In 1985 a delegation from the IMF was asking me about the state of the New Zealand economy. After they finished we called a taxi. While we waited I asked them about something which had been puzzling me. The recently elected Lange-Douglas Government was committed to major market liberalisation. Was there any country that might help me understand what would happen?
There was a short silence as if only they asked any questions, not you. And then they said one word: ‘Chile’.
I was shocked because, not long before, General Pinochet had led a coup against a democratically elected government which resulted in the murder and torture of hundreds of Chileans.
However, the delegation was pointing to how the Pinochet Government had brought in a number of American neoliberal economists and was implementing their policies. (I have reflected on the possibility, that the delegation, just briefed by the New Zealand Treasury, had concluded that they were drifting in an extremist direction, and that they were signalling to me that they were not entirely happy with the development; the IMF has always been more pragmatic than it is generally portrayed.)
So I assiduously followed up the literature on the Chilean economic changes. It stood me in good stead critiquing Rogernomics – not that anybody listened. A particular insight was that Pinochet’s economics plunged the country into a seven-year stagnation. So I was looking for the end of the Rogernomics stagnation after seven years and was one of the earliest to identify the upturn back to the same growth rate before the Rogernomes took over; however the track was lower.
That was all many years ago, although after the end of the Pinochet regime the tacit understanding was that the neoliberal economic framework was to be retained.
Should we be taking any notice of the civil unrest in today’s Chile? It has been sufficiently turbulent for the billionaire president to sack older illiberal men from his cabinet and to cancel the APEC and climate change conferences which were about to take place in Santiago.
The standard explanation of the causes of the unrest is that the neoliberal regime has continued (albeit without the brutal human repression). Inequality remains high, economic power is concentrated and the provision of public services is meagre. It sounds like today’s New Zealand, doesn’t it? However, the just mentioned indicators are worse in Chile than here and Chile is much poorer than New Zealand. (It is one of the highest income countries in Latin America but that is the result of its huge copper mines – they make up 60 percent of the nation’s exports – rather than anything attributable to neoliberalism.)
Even so, one is nagged by the possibility that since New Zealand’s liberalisation was imposed fifteen years after Chile, in about fifteen years we will be suffering the same unrest.
But when I look around the world I see other outbursts which cannot be directly attributed to neoliberalism, including the civil unrest in Hong Kong and the ‘children’s crusade’ about climate change. And before we jump to any conclusions, we might recall the student unrest of 1968 which soon settled down although it cost de Gaulle his job, the young people’s civil disturbances which contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November in 1989 (9/11 according to the European calender convention) and the Arab Springs of the early 2010s, which have been usually followed with a winter rather than a summer. Historians will recall 1848 as the ‘year of revolutions’ and how it took a long time for the protestors’ demands to be implemented. So I am not sure whether we can mechanically predict future civil unrest except that there will be more of it.
I do get the sense that there is incipient unrest among young New Zealanders without the conditions to turn it into public turbulence. The exception is climate change which is probably diverting effort away from other concerns. (Were I among the rich and powerful, I would be encouraging climate-change protests without doing anything, to keep the protestors away from threatening me.)
That does not rule out the possibility that we shall have Chilean-type protests at some time in the future – teenagers massed outside Parliament up to their ankles in sea water? Should we worry?
Until recently the predominant response was mañana – these are issues about the future, let’s get on with life today. We’ve moved on to what might be called the ‘buffeting’ stage. Tomorrow has arrived, and the new government is trying to deal with the issues that mañana bequeathed, especially as mañana did not also bequeath the institutions and instruments needed to deal with the issues. But there is still no vision – except about climate change.
To be frank, I do not think that the young people leading the civil unrest here, in Hong Kong, Santiago or wherever have much of a vision either; have you noticed their leaders tend to be attractive rather than profound? What they do have is a sense that things are not going well, that their concerns are not being addressed, and that their future is being severely compromised.
Of course we should look beyond mañana and dealing with its consequences. Let’s start with the Chilean list of high-inequality, concentrated economic power and the inadequate provision of public services, together with environmental deterioration. I add the rotten deal we give to about half our children, limiting their development and opportunity. After all, today’s children will be on the barricades in a couple of decades. While it is easy to articulate such concerns, what are we doing about them, except leaving them to mañana?
Writing this column, I have had the gravelly voice of Leonard Cohen in my ears. The 1985 song does not quite come together as an analytic piece, but it is a powerful protest reflecting the unrest of today’s young:
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
Followed by Santiago, Hong Kong and Wellingtin.
PS. The issues in this column were discussed with Bryan Crump on Nights.