A Peculiar Democracy: Middle Classes, Elites, and Methodologies of Domination during the Cold War in Colombia

It is often said that Colombia is a country with a tradition of political stability and one of Latin America’s longest-functioning democracies. Some historians usually understand the second half of the twentieth century as the moment when Colombia secured this tradition of political stability, relative social and economic growth, and an expanded urban middle class, all while avoiding a major military dictatorships. And yet Colombia is also historicized as fragmented and violent society. These two realities, the argument goes, have made the experience of Colombian democracy particularly peculiar and paradoxical. This paper invites to rethink these major narratives by moving away from assessing what democracy is supposed to be to a historical critique of democracy itself. It proceeds in two specific ways. First, it offers a transnational genealogy of how an idea of the middle class—as contested discourse—became synonymous with a normative definition of democracy. It shows how this idea has consolidated a foundational narrative of the second half of the 20th century in which the so-called paradoxical democracy has become common sense: a current anti-democratic society is coupled with an all-powerful oligarchical rule, whereas a future democracy is attached to the consolidation of a middle class. Second, it excavates the multiple social political projects promulgated by urban elites to secure their power in society. It argues that the historical formation of the urban elites during the Cold War opens up a multiplicity of questions to rethink major historical process in Colombia: meanings of citizenship, the relationships between state and society, the politics of violence, and the naturalization of different forms of material inequality. In so doing, it invites us to historicize democracy not as an ideological chimera of total emancipation but as an effect of political conflicts through which multiple forms of class domination were naturalized.