Jonathan Fox
Associate Professor of Social Sciences
University of California, Santa Cruz
February 20, 1997
Introduction (1)
In the cross-border spirit of the Schomburg-Moreno series, I would like to begin by exploring why the analysis of civil society-formation in rural Mexico is quite relevant for cross-border analysis. The degree of "thickness" of civil society is part of the context within which people decide whether to leave their homelands. Most of the rich literature on Mexican emigration focuses on changing economic conditions here and there, historically- inherited social networks, changing family and generational divisions of labor and survival strategies. (2) These are all certainly critical, but I would argue that politics matters as well: potential out-migrants face a tension between what Hirschman called the "exit" and "voice" options. Most who leave their homelands choose exit over voice. There are exceptions, to be sure -- those who join immigrant political organizations in the United States, such as the trade unions or indigenous rights groups, and some of the hometown associations -- manage to combine exit with voice. But they are the exception.
As potential emigrants survey their options, I would suggest that it matters whether "voice" at home is an option -- or at least what risks are involved in collective efforts to improve conditions in sending communities. In a democratic context, potential out-migrants could conceivably influence government policy decisions that either encourage or block job creation at home. The Salinas government decided, quite explicitly, that if agriculture produced 7 % of GDP but employed 24 % of the population, the difference between those two numbers adds up to the redundant population that should go somewhere else, and the sooner the better. (3) A more democratic government might have had a more difficult time deliberately dismantling the peasant economy.
But jobs are not the only issue. Being able to live a more dignified life, free from authoritarian abuse and -- for indigenous out-migrants -- racial oppression, might well influence the choice between exit and voice as well. In short, while democratization would certainly not be suficient to produce an accountable, participatory government that would be able to create jobs and deliver social services effectively, one could certainly argue that it is a necessary condition for the kinds of changes needed to improve lives in sending communities.
In spite of my emphasis on democratic context, this will not be a presentation on parties and elections, or the excruciatingly slow and uneven process of moving towards freer and fairer elections in Mexico. This process is important, but has fallen short in much of rural Mexico, and certainly has yet to reach most of indigenous Mexico. The forces driving democratization in indigenous Mexico are not political parties -- though they may form coalitions of convenience -- they are locally-based social and political organizations that fit better into the category of "civil society." (4)
My point of departure is that, as Robert Putnam has shown persuasively in the Italian case in his book Making Democracy Work, effective, honest government and broad-based economic development reinforce each other, but both depend on dense, horizontally-organized civil societies. (5)
What does it mean for civil society to "thicken?" The image of "thickening" is meant to suggest density, strength and solid foundations, though I recognize the risk of evoking less positive images of entanglements, swamps or quicksand. By "thickening," I refer to the broadening and deepening of social networks and organizations that are relatively autonomous from the state and broadly representative of their members.
The question I want to address today is: if a thick civil society is made up of strong, flexible social webs, where do they come from? In this project I decided to step back and rethink more than a decade of empirical work to look for broader explanations of civil society formation. It turns out that, in spite of the very powerful intellectual consensus that effective democratization rests on the foundations of a strong civil society, it turns out that social science has produced remarkably little in the way of convincing explanations of just how civil society "thickens" on the ground and then "scales up." (6)
Three major genres of explanation come to mind.
First, we have the macro-structural approaches that stress the importance of long-term changes in the economy for creating the social base for autonomous self-organization. Modernization theory argued that urbanization, industrialization and the emergence of a middle class are crucial for the emergence of an effective civil society. The idea that effective democratic institutions depend on the emergence of a strong middle class is still remarkably widespread, in spite of huge volumes of contradictory evidence from around the world, ranging from the anti-democratic histories of middle classes in the Southern Cone, Germany and South Africa to the vibrant and dense civil society of Kerala, one of India's poorest but most democratic states.
Nevertheless, this "structural determinist" explanation of democratization has proven to have remarkably strong roots, especially in the punditocracy -- in Mexico City as well as in the US. In Mexico, the electoral success of the National Action Party in more industrial and middle-class areas of the country has reinforced this view, in spite of the many broad-based civic movements in poorer and ethnically distinct regions in Southern Mexico. Since democratic movements have emerged throughout Mexico but have only won major concessions in more urban and industrial regions, I would argue that one key difference lies more in the state than in society. The ruling political class has been more willing to make concessions to some democratic movements than to others. In other words, a society-driven, middle-class-led explanation fails to account both for other kinds of democratic movements, and for the role of the state in influencing which ones win.
Second, we have long-standing cultural or value-driven explanations of civil society formation, synthesized in Fukuyama's book Trust. (7) In this view, one needs the right kind of society-wide normative values to build and sustain the kind of social relations that can produce the "public goods" that civil society is associated with -- encouraging cooperation, bounded conflict, respect for others, accountability and the rule of law, for example. I would agree that such values of "civic virtue" are certainly related to civil society-formation. But the problem is: how do we know which way the "causal arrow" goes, if you will? Here is yet another case where social scientists have problems distinguishing between correlation and causality. For example, does the spread of democratic values among the citizenry lead to a broader social base for democratic institutions -- so that political culture makes democracy possible? Or, in contrast, does the development of democratic institutions that, for example, effectively defend basic citizenship rights, broaden the spread of basic democratic values? One might think that this dilemma suggests a recursive process, but in spite of this difficult chicken-and-egg problem, some analysts are very confident that society-wide cultures come first in the causal chain.
