La diplomacia española en Uruguay en el siglo XIX: Génesis del tratado de paz de 1870

Abstract

This book describes different aspects of Spanish-Uruguayan relations from the 1830s to the 1880s. It was based on Spanish sources stored in the Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, the Archivo Histórico Nacional, and the Archivo Histórico de la Administración; and Uruguayan sources kept in the Archivo General de la Nación, the Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, and the Archivo del Museo Histórico Nacional. The author also took advantage of Spanish and Uruguayan parliamentary records and the press.In this work, Bárbara Díaz has made a successful effort to interweave discussion of bilateral foreign policy concerns with the topics of domestic politics, both Spanish and Uruguayan. She has also managed to show the pronounced differences between Uruguay’s capital city, Montevideo, and the rest of the country, the campaña oriental, and the influential role of those differences in Uruguayan foreign policy toward Spain. To study the bilateral relationship, the author focuses on three points: Spanish and Uruguayan foreign policy aims and mutual perceptions, the special interest groups such as Spanish traders operating in Montevideo, and the activity displayed by both sides’ diplomats.Díaz also considered the influence of international law, through statements made by Latin American jurists like Juan Bautista Alberdi, Andrés Bello, and Carlos Calvo. This last point is especially valuable, because it is common to find works that deliberately disdain contemporary international law regarding past events, considering it as an irrelevant sort of superstructure. Authors doing so forget that there always are two kinds of powers in the international arena: those states that can shape international law according to their national interests (or defy internationally accepted rules at a negligible cost, if any) and those states that cannot influence international rules and that only can defy international law at a high cost. But, as international law includes widely accepted rules of ideal behavior, it proved to be a double-edged sword. Stronger states, which model international law into expressions of their convenience, usually help to enact rules that afterward can be used by weaker states to defend themselves from excessive claims. In this context, the story emerges of Spanish-Uruguayan negotiations up to the exchange on October 9, 1882, of ratifications of the treaty signed in 1870.There are a few elements that could be improved for a new edition. For example, the absence of sources from the Archivo General de Indias deserves an explanation. José Presas’s Juicio imparcial sobre las principales causas de la revolución de la América española ought to have been quoted directly from the easily available original edition (p. 33), and the viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata was not founded in 1777 but in 1776 (p. 65). Moreover, although Díaz’s story starts in 1833 (p. 27), books such as Edmundo A. Heredia’s Planes españoles para reconquistar Hispanoamérica (1810–1818) and especially José M. Mariluz Urquijo’s Los proyectos españoles para reconquistar el Río de la Plata (1820–1833) could have helped to trace and identify more acutely the forces profondes, following Pierre Renouvin and Jean Baptiste Duroselle (p. 19). Thus, the Spanish Crown’s attempt to have its debt in Hispanic America recognized by the new states could illustrate how Fernando VII’s shadow reached Spanish policy toward a former possession like Uruguay, at least until 1882.In sum, Bárbara Díaz’s La diplomacia española en Uruguay en el siglo XIX provides a useful analysis of the relationship between Spain and Uruguay in the nineteenth century.