American Imaginaries: Nations, Societies and Capitalism in the Many Americas (Social Imaginaries) 9781786609670, 9781786609694, 1786609673

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American Imaginaries

Social Imaginaries Series Editors: Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle, Saulius Geniusas, John W. M. Krummel, and Jeremy C. A. Smith This groundbreaking series aims to investigate social imaginaries from theoretical, comparative, historical, and interdisciplinary perspectives. Its objective is to foster challenging research on the burgeoning but heterogeneous field of social imaginaries, on the one hand, and the related field of the creative imagination, on the other. The series seeks to publish rigorous and innovative research that reflects the international, multiregional, and interdisciplinary scope across these fields. Titles in the Series Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion Edited by Suzi Adams Productive Imagination Edited by Saulius Geniusas and Dmitri Nikulin Stretching the Limits of Productive Imagination Edited by Saulius Geniusas Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions Edited by Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith The Labyrinth of Modernity: Horizons, Pathways and Mutations By Johann P. Arnason The Creative Imagination: Indeterminacy and Embodiment in the Writings of Kant, Fichte, and Castoriadis By Jodie Lee Heap Hate Speech against Women Online: Concepts and Countermeasures By Louise Richardson-Self Debating Imaginal Politics: Dialogues with Chiara Bottici Edited by Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith Historical Imagination: Hermeneutics and Cultural Narrative By Paul Fairfield American Imaginaries: Nations, Societies, and Capitalism in the Many Americas By Jeremy C. A. Smith

American Imaginaries Nations, Societies, and Capitalism in the Many Americas

Jeremy C. A. Smith

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Selection and editorial matter © Jeremy C. A. Smith, 2022 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Smith, Jeremy, 1966– author. Title: American imaginaries : nations, societies and capitalism in the many Americas / Jeremy C. A. Smith. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2022. | Series: Social imaginaries | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022027265 (print) | LCCN 2022027266 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786609670 (cloth) | ISBN 9781786609694 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: America—Civilization—Philosophy. | Imaginary (Philosophy) Classification: LCC E20 .S64 2022 (print) | LCC E20 (ebook) | DDC 970—dc23/ eng/20220801 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027265 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027266 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii PART I:  AMERICAN IMAGINARIES: DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL SOCIETIES

1

1

Introduction3

2

Making Americans: Migration and Cities as Metropolitan Imaginaries

25

3

Creating Capitalism: National States and Regional Patterns

61

4

Political Imaginaries, Political Traditions: Ideologies and State Formation87

PART II:  TRANSNATIONAL REGIONS OF THE DIVERSE AMERICAS

121

5

The Undeclared Empire?: US Power in the Western Hemisphere and Beyond

123

6

A Region of Regions: Provincializing the Americas

149

7

First Nations Movements and Indigenous Modernities

173

8

Conclusion: Civilizational Analysis, Multiple Imaginaries, and the Diverse Americas

193

Bibliography203 Index221 About the Author

227 v

Acknowledgments

I have written this acknowledgment and much of this book on the lands of the Wadawurrung, the traditional custodians of the land. I pay my respects to the elders of the past, present, and those emerging. The lands I mention were never ceded and remain and will always remain Aboriginal land. I would like to thank my colleagues in two institutions with whom I conversed on the Americas and from whom I received valuable feedback on presentations. They include the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University and the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, University of Victoria, Canada. Arturo Grunstein Dickter and the colleagues and students at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City were tremendous virtual hosts late in 2021 and energetic interlocutors across a research seminar and subsequent conference. I acknowledge a debt to friends and colleagues at the Arts Academy and in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Federation University for many years of conversation and exchange from which I have learned so much. All these are too numerous to name individually. Above all, I am indebted to the intellectual exchanges over the past twenty years on the Americas with Joselyn Almeida-Beveridge, Johann Árnason, Chiara Bottici, Dietrich Jung, Trevor Hogan, María Pía Lara, John Rundell, and Wolfgang Knöbl. The words of my colleagues on the Social Imaginaries Editorial Collective echo across some of these pages: Paul Blokker, Saulius Geniusas, John Krummel, Natalie Doyle (till 2021), and earlier Ingerid Straume. From the Collective, Suzi Adams, my co-coordinating editor and dear friend has been one of the richest and most generous interlocutors I have been privileged to have over many years. Many points of theory in these pages reflect the lively conversations that we had between the two of us. vii

viii

Acknowledgments

The following chapters include sections substantially rewriting earlier publications. Chapter 2 incorporates extended argumentation from Jeremy C. A. Smith, “Southern Lights: Metropolitan Imaginaries in Latin America.” Thesis Eleven 166 (1): 118–35 (Copyright ©2021, DOI: 10.1177/07255136211043923), and “North America’s Metropolitan Imaginaries.” Social Imaginaries 4 (2): 43–60, 2018. Among other changes, I have added consideration of the visual arts and analysis of Los Angeles and Havana. Chapter 3 is an elaboration and reconsideration of “Atlantic Capitalism, American Economic Cultures” in S. Arjomand ed. Social Theory and Regional Studies in the Global Age. New York: SUNY Press, 339–59, 2014. I thank and acknowledge Said Arjomand and SUNY Press for clarification of permissions on the chapter. One section of chapter 5 is a synopsis of Jeremy C. A. Smith, “Encounters and Engagement in the Civilizational Analysis of Japan.” Historicka Sociologie/Historical Sociology Journal Issue 2: 31–46, 2021. In constructing chapter 6, I am drawing on “Regionality and Civilizations in the Americas: Considerations on Civilizational Analysis in the Context of American Modernities.” ’ In Civilization, Modernity, and Critique: Engaging Johann P. Arnason’s Macro-Social Theory, edited by Mertel Dunaj and Smith (London: Routledge, 2022). I thank my co-editors L’ubomir Dunaj and Kurt Mertel for their understanding on this cross-fertilization of chapters. A source of inspiration for chapter 7 is Jeremy Smith, “Outside and against the Quincentenary: Modern Indigenous Representations at the Time of the Colombian Celebrations.” Atlantic Studies 6 (1): 63–80, 2009, although the chapter comes on the back of expanded research and radical recomposition. Federation University’s regional heart has provided an influential beat in important parts of this book. I am grateful for the University’s support of the research and publication of this work, especially with my sabbatical in the first half of 2022. Finally, my dear partner Bronwyn and my joyful daughters Sari and Mietta have all had to put up with a lot during the long research and production of American Imaginaries. I cannot thank them enough for the patience that they have shown during these past few years.

Part I

AMERICAN IMAGINARIES: DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL SOCIETIES

Chapter 1

Introduction

The American hemisphere has room enough for contrasts and paradoxes, and contrast and paradox there is. A hemisphere with a history of being thought as one (Fernández-Armesto 2003), the Americas also have many regions, nations, and figurations of regional consciousness. It is big enough, yet includes very small island states. The first imperial maps of the hemisphere animated the contours of continents. Yet colonization by nation states of distant islands would make far-flung places like Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, the Galapagos, and Easter Island/Rapa Nui into American territories (see Fernández-Armesto 2003, 9–10). Built by empires, societies of the Americas became the home of modern republicanism and the creation of declarations of independence (Armitage 2007), the first of modernity’s revolts against transnational colonialism. For millions in Europe, the modern republics held out the promise, or the myth, of new world egalitarian opportunity. Yet the paradigmatic new world society holding out this promise, the United States, is also the home of the capital of capitalism and, many argue, the Empire. In the year 1800, modern democracy was an imaginary grounded as a set of ideas and institutional practices in only one small American republic. Yet, by the end of the millennium, the democratic reform of political institutions and creation of democratic spaces were compelling agenda for every major American society. Finally, this is a hemisphere of indigenous nations. Yet the (unfinished) track record of nation state colonialism in parts is as atrocious as anywhere else in the world. Each of the aforementioned paradoxes and contrasts stands in for a social imaginary of the Americas. In referring to the societies, nations, and instantiations of capitalism of the hemisphere, I allude to modern imaginaries creating a diversity of forms of being together, that is, forms of collective institution 3

4

Introduction

and identity. Often scholars in the humanities and social sciences have perceived two archetypal Americas. The United States is often taken as the sign of new world modernity and contrasted with the Latin Americas that are forever catching up (Pike 1992). This image does not do justice to the variety of American societies, regions, cities, and international influences. I challenge that image in these pages with a historical sociology of the diverse Americas.1 My specific approach, which I call intercivilizational engagement, benefits from cross-fertilization with the interdisciplinary fields of social imaginaries and civilizational analysis. How do these living intellectual traditions combine in a study of new world modernities? First, historical sociology’s cultural and historical sensibilities predispose my inquiry to the past and to the diversities of ways of being. The research of historians becomes essential alongside that of historical sociologists in sketching the complexities of America’s social imaginaries and the intercivilizational engagement they instantiate. Second, this work draws on a very particular current of post-Weberian historical sociology with a prominent reinterpretation of classical social theory of Weber, Durkheim, and Marx and a program of research into Axial civilizations and multiple modernities. This current is distinguished by its strong interest in diverse constellations of societies, kinds of social formations, and manifold figurations of power. Also distinguishing it as post-Weberian is an acute awareness of the multidimensional nature of institutions, culture, and economic life. The social imaginaries approach theorizes the core meanings— that is, the social imaginary significations—prefiguring multidimensional institutions, cultures, and economic life of civilizations and societies (and prefiguring them as multidimensional). I share in the awareness of the multidimensional nature of social life and exercise it in the disaggregation of societies, cities, regions, nations, and forms of governance of capitalism. Following Castoriadis, third, I have a strong interest in the indefinite number of ways of collectively creating human institutions and ways of being together, which leads logically to a firm endorsement of multidimensional study. The institutions and ways of being together include civilizations and their interaction as well as demarcated societies and empires in all their diversity. My own point of distinction within historical sociology as an intellectual practice lies in the exercise of historical and cultural sensibilities, identification of historical processes of the imaginary institution, and the creation of civilizations in and through intercivilizational engagement. Thus, although grounded in historical sociology—and seeking insight into patterns and processes of the past and not events as such—my approach ranges across both social imaginaries and civilizational analysis. Diachronic comparison of lines of differentiation over time between institutions and processes of different societies and constellations provides insights and understanding not always available in conventional history, political science, mainstream presentist



Introduction 5

sociology, or anthropology. My research is therefore “programmatic” in the precise sense that I ask transhistorical questions about large-scale lines of connectedness instituted through social imaginaries. Adopting this methodology, I address the following research question throughout the argumentation of American Imaginaries. Given the long histories of colonialism and deep intercivilizational engagement across three continents that inform the emergence of Colombian American societies, how might a mixed paradigm of civilizational analysis and social imaginaries help us to understand the diversity of the modern Americas (in terms of cities, capitalism, nations, nationalism, politics, states, regions, and indigeneity) from both comparative and transnational perspectives? In bringing a mixed paradigm of social imaginaries and civilizational analysis to the examination of cities, capitalism, nations, politics, states, regions, and indigeneity in modern American societies, I aim to develop a distinctive approach centered on this question. An important part of the mixed paradigm of social imaginaries and civilizational analysis I bring to this question is a multidimensional notion of intercivilizational engagement (Smith 2017). A short summary of this background notion and how it relates to the Americas is in order. Encounters and engagement between civilizations contribute significantly to simultaneous historical processes of creation and destruction. In both processes, civilizations become meaningful and even gain institutional form through mutual interaction as constellations of societies and cultures. At the nub of connections then, civilizations take shape, be it in the form of encounters—as conceived by Benjamin Nelson, Johann Árnason, and others— producing lasting legacies or engagement. As I cast it, both concepts are complementary. Engagement, as distinct from encounters, emphasizes the regularity and routine of mundane connections, often over a longer period. Engagement, however, is multidimensional as well. On my reckoning, there are four dimensions in which we find the routine agency of mobile social actors composing connections and connectedness. The four dimensions are migration, economy, culture, and polity. Across these four, the commerce in things like goods, ideas, scientific and theological doctrines, models of rulership and law, and artistic practice add up to an interlinkage between the world’s civilizations. For example, migration manifests as compulsion in slavery, indenture, and through occupation, as well as in modern forms. Economic exchange can flow through trust-based networks, across imperial state borders and in long trade cycles by land or sea. Cultural traffic between societies produces many creative fusions in science, religion, theology, philosophy, and language. Various models of polity arise from the connections of states through conquest or occupation, or merely through processes of borrowing, whether purposeful in or absorbed in interstate rivalry. Of course, the patterns vary depending on the instantiation of imaginary significations. The variation reaches to one end of a

6

Introduction

spectrum of engagement where barriers to interaction and outright detachment position civilizations in relations to one another taking the forms of interstate or interimperial animosity, distancing, rivalry, or possibly warfare. How does this apply in the Americas? In another work, I examine the imperial creation of the Euro-American world (Smith 2006). There is a powerful three-sided interconnection between the Europe, Africa, and the Americas, in which the Atlantic world was instantiated as an intercivilizational zone. On one side, a prolonged confrontation with African and indigenous cultures and their heirs shaped a new world mode-of-being in American societies. On the other side, multifaceted connections between metropolitan and American cultures forged a multiracial and multi-ethnic Atlantic sphere. The three-sided engagement over several centuries generated the conditions in which interpretations with a degree of reflexivity on place, knowledge, and belonging have arisen. In that earlier work, I finished with the republican revolutions. Here I return to pick up the chronological progression from the republic period of 1810–1830 to the turn of the millennium. That delimited periodization serves a purpose: constructing a historical-sociological picture of the social imaginaries and modernities of the postimperial Americas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Accordingly, American Imaginaries is a development of the historical sociology based on critical evaluation of the paradigms of civilizations analysis and social imaginaries laid out in the remainder of this chapter. In the chapters that follow, I examine the formation of cities (through metropolitan imaginaries), diverse instantiations of capitalism and state formation, and the political imaginary institution of ideological landscapes in national states. Following the exploration of these social imaginaries is an analysis of the advent of the United States’ global power, the emergence of regions out of intercivilizational engagement, and the late-twentieth-century eruption of indigenous modernities. Throughout these chapters, I use the scholarship of social imaginaries and civilizational analysis foregrounded here. At the same time, I draw on the discipline-specific research of sociologists, historians, and political scientists, as well as interdisciplinary generalists from the fields of social imaginaries and civilizational analysis. The introduction from this point evaluates the fields of social imaginaries and civilizational analysis. I end with a map of the book, enunciating the purpose of each chapter and a guide to reading strategies. SOCIAL IMAGINARIES IN PERSPECTIVE Where previously it was a paradigm in the making, it is now safe to say that the field of social imaginaries has arrived (Adams et al. 2015; Adams



Introduction 7

and Smith 2019).2 One innovation of the field is to recast the concept of the imagination and the imaginary as profoundly creative, particularly through collectively and anonymously instituted meaning. In turn, the imagination and imaginary create versions of the human condition in the multiplicity of societies and civilizations. This innovation is relevant to scholarship on the Americas in one specific way. The conception of connection of past and present is quite exact. Insomuch as imaginaries concretize institutions out of the social imaginary significations, temporalities, and social and cultural practices inherited from the past, the creation of society in the present is inseparable from the historically instituted. This mode of connection of what has been and what is now—which is denoted by Castoriadis’ notion of the “social-historical”—is a source of extraordinary societal and anthropological diversity. Across human history, the creativity of social imaginaries has produced the astounding variety of societies and cultures that have inhabited this planet in the past 10,000 years. A great variety is also evident in the Americas, where a historic combination of institutions and cultures—prefigured by the social imaginaries of three continents— characterizes Atlantic modernity. That social-historical variety influences the present. A long view of history helps in understanding the imaginary institution of the present. As a field, social imaginaries accommodates a long view of history, including the past of the longue duree, alongside of debates about modernity. How do past and present come together in the social-historical and in collective creation in the Western Hemisphere? When it comes to the Americas, the novelty of formation of new world societies on the back of destruction of indigenous cultures is a highly conspicuous problem and an enduring theme of studies of the Americas. Yet the nature of the novelty of creation itself in Atlantic modernity has not been interrogated quite as it could be. The core processes of creation and destruction of institutions and cultures in the modern Atlantic world are especially important in understanding the character of new world formations. The field of social imaginaries can help fill this gap and act as a productive site for the generation of a fresh perspective on the diverse Americas of the past two centuries. But we encounter an immediate problem. Students of the Americas and the Atlantic will be familiar with the styles and types of imagination. However, the imaginary is less familiar and has not been extensively applied, with only a few exceptions (Eisenstadt 2002; Almeida 2010; Eisenstadt 2013; Domingues 2008, 2016). Yet the conceptual apparatus of theories of the imaginary can aid the understanding of the core meanings informing the dynamics of cities and their creative social institutions, the development of capitalism, and the emergence of modern politics and power in new world societies. Therefore, I am confident that readers aware of the concept of imagination in historical, geographical, and