Many analysts identify particular sets of normative values about social relations with entire national, ethnic or religious cultures. One book title sums this Weberian argument up more explicitly than most: Harrison's Underdevelopment is a State of Mind, which blames Latin American underdevelopment on the Iberian legacy. (8) You also know how common it is for political analysts to refer to certain national societies as particularly "violent" or especially "corrupt," as though their entire populations grew up indoctrinated with anti-social values. In this view, the corruption and violence of governments, or of certain distinct groups within societies, is implicitly seen as the result, rather than the cause, of society-wide cultures. Taken to its logical conclusion, this view can be summed up in a phrase you may have heard 'peoples get the kinds of government they deserve. . . '
Obviously, political culture-driven explanations of civil society weakness and the lack of accountable governance are very convenient for certain elites. For example, you may have read the recent account where a prominent PRI official met with a group of New York investors to convince them of the current government's commitment to reform. But when pressed for details on Mexico's judicial reforms, she testily replied, "rule of law is such an Anglo-Saxon concept..." (9) That certainly would be news to Benito Juárez or Emiliano Zapata, whose conceptions of justice were deeply informed by the importance of the rule of law. Recall, for example, the legal discourse of Zapata's 1910 Plan de Ayala, which called for the return of "lands, wood and water usurped under the cover of tyranny... to the towns and citizens in possession of the deeds concerning these properties..."
While the original Zapatista vision of justice and order through democratic local self-government is well-known, the state of Morelos is far from the only Mexican region where the bottom-up struggle for accountable governance has deep historical roots. To take a state highlightened in the recent news for its bloody rulers, one could look at Guerrero. Armando Bartra's new history Guerrero Bronco shows that local efforts at building civil society and the rule of law stretch back not only to the National Civic Association's frustrated campaigns for municipal democracy in the 1960s, but to the wave of support for the Floresmagonista Acapulco Worker's Party in the early 1920s. That brief interlude of municipal democracy included innovative consumer cooperatives, an alternative press, citizen public health campaigns and a publicly accountable police force. On the Costa Grande of Guerrero, the "thickening" of civil society failed not because of undemocratic values or the lack of a middle class, but because the local enemies of civil society formation -- Acapulco's merchants -- were willing and able to bribe the federal army to do their bidding. (10)
The broader point here is that Mexican society has long included diverse and competing sets of norms and values about how civic life should be organized. The argument that thin civil societies are the result of less-than-civic political cultures is contradicted by Mexican history's repeated efforts to consolidate representative institutions within civil society, as a foundation for accountable governance and the rule of law. These initiatives have had many weaknesses on their own, but their main problem was that the enemies of civil society and the rule of law were stronger.
The third major genre of explanations comes from the social movement literatures, which stress the ways in which mass direct action socially constructs identities and defends excluded interests. The rich literature on social mobilization certainly shows how direct action and solidary relationships can help to change and spread understandings of groups and rights. (11) The "everyday forms of resistance" literature shows that quiescence need not imply hegemony. But a strictly society-centered, action-and-identity driven approach explains only part of the story of how civil society thickens. For example, mass mobilization may or may not be linked to dense social organization -- "thin" civil societies can mobilize too, whether through uncoordinated direct action from below or induced by top-down control. Mobilization may not involve autonomous participation, which in turn may or may not lead to effective "thickening" in the sense of consolidating horizontal and representative organization. (12) Moreover, while society-centered explanations of mobilization certainly help to understand why people engage in direct action, they rarely explain why mobilization only has lasting impact on the broader society or the state at certain times and places.
The Mexican state in particular is well known for its complex mix of responses to pressures from civil society, its ever-evolving combination of "pan y palo." As I argued in The Politics of Food in Mexico, one needs to get inside both state and social actors in order to explain how they interact -- otherwise it is difficult to explain why even partial victories are ever won from below which, in turn, is key to explaining how civil society thickens in the longer run. (13)
Most discussions of where civil society comes from are, implicitly or explicitly, embedded in one or the other of these three genres of explanation. Each makes a contribution, but each is also incomplete. They are all missing one particular piece of the puzzle, which is an explanation of when actors external to the local contribute to the bottom-up consolidation of civil society. I would argue that external "counter-weights" are especially crucial in authoritarian contexts precisely because so many bottom-up efforts at building civil society efforts are deliberately dismantled from above.
As we know from the Mexican experience, the classic formula of 'cooptation when possible and repression when necessary' usually works. Divide and conquer tactics are most effective where local movements are isolated, so the key question becomes when and how social actors become able to build horizontal links between often disconnected or divided local social actors. If one surveys the rich diversity of experiences in rural Mexico, it turns out that where such extra-local horizontal linkages have emerged, external allies, whether embedded elsewhere in society or in the state itself, have often contributed greatly to the process.
Along these lines, I am going to sketch out what one could call a "political construction" framework for explaining how civil society thickens, and will then explore how it fits empirically with the process where the conditions for civil society formation would seem to be the most difficult -- in Mexico's indigenous regions.
