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The Other Transatlantic Tie:

The Hispanosphere

by Darrin M. McMahon
Darrin M. McMahon is the Ben Weider Associate Professor of European History at Florida State
University. This article is based on a presentation made to FPRIs America and the West
Study Group in Philadelphia on October 20, 2003.

I
s there a Hispanosphere? Using conventional lenses, the observer must
strain to find it on the horizon of the popular and academic press. And this
despite the recent expansion of the analytic universe to account for an
Anglospherethe cultural, conceptual, and perhaps strategic entity formed
by the leading common-law democracies of the former British Empire.
Including at its core England, the United States, Canada, Australia, and
New Zealand, the Anglosphere might be widened, as James Bennett has
observed, to include the educated, English-speaking nations of the Caribbean,
Oceania, Africa, and India.1 It is generally agreed to include those nations
and countries that share of heritage of individualism, rule of law, honoring
contracts and covenants, and the elevation of freedom to the first rank
of political and cultural values.2 With common cultures and roots, the
Anglosphere, to borrow Samuel Huntingtons well-known formulation, is a
subcivilization within the wider civilization of the West.3
Might one draw a similar conclusion vis-a-vis the countries that make
up the Castilian-speaking cultures of the former Spanish Empire? With regard
at least to Latin America, Huntington himself cannot quite decide. He observes
that subjectively, Latin Americans themselves are divided in their self-
identifications. Some say, Yes, we are part of the West. Others claim, No,
we have our own unique culture. Huntington acknowledges the difficulty of
the case, granting that Latin America could be considered either a subciviliza-
tion within Western civilization or a separate civilization closely affiliated with
the West and divided as to whether it belongs in the West. However, he

1
James C. Bennett, The Emerging Anglosphere, Orbis, Winter 2002.
2
See Andrew Sullivan, Come on In: The Anglosphere is Freedoms New Home, The Times
(London), Feb. 2, 2003.
3
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New
York: Touchstone, 1997), p. 46.

# 2004 Published by Elsevier Limited on behalf of Foreign Policy Research Institute.

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McMAHON

concludes that for an analysis focused on the international political implica-


tions of civilizations, including the relations between Latin America, on the one
hand, and Latin America and Europe, on the other, the latter is the more
appropriate and useful designation.4
Huntington may be right. Nonetheless, it might be useful to consider
the matter the other way around, particularly if one is prepared to include
Spain in the conceptual mix as part of a broader subcivilization within the West
that would include Latin America, Spain, and other countries significantly
marked by their longstanding cultural and historic ties to the Iberian penin-
sula.5 A number of deep historical forces have helped shape culture and
identity in the Spanish-speaking world, and these forces arguably will con-
tinue to be of relevance in determining the contours of the relationships
between Europe and Latin America, and then Latin America, Europe, and the
United States.

The Hispanospheres Principal Characteristics

Scholars in Great Britain and North America have for several decades
used the term Hispanist (hispanista) to refer to those who study the Spanish
language and culture in both its New World and Old World settings. And since
at least 1970, when the U.S. Census Bureau formally adopted the term
Hispanic as a designation of ethnicity, many have used it with reference
to people who share the ethnic, cultural, or linguistic heritage of the former
Spanish empire.
Many are uncomfortable with the use of the term Hispanic, taking
umbrage precisely because of its direct reference to Spain (Hispania being,
of course, the Roman designation for the Iberian peninsula). Those who prefer
Latinoa word popularized during the 1960s as a way to distinguish those
who trace their heritage to indigenous North Americans from those tracing
their blood lines to Spainbristle at Hispanic, which reminds them of
colonization and oppression. Mexican-American author Sandra Cisneros
deems Hispanic a slave name,6 apparently unaware that Latino is hardly
more culturally authentic than Hispanic for use by a people of American origin.
Others are ready to dismiss both terms altogether, arguing that they create
false categories, while papering over true national and cultural identities.
Im not Hispanic, Latino, or even Mexican-American, one Texas-born U.S.
passportholder complained on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

4
Ibid.
5
The relationship of Brazil to the Hispanosphere, and to what can be termed the
Lusosphere more generally, is a complicated issue. For the purposes of this paper, I have
treated Brazil as a case apart.
6
Darryl Fears, Latinos or Hispanics? Debate Widens about Identity of Spanish-Speaking
Population, Washington Post, Aug. 25, 2003.

