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La République haitienne: etat des lieux et perspectives
BULLETIN
OF LATIN AMERICAN
RESEARCH
Barth&my, G6rard and Girault, Christian (eds) 1993), La Rkpublique haitienne: etat des lieux et perspectives, d ditions Karthala/Adec (Paris). 485 pp. Price not given. Recent developments in the Haitian socio-political landscape and the need to reassess the relationship between France and Haiti after 200 years of rupture was the occasion for a conference in Paris in 1991. The timing of the conference was appropriate because it coincided with the victory of Aristide in the 1990 presidential elections. For many, this event paved the way for the real democratisation of Haitian society. Yet, some of the discussions held there also presaged the military coup of September 199 1 that ousted Aristide from power. The proceedings of this conference are reported in this present volume. This book provides an overview of the fundamental features of Haitian society. It is also an assessment of the present situation and a dialogue between various important political agents of the process. The book is divided into five sections: Part I discusses the socio-historical processes in the evolution of contemporary Haiti with articles on the formation of the nation state, on the nature of Haitian society and culture; Part II describes Haitian communication, language, education and identity; Part III discusses the Haitian political structure and processes; Part IV discusses wealth and poverty; and Part V debates Haitian culture and cultural practices. Each part is an intermingling of statements, essays, testimonies and short debates. Thus, quality and content of the book is uneven. Many of the contributors to the book have been, for the last 30 years, intellectual and political activists and their contributions sometimes reflect their particular political agendas. The timing of the book, given the present political crisis in Haiti, makes it particularly interesting. Is Haiti an odd case, challenging all sorts of theoretical and political understandings? This is the most important question that the book attempts to answer. The book explains that the singularity of Haiti lies neither in its cultural traditions nor its turbulent political life. Bather, Haiti is peculiar because of its unique experience as a former French colony that staged a successful slave and anti-colonial revolution. This experience resulted in a society characterised by antinomies (p. 10). While the Haitian people succeeded in destroying colonial rule and slavery, the process was also anticapitalistic and resulted in the creation of two societies: a peasant society isolated by its culture, language, religion, norms, and values, and an urban milieu controlled by a post-colonial Western-oriented national elite. This social structure is expressed in the polarisation and antagonism that exist between the rural and the urban, between the state and the nation, For example, the many peasant rebellion movements of the nineteenth century against the colonial state structure maintained by the Haitian elite epitomised such antinomy. The analysis of the many ‘lie& of that antinomy constitutes the thread linking the various essays, debates, and testimonies presented in the book. Parts I and III are the most interesting contributions to the issues debated in the book. The central theme revolves around the Haitian project of democratisation and modes of democratic transition. The articles by Benot, Casimir, and Dahomey deal with the formation of the Haitian nation state, the nature of that state and its relationship to civil society. Benot, for example, retraces the historical roots of the antinomy. He argues that in 1791 the Haitian leader, Toussaint Louverture, faced two sets of demands: the claims of former slaves to social and civil rights and the needs of the emerging Haitian state to secure sovereignty. Toussaint and the subsequent Haitian leaders opted in favour of the latter. This choice bore important consequences for the future of the society. Political independence was achieved but the same model of development that implied economic dependence was maintained. This led to the
BOOK REVIEWS creation of a weak (vis-d-vis the world economy) yet repressive (vis-d-t& the people) state. Casimir, in contrast, questions the practices of the Haitian state. For him, contrary to the evolutionary process of state formation found in the West where the state was created to protect the nation, in the Caribbean, and in Haiti in particular, the state emerged against the nation. It functioned by exclusion, representing only an Bite minority of the citizenry. These practices of exclusion and repression are reinforced by the judicial system. For Casimir, this state is really a state/class that positions itself against the nation, Casimir concludes that, in the Caribbean, the nation is still waiting for a state (p. 36). Issues of citizenship and of civil society are important aspects of Dahomey’s article which analyses the nature of the political regime and the causes of the continuing presence of authoritarian rule in Haiti (p. 68). For Dahomey, the absence of a public political space helps to explain the recurrence of dictatorial regimes. For many of the contributors to this book, the Aristide government marked the first realistic opportunity to instal a democratic state, to build a civil society. The articles in Parts II and III describe and explain patterns, trends, possibilities, and obstacles in the process of democratisation. The article by Hilaire analyses the emergence of Creole, the Haitian language, as the outcome of a struggle between French and various African idioms to control the linguistic space after 1791. Pierre-Louis argues that the use of Creole was crucial in the uprooting of the Duvalierist dictatorship. During these political struggles, language became a political tool