Today I will also be drawing on the notion of "social capital" to hone in more on what it means for civil society to "thicken." I recognize the conceptual risks associated with the appearance of accepting the hegemony of economic concepts. It is hard to escape the power of "capital," however. Pundits speak of "political capital" to refer to stocks of public credibility. Some environmentalists speak of "natural capital" to give value to stocks of untapped natural resources. Economists of the legitimacy of the concept of "human capital. " Sociologists such as Bourdieu look at "cultural capital, " and cultural theorists refer to "symbolic capital. " (14) One could argue that the notion of "social capital" is accumulating one too many. My view is that -- like it or not - since the concept of "social capital" it is already taking off in the real world as well as academia, it has become too potentially important not to interrogate and contest its meaning and use.
So - if societal "thickness" refers to the breadth and density of representative societal organizations, this process can also be thought of in terms of the accumulation of social capital. Though sociologists and political scientists differ over how "what counts" as social capital, they would agree that the concept refers to the ways in which social relationships can be resources. This emphasis on relationships distinguishes the concept from cultural capital, where the beliefs and norms are the resource, or political capital, where images of credibility and legitimacy are the resource, or natural capital, where water and trees are the resources.
In this view, social relationships become resources when they facilitate collective action, such as when they generate trust and enforce norms of reciprocity. Some sociologists, notably Coleman, use such a broad definition of social capital that virtually any reciprocal relationship counts, including vertical, clientelistic bonds. (15) Robert Putnam, in contrast, argues that vertical networks, no matter how dense and no matter how important to their participants, cannot sustain social trust and cooperation. So he limits the definition to horizontal social relations, and stresses what he calls "networks of civic engagement" that cut across vertical clientelistic bonds.
Differences aside, these analysts agree that social capital helps to overcome the textbook obstacles to collective action, especially for otherwise under-represented groups. Indeed, social capital analysts challenge rational choice theory, arguing that actors make decisions in a social context, not just as isolated individuals.
The growing literature on social capital includes three distinct causal arguments. One is about the impact that social capital has -- its positive multiplier effects on economic development and accountable governance. Another focuses on why social capital erodes; you may have seen Putnam's widely-cited work on the decline of social capital in the US, summed up as "bowling alone," where he argues that TV has driven civic participation down and unwoven the social fabric. (16) The third argument is about where social capital comes from in the first place, and this is the question I am most interested in.
Here Putnam's comparative study of different regions of Italy offers the most challenging explanation. His study is quite relevant for thinking about Mexico because it combines a long historical view with inter-regional comparison to explain contemporary regional differences within a single national society. In short, he shows that northern Italy is wealthier and has more effective regional governments than the south because of its dense foundation of horizontal associations in civil society.
Putnam's argument about the social foundations of long-run economic growth and 'good governance' is quite compelling. His explanation of where social capital comes from is less convincing.
His explanation goes back to the 12th and 13th centuries to compare the different ways in which northern Italian city-states organized themselves in terms of local voluntary self-defense associations, versus the way feudal autocrats dominated southern Italy. Northern Italian society started out "horizontal" and participatory while the south was "vertical" and authoritarian. This foundational moment is key for Putnam, because stocks of social capital grow as they are used, trust and reciprocity beget more trust and reciprocity, leading to virtuous circles of capital accumulation. Similarly, where societies are dominated by vertical power relations and widespread mutual mistrust in society, one finds vicious circles that prevent the accumulation of social capital. This framework explains social capital accumulation in terms of two equilibrium scenarios for high and low "civicness," each one driven by their respective historical legacies. (17)
Putnam concludes: "As with conventional capital, those who have social capital tend to accumulate more - 'them as has, gets"' (1993: 169). Fukuyama, in Trust, makes a related argument about the economic history of the whole world. For Putnam, history determines social capital formation, while for Fukuyama cultural values are the key, but both agree that social capital formation is predetermined and cannot be created through deliberate action, strategy or institutional change in the historical short term. The puzzle is that here is an argument about the importance of empowerment, which is ultimately quite disempowering.
In contrast, a "political construction" approach recognizes the weight of historical and cultural legacies while allowing some room for state and social action. The approach rests on three conceptual building blocks: first, from above, political opportunities created by intra-elite conflicts can create space for civil society thickening; second, from below, social energy and political ideas sustain horizontal action, and third, linking the two are the processes of "scaling up" grassroots organizations that can gain power for underrepresented groups. I'll spell out each one of these ideas and then explain how they fit together.
First, conflicts within the ruling political class have an independent causal effect on civil society's capacity to organize because they determine the state's willingness and capacity to encourage or dismantle social capital. As Tarrow's "political opportunity structure" approach suggests, collective action emerges largely in response to: "changes in opportunities that lower the costs of collective action, reveal potential allies and show where elites and authorities are vulnerable". (18)
Even in less-then-democratic regimes, reformist officials can create positive incentives for collective action from below, as the Mexican government's rural development reforms of the 1930s, the mid-1970s and early 1980s indicate. As I argue in The Politics of Food in Mexico, in the case of the Community Food Councils of the early 1980s, these channels for participatory community oversight of government consumer food subsidy programs made region-wide networking possible for village-level organizations for the first time for hundreds of thousands of campesinos and indigenous people.
