Left Liberalism and Race in the Evolution of Colombian Popular National Identity

Abstract

Though a nation of discordant regionalism and historically weak central institutions, Colombia can paradoxically claim strong currents of popular national identity. It is well known that long centuries of relative economic isolation, coupled with Colombia's largely subsistence internal economy and torturous topography, provided few opportunities to integrate the nation's different regions. Such conditions resulted in fractured regional identities and racial compositions. What few links to the world market Colombia enjoyed before the late nineteenth century came from the mining of gold, with short episodes of tobacco and quinine exportation. Only in the 1880s and later did coffee production finally reorient the nation's economy and introduce new questions of land tenure and social relations. Colombia's fiercely partisan political system evolved during the nineteenth century, therefore, when the country was still overwhelmingly rural, inward-looking, and little more than a collection of semi-autonomous regions. Keith Christie noted that before the 1950s, regionalism was so strong that “Bogotá was essentially just another provincial capital.” As a consequence, the national army in the nineteenth century seldom proved more powerful than the many rebel armies it faced. Indeed, according to the basic Weberian definition of the “state” as the entity that controls a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and evidenced by the fact that the national government still does not control large portions of the country's territory, Colombia's central state structures continue to be glaringly weak at the end of the twentieth century.