8

Introduction

sociological research on the Americas will appreciate an elaboration of the distinction of imaginary and imagination. The social imaginary field encompasses thinkers as diverse as Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emile Durkheim, Benedict Anderson, Bronislaw Baczko, Cornelius Castoriadis, Charles Taylor, Paul Ricœur, and Claude Lefort (Adams et al. 2015). I elaborate from here on Castoriadis’s and Taylor’s specific theories of the imaginary. In a formative essay published posthumously, Castoriadis provisionally defines a distinction between the concepts of the imagination and the imaginary (Castoriadis 2015). For Castoriadis, the imaginary refers to the creation of the preconditions of human existence—particularly the creation of representation and action in the broadest sense possible—while the imagination refers to the exercise of powers of representation and agency within human existence. The capacity to put reality “at a distance” is a distinguishing anthropological feature of agency (Castoriadis 2015, 60). However, different acts of imagination distinguishing human creativity from “reality,” “add to reality an unreal extension, to think of something else, to represent and do what is not given, and to make the possible exist” (Castoriadis 2015, 60). Objects, manifestations, and the visible material forms that embody the imagination—representations and cognitively realized artifacts of knowledge such as the Vedas, Ptolemaic cosmography, iconic Renaissance art, West African masks, the Gregorian calendar, Edo-era urban design, Simón Bolívar’s “Angostura Address,” and the United States’s Declaration of Independence—configure different elements of reality set “at a distance.” The imaginary and forms of imagination give to humanity the capacity to transform based on a range of “concrete possibilities.” Representing and acting ontologically presuppose the creative ability to generate figures and forms of representations and agency. I examine Castoriadis’s later reformulations later in a comparison with Taylor’s perspective. In his preliminary formulations, Taylor appears to prefer a conception of the imagination such as Benedict Anderson’s of Imagined Communities. He writes, “The social imaginary is not a set of ideas; rather it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of society” (Taylor 2004, 24–25). Taylor foregrounds anchored practices rather than the imaginary significations prefiguring representations of those practices. Nevertheless, implicit, background meanings that create, legitimate, order and enable agency and institutionalization do matter for Taylor, as they do for Castoriadis. Taylor replaces the dichotomy of the ideal and material with an emphasis on how meaning anchors practices and ideas. Yet in Castoriadis’s thought, the focus on meaning becomes an ultimately ontological preoccupation. In his later formulations, the imaginary comprises collectively created core complexes of meaning irreducible to ideas. Such core meanings are termed “imaginary significations” by Castoriadis in his more developed work (Castoriadis



Introduction 9

1987). Based on the generative complexes of core meaning, societies are shown in both versions of this theory to be powerfully creative. Furthermore, for Castoriadis in particular, the ceaseless transformation of all dimensions of all societies is intrinsically bound up with human agency, from the creation of social rules, normative values, and symbols to the formation of new social institutions and the revolutionizing of the material mode of existence. Although the emphasis in Castoriadis falls on the radical creation of the preconditions of social existence and perpetual societal and cultural transformation, and while Taylor is focused on how meaning orders practices, both thinkers are pointing to more fundamental substrata of meaning that frame the conditions of social existence, formation and diversification of cultures, religions, polities, and economies. Turning to potential applications in comparative and historical sociology will show how this creation of diversity can be theorized. Their concepts have four related applications. In the first, social imaginaries supply social worlds with meaning. For Castoriadis, the social imaginary significations of each formation signify the reality “of the universe in which it lives, attempting in every instance to make of it a signifying whole, in which a place has to be made not only for the natural objects and beings important for the life of the collectivity, but also for the collectivity itself, establishing finally a certain “world order” ’; in other words, the world for that formation (Castoriadis 1987, 149). They are the preconditions for making social existence meaningful, in a specific society at a particular time, by anonymously signifying myth, symbols, religion, norms, power, progress, value, and development, and the profane and the sacred. Taylor sees the imaginary in a comparable manner as a variety of pregiven understandings of “their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (Taylor 2004, 23). Seen from this point of view, the conflict of interpretations acts as a further dimension of diversity within the imaginary alongside the multiplicity of imaginaries. A second application relates to politics and capitalism. Taking Western modernity as a distinct social imaginary, Taylor theorizes a conception of moral order from which derive objective notions and categories of sovereignty, democratic politics, and market economies.3 For example, because of the Western imaginary, it is possible for Westerners to picture the economy as a system (in the manner that Marx theorized); the polity, and the state as legitimate and powerful; and a public sphere of political expression and agency as a domain with autonomy from the state and part of society. The objectifications of the imaginary make this possible and meaningful, according to Taylor.

10

Introduction

Fundamentally, social imaginary significations coalesce as the backdrop to social relations, producing collective identities as well as the fundaments of meaning and creative energies. Imperial, civilizational, and national identities start with this source of collective identity through which communities imagine themselves. For Castoriadis, the imaginary significations of meaning institute an invisible dimension to all such objectifications. Taking these principles into historical sociology, I suggest that such approaches to this second application are an aid to rethinking the creation of transnational links, national societies, and cities. The collective institution of society discussed earlier implies absorption of its past. History is therefore not only the weight of the past and selective social memory, but memory in the deeper sense that all societies bear their own understanding of the meaning of the past, or more properly a historicity. Historical constitution goes further than memory of the past and patterns of change, according to Taylor. The three social forms of sovereignty, economy, and public sphere that he elaborates are deeply historical in the way they came about. Describing French and American collective memory, he writes that “the new imaginary owes a debt to the more archaic one, which has assumed part of the burden of bringing to existence the new forms. In return, the new imaginary bears the marks of its origin” (Taylor 2004, 129). From this, Taylor demarcates short and long historical patterns, giving significance to the emergence of modern forms. Western history is Taylor’s explicit focus. History for Castoriadis is internal to society, and hence social-historical. Social change is propelled on the point of tension of the already formed and forming structures, ideologies, estrangement (Castoriadis 1987, 108) but also modes of agency, solidarity, and connection. What is unique in Castoriadis here is the fluidity or indeterminacy of change. There is no logic of history behind its makers’ backs, unfolding of Reason, process of evolution or interplay of language games determining the course of human existence, as far as he is concerned. In the place of a limited range of types of social formation or social system, he sees an inestimable variety of possible courses of social order. Returning to my enumeration of applications of the concept of social imaginaries, there is a third to account for. Social imaginary significations frame encounters with difference—a helpful supposition when it comes to understanding the diverse Americas. Intercultural and intersocietal encounters stimulate diversity as different social imaginaries and distinct imaginary significations come into contact.4 The meeting of indigenous cultures and Spanish and English colonizers exemplify such encounters. The encounters of the Colombian epoch from the most pacific to the genocidal brought contrasting imaginaries together in three stages. Divergent social formations and social imaginaries confronted one another in encounters of highly conspicuous alterity. The conquerors and colonizers and indigenous people



Introduction 11

of Amerindian formations were witnesses to radical alterity in encounters where mutual incomprehension and misrecognition often resulted. The Conquest erased the wholeness of Amerindian universes of meaning. Many languages, trade routes, and sacred sites were lost; some were preserved, others have been reclaimed. However, the ontological nexus with whole environments was ruptured, as colonizers seized lands and territories. Disconnected from ecologies in which their cosmologies were elaborated, Amerindian imaginaries, as they were, lost their force. Even so, they left legacies of the social-historical in collectivist values, orientations to nature different to Western ones, myth, and surviving institutions of social organization. Indigenous civilizations have undergone a resurgence in the second half of the twentieth century, giving, in the process, a persistent vitality to the legacies of Amerindian imaginaries. I return to this in the last major chapter. Fourth, social imaginary significations are also vital sources of power in the sense of operative cultural visions of institutionalization. One caveat applies to this observation. At one level, it is the ideological imaginary that makes cultural visions of power operative and, if we follow Ricœur’s elucidation of this imaginary (Ricœur and Taylor 1986), it does so as ideology, broadly construed. As such, power and its representations inhabit mundane worlds of daily life as well as organizational bureaucracies of state (Olson 2016; Taylor 2004; Thompson 1990). The social imaginary significations of power encompass the noninstitutional and bureaucratic. That caveat to one side, the main interest for the present author is specifically on institutions of state. Thus, state formation is a coalescence of visions of power as much as it is structured transformations of the figuration of elites and classes and the accumulation of state capacities. But the two sides of the equation are not equal. Institutional power depends on the imaginary of power itself as a precondition. Castoriadis’s distinction between orders of power is helpful here (Castoriadis 1991). First is his notion of “radical ground power.” Ground power advances, as it were, as effective and recognized authority without needing the presence of physical force—Engels’s body of armed men—or other forms of coercion. Ground power encompasses manifestations of the types of legitimacy that Weber hypothesized and investigated but, in fact, it is the precondition of all instantiations of legitimacy. The social imaginary significations of power make possible “explicit power”—the second half of Castoriadis’s definition—which refers to the presence of institutional governance familiar to readers of Elias, Foucault, Giddens, Gramsci, Mann, or Tilly. The institutionalization of coercion is explicit, resting, as it ubiquitously does, on the implicit domain of ground power. How this is differentiated from society—the “whole anonymous collective”—is a historical question for Castoriadis.

12

Introduction

These concepts involve a persuasive discrimination of orders of power, but this also as far as Castoriadis goes. As observed by others, his notion of power is preliminary, incomplete and undertheorized, especially with respect to the situated nature of instituted power in specific historical and civilizational contexts (Adams et al. 2015).5 Weaving Castoriadis’s theory into historical sociology can connect an ontology of power to investigations of state formation, working with carefully considered typologies of institutionalization and legitimation. My own contribution will be to relate political, ideological, and nationalist imaginaries to state formation and major political doctrines in the Americas. Ahead of that discussion in chapter 4, there is another shortfall in the topography of power to mention: representations of power to mediate between sources and subjects of power. Maps fill in territory by representing it; national symbols and instantiations of memory create a past and nationalist mythology; spectacle in all forms nourishes legitimacy, motivation, and justification; and constitutions and representative government become the remote body of the sovereign. Representative government is especially important as it is expressly premised on the very principle of representation of explicit power. To the present author, such points on representation recall Lefort’s notion of political imaginaries (Lefort and Thompson 1986). I elaborate on these points in the fourth chapter. There, I bring Lefort, Castoriadis, and others together to elucidate points about the condensation of political power. Similar points can be made about the institution of power in the planet’s oceans; space was not considered by Castoriadis. Taking a social imaginaries perspective, I demarcate oceans from lands and territories. Modern empires imagine oceans as spaces with meanings constituted by mythical, topographical, and modern cartographical projections. The geographical imagination of the Colombian Atlantic emerged in the imperial institution of early modernities under the aegis of Iberian, British, and French empires (Eisenstadt 2002). The Atlantic’s empires extended cartographic optics beyond the possession of landmass. Imperial states made signifying claims over oceanic space— meta-geographical visions of oceans, and seas as extensions of polity and empire (Mancke 1999). Mapping the oceans was an uneven early modern process of staking prerogative over areas of the watery global commons by designating seas with national names and representing those spaces with imperial metaphors. There were limits to state power of the seas throughout the world, of course; the high seas or the great oceans were and remain shared and contested. Yet a certain kind of radical ground power applies to maritime territory as much as terrestrial state formation. The imagination of imperial geography entails and simultaneously prefigures shared conceptions of law, diplomacy, empowered sovereignty, cartography, and bureaucracy. In the global arena, modern governments have used evolving international



Introduction 13

law, diplomacy, and norms of conflict management between states, to claim and thereby “politicize” land, seas, and oceans (Mancke 1999), subjecting the Earth’s oceans (as well as its landmasses) to social imaginary significations in the process. The conventions and practices of international maritime law came to apply to the watery commons alongside of the cartographic imagination of space. Oceans and seas were modern frontiers for states and states treated them with the institutional practices at hand. While states were conceptualizing and competing for continental and terrestrial domains, they were also conceiving and fighting for oceanic ones. Both were spaces of ground power (in Castoriadis’ sense) more than institutionalized sovereignty. Three imaginaries must be elucidated to apply the historical sociology that I am discussing in this chapter: metropolitan (urbanism, migration, and creativity); capitalist (the formations of capitalism); and political, ideological, and nationalist (the competing political doctrines of national states). In the coming chapters, I unpack these three dimensions as imaginaries and domains of intercivilizational engagement. CIVILIZATIONAL ANALYSIS Civilizational analysis is a multidisciplinary field of inquiry, combining sociology, history, philosophy, anthropology, and archaeology. There was, you might say, a rediscovery of civilizations among sociologists, historians, and political scientists in the 1990s in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc and Huntington’s forecast of a clash of civilizations (and generally in critique of the latter). As well as discrete civilizations (Europe, India, Persia, Russia, East Asia), scholars in the field examine formations of the Axial Age and Antiquity, Judaism, and Islam as civilizational constellations; early modernities; and problematics of colonialism, totalitarianism, capitalism, and democracy. This serves one of historical sociology’s distinguishing objectives: to tackle essential questions of societal organization over the longue duree, across space and regions, and with perspectives combining horizons of the past and present in debating problems of contemporary modernity. Civilization as analytic hardly exhausts these problems. But it can and does bring measured analysis and studies of civilizational complexes and processes (Árnason 2003). With updated and upgraded classical perspectives in sociology, history, and anthropology, many thinkers in the field have honed distinctive critiques of Eurocentrism. The push by civilizational analysis into a wider variety of historical and cultural experiences has tested and reframed the conduct of comparative analysis, while coming into conflict with Eurocentric sources of the Western Tradition (Árnason 2003, 323–59). Civilizational analysis has

14

Introduction

developed a viable critique of Eurocentrism to rival post-colonialist critiques on the back of theoretical revision of key concepts as well as widening the scope of historical and comparative inquiry. Later, I spell out the key concepts, specifically intercivilizational encounters and engagement and world regions and modernity, before enumerating the zones of the Americas beyond the image of a reified Northern and Southern civilizations. Theoretical revision has entailed stressing the interconnections of different civilizations. But civilizational analysis takes the additional step of exercising properly sociological interest in the variability of figurations of polity, economy, and culture present within civilizations, and between them. Beginning with Benjamin Nelson, the concept of intercivilizational encounters has been the centerpiece of historical and comparative sociological approaches to connections that have the greatest and most enduring impact (Nelson and Huff 1981). In Árnason’s hands, the concept is elevated to a more sophisticated and multidimensional level of understanding of the degree of diversity of formations and of the kinds of encounters that are possible, meaning: the interplay of cultural patterns with structures of political and economic power, and with corresponding forms of social integration and differentiation. The civilizational complexes analyzed in these terms have more or less clearly defined boundaries in space and time, but they are also capable of more or less extensive interaction across the dividing lines. (Árnason 2003, 4)

Árnason’s approach facilitates an understanding of the structures of power, cultural formations, and connections in which civilizations interact. He aims to explore the individuality of a civilization as well as family resemblances with others. This produces a framework for understanding how well civilizational complexes accommodate “interpretive conflicts” and absorb critique; how open or closed they can be to creative encounters; how power-saturated they are; and how vigorously transformative they are. Árnason’s argument is that such a framework is a precondition to a more precise definition of the problems of Eurocentrism and other ethnocentrisms. Engagement with political scientists grouped around Peter Katzenstein holds out prospects for enhancement of the concept of intercivilizational encounters (Katzenstein 2010a). Taking the vantage point of the present, Katzenstein and his collaborators stress the plurality of civilizations and the pluralism of some. Globality has stimulated “trans-civilizational engagements, intercivilizational engagements and civilizational clashes” more than the integrated unity that dominated Western thinking of a century earlier about a “standard of civilization” (Katzenstein 2010b, 2). Enjoining his own discipline of international relations to pay attention to civilizations as plural constellations of states, empires, and blocs, Katzenstein points to analyses in



Introduction 15

sociology and global history of the capacity of some civilizations for transcivilizational communication and intercivilizational encounters, as well as intracivilizational clashes and variation. Following a theoretical amalgamation of Randall Collins, Eisenstadt, and Elias, Katzenstein’s collaborators strive to get purchase on the context-dependent plurality of agents, centers, traditions, and civilizational processes—the very stuff of interacting civilizational constellations. Their analyses furnish short and long histories of polycentric international relations, better given to understanding the present world with its potential relationships and threatening crises. In both perspectives, we can see a strong relational model emerging. Turning to the second overall revision made by contemporary civilizational analysis, we can see a deep diversification of subject matter. Where is civilizational analysis standing in respect of world regions, in particular the Americas? The litmus test has been the framework of multiple modernities. Eisenstadt and his network of associates have pioneered major revisions of the comprehension of manifest plurality. Eisenstadt’s network can be credited with charting a path out of the metanarrative of modernization to a more adequate picture of proliferating modernities (Eisenstadt 2013). For Eisenstadt, modernity originates in the cultural and political programs of Western Europe in which an exceptional level of reflexivity on the ontological and institutional premises of Western civilization operated. Although the extent of questioning the varieties of civilization was distinct and “provincial,” European modernity projected universalism and presumed that its trajectory was a universally relevant and suitable model for all. The first expansion of the program of modernity was into the Americas. The interaction of the expanding program of modernity with other civilizations—generally occurring alongside Western empire-building—kindled other modernities that would also challenge Western power. One benefit of the comparative historical analysis of multiple modernities lies in the accommodation of cultural and societal varieties. Recognition of the contingency of emergence in civilizations and modernities helps explain why so many societies seem to defy the developmental paths claimed to be their future by proponents of modernization. The multiple modernities framework has attracted its share of critics.6 The immediate concern is not with these, but with Eisenstadt’s analysis of American modernities and how it might contribute to the expansion of historical sociological inquiry, and where its limits are. The civilizations of the Americas and the intercivilizational engagement following the Conquest played little part in Eisenstadt’s construction of a comparative historical sociology prior to his pithy overview in 2002 (Eisenstadt 2002). In that essay, Eisenstadt identifies four civilizational dynamics distinguishing America’s modernities. First, settler-colonizers who made societies in the Americas forged collective

16

Introduction

identities that have been only dimly primordial, due to the lack of a native antiquity (i.e., a nonindigenous American Antiquity). Second, Americans fundamentally altered the metaphysical premises of Europe’s great schism of Protestantism and Catholicism when they created the social and political orders of Northern and Southern American societies. Consequently, the two basic visions of the social order guided developmental models and interpretations of the world: a flat pluralism and civic equality stood in contrast with hierarchical and corporatist patterns of social relations. Northern America and Latin America have diverged politically because of this root conflict.7 Third, the two overarching models contrasted not only with each other but also with Western Europe. The two Americas, divided by the root conflict of two visions of the social order, are not only “mirrors” of each other but also a new world “mirror” to be held up to old-world Europe.8 Finally, the dialectic of European and American self-imaging shaped interpretations of modern conditions in both old and new world societies. For Americans making new social and urban orders and new collective identities, this was a “reflexive exercise in coming to terms with their own other origins” (Eisenstadt 2002, 45).9 Eisenstadt captures the broad patterns characterizing the two Americas well. Yet further distinctions made by Eisenstadt, such as Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, remain subordinate overall to the two master patterns he discerns. Katzenstein extends the plurality of the Americas set by Eisenstadt for civilizational analysis by discerning the multiple Anglo-American traditions (Katzenstein 2012b). In addition, he takes measure of the impact of its transnational engagement and the deep-seated problem of race in US politics. Censuring Hartz and Huntington’s summations of US cultures as consensual and unitary in character, Katzenstein recovers republican traditions alongside liberal ones. He highlights racial divisions subsumed in the older reading lists of mainstream political science. With a global perspective on Anglo-America’s international record, he and his collaborators adumbrate different dimensions of the political imagination at work in the United States: migration, urbanization, borders and internal colonization, and influence of the British Empire (Katzenstein 2012a).10 They place race as a category at the heart of Anglo-American politics and test its salience in the past and persistence in the present in domestic and foreign policies. Internationally, this highlights hemispheric and global relationships and the transnational pressures they bring on the United States, as well as high levels of interconnection across the Anglosphere. Internally, it has implications for the United States’s operative model of multiculturalism, one that is mutually dependent on external relations and vice versa. The polymorphism of this approach to Anglo-America proceeds on suspicion that there are greater diversities in the Americas than Eisenstadt has allowed for.