With this program, semi-clandestine '68 generation state reformists created positive incentives: where participation succeeded, communities benefited from reduced food prices. The program also encouraged the emergence of new, regional political identities by creating a common target -- the regional food warehouse -- for diverse communities that otherwise may have had more differences than shared interests. But state reformists' most important contribution to broad-based collective action was not their offer of positive incentives. Rather, it was the capacity to buffer the negative sanctions that other state actors usually deployed against autonomous collective action beyond the village level. Official reformists legitimized regional associational autonomy and therefore provided some measure of protection for scaled-up collective action. Both the positive incentives and the buffering of the negative sanctions matter, but the first helps little without the second. Today, pro-reform currents within the state certainly seem weaker than ever, but the key point here is that when reformists have gained influence, spaces have opened up that were occupied from below.
2) The second conceptual building block of the political construction approach involves taking politically contingent ideas and motivations into account to explain how people respond to political opportunities (or threats). After all, actors with shared historical and cultural legacies often follow very different political paths.
Useful here is Albert Hirschman's "Principle of Conservation and Mutation of Social Energy." Hirschman acknowledges that most of the time, failed efforts at collective action lead people to turn away from public life -- Putnam's "low civicness" equilibrium state of perpetual authoritarian, patron client relations. But since Hirschman is more interested in explaining collective action than its absence, he looks for the exceptions. After studying a wide range of successful community development groups in Latin America, he found that many of them
"shared one striking characteristic: when we looked into the life histories of the people principally involved, we found that most of them had previously participated in other, generally more "radical" experiences of collective action, that had generally not achieved their objective, often because of official repression. It is as though the protagonists' earlier aspiration for social change, their bent for collective action, had not really left them even though the movements in which they had participated may have aborted or petered out. Later on, this "social energy" becomes active again but is likely to take some very different form". (19)
The usual response to failed collective action is demobilization, but it turns out that those initiatives that people manage to sustain in inhospitable environments are also often responses to past failures. For Hirschman, success can come from previous failure, whereas for Putnam only past success explains success. But why does civic failure lead to frustration and powerlessness in some cases, while it is "conserved and mutated" - so to speak - into constructive social energy in others? For example, when does repression lead to a downward spiral of demobilization, versus the many cases where the murder of local leaders inspires others to take their place and mobilization continues?
This is where the role of political beliefs come in -- influencing why some people, some of the time, think that they can make a difference, when most of the time, most people think they cannot... In other words, contingent ideas and leadership influence whether grievances are defined as shared and whether problems are interpreted as subject to change.
3) The third building block in the political construction approach unpacks social capital and highlights the importance of those kinds of organizations that create opportunities for others to come together. I would argue that social capital is not homogeneous: some kinds have more democratic "spillover effects" than others.
For Putnam, in contrast, assumes that social capital is homogeneous. His indicators of a society's "stock" of social capital are ultra-local, apolitical associations, such as choral societies and soccer clubs. But if this assumption were valid, then many of Mexico's poorest regions would be considered to have large stocks of social capital. They are covered with strong horizontal associational webs at the most local level. Yet these are precisely the country' s poorest regions, with the worst systems of governance in terms of both process and performance.
This becomes less of a puzzle if one recognizes that dense local ties do not necessarily lead to the kind of broader organizations that have the bargaining power necessary to fight for freedom of association and accountable government. Strong local solidarities may or may not extend beyond villages or neighborhoods. For example, the literature on the social construction of indigenous ethnicity clearly shows both the local confines of village-based identities and the importance of collective action in encouraging broader shared identities.
The state also plays an active role in either blocking or promoting the expansion of solidary ties beyond the village level. States often ignore dense local organizations until they manage to scale up and form broader networks with more bargaining power, and then they are treated as a threat.
To sum up, the kind of historical legacies of horizontal organization that Putnam stresses may up necessary but not sufficient to accumulate social capital. The scale and nature of horizontal organization matters as well, which is in turn shaped largely by the first two building blocks -- whether intra-elite conflict has opened up cracks in the system of control, and whether shared grassroots ideas about politics can sustain collective action in the face of threats and fear.
Now - I will spell out how these three building blocks fit together... This political construction approach is process-driven, involving recursive cycles of conflict as well as cooperation between actors. The key conflict is between the promoters and the enemies of horizontal collective action, both usually embedded in the state as well as society. Where horizontal social organizations manage to grow and spread in inhospitable environments, it is usually through iterative cycles of conflict between three key actors: emerging autonomous social actors, authoritarian elites unwilling to share power, and reformist allies based either within the state or elsewhere in society. Reformists are defined here as those state or societal elites willing to accept (or encourage) increased associational autonomy among excluded groups in society.
The assumption here is that as long as authoritarian elites remain united, they will respond to autonomous representative organizations with repression rather than concessions, blocking the accumulation of social capital. If authoritarian elites are divided, however, for whatever reason -- succession problems, economic crisis or war -- they will differ over whether to respond to societal challenges with repression or concessions. Intra-elite divisions can also be triggered by societal pressure from below, as the Zapatista rebellion showed. But if the Zapatista rebellion had faced a unified political elite, the government would have pursued a strictly military response and the EZLN could well have been destroyed. Instead, under pressure from the rest of civil society, an already divided political class split even more over how to respond, leading to the possibility of negotiations and non-trivial reforms of the national electoral system.