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Hispanosphere

Im Mexican.7 He would seem, though, to be in the minority. A New York


Times/CBS poll published in August 2003 found that nearly 70 percent of
foreign-born Hispanics say they identify more with the United States than with
their country of origin.8
Fractious debates over the terms of cultural identity are peculiarly
reflective of North American multiculturalism. And yet they indicate some of
the perceptional barriers to the emergence of a collective Hispanospheric
identity. The absence of such a term in the Spanish language should give us
pause. The language does possess the term Hispanidad, which designates the
generic character of all peoples of Hispanic language and culture or the
united community of Hispanic peoples, but this term carries with it con-
siderable cultural baggage.9 Beginning in the 1930s, supporters of Francisco
Franco made hispanidad a centerpiece of their campaign to revivify traditional
Spanish values along corporatist, hierarchical, and Catholic lines. The move-
ment drew in large part on the concepts of Ramiro de Maeztu, whose Defensa
de la Hispanidad (1934) sought to revitalize pan-Hispanic culture after the
humiliations and defeats of the Spanish-American War. It was given further
impetus by the establishment of a Consejo de la Hispanidad (Council of
Hispanidad) and a Hispanic Cultural Institute in the early 1940s, and enjoyed
considerable support among segments of the Spanish and Latin American
right. At a time when a diplomatically isolated Spain was seeking to expand its
economic and ideological ties, Generalissimo Franco promoted a new coop-
eration among the former Spanish colonies, bound to Spain not by Spains
power but by the spiritual, social, and cultural heritage that united them.10
Although Spain would remain a central force in defining this hispanidad,
Franco assured the world that it had long abandoned the desire to impose its
might on unwilling partners. Hispanidad would be a collective endeavor.
Needless to say, many did not trust him. While North American policy
makers worried during World War II that the Falange Exteriorthe Spanish
equivalent of the Nazis Auslandorganisationwould foment trouble in the
New World and was perhaps even pursuing new dreams of empire, 11 the Latin
American Left dismissed hispanidad for what it was: an attempt by Franco to
garner diplomatic favor. He was by no means unsuccessful in this regard, for
Juan Perons recognition of Spain in 1946 proved crucial establishing Francos

7
Oscar Casares, Crossing the Border Without Losing Your Past, New York Times, Sept. 16,
2003.
8
Simon Romero and Janet Elder, Hispanics in U.S. Report Optimism, New York Times, Aug.
6, 2003.
9
Hispanidad, Diccionario de la lengua espanola (Madrid: Real Academia Espanola, 1984).
10
Francos Dia de la Raza (Columbus Day) 1946 speech, cited in Stanley G. Payne, The
Franco Regime: 19361975 (London: Phoenix, 1987), p. 361.
11
On American concerns, see, e.g., H. R. Southworth, The Spanish Phalanx and Latin
America, Foreign Affairs, Oct. 1939, and Thomas J. Hamiltons Spain Dreams of Empire,
Foreign Affairs, Apr. 1944.

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McMAHON

legitimacy. But this success came at the cost of branding hispanidad a


reactionary and possibly threatening venture.12
Yet by whatever name one chooses to call it, the Spanish-speaking
cultures of the transatlantic world do share many common characteristics of
history, culture, language, and religion. As one critic has observed, it may be
said that while the Latin American does not exist subjectivelyvery few see
themselves as Latin Americansthere does exist a Latin American type of
society that unites its component members and gives them a fundamental
uniformity.13 Extending this proposition to include the peoples of the former
Spanish metropole yields a less cohesive uniformity, certainly. But the number
of patterns, characteristics, and traits shared across the Atlantic is nonetheless
striking.
Language. Language is the most obvious and the most important of
these shared features. To imagine a language, Ludwig Wittgenstein observed
in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), is to imagine a form of life.
Arguably, the Spanish understood this long before the twentieth century.
As historians are fond of pointing out, in 1492, the very year that Columbus
sailed for the West Indies, and only eight months after the final Moorish
surrender at Granada, the humanist Antonio de Nebrija presented Ferdinand
and Isabella with a copy of his Gramatica Castellana, the first formal grammar
of the Spanish (or indeed any modern European) language. The queens
confessor explained to Isabella the works significance as she received a copy
at a small ceremony in Salamanca: After your Highness has subjected
barbarous peoples and nations of varied tongues, with conquest will come
the need for them to accept the laws that the conqueror imposes on the
conquered, and among them will be our language. In the preface to the
grammar published less than a year after Columbus returned from his first
voyage, Nebrija himself added, I have found one conclusion to be very true,
that language always follows empire, both have always commenced, grown
and flourished together.14 The conclusion would prove prescient. At the same
moment that Castilians on the Iberian peninsula were imagining Basques,
Navarros, Catalans, Muslims, and Jews being unified by one language
castellano, the language of Castilethey began to imagine a similar identity
for the empire across the seas. The origins of Spanish nationalism are roughly
coterminous with that of the empire.
Religion. In the Hispanosphere, language was used, first and foremost,
to spread the word. In this respect, the final, fifteenth-century phase of the
reconquistathe reconquest of Iberia for Christianity that had begun centuries
12
In this regard, it is noteworthy that an internet search for hispanidad returns sites with
affiliations to integral Catholicism and the Spanish monarchical tradition of Carlism.
13
Vctor Alba, The Latin Americans (New York and London: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), pp.
1718.
14
Both citations are taken from Henry Kamen, How Spain Became a World Power 1492
1763 (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), pp. 34.

