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