The first step in the argument, then, is that reformists, defined by their greater concern for political legitimacy and resulting preference for negotiation over coercion, often conflict with hard-line colleagues over whether and how to respond to pressure from below.
The second step in the argument is that, if and when such cracks in the system open up, social organizations often attempt to occupy these spaces from below, demanding broader access to the state while trying to defend their capacity to articulate their own interests autonomously. Societal capacity to pry windows of opportunity open further depends on both prior accumulations of social capital and political strategies. Strategies and perceptions matter because some opportunities are simply missed while others are creatively pushed beyond what seemed possible at the time. The main challenge is that this process of occupying cracks in the system tends to provokes an authoritarian backlash, which usually ends a given cycle of opening from above.
The third step in the argument is that, over time, these recursive cycles of bargaining between ruling hard-liners, reformist elites, and societal groups can unfold in a "two steps forward, one step back" pattern, gradually increasing the accumulation of social capital from below.
From the point of view of social capital accumulation, one key issue is how much societal political residue is left after each window of opportunity closes. If social actors manage to conserve some degree of autonomy in the troughs between cycles of mobilization, they retain a crucial resource to deploy at the next political opportunity.
This process is highly uneven, varying greatly across different regions, social groups, and even issue areas -- social actors can gain room for maneuver around certain issues while remaining blocked in others. Contemporary Mexico shows how very different kinds of state-society relations can coexist simultaneously within the same nation-state. The most clear-cut difference would be between states that have made democratic breakthroughs, like Guanajuato, versus persistent authoritarian rule in states like Guerrero. But one also finds diverse outcomes where conditions for democratization would seem least promising, as in Mexico's indigenous regions. Here one sees entrenched redoubts of persistent authoritarian clientelism in some regions and new enclaves of pluralist tolerance in others, with large grey areas of what one might call "semi-clientelism" in between. "Semi-clientelism" refers to "modernized" efforts by government authorities to condition access to state benefits on political subordination, as in the case of much of the Pronasol program. In contrast to conventional authoritarian clientelism, however, whose power is backed up by threats of force as well as carrots, semi-clientelism draws its leverage from the threat of the withdrawal of carrots, rather than the direct threat of the stick. (20)
So what happens if one tries to apply this political construction approach to the diverse political realities of Mexico's indigenous regions? Put another way, how can social capital "thicken" where it might seem "thinnest?" After all, conditions for social capital formation seem most daunting for the more than one in ten Mexicans who speak an indigenous language. Few would contest that Mexico's indigenous peoples are socially and politically excluded, the poorest of the poor.
In Putnam's terms, since these regions lack economic development and good governance, one would think that they also lack social capital. But when one looks closely at the village level, however, social capital is uneven but certainly widespread. In much of indigenous Mexico, communities have reproduced long-standing traditions of horizontal cooperation, reciprocity and self-help, maintaining powerful community norms of accountability and justice. Certainly there are increasing religious and class cleavages within many communities, as well as cultural differences linked to out-migration, but the overall degree of survival of horizontal organization in indigenous Mexico is quite remarkable.
So - with this historical legacy, Putnam's "historical determinist" approach would lead one to expect that these dense horizontal local associational webs would lead to extensive social capital accumulation throughout indigenous Mexico. If so many communities maintain strong inherited stocks of social capital, then this capital should have grown over time through the cycles of "virtuous circles, " the upward spirals he posits for Northern Italy. Instead, until very recently most of indigenous Mexico looked more like Putnam's historical Southern Italy - dominated by vertical, authoritarian power relations. This is less puzzling if one brings political conflict in to the picture. For more than two decades, indigenous organizations have been coming together from below and then been dismantled from above, while competing external actors have pushed for both outcomes.
The result is a very uneven map, with extreme variation in the relative thickness of civil society in indigenous regions. Civil society is very thin in some regions, subordinated and divided by vertical, authoritarian clientelistic power relations, while other regions have vibrant civic movements for local level political democracy and sophisticated producer and consumer cooperatives with thousands of members.
Tables 1 and 2 synthesize the results of on-going empirical research on contemporary rural Mexican politics, showing that social capital formation in indigenous regions is following several different paths. The two key dimensions that frame state-society relations in each region are the degrees of repression and the thickness of civil society. Table 1 shows the different conceptual categories.
In Table 1, at one extreme are consolidated enclaves of high levels of scaled-up associational life and relative respect for political and ethnic pluralism. At another extreme are regions where communities are internally divided, lacking in horizontal associational life and dominated by authoritarian clientelism. In some of these regions levels of repression may be low, but only because autonomous collective action is rare. One finds other scenarios in between: regions where autonomous social organization is spreading but faces political competition from the government's Pronasol-style, more sophisticated semi-clientelism. Then there are areas of strong associational life that are actively attacked by hardliners in the state or their societal allies. These areas, in the upper right box, begin to approach "dual political power," where civil society and authoritarian elites confront each other in an unstable stalemate.