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Hispanosphere

earlierprovided the impetus for the rapid conversion and subjugation of the
New Worlds many native inhabitants. Just as the new Castilian monarchy
proved tremendously adept at joining together Castilians, Basques, Murcians,
Catalans, and Andalusians in the single purpose of ensuring the ultimate
triumph of the Holy Church, it did so as successfully with the many
indigenous peoples of the New World, triumphing over the faiths of the
Aztecs and Incas in the same way that it triumphed over Muslims, Jews,
Albingenses, Illuminists, Erasmians, and (soon) Protestants, in the madre
patria.15 Granted, there was much borrowing and incorporation of native
practices in the New Worldimages of the Virgin of Guadalupe attest to this
syncretism. But of course this was also true in Europe. And though the infusion
of African religious practices also would significantly affect the development of
the Latin American faith, the triumph of Catholicismremaining virtually
unchallenged until quite recentlyis borne out by the statistics. In 1920,
more than four hundred years after the conquest, the number of Protestants
and Jews in Latin America was less than 2 percent of the total population,
almost all of them immigrants from Europe and the United States. This situation
has changed dramatically in the last several decades, but that does not alter the
fact that whereas the colonies of North America developed as experiments in
religious pluralism, the Hispanosphere was conceived, baptized, and reared
under a single faith.
Law. With language and religion, Spain carried law: the Roman or civil
law system that had already provided the basis and content of legal activity on
the Iberian peninsula for centuries. Until the early nineteenth century, all
Spanish dominions in the New World employed, virtually unaltered, the same
legal system as the mother country. As one observer has pointed out, The civil
law was as firmly rooted there by the time of independence as was the English
common law in the 13 colonies that formed the United States.16 Well after the
expulsion of Spain, this penchant for civil-law systems endured. Numerous
Latin American countries borrowed European legal codes such as the Code
Napoleon (which was adopted in several cases almost verbatim), the Spanish
Code of Commerce of 1829, and the Italian Civil Code of 1864. Inevitably,
given their respective economic and political importance, British common law
and American constitutional law also exerted considerable influence. But the
dominant force historically remained the unifying and programmatic thrust of
the original Roman law.
Economics. The same centralizing tradition evident in the Latin
American and Spanish legal cultures has also long been observable in
economic affairs. What Venezuelan author Carlos Rangel (192988) described
as the heritage of Spanish mercantilism was clearly an important factor in

15
J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain: 14691716 (New York: New American Library, 1966), p. 108.
16
Alexander T. Edelmann, Latin American Government and Politics: The Dynamics of a
Revolutionary Society (Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press, 1969), p. 466.

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McMAHON

forestalling the emergence in both Spain and Latin America of thriving


entrepreneurial and market cultures. Monopoly practices, privileges, restric-
tions placed on the free activity of individuals in the economic and other
domains are traditions profoundly anchored in societies of Spanish origin,
Rangel observed. Governments heir to the mercantilist Spanish tradition
naturally tend to intensify controls, multiply restrictions, raise taxation, without
ever considering that there may be as many corruptible men among those
who enforce restrictions and regulations as among those who suffer them.17
The influence of these practices can be seen at work in a range of twentieth-
century economic policies that stifled the independent mechanism of civil
society, be these the corporatist models favored by right-wing dictators or
populists such as Brazils Getulio Vargas or Argentinas Juan Peron, the
import-substitution policies of the interwar and postwar years; or the
socialist and Marxist varieties of central planning, the allure of which has
only recently begun to fade.
Politics. In addition to the direct overlap of the administrative machin-
ery of monarchy during the formal period of Spanish rule, Latin America and
Iberian Spain have shared several marked features in their social and political
evolution since the early nineteenth century. Among these may be included
government instability, with frequent revolution and regime change; repeated
interventions by the military in national political life (the pronuncamiento); an
authoritarian tendency only weakly balanced by countervailing forces in civil
society (caudillismo or caciquismo); and finally a polarized, Right-Left model
of politics in which government is seen as a zero-sum proposition between
mutually exclusive alternatives. Until very recently, the practice of liberal-
democratic politics in both Spain and Latin America has been, to put it mildly,
imperfect. As Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was moved to observe in
1992, in a statement that could also have been applied to Spain until at least the
early 1980s:
The culture within which we live and act today in Latin America is neither liberal nor is
it altogether democratic. We have democratic governments, but our institutions, our
reflexes and our mentalidades are very far from being democratic. They remain
populist and oligarchic, or absolutist, collectivist, or dogmatic, flawed by social and
racial prejudices, immensely intolerant with respect to political adversaries, and
devoted to the worst monopoly of all, that of the truth.18

Vargas Llosas invocation here of cultureand in particular the illiberal and


undemocratic strains in Latin American culture that have allegedly shaped its

17
Carlos Rangel, The Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate Relationship with the United States,
revised edition (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1987), pp. 2035.
18
Mario Vargas Llosa, America Latina y la Opcion Liberal, in Barry Levine, ed., El desafo
neoliberal: El fin del tercermundismo en Amerca Latina (Bogota, 1992), cited in Claudio Veliz,
The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 19091.

