La invención política: Bolivia, Ecuador, Perú en el siglo XIX

Abstract

This book, originally published in 1992 in French, is based on the seven years of research that resulted in the author’s 1990 doctoral thesis. It is not the first book Demélas has dedicated to the Andes: in 1980 she published Nationalisme sans nation? La Bolivie XIX-XXsiècles and in 1987 and 1988, together with Yves Saint-Geours, Jerusalén y Babilonia: Religión y política en América del Sur; El caso del Ecuador and La vie quotidienne en Amérique du Sud au temps de Bolivar.The present volume, inspired by the ideas of Max Weber, presents a broad description and analysis of “the representations, social structures, and political practices” (p. 29) of the principal actors of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru in order to examine the reasons for the failed democractic experiments of the nineteenth century. She does not limit herself to an account of these failures but rather examines their situations (taken as illustrations and not as evidence) in order to demonstrate the nature of politics and its practice. This move forms part of the recent return to political history, practiced analytically and purged of its past obsessions.The book’s nine chapters, divided into two parts, contrast the proposals of political modernity—embodied in the discussions of the Cortes de Cádiz and the liberal constitution of 1812—with their reception in the Andes and the transactions they gave rise to. These proposals, certainly, were revolutionary—especially given the colonial context of Andean societies, whose traditions of social exclusion, spacial fragmentation, corporativism, and Catholicism made them particularly hostile toward these messages. The second part of the book is devoted to demonstrating the mechanisms of accommodation that resulted from the interaction between these messages and local realities.The rupture with the traditional political order began in 1812 with the establishment of universal suffrage and the call for New World representatives at the Cortes de Cádiz. Demélas places the deciding factor for the unraveling of the colonial system within Spain’s serious political issues between 1808 and 1814; at the same time, she questions the theory of national historiographers who continue to search for the “precursors” to the separation from the metropolis. But to declare a democratic independence is one thing, while to put it into practice is something else entirely. In effect, how could vassals (and Indian vassals, at that) be converted suddenly into citizens? How could equality be stressed in a society founded on inequality? How could the idea of the inalienable rights of individuals be made compatible with indigenous communities that functioned as corporate entities and whose surpluses were now, paradoxically, more necessary to support the shaky new states? The author discusses the misunderstandings that were produced in the process of resolving these tensions by means of economic policies, education, or patriotic symbolism. As if these obstacles were not enough, the nature of the national state and its own concept of its territory were both murky and filled with ambiguities. The means of accommodation, as a result, consisted in the privatization of political power and the consequent emergence of gamonalismo.Marie-Danielle Demélas’s book is an important contribution to our understanding of the cultural and political practices of these three central Andean nations during the nineteenth century. Her careful reconstruction of these practices demonstrates, in effect, the diverse mechanisms through which political actors reconciled their interests with the demands of political modernity and shows the subterfuges they used in order to preserve and promote their interests within the framework of a new political order. The life histories of Vicente Rocafuerte, García Moreno, and Aniceto Arce demonstrate how old ties to church and family were used and mixed with access to political power, as was the important effort at the modernization of Ecuadorean society by means of education. The demands of pactismo—that is, the recognition of the people as the source of legitimate political power, possessed of the inalienable right to rebel—was also a dimension of this past, now used as a justification for the political unrest of the present.Nevertheless, the book’s structure and the author’s narrative present a few difficulties. Although the analysis of the Cortes de Cádiz and the discussions it raised is a long-awaited contribution, the author’s decision to illustrate her points with discontinuous examples presents clear limitations and impedes the reader’s ability to gain a sense of process. To conceive of history as a process and not as a disjointed mosaic of situations would have allowed the author to capture the regional dimension of Andean politics, in its unity and its diversity, and not as a collection of three separate republics.