Elias, N. Dunning and S. Jephcott, E. Dunning, and S. Mennell Oxford: Blackwell. Feyerabend, P. Farewell to Reason. Fukuyama, F. The end of history and the last man. New York: The Free Press. Gadamer, H. Weinsheimer and D.
Marshall London: Sheed and Ward. Giddens, A. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Parsons London, New York: Routledge , vii—xxiv. Gosh, P. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Habermas, J. McCarthy Boston: Beacon Press. Laerence Cambridge: Polity Press. Hans, J. Skinner Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. Krell London: Routledge , — Honneth, A. Ingelhart, R. Inglegart, R. Joas, H. Honneth and H.
Koselleck, R. Meaning in History. Turner London, New York: Routledge. Lucaks, G. Luhmann, N. Bednarz Jr. Lyotard, J. Bennington and B. Massumi Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sociol Forum Randolph N. Nancy, J. Connor; trans. Connor, L. Garbus, M. Holland, and S. Nehamas, A. Magnus and K. Higgins Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , — Nisbet, R. Nisbet New Jersey: Prentice-Hall , 9— History of the Idea of Progress.
Parsons, T. The Structure of Social Action. New York, London: Free Press. Evolutionary universals in society. Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. The Social System.
London: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press. Rose, G. Hegel Contra Sociology. London: Athlone Press. Schutz, A. Spain was feudal; its colonies should also be. Arguments about globalization are, in many respects, similar to old arguments about modernization.
And now the great achievements of the West are spreading to the World From the opposite perspective Western dominance -sometimes seen as a continuation of Western imperialism- is the devil of the piece The celebration of various non Western identities, defined as religion These views, as Sen also points out, are, of course, limited to specific historical periods and spaces.
If one goes back ten centuries, one finds a different flow of globalization at work. It was only after the eleventh century that the current paradigm emerged. Up until now it continues to be valid. Latin America, however, introduces important rectifications in terms of its timing, lines of causality, and contexts. My point is that in both modernization and globalization theories, regardless of the inspiration, Latin America has been seen as "reacting" and "adjusting" to forces originating elsewhere.
Leftists, liberals, and conservatives alike have coincided in viewing the region as the latest and most important trench against globalization. It has been said that in the "ongoing war of resistance" the region is one of the last important bastions, fighting globalization both from above and below.
While these claims are not completely wrong, they are simplistic. They, among other things, have plainly ignored the contribution of Latin America to modernity and the expansion of what literature has usually called "the modern West".
The "state" in Latin America tried to "make" the nation in its entirety, rather than the other way round. This particular connection has been, to my mind, mostly overlooked. A basic reason for this neglect is that, for the most part, literature on the formation of the nation-state in Latin America and elsewhere has focused on the state but ignored the nation part of this equation.
Latin American nation-states emerged from a model that tried to attach an in-the-making nation to an in-the making state. In other words, nation builders subscribed to, at the time, a popular modern notion: one nation to each state, and one state to each nation.
That is, unlike the European and Asian experiences, each state was supposed to rule over one nation rather than over many. And, following the rise of modern nationalism in Europe, Latin America believed that each sovereign nation should be represented by its own state.
This runs counter to what most literature on nation building and nationalism has stressed as a binding factor among members of the nation: the importance of the past, common history, and traditions. As we shall see, in Latin America, the nation-state was structured under the guidelines of republicanism, which was quickly adopted by most of the region.
In Europe, this model became dominant only after World War I. And it was only by the mid-twentieth century that we find it as a dominant model in Central Asia and Africa, at a time in which postcolonial states struggled to integrate different ethnicities, tribal rivalries, and religious differences into a modern unifying version of the nation and the state.
Whether this was a better institutional choice or not for Latin America, or whether modernity is better than other political and social arrangements, is not my concern here. I want only to make the case that Latin America created its own modernity, and that this can be seen in the particular model of the nation state and republican rule that the region developed. In the rest of this essay, I will succinctly make the case for Latin America as a modernizer rather than as a mere receptor of modernity.