Introduction 17

What to make of this diversity? Previously, I hypothesized five regional Americas: Latin America, the United States, the Caribbean, Canada, and a transnational sphere of indigenous America (Smith 2010). The US South and Brazil were potential candidates. Árnason suggests that justification exists for at least nine (Árnason 2018, 195–96). My own thinking has also shifted. This book is more emphatic about the variations of Brazil and the US South.11 Mexico too and the three southernmost republics of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay), Andean America (Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia) and Central America would all appear to diverge to varying degrees from the two civilizational imaginaries that Eisenstadt demarcated, especially when the republican era is considered (Eisenstadt 2002).12 So, on my reckoning, there are grounds for demarcated eleven Americas. Not all eleven receive equal treatment. Brazil and Mexico feature throughout the book, while the Southern Cone, the US South, and Andean America receive less and more bounded attention. Moreover, there is a focused discussion of the plurality of the Americas in the sixth chapter when regionalism is taken up. The issue of contemporary Mexico’s place in the Americas calls for more comment, especially in relation to Central American regionalism. Might it be right to regard Mexico as North American in the wake of its shared past with the US Southwest? Do recent decades of integration of the three states of North America strengthen this aspect of multifaceted national character? Indeed, Mexico’s engagement with the United States was more prominent from the 1870s onward. Yet, on the other hand, if we perceive a Central American identity in Mexico based on historical position within the Spanish Empire, then Mexico’s Hispano-american background comes to the fore. Either way, Mexico’s interconnections with neighboring countries and regional counterparts were undoubtedly significant. That said, Mexico’s own profound historicity can hardly be ignored (Bonfil Batalla 1987). In sum, I would not avoid the conclusion that Mexico has distinct social-historical distinction from Latin and Central America, situated as it is in the interstices of Central and North America. TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY TRENDS In this second last section, I touch on twenty-first-century trends, including the upsurge of leftist movements and governments in the Caribbean and Latin America and the rise of Trump. Although these push beyond the scope of the work, they will have been on the minds of many readers. Indeed, to not comment on the twenty-first-century resurgence of social-democratic and socialist movements in Latin America or Trumpism would be a significant omission.

18

Introduction

The development of a strategic political alliance across the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA) nations was not in sight when Hugo Chavez was elected to the Venezuelan presidency in 1998. Yet there were portents of that future connection in the widespread opposition to neoliberalism and the surge of movement and alliance activism in the 1990s. Even with regional unities, substantial divergences between governments aligned to Chavez’s project of twenty-first-century socialism and those of Center-Left leaders such as Lula, Bachelet, and Vasquez were important (Ellner 2014; Fuentes 2014; Silva 2009). Governments around the Bolivarian project are also distinct in important ways from each other. In turn, Lula, Bachelet, and Vasquez are distinguishable in their exercise of pragmatism from the pragmatic governments of the Kirchners in Argentina, or Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, who are perceived as leftists, even though they were initially elected on unremarkable platforms. Bolsonaro’s displacement of the Workers Party in Brazil was a countervailing development of great significance. However, later elections of socialistic leaders in Mexico and Peru resumed the trend. Disentangling continuity from rupture in the efforts of New Left governments to construct social markets is evidently not easy and it is better to speak of a finely graded spectrum of interpretation and agency and a medium-term pattern with uneven trends, reversals, and counteractions. In this context, we might ask how helpful the category of “populism” is in respect of the New Left. There are important critiques from different perspectives reaching the conclusion that it is not (Lynch 2013; Dussel 2012; Bernal 2021). The facile and indiscriminate dismissal of Bolivarian and socialdemocratic leaders and institutions as populist is certainly a feature of oversimplifying detractors of Left parties of Central America, Andean America, and the Southern Cone. The uses of populism in political and media discourse to one side, more discriminating attempts by historians, sociologists, and political scientists to classify historical and current-day governments through a typology of populism has fired debates about the political contents of the regimes in question, while also casting doubt over the conceptual apparatus. In this respect, a more nuanced understanding of the growth of state capacities interrelated with the democratizing impulses of social movements is a better starting point for analyzing the emergence of new progressive forces (Plot and Seman 2007; Silva 2009). But where does this leave the concept of populism? I argue that populism is properly limited to a phase of Latin American history. To get purchase on the historical specificity of populism, I contribute to this discussion in chapter 4 with content of the national-popular regimes of the first half of the twentieth century. The New Left surge has been mostly unpredicted. Likewise, Trump was unexpected. A political imaginaries analysis casts the Trump movement in a different light. Trump and the movement he headed as president represents a



Introduction 19

hubristic attempt to reduce and neutralize the balance of institutions, procedures, and conventions that give life to democracy. Characterizing his administration as populist has proved to be unhelpful. It clarifies far less than it purports to. It is worth briefly turning to Plot’s analysis. “Volunteerism” is his preferred category on account of its emphasis on will (Plot 2018). Plot’s diagnosis is one of political imaginaries, affirming the distinction of politics and “the political” made by Castoriadis and Lefort, which I refer to in chapter 4. In the wake of Obama’s eight years in office, Trump was able to win the 2016 election with a politics of will. In Plot’s view, that election was fought against the backdrop of three competing horizons: theological-political, epistemic, and aesthetic. Trump’s voluntarism drew on a theological horizon, in which an imagined unitary nation was the basis for redemption of a lost mythic external source of sovereignty. Trump’s election campaign explicitly promoted this message when its leader asserted the sheer force of will that “we” will make America great again. Interestingly, the politics of will echoes Howard’s conception of “antipolitics” as the de-differentiation of power resulting from the pursuit of the unlimited expansion of the realm of freedom (Howard 2013) and Marcel Gauchet’s disclosure of “an aspiration to political mastery” (Gauchet 2017, 222), both of which refer to a radical diminution of the differentiated polity. This is an impoverished state, according to Gauchet in his analysis of the loss of “society” Trumpism generated (2017). There are parallels in other leader-centered right-wing populist governments, such as Bolsonaro’s in Brazil. With the steady retrenchment of experts from the state, critical counter-voices have disappeared from policy processes. The singularity of Trump’s will overshadows the epistemic horizon. Blokker too sees the essence of Trump’s rhetoric in the radicalization “of the popular authorship of laws,” which easily conflates the leader’s will and the popular will (Blokker 2019, 112). Conceptualizing this as populism, Blokker considers the “populist imaginary” as a position between totalitarianism and democracy, not a tendency to totalitarianism. Turning back to Plot, let us note the third horizon: the aesthetic affirmation of the democratic horizon of indeterminacy. If this view finds representation in the two major parties in the United States, then perhaps it is Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialist current. The Trump vision directly confronted the Democrat’s promise of continuity in technocratic government and ongoing commitment to a global system of rules-based free trade, coupled with a more Hawkish foreign policy. Wall Street backed Clinton with funding, repudiating Trump in the 2016 campaign. Victory for the “outsider” seemed unlikely. The triumph of Trump’s voluntarist politics and uninhibited contempt for expertise left many fearful of how far-reaching the transformations would go. Plot answers by pointing, with Lefort, that democracy transcends governments but is contingent and always fragile (Plot 2018). This is especially so in the United States

20

Introduction

with its fractious social imaginaries, where the original Republic—the one Tocqueville observed—is also a myth informing the aesthetic horizon and some of the egalitarian values of the social movements struggling against the “totalitarian menacing” or the resurgence of the “theologico-political organisation” represented by the Trump administration. Trump’s loss in the 2020 Presidential election amid the incoherence of his administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic represents a major setback for supporters of this genus of antipolitics in the United States and around the world. Like the renewal of varieties of leftism south of the Rio Grande, its future directions and overall fate are unclear. A further similarity lies in discontinuities with familiar ideologies of the postwar period in several states and regions up until 2000. Along with the continuities, these are not traced here. READING THIS BOOK The aforementioned observations I offer in response to these pressing questions stretch beyond the scope of American Imaginaries. How does the book unfold from this point? In chapter 2, I state that America’s cities came out of the transatlantic flows of intercivilizational engagement. As such, they form a part of the national and transnational imaginaries of Atlantic modernity as well as having metropolitan imaginaries. Following Castoriadis’s notion of the imaginary institution, I posit metropolitan imaginaries as the process of creation of the metropolis. Through a quantitative amassing of the city in connected networks of migration, trade, and cultural exchange, cities acquire the qualitative state of metropolis. This occurs through honing and harnessing the creativity of architecture and the arts. Cities in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba provide case studies. Chapter 3 moves from creation of cities to creation of capitalism. Beginning with the theoretical reconception of capitalism as an overarching imaginary, I posit a diversity of configured relationships of polity and economy in the Americas. Through a reading of Árnason, Castoriadis, Boltanski and Chiapello, Wagner, and Weber, I consider such instantiations of the “spirit” of capitalism in the economic dimension of intercivilizational engagement. Regionalist responses to globalization, also derivative of historical intercivilizational engagement, are addressed at the end. The fourth chapter turns to politics, ideologies, and the political. The first section considers theories of the political imaginary involving Castoriadis and Lefort, with a focus on the republican creation of democracy. Then I examine political, ideological, and nationalist imaginaries as framing horizons for the contingent development of ideologies and nationalisms before turning to the



Introduction 21

instantiation of specific ideological traditions. As the argument of the book revolves around the diversity of the Americas, I look at variants of liberalism, conservativism, socialism, and Latin American populism as concrete doctrines and movements deriving their structure from political and ideological imaginaries. I find important American divergencies from European ideological traditions. Chapter 5 examines the imagination of American power and a North-South division of the hemisphere. Once American state formation had extended the US republic to the Pacific and the Rio Grande, it was poised to engage Central America, the Caribbean, and the Asia-Pacific. I consider the spread of interests, institutions, and domains of American culture to Southern republics consonant with the Monroe Doctrine and supplementary interpretations. Coinciding engagement with the Asia-Pacific consubstantiated the outgrowth of an informal imperial power with connections between multiple regions of the Americas and the Asia-Pacific region to its west. In the Western Hemisphere, America created a regional hegemony while pursuing one in the AsiaPacific region that outlasted the Cold War. In this chapter I bow to convention and use “America” to denote the United States and use it interchangeably with the “United States” largely for reading convenience for this book’s audience. The centrality of the United States to the chapter’s argument justifies a temporary shift in vocabulary. Chapter 5’s incorporation of regionalism segues well into chapter 6, which is on regions and regionalism. The revival of regionalism as a theme in the human sciences comes in the wake of the decline of superpower rivalry. Chapter 6 examines two types of regionalism (subnational and multinational or world regions) and six short case studies (the US Southwest, Quebec, Brazil’s Northeast, Central America, the Caribbean, and Andean America). All the six are considered in terms of social imaginaries and the social-historical imagination of places as spaces invested with meaning arising from different dimensions of intercivilizational engagement. Of note is the multicivilizational character of the world regions under discussion and their forms of outward orientation, a strong theme in civilizational analysis. American worlds before the Colombian invasion had an imaginary of indigenous trade, cosmologies, myth, and even kinds of diplomacy. Their imaginaries were world-ordering and sophisticated. Despite the unprecedented violence of colonialism and the hermeneutic dissonances of radically variant imaginaries, cultural transmission occurred and framed the regional meeting points of indigenous and creole societies. Together, the historical aspects of survival and a spatially differentiated social order established conditions in which independent indigenous social movements could energetically emerge from the 1970s onward. In chapter 7, I show how latter-day movements have called into being indigenous modernities.13 Most prominent

22

Introduction

in indigenous modernities of the Americas is a politics that elaborates an ontology of land and life and a plurinational vision of sovereignty. This is reflected in national and transnational campaigns involving international law, constitutional reform, ecology, and forms of intercultural encounters. Just as I have in the present chapter, I touch on twenty-first-century developments toward the end of the chapter. Like most books in the human sciences, American Imaginaries can be read in different ways. Readers interested in specific social imaginaries might begin with the chapter of their choice for cities (chapter 2), capitalism (chapter 3), or politics (chapter 4). I can imagine some enthusiasts for indigenous America going straight to chapter 7, or students of regionalism making a beeline for chapter 6. Others who follow debates on American power might prefer to start with chapter 5. Reading the book in sequential order, cover to cover as it were, would follow a different logic. Early chapters are more theoretical and situate perspectives on social imaginaries in American contexts. They also explore national societies more completely. Chapters 5 to 7, on the other hand, are concerned with transnational and regional environments. Whatever choice readers make, I suggest taking chapter 8 last. It is a summary of theoretical arguments and substantive findings with notes on gaps and potential directions for further research. The book as a whole is a response, an answer of a kind, to the research question posed in the early part of this opening chapter. That being so, I would recommend a comprehensive reading. NOTES 1. The literature on historical sociology is sizable and won’t be rehearsed here (however, see Wagner 2008, 2014). 2. Seminal thinkers defining the field include Castoriadis (1987), Taylor (2004), and Ricœur (Ricœur and Taylor 1986). See also the fascinating exchange between Castoriadis and Ricœur (Adams 2017). Calhoun et al.’s (2015) definitions are recent updated interpretations. See the journal International Journal of Social Imaginaries (Brill), previously Social Imaginaries (Zeta Books). 3. See Árnason for a reading of Taylor trajectory in relation to civilizations and “life orders” (2020, 51–56). María Pía Lara descibes Taylor’s conception as a “liberal imaginary” (Lara 2021, 4, 88–89). 4. Different dimensions of intercultural projects of Americanism have not been subject to investigation as they might (Kurasawa 2008). 5. See also Lara whose conception of the imaginary, imagination, representation, and cinema focuses on institutional and social practices that generate intersectional oppressions (Lara 2021). She also emphasizes a normative vision of social



Introduction 23

imaginaries as transformative (in Castoriadis’s terms, instituting) rather than extant (or instituted). 6. See Mota and Delanty, for some examples (Mota and Delanty 2015). 7. Eisenstadt’s approach is faithful to Ribeiro’s thinking on the civilizational process, which resulted in variants emerging from this original bifurcation (Ribeiro 1971; Ribeiro and Rabassa 2000, 40–43). There is a profound tension in Ribeiro’s approach between his commitment to the binary of dual civilizational legacies and his elucidation of diversities resulting from the civilizational process. He seems to have little appreciation of the antinomies he has committed himself to. For an interesting reflection on Ribeiro’s sociology beyond Hartz, see Wagner’s remarks (Wagner 2014, 307–9). Mota provides a helpful counterpoint in respect of Brazil in (2016, 77–78). 8. See also Coletta, who cites Eisenstadt’s multiple modernities framework with approval (Coletta 2018). 9. On Latin America’s difficult paths to national and collective identity, see Annino and (Annino and Guerra 2003), especially the essay by Quijada (2003). 10. For an Eliasian historical sociology of a similar range of problematics, see Mennell (2007). 11. See Ribeiro (2000) on Brazilian identity and modernity and Knöbl (2006) on the South. 12. Note the position that Mexico can be historically reckoned a Central American republic or at least deeply entangled in it, see Campbell (1988). The two-century frame of the current work brings this into question, however. This is the era in which Mexico felt the pull of forces of integration into North America. I return to this question in subsequent chapters. 13. My interpretation of this concept draws on Rundell and Singh (Rundell 2017; Singh 2011).

