Unresolved Tensions: Bolivia Past and Present (review)

This collection of essays is a welcome addition to the new scholarship on Bolivia that has sprouted in the years since Evo Morales’s landslide election in December 2005. It brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to reflect on the significance of the election for opening up Bolivia’s political sphere to a wider swath of the (mostly indigenous) population and for tempering the nation’s neo-liberal economic paradigm in favor of moderate nationalization, redistributive social reforms, and the “refoundation” of constitutional democracy along more inclusive and multicultural lines.

Following Crabtree’s brief but clarifying introductory essay setting Morales’s victory in historical perspective, the book is organized around six “unresolved tensions”—ethnic conflict, regional fragmentation, contentious state-society relations, ongoing battles over constitutional reform, economic development, and globalization—which have defined the challenges and limits of governability and social reform under Morales and the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) in spite of their broad electoral mandate. Not only do the authors elucidate these deep-seated conflicts and tensions through their individual analyses, but the editors have set up the book as a forum for polemic and debate among leading Bolivian intellectuals. They have sought “to contrast different interpretations of past and present, often fairly radically different, with a view to elucidating the various positions adopted in Bolivia today” (p. 7). In those sections that crackle with debate and dialogue, the editorial strategy works wonderfully. It is as if the reader were plunged into the middle of a heated discussion among engaged intellectuals sitting around a smoky seminar table. Other sections of the book, however, seem to juxtapose empirical studies that engage each other, or address a larger political debate, only tangentially. But for the most part, these articles shed both heat and light on their respective themes without shying away from prescriptive analysis.

With a distinguished line-up, noteworthy scholars Xavier Albó, Carlos Toranza Roca, and Diego Zavaleta Reyles engage in a particularly trenchant debate about the historic role that ethnic conflict and mobilization have played in Bolivian politics and state formation since long before the MAS built its coalition around Bolivia’s resurgent indigenous movement. José Luis Roca and Rossana Barragán take a critical new look at regionalism’s debilitating influences on national unity and Santa Cruz’s pursuit of “regional autonomy.” George Gray Molina and Franz Xavier Barrios interrogate the changing nature of state-society relations with the rise of robust social movements since even before their apotheosis in the MAS. Rodríguez Veltzé and Luís Tapia consider the political and philosophic struggles for constitutional reform in the quest for a broader democracy. Bolivian strategies of economic development are scrutinized by Carlos Miranda and Fernanda Wanderley, and finally, Juan Antonio Morales and Carlos Arze Vargas argue over globalization’s impact on the Bolivian economy and the new government’s turn towards economic nationalism. Capping this tableau of essays is Whitehead’s insightful concluding essay comparing what are (arguably) Bolivia’s two defining political moments in the realignment of modern state-society relations, the eras of the MNR and the MAS.

In all, this book is a wonderful addition to the new literature on contemporary Bolivian politics and society and their complex relationship to deeper historical problems of endemic poverty, social inequality, racial discrimination, and political conflict. No less important, the book introduces a diversity of scholarly perspectives and political viewpoints from within Bolivia to the Anglophone world.