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State and Nation Making in Latin

America and Spain
Republics of the Possible

Edited by
MIGUEL A. CENTENO
Princeton University

AGUSTIN E. FERRARO
University of Salamanca

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CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
I

Republics of the Possible

State Building in Latin America and Spain

Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro

INTRODUCTION
Latin American republics were among the first modern political entities designed
and built according to already tried and seemingly successful institutional mod-
els. During the wars of independence and for several decades thereafter, pub-
lic intellectuals, politicians, and concerned citizens willingly saw themselves
confronted with a sort of void, a tabula rasa. Colonial public institutions and
colonial ways of life had to be rejected, if possible eradicated, in order for new
political forms and new social mores to be established in their stead. However,
in contrast to the French or American revolutions, pure political Utopias did
not play a significant role for Latin American institutional projects.
The American Revolution was a deliberate experiment; the revolutionar-
ies firmly believed that they were creating something new, something never
attempted before. The French revolutionaries dramatically signaled the same
purpose by starting a whole new official calendar from year one. In contrast,
Latin American patriots assumed that proven and desirable institutional mod-
els already existed, and not just as utopic ideals. The models were precisely
the state institutions of countries that had already undergone revolutions or
achieved independence, or both: Britain, the United States, France, and others
such as the Dutch Republic. Therefore, long before the concept was coined
in the twentieth century, Latin American countries were embarking on a very
similar enterprise to the one that we describe in our days as state building.
Aware of the weakness and instability of their existing institutional arrange-
ments, independent Latin American republics attempted to develop stronger
state organizations and stable political regimes by adjusting modern institu-
tions already tried and proven elsewhere to local conditions. Most of such
attempts were not successful, neither according to the standards of the time nor
to those of our own. Nevertheless, the question of what kind of adaptation can
be possible for modern state institutions, in view of local circumstances, was
clearly recognized and debated by the middle of the nineteenth century in Latin
American public and scholarly opinion. The issue of institutional possibility,