Chapter 2

Making Americans Migration and Cities as Metropolitan Imaginaries

In social theory and historical sociology, the understanding of modernity is distinctly metropolitan. There are good reasons for thinking that the modern and the metropolitan are closely interlaced. At the same time, it is important to ask how cities, especially metropolises, also interact with civilizations, nation states, regions, and the larger world. Scholars in urban studies associate cities with all sorts of movements and linkages. In Atlantic modernity, cities were intersections of such movements bonding the Americas with a larger maritime ecumene.1 Into these intersections, migrants came, while goods and ideas flowed through city ports, stations, and streets. New world metropolises incarnated a built environment and created communications, industrial, and transport infrastructure where indigenous places and worlds had been. As they are more or less joined to the larger Atlantic modernity and so sit at the cusp of old and new world social formations, cities are part of larger national and transnational imaginaries, as well as loci of their own imaginaries. In this chapter, I evaluate the idea of urban imaginaries as part of theorizing metropolises. Many Latin American urbanists find conceptual inspiration in ideas of urban imaginary from Armando Silva Téllez, Néstor García Canclini, Kevin Lynch, and James Scorer (Silva Téllez 2003; Cinar and Bender 2007; García Canclini 1997; Scorer 2016). I focus on a complex paradox. On one hand, cities are creations in the sense that their inhabitants purposefully seek to constitute urban order, design city spaces, and harness urban temporalities. On the other hand, cities are fluctuating ecologies of the collective instituting imaginary, in which multiple dynamics, practices, and institutions exceed all purposeful design. As ecologies, cities throb with the interaction of crowds, the assault of pollution, and the massification of the structured environment. The imaginary complex perpetually unsettles the modern imagination, meaning that the life of urbanites transpires in a thriving environment that is 25

26

Chapter 2

simultaneously a one of insecurity. In other words, urban imaginaries set the patterns of city formation, reproduction, and transformation. How that occurs is one of the central research questions in urban studies. To the idea of urban imaginaries, I wish to bring a more precise conception of social imaginary. Following Castoriadis (1987), I focus on the tension of instituted and instituting dynamics of the social-historical and apply that to distinguish metropolitan from urban imaginaries. Metropolitan creation as a process occurs mainly in three dimensions of migration, economy, and culture. Metropolises are vital locations in which the flows of intercivilizational engagement occur on a larger scale, which brings a qualitative shift in creativity distinguishing the metropolis from the city. Migrants give agency to this process in daily encounters with familiar places. Simmel’s theorization of metropolitan interactions elucidates a metropolitan animus in which we can locate migrants (Simmel 1976). With high levels of migration, metropolises attract creative specialists, who, in turn, concentrate in the arts of city-making—architecture, engineering, and planning. The arts contribute to the cityscape of creativity a further level of ingenuity, not only in institutional activities of galleries, theaters, and museums but also in the construction of grassroots practice. This too is a domain of creation, encompassing instituted and instituting practices. In short, the distinguishing features of the metropolitan imaginary include an intensity of encounters and interaction, the creative design of the built environment, and a vivacity of artistic production. These three distinguishing dimensions contain the quantitative and qualitative. In them, mass brings about qualitative shifts in processes of creation and creativity. INTERCIVILIZATIONAL ENGAGEMENT IN THE MAKING OF NEW WORLD METROPOLITAN IMAGINARIES Within this especially intense imaginary, migration is a very active dimension of intercivilizational engagement.2 Transnational migration propelled urban modernity in the Americas, integrating cultures and languages across three continents (Games 2008; see also Almeida 2011; Nugent 1992). Mainly, it was the enslaved and coerced who migrated from interiors across oceans and to settlement on frontiers, plains, border regions, hinterlands, deserts, and in coastal cities. In the colonizing societies in which they landed, they extracted, harvested, and manufactured wealth. From the 1870s, voluntary migration outweighed the indentured. The Anglo Wests (including the Anglo-Americas) may fit the model of truly impressive “explosive colonization” (Belich 2009, 82–85), but the movements of mass transatlantic migration lasting through



Making Americans 27

to 1914 where evident elsewhere in the Americas (Moya 2006, 2007). The new world fin de siècle, observes Moya, was one of “extremes: of global forces and local conditions, of the world and the village” (Moya 1998, 4), in which the whole social imaginary appears implicated in migration. The voluntary and involuntary sides of migration represent both making and destruction in metropolitan formation. Circuits of inland and intercity transport impelled onward journeys. Canal and railway networks, along with postal and telegraph systems, accelerated colonizing encroachment on the interior lands of the two subcontinents. In Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, and Canada, rail also demarcated territorial boundaries just as effectively as declared national borders did. The states of the Americas became territorial entities through the conquest of their interiors, rail betraying the continental ambitions of the most expansive states (the United States, Brazil, and Canada). A political economy of linkage in agricultural and industrial trade bound together transport networks from capital cities to the outer reaches of American states. From there, trade with other places in the hemisphere, and with Europe, Asia, and Africa inserted American production into global capitalism. Together with improvements in river and ocean travel, rail revolutionized Europe’s migratory patterns and ability to trade and thereby enhanced these connections to capitalism (Fernández-Armesto 2014, 230–33). The twentieth century saw repeat bursts of migration. The United States enjoyed a 25 percent increase in population, maintaining a growth rate well above that of other industrialized states (Freeman 2012, 446–48). The elimination of national quotas in 1965 permitted greater heterogeneity, with immigrants from Asia bringing a diversifying presence. Even so, by the end of the century, the most significant trend was immigration from the rest of the Americas. All this had an impact on cities. Canada too felt the impact of immigration from Asia and Latin and Central America, albeit in more attenuated waves. Its border with the United States was the boundary dominating the national psyche more than points of immigration (Gibbins 2005). By contrast, Latin American cities acquired a mass aspect not quite known in the North. The megacities discussed below entail significant social problems and embody the major challenges of over-urbanization. Often, the favela is counted among those problems due to its association with poverty and organized crime. However, research in urban sociology also reveals creative informality in favelas of Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela (Hernández, Kellett, and Allen 2010). Furthermore, as much as ever, the metropolises attract creative energies on the tension between urban planning and metropolitan ecologies beyond rational mastery and order. Thus, into modern metropolises, people, trade, doctrines, sciences, religions, and methods flowed. Instituting styles of architecture, modes of urban

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design, and artistic expressions of culture was part of the abundant imaginary of new world societies. In the twentieth century, creation was heavily modernist, combining romantic reclamation of heritage while projecting utopian optimism.3 Futuristic and ever taller new buildings complemented romantic condensations of nature in city parks (Schuyler 1986). As knowledge and practice, architecture and urban planning mobilize artful and often rational purpose to design buildings, parks, and city centers reflective of place. In other words, they vest spaces with the architectonic expression of a situated world. In this way, architecture has been forceful collective representations of cities reflecting intercivilizational engagement. By drawing influences from different places and eras into a collective expression of relationships to the world, architecture can give a transhistorical quality to meaning-infused urban spaces. Where cities have this quality, their squares, parks, and stations invoke other times and even other temporalities. When design best crystallizes a city’s intercultural, economic, and political transactions, architecture acts as a force for encounters. Often architecture in the cities interacted with the arts to mutual benefit of both. At different levels, art as a public good nourished urban space. Institutionally, galleries and museums condensed civilizational, national, ethnic, and metropolitan visual arts traditions. The periodic emergence of organic artistic milieu illustrates well my argument that the indeterminacy of the metropolitan imaginary exceeds all forces of subjugation. How the institutions interacted with artistic communities is examined briefly in each case discussed here, especially the driving tension between democratizing impulses and institutional structure. Among artists, different modes and genres of artistic practice mixed in a participatory style outside of established public institutions. This in turn challenged institutional representation. Contextualizing this interaction was the construction of creative economy, in which artistic impulses confront market values and commodity significations, a further level of the arts as public good. Together with architecture and the creation of cityscapes, the visual arts form part of the heritage and life of the metropolises under study, which are New York, Chicago, Los Angeles (LA), Toronto, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, and Havana.4 NORTHERN METROPOLISES The main metropolises of the United States became global cities (Soja 2000, 219–27). New York, Chicago, and LA developed this hyper-metropolitan quality through historical connectedness to larger Atlantic and Pacific ecumene. There is one key difference. New York and Chicago are architectural articulations of the social imaginary significations of civic life, while LA



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is a globalist metropolis, reflecting layers of inflow in migration, economy, culture, and politics. At the same time, all three are worldly and at the end of the twentieth century globally networked. NEW YORK For more than four decades, as the world’s most populous city, New York is the urban paradigm of migration (Anbinder 2016). Between 1880 and 1920, the city drew in unparalleled numbers of migrants and created a national infrastructure for border management. Migrants entered a maritime city. Lower Manhattan’s port culture of exchanges, expansive movements, and fraternization was a defining physical environment. At street level, people can perambulate in a metropolitan animus of belonging and detachment typical of Simmel’s theorization of the city (Simmel 1976). Nevertheless, as an immigrant city, New York created multiple spaces and an urban topography of places in which energetic creation is evident. In its built environment, the skyscraper was a stunning invention for onlookers. An initial invention of Chicago, it signified principles of limitlessness in its sleek materiality and optical transparency with glass. Proliferating faster and more spectacularly in New York, skyscrapers generated street canyons of light and shadow formed with unnatural straight lines, interrupted by occasional jags in building design. Many landmark skyscrapers of New York fulfilled architecture’s purpose to conduce experiences of the sublime for those passing through them (Sennett 1990, 116–17). Signifying openness and accessibility as well as the Promethean pursuit of endless height, the tall towers that mushroomed across the skyline of postwar New York continue the kinetic logic of influx, transitions, and egress implicit in the grid plan of early city leaders. In this respect, and in so many other ways, New York planned its built symbolic expressions of modernity ahead of the trend, as it were. In its early decades, the skyscraper represented a blueprint for city-making straight out of New York. The city’s grid plan and Promethean ambition became the exemplar for other cities (Sennett 1990, 48–49, 52–55). The grid spread as part of the broad vision of continental nation building held by the bourgeoisie in New York (Beckert 2001, 182–95). Beginning with Cleveland, the grid template appeared in key cities with little regard for topography, including the signs and impact of First Nations occupation. Back in New York, this form would be an architecture suited to the motion of the city’s bustle. Yet the democratic need for living spaces was to be the parent of invention. The later part of the nineteenth century saw a concerted effort to create a metropolitan public culture with accessible spaces (Schuyler 1986). This proved to be a battleground for a time in which Central Park was a

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watershed. As a foundation point for the urban park movement, it condensed the benefits and problems of city design into one urban space. Modernism allowed amply for such breakthroughs to recreational activities, even as New York grew to incorporate other parts of the region. With faith in planning, New York’s leadership set about authoring new rules and regulations for vertical construction and apartment living in Manhattan in the new century. After World War II, the city morphed into a network of freeways, causeways, and tunnels. The architect of the transformation, Robert Moses, was at the heart of a paradigm of the suburban city. He left the grid and the original features of New York’s growth behind, extending New York by concentrating on the boroughs outside of Manhattan. Many American cities pursued his goal of continuous construction. Inspired by Le Corbusier’s anti-humanism, Moses’s engineering produced a modernist animosity toward the ideals of the city. In place of democratic geniality and intercultural openings, Moses’s paradigm responded to crowded metropolises with mass housing estates and intercity highways built on the demolition of established communities. New York’s urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 1960s foreshadowed an unintended consequence of this paradigm: segregation of low-income housing projects, which further inflamed racial divisions. The shift to expressways and high-rise housing blocs reshaped class and race ecologies. Immune to the heritage of connectivity, this phase of city-making produced unembedded transit links, massified housing, and streets redesigned for cars. From the 1940s through to the 1970s, the vision of New York at the heart of expansion was devoid of the patterns of the city as a place of engagement, encounter, and motion. In those tendencies, technocratic reason sought to triumph over the living civilization of the city. New York’s vibrancy could produce two honed versions of modernism in, first, Moses’s vision of rational mastery and, second, the vernacular of sidewalks and communities defended by Jane Jacobs and the urban protest movement. The metropolitan imaginary produced both poles of interpretation of planning. As a metropolis, New York generated momentous conflicts around vital questions of how people should inhabit cities. Toward the end of the century, New York’s topography of iconic intersections, enduring architectural landmarks, eminent universities, parades, and world leading arts scene produced a significant creative economy. From the outset of the same century, however, the creative arts were a world divided around modernism, class, gender, race, and unadorned personal rivalries. A shift from the private collections of the philanthropic wealthy to artistinitiated groups like the Municipal Art Society gave an unofficial voice to advocacy for a more complex ecology of cultural production. Admiration for Latin culture translated easily into avant-garde circles of artists in touch with radical Left causes (Pike 1992, 215–20). Institutions were never acquiescent



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in this creative outpouring. In the 1930s, the Federal Art Project and the Museum of Modern Art lent institutional support to democratizing impulses (Saab 2004). Intercultural experimentation in this prewar period also contributed to growing nexus of arts organizations and practicing artists. Famous artists made work in and around the Museum of Modern Art, the New School of Social Research, and the Art Students League, including Diego Rivera, Joaquín Torres-García, and Frida Kahlo. They entered a tempest of creative and intellectual exchanges with others. From this point on, the intersection of artistic groups, cultural institutions, and the private sector stimulated cultural development. The institutional apparatus of New York’s culture industry enlarged itself in two bursts: one after World War II and another from the 1980s. Stoked by further philanthropic and governmental support, cultural organizations grew and diversified after the war. The city was a source of abstraction as a style, particularly in the influence of Mondrian and the Pollocks. In later years, New York was enlivened by alternative sites of production from Greenwich Village to Soho, often with complex relationships to museums and galleries. Artists staged poetry and street plays and made murals on the sidewalks and in the warehouses (Sennett 1990, 205–7). Strategies of cultural revitalization counted entertainment centers and ancillary retail businesses alongside the arts as the sine qua non of a world leading cultural sector. All these had to interface with the communities of practitioners, as well as with the audiences of consumers. In this sense, the symbolic economy of New York’s cultural businesses coexists with a cultural city in a complex of relationships between practitioners and institutions. The cultural city was inevitably linked to late capitalism. CHICAGO Located on the shores of Lake Michigan and with access to the Great Lakes, Chicago had natural advantages. However, it was the envisioned project of a metropolis in the interlinked interior, which invested human energy into making it. Derived from a potent metropolitan imaginary, projects of development of Chicago propelled investment, inland migration, and architectural creation. Above all, the city was bound to an arc of emerging interior zones to its vast West in a mutually constitutive relationship (Spears 2005; Cronon 1991). The mirage of success impelled endeavors to come to this city and to make it a metropolitan place. From its beginning, Chicago was a migrant city adding millions to its population quickly. Home to 1 million at the time of the 1893 World Fair, the population reached more than 2 million by 1910. New York’s oceanic vista may not have been there, but Chicago still drew Irish, Polish, German,

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Italian, and later black American and Jewish immigrants. Newcomers with an ethnic heritage from elsewhere as much as those from the Midwest imagined Chicago to be a metropolis both thriving and dark. Segregation thrived on existing racism, as Du Bois reflected in his essayistic comments on Northern racism as a lived experience in Chicago (Bois 1986). Segregation on the south side in the so-called Black Belt also helped to reproduce racism. The level and ferocity of class conflict animated class division intersecting racial inequality. Although Chicago’s decision makers embraced reform at the end of the nineteenth century, the city remained troubled for decades by a national reputation for turbulent labor relations, racial violence and rioting, mob gangsters operating with impunity, and an entrenched sex industry (Boehm 2004, 67–94). However, migration continued, as it did in New York. Many new arrivals found themselves congregated in enclaves, which were the main communal strategy available to survive. Urban migration brought engagement with the cultures of new Euro-American and inland communities. The city’s reform-minded elites of this time took planning and architectural innovation as tools of reform, as well as strategies for modernization. Reform’s main architect Louis Sullivan saw a city dreamt into being by its makers from the gifts given to the area by nature (Cronon 1991, 14–15). The simple layout of the city and the constructive inventiveness of its architects spoke to the creative environment generated in its imaginary institution. Sullivan conceived the skyscraper to scale new heights, stripping buildings back to basic utility. With a Beaux-arts training and an artisanal flair derived from education in different cultural environments, Sullivan’s genius was to challenge ornate Gothic designs by making an aesthetic virtue of their core structures. When coupled with coherent planning, Chicago set itself on a modernizing course missing in New York. A watershed in planning, Daniel Burnham drafted a city plan in 1909 as a direct response to the class conflict and the anomie produced by rapid industrialization (Boehm 2004, 73–75). Burnham’s concerns span public amenity and the civilizing benefits of education, public health, and availability of parkland. In his wake, city planners populated the metropolis with structures of Parisian, Viennese, and German designs. Fashionable elsewhere, the values and creations of the City Beautiful movement were present in Chicago alongside of local features. Often echoing elements of the Burnham Plan, Chicago’s burgeoning architectural firms made the most of government investments in public works to spark a proliferation of avant-garde structures in the city’s core. As this occurred, New York and Chicago began to rival one another in fashioning advances in skyscraper construction. With dynamic new designs, architects clustered into the Chicago School. As a metaphorical center for innovation, Chicagoan architecture attracted and welcomed talent from abroad. From the mid-1940s through to the 1960s, Mies Van Rohe’s modernist constructions



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merged European and Midwestern styles and techniques. His ever-newer, ever-better structures signified a sublime order within, standing in opposition to the apparently anarchic rhythms of the streets outside (Sennett 1990, 111– 14). With a new vocabulary and a singular focus on the relationship of structure to space, Miesian design dominated architecture across three decades. His encased glass interior walls added transparency to glass exteriors. With further spatial innovations, Miesian architecture achieved additional economies in constructing corporate headquarters attractive to Chicago’s enriched capitalist elite. Favorable circumstances suited postwar development and fresh planning and architecture. From the mid-1950s to 1976, Chicago grew on the back of municipal investment in housing, airports, bridges, expressways, public art, and major buildings. With the city economy booming at above national rates, the long-term Mayor, Richard Daley, was able to accumulate a political machine capable of a public sector-led makeover. Despite corruption and difficulty in getting to grips with the radical mode of politics of the new social movements, this proved that a government of longevity can boost Chicago’s fortunes in both absolute and relative terms. What Daley’s Chicago is often remembered for is the street clashes over the 1968 Democratic Convention, which punctuated an otherwise acquiescent era of growth. After a short economic crisis, Chicago’s heart revived from the late 1970s in a manner that invites instructive comparison with Toronto to its northeast. The arts too featured in the cityscape that grew in Chicago’s metropolitan imaginary institution. The city’s elites invested in civic institutions of art in the reform years of the early twentieth century. The Field Museum of Natural History, the much-frequented Art Institute, and the Auditorium of Music filled out the cityscape alongside the rising skyscrapers. For artists on the ground, immigration and then inland-regional migration induced modernist genre and style (Spears 2005, 234–57). Enduring the sanctimonious antipathy of local elites, modernists began to make a mark in the 1920s, often defying the hostile atmosphere of local authorities (Prince 1990). Chicago’s architecture and industrial engineering provided an artisanal environment, in which modernism in painting and performance could gestate. If Chicago was not the progenitor of a new genre, it was certainly the productive recipient of the stylistic idioms and preferences of modernism. Self-reflective about their own practice, Chicago’s small group of artists spoke a language of modernism comparable to avant-garde contemporaries in Latin America. Artists also found inspiration in the Mexican muralists (Hart 2002, 267–69). More generally absorbing impressionist, cubist, and urban realist techniques, a mode of artistic expression crystallized through the city’s cultural engagement. With its metropolitan grammar, Chicago became a center where practitioners could make art as a public good. Begun in the mid-1960s the Museum of

