The State and Capital Accumulation in Latin America: a Conceptual and Historical Introduction

The politics of liberalisation: Privatisation and regulation‐for‐competition in Europe's and Latin America's telecoms and electricity industries

“…Stein Rokkan (1975: 600) wrote that: ‘the European sequence simply cannot be repeated in the newest nations’. It is therefore not surprising to find agreement in the discipline well beyond theoretical divisions that Latin American states are weak or dependent (Huntington 1968: 1–2; Anglade & Fortin 1985: 287; Migdal 1988; Whitehead 1994; Cardoso & Faletto 1979; Fishlow 1990). The weakness is to some extent the product of comparatively low levels of warfare during critical periods of state formation, and of a lengthy period of Spanish and Portuguese patrimonial rule.…”

Territorial Power and the Peripheral State: The Issue of Decentralization

“…In post-colonial Africa the creation and consolidation of such functions, as clearly exemplified in the Algerian and Tanzanian cases (Raffinot and Jacquemot, 1977;Coulson, 1982) provided a counter to unfettered private accumulation. In Latin America, especially after the Second World War, the state assumed a number of crucial economic functions in connection with the strategy of importsubstitution industrialization (Anglade and Fortin, 1985;Mathias and Salama, 1983). In these cases it is important not to conflate the centralization of a range of important economic functions, and especially the establishment of state enterprises, with central economic planning, a point to which I shall return below.…”

“…It is the strategic absence of this autochthonous dimension which limits the neocolonial state's capacity to develop the moral and intellectual leadership so necessary in the construction of hegemony (Buci-Glucksmann, 1982).s These seven factors can help us understand the dynamics of political centralization, but as with perceptions of decentralization the assumption of any broad or normative stance will, as Smith (1985: 202) observes, 'be coloured by whatever theory is held, implicitly or explicitly, of the state'. Naturally, not only does one have a broad range of theories of the state for the advanced capitalist societies, but in addition there is also an already rich literature on the specificities of the peripheral or dependent state (Collier, 1979; Goulbourne, 1979; Canak, 1984;Carnoy, 1984: 172-207; Randall and Theobald, 1985; Anglade and Fortin, 1985; Mouzelis, 1986).…”