3
 Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
4
which forms the core of state-building theory and practice in our days, became
dominant in Latin American public life. The repeated failures of institutional
projects made clear that it was critical to establish new republics in the realm
of the possible.
Spain was paradoxically undergoing very similar developments to those
affecting Latin American countries, most of them its former colonies, at the
same time as they became independent. Napoleon's invasion of Spain and
the ensuing War of Liberation triggered, after 1808, a strong break with the
past on both sides of the Atlantic. The Bourbon monarchy was dissolved and
replaced by Napoleon's brother as King of Spain, a brutal change of regime
that local elites attempted to resist in many areas through experiments in
self-government. Nevertheless, explosive episodes of popular mobilization and
popular insurgency against the French took even the more combative local
elites by surprise. New forms of national consciousness developed along popu-
lar mobilization. The meeting of a national assembly in Cadiz, and the passing
of the first constitution in 1812, was made possible by the revolutionary situa-
tion created in the wake of the French invasion.
As a consequence of those years' upheaval, Spain began to address the issue
of how to construct more effective state institutions almost simultaneously
with Latin American countries. The fragility of the ancien regime was made
clear by its utter collapse when confronted by the French invasion. The catas-
trophe fueled the perception of national decadence, which had been a matter of
public concern since at least the beginning of the eighteenth century. Decadence
was not only the result of Spain's repeated military defeats in conflicts with
other European nations; there was a manifest failure to develop modern public
institutions and a successful economy in Spain. Therefore, the Spanish pub-
lic debate focused from the beginning on the issue that was to plague Latin
American countries after a few years of independent life: the perception of
backwardness and the subsequent need to "catch up."
In sum, the weakness of state institutions and the failures of public policy
projects were very much in the public attention during the nineteenth century
in Latin America and Spain. The sense of "falling behind" pervaded Latin
America even before the wars of independence were over, particularly in com-
parison with the United States. Despite the early promise, visitors and inhabit-
ants were soon bemoaning the lack of relative progress and even regression
visible throughout the continent. In his Democracy in America, Tocqueville
went so far as to note that "no nations upon the face of the earth are more mis-
erable than those of South America."1 The perception of backwardness when
contrasted with other European nations was similarly strong in Spain during
the whole period, and it became overwhelming at the end of the century. As
the famous liberal philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset described the problem
a few years later, Spain could only be described as invertebrate - that is to
1
Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Democratic en Amerique, vol. I . ( [ I 8 3 5 ] 1961; repr., Paris: Gallimard,
1986), 452.
Republics of the Possible 5
say weak and backward - compared to other, advanced European nations. 2
Unsurprisingly, a similar idea of the state as invertebrate, or hollow at the core,
has kept recurring in analysis of the problems and setbacks for state building
in Latin America.
It is true that at the end of the nineteenth century, Spain as well as the more
successful Latin American countries could boast of many symbols of moder-
nity and of diverse successes in the field of public policy and infrastructure. Yet,
public institutions remained peculiarly weak. They showed their weakness on
diverse levels: fiscal capacity was low, mainly dependent on the kind of taxes
that are most easy to collect, such as custom revenues. Internal conflicts in
the form of local rebellions, guerrilla warfare, and endemic banditry remained
widespread, particularly in areas far from the national capitals. Economic pol-
icy was typically precarious and shortsighted: national economies were orga-
nized on the basis of the dependence on foreign capital and markets, often
focusing on a single commodity, thus dangerously exposed to global market
fluctuations. Ortega underlined a common factor resulting in low state capac-
ity and deficient public policy on both sides of the Atlantic: instead of progres-
sively building an elite of highly trained and permanent civil servants, after
each election governments massively filled the higher and lower echelons of
the public bureaucracy with political partisans. National versions of the spoils
system were not just strong; they remained almost hegemonic in the Iberian
world at the time.
Then again, political elites in Spain and Latin America would have regarded
what they had achieved as particularly significant, and this could even make up
for many failures and disappointments. After countless and for the most part
violent struggles during the first half of the nineteenth century, liberalism had
been finally adopted as the official ideology of Spanish and Latin American
political institutions and economic policy at the end of the century. Perhaps
understandably, however, the implementation of liberalism showed many
fragilities and contradictions: lack of economic infrastructure and industrial-
ization, mere entrepot economies in some cases, as well as democracies that,
under the pretense of universal suffrage, were run by oligarchic groups that
manipulated elections through massive clientelism and fraud. Beginning with
the Mexican Revolution and on through the Spanish Civil War, the political
compromises and economic dependencies that had developed during the nine-
teenth century came apart and ended in political violence, civil war, authoritar-
ian military dictatorships, and widespread economic depression. Liberalism's
inconsistencies when confronted with the development of mass democracies
1
Jose Ortega y Gasset, "Vieja y Nueva Polftica," in Obras Completas Tomo 11902-1915 (Madrid:
Fundacion Jose Ortega y Gasset / Taurus, 2004), 710-737 [public speech given on March 23,
1914]; Jose Ortega y Gasset, "Espafia Invertebrada," in Obras Completas Tomo III 1917-1925
(Madrid: Fundacion Jose Ortega y Gasset / Taurus, 2004), 423-514 [first published as newspa-
per columns in 1917]. See also, Francisco Villacorta Bafios, Burguesia y Cultura. Los intelectu-
ales espaholes en la sociedad liberal, 1908-1931 (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1980), 125.
6 Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
and its lack of convincing success as economic doctrine concluded with its
wholesale collapse in the Iberian world by the 1930s.
In our days, despite a strong wave of democratization for the past thirty years
and many efforts toward the construction of successful market economies, the
weaknesses of states in Latin America remain no less visible. The concept of
brown areas, formulated by O'Donnell, has become a widely accepted charac-
terization of the phenomenon. Most Latin American states are unable to enact
effective rules and regulations across the whole of their territories - the only
partial exceptions being Chile and Costa Rica. Many peripheral areas remain
subject to systems of local power, which are personalistic and patrimonial and
open to arbitrary and even violent political practices. The same happens in the
national capitals themselves: some extremely poor neighborhoods are clearly
outside of the rule of law. Crime is rampant, and police interventions in these
areas tend to be unlawful themselves.3 The strong Spanish economic and social
development beginning in the 1960s and consolidated after democratization in
the 1970s, sometimes described as the "Spanish miracle," tells a different story,
but well until the mid-twentieth century the weakness of the modern state in
the Iberian Peninsula was not less visible.
LIBERALISM AND THE STATE PROJECT
The present book addresses the politics and techniques of state building. Unlike
much of the current literature focused on contemporary developments and cri-
sis, we discuss the lessons of history for a better understanding of present-day
predicaments. The book reconstructs state-building ideas and practices devel-
oped and implemented during the nineteenth and early twentieth century in
the Iberian world, the first region where state building was carried out as a
deliberate national project. What is more, it was a very specific political group,
the Liberals, that attempted to put into effect those political and institutional
projects. Therefore, we trace the politics and techniques of state building from
the beginning of independent life to the debacle of liberalism that took place
in the first third of the twentieth century in most parts of Latin America and
Spain. We argue that, in order to understand the travails of the state in our
days, it is necessary to analyze the previous period of liberal hegemony, the
long nineteenth century. These are the cases that offer us the best historical
opportunity to understand the frustrations and disappointments experienced
by large parts of the world with the consolidation of a modern democratic
state in our days.
The process and time period in question suggest a number of parallels with
the challenges facing new states since then. First, states arise in most cases
following the collapse of previous authority and the economic infrastructure
of societies. They often begin their institutional lives in chaos and economic
3
Guillermo O'Donnell, "Why the Rule of Law Matters," Journal of Democracy 15 (Z004):
32-47.
Republics of the Possible 7
deprivation. Specifically, the domestic context into which states were built in
the Iberian world was one of deep inequality and social or ethnic heterogene-
ity. As with many contemporary cases, many of these states were expected to
manage far too large territories, with far too varied a population, with far
too few resources. Another shared element between those early state-building
projects and the current efforts involves a legacy of international recogni-
tion and noncompetition for territory, which allowed them to avoid the
semi-Darwinian geopolitical struggles characteristic of early state building in
Europe. Much as in the contemporary era, these states were "deprived" of the
opportunity to develop their institutional muscle through military confronta-
tions for survival. Nowadays, the international community flatly refuses to
recognize territorial expansion by conquest, so such wars have become impos-
sible or at least very rare. For different reasons, but with the same result, Latin
American states in the nineteenth century did not try to wrest vast territories
from their neighbors - as was instead considered appropriate in Europe until
the first decades of the twentieth century. Spain's territorial integrity was not
threatened either during the nineteenth century: the country was not involved
in major foreign wars from the end of the Napoleonic invasion to the War of
Cuba in 1898. The international community restrained Spain's only aggressive
neighbor, France. The purpose and focus of the Spanish military was therefore
political power as well as internal repression, much as in Latin America during
the same period.
Finally, again as in the contemporary globe, states in the Iberian world
arose with a set of normative expectations regarding their obligations to their
populations and the manner in which they ruled. In general, the development
of new states in the nineteenth century was characterized by what Laurence
Whitehead - following Francois Xavier Guerra - calls precocity: having to
meet challenges and attain goals far ahead of their institutional development.
The same problem of high normative expectations against low institutional
development has affected state-building projects ever since.
The chapters included in this volume attempt to provide a historical foun-
dation for understanding key processes and challenges of today. We address
several questions, taking if possible some steps toward their answer. To what
extent do historical legacies determine the capacity and reach of states? What
are the obstacles to and paths toward the effective organization of political
power? How can states best design and create the institutions meant to provide
the basic services now associated with citizenship? How can we put together
notions of community that include diverse groups and cultures within a single
identity while also respecting the integrity of particular traditions? The Iberian
world in the nineteenth century was arguably the first regional stage on which
these organizational and political dilemmas that still haunt states today were
faced. In order to begin confronting these issues adequately, it is necessary to
discuss the circumstances in which many of them arose.
The first widely accepted account of the fragility of states in the Iberian
world was provided by the "black legend" of a cultural curse that can be found
8 Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
already well developed in the nineteenth century, and which had its propo-
nents in and out of the Iberian world - the work by Claudio Veliz would be
the best contemporary example.4 For Spain, the "national character" explana-
tions of Iberian exceptionalism have had many advocates, from Unamuno to
Sanchez Albornoz. Around the fifties in the twentieth century, a dependentista
critique of this perspective began to develop. Simplifying what was always a
fairly heterogeneous school, this perspective held that Latin America's relative
failure came from not having broken enough with a colonial, as opposed to an
Iberian, past.5 The political and economic models, which dominated the discus-
sion for several decades, were derived from the region's position in the world
capitalist system. A parallel argument placed Spain and Portugal in a similar
marginal position.
The last decade has witnessed an explosion in creative studies of colonial
legacies and their consequences. A significant group of scholars has debated
the reasons for the relative difference in "performance" between the ex-Spanish
and British colonies. Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff began the debate
with their argument over factor endowments. 6 In an interesting twist on Whig
history, they proposed that the small farmer settlements focused on grain in
North America - as opposed to commodity production in Latin America - pro-
vided the critical basis for two foundations of later success: less inequality and
racial homogeneity. These in turn contributed to a more responsive and insti-
tutionalized form of democratic rule. Yet, as North, Summerhill, and Weingast
point out, the factor endowments perspective fails to take into account the
political chaos that most of the Iberian world suffered during the nineteenth
century.7 Moreover, it fails to explain the subsequent transformation of other
cases suffering from not dissimilar endowment legacies such as the postbellum
and particularly post-19 50 U.S. South, and, of greater relevance, the Spanish
transformation after the 1950s.8 North and his colleagues focus much more
on the failure of Iberian institutions to resolve the various political dilemmas
4
Claudio Veliz, The Centralist Tradition in Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1980); Claudio Veliz, The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English
and Spanish America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
5
Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependencia y desarrollo en America Latina
(Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 1969); Peter Evans, Dependent Development: The Alliance of
Multinational, State, and Local Capital in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1979)-
6
Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff, "Factor Endowments, Institutions, and Different
Paths of Growth Among New World Economies," in How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays
on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800-1914, ed. Stephen Haber (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1997).
7 University Press, 2009).
Douglass C. North, William Summerhill, and Barry Weingast, "Order, Disorder and Economic
Change: Latin America vs. North America," in Governing for Prosperity, ed. Bruce Bueno de
Mesquita (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
8 Stanley Payne, A History of Spain and Portugal, vol. 2, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
The parallels between parts of Latin America and the U.S. South are intriguing: plantation econ-
omies, racial divides, persistence of rural oligarchies, and so forth. We have not been able to find
a political economic comparison of the two regions, but we hope one will soon appear.
Republics of the Possible 9
facing them in the nineteenth century. The emphasis here is on the absence of
order necessary to construct a viable society. The Latin American societies as
well as Spain in the nineteenth century quite nicely fit into what North, Wallis,
and Weingast have more recently termed limited access societies where an equi-
librium was established in which threats of violence, political patronage, and
economic rents precariously balance one another without an underlying insti-
tutionalized and impersonal order.9
None of these perspectives succeed in opening up the black box of insti-
tutional failure. The Iberian world was transformed from 1810 to 1900, yet
many of the same governance challenges persisted. Coatsworth has noted
that despite the considerable economic progress seen in the region during the
nineteenth century, "legal codes, judicial systems, fiscal burdens, commercial
regulation, and governing structures" as well as even more basic state capaci-
ties were vastly underdeveloped. 10 Payne has offered an excellent summary
of the reasons for liberal frustration in Spain that sound remarkably like the
problems facing Latin America during the same time period. Among other
factors, Payne discusses the unwillingness of the elite to reform the political
system in keeping with the economic and social development of the country;
from the 1890s on, the governing oligarchies of the Liberal and Conservative
parties utterly failed to expand and reform themselves, or to incorporate new
goals and interests. 11 Spain had a relatively large middle class at the time,
actually larger than in half the countries of Europe, but the middle class
displayed a characteristic lack of entrepreneurial, bourgeois, or modernizing
psychology. It was further weakened by the divisions caused by the increas-
ingly antiliberal stance of the Catholic Church, which had a considerable
following among the middle and upper classes and to some extent in the
government. 12
In Latin America and Spain the state remained fragile for the whole nine-
teenth century, and it remains weak in Latin American countries to this day.
As mentioned previously, the standard explanations for state weakness in the
Iberian world are partial and unsatisfactory. The present book explores the
question and tries to offer some answers of its own. We begin in the next sec-
tion by providing a theoretical account and analysis of what states, as insti-
tutional actors, are supposed to do. The account is organized around diverse
tasks and basic public policy programs that states can either carry out or fail
to do so.
9
Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A
Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (New York: Cambridge
10
John Coatsworth, "Inequality, Institutions and Economic Growth in Latin America," Journal of
Latin American Studies 40 (2008): 545-569, 559.
11
1973), 499-
12
Ibid., 599, 604.
IO Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
DIMENSIONS OF STATE STRENGTH
Why is it important to focus on the state?13 Obviously, the state matters when
it uses illegal violence against either its own population or that of another state.
Few would question the importance of states in times of international conflict
or internal oppression. But the state fulfills basic roles in areas where its partici-
pation may not be obvious at first sight. To begin with, markets are impossible
without states. For even the most basic markets to work, some authority must
exist that guarantees property rights and enforces contracts. Modern states
are capable of using their control over violence in a territory to guarantee that
exchanges can take place with some degree of assurance and predictability.
Sometimes the state itself becomes a source of unpredictability, but we only
stress here that states are capable of guaranteeing contractual exchanges, not
that they always do. Second, without states there can be no citizens and no
personal rights. It is commonplace to think of the repressive power of the state
as limiting individual autonomy and freedom. However, the state's collective
force also serves to guarantee the basic rights of citizens. Without a state there
can be no courts in which to exercise civil rights; without a state there are
no organized contests for leadership in which to exercise electoral rights; and
without a state those most in need of social protection and support will have
to depend on the kindness of strangers.
If the proposition that effective states are essential for promoting
broad-based development is now widely accepted, we still do not understand
well what makes states effective. The political and sociological literature regu-
larly uses the concept of state capacity and related terminology and ideas, such
as strength, power, and stability. The notion of state capacity has existed for
decades and was obviously a central element in much of nineteenth-century
German social theory, but it became a regular part of developmental literature
only in the 1980s. The notion of state capacity is self-evident and deceptively
simple: the problem comes from attempts to use it in a systematic manner
