Nation and State in Latin America

Political Language During Independence

Jose Carlos Chiaramonte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351503792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

No one in Latin American historiography has paid more attention to questions related to the emergence of nations than Jose Carlos Chiaramonte. Reflecting on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century uses of the concept of nation in Europe and the Americas, Chiaramonte argues that historical questions related to the term "nation" derive from its changing meaning in different contexts. The historian would be better advised to focus on the development of forms of state organization, and the emergence of national states, rather than the "nation" as a cultural community prior to independence.Nation and State in Latin America begins by examining the effects on historians of the ideological and methodological prejudice spread by contemporary nationalism on the historical studies of Latin America. Chiaramonte analyzes uses of concepts such as "nation" and "state" in both Europe and the Americas. Chiaramonte considers the prominence of sovereign "pueblos" (cities and townships) and their role during independence. He argues the non-existence of nationalities in the period and proves that feelings of collective identity at that time amounted mainly to local affections.He concludes with an analysis of major trends in federalism and the law of nature and nations, crucial to understanding the political concepts of the age of birth of modern Latin American nations. This book covers the whole of Latin America, making use of comparative viewpoints. The different national intonations of the concept of sovereignty and the nuances of the federal and confederate forms of the state are examined in detail.

1. INTRODUCTION

1. If we review the recent debate over the formation of the Latin American nations, we should reflect on certain issues that disrupt the analysis. These issues are raised by the nature of a subject that affects the non-historiographical assumptions of historians’ work and makes it more complicated than usual.

Examining the origins of a nation carries with it a risk for historians belonging to that nation. The risk is that, when the unavoidable critical procedure of historical research, without which historians’ results would be meaningless, is brought to bear on the foundations of their national State, it can either bring them into conflict with the collective beliefs on which the sense of nationality regarded as the backbone of the State is often made to rest, or make them distort their historical analysis through a prejudiced attitude deriving from the limitations inherent in their loyalty to this collective affection.

The issue is rarely made explicit. A kind of shame or discomfort brought on by the dilemma inclines us to avoid it. One Uruguayan historian has confronted it head on yet his conclusions are strangely contradictory and only confirm the acute difficulties involved. In the introduction to his posthumous book on the birth of Uruguayan nationality, Carlos Real de Azua wastes no time in getting to grips with the peculiar difficulty of a subject which

“far more than any other, usually withstands scientific examination and an objectively intended approach. Everywhere there seems to be an incoercible tendency to ritualize the force of traditional dicta about the issue, to protect it against all ‘revisionism’ and any critical variation through a kind of sacralization or tabooization.”

On the following page however -despite what such an opening might lead us to suppose- the author acknowledges the legitimacy of certain limitations:

“it seems indisputable -we have to acknowledge- that one must not delve too far or bring up too often ‘the ultimate reasons’ why a community holds together, the most intimate, delicate fabrics of that ‘concord,’ that reciprocal ‘cordiality’ that is supremely desirable as the foundation of the best communal life. If -as has been observed on more than one occasion- this is true for the human couple, it is equally true for the massive secondary group formed by a nation."¹

In homage to Real de Azúa I should add that, despite such moments of reticence, by attacking certain interpretations prejudicial to his subject matter he has, with the exceptional acumen typical of him, brought up the issue of his profession’s demands for intellectual probity.²

If the limitations usually considerednecessary when dealing with certain subjects involve an inevitable falsification of the results of historical research either by distortion or omission, it also unconvincing for such limitations to be founded on a fear of the risks such research might pose to the bedrock of a nation, when applied willy-nilly. The unbiased examination of History can seriously corrode the foundations of the social organism (I am using current expressions, a particular case of which we shall soon examine). The very assumptions of our culture proscribe any limitations that may impede a deeper knowledge of a given reality and the dissemination of this knowledge.

But this is not what I am referring to with my misgivings about the reasons for the demand to limit the knowledge of certain subjects. One may also conjecture in this respect that those who advocate such limitations are in fact -and perhaps unconsciously- seeking to safeguard their personal or group authority over a ‘captive’ audience (captives of the assumptions of a political, ideological or denominational community) -that they are, in short, shielding their leadership of a community from criticism insofar as such criticism compromises the doctrinal assumptions with which their leadership is identified.

A clearcut example of this was an incident that occurred in Buenos Aires at the turn of the 20th century. In 1904 Miguel Cañé, the outgoing Dean of the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Faculty of Arts) of the University of Buenos Aires, was forced to make certain observations about a series of lectures on Facundo Quiroga (the 19th century caudillo made famous by Sarmiento) by the young historian, David Peña. Quiroga was felt to be an improper subject of study at university level. Cañé stated:

“I have for my part followed with interest an essay at vindicating one of our dimmest figures, made by a spirited and talented young lecturer of this house, an essay which, although more brilliant than effectual, constituted in my eyes a veritable lesson in the different ways in which history may be approached.”