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Hispanosphere

institutions and collective modes of thought over the centuriesis, of course,


complicated and controversial. Yet no shortage of skilledand one might add
politically intrepidobservers, including Rangel, Claudio Veliz, and Lawrence
Harrison, have probed the culture question in recent years, drawing out a
number of the points that I have touched on above. Their work has by no
means dispensed with complications and controversy. But it does make clear
that Vargas Llosas recourse to a cultural explanation in order to account for
Latin American shortcomings on the political and economic front cannot be
lightly dismissed. Several long-term historical forces may be said to have
shaped Latin American and Hispanospheric culture in ways that make
the transition to systems of liberal democracy and free market economics
particularly challenging.

The Hispanic Hedgehog

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big
thing. So observed Isaiah Berlin in a celebrated 1951 essay on Tolstoy,
quoting the seventh-century BCE Greek poet Archilochus. Berlins well-
known development of the idea holds that the hedgehog relates everything
to one central vision, where the wily fox pursues many ends, often unrelated
or even contradictory. By Claudio Velizs argument, Spain, along with its
former New World possessions, is the hedgehog, and Great Britain, along
with its former American colonies, is the fox. The British-American fox has
shown itself to be endlessly adaptive, energetic, and inventive since the
eighteenth-century, creating an economy and a political culture that knows
many things. Spain and its New World colonies, by contrast, have until very
recently displayed imperviousness to deviation or change and resistance to
innovation. They plod and react, burrowing down in the service of one big
idea.
Max Weber, R. H. Tawney, and Lord Macauley saw Spains one big idea
to be Catholicism. As Macauley observed in an 1840 essay, the striking
contrast that could already be observed between eighteenth-century Britain
and Spain in arms, arts, sciences, letters, commerce, and agriculture was not
confined to the European side of the Atlantic. Comparing Englands colonies to
Spains, he wrote that the North owes its great civilization and prosperity
chiefly to the moral effect of the Protestant Reformation, and that the decays of
the southern countries . . . is to be mainly ascribed to the great Catholic
revival.19
Veliz is not as Whiggish as Lord Macauley, nor as willing as Weber to
see everything through the prism of a Protestant (or Catholic) ethic. Rather, he
might be best described as Tocquevillian. For Veliz is an analyst of what

19
Cited in Veliz, New World of the Gothic Fox, p. 3.

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McMAHON

Tocqueville described as habits of the heartthe various opinions, attitudes,


laws, and mores that make up the whole moral and intellectual state of a
people. He also follows closely the lead of Tocquevilles The Old Regime and
the French Revolution, which argued that the cultural changes brought about
by this mammoth upheaval were themselves the result of previous political
changes, above all the growth of the modern bureaucratic state. Similarly, Veliz
is inclined to see the political history of the Spanish Old Regime as a critical
factor in shaping the habits of the heart of the Hispanosphere for centuries to
come.
To Veliz, the one big idea of the Spanish hedgehog is the consolidation
of state power. He argues that well before Great Britain, France, and other
countries on the European continent began erecting the machinery of mon-
archical states during the seventeenth-century Age of Absolutism, Spain had
already achieved a remarkable degree of consolidation and cohesion around
the crown of Castile as a result of the mobilizing efforts of the final defeat of the
Moors and the Counter-Reformation. Moreover, the accretion of central
authority that was achieved in Spain at the expense of the power of local
grandees and regions was realized in the New World with even greater
success.
Like the Greek poets prickly metaphorical beast, the Catholic monarchs and their
ministers knew one big thing very well indeed: if their fledgling New World overseas
was to be well governed, virtuous, and prosperous, they had the responsibility to
exclude from it any vestiges of the divisive particularisms, baronial greed, and
seigneurial ambitions associated with the feudalism that was then fading throughout
western Europe.20