I will do so by, first, offering a brief comparative overview of nation-building in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Second, I will try to summarily discuss the particular contribution of Latin America to a wider and global process of nation-making that spanned the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Modernity includes more than economic development. It is also the creation of institutional modular arrangements that can be transferred and imported from one region in the global system to another. Industrialization and modern economic financial structures can be bettered and encouraged but they cannot be totally exported.
Institutions can. Thus, the structural paradox of Latin America, pointed out long ago by dependency theorists like Cardoso and Faletto: modern institutions parties, unions, party systems, nation-states long endured and functioned with different degrees of autonomy but in less developed contexts. Very importantly, modernity is also about the creation and evolution of imaginaries.
In this regard, Latin America represents one of those special intersections of the post-colonial where different images of power connected to the global and the local met, and where border thinking filtered different imageries of modernity. These images of modernity were strongly connected with ideas about the desired "national community", with a debate as to what should unite individuals and peoples under the same "nation", and with formulae as to how to create needed bonds between governments and citizens.
What I want to stress here is that from around to the early s, among other things, conceptualizations of the nation and its future, both desired and real, became crucial blocks in the construction of the nation-state. Discussing modernity in connection to nation-building does not mean that one needs to adopt a Eurocentric or North American perspective.
Some of them were conducive to trying to imitate either Europe or the United States. Almost the entire region opted for republican rule and slowly but surely accepted party competition and elections, closer to the modern North American model than to any other, but not exactly identical.
Those who did not, like Venezuela, after the fall of Juan Vicente Gomez nonetheless evolved into electoral politics and a more modern design of the state. Mexico and the Mexican revolution provide a well-known exception that confirms the rule. State makers adopted a modern notion of legitimacy that differed from that of Europe and the United States. Nations were conceived and built at the post-colonial crossroads of cultures, global influences, modern liberal thinking, and colonial backgrounds of dependence, resistance, and negotiation.
Images and conceptualizations of "the nation" were bound to incorporate bits and pieces of all this process and the imaginary of indigenous, ethnic and immigrant communities. While most literature agrees that subaltern notions of the nation survived at the margins of "official" definitions promoted by the state, in official conceptualizations and imagining of the nation much of the subaltern was also incorporated.
Total exclusion was attempted but failed; in the end, those excluded nonetheless impinged some of their imaginary of modernity and the nation upon the "official" definitions of the national community promoted by the state. A comparative overview of Latin America and Europe supports the notion that the region made its own contributions to the expansion of modernity and "the West", rather than being a mere imitator of influences coming from elsewhere.
In Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, "nations", in the traditional sense of the word, possessed long and rich histories. Long before the modernizing sixteenth century, they constituted part of the European landscape.
Most of them lived, for centuries, under the ruling of the same state, e. As Charles Tilly and others argued many times, the advent of the modern world marked a shift toward the emergence of smaller states.
Such states tended to rule over fewer nations. The o ne state-one nation formula, however, remained more the exception than the rule for a long time. Latin America adopted this model shortly after independence and established its preeminence in a whole region before Europe did likewise. Europeans for sure did not see modernity in Latin America. And as far as North Americans were concerned, the region remained a mix of barbarism and republicanism. Yet, looked at from the point of view of comparative political analysis and bearing in mind other less developed regions of the world, Latin America represented much more than that.
It represented another model of modernity. True, the new states were, by European standards, weak. The encouragement of patriotism and the construction of national identity, for instance, appeared as top priorities in the agenda of the new republican states. No question that pre-modern states like the Elizabethan state, for instance behaved similarly to modern states in a number of counts.
For instance, they made strong efforts to "consolidate patriotic feeling". A closer look, however, detects something qualitatively different. Pre-modern states did not prioritize the creation of consensus about the "national character" or the characteristics of the nation upon which they were to rule.