across a variety of cases. What is it that states do, and how can we trace the
development of these various capacities across a century in Latin America and
Spain? Combining a variety of proposed typologies, from Weber to Bourdieu
and Mann, we discuss four different types or categories of state capacity and
state strength.
The first we call territoriality and involves the classic Weberian notion of
monopoly over the means of violence. Note that we explicitly do not spec-
ify the legitimate use of that violence as we wish to distinguish between a
simple capacity to coerce from the much more complex notion of justifying
such coercion. This is Michael Mann's despotic power at its most fundamental;
the power that state elites are able to exert over civil society without having
13
Much of this section was developed in conjunction with Centeno's work with Elaine Enriquez,
Atul Kohli, and Deborah Yashar on the Princeton Network on State Building in the Developing
World, (https://deptbedit.princeton.edu/statebuilding/).
Republics of the Possible 11
to enter into routine negotiations with other actors. The concept of despotic
power captures the common perception of power as the capacity to issue and
impose - successfully - commands and order. This form of state power or
capacity is the simplest to wield, as it merely requires the acquisition and utili-
zation of enough relative coercive force to impose one's preferred order. This is
the state as disciplinary institution. It takes place on two fronts: first, in relation
to other states defining sovereignty and, second, against internal or domestic
rival claimants and subjugated groups.
The second form of state capacity is economic and involves two different but
usually connected processes. First, this is about the state promoting the general
prosperity of a society. Prior to the Keynesian revolution, states mostly contrib-
uted to this in the course of the unification of an economic space through the
creation of a national market. Of arguably greater relevance for our cases, the
states may also increase their economic strength by creating the physical and
legal infrastructure supporting the insertion of their domestic economy into a
global system of exchange. A second aspect of economic power involves the
control over and appropriation of resources through the establishment of an
efficient fiscal system.
In many ways, these two forms of state strength are the ones on which the
seminal collection edited by Tilly on the formation of national states in Europe
focuses.14 For these authors, stateness consisted of consolidation of territorial
control, differentiation from other forms of organization, the acquisition of
autonomy, and centralization and coordination of resources. From this per-
spective, the process of state building may be - perhaps too simplistically -
reduced to the coercion-extraction cycle; the state is very much an organization
of control: over money, over bodies, and over behavior. Note that for most
scholars, there exists a circular causality between territoriality and economic
power.
The third form of state capacity is related to what Mann calls infrastructural
power, but we define it somewhat differently from Mann. On simple terms,
infrastructural state capacity involves the organizational and technical power
to process information, build organizational structures, and maintain transpor-
tation and communication systems. According to Mann, infrastructural power
refers to the capacity of the state to coordinate society by means of the dif-
fusion of law and administration in many areas of social life that, before the
huge expansion of this type of power in the nineteenth century, had remained
outside the scope of state concern. The infrastructural power of the state can
be measured along several dimensions. We can start by measuring the success
of public policies: how effective is the state in promoting or defending public
order, economic prosperity, public services, or inclusion? A second approach is
geographical: how deeply into a national territory does the state's writ travel?
14
Charles Tilly, ed. The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1975).
12 Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
A third divides the population by hierarchical categories of class, race, gender,
ethnicity, and others and asks to what extent does the state's regulatory power
only apply to those on the bottom, or to what extent does its protection and
services only apply to those at the top?
Infrastructural capacity is what makes modern states unusually strong,
and it grew exponentially, together with civil administration, during the nine-
teenth century. Moreover, infrastructural strength is closely connected to what
Laurence Whitehead calls the cognitive capacity of the state through which it
amasses information and establishes categories and standards; in James Scott's
language, this is how the state makes society legible. The state concentrates,
treats, redistributes, and unifies. The expansion of bureaucratic organization
substantially increased the penetration of the state in terms of infrastructural
power. However, according to Mann, such an increase in infrastructural power
did not imply, as Weber mistakenly assumed, an increase in the despotic power
of a central state elite. Infrastructural strength does not involve centralization
of power; rather, the contrary is the case. First of all, modern state administra-
tions have rarely been monocratic; they develop as an array of bureaucratic
organizations variously linked to power networks in civil society.15 Secondly,
the expansion of infrastructural penetration predictably goes both ways: as
a result of the embeddedness of relatively autonomous bureaucratic orga-
nizations, civil society's capacity to bring influence to bear on the state also
increases. The expansion of infrastructural power occurs simultaneously with
the widespread politicization of civil society.
The final form of state capacity is what Bourdieu calls symbolic power or
what Weber discusses as legitimacy. What is critical here is the concentration
of what had been diffuse social rituals and practices of deference and con-
formity to authority into an objectified and bureaucratic process; it is about
the monopoly, not over violence or even over identity, but over the judgment
of truth claims. The Weberian tradition, which includes of course Tilly, has
described a linear progression away from arbitrariness. To illustrate this point,
Tilly quotes Balzac's famous dictum in La Cousine Bette: "L'arbitraire c'est la
demence du pouvoir"; arbitrary rule is power gone mad. But we might best
understand symbolic power as the capacity to make the arbitrary seem not
mad. In Woody Allen's Bananas, for example, we know the new dictator of San
Marcos is mad when he declares the official language of this Latin American
country to be Swedish. Yet, how much more arbitrary or "mad" is that than
any nineteenth-century effort to homogenize and standardize a population
according to some perhaps arbitrarily chosen lingua franca? The real differ-
ence may not necessarily be in the level of madness of the command, but in
the symbolic strength of who is doing the commanding. As Bourdieu notes,
"what appears to us today as self-evident, as beneath consciousness and choice,
has quite often been the stake of struggles and instituted only as the result of
15
Michael Mann, "The Sources of Social Power," in The Rise of Classes and Nation-States,
1914, vol. z (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 5^, 475-
Republics of the Possible 13
dogged confrontations." 16 The study of the state's symbolic capital is the his-
tory of how it constructed its own sense of inevitability. It is the quality that
places the authority of the state, as such, out of the bounds of contention. In
this context, Joseph Strayer assigns a central role to what he calls "loyalty" and
a "shift in the scale of loyalties" and a new "priority of obligation" or what he
later calls a "cult of the state."17
Although closely connected, symbolic power and nationalism or nation
building are not exactly the same. Symbolic power is not so much about the
creation of a community but about the monopoly of legitimacy by the state
apparatus. With a very different set of intentions, this is what Corrigan and
Sayer are after: the rituals of ruling and the construction of "reasonableness."18
Again, this is not about identity but about the unquestionable allegiance to a
set of institutions defined by and as the state; it is not about love of country
but obedience to country. Nevertheless, nationalism provides the ideological
linkages that serve to create collectives that view themselves as such and that
provide the foundational legitimacy for state claims to power.
T H E I B E R I A N STATE
How does this theoretical exercise reflect or summarize the present book's
approach to state building? Most importantly, the theoretical perspective
described earlier allowed us to divide state-building projects into four, not nec-
essarily sequential or linear, parts or components. The first two involve the
consolidation of organized physical force, that to a certain extent had been
accomplished in most Latin American cases and in Spain by i860, and the
creation of economic capital through insertion into the global economy, which
was attempted from i860 to 1930 with relative success. Both phases or com-
ponents of state building correspond to the standard partnership of an oligar-
chic liberalism with the economic liberalism of global integration. The two
typically liberal dimensions of state-building projects, territorial and economic,
have served as the focus for much of the bibliography of the period. They are
considered and discussed by the essays in the second part of the book, after this
introductory part. The next two types of state power, infrastructural and sym-
bolic, have been relatively neglected by the state-building literature until now.
All chapters of the book consider infrastructural and symbolic state power to
some extent, whereas the chapters of the book's third and fourth parts focus
primarily on their development as a component of state-building projects in
Latin America and Spain.
16
Pierre Bourdieu, "Rethinking the State: On the Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,"
Sociological Theory i z , no. 1 (March 1994): 15.
17
Joseph Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1973), 47.
18
1760- Philip Richard D. Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as
Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).
14
Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
To begin at the beginning, historical narratives agree that a major difficulty
facing the newly independent nations was the absence of a political order. The
uncertainty of the outcome regarding the continent's territorial division and
the domestic order underlying it led to a perpetual militarization that lasted
much longer than the actual wars. Equally important, the collapse of imperial
authority saw a veritable explosion in banditry and brigandage. For good rea-
son, the states in the first half-century of independence privileged order above
all else.
They faced three possible threats. First was the threat they faced externally
from Spain's refusal to accept the end of empire and then from later claimants
to be the successors to such an empire. They also faced competition from one
another for control of relevant territories. Despite significant exceptions, these
threats were relatively minor and not as critical as in the European cases from
the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Much more serious were the threats
posed by intra-elite competition, either contesting the authority of the central
state or fighting to gain dominion over it. These often-violent struggles were
not really resolved until well into the nineteenth century. Finally, there were
the threats from below, from those for whom the benefits of independence and
nationhood were few and scarce and who sought a social revolution parallel-
ing the political one. Arguably, much of Latin America is still dealing with the
challenge to build a democratically integrated social and political order.
The Spanish experience in the first half-century of liberalism in many ways
resembles that of the majority of Latin America. The conflicts featured initial
opposition from a monarch attempting to reestablish absolutism, then a popu-
lar revolt against what may be described as "secular modernity," and internal
struggles within the Liberals producing two clear wings: moderate and "pro-
gressive," all leading to perpetual government instability and increasing mili-
tary politicization.
After 18 60, the Liberal states in Latin America and Spain were able to impose
much greater control over the countryside and to begin to consolidate their
monopoly over the means of violence. In Latin America, military campaigns
were fought against three potential rivals: autonomous Indian tribes, regional
powers, and brigands. All were defeated. By 1900, the national capitals reigned
supreme - even if the reach of the rule remained limited.
In terms of economic power, the independence wars and the victory brought
about huge economic costs and the disarticulation of production and exchange
networks. Postindependence civil wars made the situation worse. Economically,
Spain failed to grow until after 1850 and fell progressively back behind Britain
and France - for example, in 1850, when these countries and the United States
already had railroad mileage in the thousands, Spain had a total of 28 kilome-
ters connecting Madrid with Aranjuez.
The economic performance of the Iberian countries improved considerably
in the last third of the nineteenth century and on through the Great Depression.
The engine for both economic development and state expansion was the boom
in international trade. The economies of the Iberian world participated in the
Republics of the Possible 15
so-called Second Industrial Revolution. Between the last third of the nineteenth
century and the first third of the twentieth, many of these countries - includ-
ing Spain - saw exports increase by factors of 4 to 6. Yet, the development of
a national infrastructure lagged behind. The state penetrated the society in
order to accelerate its integration into the global system, but not in order to
integrate society to itself. The lack of transport and communication infrastruc-
tures made the development of internal markets very difficult and fragmentary.
Even worse was the poor fiscal reach of the state, and hence its poor capacity
to finance itself through fiscal revenues instead of loans.
As noted earlier in this chapter, much of the scholarly attention has been
devoted to the territorial and economic aspects of state development in the
region. Much less has been devoted to the development of what we, following
Mann, define as infrastructural power. As a rule, the process of securing territo-
rial power was characterized in the Iberian world by accommodations made
with local elites in order to assure that control flowed not just from above, but
also and often mainly from below to the center. That is, rather than imposing
itself on its national territory, the central state authority negotiated control over
regions and other parts of the political territory with local elites. This partner-
ship was cemented by an economic policy focusing on external commodity
trade, which tended to benefit local elites. The legacies of this accommodation
were to haunt the states' efforts to develop both infrastructural capacity and
political legitimacy.
A basic requirement for the development of infrastructural power is the
creation and consolidation of autonomous bureaucratic organizations staffed
by career civil servants, in other words, a professional state bureaucracy. The
growth of mass democracies and electoral machines during the nineteenth cen-
tury transformed public bureaucracies. State administrations had been run until
then by a few learned patricians, clerics, and clerks, but mass democracy and the
consolidation of electoral machines turned public bureaucracies into vast sys-
tems of political clientelism. The transformation took place during the second
half of the nineteenth century in Latin America as well as in Spain and in the
United States - in the latter case it began earlier. Only in Spain and the United
States wide political movements, with popular support and the active contri-
bution of parts of the academic elite, were able to counteract and restrain the
massive manipulation of public office for political purposes. Regeneracionismo
in Spain and the Progressive Movement in the United States succeeded in dis-
crediting and outlawing massive political clientelism in the timespan between
1890 and 1930. The turning points usually mentioned in the literature are the
Pendleton Act of 1883 for the United States and the Estatuto Maura of 1918
in Spain. In both cases, the creation of professional state bureaucracies was the
result of a protracted political struggle; it was much more than just a technical
reform from above.
Besides confronting electoral party machines, the development of career
civil services had to contend with the arrangements with local elites, which
secured the national state's territorial power in the first place. The state could
16 Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
only command obedience in the regions if the local elite decided to actually
institute its directives. However, for many reasons the local elites were strongly
set against the creation of professional bureaucracies - patronage was one of
their basic instruments of power. Without a serious determination to confront
the power of electoral machines and local elites, central states in Latin America
remained during the nineteenth century - remain mostly to this day - incapable
of creating a national career civil service. Legislative assemblies, of course, pass
civil service acts regularly, but they are hardly ever implemented and often
circumvented as a matter of fact. Again, Chile and Costa Rica represent partial
exceptions in the Latin American context, as discussed by specific chapters in
the book.
From infrastructural power we move to symbolic power, discussed in the
fourth part of the book. The chapters in the fourth part analyze symbolic power
in terms of political legitimacy and the development of national consciousness.
The nation represents a crucial source of symbolic power and legitimacy for the
state, and this connection plays a decisive role for state building. There seems
to be broad agreement with John Lynch's judgment that before the 1850s most
Latin American countries had, at best, "an incipient nationalism almost entirely
devoid of social content."19 And despite many efforts, one could argue that state
nationalism - as opposed to the chauvinism of the World Cup and mis monta-
nas son mejores que tus montanas - had not developed very far.
The key factor here may be the inherent contradiction between the commit-
ment of the Liberals to social and political equality - at least in principle - and
their aversion to a strong bureaucratic state. Without a powerful administrative
machinery, they could not remake society, even if they had truly wished to do
so. Without a unified society, a national state project was doomed to failure. As
much in Spain as in Latin America, there was a fundamental fear of national-
ism from below among the elites. Thus none of the main models of nationalism
were consolidated on either side of the Atlantic. Elites were not able to create
a sense of shared ethnic or cultural community, nor could a republic of citizens
consciously sharing in a collective political project be developed. In Spain and
Latin America, vast social and ethnic exclusions made the consolidation of
both models of national community extremely difficult or impossible during
the nineteenth century.
Over and above the relative weakness of nationalism in the region, in the
decades after independence there was the loss of the significant and genuine
legitimacy that the colonial regime had enjoyed. This was particularly true
prior to the Bourbon reforms. Note that many of the post-1808 revolts began
with calls to the supreme legitimacy of pre-Napoleonic order. This political
view of the world was shattered in the process of independence and further
19
John Lynch, quoted by Fernando Unzueta, "Scenes of Reading," in Beyond Imagined
Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, eds. John
Charles Chasteen and Sara Castro-Klaren (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 123.
Republics of the Possible 17
discredited during the fight between Liberals and Conservatives in Spain. And
certainly by midcentury nothing similar in terms of symbolic power had yet
taken its place.
Part of the symbolic deficit was the obvious contradiction between what the
state said and what it did. Much as with the assurance of skill, the key is not
to promise more than one delivers. As Charles Hale has put it, the transforma-
tion of liberalism after 1870 "can be seen in part as the inadequacy of the ideal
of the small property holder in countries made up of latifundia owners and
dependent rural peoples, whether slaves, peons, hereditary tenants or commu-
nal Indian villagers. In an era marked by the resurgence of export economies,
the elites could and did conveniently hold to the formalities of Liberal social
philosophy while neglecting its earlier spirit."20 The fate of democratic com-
mitment was a little different. Here the letter of the law was followed while the
spirit was violated constantly, creating what some call a "fictitious Liberalism"
or an "antidemocratic pluralism." The result of this new liberalism was a con-
tinuation and a deepening of the social dualism that characterizes much of the
Latin American continent to this day. Originally a Spanish topic, the notion of
the two Spains has been variously applied to Latin American countries, such as
in the concept of Bel-india famously coined by Edmar Bacha in the seventies