"Dual political power" describes much of indigenous Chiapas. Many of the areas now under military occupation may be significantly demobilized and would fall into the lower right hand box. But many other indigenous regions in the state fit into the "dual power" situation described in the upper right hand box. Recall how civic mobilizations and land invasions erupted throughout areas outside the EZLN's original base region.
Table 2 shows how many indigenous regions actually fit into the main scenarios in practice (at least as of 1995). Note that these categories refer to ethnically distinct regions rather than to "entire" ethnic groups, because of the great diversity within as well as between ethnic groups. Let me stress that the regional categorizations are neither complete nor definitive.
If non-indigenous peasant regions were also included in Table Two. the main differences would be that more regions can be counted as pluralistic, mainly because PAN governors appear to have dismantled much of the ruling party's clientelistic control apparatus -- certainly in Guanajuato, and perhaps in Chihuahua and Baja California Norte as well. In general, however, there is a similar diversity of state-society relations in non-indigenous rural areas, though the local solidarities are rooted less in ethnicity and perhaps more in the collective identities inherited from the "foundational moments" of land distribution - in those regions that experienced land reform.
TABLE 1: Political Space and Social Captital Outcomes in Rural Mexico
Social Capital Level Regional Level of Repression Low High High Pluralist enclaves (the result of successful prior mobilization against authoritarian rule) Mobilization against authoritarian rule, unresolved (potential "dual political power" situation) Medium Semi-clientelist competition between state and civil society (state control exercised more with inducements than with coercion) Growing societal challenge to authoritarian rule (coercion has contradictory impact, both encouraging and discouraging protest) Low Authoritarian rule rarely challenged and therefore rarely punished Forced demobilization (aftermath of blocked challenge to authoritarian rule) TABLE 2: Social/Geographical Distribution of Indigenous Social Capital in Rural Mexico
"Subnational political regimes" States (regions within states) Pluralist enclaves Oaxaca (Juchitán, Sierra Norte, parts of Mazateca Alta); Michoacán (parts of the Purépecha region); Sonora (Yaqui region). Semi-clientelist competition Oaxaca (parts of Mazateca Alta, Central Valleys); Michoacán (parts of Purépecha region); Hidalgo (Nañhú region); Puebla (parts of Sierra Norte); most of Yucatán, Campeche, Quintana Roo, state of Mexico Authoritarian rule under challenge Chiapas (most of Altos, Lacandón, Sierra Norte, Sierra Sur), Tabasco (Chol region), Guerrero (Alto Balsas, Montaña, Costa Chica); Oaxaca (Northern Isthmus, Pinotepa, parts of Mixteca); Hidalgo (parts of Huasteca) Authoritarian rule dominant Veracruz (Sierra Zongólica), most of Huasteca, Hidalgo (parts of Huasteca); Guerrero (parts of Montaña); Oaxaca (parts of Mixteca); Puebla (parts of Mixteca, Sierra Norte); Chihuahua (Raramuri region) So far, these tables describe where indigenous civil society has thickened but not how. My sense is that where autonomous indigenous organizations have managed to consolidate, they did so by following one (or more) of the three main causal pathways.
As outlined in Table 3, these main causal pathways include: 1) state-society convergence, involving some degree of synergy between reformist state actors and local societal groups, 2) collaboration between local groups and external actors from civil society, such as church reformers, NGOs or political radical; and 3) independent emergence from below, where social capital was produced more independently by local movements for democratization, accountable governance or socio-economic development. While these three catagories are conceptually distinct, they overlap in practice.
TABLE 3: Possible Causal Pathways for Social Capital Accumulation
State-society convergence: Local/Outsider societal collaboration: Independent scaling up: Synergy between state reformists and local societal groups (synergistic collaboration) Synergy between local groups and external allies in civil society (religious, developmental, environmental, civic or political) Bottom-up production of social capital through autonomous local social, civic or political/electoral initiatives in the absence of external support 1) State-society convergence
In the first scenario, the main patterns of collaborative production of social capital between state and societal actors took the form of successive initiatives by middle and lower-level reformist government officials to tolerate and sometimes even to encourage relatively autonomous grassroots organization. Mexico’s uneven patchwork of reformist rural programs followed three distinct cycles of partial openings from above, in the 1970s, the early 1980s, and in the early 1990s. (21) To sum them up, each reform opening was broader in some policy areas than others, and stronger in some regions than in others, and they were at best the regional exception rather than the national rule.
Following a "two steps forward, one step back" process, each partial opening of access to the state was ended by an authoritarian backlash -- though in each case some social capital survived and not all reformists were purged. From the long term point of view of the accumulation of social capital, some of these regional exceptions overlapped, cumulated and networked horizontally, eventually accounting for many of the regions where representative indigenous groups were consolidated by the mid-199Os.
2) Collaboration between local and external civil society organizations
The second causal path for social capital formation is through collaboration between grassroots and external actors from within civil society. The Chiapas experience illustrates this process especially well -- a state where government hard-liners successfully vetoed the "state-society" partnership scenario for change. In Chiapas, the key external allies were the Catholic bishop, various secular left-wing organizations, and more recently, NGOs.