Contrastingly, Latin American state makers took these matters very seriously. States in Latin America also showed interest in encouraging patriotism, but at the same time they worried about achieving consensus regarding the cultural and physical characteristics of the national community. The development of the nation-state paralleled an emphasis on patriotism and nationalism. It also worked at post-colonial definitions and imaginings of the "national community". And the new states definitely strived much more thoroughly to implement the modern one nation-one state formula.
In Europe, older, pre-modern and stronger states could traditionally rule over many nations. These nations were many indeed. Location and character of different ethnicities and nationalities in Europe in The ratio between these nations and existing states was heavy on the side of nations. That is, few states were able to rule over many nations. Nations were bounded by shared ethnicities, culture, common histories, and geographical location. Armies, taxation systems, and bureaucracies bound states.
Nations epitomized strong political and social actors that were able to survive amalgamation into empires and large states. In nineteenth century Europe, size was part of the definition of a nation. It was argued that small nations had much to gain by merging into bigger ones. Strong states embodied the conduit by which these mergers could take place. Multiethnic and multiracial nations became, therefore, unavoidable.
Europe, diverse and rich in nationalities figure 1 , had no choice but to form multinational nations. Otherwise, it would evolve into what was perceived as a hopeless "small nation model", that is, a continent defined by nations of Lithuanians, Moldavians, Basques, etc.
Large territories and abundant populations provided the clue for the success of a large and strong "Nation" actually composed of many smaller "nations" under the administration of one well-built state. In Latin America, the "strong nation" model was also popular. Yet nation makers relied on weaker institutions, and thus, a unified nation where multiethnic and racial differences could be avoided or eliminated altogether seemed to be a more viable model.
From their standpoint, in addition to racism and prejudice, the survival of indigenous nations triggered fear. The idea of many nations living under one state was perceived as a recipe for conflict. They saw strength in homogeneity rather than in heterogeneity. In the imaginary of modernity, conflict among nations was the source of much evil and ought to be avoided. Indeed, for some, it was up to modernity to eliminate nations altogether.
The reasons were obvious: many contemporaries looked at strong national feeling as one of the most important causes of war. Thus, for the most part, Latin American states were able to block Native American nations from having political representation in the new states.
Indeed, with different degrees of success, they tried to avoid the one state-many nations situation at all costs. On the one hand, Liberalism fostered the combination of Republican rule with the one state-one nation formulae; this was taken seriously. On the other, modernity's prescription -to each state its own nation, to each nation its own state- seemed more convenient for weaker states, such as the republics of Latin America. It represented a more manageable system: one in which new rulers could centralize power and construct legitimacy by relying upon one dominant national identity.
Similarly to what occurred in Europe, however, and despite all the killings, slavery, and elimination of Native Americans, in Latin America multiethnic and multiracial "Nations" could not be completely avoided. With the very relative exception of a few lands of recent settlement Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica whose cities were populated by a majority of Europeans, the rest of the region had to accommodate large numbers of people representing different cultures, races, and ethnicities.
Lord Acton once argued that nations became stronger when possessing different centers of power represented by different nationalities and cultures: "A state which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself; a state which labors to neutralize, to absorb or expel them, destroys it own vitality; a state who does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government. Only slowly did the Latin American nation state acknowledge diversity. When in the twentieth century it did so, it perceived it as something that needed to be integrated into a larger and stronger "national culture".
This explains the policies that states designed from the onset to reduce the influence and physical presence of undesired groups African Americans, Indigenous populations by marginalization and extermination. We know that immigration policy was used to "purify" the population as well. As has been amply documented, the Argentinean, Uruguayan, Peruvian, and Brazilian states aggressively encouraged immigration of the desired "races". At many points in its development- Colombia tried to do the same.
