Regresar

The New Wave of Constitutions in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela: An Emerging Democratic and Legal Revolution

Abstract:

Línea Sur 11 2016 pp. 104–121 in the Spanish Constitution are considered as ‘fundamental rights’1 and can be claimed through a legal appeal, 2 while social rights3 cannot (except the right to education). 4 Therefore, first and second generations of constitutionalism fit the traditional view of Human Rights where, as Ramiro Ávila has suggested, only rights with negative dimensions could be claimed because they did not require any expenditure by the State; that is to say, the State was abusing its power (2012, p. 77). Because of the normative weakness of social rights, it is easy to subordinate public policy to economic interests of a minority or to financial and banking power. Neoliberal policies have progressively dismantled the Welfare State, turning social rights into empty shells. Dávalos (2008) illustrates the path of violence and domination that neoliberalism has had to follow in order to be renovated. At first, led by characters such as Hayek, Mises, Baudin or Aaron, the liberal reconstruction was based on the reformulation of its conceptual pillars, from the perspective of law, ethics, epistemology, and politics. During a second phase, exponents of neoliberalism like Milton Friedman aimed to demolish the concepts that structured the decentralized planning of the Welfare State and that were founded on the economic analysis developed by the British economist, John Maynard Keynes (Dávalos, 2008, p. 6). As a third phase, neoliberalists seized spaces of power through the victories of Pinochet in Chile (1973), Margaret Thatcher in England, and Ronald Reagan in the US in 1979 (Dávalos, 2008, p. 6).