Political Order and Political Decay (42 page)

In the succeeding two centuries, however, some countries evolved in a very different direction. Prussia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Britain, and other European countries followed France in the development of centralized bureaucracies organized along Weberian lines. The French Revolution had, moreover, unleashed not just demands for popular political participation but also a new form of identity by which a shared language and culture would be the central source of unity for the new democratic public. This phenomenon, known as nationalism, then prompted the redrawing of the political map of Europe as dynastic states linked by marriage and feudal obligations were replaced by ones based on a principle of ethnolinguistic solidarity. The levée en masse of the French Revolution represented the first coming together of all these trends: the revolutionary government in Paris was able to mobilize a significant part of the available able-bodied male population to defend France. Under Napoleon, this mobilized expression of state power went on to conquer much of the rest of Europe.

What is interesting about Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then, is the dogs that didn't bark. Strong states like France and Prussia never appeared anywhere in the region, with the possible exception of Chile. Nationalism and patriotic fervor did not emerge in anything like the form they took in Europe, where entire populations could be aroused in anger and competition against their neighbors. With one or two exceptions, states never achieved the capacity to dominate and mobilize their populations. In many respects, the independent governments that appeared after liberation from Spain and Portugal continued to resemble their colonial predecessors. Old regime Spain was characterized by weak absolutism: the state was centralized and autocratic but relatively weak in capacity and unable to dominate its own elites. Although many of the new postindependence Latin American governments were nominally democratic, they were never able to generate more than a moderate amount of state capacity. The failure to create modern states was marked first and foremost by the inability of Latin American states to extract significant levels of taxation from their own populations. As a result, governments met fiscal deficits as old regime Spain did, by inflating the money supply. Inflation is a backdoor form of taxation that has many distorting and unfair consequences for the populations that have to endure it. More than in any other region, inflation became the hallmark of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America.

So why did strong, modern states not emerge in Latin America as they did in Europe? If there is a single factor that explains this outcome, it is the relative absence of interstate war in the New World. We have seen how central war and preparation for war were in the creation of modern states in China, Prussia, and France. Even in the United States, state building has been driven by national security concerns throughout the twentieth century. Though Europe has been remarkably peaceful since 1945, the prior centuries were characterized by high and endemic levels of interstate violence. Over the past two centuries, the major political acts that reconfigured the map of Europe—the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, and the wars of unification of Italy and Germany—all involved high levels of violence, culminating in the two world wars of the twentieth century.

There has been plenty of violence in Latin America, of course: today the region is infested with drug cartels, street gangs, and a few remaining guerrilla groups, all of which inflict enormous sufferings on local populations. But in comparison with Europe, Latin America has been a peaceful place in terms of interstate war. This has been a blessing for the region, but it has also left a problematic institutional legacy.

A PEACEFUL CONTINENT

The sociologist Miguel Centeno has documented the fact that Latin America over the past two centuries has been much more peaceful than Europe, North America, and Asia. This is true whether measured by cumulative battle deaths (see
Figure 13
), mortality rates, percent of the population mobilized for war, or intensity of war, that is, the rate at which people were killed in a given year (see
Figure 14
). He points out two further facts: first, that levels of violence decreased steadily over time, making twentieth-century Latin America one of the most peaceful regions in the world; and second, that Latin American violence has tended to occur in civil rather than interstate wars. Centeno argues further that when Latin American wars occurred, they tended to be limited in nature, seldom involving the kinds of mass mobilizations of entire populations that occurred following the French Revolution or during the two world wars.
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The wars that Latin America did fight came in a couple of waves. The first was the wars of independence from Spain, which were triggered not by the ideas of the American or French Revolutions but by the French occupation of the Iberian peninsula and Napoleon's placing his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne in place of the Bourbon royal family in the years 1808–1810. In Portugal, the monarch moved the seat of government from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, though the royal family was to return to the peninsula after Napoleon's defeat. The collapse of legitimate authority in the home countries led to Creole uprisings in Buenos Aires, Caracas, and northern Mexico, which royalist forces were able initially to suppress. But after the restoration of the Bourbon Ferdinand VII to the Spanish throne in 1815, a second wave of revolts broke out and led to independence for virtually the whole of South America by the mid-1820s.

FIGURE 13.
Cumulative Battle Deaths

SOURCE
: Miguel Angel Centeno,
Blood and Debt

FIGURE 14.
Total Wars by Region

SOURCE
: Miguel Angel Centeno,
Blood and Debt

The Latin American wars of independence went on for much longer than the American Revolution, and did far more damage to the infrastructure of the region, setting it back economically for much of the first half of the nineteenth century. The most notable feature of these wars, however, is how little they affected the class structure of the underlying societies and their extremely limited impact on state building.