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Contemporary Art was a meeting point of curators, critics, and artists situated in both institutional and community cultures. In this vein, recovery of black American art as a place-specific record of segregation in the South Side’s Black Belt paralleled the energetic community of Harlem in its advocacy for landmarks to black memory. When the University of Chicago broadened its curriculum to incorporate Art History in the mid-1970s, it too connected creative practice to a network of artistic production and social and political critique. Chicago’s arts milieu continued to thrive on the interaction of institutional structure with constituent creative communities. High levels of immigration and cultural cross-flows are dimensions of the historical creation of both Chicago and New York. Instituting patterns of interaction that go beyond the rationalization of city life, the metropolitan imaginary generates distinct ecologies of creativity. Since the United States crafted itself as a continental nation, it seems relevant to ask how does the Pacific metropolis compare? LOS ANGELES If Chicago and New York are the paradigm of grid-based metropolises, then LA is a template of suburbanization. From its inception, LA spread continuously outward, spurning the verticality of eastern cities for a polycentric form. In part, it tailored suburban sprawl to this form. A different city for a different century, the population grew across the five counties in accelerated bursts. New municipalities sprouted on the back of expanding agriculture and petroleum production; forty existed by the time that the 1920s were beginning to roar, housing more than 1 million people. With oil came the automobile culture and the polycentric form consequently refashioned itself as a lattice of motorways. Over two decades from the 1920s to the 1940s, the city turned from a light rail transport system to freeway construction based on an extraordinary upsurge in car ownership. The influx of migrants from the south and Midwest in the 1920s led to a proliferation of new zones and distinctly Californian architectural styles. Together, migration and expanding vehicle transport prefigured the freeway city that LA would become. Over the decades of the twentieth century, secular trends of migration defied the city’s late-nineteenth-century logic of ethnic purification. Mexicans, Chinese, black Americans, farmers, Koreans, Vietnamese, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Pacific islanders moved to LA in different waves. “White flight” to newly incorporated municipalities barely within the city limits followed (Soja 2000, 283–97; Rocco 2014, 128–32). As a trend, white flight pulled people away from the original center and thereby altered the ethnic ecologies of the city. Migration rates may have slowed slightly as the new



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millennium closed in. However, by most measures, they were still impressive with a majority of residents being foreign-born—“a majority of minorities” as Soja suggests (2000, 284). Far from equitable, life chances have structured the fortunes of migrants and circumscribed experiences of the urban cultural world. By the century’s end, migrants were entering a segregating metropolis and highly segmented labor markets. California had its own species of Fordist political economy to match these divisions (Soja 2000, 135; Freeman 2012, 20–23). Through fiscal support and by means of public and social policy, the Federal Government nourished growth in manufacturing (particularly in defense and aerospace industries) and superhighway construction, alongside tourism and digital and high-tech industries (Cuff 2000; Davis 1990; Klein 2008). This Fordist political economy suited LA’s polycentric urban form. For much of its history, periodic surges in major projects altered the extended cityscape (Cuff 2000). Since the Depression, many projects have involved large-scale land development of private housing. Rather than moving with existing patterns of land use, project planning has tended to treat urban space as a tabula rasa on which to design housing afresh. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the projects brought competing visions of the city into confrontation. Liberal modernists with ideals of medium-density communities in mind pitted their plans against statesubsidized land developers eager to optimize newly incorporated spaces in LA County. If there is a winner, it is the developers and that was due to the impetus behind the car culture. The automobile was a figure of imagined liberated lives. Projections of mobility demanded horizontal expansion, where growth in other metropolises had headed toward the heavens (Cuff 2000). Beginning with a mania of freeway construction in the 1950s, the scale and shape of LA altered. Opposition may have checked Robert Moses in Manhattan, but his vision never ran aground in LA. Indeed, vision and economic power drove LA and, in this sense, it is a figurative metropolis. As Davis observes, “Compared to other great cities, Los Angeles may be planned or designed in a very fragmentary sense (primarily at the level of infrastructure) but it is infinitely envisioned” (1990, 23, emphasis in original). Like Chicago, this imaginary has a dark underbelly. By the 1990s, the city wanted for public spaces. It appeared evacuated due to the long-term erosion of housing, public transit lines, and vibrant communities. Little replaced it, creating what Klein describes as a pocked cityscape of phantom memories; in other words, a form of memory where absent structures and past consociations shape the imagination of place (Klein 2008). For that reason, it was easy for LA to switch in the 1990s from images of the “Pacific Byzantium” to the United States’s most dangerous city (Klein 2008, 114–19). The beating of Rodney King heightened the image by, first, broadcasting a seminal moment in the history of racism in LA’s criminal justice institutions and,

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second, by reinforcing the entrenched state of race conflict. Deep ethnic divisions, inscribed in the architecture of prisons, gated communities, and urban security seemed an ingrained feature of LA (Freeman 2012, 452–53; Davis 1990, 223–57). With the evacuation of the inner city, the consequences of outgrowth became more conspicuous. How had this twentieth-century metropolitan imaginary formed architecture? An initial wave of modernist public housing gave way to suburbanism in the postwar era (Cuff 2000, 20–22). Modernism flourished here in the well-known designs of Richard Neutra and his contemporaries. Yet it was limited to housing and interior design (Davis 1990, 63). As a fragmented profession, Californian architecture responded with new urbanism in the 1980s and 1990s. Estate villages with the advantages of small-scale environments accommodated local ecology in appealing ways. Such growth molded the practice into a profession. Californian housing styles catered to eclectic taste, especially design amplifying the amenity of the external environment. The atrophy of Downtown impelled architects to concentrate on newer counties, giving them a wide canvas of housing projects on which to experiment. Like architecture, the visual arts fostered experimentation. An infusion of influences and different genres from other national traditions fostered creative expression. LA had grown out of a promise of opportunity for newcomers and the flow of visitors and migrating artists, writers, actors, and directors sustained a renewal of the arts. There is, of course, an institutional environment, including the film industry, which many artists benefited from. In a city where the boundaries between different genres of creative practice were porou, Hollywood influenced art forms and thereby nourished the city metropolitan cultural ecology. High-end investment in culture in the 1980s was part of a new promotional strategy (Davis 1990, 22–24). The arts already had a local bohemian avantgarde. A distinct West Coast scene had steadily built up by the 1960s. When the counterculture surfaced across the United States, a new generation began to make an expansive and deep impact in California. New trends nurtured an environment in which, first, radical forms of expression could readily find audiences and, second, artists could link personal expressive styles with political positions on war, civil rights, race, gender, ecology, and sexuality (Peabody and Martin-Gropius-Bau 2011, 228–36). Black art expanded on the back of black pride. Chicana artists affirmed Pan-American identities and making visual narratives of an older America. Jewish, black, and Korean communities also nurtured exhibitions. In terms of style, edgy ceramics, sculpture, and mural and poster art reflected unconventional practices. The California Institute of the Arts nourished this ecology of creativity. The feminist art of the 1970s found a home there from which it could critique social conditions and the patriarchy of the West Coast arts sector (Peabody



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and Martin-Gropius-Bau 2011, 264–69). For this generation, a politics of aesthetics accompanied broader radical critique. At the same time, Californian artists were challenging aesthetic conventions by making industrial art with recovered materials. LA had enlarged its community of artists, which, in turn, was enlarging the realm of creative expression. The metropolitan imaginary generated competing figures of an actually existing metropolis (Klein 2008). Significations of planned urban development vied with those of organic emergence engulfed in the social-historical and mostly prevailed. Caught between extremes, the city always seemed fragile and “provisional’ ” (Cuff 2000). The opposites of existence, along with the migratory and cultural inflows of intercivilizational engagement, nurtured creative metropolitan ecologies that proved highly adaptive in architecture and edgy in the arts. Vision mattered, even more out on the Pacific edge than in the Midwest. However, vision also confronted an inescapable indeterminacy of the imaginary institution. CANADA Canada is unmistakably an immigrant society. However, its migration was concentrated in a single wave. Overall, not as many settlers came to Canada during the major phase of transatlantic migration (Nugent 1992, 136). Nevertheless, it grew at a face pace from the end of the nineteenth century to the start of World War I. With more than 300,000 arrivals, 1913 was a peak year. Many came in response to promotion of West Coast development. Western Canada had a boom, which brought a tenfold increase in the population over three decades (Belich 2009, 406–14; see also Berdahl and Gibbins 2014). Beginning in British Colombia, gold rushes accelerated light patterns of colonization, connecting the West with the worldwide currents of global historical migration (Mountford and Tuffnel 2018). Boosters attracted Americans from the United States. Numbers from Asia were remarkably high before a nativist backlash suppressed entry from China altogether. Postwar settlement of refugees began a process of steady population growth. Foreign-born Canadians had fallen to as little as 15 percent of the population at one point. However, from the 1970s, the number of foreign-born recovered to higher levels and then exceeded them. Asian and Caribbean heritage is the most prominent background in more recent decades (Edmonston 2016). They are, moreover, more likely than previously to arrive in Quebec. Extraordinary rates of emigration offset postwar immigration to a degree. This pattern also distinguishes Canada’s experience from that of the United States. Canada’s major cities clustered around the border (Gibbins 2005, 153). Akin to the national consciousness of their Southern neighbor, the shared

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border with the United States has a mythic quality in Canadian collective identity. As it is undefended, Canadians regard the border as a political and economic shield protecting Canadian culture. The border is highly visible on Canada’s horizon, while conversely holding less significance for the United States. Overwhelmingly, Canadians live close to this border in cities nourished by migration in the second half of the twentieth century (Lipset 1989, 51). Fast growing Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver could claim more than half of Canada’s population (Edmonston 2016, 42–44).5 Moreover, nearly three-quarters of the country’s immigrants land at one of the three. Montreal incorporated a third of Quebec’s people, receiving a high number of French-speaking migrants from the Caribbean, North Africa, and the Middle East. Added to the strong metropolitan attraction for working class and rural migrants, Montreal draws from both abroad and from home (Taylor and Laforest 1993, 9). With the three major cities diversifying dramatically, it is right to class each as a heartland of ethnic pluralism and metropolitanism. On raw figures (2010), Toronto has the largest minority population at 47 percent, followed by Vancouver (45 percent) and Montreal at 20 percent (Berdahl and Gibbins 2014, 49). Each is an outcome of different strategies to achieve global city aspirations. They are major metropolises receiving migrants, generating models of urban creation, and fostering a vibrant arts sector. Let us look more closely at Toronto. TORONTO Started as a military outpost, Toronto became a town of traders and railway builders, and then a Victorian milieu of urban stability (Dendy, Kilbourn, and Litteljohn 1986). In the long wake of the 1837 rebellion, the city directed its energies to commerce, finance, and industry. A canal system and rail networked Toronto with Montreal and New York. With finance and industry also growing, Torontonians welcomed the 1867 inauguration of the Confederal Constitution in a mood of confidence about the future. From that point, Victorian Canadians focused on the enhancement of public buildings as built representations of modernity and the construction of public institutions and services. Universities, a concert hall, botanical gardens, and artistic societies supplemented sewerage, garbage collection, a developed police force, and hospitals. Toronto underwent rapid urbanization like New York and Chicago. The population doubled in thirty years between 1880 and World War I. It reached half a million by 1920. Jews and Italians living alongside of Irish immigrants and a black American quarter grew into distinguishable communities. Comparison with US cities indicates that the “color hierarchy” is



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flatter overall in Canadian cities (Myles 2004, 40). As black ­Torontonians bought houses they tended to leave black majority neighborhoods (Myles 2004). By ­contrast, the reverse is the case for Chinese migrants. The unusual pattern sets Toronto apart. Here the ecology of enclaves analyzed by the nearby Chicago School was absent. As Toronto built up industry, it increasingly left Quebec City behind to become the epicenter of economic and cultural traffic. Though lacking a planning process like the Burnham Plan, civic leaders were not bereft of interest in the City Beautiful Movement (Dendy, Kilbourn, and Litteljohn 1986, 152–54). In a separation of public and private spheres, they promoted urbane green spaces, distinct from private metropolitan living. Their intervention led to public issues. The model of urban modernity they promoted supported patriarchal family-based home ownership as a moral principle over apartment tenancy (Flanagan 2018, 182–215). They subsequently proposed suburban expansion as a means of achieving greater home ownership. Suburbanism in turn encouraged car ownership from as early as the 1920s. In response to the growth of vehicle traffic, municipal authorities began a road-paving program. Office construction and an increase in public amenity and accessibility brought banks, companies, and people to downtown. The architecture of the built environment generally improved as these vehicles of Anglophone capital housed their activities in elaborate headquarters possessing a powerful elegance—a quality which itself communicated power. Yet the promise of continual growth faded. The population plateaued and remained at steady levels until the 1970s (Dendy, Kilbourn, and Litteljohn 1986, 199–203; Lipset 1989, 112). Toronto then began to lose its dominant white character as new waves of non-Anglo migrants have joined the city (Myles 2004; Dendy, Kilbourn, and Litteljohn 1986, 13, 208). Migrants from Portugal, Greece, India, Pakistan, Korea, the Philippines, and the Caribbean altered a city historically influenced by Irish, Italian, Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and, of course, British communities. They entered a relatively welcoming environment of relative racial tolerance (Lipset 1989, 112–13). New migrants and cultural fusion enriched the city’s design cultures. Similarly, architects trained in the United States brought American designs and new skyscrapers, including Mies Van der Rohe. The city was heir to a mixture of styles, including art deco and international styles. New designs helped local architecture to flourish. With design philosophies informed by international models, Canadian architectural and urban design proved receptive to unconventional inspirations. Japanese designers practiced in Toronto, Scarborough, and Ottawa. US architects plied influence on trends in Toronto, alongside of more established British guidance. New structures altered the vista with a blend of colors and materials (Dendy, Kilbourn, and Litteljohn 1986, 254–65). When artists, municipal advisors, and creative intellectuals—later

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including urbanist Jane Jacobs—worked with architects, Toronto acquired the look of a creative architectural metropolis. As was the case with the architects, international modernism influenced visual artists (Carney 2017). Modernism brought a tension between foreign trends and provincial themes echoing the tension between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. On the Romantic side, primitivism acclaimed the provincial in landscape painting around the time when Federal Government support for the arts was starting to increase (Carney 2017, 4–36). Previously neglected by the main galleries, allied artists in Toronto and Montreal profited from official promotion of modernist exhibitions. As artists increasingly exhibited new work, visual depictions increasingly turned to the urban. Modernism’s inability to endure intact proved as definite in Toronto as it did in New York, Chicago, and LA. Over many decades, the arts slowly incorporated feminist, First Nations, and Francophone critique into contemporary decisions. Francophone critique emanating from Montreal emphasized a freestanding art vivant like no other in the global Francosphere (Carney 2017, 139–55). The position of Montreal’s creative current puts it at odds with the Federal and Quebec governments, as well as other provincial settings. The sharp division in the arts over national identity parallels the wider standoff in Canada between the two founding European nations. I return to this in subsequent chapters. Are comparable patterns of intercivilizational engagement evident in other major cities in the Americas? Further exploration will illuminate other constellations of the social-historical. These take us south to other domains of the metropolitan institution. SOUTHERN METROPOLIS, DIVERSE IMAGINARIES Metropolises of the southern subcontinent reflected dynamics of international and intra-regional migration in their urban creation. Strong transnational links made major metropoles beacons of modernity possessing the features of recognizably modern life: plazas, avenues, monumental public buildings and statues, parks, museums, theaters, and galleries. Their form and architecture expressed modernity’s emergence. While only 15 percent of the population lived in towns and cities in 1900 (Moya 2007, 184–90), those major cities connected with global transformations were centerpieces of Latin American modernity. Furthermore, metropolises were recipients of migrants from within the subcontinent, as well as European and Asian immigrants. Trends shifted in the second half of the twentieth century. Movement between Latin American countries became the prominent migratory impulse. Rural migrants, drawn to larger industrializing cities, helped turn Latin



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America into an urban world region. In contrast, European migration went into reverse: 1990 estimates of European-born people had fallen from 4 million (in 1970) to 2.5 million (Pizarro 2001, 90). Thus, where Spanish America experienced four centuries of immigration, net emigration was the predominant pattern of the last four decades of the twentieth century (Clark, Hatton, and Williamson 2004). Much of the flow went to the United States and Canada, and the share of those two countries of total Latin American emigration rose (Clark, Hatton, and Williamson 2004, 1875; Carballo 2019). One general observation is that while Mexicans dominate the data, the figures indicate that there are a great many also moving from the Caribbean and Central America (Castles, Haas, and Miller 2014, 131–37; Clark, Hatton, and Williamson 2004, 1878–82). Seen from this angle, Mexico looks like a major receiving country—a point lost in US debates about border protection and security (see Carballo 2019; Martin 1999).6 By the end of the century, the region’s megacities were growing. Newcomers confronted a topography of enclaves, where occupants live in unofficial neighborhoods contrasting with long-established suburbs and newer gated communities. Many are considered part of the “informal city”—a residual category applied to many of Latin America’s urban centers to classify the other of ordered suburbs.7 In the formal city, governments could plan the development of modern infrastructure and the provision of services. The formal city appears to have no place for the indigenous, or for lower class workers (servants, cleaners, maids) as permanent metropolitan citizens. The hierarchies of Latin America’s segmented social orders are magnified in these metropolitan contrasts. In this environment of ecological decline and enhanced stratification of class relations, architectural and artistic ingenuity continues to thrive in southern metropolises. Next is Buenos Aires, a major recipient of international traffic, along with the endogenous impulses of intercivilizational engagement generated within, as we shall see. BUENOS AIRES In the wave of emigration from Europe, an astounding number set out for the River Plate region. European emigrants to Argentina totaled 6 million (McGuire 1997, 30–31), some 20 percent of Europe’s total (Moya 1998, 47). Between 1850 and World War I, the foreign-born proportion of Buenos Aires’s population increased from 36 to 51 percent (Moya 1998, 148–49). The city’s population doubled in the 1880s, and then repeated that feat in the 1890s (Rock 1987, 153). By 1914, it was, arguably, the foremost capital in the Western Hemisphere. As free arable land began to run out, newcomers