Recall that when Samuel Ruíz became bishop of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the early 1960s, Chiapas highland communities were largely dominated by local indigenous elites whose authoritarian control was bolstered by their linkages with the state and national government. A decade later, when the Bishop convened the first autonomous, state-wide public indigenous forum (thanks to a brief rapprochement with the governor), his diocese had trained about 1,000 lay activists. These catechists promoted autonomous community organizations and local self-help projects. Fifteen years later the diocese had trained over 8,000 such local leaders. The political space created by the diocese was the most important single factor permitting collective action beyond the village level, starting with the first state-wide indigenous congress in 1974. Many local and regional organizations later followed their own path, creating the dense regional civil society from which the EZLN emerged. (22)
3) Independent production of social capital from below
Social capital can also grow and thicken independently, of external allies, through sustained collective action by autonomous local social and political movements. Some of these groups are socio-economic, building community-based economic development alternatives, others are civic, fighting for non partisan democratic, accountable government at the local level, while others promote a partisan opposition alternative. In practice, this independent pathway has tended to follow the civic or political route more, while the socio-economic organizations have been more likely to follow the state-society synergy path.
In some cases the independently bottom-up movements involve local defections from the ruling party, while others have promoted alternative civic identities, often with a strong ethnic dimension, as in the classic case of the electoral, social and cultural democratization of Juchitán, in Oaxaca. Yet even in this "paradigm case" of bottom-up, identity-based mobilization, the movement was able to emerge in the first place by taking advantage of an elite political opening in the early 1970s. Juchitán's subsequent waves of mobilization, repression and renewed mobilization, framed by a triangular conflict with divided state elites and eventually leading to municipal electoral democratization, are quite consistent with the "political construction" approach. While mobilization from below was fundamental, the local movement developed increasingly important national political alliances, and made its greatest progress when reform-oriented elites controlled state politics. (23)
The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) seems to be an even clearer example of social capital formation in the complete absence of external allies (with the exception of a handful of Mexico City radicals who sunk local roots). Let's see how the political construction approach fits: By the early 1990s, growing authoritarian attacks on the main external allies of moderate autonomous social groups in Chiapas -- federal reformists and the bishop -- dramatically changed the political opportunity structure seen from below. The path of gradual change by through working within the system led only to more repression. In this context, the Zapatistas began to win over many of the already organized in Chiapas.
For more than a year, perhaps hundreds of villages debated in assemblies whether or not to take up arms -- though they debated in their own languages, and were therefore unintelligible to most government officials. This was a powerful indicator of the trust and loyalties woven into their dense webs of horizontal association: in spite of the fact that many communities were deeply divided over whether to take up arms, one did not see defections before the uprising, adding to the government's surprise. Looking at this another way, the lack of reform opportunities within the system caused diverse, broad-based, already-organized community-based and regional organizations to split over the decision of whether or not to take up arms.
So - while on the surface the Zapatista movement seems to be a clear-cut example of how civil society can thicken without external alliances, it turns out that two major qualifiers are in order. First, as I have suggested, the EZLN took advantage of an already thick civil society that had consolidated thanks in part to prior external support, mainly from the church.
The second way in which the Zapatista movement's trajectory was not totally independent was that once the rebellion was launched, the mobilization of external civil society allies at national and international levels, as well as deep divisions within the ruling political class, prompted the president to declare a unilateral cease-fire after less than two weeks of fighting, blocking a Guatamalan-style military "solution. " In the course of the ups and downs of the negotiation process that followed, the Zapatistas' capacity to maintain diverse national and international civil society alliances has allowed them to remain a political force in spite of what seems to be their military weakness. So even in this extreme case of "strictly" bottom-up consolidation of civil society in one of Mexico's most remote indigenous regions, external allies turned out to be crucial to the movement's development.
Conclusions
In conclusion, more than two decades of recursive cycles of collective action have left an uneven map of social organizations in the Mexican countryside, ranging from enclaves of local democracy to large and entrenched redoubts of authoritarian rule, with complex grey areas of semi-clientelism in between. The conventional social science frameworks for explaining civil society formation cannot explain this diversity. Urban middle-class-led social structural accounts cannot explain the emergence of civil society where middle classes are either divided, authoritarian or nonexistent. Frameworks that assume implicitly homogeneous political cultures will not fit either. Political culture driven explanations, where outcomes are explained by deeply-embedded, inherently hard-to-change cultural values cannot explain diverse political outcomes within broadly shared cultures, nor can they explain the dramatic changes in self-representation by indigenous Mexicans within a relatively short period of time. And strictly bottom-up, movement-driven explanations cannot account for why some manage to thicken, while many others unravel -- or are unraveled by others. In response, I sketched out a political construction approach that highlights the diverse actors on both sides of the process, both within society and the state.
To sum up the argument conceptually, historical legacies are woven deeply into social fabrics, but those imprints are not necessarily fixed by history. Densely-woven social fabrics can be unraveled by state-sanctioned coercion, on the one hand, while external allies from either state or society can help to weave or reweave them on the other.
Notes:
1. The latter two-thirds of this essay is based on "How Does Civil Society Thicken? The Political Construction of Social Capital in Rural Mexico," World Development, 24(6) June, 1996 [also to appear in Peter Evans, ed., Government Action and Social Capital: State-Society Synergy in Development, Berkeley: Research Series/International and Area Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 1997.