The missing social revolution was reflected in the dominance of conservative groups in virtually every newly independent country. It is ironic that Hugo Chávez, the populist Venezuelan president, virtually beatified the region's liberator, Simón Bolívar, as a hero of the Left. Bolívar came from a wealthy Creole family. Although he performed truly heroic military feats in defeating Spanish forces, he had inconsistent political commitments, sometimes expressing liberal views and at other times more authoritarian ones. The last thing he wanted to be was a social revolutionary. The same was true of José de San Martín, the other military genius who liberated the southern half of the continent, who proposed establishment of a monarchical government in Peru once Spanish rule ended. The only genuine social revolutionaries were two priests, Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos, who mobilized an army of poor indigenous and mixed-blood people that threatened the Creole elite in Mexico City. Morelos's program promised “a new government, by which all inhabitants, except
peninsulares
, would no longer be designated as Indians, mulattoes, or mestizos, but all would be known as Americans.”

Both Hidalgo and Morelos were captured and executed, and their movements suppressed. The local Creole elites came to support independence in Mexico and Peru only because Ferdinand VII back in Spain agreed to accept the liberal constitution of 1812; independence for them was thus meant to prevent liberal reform from spreading to the New World.
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The makers of the American Revolution, by contrast, were liberal and democratic to the core. Independence from Britain served to embed democratic principles in the institutions of the new nation, even if it did not bring about a social revolution. The leaders of the independence movements in Latin America were far more conservative, despite the fact that they felt compelled to adopt formally democratic institutions. Even less did they envision upsetting the region's class structure.

Independence did, however, create a large state-building task as the different components of the Spanish empire sought to create freestanding political orders, which as in Europe involved a splitting apart of certain political units and the merging of others into more centralized polities. Simón Bolívar created an entity known as Gran Colombia in 1819, which incorporated much of present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, northern Peru, Ecuador, and parts of Brazil. This huge region, spread over mountainous and jungle terrain, resisted centralization and split apart into separate countries by 1830 (Panama was detached from Colombia with help from the United States in 1903). Similarly, Agustín de Iturbide, leading an independent Mexico, made himself emperor over territory that included Central America. That area broke free in 1823 as a unified Federal Republic of Central America, but it soon broke apart into the separate nations of El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica, which resisted several subsequent efforts to reunify them. These new polities often corresponded to Spanish administrative districts, but they did not have their own strong cultural identities the way that France and Germany did. On the other hand, Argentina and Mexico, which had broken down into regional fiefdoms, were unified under authoritarian rulers such as Juan Manuel de Rosas in Buenos Aires, who gradually suppressed regional revolts and accumulated power around centralized governments.
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The second big wave of interstate wars took place in the middle of the nineteenth century and can be seen as the finale to this period of postindependence territorial reshuffling. Argentina and Brazil had fought a series of conflicts over control of the mouth of the Río de la Plata, which eventually led to the creation of the independent buffer state of Uruguay in 1828. The two countries continued to contest for influence over Uruguay; this eventually triggered intervention by Britain and France, which sought to protect their commercial interests in the region. Brazil and Argentina were also involved in the War of the Triple Alliance, a bizarre conflict that pitted these two large countries against impoverished Paraguay. This was an utter disaster for Paraguay, which was thereafter “removed … from the geopolitical map.”
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The two other major conflicts of the time were the Mexican-American War, by which Mexico lost the entire area from Texas to California to a rapidly expanding United States, and the War of the Pacific, fought among Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, which led to Chilean acquisition of the rich resources of the Atacama and turned Bolivia into a landlocked country. After the War of the Pacific concluded in 1883, Latin America's borders were largely fixed, and no major interstate conflicts broke out thereafter (with the exception of the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay in the 1930s, a conflict little remembered even in Latin America).
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Interstate wars in Latin America have been so infrequent and politically unimportant that many major surveys of Latin American history barely cover them. Compared to Europe and ancient China, or indeed North America, war had a marginal effect on state building. Charles Tilly's aphorism “war made the state, and the state made war” remains true, but begs the question of why wars are more prevalent in some regions than in others.

The region's lagging state building is evident from a number of measures of state capacity, but above all in taxation. In China and early modern Europe, the resource requirements of long-term warfare led states to tax their citizens, create finance ministries and bureaucracies to administer the tax extraction, build administrative hierarchies to manage extensive logistical systems, and the like. All of this led to a dramatic expansion of the revenue needs of early modern European states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the growth of civilian bureaucracies. Organized violence also promoted political development through the wholesale elimination of certain social classes that were bulwarks of the old patrimonial state, like the venal officeholders of Old Regime France or the Junker class in Prussia.
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