It is the premise of this paper that Chávez's Venezuela is a direct rebuttal of the situation depicted of the Latin American Left in Jorge Castañeda's Utopia Unarmed.

Chávez is inviting the Latin American Left to reconsider or to renew its position toward different issues such as nationalism, regional integration and, to some extent, democracy. This is Venezuela's Utopia. He has reinforced his vision with an aggressive Leftwing rhetorical tone that has been missing since the collapse of Communism. And furthermore he has rearmed his discourse with history (see chapter 3), placing his mission within the bounds of historical inevitability. In this way Chávez could be considered as the unwelcome answer to what has been described as "The New Left," or to use a more current term, "The Third Way."

Most of the arguments of this "New Left" are examined by the Mexican Castañeda in his seminal work of 1993. This book was clearly an attempt to respond to the sense of defeat and disillusion felt by the Left throughout the world, and more particularly in Latin America, following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.

Perhaps due to the depths of despair experienced by the Left at that time, the book has become a point of reference and its author a sort of guru for Social Democracy in Latin America. I use the label "Social Democracy," although nowadays the term "Third Way "may be more appropriate. Castañeda seems to consider that the essential role for the Left in the 1990 was to be the torchbearer of Liberal Democracy: "The Left's greatest challenge is the enormous chore of democratising democracy in Latin America.".

As mentioned earlier, the book was published in 1993, some three years after the fall of the Berlin wall and ten years after some of the first economic structural adjustment policies had been implemented in Latin America with some success. From an interventionist state model, Latin American countries were moving towards free market principles. Such events were, at least apparently, administering a severe defeat to the Left. Moreover, some were even arguing that they were the proof that we had reached "The End of History". The core of this thesis developed by the American scholar Fukuyama being that there will be "no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions because all of the big really questions were settled". Liberal Democracy and free markets became, with Fukuyama's encouragement, widely seen as the only coherent and serious form of development.

Chávez's success would seem to contradict both Fukuyama and Castañeda. For not only has the president constantly denounced neo-liberalism but he has also rejected the concept of Liberal Democracy which, he had declared in 1995, "Has failed, from whence the need for us to reinvent our own model."

In contrast, for Castañeda, there is no doubt that the future of the Left, and in many ways for the entire continent is in adopting the clothes of Social Democracy. If he reckons that a lot has been achieved, he also considers that the Latin American Left still has to make a greater commitment towards Liberal Democracy and has to redefine its nationalism.

Regarding the Left's approach to democracy, Castañeda describes it as being too often "instrumental". According to him, the "Left's different factions [...] neglected the intrinsic merits of democratic rule and tended to support democracy only when it supported them".

Moreover, he claims, the Left will not be entirely democratic until its leaders have made a clear condemnation of the Cuban regime. Actually, it was on this subject that Castañeda adopted his fiercest tone, having little patience with Cárdenas and Lula, respective leaders of the PRD (Partido Revolucionario Democratico) in Mexico and the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores) in Brazil. Eight years later, one could wonder what Castañeda might think of Hugo Chávez. Having played in a baseball match one evening in November 1999 in La Havana, Chávez declared: "Venezuela is travelling towards the same sea as the Cuban people: a sea of happiness and real social justice and peace"

Through the Cuban example, it seems that Castañeda was not taking into account the emotional factor that is so important to an understanding of the Left - Chávez's attitude being a good example. It is this emotional factor which might explain this need to search for a Utopia. Moreover, by insisting so much on this "democratic imperative" not only for the Left but also for Latin America, Castañeda finishes by dismissing the weight of a certain historical tradition of the Left which finds its roots in the French Revolution: the Jacobin tradition.

More than in the Marxism-Leninism paradigm, it is within the Jacobin tradition that the close identification of nationalism with the notion of independence and social change can be clearly seen. This was "a mainstay of the Left's ideology for nearly a century". Furthermore, the Left's historical lack of commitment to democracy can be better understood in the context of the eighteenth century doctrine. It was through this Jacobin model that the notion of nationalism as a progressive force developed. And that the well being of a nation and her people could be associated with the building up of a strong state without necessarily the need for a representative democracy.

Such ideas, in a continent where the state was created before the emergence of a real national consciousness and where the question of identity was very fragile, were very attractive. Castañeda is clear on this point: "The Jacobin, anti democratic streak was present in Latin American political culture before anyone had ever heard Lenin". It is this Jacobin model that in many ways Chávez is renewing. As Margarita Lopez Maya points out, "Nationalism lies in the heart of Chavismo". However, this nationalism has to be understood through a Bolivarian paradigm, which is to say of a great independent Latin America. For President Chávez, "If we do not succeed in the regional integration, as Bolivar planned, of the alternative forces in our continent as soon as possible, even if we manage to keep power, we will not succeed in achieving our revolution"

There is no doubt that the Left advocated by Castañeda is moderate and some distance from that of Chávez. For the following statement of the regular columnist of Newsweek could find echoes in many Social Democrat's speeches: "The only thing left to fight for is a future that is simply the present, plus more of the same". Yet, in a continent where still 2/3 of the entire population live close to the poverty line (in Venezuela nearly 80 % live in poverty despite the oil wealth) it is hard to believe that such a "present, plus more of the same" is worth fighting for.

At the opposite end of scale, Chávez's discourse is typically revolutionary, in the sense that it is rooted in the promise of a radical break with the past and the inauguration of a new era. For him "what has been called the democratic system in Venezuela has not differed so much from what came before...Everything has remained the same, it's been the same system of domination, with different faces. ...It's been the same system - in economics and politics - and the same denial of basic human rights and of the rights of the people to determine their own destiny". "Tremble, oligarch!" was one of his slogans in his last presidential campaign. These words were borrowed from a military campaign song popular during the civil wars of the mid-19th century. The song celebrates the deeds of one of Chávez 's heroes, Ezquesiel Zamora, whose ideas - with those of Simon Bolivar and Simon Rodríguez - constitute the current President's main influence. (See chapter 3).

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, an enormous amount of attention was given to the Left as it was considered defeated. However, in a longer view, it could be argued that the main loser has been Christian Democracy. Thus, its place on the political spectrum is now occupied by a Social Democracy which is, "Third Way" or not, in many ways much more conformist and defeatist than ever, as is Castañeda, when one considers their subservience to the financial markets.

By vacuity, or opportunism this Social Democracy has decided to give up struggling for the progress of society. It might be claimed that the label Social-Conformism characterises the movement more accurately. A Utopia Unarmed may have been considered as progress, yet it might not be sufficient to respond to the increasingly worsening living conditions of the Latin American population. Nevertheless, the Chávez phenomenon might have opened a new chapter for the Latin American Left in this long "end of history."

Maximilien Arvelaiz(Franco-Venezolano)