Back2. For a comprehenisve overview, see, among others, Merilee Grindle, Searching for Rural Development: Labor Migration and Employment in Mexico (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). In spite of its nuanced treatment of the emigration process, rural social movements are ignored.
Back3. For further discussion of rural and national politics and policy in the Salinas period, see "The Politics of Mexico's New Peasant Economy," in María Lorena Cook, Kevin J. Middlebrook and Juan Molinar, eds., The Politics of Economic Restructuring: State- Society Relations and Regime Change in Mexico, La Jolla: UCSD, Center for U.S. Mexican Studies, 1994 ; published in Spanish as Las dimensiones políticas de la reestructuración económica, México: Cal y Arena, 1996.
Back4. See the data on the presence of national parties in indigenous regions presented in Jonathan Fox, "National Electoral Choices in Rural Mexico," in Laura Randall (Ed.), The Reform of the Mexican Agrarian Reform (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1996).
Back5. See Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Back6. For an early discussion of "scaling up" in the urban context, see Sheldon Annis, "Can Small-Scale Development Be Large-Scale Policy?" in Sheldon Annis and Peter Hakim (Eds.), Direct to the Poor: Grassroots Development in Latin America (Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 1988).
Back7. Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: The Free Press, 1995).
Back8. Lawrence Harrison, Underdevelopment is a State of Mind: The Latin American Case (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985). See also his Who Prospers? How Cultural Values Shape Economic and Political Success (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
Back9. See Current History, 1996.
Back10. See Armando Bartra, Guerrero Bronco: Campesinos, ciudadanos. guerrilleros en la Costa Grande (México: Ediciones Sinfiltro, 1996).
Back11. For a diverse set of approaches that tend to stress identity-based explanations of social mobilization, see Arturo Escobar and Sonia Alvarez, eds., The Making of Social Movements in Latin America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992).
Back12. On the distinction between (potentially vertical) mobilization and (inherently horizontal) participation, see Jonathan Fox, "Democratic Rural Development: Leadership in Regional Peasant Organizations," Development and Change, 23(2), April, 1992.
Back13. Jonathan Fox, The Politics of Food in Mexico: State Power and Social Mobilization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
Back14. For an application of the concept of cultural capital to the study of Mexican immigration, see Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Lane Ryo, Cultural Capital: Mountain Zapotec Migrant Associations in Mexico City (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993). More generally, see Pierre Bourdieu, "The Forms of Capital," in John Richardson, (Ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood, 1987[1979]) and Michele Lamont and Annete Lareau, "Cultural Capital: Allusions, Gaps and Gillsandos in Recent Theoretical Development," Sociological Theory, Vol. 6, Fall 1988.
Back15. See James Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1990).
Back16. See Robert Putnam, "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Journal of Democracy, 6(1), January, 1995.
Back17. For critiques of the historical argument, see Leonardo Morlino, "Italy's Civic Divide," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 6, No. 1, (January, 1995) and Sindey Tarrow, "Making Social Science Work Across Space and Time: A Critical Reflection on Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work," American Political Science Review (90(2), June, 1996.
Back18. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements. Collective Action and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Back19. Albert Hirschman, Getting Ahead Collectively (New York: Pergamon Press, 1986).
Back20. On changing patterns of clientelism in Mexico, see "The Difficult Transition from Clientelism to Citizenship," World Politics 46 (2), January, 1994, and "Targeting the Poorest: The Role of the National Indigenous Institute in Mexico's Solidarity Program," in Wayne Cornelius, Ann Craig and Jonathan Fox (Eds.), Transforming State-Society Relation in Mexico, The National Solidarity Strategy (La Jolla: University of California, San Diego/Center for US-Mexican Studies, 1994).
Back21. For details, see the Fox article in World Development and the book chapter in Cornelius, Craig and Fox, ibid.
Back22. On the origins of the Chiapas rebellion, see, among others, George Collier, with Elizabeth Lowery Quaratiello, Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas (Oakland: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1994); Neil Harvey, "Rebellion in Chiapas: Rural Reforms, Campesino Radicalism and the Limits to Salinismo," Transformation of Rural Mexico, No. 5 (La Jolla: University of California, Center for US-Mexican Studies, 1994); "Peasant Strategies and Corporatism in Chiapas," in Joe Foweraker and Ann Craig (Eds.), Popular Movements and Political Change in Mexico (Boulder: Lynne Renner, 1990); "Corporatist Strategies and Popular Responses in Rural Mexico: State and Opposition in Chiapas, 1970-1988," Ph.D. dissertation (Essex: University of Essex, 1988); and Luis Hernández Navarro, "The Chiapas Uprising," Transformation of Rural Mexico No. 5 (La Jolla: University of California, Center for US-Mexican Studies, 1994); and Chiapas: La Guerra y la Paz (Mexico City: ADN, 1995).
Back23. On Juchitán politics, see Howard Campbell, Zapotec Renaissance (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1994) and Jeffrey Rubin, Decentering the Regime: History. Culture. and Radical Politics in Juchitán. Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997 forthcoming) and "COCEI in Juchitán: Grassroots Radicalism and Regional History," Journal of Latin American Studies, 26(1) February, 1994.
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©1998, Latin American Studies Program, Mount Holyoke College