Next year, 2023, will mark fifty years of the bloody US-supported coup d’état in Chile that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and installed a brutal military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet. A sharp and violent break with decades of constitutional democracy in Chile, the coup inaugurated a tragic and devastating period justifiably notorious for the Pinochet dictatorship's killing, imprisonment, torture, and 'disappearance' of thousands of its opponents. Many thousands more were forced into exile. The social and political consequences of the dictatorship endure to this day.

The 1973 coup took place at a pivotal moment in a worldwide conjuncture marked by crisis, challenge, and contested transformations. The movement for a New International Economic Order, of which Allende’s Chile was a key protagonist, seemed to be growing in strength. Most Western societies were facing an upsurge in collective protests of workers, women, and minorities. The dissolution of the Bretton-Woods system of fixed exchange rates, the weakening of state regulation of external transactions, and the decline and eventual demise of Fordism, plunged the postwar order into crisis and challenged the key underpinnings of the postwar social settlement in the West. Coming against this backdrop, the Pinochet regime’s attacks on trade unions and workers’ and other collective rights, and its policies of deregulation, privatization, including of social security, health, and education as well as for intensifying inequalities in Chile, fuelled the advance of neoliberalism and the ascendancy of a New Right in the West.

The links between the Chilean dictatorship and the spread of neoliberalism are widely recognized, but they remain an avenue for further exploration. The Pinochet dictatorship escalated tensions between political and economic liberalism into an existential crisis for economic freedom that could only be resolved by the suppression of political rights and freedoms. The regime’s neoliberal ideological toolkit proved more popular and enduring than the Pinochet dictatorship or for that matter the ‘Chicago boys’, a similar logic of ‘usurping’ and ‘economizing’ the democratic having been enacted in the decades since in many countries, including Western democracies. Subordinating political rights to economic freedom and identifying democratic legitimacy with passive consent, some of them have also responded to movements like Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion with laws and regulations virtually outlawing public protests. Ironically, while Chile is emerging from dictatorship’s long shadow, democracies in several other countries continue to mobilize discourses of economic freedom and individual accountability to intensify restrictions on individual and collective rights, including of vulnerable minorities, together with heightened surveillance, controls, and new powers to curb dissent and protest. Hence, though structural links between metropolitan centres and their former colonies may have loosened with the end of formal colonialism, the global proliferation and traffic in repertoires of authoritarian and counter-democratic practices in the last five decades seem nevertheless to warrant closer attention.

Against this backdrop, the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy is organizing an international workshop on ‘Economic freedom and political rights: Neoliberal challenges to democracy’ on 31 May and 1 June 2022. This event is envisaged as a collaborative effort to map the genealogies and trajectories of neoliberal governance between dictatorship and democracy. We also hope it will be a prelude to talks, workshops, conferences, and other events over the next 18 months to help place in perspective the profound implications of the 1973 coup and the dictatorship for our rights, freedoms, and democratic aspirations, both in Chile as well as in the wider world.

Please address all communications about the workshop to democracy@graduateinstitute.ch