Neoliberal discourse and the crisis of politics and culture: A comparative study of Dominican Republic and Costa Rica grass-roots politics during the eighties

This dissertation attempts to explain the relationship between the policies of structural adjustment and the neoliberal discourse that justified them, and of the social mobilizations and discourses opposed to these policies in two small Latin American countries during the 1980's: the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica. Two analytical perspectives converge in this dissertation: (1) discourse analysis (Michel Foucault and Ernesto Laclau), with which the genealogy and resulting hegemony of the neoliberal discourse is reconstructed, that as a consequence became the dominant frame of intelligibility in explaining the transformations that ended by displacing the Keynesian model of organization of the economy, and in designing and implementing the policies that restructured capitalism, and (2) the theories of social movements, combining the contributions of the model of political process (Tilly, Tarrow, McAdam) and frame analysis (Gamson, Snow and Benford).; Regarding the two national cases, that of the Dominican Republic turned out to be the most documented, with the Costa Rican case serving to demonstrate, in a timely fashion, how the different strategies adopted by the social movement organizations, as well as the relationship among organizations and states and the framing of the issues, relate to the political culture and the historical memory given in each society, leading to different results. Given the differences between the political regimes of the Dominican Republic and of Costa Rica, which can be reduced fundamentally to the difference between an authoritarian regime and a Welfare State, in Costa Rica the responses to the neoliberal policies and discourses were more effective in counteracting these and in preserving social policies that benefited the most vulnerable groups. It is also argued that, even in the case of Costa Rica, and more so in that of the Dominican Republic, the social conflicts of the eighties being an unequal struggle among global and national actors, the latter being unable to combat the former on their own terrain, finally, and in spite of the differences between both cases, the readjustment implied the imposition of neoliberalism as a hegemonic discourse, determining that the social and economic policies had the latter as its only reference.