because the discourse was not formal, but contradictory and argumentative reflecting the tensions, contradictions, and conflicts in contemporary Haiti (p. 129). For Pierre-Louis, the political use of Creole manifested the will of the majority to become citizens, to claim their rights (p. 131). In Part III, the articles by Moise, Trouillot, Hector, Pierre-Charles, and Midy discuss issues related to the nature of the transition, the project of democratisation, and the social agents involved in these processes. These articles clearly express the political stands of their authors. For Moise the transition to democracy poses a problem beyond a mere constitutional reform. The election of Aristide clearly showed the need for a new form of political regime. With the uprooting of the Duvalier regime, there is a clear rejection of the existing form of political regime and a demand to reorganise the state (p. 153). For Moise, the new constitution of 1987 attempted to meet these new demands. It rejected the autocratic model that had prevailed since 1804. The new constitution was an attempt to make people the source of sovereignty and to eliminate the hegemony of the presidency. This constitution set the stage for the decentralisation of power. The creation of independent civil institutions and the separation of power between the presidency and the new position of prime minister facilitate the process. This is the task faced by the Aristide government. Trouillot argues that there are in fact three transitions at stake: a passage from a corrupt to an accountable state; a shift from a dictatorship to a democratic political regime; and a transition from an illegal to a legitimate regime. Yet, for Trouillot, the creation of a social contract-which has never existed in Haiti-is crucial. To what extent the Aristide government would be able to create this pact given the ‘lumpemnisation’ of the crisis remains for Trouillot an open question (p. 190). Hector, in contrast, states that the problem of the transition is manifested in the way in which Aristide was elected. For him, the populism of the government is a threat to the system of representative power. What form should democracy take? Direct participation? Or a system of representation? Moreover, the participation of United Nations observers in the 1990 elections posed conflict between the sovereignty of the nation and a situation of supranationality (pp. 190-196). The articles by Pierre-Charles and Midy discuss the failure of the political parties
BULLETIN
OF LATIN
AMERICAN
RESEARCH
and the emergence and role of new social movements in the victory of Aristide. For Midy the victory reflected a double process: the decomposition of an unequal system of elite/masses and the recomposition of a new social pact with the inclusion of the majority. This book, while appealingly broad in its approach, suffers from this broadness and could have been strengthened with a more thorough editing. Indeed, the book ends without a conclusion which could have at least synthesised some of the issues discussed. Similarly, some of the essays are consistent, others provide some historical perspective, yet many-such as the debate about the nation state-suffer from the conceptual ambiguity. In fact, the core argument of the book concerns a model of society and the project of democratisation. These issues, however, never surface as a central part of the discussions. In that vein, the provision of section overviews would have been helpful in opening new avenues for readers not familiar with the internal dynamics of Haitian politics or with the political trajectories of the contributors. The book does not articulate sufficiently the guiding themes to the core argument. Despite its loose presentation of the issues, too much is at stake in Haiti for this book to be ignored. Carolle Charles City University of New York
Lal, Brij V., Munro,
Doug and Beechert,
Edward
D. (eds) (1993), Plantation of Hawaii Press
Workers: Resistance and Accommodation, University (Honolulu).
viii + 343 pp. USS 38.00.
For over 20 years historians of Latin America have debated how to analyse debt peonage. Were debt peons forced labourers or free wage workers? This book addresses that question. Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation is a collection of essays about plantation labour systems in a comparative framework. The primary focus of the book is the Pacific Islands: Hawaii, Melanesia, Samoa, the Solomon Islands and Fiji. However, plantation labour in Latin America is analysed in three excellent chapters. David McCreery examines coerced labour systems in Guatemala from 1870 to 1940. Allen Wells and Gilbert Joseph investigate the forms of domination and worker resistance on Yucatecan henequen estates during the late Porfiriato; and Michael J. Gonzales reviews the nature of labour systems on northern Peruvian sugar plantations from 1880 to 192 1. While the chapters on Latin America have been published previously, their presentation in one volume is useful in that it invites comparison. The editors’ purpose is to criticise orthodox approaches to debt peonage and workers’ resistance. In the introduction Munro suggests that in general the covert coercion of the market was more significant in forging plantation labour systems than planters’ recourse to overt force. The editors are extraordinarily broadminded, however. Two of the three selections on Latin America argue the opposite. McCreery presents a sophisticated Gramscian analysis of the interplay between political hegemony (coercion) and ideological hegemony (social consensus). He proceeds to demonstrate that the Guatemalan state ‘rested increasingly on simple force, on coercion and violence, rather than on shared culture and values of consensus’ (p. 2 17). Guatemala’s coffee planters enforced their power with the repeating rifle and the telegraph. Wells and Joseph develop a complementary argument for the Yucatan.
