Thirteen - The Refoundation of the State in Bolivia and Ecuador?

Summary

In this chapter, I focus on a specific attempt to replace the national feature of the “nation state” by indigenous people’s movements in some Latin American countries in the first decade of the twenty-first century. When indigenous movements, both in the Latin American subcontinent and in the world at large, fly the flag of the refoundation of the state they target the feature of the modern state form that made them invisible and caused so much destruction and unjust suffering for so long, namely the supposedly national character of the nation state derived from the capitalist, colonialist state. Their experience is painful evidence of the difficult task of refounding the state. Due to its long history, the modern state form is much more than an institutional conglomerate. It is a cultural artefact. Rather than a political struggle in the strict sense, the struggle for the refoundation of the state is a social, economic, and cultural struggle, a struggle for symbols, mentalities, habitus, and subjectivities. In this chapter, I describe the political processes in Bolivia and Ecuador, the two countries in which efforts to refound the state were most credible in the first decade of the millennium highlighting the main features of the projected refounded state as laid out in the new constitutions.