In the Name of Reason: Technocrats and Politics in Chile

3. Technocrats and the Entrepreneurial State

3 Technocrats and the Entrepreneurial State When scholars look at the political role played by technocrats, two main interpretations come frequently to the fore. Sometimes, the ascendancy of technocracy is regarded as being mainly the result of the technocrats’ own efforts to obtain a larger share of power and influence to the detriment of politicians and other contenders for power. For this purpose, technocrats may make use of their technical credentials, expertise, and professional prestige to obtain their final political objective. In contrast to this, technocratic ascendancy is sometimes presented as being mainly the work of political groups in governmental positions who resort to technocrats for their own political and ideological purposes. In other words, technocrats are rather seen as passive tools employed by others. Technocratic experiences worldwide can undoubtedly provide numerous examples supporting either of these interpretations. What these distinct readings have in common is the fact that in both cases the technocratic ascendancy is presented as a result of the supremacy achieved by a particular group (technocrats or politicians in power) who eventually impose their will on the rest of society in a kind of ‘‘winner-take-all’’ situation . I suggest that there is another path to technocratic ascendancy, one that in my view corresponds to what has been taking place in Chile since the late 1930s; namely, technocratic ascendancy as a result of a political stalemate. In this manner, the consolidation of the state technocracy in Chile since the late 1930s can be seen as the result of a very fragile equilibrium of forces. technocrats and the entrepreneurial state 85 On the one hand, we find center-leftist reformist forces that control the government but are not strong enough to impose their agenda on the rest of the country and on the other, right-wing conservative forces, which since the mid-1920s have lost direct control of the executive but are still able to block most governmental initiatives. I suggest that the strong presence of technocrats in state agencies since the 1930s must be regarded as a kind of ‘‘demilitarized zone’’ established between these contending sociopolitical forces to make the functioning of the Chilean democracy possible. As a matter of fact, these technocrats constituted the sole actor that was acceptable to powerful groups in society (agrarian and industrial entrepreneurs, bankers, and conservative political parties) to be the main administrator of the nation’s financial resources. The alternative was that public policies should be designed and implemented by radical, socialist, and even communist politicians, which in the eyes of conservative Chile was totally unacceptable. On the other hand, Chile’s progressive forces had in general great confidence in the professional expertise of the engineers in charge of the most important state agencies related to production and infrastructure. They generally regarded these technocrats as honest and competent public servants who did not represent any political current and who were mainly motivated by the goal of expanding and modernizing the Chilean industry and the state apparatus. The evidence of the tacit acceptance by the Left of this pivotal role assigned to technocrats since the late 1930s is the fact that in those years technocrats never became the focus of criticism within the socialist movement and labor organizations. For these reasons, the consolidation of the state technocracy since the late 1930s cannot be regarded as disconnected from the establishment of the Estado de Compromiso—as the old Chilean democracy became known— because it was a vital expression of that compromise. From this perspective it can be argued that as a result of a particular balance of forces and the necessity of the political system to subsist, the Chilean state technocracy became a key facilitator of democracy in the country. It is for this reason that later attempts to perturb this equilibrium in favor of one of the contending sociopolitical forces weakened not only the foundations of the Estado de Compromiso but also the buffer function played by the state technocracy. As the final section of this chapter shows, this is exactly what occurred when in the late 1950s the conservative sectors attempted to reshape the foundations of the Estado de Compromiso. In their effort to break with the pattern of state-led industrialization and to impose free market policies, the Right in power launched an 86 in the name of reason open attack on the technocrats who had administered important state agencies for decades, and replaced them...