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Abstract
Should political liberties be included in the Human Development Report? Their brief and controversial debut on the report between 1991 and 1993 seemed to close the door for political liberty measurements because of their technical difficulties. Yet, political freedoms seem to be ever more urgent capabilities. This paper intends to reopen the debate on whether political freedoms should be incorporated into the Human Development Report. It uses the Chilean dictatorship's example to reflect on how development is inevitably trumped without them. After briefly responding to some of the main criticisms political freedoms measurements have encompassed the paper proposes an additional reason to incorporate them: they portray the only truly collective capability, representing an essential aspect of human existence which is now absent from the Report.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to the University of Chicago Juniors Scholars Colloquium for their great feedback on the first version of this paper. To Martha C. Nussbaum and David A. Weisbach for introducing me to the Capabilities literature and its challenges. To Daniela Sanhueza and Marcela Álvarez for their encouragement through this project. And most of all, to Juan Wilson for his invaluable support every step of the way.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This task should be continued on future works by analysing different cases, a story similar to the one I will observe through this paper can be told for example about México (Smith Citation1991).
2 It is worth noting though that despite the economic growth and diminishment of poverty, inequality within the country augmented during the military dictatorship so even in economic terms the Chilean experience had strains (Contreras Citation1996).
3 The Junta was constituted by the four Commanders in chief of the armed forces: navy, air force, police and military. The Junta’s original intention was to be the country’s power center as a collegiate body. Future, however, provided differently “because the navy and the air force did not have enough personnel to assume all the necessary functions, and because General Pinochet was determined to impose his authority and power quickly, which were strengthened by the army’s larger size” (Huneeus and Sagaris Citation2007, 182–183).
4 Dictablanda is an invented figure which denotes “soft dictatorship” as the term is construed by the combination of “dicta” but instead of “dura” (which literally means hard or harsh), it incorporates the word “blanda” which means soft. The word became somewhat popular in Chilean far-right conservative circles were Pinochet’s dictatorship has been referred to as dictablanda instead of dictadura.
5 For a description and evaluation of the economic policies implemented by the dictatorship, see Harberger (Citation1982), Foxley R (Citation1986), Corbo (Citation1985).
6 Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación (“National Committee on Truth and Reconciliation”).
7 For instance, one testimony explained that:
When I felt so many people rejecting me or not understanding, I preferred to keep quiet. I was ashamed to face reality. I didn't know how to answer where my father was. I wasn't sure whether he was dead or had abandoned us. (CNVR Citation1993, 1009)
8 The website of the Museum of Memory (Citationn.d.) offers a complete and updated list of those who are recognised as detenidos desaparecidos. Available at: interactivos.museodelamemoria.cl/victimas/?s=&cat=6®ion=0&calificacion=0&militancia=0&year2=0 Accessed March 11, 2020.
9 The specific circumstances were that 59 died by the order of war tribunals, 93 during protests, 101 during alleged escape attempts, 815 through other kinds of executions or death by torture, 87 were killed by political violence on 1973, 38 during protests, 39 during gun battles and 90 by politically motivated violence form private citizens (CNVR Citation1993, 1123).
10 Comisión Nacional Sobre Prisión Política y Tortura. (“National Committee on Political Incarceration and Torture”).
11 Pueblo may be translated as “the people” or “body politic”. The richness of the Spanish term lies in the conjunct evocation of both of these aspects in one word. Pueblo is inevitably a collective description, referred to the political body (as in “We the people”) or the non-economically favoured mass (equivalent to the English phrase “the common people”). But unlike the term “people,” the word pueblo can never mean the plural of person as a sum of unrelated people. It inevitably involves a sense of unity be it cultural, economic or political. On memory and the Chilean dictatorship see Piper (Citation2005).
12 In words of the acclaimed Chilean poet Nicanor Parra: “There are two breads. You eat two. I eat none. Average consumption: one per person.” (Free translation from: “Hay dos panes. Usted se come dos. Yo ninguno. Consumo promedio: un pan por persona”) Parra’s potent satire ludically illustrates how insufficient product per capita measures (as a reflection of a country’s available resources) are to really learn how much resources the people of a certain country have access to. This is highly relevant in the case of Chile which, according to the most recent available data was found to be the second most unequal country in the OECD with a Gini (at disposable income after taxes and transfers) of 0,454 in 2015, only surpassed by Mexico’s 0,458 in 2016 (OECD Citation2019). [Accessed April 24, 2019].
13 United Nations Development Programme.
14 Nussbaum’s and Sen’s version of the Capabilities Approach is regarded as the original version of the approach but it is not the only one. For other versions, for example, see Kaufman (Citation2007), Wolff and de-Shalit (Citation2007), Alexander (Citation2016), and Riddle (Citation2014).
15 Besides rejecting the narrowness of wealth-focused accounts, a crucial aspect of the capabilities approach is that it enhances human freedom as the focus (as opposed to human functionings). That is, because we value human freedom we do not focus our analysis on what people do (hence implicitly imposing some determinate course of action) but on what people are able to do, that is, what opportunities have they been afforded (Nussbaum Citation2003, 43; Sen Citation2000, 74).
16 Nonetheless, “the evaluative focus of [the approach], can be either on the realised functionings (what a person is actually able to do) or on the capability set of alternatives she has (her real opportunities). The two give different types of information-the former about the things a person does and the latter about the things a person is substantively free to do. Both versions of the capability approach have been used in the literature, and sometimes they have been combined” (Sen Citation2000, 75).
