democratization and market reforms had failed to reduce profound
inequalities and enduring poverty. Populist leaders deployed an anti-
American, anti-globalization discourse and experimented with nation-
alization and strong-armed interventions, but they also invested in
social programs and in redistributive measures, in a more or less client-
elistic manner. More orthodox with respect to the market, public
administration, and the world order, reformist governments also
undertook to improve social programs and income distribution.^87
Across the continent, the politics of left and right became alive, and
was very clearly defined around the question of equality.
In Taiwan and Korea, similar debates on democratization and
neoliberalism took place but, in these cases, it was leftist social move-
ments that moved non-programmatic political parties to adopt redis-
tributive and welfare state reforms.^88 In South Africa, achieving
effective redistribution proved difficult and the African National
Congress may even have failed in this respect, but political debates
were also consumed by equality and by the possibilities of social
justice in a neoliberal world.^89 In the Kerala state of India, the social-
democratic Left Democratic Front defeated the neoliberal right by a
landslide in 2006, building on its previous success in alleviating
poverty, in a region with a very low aggregate income.^90 In the dem-
ocracies of the different continents, then, the long historical debate
between the left and the right was reaffirmed through competing
visions of equality.
The same dividing lines manifested themselves in world politics, as
the new development consensus rapidly showed its limits. This con-
sensus, indeed, always remained imperfect. Reflecting their distinct
(^87) Jorge G. Castan ̃eda, “Latin America’s Left Turn,”Foreign Affairs, vol. 85, no. 3,
May/June 2006, 28–43, pp. 30 and 35; Michael Shifter, “In Search of Hugo
88 Cha ́vez,”Foreign Affairs, vol. 85, no. 3, May/June 2006, 45–59, pp. 50–51.
Joseph Wong, “Democratization and the Left: Comparing East Asia and Latin
America,”Comparative Political Studies, vol. 37, no. 10, December 2004,
1213–37, pp. 1219–23; Sandbrook, Edelman, Heller, and Teichman,Social
89 Democracy in the Global Periphery, pp. 18 and 235.
Nicoli Nattrass and Jeremy Seekings, “Democracy and Distribution in Highly
Unequal Economies: The Case of South Africa,”Journal of Modern African
Studies, vol. 39, no. 3, September 2001, 471–98; Patrick Bond,Talk Left, Walk
Right: South Africa’s Frustrated Global Reforms, second edition, Scottsville,
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006, pp. 14–15 and 179–89.
(^90) Sandbrook, Edelman, Heller, and Teichman,Social Democracy in the Global
Periphery, pp. 85 and 91.
190 Left and Right in Global Politics