The Problem of Political Order in Early Republican Spanish America

Abstract

The persistent instability and disorder of Spanish American polities in the post-Independence period was undoubtedly one of the most perplexing concerns of Spanish American elites in the nineteenth century. It has remained a subject of interpretive debate by twentieth-century students of the area. The following article sketches several general approaches to the problem among twentieth-century interpreters, compares contemporary nineteenth-century analyses with the salient twentieth-century interpretations, and offers a critical commentary on the various sorts of twentieth-century analytical frameworks.The three salient twentieth-century interpretations of political disorder in the nineteenth century are: (1) those that emphasise deeply embedded characteristics of Spanish American culture as underlying causes of political instability; (2) those that attribute political disorder to structural problems, particularly to weaknesses in the economic structure or shifts in the social structure; (3) those that see political instability as a reflection of conflicting ideologies, economic interests, and/or the aspirations or fears of identifiable social groups.The distinctive feature of cultural interpretations of Latin American politics is their common belief that cultural characteristics are indelible and more-or-less unchangeable. And, since such cultural interpretations emphasise what might be considered ‘negative’ aspects of Spanish or Spanish American culture in order to explain defects in Spanish American politics, their assumption that cultures do not change over time tends to imbue such interpretations with a certain pessimism about the future of Spanish American politics.An early twentieth-century exponent of cultural approaches to understanding Spanish-American political disorder was Francisco García Calderón, who, thinking particularly of the phenomenon of caudillismo, emphasised Spanish authoritarian individualism.