In practice, this meant denying the New World the medieval institutions of
aristocratic power, such as the cortes, the councils, and audiencias that in the
Old World were able to mediate, however imperfectly, the absolute authority
of the crown. What was increasingly true in Spain was even more so in the
Spanish Empire: the power of the Catholic kings was virtually unchecked.
Following a remarkably brief period of conquest and pacification, Spanish
power in the New World remained virtually undisputed until the late eight-
eenth century.21
The success of this hedgehog strategy was repeated on many other
levels as well. The Spanish Crowns interest in economic matters, for
example, was meticulous, involving total monopolistic control over
industry and trade, the creation of a princely bureaucracy that lived almost

20
Ibid., p. 29. Veliz pursues this same argument at greater length in his The Centralist
Tradition of Latin America (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1980), esp. pp. 1628.
21
The one exception, Gonzalo Pizarros attempted rebellion in Peru in the mid 16th century,
proves the rule. Pizarro and his followers were suppressed with such force that as Veliz
observes, he had no imitators during the three centuries of Spanish rule in the New World
(p. 31).

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Hispanosphere

solely from taxes (and that grew in direct proportion as they were
raised), and the steady application of centralized authority. In economic
matters, no less than politics, diversity, heterogeneity, adulteration, and
discontinuity in any form were considered to be inimical to the flawless
unity demanded.22
In New World religious and intellectual matters, Spains role as the
spearhead of the Counter-Reformation was all the more pointed for the
colonies lack of resistance. Spain was able to effect all the institutions and
ideologies it had honed in the fierce fighting of the Continental religious
warsthe Inquisition, the Society of Jesus, the integrating vigor of a revived
Thomism, the rigidly hierarchical understanding of social order, censorship,
and the other-worldly mysticism perfected by the likes of San Juan de la Cruz
and Santa Teresa de Avilavirtually without opposition. In Latin America, the
thrones authority over the altar was potentially greater than anywhere else in
the world. By the bull Universalis ecclesiae regimini of 1508, the pope had
conceded to the Spanish kings in perpetuity the privilege of founding and
organizing all churches, and presenting to all sees and livings in all overseas
territories which they possessed then or might acquire in future. In practice
this meant that not a single priest or bishop could cross to the New World
without a royal permit, and that the crown need not wait for papal confirma-
tion before making any ecclesiastical appointments. Similarly, not a single
hospital, church, bishopric, or university could be founded without the
authorization of the crown. In the Spanish empire, earlier and to a greater
degree than was true almost anywhere else in Europe, the church acted at the
behest of the throne.
Veliz may overstate his case, exaggerating the power of the early-
modern Spanish state in practice, if not in theory. Similarly, he has compara-
tively little to say about the well-documented inertia of those surviving
indigenous peoples in the New World, who showed themselves to be
remarkably resistant to the extension of Spanish culture and power. But
the implications of Velizs general argument are profound. He makes a
compelling case that the French precedent that had frightened Tocque-
villethe absolute power wielded during the Revolution and the forces that
militated against the development of intermediary associationsoccurred in
the Spanish case to a greater order of magnitude. His claim that not a few
emphatically republican regimes of the New World are still living today
under the centralist shadow of Philip IIs extraordinary decades tells us
something important about the long-term political culture of the Hispano-
sphere.23

22
Ibid., p. 32.
23
Ibid., p. 47.

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McMAHON

Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment

Velizs argument can be extended to account for the astonishing anarchy


and fragmentation that swept Latin America during the wars of independence. In
effect, the breakdown of this period, which brought an abrupt end to nearly
three centuries without large-scale violence, can best be understood as the
terrible rush to fill a vacuum opened up by the collapse of absolute authority. Just
as in France during the Revolution, one leader after another stepped forward to
serve as the peoples spokesman. But in a culture without established mechan-
isms of representation, and without institutionalized traditions of mediating
power, legitimacy was based in the end on force of arms alone. The result, as
Bolvar remarked, was terrible days, blood flowing in streams and an anarchy
that would long render Latin America ungovernable. When he looked to the
future at the end of his life, the Liberator predicted that a host of tyrants will rise
from my grave to drown in blood their civil wars. The greatest birth of nations in
world history until the break-up of the European empires after World War II was
thus baptized in blood. In this dark vision, warlordism, savagery, and civil
fragmentation were the terrible underbelly of the Spanish hedgehog.24
It is hard to overstate the long-term effect the wars of liberation had on
the development of the Hispanosphere. Equally important is another force that
simultaneously issued from these wars and fanned their fire: the Enlight-
enment and its Counter-Enlightenment response.
There has been little study of the Enlightenment, its reception, and its
relationship to the upheavals of the wars of independence in the context of the
Spanish Empire,25 even though the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlighten-
ment arguably had as powerful an effect on the Hispanosphere as elsewhere in
the Catholic world. Far from further dividing Spain from Europe, or marking
off a Latin American exception, the Enlightenment actually cemented cultural
ties within the Spanish-speaking world. As one critic has aptly observed, The
Enlightenment, though varying from one country to another, was marked by
the same basic features on both sides of the Atlantic and underwent greater
changes in crossing the Pyrenees into Spain than in crossing the Atlantic,
mainly from Spain, to Spanish America.26