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found themselves unable to find a livelihood outside of the cities. Many migrants underwent a process of proletarianization as they moved to the cities (Nugent 1992, 118–19). The dual lines of migration fueled the development of modern Buenos Aires. A romantic anti-modernism sprang up in reaction to the growing foreign presence (Delaney 1996; Sarlo 2000, 114–15; Coletta 2018, 59–60; Moya 1998, 350–67). When ardent Argentine intellectuals cast migrants as the avatars of modernity, they constructed an impression of two symbolically conflicting civilizations: that of urbanized immigrants and that of the heroic and organic “creature of the pampa” (Delaney 1996, 441). In their writings on Europe and Argentina, the earlier “1837 Generation” of Argentine political thought had prefigured a civilizational discourse in this conflict (Knöbl 2018, 31–36; Rock 1987, 114). However, the generation that produced Alberdi and Sarmiento were greater enthusiasts for the attributes of European civilization than gaucho life. For their successors, circumstances were different with the urban and progressive representing “civilization” against an authentic creole culture (Coletta 2018, 88–89). By 1914, Buenos Aires was one of the great portal cities, yet the presence of the Pampas and more distant Patagonian regions was undeniable. Modernization made it easy to remember the Pampas romantically as a stable world of virtue. Thus, ambivalence toward the transformations of modernity turned on a rural melancholy of fin de siècle Argentina. Ambivalence could quickly become Southern anti-urbanism. Even so, Buenos Aires was a place for “strangers in the city” (Sarlo 2000, 113–15). Italians, Spaniards, Poles, Germans, Russians, Lebanese, Turks, French, Scots, Welsh, and the English came in numbers. Numerical dominance belonged to Italians and Spaniards (Nugent 1992, 114). As Moya asserts, Spanish migration was more significant than often thought. Through community associations and friendly societies, Spaniards forged a distinct identity (Moya 1998, 300–1, 399–401). Spaniards were joined by Argentine Jews in sustaining a relatively stable metropolitan culture during this period (Senkman 1998, 133–40). As one aspect of the tight connection between Britain and Argentina, Britons were promised a better life in the Argentine as reward for the virtues of wealth-producing labor. Indeed, Argentina did prove enriching for a visible number of Anglo-Saxon migrants. However, for many other immigrants, living conditions in the metropolis were decidedly harsher. Sex slavery and abuses of workers’ rights entrenched some in a miserable existence (Rock 1987, 176). Furthermore, for the middle class rising out of the established popular classes (and well above poor immigrant communities), there was “status confusion”—a loss of recognition of the class hierarchy of the previous era (Delaney 1996, 453–55). Buenos Aires combined the best and worst of urban modernity.



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Stimulated by internal migration, Buenos Aires became denser as Argentinians sought employment in manufacturing in the 1930s and early 1940s (Rock 1987, 234–37). The trend accelerated during the Peron years, further bolstering the government’s working-class base. The impact of intra-regional migration in the second half of the century on Argentina was substantial, as it was for Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile (Castles, Haas, and Miller 2014, 140). Existing porteño identity accrued further layers of creole identity out of this movement (Schneider 2006, 10–12). By 1980, more than a third of Argentinians lived in Greater Buenos Aires, such was the position of the littoral city (Rock 1987, 330). The Pampas and the provincial areas were still important, but Argentina’s center was not in doubt. If Córdoba was the only counterpoint, then the lack of any other cities to rival Buenos Aires only served to underline the latter’s supremacy as the country’s portal to the world. As with its peoples, Argentina’s urban design and architecture bore the marks of diversification. The littoral position of Buenos Aires at the confluence of riverine and international trades gave the metropolis the chance to absorb institute customs-raising revenue capacities (Knöbl 2018, 30–31). Concentrating national trade and in a position of exposure to international forces, influential Buenos Aires-based merchants were able to bring pressure to bear on public authorities. Responding to this pressure, governments stabilized the legal environment and built infrastructure to complement the metropolis’s internationality. Port, rail, and tram building, along with communications and electrification, enhanced the city’s claim to modernity (Rock 1987, 144–47). Rail emanated from the capital, aiding the conquest of the Pampas and Patagonia. With that advantage, porteño elites pressed their claim to leadership of the Argentinian state. Coexisting with the self-enriching elite in Buenos Aires, British capital and British traders provided both competition and a complementary dynamism. With British investment on the rise, the city modernized rapidly. Local elites with Europeanized sensibilities were subject to a cultural normalization of exchange associated with capitalist market cultures, as was much of the population (Salvatore 2001; Sarlo 2000). This habituation to the capitalist imaginary of market forces and trade occurred alongside the rise of cosmopolitanism. The capital’s citizens became accustomed to a porteño metropolitan culture. They were receptive to foreign philosophy, art, literature, and theater, as well as to trade and investment. Importantly, urban design and architectural style were imbued with international influences. French design was visible in the Haussmann-like makeover of the city center, which created public spaces of place and mind (Miller 2008, 81–82; Needell 1995; Arbide 1995). Yet the capital’s atmosphere still diverged in important ways. Along its boulevards, statues and monuments smuggled in Baroque expressions of power. Tall buildings complemented

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monumental streets. The shape of the city’s core had been an artifact of multiple inputs by different architects, including ones from overseas. During the 1920s, art deco and neoclassical motifs appeared. The capital’s architectonics displayed US influences also. Architectural modernism from abroad was complemented by imaginative local schools of architecture. International practice influenced architectural firms as well. In them, modernism came from collaboration, not individual genius (Arbide 1995). As with other Latin American metropolises, local schools of architectural imagination coalesced. The municipal council and a new School of Architecture at the city’s university became the focus of an Argentine urbanism. The Council introduced building codes to regulate the aesthetics of new neighborhoods, while the School of Architecture fostered a vernacular modernism alert to developments overseas (Guillen 2004, 18–21). Argentine architects journeying through Europe learned from Le Corbusier’s school of design and brought the lessons home. They applied those techniques along with local styles in central commercial and public buildings in the metropolis. Modernist banks, office buildings, and department stores thus found a place at the heart of Buenos Aires. While all this suggests that the so-called CIAM model was widely subscribed to, not all accepted the international style. It was one of several inspirations. Until the Peronist era, these were the influences shaping Buenos Aires. The regime refashioned public space to create the structural settings of a new politics (Domingues 2016; Scorer 2016, 135–43). Public places became sites of conflict and spectacle at the level of the social imaginary. As a major example, the regime made the Plaza de Mayo a symbol of access for the popular and working classes (Podalsky 2004, 35–39). Through its careful selection of major construction projects, the regime did much to enhance the cult of Juan and Evita Peron (Del Rosario Betti 2006). Peronism promoted an austere neoclassical aesthetics that in turn substantialized power. New buildings and spaces emphasized democratic access, aiming “to dignify the lower class” (Del Rosario Betti 2006, 233). It became a center of populist power. Architecturally and culturally, much changed after Peron (Podalsky 2004). Podalsky identifies a resurgence in a reformed middle class as a trend in Argentina’s metropolitan imaginary. From suburban and mass housing to multinational skyscrapers, aspects of functionalist form inserted themselves in the capital’s redevelopment. New companies specializing in sourcing resources and technology from overseas completed of rationalist style (Arbide 1995). In particular, the city’s visage re-formed around Miesian towers, which were symbols of new commerce and finance in a varied city (Podalsky 2004, 12–15, 176–78). Surrounding them was a con-urban figuration of residential zones.



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The architectural transformations of the 1960s prefigured the consumer city that emerged in the 1990s (Podalsky 2004, 229–35). Its central buildings were still modernist glass structures emanating transparency and light. However, contemporary architecture has crowded in and around the center, leaving porteños to visualize the city through a lens of late modernism. Above all, the city’s main axis, centered as it is on spatial and portal access to the greater Atlantic world, still symbolizes Argentina’s connection with global developments. At the century’s end, however, there were also democratic spaces poised for occupation (Svampa 2005, 263–66). In a short time, they would again become important political spaces. But, ahead of the economic crises that beset Argentina early in the twentieth-first century, Buenos Aires seemed to be a metropolis of the global age, interwoven with the world economy as a feature of its wider globality. Art played a small yet significant role in the national imaginary by bestowing distinction on an ambivalent Argentine identity. With a stable institutional base of museums and galleries. Buenos Aires would be a focal point for Argentinians to debate the country’s place in the Americas (Giunta 2007, 67–70). Like other Latin American metropolises, its arts sector was cast in tension between institutional production and democratic practice. The institutional structures of arts practice emerged from modest beginnings in the nineteenth century. Direction was found in the 1890s as institutions like the National Fine Art Museum and National History Museum began collecting Argentinian works. A tradition of art-collecting had gained a foothold in the wealthy elite looking to spend money made in agriculture and pastoralism on status symbols (Schneider 2006, 46–47). Once institutionalized, the arts acquired the confidence to stage the Centenary International Art Exhibition in 1910, a modest success in aggregating international connections. Toward the end of World War I, artists returning from sojourn in Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Madrid, or Berlin brought back cubist influences (Weschler 2011). They were part of the international circulation of ideas about form and representation that honored the intellectual and creative ingenuity of Latin American modernism. This creative heritage accumulated in university and museum archives. Postwar art was institutionally strong, but normatively conservative. Outsiders compared the arts in Buenos Aires with Paris, while some characterized the capital as a “southern New York” (Giunta 2007, 215). Observers portended a takeoff especially in painting, which was a noticeable medium. A neo-avant-garde capable of bringing the conservative vein of Argentinian art into question emerged in the 1960s (Podalsky 2004, 139–47). The new current had a democratizing impact on the arts, orienting creatives to making public art. Around the same time, international arts organizations and networks stimulated Argentinian projects (Giunta 2007). Influenced by the

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polarized politics of the 1960s—yet also fueling it—Argentine artists altered the meaning of internationalism. They succeeded in forging links with the United States, Europe, and with the rest of Latin America. Argentinian art circulated at greater velocity. Direct support from the Alliance for Progress at the start of the decade encouraged international recognition. It did not last, especially as the US commitment to the Vietnam War increasingly became incompatible with Latin American art, which was producing creative works with an explicitly anti-imperialist thrust. Nonetheless, Argentinians continued to crave recognition in American circles and relished all opportunities to exhibit, boldly chasing “equal exchange between Buenos Aires and the capitals of the art world” (Giunta 2007, 282). Arts activism brought direct confrontation with conservative norms and mores. Transgressive gesture in public art was the sign of dissent in the 1960s and early 1970s. Unlike other arts movements of the era, women artists led this imaginative disruption. Targeting urban issues also, countercultural artists exposed themselves to harassment. The movement went underground when the military took power in 1976, surfacing with strategic critique only at opportune moments. Artists responded with practices reflective of private places, as the public sphere was held brutally by the military. The arts thus maintained a subterranean existence. Movement from politicized confrontation to a politics of intimacy defined the neo-avant-garde during this phase. After the fall of the dictatorship, the visual arts became an important register in the construction of memory of repression. With a focus on instituting an aesthetic notion of beauty in the phase of democratization, Buenos Aires’s contemporary artists attempted in the 1990s to recover intimate aspects of daily life suppressed by the military. Democratic practice was gaining the upper hand by the end of the century. MEXICO CITY The paradox of the metropolitan imaginary would manifest in Mexico City as a tendency to absorb people and cultures en masse. This tendency was instituted in tension with efforts to make metropolitan places representing the historical and cultural plurality of the city. The metropolitan imaginary defined this city’s modernity in peopling, creation of metropolitan form, and the artistic expression of place. Migration is a starting point. Mexico enjoyed a minor wave of European arrivals from the 1890s. After World War I, internal migration overtook the Spanish inflow. Mexico City’s population doubled between 1940 and 1950. Further tripling before 1970, the national capital began to spill over from its historic core and the Federal District to a greater Metropolitan Area (Oles



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2013, 313). Increasingly, newcomers settled in peripheral neighborhoods. By century’s end, Mexico City was one of the most populous places on the planet, having added 3 million extra inhabitants to the city’s total. Of the 18 million who called it home by that time, half were migrants, many drawn by the promise of flight from poverty. They came from rural and mountainous areas of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Hidalgo, Tlaxcala, and Guerrero. With large numbers of migrants coming to a metropolis ill-equipped to absorb them, Mexico City ended the century with a large informal sector, which in fact is decidedly diverse in its composition and subcultures (García Canclini 1997; Davis 1994, 279–80). Beginning with some remarks on historicity, I make four observations about Mexico City. Patterns of metropolitan fusion echo an entire mode of intercivilizational engagement that, in turn, is characteristic of the socialhistorical. As a place with indigenous meaning, Mexico’s formation was, from the outset, cast by the Conquest and its lasting consequences. The social-historical instantiates a pattern of accumulation of the legacy of the past in the built environment, memory, and the arts. The coexistence and conflict of two civilizations and two imaginaries, indio and Spanish, resonates deeply in the memory of its capital. Mexico City had been one of the diverse zones of the Spanish Americas, both in its range of spoken languages and, in the postwar period, its physical commemoration of First Nations culture in museums, archaeological sites, and public art (Bonfil Batalla 1987, 73–96). The colonial confrontation of two civilizations sets a meta-pattern of integration evident in Mexican cultural creativity. As a second point, I want to suggest that Mexico City’s heritage is substantial, retaining in its architecture and urban form a visible material patrimony. Prior to the revolution, Mexico City’s cosmopolitan civic culture manifested in public spaces and heroic monuments (Oles 2013, 198–223; Trillo 1996). Reconstruction of the central core in the 1880s engraved a positivist imagination of modernity and progress into the city’s physical fabric. The transformation evinced elements of a civilizing process (Trillo 1996). As it trained the streets and public spaces of the city, the restructure tamed discontented inhabitants with boulevards and statues of historic heroes stylized for local tastes and plazas. Open streets and public order corresponded with the free trade ethos widely endorsed by the national government (Hart 2002, 257–61). The regime must have felt confident in its civilizing achievements as it took every opportunity to promote its multicivilizational heritage and its metropolitan culture internationally, including at numerous world fairs. Structurally, the city lost some of its neoclassical luster during the first decade of revolution. Yet revival came afterward. Architecture’s professional growth from the late 1920s onward reflected a dialogue with Mexico’s past, as well as the international influences flowing through the country’s arts and

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sciences. The visual arts were similarly situated at a junction of the past, present, and international. The metropolis underwent a period of modernist efflorescence between 1920 and 1940, evident in economic and architectural development. Like many of Mexico’s cities, the capital grew after the Revolution on the back of state investment in services and public buildings (Jimenez 2011; Davis 1994, 103–4). In architecture, an urban avant-garde brought rich traditions from within Mexico (particularly pre-Colombian revivalism) and from outside (Carranza 2010, 1–13; see also Miller 2008, 1–21). Those architects reviving the city’s monumentality joined others breaking through to new forms of urban design influenced by different artistic genres. (Carranza 2010, 169–201; Josten 2018). Among those genres, indigenism, art deco, neoclassicism, functionalism, and Cubism began to inform architectural practice. Functionalism was a particularly important paradigm. From the 1920s through to the 1960s, it variously combined aspects of all architectural influences with the recognizable form of the fashionable International Style. Many practitioners experimenting with functionalist designs were seasoned travelers and thus ideal students of Le Corbusier’s school of thought. They married Beaux-arts elements with functional utility and in doing so brought Le Corbusier’s metaphor of the machine into the grammar of architecture. In the eyes of Mexican functionalists, cement was the specific material promising the greatest utility (Carranza 2010, 126–27). With it, functionalists could design with apertures to light and a sensitivity to local heritage and the surrounding landscape; in other words, their practice adapted elements of location, culture, and history (Burian 1997). Moreover, the arts inspired in functionalist designers the vivid use of color, reflecting a lasting infusion of indigenous, colonial, and republican legacies. This was a matter of receptivity to other paradigms and fields of practice, as well as one of style. Fourth, creative adaptation applies to the construction of memory also. Mexico’s profound past is memorialized through different media. In this respect, the capital’s monumental cityscape combines different significations. Much of the statuary reflects older state-sponsored ideological intent, while other sites are more open to popular meaning. Where a feature may have been iconographic in the past, the meaning of its signification can change when its surrounding environment becomes saturated by other significations (García Canclini 1997). The massing of urban buildings and the increased velocity of movement can destabilize the original semantics of public intersections and squares. This is especially so in places where the physical environment has become crowded, and the spatial distribution of signs has become mixed. In mixed spaces, metropolitan memory becomes renegotiable in the intersections of both past and present and the tangible and intangible. At the end of the twentieth century, the overall relationship of heritage and memory