17 Though it is important to keep in mind that he believes that not “everything that can be put into the format of that space [of evaluation] must, for that reason, be important—not to mention, equally significant” (Sen Citation1999a, 46).
18 Its significance can be recognised in several of the Nussbaum’s central capabilities; in “Senses, imagination and thought” in relation to freedom of expression, in “affiliation” regarding the freedom of assembly and speech and in “Control over one’s environment” which in relation to the political environment entails “Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the right of political participation, protections of free speech and association”. In the case of the Chilean dictatorship’s violent opposition to political dissent or criticism, other capabilities of the list were also deeply trumped such as the capacity to experience “emotions” which includes being able to mourn our losses, question that became extremely hard in the case of the detenidos desaparecidos. The brutality of the CNI’s and DINA’s tortures entailed an irremediable detriment to “bodily integrity” because of the severe physical harm inflicted on the victims and to “life” on the cases in which it left a life “so reduced as to be not worth living” (Nussbaum Citation2003, 41–42). Sen explicitly argues in favour of political freedom as a relevant consideration for development in chapter 6 of Development and freedom. He argues against those who allege that “focusing on democracy and political liberty is a luxury that a poor country “cannot afford”” and that “basic political and liberal rights” are important for development (Sen Citation2000, 146–148).
19 Sen’s argument was specifically about democracy but I use the more general term of political liberties in order to assess a larger number of issues related to collective action and participation.
20 Sen’s example considered the experience up to the year 2000, but according to the statistics of Our World in Data (Citation2019), it remains true up to 2016 [Accessed May 4, 2019. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/03/Famines-by-pol-regime.png]. Since then, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Citation2019), several regions of Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen have entered a state of emergency which nonetheless has not yet constituted a state of famine. In the context of Civil War famine has been declared on some zones of South Sudan. [Accessed May 4, 2019. http://www.fao.org/emergencies/crisis/fightingfamine/en/].
21 Surely under this form of negative induction, one could argue for a myriad of things that ought to be incorporated into the measurement, for example, the access citizens may have to art. But, naturally, not all of them can be incorporated into the measurement without it deveining in an unintelligible and therefore irrelevant collage of countless aspects. The simplicity of the HDI is part of its charm as it allows for a somewhat complex consideration of aspects by focusing on modest and comprehensible criteria. Therefore, prioritisation is an important part of determining which measurements ought to be incorporated to the index.
22 As in the case of development measures, evaluation methods on higher education carry the risk of leaving out relevant components of the education process. Thus, the signalling of one (or some) particular feature (or features) over the others implies to an extent that other measures are not signalled to be as relevant as the ones that are actually being evaluated.
23 I have in mind the evaluations that grade different items separately (food, ambiance, price, service) but give an overall score to the restaurant which is not an average of the other variants but an independent (although certainly influenced by those factors) score. The symbolic power of the HDI would be that of the overall score whiles that of the HDR would correspond to the value ascribed to the assessment of the items separately.
24 See for example the revision of the indexes of the Freedom House (Citation2019) Report methodology in 2016 and 2017. Accessed May 1, 2019. https://freedomhouse.org/report/methodology-freedom-world-2019.
25 It could be argued that the environmental index of the 2018 report is a collective indicator. Nevertheless, it is not collective in the sense that it belongs to the public sphere as I shall argue of the political liberties on the following pages. At most, the environment is collective in the sense that it is a common resource. That is, a resource that is available to all and affects all. It is not a space in which people necessarily relate to each other. The eventual collective character of the environment is relatively contingent, if something, its capacity to group people together has been given by the political organisation against the environmental destruction threat by indiscriminate economic exploitation.
26 The space that can be exercised in our shared reality, in the eloquent words of Arendt: “[W]herever the man-made world does not become the scene for action and speech—as in despotically rules communities which banish their subjects into the narrowness of the home and thus prevent the rise of a public realm—freedom has no worldly reality. Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance” (Arendt Citation1961, 148–149).
27 Veja, 2 December 1998. The context of his comment was a Congress plenary were the non-recognition of Pinochet’s immunity was announced.
28 Accessed May 5, 2019. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-says-torture-works-backs-waterboarding-and-much-worse/2016/02/17/4c9277be-d59c-11e5-b195-2e29a4e13425_story.html?utm_term=.e9286c260cef.
29 On a literal translation “much more early than late” and, on a more contextual translation “sooner rather than later”. The phrase alludes to Salvador Allende’s final speech on 11 September 1973 from la Moneda as the presidential house was being bombed by the militaries. The President commended the Chilean people not to sacrifice themselves by fighting the armed forces. On the final words of his speech, he prompted the Chilean people to have faith and said “Keep knowing that, rather sooner than later, the great avenues will open again where man may pass freely in the pursuit of a better society” (Free translation of the Spanish version of Salvador Allendes last speech, delivered on 11 September 1973). [Accessed May 2, 2019. http://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-article-82594.html].
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Natalia Niedmann Álvarez
Natalia Niedmann Álvarez is a JSD Candidate at the University of Chicago where she previously obtained her LLM Degree under the sponsor of BECAS CHILE. She graduated from Universidad de Chile Law School summa cum laude in 2017. She has been admitted to the Chilean Bar since 2017 and is a member of the Colegio de Abogados de Chile.