24
The lines from Bolvar are cited in Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society
18151830 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 651.
25
The old standard with respect to the New World is Arthur P. Whitacker, ed., Latin America
and the Enlightenment: Essays (Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 1967), first published in 1942. See also
A. Owen Aldridge, ed., The Ibero-American Enlightenment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1971), and Diana Soto Arango, Miguel Angel Puig Samper, and Luis Carlos Arboleda eds., La
Ilustracion en America colonial: biliografca crtica (Madrid, 1995). On Spain itself, Richard
Herrs The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U. Press, 958),
remains a fundamental point of departure.
26
A. Owen Alridge, The Concept of the Ibero-American Enlightenment, in The Ibero-
American Enlightenment, p. 22.

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Hispanosphere

It is misleading to think of the Enlightenment itself as a direct and


ineluctable cause of the movement for independence in the Spanish New
World. The general spirit of empiricism, utilitarianism, skepticism, and rational
inquiry were certainly corrosive of Spanish absolutism and Catholic ortho-
doxy. But it can be argued that this spirit was actually promoted most strongly
by the Spanish Bourbons themselves, who sought, somewhat along the lines
of the German Cameralists, to shore up their rule, promoting greater efficiency
and utility, by pursuing enlightened reforms. Moreover, while key figures in
the independence movement, such as Francisco de Miranda, Mariano Moreno,
and notably Bolvar himself, were indeed intimately familiar with important
works of Enlightenment thought, the old question of whether books really
cause revolutions must be asked, particularly in this case, where their influ-
ence was relatively circumscribed and contained. Historian John Lynch con-
cludes, summarizing a complicated story, While the Enlightenment had an
important role in Spanish America . . . this role was not primarily a cause of
independence.27
Yet the Enlightenment was, Lynch continues elsewhere, an indis-
pensable source from which leaders drew to justify, defend and legitimize their
actions, both during the Independence movement and long after.28 This is
extremely important, for the process had the effect of associating Enlight-
enment thought and principlesparticularly French Enlightenment princi-
plesdirectly with revolutionary change. Henceforth, a crucial constellation
of valuesreligious tolerance, freedom of speech and association, represen-
tative government and the rights of man, the separation of church and state,
economic laissez-faire, liberty, equality, and fraternitywere associated
directly with both the abolition of the European Old Regime and the liberation
from Spanish tyranny in the New World.
In turn, and no less importantly, supporters of the Empire, leading
figures of the Church hierarchy, monarchists, and other conservatives came
to see the Enlightenment and its values as directly responsible for the violent
and unsettling changes that seemed to be sweeping the world. Thus, as early
as 1799, the Cathedral Chapter of Mexico City could complain that the
pernicious doctrines of Freemasons and French philosophers were con-
taminating society, echoing in this way the voices of a Catholic Counter-
Enlightenment literature that had flourished on the continent since at least
the mid-eighteenth century.29 With the outbreak of the Wars of Independence,
such complaints only multiplied, with observers in both the New World and
Spain decrying the nonsense of the modern libertines, Voltaire, Rousseau,
27
John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions 18081826, 2nd edition (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1986), p. 28.
28
John Lynch, The Colonial Roots of Independence, in Latin America between Colony and
Nation. Selected Essays (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 103.
29
Cited in Nancy Marguerite Farriss, Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico, 17591821: The
Crisis of Ecclesiastical Privilege (London, 1968), pp. 1923.

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McMAHON

and their disciples and partisans, while warning of the noxious influence of
the doctrines of the encyclopediasts, whom they charged with sowing
atheistic, materialist, and revolutionary beliefs.30 Soon liberalisma word that
was in fact a Spanish coinage (liberalismo) quickly adopted in English and
Frenchwas being implicated in these sweeping indictments. Liberalism,
Catholic polemicists argued, was the bastard child of the Enlightenment, an
insidious force that undermined authority and sapped faith wherever it spread.
Thus, regardless of the actual role of Enlightenment ideas as an initial
cause in the movements for Latin American independence, defenders and
detractors alike came to concur on their centrality and importance. Their
concurrence laid the groundwork for a particularly divisive pattern of political
and intellectual opposition in which the world was seen as a battleground of
contesting and irreconcilable forces, a war to the death pitting Left against
Right. At one extreme, Spanish and Latin American conservatives grew
convinced that the destruction of the empire and the liberal assault on order,
hierarchy, and faith were products of a conspiracy that began with the
Enlightenment but had metastasized to other forms of social and political
dissidence.31 In nineteenth-century Spain, the critic Menendez y Pelayo was
far from alone in believing that the subversive forces undermining his country
(republicanism, socialism, anarchism, and materialism) were outgrowths of
enciclopedismo, the foreign cancer that had emanated originally from Enlight-
enment France. In nineteenth-century Latin America, as well, conservatives
were inclined to view their liberal adversaries, along with the worrying spread
of Freemasonry and (gradually) Protestantism, as evidence of an original and
ongoing anti-Catholic plot.32 In the twentieth century, Marxists and some-
times Jews were slotted into these categories, thus producing what Rangel
identifies as the Judeo-Protestant-Masonic-Liberal-Marxist Anti-Christian
Conspiracy, theories of which remained prevalent among sectors of the
Latin American Right until only recently. From this perspective, the alter-
natives to authoritarian regimes, particularly during the Cold War, seemed
relatively few.33
Needless to say, such a polarized environment was hardly hospitable
to political compromise. On the contrary, it helped bolster a political culture in
which winners were apt to take all, perpetuating trenchant divisions inimical to
stable development and the orderly transition of power.