to describe Brazil: a first-world Belgium in certain small areas of the indus-
trial south and southeast, surrounded by masses of unfortunates living in a
third-world India.
These divisions led to what has been called the "weak nationalization of the
masses." Many of the countries began institutionalizing a set of national sym-
bols, which were supposed to give concrete symbolic expression to the national
community. But such efforts were mired in part by the deeply racist attitudes
of elites to their migrant, ex-slave, or Indian subalterns. Whatever state author-
ity was used was implemented to augment the consequences of inequality and
to benefit those in power. Rather than being a vessel for individual liberty
or a guardian of the nation, the state was often no more than a more or less
effective elite protection mechanism. Following John Coatsworth on Mexico,
instead of a liberal ideal of a "limited government with effective institutional
constraints on government predation," what the Iberian world received was
institutionalized cronyism producing economic growth by guaranteeing pro-
tection to a small elite of the politically connected.21 That those below found
their voices in increasingly radicalized political movements should have come
as no surprise. Rather than being brought into the state by "really existing"
suffrage or through social reforms, or united by external enemies, non-elite
sectors increasingly opted out of the system. Because the political game was
clearly fixed against them, they would not buy into it.
10
Charles Hale, "Political and Social Ideas," in Latin America: Economy and Society 1870-1930,
ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 238.
21
John Coatsworth, "Structures, Endowments, and Institutions in the Economic History of Latin
America," Latin American Research Review 40, no. 3, (2005): 141.
i8 Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
These countries all sought to develop new forms of community centered on
the state, but these efforts ran into the kind of difficulties that we have already
found in our discussion: elite divisions, limited infrastructural capacity, and
historical legacies of deep racial and class divisions. One of the dominant char-
acteristics of Latin America from the very beginning of its modern history up
to the present day has been its social and political fractionalization. Collective
identities that do exist are not congruent with the nation-state; they are often
developed in opposition to it. Some of the most salient collective identities did
in fact arise out of opposition to the nation-state in the first place. Divisions
along just about every possible line characterize the region. The different parts
of Latin American society peer at one another through barricades: few from
the privileged venture beyond their protected areas, and the underprivileged
rarely get even basic recognition from the privileged, much less access to their
world. Over much of Latin American history, the explicit goal and hope of a
wide range of political projects has been that progress of one sort or another
would lead to a social convergence. One version of this vision saw the histori-
cal mingling of groups as inevitably leading to a new form of nation. This is
best epitomized by the Mexican ideology of the raza cosmica arising from the
various conflicts and combinations. A more liberal vision expected that with
enough economic progress, these fissures would be closed. This was at the very
heart of the concertacion discourse in Chile. But material, social, racial, and
political progress have yet to close these gaps.
As mentioned earlier, throughout the present book we have tried to include
in the analysis a key deficiency of state development in Latin America, relatively
neglected by the literature: the fragmentary consolidation of infrastructural
and symbolic power. Much as with the liberal vision and the liberal political
projects of the nineteenth century, most of the research on state building has
until now focused almost exclusively on the coercive and economic powers of
the state. In fact, much of the literature on state building continues to empha-
size the development of "power over." The experience of the Iberian world in
the nineteenth century would indicate that this is not sufficient; that the state
has to not just repress, but also create.
PLAN OF THE BOOK
In the next chapter of this introductory part, Chapter 2, Frank Safford offers
a general overview of the process of state building in five of the most impor-
tant national cases in Latin America: Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and
Colombia. Safford presents a summary and comparison of the development
of state strength on the basis of seven variables in each case. Four of the vari-
ables correspond to the classic territorial and economic dimensions of state
power. They are (1) economic geography including resources and integration;
(2) political geography including transportation; (3) foreign trade and fiscal
capacity; and (4) military and political strength in relation to foreign pow-
ers. The three remaining variables are related to symbolic and infrastructural
Republics of the Possible 19
power. They include (1) constitutional arrangements and their acceptance by
citizens, a crucial component of what we designate as legitimacy; (2) agreement
and conflict with the church as a symbolic and political power; and (3) control
over the military, the first and only state bureaucracy whose modernization
and professionalization was consistently promoted by the political leadership
of the state in most Latin American countries during the second half of the
nineteenth century.
The third and last chapter of the book's introductory part focuses on the
development of state strength in European countries during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Wolfgang Knobl argues that standard accounts over-
emphasize the transformative capacities of European states during the time
period. He shows that it actually took quite a long time for even the most suc-
cessful European states to incorporate their citizens and to transform the struc-
tures of their societies. A comparison between state building in Europe and
Latin America in the liberal era should not exaggerate the differences between
these two macroregions, but rather explore how each dealt with particular
challenges.
The second part of the book, from Chapter 4 to Chapter 8, covers the
strategies and struggles carried out by Latin American states to consolidate
their territorial and economic strength. In the first two chapters of this part,
Joseph L. Love and Jeffrey D. Needell analyze the other recognized - if par-
tial - exception to the general failure to build strong states in Latin America
from a contemporary perspective: Brazil. Needell argues in Chapter 4 that the
alliance between the crown and the socioeconomic elite secured Portuguese
America's wide territorial reach and a stable social order under the parlia-
mentary monarchy. Despite a series of initial conflicts, the majority of the elite
came to accept the established political regime by 1850. The state supported
the economic power of slave-plantation owners and their allied domestic inter-
ests and produced significant infrastructural, financial, and communications
reforms. Increasing state autonomy, however, slowly drove a wedge between
monarch and elite. The resulting struggles left the monarchy vulnerable to
a positivist militants' coup under military aegis. Joseph L. Love's Chapter 5
takes up the story with his discussion of the Old Republic. He argues that
the new federal regime offered critical advances in the area of fiscal reach -
extracting and spending more at all levels of government - public health,
and education. The creation of a cohesive Brazilian territorial state was the
achievement of the centralized empire, but the country only "held together"
after the creation of the republic in 1889 by meeting the regional demands of
Sao Paulo and other southern states. Decentralization led to very much higher
tax efficiency, better public services, and other indicators of state strength.
The rapid economic growth of Brazil during the republic, however, may have
been attained at the expense of intensified regional economic differences: the
advance of some regions was paralleled by increasing poverty in other regions.
The Old Republic was not prepared to confront radically unequal economic
development among the states.
zo Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
Moving to Mexico, Alan Knight analyzes in Chapter 6 the strength of the
Mexican state during the Porfiriato (i876-1911) and early revolution (1910-
1930). While the socioeconomic changes brought about by the Revolution of
1910 are a matter of hot dispute, there is greater consensus that the political
realm was substantially transformed. Knight first notes shifts in the public tran-
script^ or official discourse, of the two regimes. There were much more marked
shifts in political practices, because the revolution generated extensive popular
mobilization, a brisk circulation of elites, a new populist style of politics and
a measure of genuine popular empowerment. The new politics of the revolu-
tionary regime, however, perpetuated the great gap between public transcript
and political practice - hence, the rule of law, for example, remained highly
imperfect.
Focusing on Nicaragua in Chapter 7, Salvador Marti Puig analyzes the
weak state building under both Conservative and Liberal political regimes. He
argues that in Nicaragua modernizing measures lacked the presence of social
forces that could guarantee both the restructuring and articulation of local
interests and the development of state strength. The dreams of the Nicaraguan
ruling class revolved around another endeavor: the building of the interoceanic
canal. For that project to crystallize, however, a foreign power was needed that
would mediate and assume the costs the work entailed, and that inevitably
involved limitations on the sovereignty of the incipient state.
Chapter 8, the last chapter of the second part of the book, connects fiscal
capacity to infrastructural power, discussing the weakness of tax systems and
the development of spoils systems in Spain and Argentina as the result of com-
promises with local elites. Claudia E. Herrera and Agustin E. Ferraro analyze
the parallel development of massive political clientelism in Spain and Argentina.
Informal political practices showed not only many correspondences on both
sides of the Atlantic, even the language employed by the actors to describe such
practices was the same: terms like empleomania, oligarquia, and caciquismo
were simultaneously in use in Spain and Latin America at the time - some of
this vocabulary remains very much in use to this day.
The chapters of the third part of the book study the development of infra-
structural power in Latin America. Ivan Jaksic examines in Chapter 9 the role
of Andres Bello as a nonpartisan expert for two key areas of state building in
Chile: the creation of a public education system and the reform of civil legis-
lation to replace the colonial law system. Bello's contribution was extremely
significant in itself. More than that, however, his influence on public life reveals
that Chile's political elite recognized early on the need to incorporate nonpar-
tisan experts into leading roles in public policy formulation and implementa-
tion. This organizational feature of the Chilean state was unique at the time in
Latin America, and it helps to explain the unusual strength and effectiveness of
public institutions in the country. Moreover, Jaksic shows that the institutional
strength and stability of the Chilean state was not based on the concentration
of power in the executive; this is an old myth, which continues to receive wide
currency even in our days. Quite the contrary, the stability and strength of
Republics of the Possible 21
Chilean public institutions were the result of a robust separation of powers:
the Chilean Congress was a major actor in politics and public policy during
the whole period.
James Mahoney examines in Chapter 10 similarities and differences in
state-building processes among five Central American countries. During the
late nineteenth century, political elites implemented policies to modernize the
state and stimulate export agriculture. In all five countries, this period saw
large increases in exports, providing governments with access to new resources.
These new resources, however, were not mainly used to build effective states
run by professionally trained career civil servants. Instead, they were put
toward building up the military. Thus, during the liberal reform period, the
region launched a general pattern of state militarization without bureaucrati-
zation. Only in Costa Rica were conditions present that linked the interests of
politicians to gradually pursue real bureaucratic development.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Argentina had developed con-
siderable expert bureaucracies with well-defined public policy objectives, par-
ticularly in elementary instruction and public health. Ricardo D. Salvatore
examines in Chapter 11 the successful contribution of expert bureaucracies to
the provision of public goods in Argentina. The evidence indicates consider-
able accomplishments throughout the period in question. Yet, although ini-
tially successful, efforts to establish professional state structures were undercut
by massive political clientelism or empleomania, as the massive appointment
of political partisans for public office was designated at the time in both Spain
and Latin America. To further public education, the state created large bureau-
cratic structures, but many of these positions were soon turned into political
spoils: politicians began to distribute management and professorial jobs among
their political clientele without much regard for merit or expertise. Something
very analogous happened concerning the public health campaigns. As a result,
the efforts to develop infrastructural power were seriously handicapped. The
success and the limits of education polices in Peru had certain parallels to the
problems and difficulties of bureaucratization in Argentina, as discussed by
Hillel D. Soifer in Chapter 12. After decades of severe crisis, Nicolas Pierola
came to power seeking social peace and political stability through a broadly
liberal project of social transformation and state building. One component
of this effort was increased central oversight of primary education. The sub-
sequent two decades marked the most significant progress in the history of
Peruvian schooling to date, which was instituted against the objections of local
elites who opposed the education of the rural poor. In the longer run, however,
as rural unrest rose, Lima needed to rely on these local elites to bring social
peace, and this led to the undermining of the Liberal education reforms.
The fourth part of the book focuses on the development in Latin America
and Spain of what we have called symbolic power. In Chapter 13, Roberto
Brefia discusses the role that liberalism played during the independence move-
ments of Spanish America in 1808-1825. He stresses the influence of Spanish
liberalism, a current of political thought developed during the debates over the
22 Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
Cadiz Constitution, and he argues further that the influence of North American
and French political ideas has been exaggerated by most of the literature on
the subject. The connections in terms of political ideas and political movements
between Spain and Latin America remained strong after independence, stronger
than many classic historians have been willing to acknowledge. Brefia concedes
that liberalism in the region was fraught with inconsistencies and ambiguities.
However, the point of the paper is not to show that Spanish America was "less"
liberal than the rest of the Western world, but to adopt a more critical stance
toward an ideology and a historical period of the Western world that has been
frequently explained through dichotomies - absolutism versus liberalism, for
example - that are practically useless.
From the standpoint of the core countries that dominated the global sys-
tem of the nineteenth century, Latin America remained a distant "uncivilized"
and conflictive region. In Chapter 14, however, Fernando Lopez-Alves claims
that the new republics represented something very different. While in Europe
authoritarian, aristocratic, and imperial forms of rule were alive and well, in
Latin America, elites had no choice but to innovate and experiment with new
and modern forms of governance. In Latin America, the modern one state-one
nation formula was adopted at the same time that states were being built. And,
despite the early hesitation of countries like Mexico and the much more sig-
nificant Brazilian exception, after independence republican arrangements were
quickly established in the whole region as the norm. Paradoxically, in the name
of modernity weaker states tried to "erase" and/or marginalize preestablished
nations. Latin America is still living with the consequences of this paradox.
Jose Alvarez Junco explores in Chapter 15 the fragmentary and conflict-
ing development of Spanish national myths from the Napoleonic invasion at
the beginning of the nineteenth century to the aftermath of the cultural crisis
triggered by the loss of Cuba in 1898. The chapter discusses the fact that, in
clear contrast to Latin American and other European countries, the formation
of national myths was not initiated or even supported by state institutions in
Spain. Spanish governments were quite hostile to any ideology that could pos-
sibly mobilize the masses. The Spanish state was not only distrustful of mod-
ernism, but also its legitimacy was constantly questioned, it was perpetually in
debt, and governments barely had the capacity to implement public policy. It
was only after the crisis of 1898 that political elites began to show more inter-
est in the question of national identity. The result was a late and frenzied con-
struction of national myths. This came too late to have a lasting impact, and, in
any case, the traditional right was never fully committed to the task.
It would appear then that Benedict Anderson was incorrect in assigning Latin
America a primary role in the development of contemporary nationalism.22
These countries all sought to develop new forms of community centered on the
state, but these efforts ran into a similar set of difficulties that we have found
" See Claudio Lomnitz, "Nationalism as a Practical System," in Miguel Centeno and Fernando
Lopez-Alves, The Other Mirror (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Republics of the Possible 23
in our discussion earlier in this chapter: elite divisions, limited infrastructural
capacity, and historical legacies of deep racial and class divisions.
Based on an analysis of official results from every national census conducted
in Latin America from 1830 to 1930, Mara Loveman shows in Chapter 16
that Latin American state builders used national censuses to advance two dis-
tinct but related nation-making goals: (1) to make the case that they deserved
to be recognized as legitimate members of the international club of "civilized
nations"; and (2) to demonstrate the integrity of the nation as a whole through
the careful delineation of its constituent parts. Even as large gaps and omis-
sions in early national censuses revealed the tenuous infrastructural reach of
Latin American states, the published volumes of census results presented the
ultimate object of enumeration - the nation - as an already existing fait accom-
pli. At the same time, censuses inscribed and reified certain kinds of divisions
within the enumerated population, while hiding others from view. Through a
close reading of official statistics as political and cultural artifacts, the chapter
shows how those charged with producing Latin America's early national cen-
suses participated in constituting the national communities they were supposed
to merely count.
Sarah C. Chambers focuses in Chapter 17 on Chile's judicial sector, one of
the most stable state institutions during the early decades of the nineteenth
century in all of Spanish America. The chapter investigates how having access
to courts, particularly for subaltern sectors of society, gave common citizens of
the newly independent republic a stake in state building. No system of justice
was free from prejudice and corruption, but the case of Chile shows how new
states could gain legitimacy among those members of subaltern groups who
won redress in court.
In the last chapter of the book's fourth part, Nancy P. Appelbaum writes
about Colombia's Chorographic Commission, one of the region's most exten-
sive geographic surveys in the nineteenth century. The author examines how the
commission's maps, texts, charts, and paintings provide insights into the elite's
nation-state building project and the tensions and contradictions that under-
mined it. The commission constructed the national territory as an aggregate
of distinct regional spaces and peoples, a depiction that paralleled the elite's
radical federalist political project. At the same time, however, the commission
portrayed the nation as undergoing a unifying racial mixture that was absorb-
ing supposedly inferior - nonwhite - races and was creating a homogenous
national race, and yet the commission's chorographic approach also empha-
sized regional and racial differences. Ultimately, the commission constructed
a regional and racial hierarchy that still marginalizes some places and peoples
within the nation. Racialized hierarchical geographies also emerged in other
Latin American countries, for example, Peru and Mexico, although the particu-
lar contours differed in each case.
At the end of the book, the conclusions seek to summarize and link the
results of the chapters to the challenges confronting Latin American states in
our days. We try to review, in our final contribution, how the authors have
24
Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro

