Rethinking the center: Party politics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chile

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manoeuverings taking place inside Peru’s best organised political party occasioned by the advancing senility of the@ ma’mixo, Victor Raul Haya de la Torre. Upon the death of Haya and an unexpected electoral defeat in the May 1980 general elections, internal schism grew, as Armando Villanueva and Andres Townsend vied for control of the party apparatus. Graham explains how this conflict between two leading lights of APRA’s ‘old guard’ created the political conditions for a new generation of activists, headed by Garcia and Luis Alva Castro, to rise rapidly through the ranks and eventually gain control of the organisation. Again, these events are narrated in a knowledgeable evenhanded fashion, and provide the most detailed account to appear in English on the topic. On the other hand, the following sections on the 1985 election campaign and the rollercoaster performance of APRA in govemment (‘boom’ 19851987 to ‘bust’ 1988-1990), largely covers the same ground and adds nothing new to existing publications in English. More interesting is Graham’s account of APRA policy towards the ‘informal sector’, where the author outlines how the party attempted to employ clientist practices to strengthen its political base in the pueblos jdvenes, especially around Lima, where the left gamed substantial support. This policy was pursued in an effort to convert APRA into ‘the natural party of government’ along the lines of the Mexican PRI. Graham illustrates how the strategy collapsed as a result of APRA’s disastrous economic ‘management’ and the ability of many ‘informals’ to see through the blatant attempts to manipulate and co-opt. What APRA failed to appreciate, as did Mario Vargas Llosa in 1990, was that although much remained the same, the veluscato of 1968-1975 has ensured that Peruvian politics would never quite be the same again. On the basis of APRA’s sorry record in office, the author (unsurprisingly) summarises that democratic consolidation ‘remains an elusive goal’ (p. 2 17) in Peru, a conclusion that could have been reached without recourse to the banalities of what passes for theory in mainstream US political science. This quibble aside, Carol Graham has produced a worthwhile book that also has the advantage of providing a good teaching aid. Lewis Taylor University of Liverpool

Scully, Timothy R. (1992), Rethinking the Center: Party Politics in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Chile, Stanford University Press (Stanford). ix + 287 pp. $42.50 hbk. The reasons for the comparative stability and civilian domination of Chile’s politics since independence form one of the major questions in Latin American history. Timothy Scully’s book, which has its origins in a Berkeley PhD thesis, is very much an attempt to reappraise the problem using the perspectives offered by the United States and Western European tradition of political science. Drawing on theoretical debates about the stability of party systems and the significance of centre parties, Scully identifies three critical junctures in Chile’s political history, all of which stimulated the formation of new parties and the redefinition and realignment of the old. The first conflict, between 1857 and 1861, centred on the church, and gave birth to the Liberals, the crucial mediators in congressional politics until the early 1920s. The second, between 1920 and 1932, occurred over the political incorporation of the urban working class, created two major left-wing parties, and put the Radicals into the position of political brokers. The third was marked by the right’s loss of control over

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the countryside between 1952 and 1958, and saw the growth of the Christian Democrats in the centre. In contrast to the parties which had occupied this position in earlier periods, however, the Christian Democrats possessed a much more ideological and exclusive vision of the way in which they wished to reshape Chile, and their reluctance to act as brokers in the system contributed to its eventual collapse in 1973. Perhaps the key feature of Chile’s return to civilian government, Scully argues at the end of the book, is the change in the attitude of the Christian Democrats towards parties elsewhere in the political spectrum. Scully is surely correct to argue that too much attention in Latin American political history has been paid to the left, and insufficient to the centre (and to the right, it might be added), and his approach certainly offers an interesting and provocative analysis which will be of interest not only to Chilean specialists but also useful to advanced undergraduate and MA students. However, it is very much a work of political science, rather than of political economy, and the rather narrow lens through which Chile’s history is therefore viewed has some imperfections. The treatment of the 1973 coup and the Pinochet regime is indicative of this, for despite the fundamental changes which resulted in the dismantling of the state, the restructuring of the economy, and, by the late 198Os, a broad consensus about the direction of economic policy, the military government is not, in Scully’s terms, a critical juncture, since no important new parties appear. Will future scholars see 1973-1990 as unimportant a watershed as this argument implies? The same criticism could be directed at Scully’s treatment of the nineteenth century, where the conquest of the nitrate pampa in 1879-1880 and the 1891 civil war receive scant attention. Scully instead sees the period from 1861 to 1920 as a continuity in Chilean history, 1891 simply marking a failed attempt to restore a presidential system at the expense of congress. The problem with this approach is that it ignores some of the underlying economic realities which permitted the political system to function. Surely any interpretation of Chilean political history has to recognise the peculiarities of the country’s economy between the Pacific War and the Pinochet coup, an economy which depended on mining exports produced by foreign firms. These exports meant not only that the state was forced to act as mediator between the export economy and domestic business elites, but they also provided the resources for government to play a much more active economic role than elsewhere in Latin America. They thus lubricated the factional alliances, the patronage and the graft which marked the Chilean political system. Moreover, stability seems often to be seen by Scully as an end in itself. An alternative reading of Chilean political history might suggest that although it has certainly been marked by lengthy periods of civilian domination, the system was unable, precisely because of the brokerage role of the centre parties and their use of the state to maintain their privileges and influence, to deliver fundamental change when required. In the end the stalemate inherent in the Chilean multi-party system resulted in the two periods of Ibafiez, and then in its total breakdown in 1973. The problem, perhaps, is that at particular times in the country’s history Chilean politicians have become complacent about its apparent stability, compared with its neighbours, and thus failed often to recognise the rather fhmsy economic foundations on which it rested or the social pressures which were building up in the system. Rory Miller University of Liverpool