But he went on to warn that such boldness undermined the foundations of the social order:

“In higher education the freedom of the lecturer must have no other limit than what his own moral and intellectual culture dictates to him; his moral culture will prevent him from always going against what he believes to be the truth; his intellectual culture from needlessly clashing with opinions and sentiments that are the basis of the social organism to which he himself owes the noble privilege of teaching."³ (My italics)

It seems inconceivable nowadays that studying a historical figure like the controversial caudillo from La Rioja should be objected to, no matter how much controversy he was, and still is, capable of provoking. And yet, the Dean of the Faculty that housed historical studies felt it jeopardized the very foundations of society. The question that immediately springs to mind is whether Cañé was confusing the foundations of the social order with those of the cultural leadership of a circle of intellectuals of which he was a part and for whom certain past figures and periods ought to be ignored. I would add that this is not necessarily mean- minded personal interest on Cané’s part, but one case amongst many where a ruling group confuses the foundations of society with its own particular profession of faith.

2. As I have shown in previous works on the history of Río de la Plata and inquired into with regard to other parts of Latin America in the pages following this ‘Introduction,’ neither the present-day Latin American nations nor their relevant nationalities existed at the time of the independences. The nations were not the foundations but the (frequently late) outcome of these movements. If we look at what really did exist, namely, the sovereign nature of the autonomous entities (cities or provinces) that formed the movements of autonomism and independence, then the very substance of everything we have been accustomed to say about this movement and its consequences over a long period may be overturned. Most significantly, national statements can hardly be made about a geography of independent sovereign political units (often no larger than a city and its rural environs) that had begun to form alliances or confederations. Nor can we really infer the establishment of national citizenship (Venezuelan, Mexican, Argentinian or otherwise) when these sovereign entities were precisely the cities or ‘provinces’ that were the protagonists of much of early 19th century history.

It is certainly becoming increasingly common to acknowledge the late emergence of the nation, in other words, the result, not the foundation, of the independence process. But this has not necessarily been translated into a clearer understanding of what existed in the national entities’ stead. Even now that the premise of the nation standing at the start of things has disappeared; the same premise continues to govern the historiographer’s task because its overarching influence has prevented us from inquiring into the real nature of the forms of organization and political action in the period between the collapse of the Iberian empires and the formation of the Latin American national States. Worse still, the political conflicts of the first half of the 19th century are repeatedly and reductively interpreted as a struggle between the praiseworthy standard bearers of the national spirit and the mean-minded representatives of parochial interests.

In other words, the conception of the nation as a starting point still influences historiography in two ways: directly, by putting the nation at the beginning, and indirectly -even after this error of perception has been corrected- by the continued dominance of a concern with the birth of the nation such that all history prior to its constitution becomes an explanatory teleology for it. It thus remains in a world of'protonationalisms,’ ‘anticipations’ or ‘delays,’ a world of tendencies that supposedly favour or hinder the emergence of the nation.

3. One form this outlook takes is to interpret any sense of collective identity (even in times as remote as the 16th century) as manifestations or anticipations of the national identities of the 19th century. This way of dating the birth of the sense of nationality is tantamount to confusing the fiction of the contemporary State implicit in the principle of nationalities -if founded on a nationality- with the feelings of collective identity that have existed throughout History and which, between the 16th and the 18th century, were found in political communities with no pretension to sovereign independence such as the cities, ‘provinces’ and ‘kingdoms’ of the European monarchies.

By proceeding like this, it is implicitly admitted that the modern national identity -the counterpart of a national State- is not a politically based construction, but a sentiment reflecting supposed ethnic homogeneity. As the historiography of recent decades has shown for both European and pan-American history, such homogeneity is just another case of the “invention of traditions"; it simply did not exist in the vast majority of contemporary nations.

4. Another of the anachronisms that has a strongly disruptive influence on our understanding of the nature of the sovereign political units emerging from the independences is our tendency to reduce the range and variety of ‘sovereignties’ to the dichotomy of independent State vs. colony, with some admission of an intermediate situation in terms of ‘dependencies! Roughly reflecting today’s international world, this taking stock does not fit the variegated array of sovereign entities that existed from the 16th to well into the 19th century. As one historian of modern political thought has observed about the distinctive quality of 17th century German political life, the multitude of sovereign political entities comes as a surprise to those of us accustomed to the image of the great dynastic States of Western Europe. It makes political conceptions about ‘’small-scale political societies” peculiar to that part of Europe -though not in fact exclusive to it- all the more thought-provoking.⁴ These features are reflected equally surprisingly in Bodin’s minimum dimensions for a sovereign republic (discussed in Chapter 2), where a minimum of three families, each with a minimum of five people, is enough to define a sovereign State.⁵

The fact that nation and State were thought of as synonyms at the time of the independences may also surprise us and lead us to misinterpret this earlier meaning of the terms by unconsciously projecting on them our present experience of the idea of a State. Because the usage of the day assimilated nation and State, the State was not seen as a complex institutional whole (as reflected in the relatively recent appearance of the expression ‘state apparatus'). Instead the ‘State’ (or ‘republic') were regarded as human groups with a certain order and a certain code of command and obedience, an outlook that made it possible to assimilate both concepts.