advanced the understanding of the past trajectory of state and nation making 2
in the Iberian world, discussing each type of state capacity and their histori-
cal sequencing. We seek thus to connect the strengths and weaknesses of con-
temporary state formation and contemporary state governance to the original The Construction of National States in
institutional designs and political strategies carried out during the long nine-
teenth century. The conclusions attempt to make explicit the lessons and clues
Latin America, 1820-1890
for the contemporary world that result from the successes, and from the many
failures, of the liberal designs and strategies for state and nation building that Frank Safford
were described and analyzed in each of the book's chapters.

A central inspiration for the present book has been the notion that Latin
American states were for a very long time and largely remain "hollow," that
is to say, not able and perhaps not willing to exercise the authority and power
assumed to be a requirement for nation-states at any given time. During our
various meetings, we found a broad consensus regarding the less than optimal
performance of Latin American states during the nineteenth century. Yet, these
patterns were rather general, whereas the stories of state formation in Latin
America are variable. Some states became relatively more effective, and the fac-
tors affecting their success or failure varied in their relative importance. It will
be evident in this essay that I do not see a single factor enabling, or inhibiting,
state development in nineteenth-century Latin America, but rather an assem-
blage of factors, not all of which are equally important, or operate in the same
way, in all cases.
I examine five states in Latin America during the nineteenth century: Chile,
Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. The focus is on their relative effec-
tiveness in establishing public order and secondarily in their development of
infrastructure. The broader questions of civic participation and national iden-
tity, although important, will receive brief mention; further elaboration will
require additional research. The chapter deals only with the nineteenth cen-
tury; I hope to deal with the twentieth century at a later stage.
The essay focuses on seven variables: (1) economic geography, including
topography, resources, and relative economic integration; (2) political geog-
raphy, including geographic and transportation conditions affecting political
integration 1 ; (3) relative economic and fiscal strength; (4) the relative public
acceptance of the political systems, whether framed in constitutions or not; (5)

