increased by almost 100% during the period 1980-88. Yet the income
obtained in 1988 was 30% less than that of 1980. See also Singh (1993).
[4]
In 1995 malaria affected, per 100 inhabitants, 16 people in Kenya, 21
in Papua New Guinea and 33 in Zambia (UNDP, 1999).
[5]
Cf. Featherstone (1990); Appadurai (1990); Berman (1983); W. Meyer
(1987); Giddens (1990, 1991); Bauman (1992). See also Wuthnow (1985,
1987); Bergesen (1980).
[6]
See also Featherstone (1990: 10); Wallerstein (1991a: 184); ChaseDunn (1991: 103). For Wallerstein the contrast between the modern world
system and the former world empires lies in the fact that the former combines a
single division of labour with a system of independent states and multiple
cultural systems (Wallerstein, 1979: 5).
[7]
On this question, see Stallings (1995) in which the regional responses
of Latin America, Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa to global pressures
are analysed. See also Boyer (1998) and Drache (1999).
[8]
Amongst many others, see Boyer (1996, 1998); Drache (1999).
[9]
On the concept of turbulence in scales and explosion of scales, see
Santos (1996).
[10]
Cf. also McMichael (1996: 169). The dialectics of inclusion and
exclusion are particularly visible in the global communications and information
technology market. With the exception of South Africa, in terms of this market,
the African continent does not exist.
[11]
The idea of cosmopolitanism, like universalism, world citizenship and
the rejection of political and territorial borders, has a long tradition in Western
culture, from the cosmic law of Pythagoras and the philallelia of Democritus to
the "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto" of Terence, from the medieval
res publica christiana to the Renaissance humanists, and from Voltaire, for
whom "to be a good patriot, it is necessary to become an enemy of the rest of
the world" to working class internationalism.
[12]
The distinction between the real and the symbolic should not be
extended beyond reasonable limits, since each of the poles of distinction
contains the other, (or some dimension of it), although in a recessive form. The
material "something more" I am referring to basically consists of the economic
and social rights won and made possible through the Welfare state: indirect
salaries, social security etc. The symbolic "something more" includes, for
example, inclusion in a national ideology or a consumer ideology and the
conquest of effective rights. One of the consequences of hegemonic
gobalisation has been the increasing erosion of the material, compensated for
by the intensification of the symbolic "something more".
[13]
I analyse this question in my study of the participatory budget in
Porto Alegre (Santos, 1998a).
[14]
On the common legacy of humanity, see, amongst others, Santos
(1995: 365-373) and the exhaustive study by Pureza (1999).
[15]
On globalisation-from-the-bottom-up or anti-hegemonic globalisation,
see Hunter (1995); Kidder and McGinn (1995). See also Falk (1995 and 1999).

Both works consider the coalitions and international workers networks which
have emerged out of the NAFTA.
[16]
In the same way, it is suggested that the progressive movements
should use the instruments of economic nationalism to combat market forces.
[17]
On concepts of high or low intensity democracy see Santos (1998b)
and Santos (2000b).
[18]
See Castells (1996).
[19]
This phenomenon is analysed in detail in Santos (2000b).
[20]
On this global reform "movement" of the law courts, see Santos
(2000b).
[21]
Wallerstein (1991a); Hopkins et al. (1996). See also Arrighi and
Silver (1999).
[22]
Aglietta (1979); Boyer (1986, 1990). See also Jessop (1990a,
1990b); Kotz (1990); Mahnkopf (1988); Noel (1987); Vroey (1984).
[23]
On these three strategies of the modern state, see Santos (1995: 99109).
[24]
Despite considering globalisation an old phenomenon, some
theorists of the world system, such as Wallerstein, follow paradigmatic readings
on the basis of systematic analyses, namely the analysis of the superimposition
of breaking points on the different long-term processes which constitute the
modern world system.
[25]
The justification for this position is presented elsewhere (Santos,
1995, 2000a).