from Part One - The Tragic Optimism of the Law: THE END OF A STORY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2023
In this chapter, I briefly analyse the fate of legal reformism. The global financial crisis of 2008 which reverberated in Europe in 2011, the crises of progressive governments in Latin America in the second decade of the millennium, and the economic and social meltdown caused by the pandemic of the new coronavirus are all signs of a deeper malaise in the development model that sustained legal reformism for the past hundred years. The end of legal reformism started when the ideal of democracy and the rule of law ceased to be a progressive objective which progressive forces had struggled for in many countries, often at great personal risk, and became an international imposition, a condition of development assistance and structural adjustment policies demanded by the World Bank and the IMF. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, political science invested a great deal of research in identifying conditions for the sustained adoption of liberal democracy in the developing world, which included agrarian reform, a sizeable middle class, and a certain balance between urban and rural areas. From one day to the next, all of this research was consigned to the dustbin of history. Rather than focusing on the conditions for democracy and the rule of law, the “international community” converted democracy and the rule of law into the conditions for everything else, and most importantly for receiving development assistance and financing. Liberal democracy became the most legitimate regime of a weak state confronted with neoliberal global impositions. Under these conditions there was no room for progressive legal reformism. Conversely, there was plenty of room for conservative authoritarian reformism or counter-reformism.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.