1
Christian Cwik emphasizes lack of effective control of substantial regions within state borders
in "Los 'contra-estados' independientes en el Gran Caribe y el proceso de la llamada indepen-
dencia, 1780-1840" (in a conference of the Asociacion de Historiadores Latinoamericanos y del
Caribe [ADHILAC], on "La formation de los Estados latinoamericanos y su papel en la historia
del continente," Asuncion, Paraguay, October 1 0 - i z , z o n ) .

*5
19

Paper Leviathans
Historical Legacies and State Strength in Contemporary
Latin America and Spain

Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro

We began this volume proposing that the experiences of Spain and Latin
America in the nineteenth century are relevant for those countries under-
going the process of state building today. We noted that many of the same
problems and challenges faced by contemporary states-in-the-making were
common in the Iberian world: divided societies, improvised and often flawed
institutional designs, and public organizations with responsibilities far above
their capacities. In order to explore the contradiction between performance
expectations and organizational realities, we identified four different forms
or categories of state power: territorial, economic, infrastructural, and sym-
bolic. Using these forms or categories of state power as an analytical scheme,
we conclude the book with a summary of where our cases find themselves
200 years after independence, and how the patterns therein provide clues
about the relative importance of each form of power. By linking contempo-
rary states to their precedents, we hope to suggest how historical legacies
help determine present outcomes, and to explain the relative lack of success
of state-building projects in Latin America and Spain during the nineteenth
century.
Looking at our cases, we first need to consider the differences between
Spain and Latin America. In the first section of this conclusion, we discuss the
background for the successful Spanish state development during the twenti-
eth century, an achievement arguably without parallel among Latin American
countries. We will claim that some of the key factors for the later development
of Spain are to be found at the turn of the century, a crucial period for state
building in Europe as well as in the Americas. The failures of modern state
building in Latin America are clearly felt today. In the second section of the
conclusion, we will discuss and summarize some of the results of the book's
chapters as applied to the different forms or categories of state power in Latin
America in our days. In the third and last section, we discuss what may be the
central political deficit in much of the continent today.