OF LATIN AMERICAN
RESEARCH
Barth&my, G6rard and Girault, Christian (eds) 1993), La Rkpublique haitienne: etat des lieux et perspectives, d ditions Karthala/Adec (Paris). 485 pp. Price not given. Recent developments in the Haitian socio-political landscape and the need to reassess the relationship between France and Haiti after 200 years of rupture was the occasion for a conference in Paris in 1991. The timing of the conference was appropriate because it coincided with the victory of Aristide in the 1990 presidential elections. For many, this event paved the way for the real democratisation of Haitian society. Yet, some of the discussions held there also presaged the military coup of September 199 1 that ousted Aristide from power. The proceedings of this conference are reported in this present volume. This book provides an overview of the fundamental features of Haitian society. It is also an assessment of the present situation and a dialogue between various important political agents of the process. The book is divided into five sections: Part I discusses the socio-historical processes in the evolution of contemporary Haiti with articles on the formation of the nation state, on the nature of Haitian society and culture; Part II describes Haitian communication, language, education and identity; Part III discusses the Haitian political structure and processes; Part IV discusses wealth and poverty; and Part V debates Haitian culture and cultural practices. Each part is an intermingling of statements, essays, testimonies and short debates. Thus, quality and content of the book is uneven. Many of the contributors to the book have been, for the last 30 years, intellectual and political activists and their contributions sometimes reflect their particular political agendas. The timing of the book, given the present political crisis in Haiti, makes it particularly interesting. Is Haiti an odd case, challenging all sorts of theoretical and political understandings? This is the most important question that the book attempts to answer. The book explains that the singularity of Haiti lies neither in its cultural traditions nor its turbulent political life. Bather, Haiti is peculiar because of its unique experience as a former French colony that staged a successful slave and anti-colonial revolution. This experience resulted in a society characterised by antinomies (p. 10). While the Haitian people succeeded in destroying colonial rule and slavery, the process was also anticapitalistic and resulted in the creation of two societies: a peasant society isolated by its culture, language, religion, norms, and values, and an urban milieu controlled by a post-colonial Western-oriented national elite. This social structure is expressed in the polarisation and antagonism that exist between the rural and the urban, between the state and the nation, For example, the many peasant rebellion movements of the nineteenth century against the colonial state structure maintained by the Haitian elite epitomised such antinomy. The analysis of the many ‘lie& of that antinomy constitutes the thread linking the various essays, debates, and testimonies presented in the book. Parts I and III are the most interesting contributions to the issues debated in the book. The central theme revolves around the Haitian project of democratisation and modes of democratic transition. The articles by Benot, Casimir, and Dahomey deal with the formation of the Haitian nation state, the nature of that state and its relationship to civil society. Benot, for example, retraces the historical roots of the antinomy. He argues that in 1791 the Haitian leader, Toussaint Louverture, faced two sets of demands: the claims of former slaves to social and civil rights and the needs of the emerging Haitian state to secure sovereignty. Toussaint and the subsequent Haitian leaders opted in favour of the latter. This choice bore important consequences for the future of the society. Political independence was achieved but the same model of development that implied economic dependence was maintained. This led to the
BOOK REVIEWS creation of a weak (vis-d-vis the world economy) yet repressive (vis-d-t& the people) state. Casimir, in contrast, questions the practices of the Haitian state. For him, contrary to the evolutionary process of state formation found in the West where the state was created to protect the nation, in the Caribbean, and in Haiti in particular, the state emerged against the nation. It functioned by exclusion, representing only an Bite minority of the citizenry. These practices of exclusion and repression are reinforced by the judicial system. For Casimir, this state is really a state/class that positions itself against the nation, Casimir concludes that, in the Caribbean, the nation is still waiting for a state (p. 36). Issues of citizenship and of civil society are important aspects of Dahomey’s article which analyses the nature of the political regime and the causes of the continuing presence of authoritarian rule in Haiti (p. 68). For Dahomey, the absence of a public political space helps to explain the recurrence of dictatorial regimes. For many of the contributors to this book, the Aristide government marked the first realistic opportunity to instal a democratic state, to build a civil society. The articles in Parts II and III describe and explain patterns, trends, possibilities, and obstacles in the process of democratisation. The article by Hilaire analyses the emergence of Creole, the Haitian language, as the outcome of a struggle between French and various African idioms to control the linguistic space after 1791. Pierre-Louis argues that the use of Creole was crucial in the uprooting of the Duvalierist dictatorship. During these political struggles, language became a political tool because the discourse was not formal, but contradictory and