One can argue that all these tensions were associated with the imposition of a modern model of nation making. A modern landscape of nation-states did emerge in the region. Most of them instituted policies aimed at creating their desired nation.
Figure 2 pictures the very early rise of a number of nation-states in Latin America, some of them already republics. A few of the new states are still missing in this picture, which represents post-colonial Latin America right after independence. As has often been said, this political map has experienced only a few alterations to the present day. Colonial possessions notwithstanding, the picture is quite similar to that of the twentieth century.
South America in Therefore, Europe and Latin America can be said to represent very different and yet complementary processes of nation-state formation and modernity, both belonging to the West. Europe was definitely more "modern" in terms of economic development, patterns of centralization of authority, organization of bureaucracies, educational systems, and the development of science and technology.
Latin America represented a modern, yet different experience in terms of the emergence of nation-states at an earlier time in conjunction with globalization, and the development of polities that, from scratch, accepted the notion that the state could craft the characteristics of a unifying nation.
None of the Latin American republics seriously thought of reproducing European models of rule. Europe was mentioned, dreamed, imagined, fantasized, criticized, and many times praised. At the same time, there existed a solid awareness that it could not really be "copied". The U. But nobody really seriously considered that the United States could be reproduced down south either.
We should not forget either that, in the eyes of Latin American republics, most of Europe did not just represent modernity: it also embodied monarchical rule, colonialism, and archaic institutions. Regarding the United States, most Latin American nation makers viewed the First Republic as a model worth imitating; President Faustino Sarmiento in Argentina has been often cited as a well-known example of admiration for the u. Yet, as we shall see, the United States was also perceived as too different a republican experience from that of Latin America, with its emphasis on religious communitarian values, land grant policies, a code of communal laws inherited from the Tudors, and a Federal system that at mid-nineteenth century seemed too difficult to reproduce in different Latin American regions.
Both the Old and New Worlds confronted the task of "accommodating the masses" into politics and creating identity. Since the eighteenth century "the nation" that elites and government tried to construct was designed, in part, to keep the masses at bay. But in the end the "masses" had to be integrated. In the late s Ortega y Gasset argued that modernity made "the people" believe that it was sovereign: "To this day, the ideal has been changed into a reality, not only in legislation To my mind, anyone who does not realize this curious situation of the masses, can understand nothing of what today is beginning to happen in the world.
State formation was shaped by pressures to accommodate the masses into a republican model of power centralization. This had advantages and disadvantages. European states, bearers of long established traditions, seemed less free to innovate than the new republics. Rulers in Latin America, in a vacuum of established glorious traditions that would fit the new republics, appeared freer to innovate.
The result was that they mixed a number of colonial practices with liberal republican institutions of government and a number of foreign influences, both from outside from the international system and from inside the nation immigrants.
Yet this freedom to innovate and choose from possible types of regimes remained more limiting in Latin America than in Europe. European states, stronger and possessing well-established traditions that glorified rulers, political institutions, and national histories could resort to past glories and heroes and thus opt from a wider arrange of possible models of government. Even as late as the nineteenth century the return of monarchy, empire, colonialism, and other forms of traditional aristocratic rule remained a possibility and a reality France, Austria, Germany, Italy, etc.
After the s, liberal and socialist doctrines were popular in intellectual and political thinking as well, and many in Europe feared that the advent of the masses into politics would bring about a sort of wild socialism or communism able to undermine the status quo. In Latin America, practically the opposite was true. To the question of modern democracy, republican rule, monarchy, socialism, or imperialism, the region had but one answer: modern liberal republics.
Mexico of course debated it, and similar controversies can be found across the region. And yet, again, shortly after independence most countries adopted republican rule and constitutional regimes. In a way, Francis Fukuyama's argument of "the end of history" could apply here.