399
400 Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
THE SPANISH DIFFERENCE
The "Spanish miracle" in the second half of the twentieth century is certainly
remarkable. While Spain and Latin American countries shared many char-
acteristics up until the end of the nineteenth century, soon afterward their
paths began to diverge drastically. We can see this through a variety of met-
rics. For example, the confidence of the financial markets in the Spanish state
rose strongly at the beginning of the twentieth century. The differential yield
between Spanish government bonds and those of the United Kingdom had
been higher than those of Latin American countries as late as 1888. By the start
of World War I, Spain had to pay a much smaller premium on its debt than any
country in Latin America. Interestingly, at the same time, Spain was undergoing
a major democratization as the percentage of the population at least nominally
enfranchised increased substantially, while the enfranchised population in most
Latin American countries remained largely the same. Also at the turn of the
century we see a significant decline in the percentage of the Spanish population
not attending school, a trend accelerated with the Second Republic and then
continued from the late 1950s onward. 1
The increasing confidence of global markets in Spanish government bonds,
as well as the positive results in education and other public policy areas, point
to an increase of state capacity at the beginning of the twentieth century.
This was in fact the case. Particularly as regards infrastructural power, those
decades set the basic configuration for the development of the Spanish state
during the rest of the century. Whereas Spain may have been an "invertebrate"
country at the beginning of the twentieth century, as Ortega famously put it,z
the modernization of state and society progressed markedly in the following
decades.
In any case, as Knobl makes clear in Chapter 3 of the present book, it is a
common mistake to think that other European states consolidated their infra-
structural and other types of state power during the nineteenth century. In
fact, many of the features and achievements that define the "strong" European
modern state were the product of the first half of the twentieth century. This
is equally valid for less powerful states as it is for the great powers in Europe,
such as France, Germany, or the United Kingdom.
Therefore, the first decades of the twentieth century were a crucial period for
state building across the Western World. The study of this period offers essential
clues in order to understand the very different results in terms of development
of state structures between Spain and Latin America. In the context of this com-
parison, the contrast between Argentina and Spain is especially revealing.
1
Bond yields and enfranchisement data from the "Global Finance Database" (OECD), accessed
April 29, 201 z, http://eh.net/databases/Finance/. For education, see Clara Eugenia Nunez,
"Educacion" in Estadisticas historicas de Espana: Sighs XIX-XX. Vol. I, ed. Albert Carreras
and Xavier Tafunell (Bilbao: Fundacion BBVA, 2005), 155-244.
2 liberal, 1908-1931 (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1980), 93~97- Carmen Fernandez Rubio, La Escuela
Jose Ortega y Gasset, "Espana Invertebrada," in Obras Completas Tomo III 1917-1925 (Madrid:
Fundacion Jose Ortega y Gasset / Taurus, 2004), 423-514 [first published as newspaper columns
in 1917].
Paper Leviathans 401
As is well known, for the first decades of the twentieth century Argentina
seemed most clearly poised among Latin American countries to become a
modern developed nation in the near future. What went wrong compared to
Spain? Argentina and Spain began to develop and consolidate extensive expert
bureaucracies toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of
the twentieth century. The historical background, as discussed by Herrera and
Ferraro in Chapter 8, was not favorable in either case for the professionaliza-
tion of state institutions. Patronage practices among the elite evolved during
the second half of the nineteenth century into massive spoils systems both in
Spain and Argentina. The recruitment of public employees depended on politi-
cal loyalty, while professional capacity or merit represented a secondary con-
sideration in the best of cases.
The creation and consolidation of expert bureaucracies in Argentina is
described by Salvatore in Chapter 11 of the book. Meritocratic recruitment
and bureaucratic autonomy were the foundation for new strategic public policy
programs, as was most clearly the case in education. Argentina's Council for
National Education, created in 1881, was given financial autonomy and a cer-
tain degree of independence from the executive power. A similar development
occurred in Spain at about the same time, and new bureaucratic structures
were created in order to consolidate a national system of public education. The
creation of public institutions for the development of education was a rela-
tively common pattern in all countries undertaking serious modernizing efforts
at the time in the Iberian area, such as Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru, which have
been discussed in Chapters 9,10, and 12 of the book. But Spain and Argentina
were clearly the two most successful cases in the region. However, the design
of bureaucratic structures showed significant variations in every one of the
countries mentioned, and these disparities were to have lasting consequences
for the wider goal of state building.
Strong resistance of conservative elites to public education seemed to be
a feature of Spanish and Spanish American societies during the whole nine-
teenth century. Some countries were more successful than others in facing this
challenge. This phenomenon was considered by Alvarez Junco for the case of
Spain in Chapter 15, and thoroughly discussed by Soifer for the case of Peru in
Chapter 12 of the book.
The creation of the Ministry for Public Instruction in 1900 was a fundamen-
tal step for the development of a national education system in Spain. Soon after
its creation, the ministry began a program of sweeping reforms. One of the
first was to finance all teachers' salaries in Spain from the central state budget
and to organize payment of salaries directly by central offices in each region.3
In Argentina, the Council for National Education initially had a similar role
in distributing large subsidies for education to the provinces. Later on, the
3
Francisco Villacorta Baiios, Burguesia y Cultura. Los intelectuales espanoles en la sociedad
Normal Masculina de Oviedo y su incidencia en la formation de maestros (1900-1940) (Oviedo:
Universidad de Oviedo, 1997), 35.
4QZ Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
council proceeded to systematically establish national schools in Argentina's
provinces, schools directly financed and operated by the central state. Thus
both in Argentina and Spain, significant organizational reforms challenged the
resistance of local elites, and the success of the central state led to very positive
results for the public policy programs implemented.4
In contrast to Spain and Argentina, in Peru the central state could not, or
did not want to, prevail over conservative local elites in order to establish a
national education system. As a consequence, public policy programs failed to
achieve substantial results. As described by Soifer in Chapter 12, the process
began in 1895, when the liberal Civilista coalition launched a series of reforms
in the area of education. At first, the coalition seized hold of the implementation
of policy in the regions and overrode local elites. Education policy was central-
ized, and a specific public bureau, the General Direction of Public Education,
was put in charge of the system after 1909. The bureau had a serious design
flaw, however, because it lacked any kind of independence from the executive
power. Nevertheless, as Soifer makes clear, for the first years the results were
remarkable, with a sharp increase in the number of schools in Peru, as well as
improvements in the quality of teaching.
A wave of peasant revolts in the southern highlands of Peru between 1915
and 1924 changed the political situation. The liberal coalition abruptly lost
nerve and began to conciliate conservative local elites in order to guarantee
their support for the repression of the peasants. Control of education was
officially devolved to the regions, and modernization efforts stopped. Lacking
financial and operational autonomy from the administration's political leader-
ship, the General Direction of Public Education was rapidly neutralized.
Of course, bureaucratic organizations without organizational and finan-
cial autonomy are entirely powerless to continue with public policy programs
without the political support of the administration. In such a situation, a politi-
cal whim can quickly destroy programs and structures, as well as the results
previously achieved.
Lack of political independence became also a serious problem for the
Council of Education in Argentina. However, in Argentina's case, the liberal
elite did not abandon its commitment to modernization. Argentina's liberal
elite remained committed to public education and ignored or successfully
fought against local resistance to the creation of a national education system.
Nevertheless, although the Council of Education had financial autonomy in the
form of earmarked taxes, its board of directors was appointed by the executive
power. Only the appointment of the chairman of the board required approval
by the Senate. Political influence on the Council of Education did not lead,
4
Argentina began with an illiteracy rate of 31.5 percent in 1900, measured among army recruits,
and was able to reduce the illiteracy rate to 16.3 percent in 1930. Spain began with an illiteracy
rate of 35.4 percent in 1900, similarly measured among army recruits, and achieved a rate of
11.5 percent in 1930. Data for Argentina from Table 11.1, Chapter 11 of the present volume.
Data for Spain from Nunez, "Educacion," 231.
Paper Leviathans 403
as in Peru, to its neutralization or to the abandonment of public policy pro-
grams in the area. Instead, as described by Salvatore in Chapter 11, what hap-
pened in Argentina was an increasing politicization of the system of national
education. As opposed to recruiting managers, inspectors, school directors,
or even secondary school teachers on the basis of publicly proven merit, in
Argentina those positions began to be filled with political appointees. In other
words, the powerful and well-financed system of national education came to be
treated as part of the political spoils. Parliamentary denunciations in 1913 and
1914 already made clear that massive clientelistic appointments enormously
increased education costs through inefficiency and waste, and they reduced the
quality of teaching.
Notwithstanding parliamentary denunciations by minority groups in
Congress, the eradication of the spoils system was not a top political priority
for the major political forces in Argentina at the time. The coming to power
in 1916 of the Radical Party, that is, the radical wing of the liberal opposi-
tion, did not substantially change the practice of massive clientelistic appoint-
ments in the national bureaucracy. Of course, such political practices, known
in Argentina as politica criolla, had very negative consequences on the progress
of state modernization in the country. Infrastructural power depends essen-
tially on the growth of expert bureaucracies recruited on merit and invested
with operational autonomy from the government.5 Advancements in this area
represented the key difference between state-building processes in Argentina
and Spain.
As part of a progressive reform of the whole national bureaucracy, a career
civil service was created in Spain for the Ministry for Public Instruction in
1911, following similar reforms in other ministries. The new regulations were
typical for rational bureaucracies as defined by Weber. Public competitions for
admissions and promotions in the civil service were introduced, tenure was
granted to the civil servants thus recruited, and political dismissals were made
extremely difficult. In 1918, the career system was extended to all employees
in the national public administration. The reform was successful in putting an
end to the spoils system in Spain, that is to say, to the recruitment of public
employees based on political criteria.
Needless to say, the whole process of state modernization in Spain was bru-
tally cut short by the fascist dictatorship that took power in 1939. Public school
teachers were massively dismissed or in numerous cases summarily executed
for being natural supporters of the Spanish Republic; career civil servants not
loyal to the fascist dictatorship were similarly dismissed or killed. All the same,
when the Franco dictatorship saw itself compelled to modernize the structures
of government and public policy in the early 1960s, the professionalization
of the public bureaucracy was carried out on the basis of the major civil ser-
vice reform of 1918. The modernization of the structures of government and
5 Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power: Vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation States
1-760-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 475.
4°4 Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
public policy in the 1960s was followed by fast economic growth, and both
changes pointed the way to political democratization. In this as in other areas,
the social and political modernization of Spain between 1900 and 1936 laid
out the foundations for the successful democratic transition after 1975.
In Spain as well as in the United States, the decline of the spoils system
toward the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the development of profes-
sional bureaucracies, were supported by wide political movements with a strong
cultural impact. Regeneracionismo in Spain and the Progressive Movement in
the United States made the end of the spoils system part of a cause of "national
renewal" with a strong ethical and democratic appeal. Interestingly, a similar
political and cultural movement developed in Argentina at the time, and it
was represented by the liberal opposition of the Radical Party. However, the
focus of Argentina's reformers was electoral corruption; their main goal was
to establish and consolidate legal guarantees for transparent elections. As men-
tioned earlier, civil service reform was not the movement's priority.
In the terminology employed by Mahoney in Chapter 10, a political and
cultural movement focused on political clientelism and fighting for civil service
reform can operate as a "trigger" or generative cause for rapid, punctuated
change in the area of state modernization. From systems of political spoils,
where corruption and bureaucratic mismanagement were seen as endemic, the
United States and Spain were able to create professional bureaucracies in the
relatively short period of two or three decades. In both cases, the punctuated
character of the change becomes a topic in the literature by being associated
with a single moment or single legal reform. For the United States, that particu-
lar moment is the passing of the Pendleton Act of 1883, and for Spain it's the
civil service reform or Estatuto Maura of 1918. Of course, in both cases it took
much more than a singular reform to change administrative practices from
the spoils of office to bureaucratic professionalism. Those single reforms are
mainly symbolic moments but important ones nonetheless. As symbols, they
express the fact that such profound transformations, completed in only two or
three decades, were quite fast in terms of state building.
This can be confirmed by considering the cases of Chile and Costa Rica,
two of the countries in Latin America where the consolidation of the mod-
ern state was most clearly successful. Successful state modernization can be
roughly gauged in our days by governance indicators and other measures of
bureaucratic quality. Chile and Costa Rica are usually the two countries in the
region that have been on the top of every measure since such data began to be
systematically collected in the 1990s.6
Analyzed by Jaksic in Chapter 9, the central state in Chile early on developed
the practice of employing nonpartisan experts to run relatively independent
6
See Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay, and Massimo Mastruzzi, "Governance Matters VIII. Aggregate
and Individual Governance Indicators 1996-2008," Policy Research Working Paper 4978, The
World Bank Development Research Group, June 2009, Washington, DC, accessed April 29, 2012.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=i42459i. See also Worldwide Governance
Indicators, accessed April 29, 2012, http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.asp.
Paper Leviathans 405
areas of public policy. In some well-known cases such as Andres Bello or
Domingo Sarmiento, the nonpartisan character of such experts was reinforced
by their being nonnationals. The practice probably originates with the success
of Andres Bello as a leading public intellectual and state reformer since his
arrival to Chile in 1829. Later on, the practice of hiring nonpartisan experts for
leading positions in the state bureaucracy was enlarged and supported by the
Chilean Congress as a mechanism for the oversight and control of the execu-
tive power. In this way, the growth of a spoils system in Chile was kept in check
by the strong separation of powers.
The role of nonpartisan public experts leading relatively autonomous
bureaucratic organizations had a strong impact on public education in Chile, a
key area for social and state modernization. The first strong impulse to public
education came with the creation of the University of Chile in 1842. From the
moment of its creation, the university was put in charge of the direction and
supervision of primary education. Andres Bello was appointed rector, a position
that he kept until his death in 1865; the length of tenure confirmed the nonpar-
tisan character of his appointment as a public policy expert. In the following
years, the number of new schools and the student population grew rapidly. The
consolidation of a national system of public education was further advanced
with the creation of a specific public agency in 1882, the Inspeccion General de
Instruccion. Again, a nonpartisan expert was appointed to this strategic public
policy position, Jose A. Nunez. For the four years previous to his appointment,
Nunez had been commissioned by the Chilean government to travel across
European countries and the United States in order to study primary and sec-
ondary school systems. Interestingly, Domingo F. Sarmiento had been commis-
sioned by the Chilean Government to do a similar research trip in 1845. What
we see, in the career of Nunez and other top officials of the Chilean state, is
the systematic acquisition of expert knowledge and the deliberate training of
a nonpartisan public policy elite. Length of tenure confirming again the non-
partisan character of his appointment, Nunez remained in office for fifteen
years until 1897. And the relative bureaucratic autonomy of the Inspeccion
General is amply confirmed by its frequent conflicts with successive ministers
of Education.7 It is interesting to consider, comparing bureaucratic practices
in Chile and Argentina, that the most celebrated expert on public education in
both countries, Sarmiento, was the first appointed president {superintendente)
of the Council of Education in Argentina in 1881. However, he remained in
office less than a year and was forced to resign due to disagreements with
the minister.8 The episode corroborates the extreme political vulnerability of
bureaucratic agencies in the latter country.
The development of an expert bureaucracy, relatively autonomous from the
government's political leadership, was a lengthy and gradual process in Chile.
This was a case of incremental bureaucratic expansion, as defined by Mahoney
7
Maria Loreto Egafia Baraona, La Educacion primaria popular en el sigh XIX en Chile. Una
prdctica de politica estatal (Santiago: Lorn Ediciones, 2000), 77, 228.
8
Manuel Galvez, Vida de Sarmiento. El hombre de autoridad (Buenos Aires: Emece, 1945), 579-
406 Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
in Chapter 10. Although slow, incremental change gives the modernization
process stability and strength. The role of public policy experts in Chilean state
management became during the nineteenth century a part of the country's
informal constitution; it came to represent, in other words, a regulating prin-
ciple in the dynamics of the separation of powers. It is a fundamental political
value in Chile, regularly reflected and confirmed by political practice up to our
days, that the executive is not allowed by Congress to appoint mere loyalists
or partisan hacks to crucial public policy positions, as happens all too often in
other Latin American countries, with disastrous effects on public policy.
A similar process of incremental change is described by Mahoney for the
case of Costa Rica. Bureaucratic modernization was a slow but continuous
development from 1875 onward. Through the creation of specialized public
agencies for key public policy areas and other reforms, the state bureaucracy
was able to gain increasing autonomy from the particular administration in
power, the military, and the economic elite. Again, bureaucratic modernization
was particularly strong in the area of education, including the appropriation
of considerable economic resources for this public policy area. Exceptionally
among countries in Latin America, by the early twentieth century Costa Rica
employed more resources in education than in the military.
The ample majority of countries in Latin America were not able or not will-
ing to follow a consistent path of bureaucratic modernization at any point dur-
ing the twentieth century. Even countries where economic and human resources
were readily available, such as the case of Argentina, did not allow for expert
bureaucracies to assume control of public policy areas. Lack of bureaucratic
development had a primary impact on infrastructural power. In fact, as defined
by Mann, infrastructural power is based on an array of relatively autonomous
bureaucratic organizations variously linked to power networks in civil society,
that is to say, embedded professional bureaucracies.9 But lack of bureaucratic
modernization had a significant impact on the other forms or categories of
power as well. Territorial power depends on the effectiveness of the police
and of the military, which are of course bureaucratic organizations that have
to be run by experts in order to be fully operative. The intrinsic link between
economic power and bureaucratic rationalization was very clearly described
by Max Weber. Indeed, this specific connection has been called the "Weberian
state hypothesis."10 Finally, even the development of the state's symbolic power
depends on bureaucratic rationalization. It is not just that public policy enjoys
much more credibility, and produces better results, when formulated by non-
partisan experts. National consciousness itself, which was the product of rela-
tively leisured intellectual and artistic elites in the first half of the nineteenth
century, became a matter of systematic development by vast professional
9
Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 58, 475.
10
James E. Rauch and Peter B. Evans, "Bureaucracy and Growth: A Cross-National Analysis of
the Effects of 'Weberian' State Structures on Economic Growth," American Sociological Review
64 (October 1999): 748-765.
Paper Leviathans 407
bureaucratic organizations, that is to say, by the public education systems dur-
ing the second half.
In Latin America, incomplete or fragmentary bureaucratic modernization
resulted in weak states on all fronts. States in the region developed as partially
hollow structures, lacking the capacity to deliver basic public policy results
that are typically expected of modern political entities - Leviathans, but only
on paper. In the next section, we will discuss how this legacy affects the perfor-
mance of contemporary states in the region.
PAPER LEVIATHANS
The geographical and effective reach of the different contemporary Latin
American national states is quite different across the region. Whereas Latin
American countries were able to assure their territorial sovereignty and basic
geographical shape by the mid-nineteenth century, they faced a much greater
test from internal challengers. The nominal authority of the centralized state
was, in most cases, assured by 1900. The most prominent exception, as detailed
by Needell in Chapter 4 of this book, was Brazil, but even here national unity
was purchased with a significant political price.
Conflicts that followed were rarely about the geographical definition of the
nation or even about ethnic/nationalist claims, but about the distribution of
national riches between classes, individuals, institutions, and regions. In many
cases, these struggles have yet to be resolved; and as a region, with few excep-
tions, Latin America has never been able to establish the Weberian monopoly
over the use of violence in its territory. Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Costa
Rica, and Ecuador have been the most successful. In the case of the first, how-
ever, governmental writ is shallow and thin in the outer reaches of the country-
side and in the core of many cities, whereas in the rest of the Southern Cone,
the "dirty war" and the autonomy enjoyed by the repressive apparatus would
make it difficult to say that the countries were truly pacified until the 1980s.
Peru and Colombia have suffered through extended periods during which the
command of the state over significant parts of the territory was very much in
question. Even under military rule, the capacity of the Bolivian state to impose
its will through violence was limited (no matter its intentions).
The record is particularly negative if we think of threats to territoriality as
not stemming from rival political projects but simply from the absence of a
single enforcement institution. In Mexico, the past five years have seen the toll
of drug murders approach 50,000. In Venezuela and most of Central America,
violent crime has made normal urban life very difficult. Two hundred years after
independence, the state does not necessarily rule over the entire continent.
In terms of economic power, we again have a wide distribution but some
common themes. The relative economic decline of Argentina is infamous
whereas Brazil is now one of the world's major economies, and Chile could
soon enjoy wealth levels of the lower tranche of the OECD (Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development). Mexico is arguably the most
408 Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
interesting case as it has combined a significant manufacturing sector with con-
tinued fiscal dependence on oil production. Despite (or because of?) NAFTA
(North American Free Trade Agreement), it has not been able to grow dramati-
cally over the past twenty years and its income per capita ratio to the United
States remains a stubborn quarter to a third. Some countries have experienced
dramatic booms and busts, such as Peru, while others have been relatively
more consistent. But, with some prominent exceptions, the economies in the
twenty-first century look very much like their nineteenth-century counterparts.
For example, in a world where it is increasingly important to both develop
export markets and to participate in high-value-added production, many of
the countries in the region find themselves in the worst possible category with