This kind of observation is doubly thought-provoking in that it provides an insight not only into a political world with a wide variety of manifestations of autonomy, but also into a reality where the political units with varying degrees of sovereignty may well be very small in scale. This feature was to all intents and purposes non-viable internationally speaking by the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet it is still present on the political stage created by Latin American independences, when ‘provinces’ of varying sizes -often consisting of a city and the rural territory under its jurisdiction- declared themselves independent sovereign States and maintained their claim to sovereign independence with various degrees of success. For beneath the Spanish Bourbons’ unsuccessful efforts to unify the monarchy politically, the remnants of that variety of intermediate powers -condemned by the theorists of the modern State as a source of anarchy- had persisted in Spanish political structures. These remnants later surfaced in their colonies in the early decades of the 19 th century, leading one indignant proselyte of the Unitarismo to write that the supporters of the confederation wanted “the federative republic to be composed of as many integral parts as the country has cities and towns, however paltry they be” and for “every town, where there is a municipality, though there be not fifty inhabitants, to be a province and independent state."⁶

⁵. Despite recent criticism of'modernism’ (examined in Chapter 2) the majority of historians and social scientists believe that the emergence of the nation as the foundation and/or correlate of the national States and nationalism are a modern phenomenon originating in the closing stages of the 18th century. In its origins the phenomenon was popular and democratic. It was opposed to the manifestations of feudalism still surviving either in the various forms of particularism or the oppressive practices of despotism and aimed to organize more inclusive political and economic spaces, unified under the doctrine of popular sovereignty.⁷

The notion of nationality as the keystone of the new States’ legitimacy played an essential role in this development. One of the most influential conceptions of nationality (developed on criteria that, broadly speaking, go back to Herder, and through Fichte, into the broader European realm) linked it to affective levels in human behaviour in opposition to the rationalist emphasis of Enlightenment culture, and tended to substitute the new notion for the role previously played by the contract in the theoretical foundation of the legitimacy of States. Another current, generally thought to have its roots in the French Revolution, would later make nationality a concept compatible with the contract theory of the birth of the nation.

However, in the late 19th century explosion of nationalism and subsequently, with the ensuing widespread conflict and war, the concept of nationality would in practice give way to a form hostile to rationalism. The idea of nationality was thus superimposed on the diversity of interests of each national society -a diversity allowed by the notion of contract (which, in theory at least, attended to parties’ interests) and associated with another concept, namely that of people which, with its broad social catchment, also seemed to attenuate this diversity of interests and proved useful in the wielding of political hegemony by the sectors of greatest influence within each country.

6. In this view, both the ‘modernists’ (Kedourie, Gellner, Hobsbawm) and their recent critics (Greenfeld and Hastings)⁸ assume that the term nation refers to the phenomenon corresponding to contemporary national States. Thus the critics of modernism are also paradoxically trapped in a ‘modernist’ reduction of the concept of nation: when they try to trace nations’ origins back to the Middle Ages, they are referring to the modernists’ nation, whose indissociable correlate -real or virtual- is the contemporary State.

Precisely. If we are concerned about the historical phenomenon of the national State, Hobsbawm and others’ chronological dividing line is admissible, restricting the analysis as it does to the French Revolution onwards. But if what we are trying to understand is what men have designated nation, then the analysis must go all the way back to Antiquity; not -as is frequently the case with the exponents of both standpoints- in a way that reduces the differences in meaning to a mere philological prologue reviewing the uses of the term throughout history, but taking into account the fact that its different senses can be understood in another way as corresponding to various forms of human association whose substantial historical differences are glossed over by the ambiguous term, nation.

We can say then that most of the bibliography on the subject in recent decades has approached the history of the nation as a correlate of the problem of contemporary nationalism, a history of t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Shifts in The Concept Of Nation, 1700-1850
• 3 The Formation Of National States in Latin America*
• 4 The Natural Law Foundations of The Independence Movements*
• 5 Major Features and Trends In Natural Law
• 6 Notes on Federalism &The Formation of National States