Is the Pink Tide the Rebirth of History?
Image courtesy of Diego Carneiro via Unsplash
Reflecting upon the historical upheavals of the twentieth century with the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc imminent, in his The End of History (1989) Francis Fukuyama posits that he had arrived at the inevitable endpoint of humanity’s ideological evolution. He concluded that liberal democracy and its inherent economic system of a capitalistic market economy had ascended over the international system once and for all, and predicted that the coming century would witness a “collective marketization” and democracy’s spread over the remainder of the Earth, ushering in an epoch of unprecedented abundance and perpetual peace.
According to Fukuyama, this was because now the only real competitors to capitalism and its monopoly on democratic rule, socialism and Marxism-Leninism, had ended in abject authoritarianism and utter failure. The West, triumphant politically and economically, soon enough would be emulated by all.
A quarter into the twenty-first century, many have observed in some ways the exact opposite of Fukuyama's predictions. While economic growth under capitalism continues unabated, so has inequality, and the number and quality of democratic countries has actually been decreasing year after year. In the West itself, neo-fascism and right-wing populism are gaining traction, 47 percent of the world’s population still lives in poverty, and China’s strange amalgam of a command and market economy will soon surpass even the United States’.
In Latin America, Earth’s most unequal region, a political movement variously called the “Pink Tide,” “socialism of the twenty-first century,” and “post-neoliberalism” is resurging across the continent. Is this a middle path between the rampant repression of twentieth-century socialism and the crushing inequality of twenty-first-century capitalism?
The name “Pink Tide” describes the phenomenon of left-leaning political parties that have swept into power across Latin America since 1998. After almost completely receding in the 2010s as right-wing reactionary governments won election after election, in 2023 more of the region is awash with the Pink Tide than ever before. The recent re-election of Lula Da Silva in Brazil marked the seventh left-leaning administration elected within the last five years.
Socialism’s history in Latin America stretches back to organizations formed from rural peasants and urban workers around the turn of the nineteenth century who by the mid-twentieth had gained enough mass support for center and far left-wing governments to be elected or violently instituted across the continent. The United States—in an initiative called “Operation Condor”—then allied itself with conservative elements in eight different countries to collaborate in a series of coups d'etat implementing right-wing military dictatorships and imposing neoliberal economic reforms. When the Dictatorial Era ended around the 80s and early 1990s, democracy was restored but poverty remained rampant. In 1998, the first Pink Tide began to swell when Hugo Chavez was democratically elected in Venezuela.
I have analyzed the economic and political evolution of two countries with polarized outcomes that both pioneered the Pink Tide, Venezuela and Brazil, to see if the movement either disproves Fukuyama's dichotomy between socialism and authoritarianism versus capitalism and democracy or if it has offered a viable alternative to the western hegemony over the international system.
Venezuela’s first socialist president, Hugo Chavez, made great strides in some areas, such as huger and poverty reduction; however, since his successor, Nicolas Maduro, seized power, the country has been in a state of prolonged crisis. In 1998, GDP was $91.3 billion USD, maxing out at $482.4 billion USD in 2014 and by today shrinking to $86.7 billion USD. In 1998, GDP per capita was $3,885 USD, peaking at $15,975 USD in 2014 and plummeting to $3,266 today. Venezuela’s GINI Coefficient, which measures income inequality, has risen from 0.48 to 0.56 (where zero represents total equality, one total inequality).
Brazil fared much better under the socialist leadership Lula Da Silva than Dilma Rousef from 2003 to 2016—that is,until both were respectively imprisoned and impeached on dubious grounds by their political opposition and succeeded by far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro, who was president until Lula’s reelection last year. From 1998 to the most recent estimates, the Brazilian GDP rose from $863.7 billion USD to $1.609 trillion USD, and GDP per capita rose from $5,049 USD to $7,507 USD. It should be noted, though, that both of these values reached their zenith in 2011, then declined precipitously before recently beginning to recover. From 1998 to 2020, the Brazilian GINI Coefficient fell from 0.59 to 0.48.
To assess the political evolution in each country, with respect to Fukuyama’s theory, I consulted the Freedom House and Democracy Indexes. In 1998, Venezuela was classified as a “Partially Free Country” by the Freedom House Index, and today it is “Not Free”, receiving a 2022 freedom score of 14/100 (aggregate scores were not introduced until 2016). Meanwhile in 2006 (the first year the Democracy Index was created), Venezuela received a score of 5.42, which more than halved to 2.23 by today. Conversely, Brazil was classified as “Free” in both 1998 and 2022, receiving a 2022 freedom score of 73/100. On the Democracy Index, Brazil received a 7.38, which has declined slightly to 6.78 by 2022.
Venezuela has taken a Marxist-Leninist, single-party state approach, completely dismantling democracy and turning Latin America’s once richest country into one of the poorest. Brazil has followed the footsteps of European-style social democracies, content to just nationalize some key industries and create a more robust welfare state while largely respecting private property, pre-existing democratic institutions, and the rule of law.
At first glance, these outcomes seem to fall perfectly in line with Fukuyama’s prediction. However, upon further examination, I would argue that the Pink Tide actually perfectly demonstrates the fatal flaw of his thesis. Economic growth under socialism and democracy coexisted in Venezuela for over a decade, and Maduro’s mismanagement cannot be separated from the crippling sanctions regime imposed by the West to explain Venezuela’s rapid deterioration. Conversely, consider that respecting democratic institutions allowed for much of the economic progress made by the left-wing government in Brazil to be erased by the conservative backlash. The End of History is overly deterministic in considering political and economic systems as if they exist in a vacuum with the invisible hand of history selecting superior ideologies. It fails to account for the fact that interactions between capitalists and socialist elements themselves, both within and between societies, have accounted for much of the success and failure of each, with the former always having an advantage over the latter not necessarily from merit but by having been pre-established.
Consider also that arguably the most revolutionary changes under the Pink Tide have been foreign rather than domestic. The second Pink Tide remains dead set on increasing regional integration, decreasing dependence on the West, and increasing cooperation with other countries in the Global South.—especially China, which has been rapidly replacing the United States as the region's largest trading partner. If it remains unified under the Pink Tide in the face of declining western hegemony, Latin America could be one pole in a rapidly emerging multipolar world order, in which it will have more policy independence.
Perhaps, as the international ostracization of Venezuela has clearly demonstrated, the Pink Tide governments know their own history and understand for the time being that they won’t be allowed to simply construct twenty-first century socialism in the United States’ own backyard.
Instead, countries like Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, among others who’ve adopted a more reform-based approach, are operating within the norms of the Western-dominated international system to gradually uplift their people without deviating too far from the neoliberal consensus and gathering their strength as a geopolitical bloc—all the while allying themselves with a declining United States' rapidly rising biggest rival, so that if and when the time comes, there will be no second “Operation Condor”.
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