READY TO PLAY A ROLE IN IMPROVING THE POLITICAL CULTURE OF CANADA?
G LO B A L B R I E F • S P R I N G | S U M M E R 2 0 1 1
Carleton University is now accepting applications for admission to the Clayton H. Riddell Graduate Program in Political Management. This one-year full-time master’s degree will prepare students for careers as staff members to elected representatives, political managers and strategists, and political liaison officers for civil society organizations. Study in the nation’s capital in the first program of its kind in Canada, and help to change the practice of politics for the better. To learn more or to apply, visit us online at carleton.ca/politicalmanagement Subject to approval by the Ontario Council on Graduate Studies.
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by painful reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, and aided in recent years by positive terms of trade for raw materials and commodities – has issued in an impressive growth of the middle class in most Latin American countries, those beyond the elites have begun to have more of a say in policy-making, and in political decisions more broadly. Public opinion is becoming increasingly relevant as democracy consolidates – just as this empowered middle class finds its own voice to defend its priorities and needs. As a consequence, Spanish is becoming more and more relevant in the political debates, in social discourse and – to be sure – in the economic arena. A growing number of political leaders, businesspeople and technocrats are coming from the middle class; these are people who did not have access to public education in which learning a foreign language was a ‘must.’ As they seek to increase their political clout, they are certainly acquiring foreign language skills (the growth of English as a Second Language institutes is an excellent indicator of rapid economic development in Latin America). However, they are less inclined to speak English – or perhaps less confident in their ability to do so well – than the elites who learned English in their early years. As the English- and French-speaking elites lose power to the rising middle class, those outside of Latin America will inevitably have to pay more attention to the voices coming from the region – in Spanish, Portuguese and even native languages. Bref: If Latin America continues to develop, and if economic growth brings even more people into the middle class, Spanish and Portuguese will before long displace English and French as the languages spoken by those who carry peculiar weight in the political, business and social realms. This trend is contingent, of course, on a big ‘if.’ Latin America has experienced periods of economic boom and bust in past decades. The rise of the middle class has been announced and celebrated before – particularly when there was high demand for raw materials (materias primas) in other regions of the world, with Latin America being eager to sell its rich non-renewable and renewable goods. However, when the terms of trade became negative, and demand for raw materials decreased, Latin American nations suffered profound economic crises; the ‘inevitable’ rise of the middle class turned out to be short-lived. This time around, a few countries – although certainly not all of them – seem to have learned from past mistakes. (To take but one simple example, countries like Mexico, Chile, Peru and Colombia have adopted counter-cyclical policies to constrain public spending in years of trade surpluses to save them in years when they experience trade deficits. This practice has allowed them to weather periods of economic downturns – as during the crisis of 2008.) Those countries should be able to survive the next downward period in the economic cycle. In those countries, the middle class will survive, and democracy will continue to consolidate. And the importance of Spanish will increase as the middle class further strengthens its growing leadership position. | GB