Most ruling elites considered that republican rule and some sort of participatory political system was their only available alternative. Of course pro-colonial and monarchical factions did emerge in Latin America. But, unlike those in Europe, they did not possess the power to establish monarchical regimes. Rather, in most of the continent the new ruling elites claimed to exercise power in the name of change and newness, rather than in the name of "pre-modern forms of rule".
In terms of monarchical and imperial rule, there surely existed honorable indigenous precedents. But when General San Martin argued that perhaps the best thing for the new emerging polities was to rescue a Latin American royal tradition as opposed to borrowing it from Europe and thus to elect an Inca Emperor as a supreme ruler, his proposal provoked utter rejection. As the assembly put it, to revert to an "inferior Indian royal house" was deemed backwards and against modernity.
Another aspect of the process of incorporation of the "masses" into the nation-state that differentiated Europe from Latin America -and which points to Latin American modernity- was the type of incorporation. On both shores of the Atlantic, elites and the emerging middle classes shared a number of concerns about the ascent of the populace as an actor in the process of decision-making. In Europe, many believed that the mob was taking over the politics of their time.
Similarly to the current situation, in Europe, at the time, it was believed that the "ghosts" of "the crowd" and "the "masses" represented a serious threat to European culture. Progressives and liberals on both sides of the Atlantic saw it differently: the masses represented the glorious armies of proletarians and peasants defending self-determination and progress.
Thus, urban crowds seemed to symbolize, at the same time, the most dangerous manifestations of modern life and a source of promise and inspiration. In the region as a whole, weak states faced demands from below.
The rank and file of political parties, guerrilla-type groups, and dissident regional leaders could often threaten the state. In Europe, these threats were not as powerful. Thus, in Latin America demands coming from local caudillos and the lower classes, as well as the evolving pacts between the central power and rebellious forces were incorporated into the institutions of the state and the conceptualization of the nation. Therefore, the institutional vehicle of incorporation stronger monarchies and larger states in Europe, weak republics in Latin America separated the two worlds.
In some regions of Latin America like the River Plate, where indigenous populations were less numerous, prior identities were weakened either by war, displacement, or genocide.
In Colombia, we find a similar situation in many ways. Unlike Europe, elites had to create a new sense of belonging. In heterogeneous societies whose inhabitants remained deeply divided along racial, ethnic, and class lines, and where large contingents of immigrants kept their allegiance to foreign nationalities, elites needed to create some sort of national identity to build legitimacy.
Here, Europe also experienced something different, not because states did not house immigrants from distant regions of the continent, but because of much smaller sheer numbers. Europe and Latin America shared a similar conceptualization of the nation in that "the nation" was conceived as representing a defined hierarchy.
In Latin America, horizontal camaraderie, as defined especially by Benedict Anderson, was hardly a part of the imagining of the national community. The nation was going to be status and class- oriented. Inglehart R. Inkeles A. Isenhour C. Jorgenson A. Kearney A. Kim K. Kuhn T. Lerner D. Levy M. The Family Revolution in Modern China. Modernization and the Structure of Society. Lipset S. Liu J. Marks G. Marsh R. National Development and the World System. Mol A. Globalization and Environmental Reform.
Murphy R. Nolte P. Smelser N. Parsons T. Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives. The System of Modern Societies. Rostow W. The Stages of Economic Growth. Roxborough I. Schmidt V. Schnaiberg A.
The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity. Social Change in the Industrial Revolution. Sonnenfeld D. Starrs R. Strabac Z. Torfason M. Pohl K. Wallerstein I. Coser L. Reference Works.
Primary source collections. Open Access Content. Contact us. Sales contacts. Publishing contacts. Social Media Overview. Terms and Conditions. Privacy Statement. Login to my Brill account Create Brill Account. Email this content Share link with colleague or librarian You can email a link to this page to a colleague or librarian:.
Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Author: Robert M. Marsh 1. Online Publication Date: 10 Jul Access options Get access to the full article by using one of the access options below. Buy instant access PDF download and unlimited online access :.
Add to Cart.
0コメント