relatively low levels of trade and high dependence on primary exports (or in
some cases remittances from migrants). Dependence on a few markets con-
tinues with the United States still dominant but China exerting considerable
influence on the regional economy.
The persistent and world-leading levels of inequality not only have politi-
cal and social consequences (in the violence described previously and collective
cohesion discussed later in this chapter), but also establish a ceiling for the
development of domestic consumer markets. Again, there are exceptions, and
certainly Brazil, Mexico, and Chile have made significant strides, but these have
been accompanied by very high levels of household debt, making the economic
dynamic very fragile. Much as in the nineteenth century, income is concentrated
at the top and a far smaller amount of it is reinvested domestically. Much as
was the case with nineteenth-century opera houses, the skyscrapers of the major
cities obscure the tenuous nature of much of the region's development.
As already mentioned in the previous section, most Latin American coun-
tries were not able or not willing to develop modern professional bureaucra-
cies during the first decades of the twentieth century, a crucial period for state
building in Europe and the Americas. As a result, with the exception of Chile
and Costa Rica, all other countries in the region see local versions of the spoils
system define the public administration to this day. This means that every new
elected government appoints vast numbers of political loyalists to high- and
medium-level management positions, or even to the lower ranks of the public
bureaucracy. Considering measurements from the past ten years, in extreme
cases like Mexico or Argentina each new administration is expected to appoint
tens of thousands of political loyalists, up to more than 10 percent of total pub-
lic employment.11 Political appointees are not always incompetent in the area
of public policy they are assigned to, but competence is not the main reason for
their appointment in any case.
11
See, for Mexico, George Philip, Democracy in Latin America: Surviving Conflict and Crisis?
(Cambridge: Polity press, 2003). 44. See, for Argentina, Agustin E. Ferraro, "A Splendid Ruined
Reform: The Creation and Destruction of a Civil Service in Argentina," in International
Handbook on Civil Service Systems, ed. Andrew Massey (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011),
152-177.
Paper Leviathans 409
Nevertheless, there has been significant development in the "cognitive"
capacity of the state. As Loveman describes in Chapter 16, censuses were
employed during the nineteenth century as a tool to create imaginary homo-
geneous populations and hide or deny racial diversities. Censuses expressed
the rejection of the elites toward the human community of their own countries
(more on this later). During the second half of the twentieth century, there have
been substantial advances in this area, censuses becoming more honest and
representative.12 Public discussions and mobilizations by civil society groups
have been particularly significant in Brazil, leading the way for Brazil and other
Latin American countries to acknowledge and sometimes embrace racial diver-
sity. In any case, decennial censuses are now standard throughout the region,
and many countries have created sophisticated national registry systems.
In many countries, electoral systems are as good as anywhere in the world,
although this is a fairly new development. One area in which the challenges
to state capacity are clearest is in the production of accurate cadastral surveys
and land registries. This reflects the continuing rural inequality throughout
the region as well as the capacity of local elites to resist efforts to document
resources. The pictures painted by Soifer in Chapter 12 and by Loveman in
Chapter 16 remain very relevant.
Perhaps the area where the infrastructural capacity of the state has been
least developed is taxation. 13 Overall, Latin American countries tax their
economies at roughly half the level of OECD countries. There are exceptions
(Argentina and Brazil), but the majority of countries extract 20 percent or less
from their economies. Moreover, a significantly greater amount of government
revenue comes from indirect taxation including consumption taxes. These do
not only tend to be more regressive, but they are much easier to administer and
require less developed enforcement mechanisms. In several countries these are
augmented by the, again, relatively administratively easier collection of roy-
alty revenue from natural resource extraction. The low levels of taxation have
important political and social consequences: the levels of government service
delivery remain low in many countries, and the fiscal legitimacy of the state is
perpetually in question.
The result of low professionalization and lack of resources is a spotty provi-
sion of social services, with a great deal of between- and within-country vari-
ance. On the former, the countries in the Southern Cone tend to do a much
better job delivering basic services such as water, sanitation, basic health, and
primary education. This is not simply a function of relative wealth (although
that is of course relevant), but it reflects the more extensive development of
state infrastructures and particularly political commitment to welfare policies
for large parts of the twentieth century. Again, it is important to emphasize
that wealth in and of itself does not guarantee services: both fairly wealthy
12
See the discussion in Giorgio Mortara, et al., "Appraisal of Census Data for Latin America," The
Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 42, no. 2, Part 2 (April 1964): 57-85.
13
OECD, Revenue Statistics in Latin America, Paris, 2012.
4io Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
Mexico and Venezuela rank lower than poorer countries such as Costa Rica.
The within-country differences betray the fragmentary consolidation of the
state even more starkly. As in much of the less developed world, national fig-
ures disguise a great deal of variance. In the right neighborhoods, the quality
of life and services is on par with Western Europe. However, significant parts
of even the capital cities exist without any basic services. Most urban centers
are surrounded by a ring of misery where running water, schools, and health
clinics are scarce and where the rule of law is severely constrained. This is a
result, not only of the structural deficits of the state, but of the continuing
failure of many of these states to secure the monopoly of authority in their
territories.
We now come to the fourth type of power that we discussed in the intro-
duction and the one that we would argue is least developed in Latin America.
Measuring something as diffuse and ill-defined as symbolic capital may be
difficult and frustrating, but that does not mean that the underlying factors
behind the concept do not matter. Social science does experience the classic
problem of only looking for one's lost keys under the light as that will be the
only place where they can be seen. This is a sensible strategy, but it would be
absurd to then claim that the keys could not be anywhere else. Similarly, the
difficulty in getting concrete measures of symbolic capital should not prevent
us from considering how the underlying historical relationship between the
national government and the population shapes and has shaped the capacity
of the Latin American state.
Central to the notion of symbolic capital is its "taken for grantedness."
Similar to Gramsci's notion of hegemony, it implies the absence of alterna-
tives or a lack of questioning the fundamental order of things. Note that this
does not necessarily mean agreement with any or all policies, but rather an
acceptance that the state is here to stay and one has to respect its wishes. The
expression "you can't fight city hall" is assumed to betray a cynical and reluc-
tant conformity. It may, however, actually demonstrate more a basic faith in the
centrality and sovereignty of city hall. The latter is what we mean by symbolic
power. This may be expressed in the three different operational ways: degrees
of patriotism/nationalism, legitimacy of the state, and levels of trust in the gov-
ernment. We will examine the contemporary evidence on all three.
How nationalist is Latin America? As with many such questions, it all
depends on how one defines nationalism. Based on the often-portrayed seas
of flags accompanying national football (soccer) teams and the often-irascible
public response to perceived transnational (and especially American) encroach-
ments on national sovereignty, we might classify Latin America as extremely
nationalistic. However, this nationalism is often a sentiment that only expresses
a "love of place." As Lopez-Alves points out in Chapter 14, a specific form of
nationalism in Latin America focuses on the natural endowments of the land
as the main source of national pride. In contrast to the typical forms of nation-
alism discussed in the literature on the subject, in Latin America geographical
and natural characteristics often take priority over the human communities
Paper Leviathans 411
as a source of emotional attachment. Therefore, as Lopez-Alves states, more
often than not human influence on the nation is seen as damaging and neg-
ative. The point is amply confirmed in Chapter 18. Appelbaum studies the
work of Colombia's Chorographic Commission, one of the most ambitious
geographic surveys carried out in nineteenth-century Latin America. Many
documents such as maps and travel writings, produced by the commission,
were extensively reproduced and employed for atlases and schoolbooks, thus
substantially contributing to the configuration of a Colombian national imag-
inary. The maps and other materials such as watercolors display the beauty
of landscapes and the bounty of natural resources in a very positive way. But
watercolors or reports depicting humans often show tensions and flaws. These
are often of a racist nature, depicting blacks or Indians as problematic; but
whites or light-skinned people are also sometimes shown as languid, weak,
and slothful. In contrast to the invariably positive resources and beauty of the
land, a source of strong pride, the human community is often seen as deficient
in Latin American national imaginaries.
No doubt, Latin American countries show a strong tradition of anti-
imperialist feelings and pride in their national sovereignty. Of course national-
ism in the region includes some kind of psychological bond between people,
and a conviction of their identity and differentiation from others; it refers also
to a perceived and identified community.14 We can easily detect such sentiments
in Latin America, and this is the reason why observers continue to argue that
national identity "continues to be a significant factor in the lives of many Latin
Americans."15
However, we would like to differentiate from this psychological national-
ism, or from the specific Latin American nationalism of natural endowments,
a more political kind of bond. Usually designated as patriotism in political
philosophy, this is a very different political animal. It is a political force, and it
has to be understood in reference to the state as a political entity. It involves the
identification with a state and the recognition of no higher duty than advanc-
ing its interests. This is less a matter of celebration of identity and more of what
Anderson notes as "colossal sacrifices" made in its name. 16 This communal
"commitment" to the state is what often underlies the "horizontal camarader-
ies" that are so central to patriotism.
Consider the results of two questions from the Latin American Public
Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University.17 In one, respondents are asked about
their sense of pride in being of a certain nationality. In the other, they are asked
about their pride in the political system of that country. Consistently, more
14
Walker Connor, "A Nation is a Nation, is a State, is an Ethnic Group, is a ...," Ethnic and Racial
Studies 1, no. 4 (October 1978): 377-383.
15
Nicola Miller, "The Historiography of Nationalism and National Identity in Latin America,"
Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 2 (2006): 201.
16
Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 7.
17
LAPOP 2008.
412 Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
than 90 percent express a great deal of pride in being of a certain nationality,
whereas the numbers for the political system are a small fraction of this (with
exceptions such as Costa Rica). We want to suggest that the first is a general
measure of nationalism, while the second is closer to a measure of state patrio-
tism. Obviously, this is no more than suggestive, but in the absence of concrete
data on patriotic or nationalist sentiments, the consistent gap between the two
represents the peculiar status of Latin American national consciousness. There
is broad agreement in contemporary scholarship that in Latin America the
link between any national community and the state as an institution was and
remains weak, and that the legitimation of political authority as the voice of
the nation has been limited at best.
The dominant characteristic of Latin America from the very beginning of
its modern history through today has been its social and political fraction-
alization; Latin America is a permanently divided region with not very well
developed "horizontal ties."18 We do not deny the existence of a multitude of
collective identities based on ethnicity, class, region, and other criteria,19 nor
are we arguing for an extreme individualized atomization, but we contend that
few of these identities have been able to embrace the entire nation or society
(or even existed in opposition to the state as such, in favor of a different defini-
tion of the territory). Efforts to create "nations," as documented by Appelbaum
in Chapter 18, had serious difficulties with heterogeneity, often choosing to
disguise or deny it.
Latin America is defined by intrastatal divisions much more so than by inter-
statal ones. We can begin with the obvious racial/ethnic legacy of the conquest
that still defines so much of Andean and Mesoamerican societies, and that of
plantation agriculture, which characterized much of the Atlantic Coast. There
are also the regional gaps that pervade practically every country: plains and
mountains, coasts and interior, and capital and provinces. There are also the
class gulfs in this most unequal of regions, a fact that defines the rhetoric and
struggles of politics. Finally, there are the ideological divisions of Left, Right,
and in between. That many of these divisions are congruent and interact makes
the schisms even starker.
What about legitimacy? Few concepts have been as consistently maligned
as legitimacy, yet we return to it once again in order to explain differences
in behavior that can have no other origin. We follow Juan Linz in defining
18
Claudio Lomnitz, "Nationalism as a Practical System: Benedict Anderson's Theory of
Nationalism from the Vantage Point of Spanish America," in The Other Mirror: Grand Theory
through the Lens of Latin America, eds. Miguel Angel Centeno and Fernando Lopez-Alves
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, zooi).
^ The work of Florencia Mallon (Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and
Peru [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995]), Peter Guardino (Peasants, Politics, and
the Formation of Mexico's National State: Guerrero, 1800-1857 [Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2002]), David Nugent (Modernity and the Edge of Empire: State, Individual,
and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes, 1885-1935 [Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1997]), and others clearly has demonstrated that such a community arose in the nine-
teenth century.
Paper Leviathans 413
legitimacy as "the belief that in spite of shortcomings and failures, the existing
political institutions are better than any others that may be established, and
that they therefore can demand obedience."20 Various projects have attempted
to compare levels of legitimacy within Latin America and between the region
and other parts of the world. 21 The methodological rigor and robustness of the
results indicate that these general findings do reflect an underlying reality.
The first observation is that there is a great deal of variance within the
region. In practically every study the triumvirate of Chile, Costa Rica, and
Uruguay are leagues ahead of their neighbors whereas the Andean and Central
American countries are at the bottom. Survey after survey demonstrates that
the majority of citizens in these latter countries do not accept the political (not
to mention the socioeconomic) rules of the game as reasonable, sensible, and
justifiable. Too many political conflicts are not about who will run the machin-
ery of the state, but about the need to dismantle it. In general, while popula-
tions might offer diffuse support for general principles (but even support for
democracy and the market are declining), they show much lower enthusiasm
for the actual on-the-ground manifestations of the act of being governed.
In large part, this may be explained by the low levels of trust in the capac-
ity of state governance. The absence of trust leads "citizens to become cyni-
cal about the political system and disaffected with the existing order."22 The
consequences of this are greater than individual discontent or alienation; no
system of governance is efficient and fair to all, all of the time. In fact, work-
ing systems may need to "fool" some of the people some of the time in order
to function. Constraints on belief make it harder to deliver good governance
or for the relevant groups to recognize it when they see it. So, for example, it
is much more difficult for officials to remain honest and behave appropriately
when nearly three-quarters of citizens feel that they are corrupt and expect
them to behave that way.23 There is something of a causal circularity involved
in the relationship between trust and governance, which makes policy reform
very difficult. Lack of trust reflects low quality of governance, but it may also
retard efforts to improve it.
10
Juan Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 6.
11
Bruce Gilley, "The Meaning and Measure of State Legitimacy: Results for 72 Countries," European
Journal of Political Research 45 (2006): 499-525; Timothy J. Power and Jennifer M. Cyr, "Political
Legitimacy in Latin America," International Social Science Journal 196 (2010): 253-272; Mitchell
A. Seligson and John A. Booth, The Legitimacy Puzzle: Democracy and Political Support in Eight
Latin American Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
" Larry Diamond, "Building Trust in Government by Improving Governance," 7th Global Forum
on Reinventing Government: "Building Trust in Government" (Vienna, Austria: June 27-29,
2007), 1.
23
Mitchell A. Seligson, "The Impact of Corruption on Regime Legitimacy: A Comparative Study
of Four Latin American Countries," Journal of Politics 64, no. 2 (2002): 408-433; Rosario
Espinal, Jonathan Hartlyn, and Jana Morgan Kelly, "Performance Still Matters: Explaining
Trust in Government in the Dominican Republic," Comparative Political Studies 39, no. 2
(March 2006): 200-223.
414 Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
The results of various surveys mirror those on legitimacy. In general, Latin
America is the least trusting region in the world. The military, police, courts,
parties, and legislatures are trusted by less than 30 percent of the population. 24
Within the region we find that Chile and Brazil have the highest indicators of
trust. The Brazilian phenomenon is a relatively recent one with other studies
indicating radical improvements in attitudes toward the state over the past
decade. Argentina, Dominican Republic, and Peru are at the bottom. Some
of the individual findings describe what can only be called a "rejected state":
only 6.6 percent of Argentineans have significant trust in the civil service, 19.2
percent of Peruvians trust "the government," and 30 percent of Mexicans trust
the police.25
The image that comes through these figures is clear: with some exceptions,
the Latin American state does not exert the expected monopoly over violence,
generate effective development, or provide services at the levels one would
expect. Perhaps more importantly, this failure is widely acknowledged in large
parts of the population and shapes its image of the state. To what extent is this
a historical legacy from the period analyzed in the book? We will discuss this
point in the next and final section.
HISTORICAL LEGACIES
The Spanish experience indicates that history is not destiny. Whatever its trou-
bles in 2012, Spain has achieved levels of democracy and economic well-being
that would have been impossible to imagine in 1939. Argentina in the same
year had just begun to experience the almost continuous relative decline that
has characterized the country's last several decades. That Chile would be a
political and economic success was not obvious on September 11, 1973, nor
was it clear even twenty years ago that contemporary Brazil would experi-
ence a sharp decline in poverty and inequality. Nevertheless, as Mahoney has
shown, where one starts does help determine where one ends.
There is much of our present that we can recognize in the historical case
studies. An obvious example is the reality of Chilean exceptionalism since
the middle of the nineteenth century, while the challenges facing the Peruvian
state in the early twentieth century persist well into the twenty-first century.
However, the question should not be how well the past predicts the future,
but how to use it to understand the specific nature of political, social, and
economic challenges.
In this we follow Guibernau, Jones, and Miller in their excellent intro-
duction to the special issue of Nations and Nationalism dedicated to Latin
2
* Peri K. Blind, "Building Trust in Government in the Twenty-First Century: Review of Literature
and Emerging Issues," 7th Global Forum on Reinventing Government: "Building Trust in
Government" (Vienna, Austria: June 27-29, 2007), 10.
2 17
5 World Bank. Results, Performance Budgeting and Trust in Government (Washington, DC:
World Bank, 2010), 214-215.
Paper Leviathans 415
America.26 They note three special characteristics of the region when com-
paring it to similar nation-states: race, warfare, and legitimacy. The legacy of
colonial inequality haunts many of the accounts presented in this book. It is
impossible to understand the relative fragility of Latin states without taking
into account the extent to which they had to deal with consolidating not one
nation but many, sharing territory and little else. The point is clearly made by
Knobl in Chapter 3.
The relative absence of interstate violence deprived (if that is the right word)
the region of one of the most common stimuli for collective identification.
Given initial divisions and the absence of cohesive experiences, is it any wonder
that the region has not been able to establish secure political legitimacy?
This is not a new phenomenon. In many ways, these divisions are what
defined the postindependence projects whereby a form of liberalism was
attempted without the concomitant creation of a state able to foster political
unity or a sense of nation that inspires cohesion. The nineteenth-century liberal
project floundered precisely because it refused to do one of two things: impose
an order or open the society to redefine what that order should be. Over much
of its history, the explicit hope of a variety of political projects has been that
progress of one sort or another would lead to a social convergence. One ver-
sion of this vision saw the historical mingling of groups as inevitably leading
to a new form of nation. This is best epitomized by the Mexican ideology of
the raza cosmica arising from the various conflicts, or the creation of a generic
post-racial guajiro identity in the Andes and the Caribbean. A more liberal
vision expected that with enough economic progress, these fissures would be
closed. This was at the very heart of the Concertacion discourse in Chile. In
actual fact, however, material, social, racial, and political progress have yet to
close these gaps in the present.
Fractionalization in Latin America is a reflection of the failure of a post-
conquest national hegemonic project on the continent. No side of any of the
various divisions has been able to defeat the others so as to impose its own
worldview or domination. Note that this is not necessarily a bad thing. The
imposition of a hegemonic project and of a true class or racial domination
is not a pretty sight and leaves destruction all around; the imagined national
community has been too often produced by imposition in the past.
Latin America, however, has largely defied this tradition. Political violence
has not customarily served as the handmaiden of such communities, nor have
such sentiments helped to account for the level and type of conflicts seen in
the region. One of the authors has already noted the failure to historically link
martial prowess or even danger with a strong sense of nation in the region.27
In contemporary Latin America, we do have some cases where the classic
26
Montserrat Guibernau, Charles Jones, and Nicola Miller, "Introduction to the Special Issue,"
Nations and Nationalism 12 (2006): 191-199.
Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).
416 Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro
war-nationalism dyad appears to have played out. On April 1982, for example,
Argentineans almost unanimously signaled their support for the invasion of
the Malvinas/Falklands. Despite its low legitimacy and support, the military
regime appeared to have one more gasp of life as it sought to portray itself as
the defender of national patrimony. This euphoria, however, did not last very
long and, like the military dictatorship, could not survive the defeat.28 Similar
popular sentiment may have helped bring down the Sanchez de Losada govern-
ment in Bolivia in 2003 when it appeared to be accepting the now century-old
Chilean control of the Pacific coastline. A much longer term dynamic has
existed in revolutionary Cuba. Whereas many thought that the regime would
follow its Soviet supporters into the dustbin of history, it has been able to
survive four U.S. presidents since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is now widely
accepted that it is precisely the American opposition and the nationalist core of
the Cuban Revolution that best helps to explain its longevity.
As in much of the developing world, however, contemporary political vio-
lence in Latin America does not consist of conflicts between states, but struggles
within them. In particular, the pattern in the region over the past few decades
has been that states are not confronting well-articulated and institutionalized
oppositions that seek to replace national governments as more amorphous
forces that challenge the authority of the state without necessarily offering an
alternative project. It is this form of threat that most developing nations face.
In the face of this we would argue that the major lesson of Latin America is
that the creation of a political sense of the nation may be the most important
aspect of state building. It may be true that nations are impossible without
states, but effective states may also be impossible without the bonds of human
solidarity implied by a strong national community.
i8
Of much longer (if not larger) import was the boost that the victory gave Margaret Thatcher.
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