30
On the eighteenth-century Spanish context, see Javier Herreros Los origines del pensa-
miento reaccionario espanol (Madrid, 1971).
31
On the development of Latin American conservatism in the nineteenth century in the
context of doctrinal opposition to liberalism, see Jose Luis Romero, ed., Pensamiento con-
servador (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1978).
32
See Jean Pierre Bastian, ed., Protestantes, Liberales, y Francmasones: Sociedades de ideas y
modernidad en America Latina, siglo XIX (Mexico City: Cehila, 1990).
33
Rangel, The Latin Americans, 15962. A classic argument in this vein is provided in Msgr.
Jose Mara Caros El misterio de la masonera, reprinted in 1954, and cited by Rangel.

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Hispanosphere

Goodbye to All That?

Much of the above might seem historical. Spain, after all, has achieved
a great deal since the inception of the 1978 federal constitution. In 2003 it
celebrated a quarter-century of stable multi-party rule, and it is enjoying the
sustained economic progress of a well established free-market economy.
Under the leadership of Jose Mara Aznar (19962004), it witnessed the
successful consolidation of the Popular Party, which is conservative but not
of the Right, respectful and supportive of the norms of liberal democracy,
while firmly defending religion, the family, private property, and the cohesion
of the nation. The Left, under the Spanish Socialist Party, has moved steadily
toward the center. Gone forever, it would seem, are the deep cleavages that
wracked the country during much of the nineteenth century and produced
such catastrophic conflict during the short-lived Second Republic and the
Spanish Civil War.
In Latin America, too, one can point to a number of recent successes
and positive developments. For the first time in its history, democracy (at
least nominally) is now the norm, and with the collapse of communism,
armed insurgencies and challenges to the free market have waned. The
stunning growth of evangelical Protestantism has diluted the religious
monopoly of the Catholic Church, forcing it to respond accordingly. And
yet old problems die hard. Former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda
observes: In too many nations, human rights, property rights, due process,
an efficient and accessible judicial system, and brief, nonprogrammatic
constitutions are either insufficiently represented or inadequately
respected.34 Even in Chile, where economic and political reforms have
arguably taken deeper root than anywhere else in Latin America, the
divisions that surfaced at the thirty-year anniversary of the Pinochet coup
on September 11, 2003, suggest the resilience of the political culture of Right-
Left contestation. Such problems are worse in Venezuela and Columbia,
while in Argentina and Peru, halting structural reforms have failed to deliver
the hoped-for economic results. If Spain has triumphed over its past, Latin
America is still struggling to emerge from its own and will require a great deal
of assistance to do so.

Friends in the Neighborhood: The Need for Engagement

Spain had a good deal of assistance in achieving its economic miracle:


U.S. security guarantees during the Cold War, massive foreign capital inflows,
and the EUs shepherding through the process. If indeed there are strong forces
in the Hispanospheres culture militating against the success Spain is now

34
Jorge Castaneda, The Forgotten Relationship, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2003, p. 79.

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McMAHON

enjoying, then such help is crucial. As Lawrence Harrison has pointed out,
although culture does change, it does not do so easily:
Democratic forms and open economic policies are a major step forward for Latin
America, and they are likely to promote the values and attitudes that are necessary
for their successful functioning. But a good deal more is necessary before Latin
America can be confident of the irreversibility of democracy and free market politics,
to say nothing of purposeful, sustained, and rapid movement toward First World
status.35

A number of Latin Americans have made similar arguments of late;


