Five Republics and One Tradition: A History of Constitutionalism in Chile 1810–2020 by Pablo Ruiz-Tagle

Abstract

Ruiz-Tagle’s Five Republics and One Tradition poses a conundrum for a historian reviewing it in a history journal (even a journal identified with interdisciplinary methodologies): Ruiz-Tagle is a leading legal scholar, and the book, despite its title, is not a work of history, not even legal history. Since it does not employ primary sources, it contains no original research. Nor does it engage with the considerable historiography of modern Chile, often to its detriment. How then to assess its contributions? It is probably most useful to approach the book as a primary source, as the product of a particular historical moment (a “constitutional moment” in the author’s own words) and a particular political-ideological perspective (liberal.) Rather than a work of history, Ruiz-Tagle’s book is a legal brief for a new constitution free of the excessive presidentialism that he views as a legacy of Chile’s republican tradition.In 2019, a small hike in subway fares sparked massive protests throughout Chile. Ruiz-Tagle provides a short afterword describing the estallido social (social explosion) in which Chile “woke up” (the protesters’ phrase) after three decades of a limited transition to democracy following the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). Weeks of protests by sometimes more than 1 million people included a dazzling array of social actors and movements, ranging from students to indigenous right and feminist, lgbtq, and environmentalist groups. By the end of several months of protests during which, to Ruiz-Tagle’s dismay, “the government [had] a hard time controlling public order” (280), parties in congress agreed to protestors’ demands for a popular assembly to write a new constitution to replace the one imposed at gunpoint by the Pinochet dictatorship in 1980. As Ruiz-Tagle notes, this constitution has been reformed innumerable times since 1990. But, as he also recognizes, many of its anti-democratic and authoritarian features remain, especially those designed to prevent any challenge to the neoliberal economic policies that became the military regime’s signature legacy along with its atrocious record on human rights. The 1980 constitution has been a major obstacle to redressing Chile’s severe social inequalities, another unfortunate legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship and its free-market reforms.Written in the years between President Michele Bachelet’s 2015 proposed plan for a new constitution and the 2019/20 estallido social, Five Republics and One Tradition examines the history of five Chilean republican periods to make a case for what a new Chilean constitution should look like. As Ruiz-Tagle’s apparent distress at the radicalism of the 2019/20 protests suggests, his is a self-consciously moderate and centrist set of proposals for a new republican constitution free of what he terms “Jacobonism,” “political correctness,” and “the fear and the menace generated by threatening and arrogant speeches that promote only profound changes” (2–3). Ruiz-Tagle’s intellectual inspirations are Alphonse de Lamartine’s three-volume Histoire des Girondists (Paris, 1947) and prominent nineteenth-century Chilean Liberal Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna’s The Chilean Girondists: Reminiscences of an Eyewitness (New York, 2004; orig. pub. 1876). He concludes the book with a call for a new generation of Chilean Girondists who might author a liberal constitution free of the excessive presidentialism that, he argues, has been an important part of Chilean republican tradition.Ruiz-Tagle strains to distinguish Chile’s republican and liberal traditions (developed during the “five Republics”) and the 1980 neoliberal constitution without paying much attention to the shared features and historical continuities of Latin American liberalism and neoliberalism. Despite his occasional protestations to the contrary, as well as some of the actual historical material presented in the book, the book is a Whiggish account of the progressive expansion of freedom and rights since independence in Chile, with the Pinochet dictatorship and the neoliberal era in historical parentheses. To draw a sharp distinction between Chilean liberalism and neoliberalism requires that Ruiz-Tagle ignore a considerable body of historical scholarship on authoritarianism and political violence in Chile since independence. Notably absent from his bibliography, for example, are the groundbreaking works of Lira and Loveman on the history of political violence and the use of authoritarian legal instruments like states of siege, amnesties, extraordinary faculties, internal state-security laws, “decrees with force of law,” and “decree-laws” by republican governments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1Absent too is any reckoning with the flipside of Chilean (and Latin American) liberalism—its commitment to “public order,” which translated into a suspicion of popular participation and democracy and a commitment to the genocidal elimination of indigenous peoples and appropriation of their land. For example, Vicuña Mackenna, Ruiz-Tagle’s model for the Chilean Girondists, was an ardent advocate of the military subjugation of independent Mapuche groups. Fanning the exterminationist flame circulating in liberal publications at the time, Vicuña Mackenna denounced them as “savages,” the “enem[ies] of civilization,” and not belonging to the Chilean nation. Nor does Ruiz-Tagle pay attention to major moments of state violence and authoritarianism that also defined the Liberal governments. He describes the expansion of political and social rights under Liberal President Arturo Alessandri without mentioning the massacres of nitrate workers in San Gregorio (1921) and La Coruña (1925), and of peasant rebels in Ránquil (1934). Ruiz-Tagle briefly mentions (in a block quotation from a secondary source) Alessandri’s resort to the authoritarian toolkit codified in the Internal State Security Law (Decree-Law No.50) to establish social and political order during the 1930s, but he fails to analyze it. This decree-law and others like it reflected the limits of the republican constitutional moments that Ruiz-Tagle views as laying the foundation for the expansion of political freedoms and rights going forward.