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changed as the consequences of globalization became unavoidable. At this time, the accumulation of intangible heritage began to add a digital dimension to the physical cityscape. Also, a repository of memory, the arts began to develop in the second half of the nineteenth century. Photographs and lithographs of scenes from Mexico City joined landscape paintings of the countryside as the main forms of representation (Oles 2013, 181–88). After the Mexican Revolution, the state instigated support for the arts, allowing early modernists to thrive on images of modern Mexico City (Oles 2013, 255–60). The quick reorientation of the revolutionary regime to the arts came at a time when a cosmopolitan atmosphere was descending on Latin America’s metropolitan cultural sectors (Weschler 2011). As the region shifted, so too did Mexican artists. They shifted away from imitation of single international genres to a position of inventive adaptation, fusion, and admixture (Weschler 2011). Among many in a new generation, the Muralist Movement actively contributed to the shift by fusing modernism with classical Mexican motifs. As Mexico’s best-known artist, Diego Rivera situated pre-Colombian imagery at the heart of the nation’s classical aesthetics. The quest for authenticity led to expressive and popular styles in art. Culturally, the muralists and other artists invoked a national tradition, which had been born in the form and content of pre-revolutionary popular aesthetics as critique of the old regime. The legislators of new revolutionary nationalism could easily adopt their example as the official version of Mexican art. As they did so, they were aestheticizing politics and proletarianizing aesthetics (Carranza 2010, 8–9). With an international reputation (thanks to Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Jose Clemento Orozco, and David Siqueiros), Mexico’s cultural leaders could assert the originality of the nation’s visual culture, while pointing out international influences in their art (Oles 2013).8 The international connectivity of Mexican modernism continued after World War II (Oles 2013, 326–31). Internationalism accelerated as the imagery, concepts, and colors of Mexican art circulated more widely and at a greater velocity. Other genres diversified the field: surrealism, neo-realismo, figurative abstraction, and neo-Mexicanism (Oles 2013, 295–349, 366–86). Some artists sought inspiration from Mexican sources and contributed to a transcultural commerce of ideas, symbols, and styles. Artistic exchanges were bolstered by increased international travel. Even so, substantial barriers to regional augmentation of Latin American arts remained, and this effected Mexican practitioners. In the 1970s, art collectives challenged political repression. Mexico City’s feminist art movement was built on the traditions of muralism and the example of Kahlo, as well as US influences. More widely, contemporary art in the later years of the century began to use the city’s public spaces, streets, buildings, vehicles, and even people of the city as part of creative constructions and political critique. In summary, much of

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the activity of postwar artists centered on Mexico City, which was also the object of their imagination, the site of their activism, and even a canvas for their work. Mexico City had a material appearance at variance with other megacities of Latin America. For much of the century, we do not find a concentration of wealth, prestige, and income in a vertiginous Downtown center bordered by informal urban settlements (Davis 1994, 296–97). Instead, the metropolis had a flat topography of spatially dispersed subdivisions. In the migratory flows, architecture and urban design, and strong arts sector, Mexico City was like other metropolitan capitals. Moreover, the traffic of people, ideas, doctrines, cultural influences, and economic goods suggests an overarching pattern. The specific feature of the metropolitan imaginary, distinguishing it from other cities in Mexico is its overall pattern of mass absorption. BRAZIL In area and population, Brazil is a Latin American giant. Historically, the nation stands out on account of its Lusitanian heritage, its noticeably multiracial composition, and the heavy legacy of slave trading, which was more intense throughout the territory and more enduring (Ribeiro 1971). In the second half of the nineteenth century, a “second slavery” particularly effected Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (Tomich 1991; Kaye 2009). This shaped both Sao Paulo and Rio. With the abolition of slavery, voluntary migration from Europe increased. Being mobile, most migrants headed for Sao Paulo state. Non-Portuguese Europeans found that they could maintain ethnic community cultures there under a population policy intended to transculturalize the populace (Ribeiro 1971, 228; Senkman 1998, 127–30). The migration nexus was linked to international developments. With slavery ending in the 1880s, the volume of immigrants accelerated and the range of sending countries diversified to include Portugal, Austria, Russia, and Japan. Three million came in the four decades between 1880 and 1920. Assistance for passage was available, but some sponsored themselves. Initially, many ended up as sharecroppers. However, later arrivals turned to small business after it became evident that their choices were constrained by blockages to landownership. The city became their option. Those following in later decades still landed at the port of Rio de Janeiro with many heading eagerly for the center of Sao Paulo. In the wake of the nation’s separation from the monarchy, both metropolises began to assume the appearance of cosmopolitanism. English and French could be heard from the lips of the wealthy and students (Owensby 1999, 19). The newcomers hearing those voices and languages would soon know that they were joining cities increasingly connected with foreign trade and imbued



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with market cultures (Owensby 1999, 18–26). In social relations, commerce and wage labor became the norm. Metropolitan elites did not lose power in this process; they simply adapted their existing habits and practices of clientelism to market conditions. Rio’s population quadrupled over five decades. However, Sao Paulo’s increased nearly fifteen-fold, enhancing its status as the thriving metropolis of the southern plantation district (Moya 2007, 188). The national inflow peaked in 1891, ensuring that the high-water mark of foreign presence was registered in the 1900 census: 6.2 percent of the population was born elsewhere at this time. Immigration peaked earlier than other American countries even though its closure came later in 1927. Provincial migration helped. With rising economic fortunes, rural migrants came to the metropolis, keeping the rates of urbanization and industrialization growing (Ribeiro and Rabassa 2000, 139–43; Mendes 2008). Sao Paulo had more than a half a million inhabitants by 1920—a beneficiary of industrialization and growing dominance of exports (Owensby 1999, 27–28). Increasingly, the middle class and industrialists began to define the city’s character from this time. Both metropolises were flourishing with the arrival of more rural migrants coming from the north. But by 1950, Sao Paulo was moving ahead (Owensby 1999, 48; Andrews 2004, 164). Like much of the subcontinent, Brazil also suffered the effects of emigration from the 1970s, much of it stimulated by overseas developments. Emigration to Portugal after its 1974 revolution saw more than 100,000 leave (Castles, Haas, and Miller 2014, 114–15). Coinciding flows from other Latin American countries increased negating a good deal of the emigration (Castles, Haas, and Miller 2014, 128). Reaching 10 million by the century’s end, Sao Paulo is one of the Latin America’s metropolitan giants. This is not only a matter of massification, but it is also the power, centrality, and creativity of the metropolis that distinguishes it. CITYSCAPES OF RIO AND SAO PAULO Rapid urbanization accompanied demographic growth. At the outset of the century, city leaders in Rio produced developmental programs of urban reform. These included extending postal and transport connection to the provinces (da Silva 2002). Not wanting to be left behind Buenos Aires, Rio’s cityscape witnessed a Hausmannian takeover of the colonial heritage at the end of the nineteenth century. Brazil’s elite committed to a “civilizing mission” in line with its adoption of positivism (Carvalho de 1992; Needell 1995). On one hand, this meant boulevards, clubs, shops, theaters, cafes, parks, and cars to conjure up a theater of diversion for downtown elites.

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A differentiated public sphere manifested in urban division as the growing sensibilities of status distinction in the white-collar middle class divided city workers from manual laborers (Owensby 1999, 58–71; Topik 1978). On the other hand, the modernizing program provoked conflict in Rio itself. The municipal government vigorously prosecuted a sanitation campaign, which, in turn, pushed the poor away from downtown areas further into zones of improvisation, thereby producing the first favela (Andrews 2004, 120–21; Mendes 2008, 469–70). In the process of constructing a Francophone core, its metropolitan elites relocated to Beaux-arts hotels more removed from the traditional center (Needell 1995, 533–37). A long and uneven process of partitioning Rio had begun in which favelas and elite housing would be inexorably conjoined, but never intermixed. The intensification and outgrowth of favela housing would provide the impetus to the city’s population growth during the postwar era (Mendes 2008, 494). This contrast marked Rio until informal settlements began to spring up elsewhere. Known widely as “tropical modernism,” an original Brazilian architecture flourished from the 1920s to the 1960s on the back of vibrant adaptation (Le Blanc 2012; Andreoli 2004). Sao Paulo was the metropolitan incubator for the distinct Brazilian vernacular of architectural modernism. Rio also maintained a robust school of architecture. A brand of functionalism went on to harness industrial materials in the construction of apartment towers and offices on a large-scale in Rio and in Sao Paulo. Brazil’s celebrated generation of architects—with Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer as the best known—aimed at masterly fusions in engineering and aesthetics, producing along the way structures that diverged from purist functionalism (Le Blanc 2012). However, since the 1960s, Brazilian architecture has continued to labor fruitfully, but without admirers either internationally or indeed within Brazil itself (Andreoli 2004). Architects made use of artistic accessories, landscapes, and colors in educational, commercial, and residential buildings. In this phase, there was less call for new stock of public infrastructure, or indeed for innovation in larger commercial or cooperative projects. New building could be found in medium-sized structures and housing of the time. Furthermore, while there is less institutional support for interdisciplinary partnerships with artists, a groundswell of collaboration from the 1970s ensured that combinations of creative design would be an ongoing source of ingenuity. Connections to Japanese, German, and Austrian schools of design opened channels for exchange, as well as opportunities for international practitioners to bring their faculties and techniques to Brazil. In addition to adopting new foreign practices, metropolitan practitioners have diversified their materials. Like the Mexicans, they continue to build with concrete in major projects. However, the most innovative designs increasingly incorporated rustic and ecological



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motifs into their medium and small-scale structures. Contemporary architects have taken these and other new infusions to be divergences from modernism into exploratory fields of practice. The 1990s capped the century with break-away constructivist currents showing a sharper departure from tropical modernism. Rio and Sao Paulo’s architectural firms began to show a willingness to engage emergent designers as a new practicing generation. Sao Paulo’s skyscraper skyline is, by any measure, particularly conspicuous. As well as occupying a vast spatial footprint, this rapid-growth metropolis has become a veritable vertical sprawl. Yet room remains for creative divergence. By sourcing national materials with greater regularity, architects made a partial turn to the local climate. Even so, the formal architecture in Sao Paulo materializes as frightfully new. With this, Sao Paulo has acquired a reputation as Latin America’s most expensive city, even as it diversifies itself economically. Decay in the historic nucleus left a stock of vacant residences (Lima and Pallamin 2010). At the same time, development of informal neighborhoods and peri-urban business districts were distinctive features of the latter two decades of the century, which deepened the segmented character of the city and its appearance “as a mosaic of misplaced pieces” (Lima and Pallamin 2010, 39). Business parks and unregulated settlements impelled metropolitan growth in the age of the so-called global cities. The polarity of the city was both source and environment for social movements concerned with housing and workers’ rights in the 1980s and 1990s. Urban conflict increased in this context, positing a complex challenge for social movements. On one hand, the discourse of the movements articulated a plan for a revitalized global city quite compatible with the global significations of capitalism. On the other hand, the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) and Lula, as its famous leader, had origins in Sao Paulo, with different ideas (Ottmann 2002). This was a metropolis replete with effects of polarization. BRAZIL’S ARTISTIC CITIES Brazil’s coastline and hinterlands were popular subjects for landscape painting in the nineteenth century. Portal Rio and riverine Sao Paulo caught the eye of imaginative travelers. European form framed the creative work of this period. A profusion of French influence in the nineteenth century eased the introduction of neoclassical themes in landscape and street scene painting and lithography. The arrival of English, Swiss, Portuguese, Austrian, Italian, and German artists consolidated the trend in Sao Paulo and Rio. Still, French genres of art dominated, as art nouveau steadily complemented and then

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edged out neoclassicism. Distinctive Brazilian practice remained subservient to French form in this phase. The emergence of milieu with a critical mass sufficient for crafting distinctively Brazilian work had to wait a new century and the breakthrough to modernism (Sevcenko 2000, 94–100). It coalesced more dramatically in Sao Paulo than in a less receptive Rio, especially in the institutional environments of the Semana de Arte Moderna and, in the 1930s, the Sociedad Pro-Arte Moderna. With active intermediaries between Paris, Berlin and Brazil, sculpture and painting flourished in connection with literature and poetry. International connections should come as little surprise; so many were immigrants or the children of immigrants. The state too was an influence. From the 1920s through to the 1950s, modernism’s works contributed to the emergence of cultural and aesthetic nationalism due to the weighty patronage of the Brazilian state (Sevcenko 2000, 96–99). Modernism advanced in the arts as it did in architecture. Modernists emerged fully during the 1980’s return to democracy. In the metropolises, there was no lack of exhibition space. The Museo de Arte de Sao Paulo, the Museo de Arte Moderna, and Sao Paulo’s Biennale constituted three institutions of a flourishing cultural modernism. With international relationships and exchanges with artists and arts institutions in Europe and North America, modernism was able to cast a long shadow over the arts in postwar Brazil. Echoes of it are evident in the contemporary arts featured in the galleries of Sao Paulo and Rio (Lange, Horrigan, and Filho 2014). Opportunities to exhibit spread beyond metropolitan sites to Recife and Belo Horizonte. The inclusion of provincial producers in the rollcall of national artists coincided with increased global attention on Brazil. Through this, contemporary Brazilian art acquired a broadening international vocabulary, further relativizing the modernist tradition. The relativization of modernism was itself an act of artistic modernity, the crystallization of a consciousness of modern distinction. The shifts put creative practice on a new plane. Stylistically, contemporary art shows an ease with which creatives can range across different mediums: sculpture, painting, video, installation, and site-specific work (Lange, Horrigan, and Filho 2014). The sites of art also varied in contemporary practice. Street arts began to crop up in Rio and Sao Paulo. Some contemporary artists also craft their bodies creatively, making for mobile work reflective of their mixed histories. Video and photographic art—also mobile work—illustrate people and streets. Modernism looks distant when one considers the movement, sound, and light of contemporary arts. Yet like architecture and intercultural fusions brought about by the steady impulses of migration, a Brazilian modernity is still evident, especially if one seeks to situate the Brazilian encounters in an expanded framework of multiple modernities (Mota and Delanty 2015).



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HAVANA By the end of the 1890s, Havana was enjoying the life of a major portal city: entrepôt of world trade, junction of transcontinental migration routes, and focal point of cultural fusion. How did it arrive at such a position? What has shifted since? Havana was a transfer point and recipient of wealth transmitted within the Spanish empire and the dynamic transatlantic and cis-Atlantic trade (Segre, Coyula, and Scarpaci 2002). Slaves were part of that wealth, driving a mode of capitalist development that incorporated European wage labor, a Chinese “coolie” workforce, plantation production in the hinterland, and economic modernity in its cities and ports (Moya 2007, 184–85). The “second slavery” did much to define the century in Cuba and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere (Tomich 1991; Andrews 2004). Its impact was profound, extending beyond plantation production and culture and language. Publicly, free blacks, mulattoes, and slaves had a high public profile, putting nineteenth-century Spanish-Havanans in a collective state of anxiety about the latent potential for a Haitian-style rebellion. A policy of white immigration aimed to bolster the Spanish minority community, while Chinese newcomers were welcomed for their labor, business organization, and capital, much of it freshly procured from Northwest America’s goldfields. For a time, Cuba received more European immigrants and employed more Coolie laborers than any other country in the world (Andrews 2004, 137–39; Moya 2006, 9). With people came news, books, and information. Different traditions and practices intermingled in the Caribbean’s major city. Havana achieved above-average growth. Already home to quarter of a million residents by 1900, the city doubled that by 1925. Mexicans, Spaniards, other Caribbean islanders, and Chinese brought business acumen, capital, and labor at that time. Americans and the Cuban rich increasingly inhabited enclaves of wealth juxtaposed to great swathes of poverty. From the 1940s, growth accelerated. Central Havana became dense, as property investment and cigar and rum manufacturing fueled construction. By the 1950s, Havana’s populace stood at more than a million and part of the city suffered from major overcrowding. Having grown nearly sixfold since 1898, the capital housed a fifth of the island’s people (Segre, Coyula, and Scarpaci 2002, 78, 120). Only the historic core remained untouched by the metropolitan swell. Cuba’s diaspora incorporated the southern shores of the United States in the shared history of the two republics. Free movement between Cuba and Florida has been typical of the historical relationship between the island and its large northern neighbor, but all within a context of American regional hegemony (Pérez 2003). Geopolitical conditions have overdetermined migration and resettlement patterns of Cubans in the United States since 1960.

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Being comparatively successful in the United States, the Cuban community has molded Miami into a cultural enclave. The Cold War policy of lionizing Cuban refugees reflected geopolitical priorities in the second half of the twentieth century. Within Cuba itself, a shift in trend occurred following the collapse of the Soviet Union as domestic migrants headed for Havana in greater numbers. Still a dominant demographic force by 2000, Havana’s 2 million was predicted to drop in the new millennium (Segre, Coyula, and Scarpaci 2002, 230). The demographic outlook reflected other tensions in Cuban life after the Soviet Union. Havana’s urban outline stands as one of Latin America’s most diverse. Indeed, Spanish Havana had entered the nineteenth century with idiosyncratic form (Portes, Itzigsohn, and Dore-Cabral 1994) and significant urban development. By 1900, the island’s urban infrastructure surpassed many European countries in rail, telephone, and steam-shipping. The city’s architecture endured the departure of US Marines in 1902. Neoclassical motifs and colonnaded porticoes and arcades joined porches and courtyards during the art deco period as features suited to the climate. A modernizing vision for the city began a long wave that only ended with the revolution. Constructions around Havana Vieja took France and Spain as external models. Elsewhere, modernist design complemented the new developments (Segre, Coyula, and Scarpaci 2002, 50, 68–74). Indeed, a variety of styles proliferated: art deco, Arabic, art nouveau, and monumental-modern coexisted with the historic Baroque center (Segre, Coyula, and Scarpaci 2002, 123–29). In the barrios, artistically crafted apartments mixed creative practices. Interiors reflected the close alliance of art and architecture in the design of halls, elevators, stairwells, lighting, and furnishings. A few years later, rationalist, Romanesque, Gothic, and brutalist house designs joined these styles in a phase of remarkable experimentation with design. North American architectural influence was kept at a distance until the 1940s. Batista’s expedient relationship with American business, government, and organized crime eased the penetration of the international style in that period. A program of demolition of older structures paved the way for new office blocks, hotels, and casinos, all geared for tourism and American business. Tourism boomed and it showed in the city’s skyline and street culture. The island’s image in the United States was that of a pulsating pleasure ground waiting to welcome white visitors (Hopkins 2018, 539–40; Pérez 2003, 226–33). To some degree, whole segments of Havana lived up to this image. Cubans attuned to American customs spoke eloquent English and comported themselves with American habits (Hopkins 2018, 571–73; Pérez 2003, 114–17, 127–45, 207–14). In a more civic spirit, major public buildings were also built. Havana’s polycentric morphology took full form.