Castanedas above-cited article is a case in point. A former Marxist with a
tendency in his youth to adopt the well-warn themes of Latin anti-American-
ism, in 1995 Castaneda surprised many with Ferocious Differences, a hard-
hitting article in The Atlantic, in which he ascribed numerous shortcomings
of Mexican development to problems within Mexican culture. He holds to
this line, calling at the same time for increased U.S. involvement in the
region to ensure that the already perceptible disillusionment with demo-
cratization and economic reform does not spread further. Castaneda has
thus evolved from Yanqui, go home to Yanqui, come here. He sees
inevitable, but regrettable, lack of U.S. focus on the region since 9/11 as a
cause for concern.
Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo, too, stresses the importance of
aggressive U.S. leadership and assistance in the region. Help me to free my
people, he repeatedly implored in a September 2003 speech at the Council on
Foreign Relations, pressing for increased private-sector investment and
strengthened economic, political, and cultural ties.36 The New York Times,
remarking on this transformation, captioned an April 2004 article, For Once,
Latin Americans Ask the U.S. to Butt In.37
Given its immediate and long-term historical experience, Spain is
potentially well placed to help the United States in this process of engagement.
To some extent Spain began to assume this role under Aznar, who encouraged
investment and closer ties with the region while at the same time reiterating his
countrys commitment to a strong relationship with the United States. Closer
transatlantic ties between Spain and its former colonies could benefit the
United States by creating tensions within the EU that would thwart its becoming
a more unified body, better able to challenge U.S. interests. To Washington,
Madrid is thus an important potential ally in the search to promote closer and
more effective U.S.-EU ties.

35
Lawrence E. Harrison, The Pan-American Dream: Do Latin Americas Cultural Values
Discourage True Partnership with the United States and Canada (Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 1997), p. 257.
36
Alejandro Toledo, on-the-record speech delivered at the CFR, New York, Sept. 22, 2003.
37
Larry Rohter, For Once, Latin Americans Ask the U.S. to Butt In, New York Times, Apr. 4,
2004.

670 | Orbis
Hispanosphere

Of course, this may be less feasible in the wake of the recent Spanish
elections, which brought to power a Socialist government under Jose Luis
Rodriguez Zapatero,. Zapatero has allied himself closely with French and
German strategists, who favor a more integrated and assertive EU, raising the
possibility that Spains enhanced ties with Latin America could serve as a
Trojan horse for greater EU (as opposed to strictly Spanish) influence in the
region. As Gerard Baker, associate editor of the Financial Times, pointed out
in a recent article for the Weekly Standard, should Europe decide to throw its
sizeable economic weight around in Latin America, it could have great
influence.38 EU external affairs commissioner Chris Patten has pointed out
that the EU is the main investor in the region, its second largest trading partner,
and provides nearly half the regions development assistance.39 Its potential
influence in Latin America is therefore considerable. And as the success of
France and Germany in dissuading Chile and Mexico from voting with the
United States at the UN prior to the Iraqi war suggests, this influence may not
always be to the United States advantage.
In the end, however, these larger strategic considerations pale before
the more pressing concern of achieving a secure, democratic, and prosperous
Latin America. This is, and will remain, a vital North American interest, and as
such demands increased vigilance. Where decades ago, under the Roosevelt
administration, a good neighbor policy meant limiting U.S. involvement in
the region, today such a policy entails increasing participation in Latin
American affairs, with an eye to shoring up threatened democracies, assisting
weakened economies, and bolstering judicial systems and the rule of law.
For many of the reasons discussed above, implementing such a policy
will not be easy. The bleak pessimism of George F. Kennan after touring the
region in 1950 remains instructive:
[T]he shadow of a tremendous helplessness and impotence falls today over most of the
Latin American world. The handicaps to progress are written in human blood and in
the tracing of geography; and in neither case are they readily susceptible of oblitera-
tion. They lie heavily across the path of all human progress; and the answers people
have suggested to them thus far have been feeble and unpromising.40

And yet, more than a half century later, the United States and its allies possess
at least some promising answers to the questions that have long bedeviled the
region. Here, it is worth recalling once again the insight of Tocqueville.
The Americans of the United States already exercise a great moral influence upon all
the nations of the New World. Enlightenment comes from them. All the nations
inhabiting the same continent are already accustomed to consider them as the most

38
Gerard Baker, Against United Europe, Weekly Standard, Sept. 22, 2003.
39
Chris Patten, Opening of the Seminar on Social Cohesion in Latin America and the
Caribbean, Brussels, June 5, 2003, http://europa.eu.int.
40
George F. Kennan, Memoirs 19251950(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967),
p. 481.

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McMAHON

enlightened, the most powerful, and the richest member of the Great American family.
Consequently all eyes are turned toward the United States, and as far as they can they
imitate the peoples dwelling there.41

Of course, in the midst of the United States ongoing and unpopular struggle in
Iraq, such pronouncements may seem out of context. But the
potential of Tocquevilles words remains, and should be made the
most of while history is still on our side.

41
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed., J. P. Mayer
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1988), p. 405.

672 | Orbis

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