Independence and the Creation of Nation-States in Iberian America: A Comparative Analysis of Portuguese and Spanish America

Abstract

The process of nation-state building in Latin America was certainly not even; it took longer in some cases than in others; and the creation of new republics was far from being a generalized phenomenon, let alone a swift one. In the Americas, it can be said that only the United States constituted an exception, bringing the experiment of the modern republic into the world at the very first fracture of the Ancien Régime. Moreover, the American Revolution opened the way for both France and Haiti to also accelerate their own internal processes and move to the peak of the so-called Age of Revolutions. Nevertheless, even in the example of the early American republic, the structures of the modern nation-state would only be fully realized much later, in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was only in the aftermath of the Civil War, especially during the two decades following Reconstruction, that more Hamiltonian-like or centralized policies took place in America, promoted by a de facto national state project. Conversely, in the case of Iberian America, what could be perceived throughout the first half of the nineteenth century was a series of long-term political changes, initially triggered by the fall of the Spanish Empire and followed by decades of revolutions and wars of independence. Attempts at nation building took different directions among the various parts of the former Iberian empires, and the political map of the continent changed many times over during the post-revolutionary period. Liberalism and republicanism wrought many important changes to the principles of legitimization of political power, but there was no single republican model for Iberian American countries. The label of Republicanism itself applied at the time to a great variety of endeavours, some radical, others not, which brought about the development of many new political practices. Such practices certainly created modifications in the relationships between the ‘many and the few’ and, at the same time, extended and redefined the old borders of inclusion and exclusion for the new emergent polities. Class, ethnic, racial, and gender cleavages all need to be considered from this perspective, and the different connections these groups were to establish with the building of citizenship under the new order must be highlighted for each of the different societies under study. In short, diversity was what prevailed as ‘the’ pattern.