argumentative reflecting the tensions, contradictions, and conflicts in contemporary Haiti (p. 129). For Pierre-Louis, the political use of Creole manifested the will of the majority to become citizens, to claim their rights (p. 131). In Part III, the articles by Moise, Trouillot, Hector, Pierre-Charles, and Midy discuss issues related to the nature of the transition, the project of democratisation, and the social agents involved in these processes. These articles clearly express the political stands of their authors. For Moise the transition to democracy poses a problem beyond a mere constitutional reform. The election of Aristide clearly showed the need for a new form of political regime. With the uprooting of the Duvalier regime, there is a clear rejection of the existing form of political regime and a demand to reorganise the state (p. 153). For Moise, the new constitution of 1987 attempted to meet these new demands. It rejected the autocratic model that had prevailed since 1804. The new constitution was an attempt to make people the source of sovereignty and to eliminate the hegemony of the presidency. This constitution set the stage for the decentralisation of power. The creation of independent civil institutions and the separation of power between the presidency and the new position of prime minister facilitate the process. This is the task faced by the Aristide government. Trouillot argues that there are in fact three transitions at stake: a passage from a corrupt to an accountable state; a shift from a dictatorship to a democratic political regime; and a transition from an illegal to a legitimate regime. Yet, for Trouillot, the creation of a social contract-which has never existed in Haiti-is crucial. To what extent the Aristide government would be able to create this pact given the ‘lumpemnisation’ of the crisis remains for Trouillot an open question (p. 190). Hector, in contrast, states that the problem of the transition is manifested in the way in which Aristide was elected. For him, the populism of the government is a threat to the system of representative power. What form should democracy take? Direct participation? Or a system of representation? Moreover, the participation of United Nations observers in the 1990 elections posed conflict between the sovereignty of the nation and a situation of supranationality (pp. 190-196). The articles by Pierre-Charles and Midy discuss the failure of the political parties
BULLETIN
OF LATIN
AMERICAN
RESEARCH
and the emergence and role of new social movements in the victory of Aristide. For Midy the victory reflected a double process: the decomposition of an unequal system of elite/masses and the recomposition of a new social pact with the inclusion of the majority. This book, while appealingly broad in its approach, suffers from this broadness and could have been strengthened with a more thorough editing. Indeed, the book ends without a conclusion which could have at least synthesised some of the issues discussed. Similarly, some of the essays are consistent, others provide some historical perspective, yet many-such as the debate about the nation state-suffer from the conceptual ambiguity. In fact, the core argument of the book concerns a model of society and the project of democratisation. These issues, however, never surface as a central part of the discussions. In that vein, the provision of section overviews would have been helpful in opening new avenues for readers not familiar with the internal dynamics of Haitian politics or with the political trajectories of the contributors. The book does not articulate sufficiently the guiding themes to the core argument. Despite its loose presentation of the issues, too much is at stake in Haiti for this book to be ignored. Carolle Charles City University of New York
Lal, Brij V., Munro,
Doug and Beechert,
Edward
D. (eds) (1993), Plantation of Hawaii Press
Workers: Resistance and Accommodation, University (Honolulu).
viii + 343 pp. USS 38.00.
For over 20 years historians of Latin America have debated how to analyse debt peonage. Were debt peons forced labourers or free wage workers? This book addresses that question. Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation is a collection of essays about plantation labour systems in a comparative framework. The primary focus of the book is the Pacific Islands: Hawaii, Melanesia, Samoa, the Solomon Islands and Fiji. However, plantation labour in Latin America is analysed in three excellent chapters. David McCreery examines coerced labour systems in Guatemala from 1870 to 1940. Allen Wells and Gilbert Joseph investigate the forms of domination and worker resistance on Yucatecan henequen estates during the late Porfiriato; and Michael J. Gonzales reviews the nature of labour systems on northern Peruvian sugar plantations from 1880 to 192 1. While the chapters on Latin America have been published previously, their presentation in one volume is useful in that it invites comparison. The editors’ purpose is to criticise orthodox approaches to debt peonage and workers’ resistance. In the introduction Munro suggests that in general the covert coercion of the market was more significant in forging plantation labour systems than planters’ recourse to overt force. The editors are extraordinarily broadminded, however. Two of the three selections on Latin America argue the opposite. McCreery presents a sophisticated Gramscian analysis of the interplay between political hegemony (coercion) and ideological hegemony (social consensus). He proceeds to demonstrate that the Guatemalan state ‘rested increasingly on simple force, on coercion and violence, rather than on shared culture and values of consensus’ (p. 2 17). Guatemala’s coffee planters enforced their power with the repeating rifle and the telegraph. Wells and Joseph develop a complementary argument for the Yucatan.