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New Americanized zones came to a standstill with the 1959 Revolution. Poor and rich Havana stood in acute contradiction; the Havana of the street confronted multistory buildings with which it had coexisted for nearly two decades. Housing was an immediate emergency. Despite the departure of most professional architects, the government was able to launch a program of residential construction. Prefabricated concrete was the material of necessity and, indeed, of choice, as it was throughout Latin America. Quality was sacrificed to utility and quantity, a lasting situation for Havana, despite the creative response of locals to the scarcity of materials generated by the US blockade (Segre, Coyula, and Scarpaci 2002, 197–233). Nonetheless, spirited experimentation in socialist city planning did take place, producing tangible growth in the decades that followed (Segre, Coyula, and Scarpaci 2002, 138–50). To be sure, strategies of urban development struggled to break from scarcity and the command and administer system of economic planning. Critics noted that housing did not have the temper of Cuba’s living urban environments. Added to this, Cuba suffered in the 1990s from the economic shock and acute scarcity arising from the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent exposure to market relations and consumerism. Remarkably, a crisis in mechanized agriculture forced rapid and ingenious conversion to urban production in patio and market gardens. Forty percent of Havana was given over to this experiment in sustainable agriculture. By 2000, 2.5 million Havanans had re-established food security. Modern Havana’s could still echo creative responses to desperate circumstances in the decayed capital. Cuba’s cultural and artistic legacy is multifaceted. Trained in the European fine arts tradition at the Academy of San Alejandro, early artists turned out rich landscapes, portraiture, lithographs, and sculpture. Nineteenth-century works represent aspects of life in this intensely slave-based society. The Academy, along with the traditions and practices of the nineteenth century, established a technical skill base and institutional environment for the Cuban arts (Libby and Martínez 2015). To this cultural patrimony, many artists brought different varieties of modernism. The twentieth century saw a distinctive Cuban style emerge, which assimilated lessons of modernism and adapted them to local practices and networks. This brought Cuban character into new visual registers of cultural practice (Loomis 1999, 1–3). Art history remembers Wilfredo Lam’s artistic practice better than that of his contemporaries. He stands out for his modernist syncretism of Afro-Cuban and French styles in works of surrealism and Cubism. With significant international connections, he drank in multiple influences. Although a creature of Havana, his time in Paris and New York fed his creativity directly. Such a syncretic artist may be considered a giant of Cuban culture. But there is a ranging tradition to contend with and it earned for Havana a reputation in modernism (Libby and Martínez 2015).

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The 1959 revolution divided the arts (Segre, Coyula, and Scarpaci 2002, 358). On one hand, revolutionary art, murals, and graphics quickly took over the scene. On the other, many artists found themselves without an income when tourism ended. A complex division remained. The new government brought new institutions. Aiming to popularize the creative arts, Castro and Che Guevara inaugurated a School of Arts in 1961 (Loomis 1999). Its utopianism gave way to orthodox cultural policy. After some years of Soviet-style governance of culture, a more vivacious scene emerged at the intersection of revolutionary initiative from above and lively intervention of young artists from below (Weiss 2011). For example, the Cuban government instituted an emancipatory agenda for women. The overall impact was limited but major figures such as Antonia Eiriz and Marta Maria Pérez achieved a high profile. Moreover, space appeared for independent practice for women and Afro-Cuban artists. Early initiatives anticipated a later efflorescence. In the 1980s and 1990s, art enjoyed a simultaneous expansion of the institutional environment and international connectivity. Havana’s biennial made it a regular focus for Central and Latin American artists, while producing a multinational dialogue. In addition, festivals and revived tourism more generally brought audiences into contact with Cuban practitioners. Museums mushroomed adding to cultural tourism, helping to popularize Cuban art, science, and (illicit) tourism in the United States (Pérez 2003, 276–80), even while there was a withdrawal of artists from engagement with the Cuban public itself (Weiss 2011, 171–83). With growing links overseas, contemporary art increasingly entered international circuits. Part of overseas exhibitions involving foreign foundations, Cuban participation in the international public sphere multiplied in the late 1990s, even though conditions of the Special Period left people dependent on the informal collectivism of underground neighborhood groups. The contemporary arts have made the duality implicit in daily life an explicit problem. Official cultural policy gives little space for artistic expression of the mundane (Weiss 2011). In the 1990s, the country’s increasing integration into global capitalism exacerbated this tension. Since contemporary practitioners pay less heed than their forebearers to the 1976 constitutional requirement for artists to serve the society, their work often desacralizes the symbols of collectivity, while still promoting complex identities that form at civilizational, national, ethnic, and cultural intersections. Like their critical contemporaries elsewhere in Latin America, young artists issue provocations when they reassemble the symbolic elements in their depictions of the metropolis. By the end of the 1990s, Havana, though decaying physically, still had sources of creativity.



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CONCLUSION These cities are instances of social imaginaries as well as generative of their own imaginaries. As places, they are condensations of movement and logics of creation and destruction, including creative designs of themselves and their memory. In the past two centuries, the metropolises of the Americas attracted many newcomers in large-scale migration through a greater Atlantic sphere formed by historical intercivilizational engagement. What made their imaginaries distinct qua metropolitan imaginaries was the making of places that lure people, goods and flows, and creatives en masse and in connection with one another. The massification of cities sets metropolises apart. Some of the cities discussed earlier were premier cities at specific junctures. In the 1990s, some counted as “world cities,” while others as megacities. The intensity of experience of the mass anonymous collective becomes a shared metropolitan habitus. Metropolitans confront strangers in a massified environment saturated with the built form. Metropolises of the United States and Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina more or less share these qualities of the metropolitan imaginary, while Havana is a metropolis of the nineteenthcentury Atlantic modernity with the aftereffects of intercivilizational engagement. America’s metropolises condensed the effects of economic flows; multiple migratory movements; and the circulation of ideas, doctrines, news and cultural and scientific practices, and artifacts. With such flows, these cities were sources of creation and zones of creativity to a greater extent than in sometimes recognized in urban studies. There is no intention here to discount the “dark underbelly” of mass urbanism—itself an imaginary creation. Contemporary metropolises are beset with rising environmental problems, class divisions, crime, insecurity, and deadlocks in transport. They are the effects of an instituted and instituting metropolitan imaginary, to echo the language of Castoriadis. So also does the transformative and crisis-laden character of capitalism derive from the interplay between an instantiated capitalist imaginary and contestatory orientations and dynamics. This is the subject matter of the next chapter. NOTES 1. I am indebted to Trevor Hogan (Latrobe University) for several conversations on this topic. 2. This observation emerged from an exchange with María Pía Lara (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana). 3. This was unmistakable in Latin America according to Coletta (2018, 21–22, 116–43).

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4. There are other potential candidates: San Francisco, Houston, Washington, Miami, Quebec City, Kingston, Montevideo, Santiago, Kingston, Belo Horizonte, Caracas, and Lima. 5. Many others live in medium-sized cities that hug the border: Victoria, Winnipeg, Regina, and Windsor. 6. Roniger also details Mexico’s refugee policy and escalating restrictions in respect of Central Americans (Roniger 2011, 133–36). 7. Hernandez, Kellett, and Allen argue that diverse favelas and more conventional informal settlements represent untamed creative impulses in response to the concentration of poverty, rather than urban pathologies per se (Hernández, Kellett, and Allen 2010). 8. On US sympathizers with this artistic turn, see Pike (1992, 244–46).

Chapter 3

Creating Capitalism National States and Regional Patterns

This chapter marries theories of capitalism with historical and comparative research into economic diversity in the Americas. Studies of American economies colored by the modernization metanarrative have typically contrasted traditional southern Iberian societies with a northern new world modernity (Eisenstadt 2002). This oversimplifies a more complex picture, as I intend to show by examining the interpretive multiplication of the imaginary significations of capitalism in governmental reform of the relationship of polity and economy. In its theoretical innovations, this chapter is concerned with the capitalist imaginary and variations of its spirit that arch over the integration of capital, labor, and trade. I build on theoretical work by Árnason, Boltanski and Chiapello, Castoriadis, Wagner, and Weber. By the end, economic models of dynamic, Anglophone capitalism in the North and patterns of dependent development in the South will begin to look problematic when compared with the diversity of emergence of modern capitalism. While one objective is to explore diverse national versions of capitalism, another is to explore regional responses to globalizing tendencies. Through a combination of comparative histories of economic outgrowth and regionalization, and a theorization of the capitalist imaginary, I develop a social imaginaries-based historical sociology of economic diversity in the Americas. Four presuppositions preface a detailed theoretical elaboration. The first is that capitalism is a dynamic imaginary that does not fold other spheres of social life into a singular and whole system. Instead, the capitalist imaginary multiplies capitalism and does so inexhaustibly and in combination with political and cultural factors. Second, how capitalism’s manifold varieties emerged is a historical question for which we must refer to intercivilizational engagement to gain some understanding. Intercivilizational engagement in economic relations created a greater diversity of the capitalist imaginary than 61

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much of social theory, economic history, and critical theory has presumed. Existing research on the varieties of capitalism itself oversimplifies the global picture of diverse but interconnected forms of capitalism (Árnason 2001, 118–20). For the Western Hemisphere, diversification issues not only from imperial legacies as part of the social-historical but also dynamically through the actions of national states orienting to regions—the third presupposition. In this historical diversification, we find activist states with varying political programs and the contestatory and countervailing influences of socialdemocratic and labor movements. Fourth, I note that transnational slavery and capitalism are too deeply entwined in Atlantic modernity to meaningfully analyze separately (McMichael 1991, 466–69; Tomich 1991; Kaye 2009). The four presuppositions are the starting points for the remainder of the chapter, rather than elements for further debate. THE IMAGINARY INSTITUTION OF CAPITALISM Castoriadis’s proposition that capitalism is a set of imaginary significations anchors my position. For Castoriadis, capitalist imaginary significations saturate the social world with core meanings that steer economic agency. Scattered through his writings are a range of comments on the nature of capitalism and political economy as its expression. In brief, he explores the abstractions of the market, of class struggle and of labor and labor value, but in ways often fundamentally at odds with Marxian political economy. His critique of labor, value, and production is a re-evaluation of liberalism, national economies, ecology, consumption, and, most of all, the contention that capitalism is an economy or system. Yet capitalism does have an internal logic, inasmuch as it seems “entirely and exhaustively rational” (Castoriadis 1987, 156). Capitalism institutes the economic as supremely sovereign in modernity based on its imaginary significations. In other words, an entire universe of meaning prefigures basic notions of value, exchange, labor, and price, which make capitalism operative. Yet capitalism is not a “force” that can wholly subsume opposition, resistance, and critique, even though the capitalist imaginary unleashes the goal of the unlimited expansion and extension of human powers over the nonhuman world, that is, the goal to wholly subsume all. The capitalist imaginary, furthermore, depends vitally on human creativity, one source of potential opposition, resistance, and critique, including the creativity of workers in conditions of alienation. Thus, capitalism cannot be an all-encompassing systemic force even if, as Taylor also stresses, it can be pictured as such.1 Rather, capitalist imaginary significations cause the economic to be sovereign insomuch as it becomes a given that the economy is in its essence self-evidently rational and a guide to economic agency. Markets, money, and



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the laws of market forces seem so compelling as to appear as nomos, laws as “natural” as the laws of physics. They coordinate resource allocation and frame the choices of investors, producers, and consumers. Demystifying the complexity of market coordination is the mission of economics, which in turn depends on complex mathematical computation of inestimable number of movements, decisions, and actions in production, investment, trade, insurance, and purchase and sale of services and goods (Blaney and Inayatullah 2010). While critics may lay siege to the science of economics, its endurance as specialist knowledge signals its compelling forcefulness in the cultural universe of modern capitalism. Disregarding Castoriadis’s hostility to Weber for the moment, we can draw some parallels between Castoriadis’s elucidation of the imaginary of capitalism and Weber’s notion of a capitalist “spirit.” Both Castoriadis and Weber capture the expansive force of capitalist modernity and the kinds of rationality it creates in nonreductive conceptions. Since they are nonreductive, both theories remain adaptable to diverse manifestations of modernity. A helpful provisional conclusion here is that capitalism is an imaginary that makes the economic sovereign but does so in different instantiations of polity and economy and operative spirit of capitalism.2 This is one important parallel. Sympathetic critics of Castoriadis draw further parallels between Castoriadis and Weber. They also bring noteworthy correctives to Castoriadis’s original perspective. Wagner emphasizes the contingency of modernity’s twin imaginaries of capitalism and autonomy (Wagner 2008, 80–82). Since contingency is always evident in historically specific locations, Wagner avers that historical vision is obligatory in probing capitalism’s local manifestations. Invoking Ellen Meiksins Wood’s research as an example of historicized research, he privileges those arguments for sovereignty of the economic that had an enduring impact on political economy and, in an interpretive echo of Weber, the spirit through which economic imperatives are obeyed (Wagner 2008). In his formulation of modernity in the 2000s, Wagner saw this as an interpretive turn of a kind occurring widely in different places where the capitalist imaginary reached. This was beyond Castoriadis’s frame. Elaborating the social imaginary significations of capitalism as an economic problématique, Wagner’s historical sociological response to debates about diversity became more refined. Specifically, his project made neglected experiences of modernity, like the South African and Brazilian ones, central (Wagner 2014; Mota and Wagner 2021). These are novel modernities, distinct from old-world contexts (Wagner 2014, 297). In Brazil, South Africa, and the southern United States, interpretive frames were racialized in different ways, slavery figuring problematically as a centerpiece of the economic problematique. The interpretive frames are central features of national versions of capitalism in settler societies built up as sedimentations

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of meaning, which proffer specific political options, prominently laborist, and social-democratic ones. Where Wagner conceptualizes the issue as one of interpretive realization of the instituting imaginary, Árnason discerns in the enduring legacies of civilizational meaning, core significations that bestow “varieties of accumulation” on world capitalism (Árnason 2005, 25–26; cf. Mota and Wagner 2021, 85–88). At both abstract and concrete levels, inputs of meaning are required to give otherwise meaningless accumulation of worldly contents (Árnason 2001, 107; Árnason 2005). Money is an example. At an abstract level, money symbolizes wealth, but not in a benign manner (Árnason 2005, 15). Marx’s speculations on the abstract power of money in The Grundrisse were insights not taken to logical conclusions in his wider work. They might have drawn him to formulations akin to Polanyi’s “fictitious commodities” (as indeed Weber might have been drawn). Yet this was not a path ventured down (Árnason 2020, 17–21). A more productive route, on Árnason’s account, would be to theorize the sacred value of money acquired as the absolute good in the field of economic action. Money, as abstract power, is nevertheless based in national and even metropolitan contexts of law, religion, ideologies, and aggregated practices of major institutions (such as regulatory agencies and financial houses). Thus, primary elements associated with the capitalist imaginary are inseparable from the forms of cultural, moral, and political grounding that work in manifold instantiations of capitalism (Árnason 2020, 25–29). The primary elements—social imaginary significations by another name—once interpreted and reinterpreted help sustain commitment to capitalism’s re-creation. In mass, they can become a new spirit of capitalism. Árnason is well placed to integrate Weber’s social theory with contemporary sociological research on the motivational inputs into existing capitalisms, especially in the context of a renewal in debates about Weber’s notion of spirit of capitalism (Joerges, Stråth, and Wagner 2005; Swedberg 2007). In addition to Árnason’s theoretical reading, Boltanski and Chiapello’s seminal text comes to mind (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007). In their hands, the spirit of capitalism is rendered as the body of meaning that furnishes the motivation, commitment, and values lacking in imaginary significations of rational mastery and infinite expansion. To this generalized essence of capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello have incorporated different historical stages of the spirit, which add from essential sources of legitimacy, motivation, and cultural valorization from outside of the capitalist imaginary. Boltanski and Chiapello’s analysis tracks how oppositional critiques are assimilated into capitalism’s cultural apparatus. Do approaches to the spirit of capitalism fit? In the Americas, national states and regional figurations do much to institutionalize the spirit of capitalism (or rather the interplay of interpretations and capitalism imaginary



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significations).3 Prima facie, Boltanski’s creative reconstruction of Weber’s thesis is open to theoretical reinterpretation and applied research. That is not my purpose here, however, beyond making the following point. Boltanski and Chiapello’s innovative perspective needs heightened awareness of capitalism’s diversity. Even if we limit the field of investigation to the Western Hemisphere—a zone expansive enough in itself—there is substantial variation to discuss. To close this section, let us look at the next steps. The task is an examination of economic diversification of the capitalist imaginary, exploring how the problems of economic development are defined from the mid-nineteenth century through to the heyday of neoliberalism. Different doctrines of political economy influence the polities of the hemisphere. They have engendered surges of institutional and policy reform and, in some cases, a more entrenched mode of social regulation and an institutional complex to structure it. I examine national and regional figurations of capitalism in the remainder of the chapter in the following order: the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central and Latin America, and the Caribbean. In the political constitution of relations of economy and polity, we find the actualization of capitalism’s principal significations in the Americas (Joerges, Stråth, and Wagner 2005). THE UNITED STATES In the first case, I examine the key elements of delimited political doctrines informing the spirit of capitalism in the passions of work, industry, the pursuit of material well-being, and audacity tempered with calculative reason (Swedberg 2007, 48–53). As part of a distinct spirit of US capitalism, the traits of that spirit also shape the culture and history of capitalism. After outlining the initial balance of traits or passions following the revolution, this section examines a new spirit and new imaginary significations of capitalism. These take the form of the New Deal and Reaganite neoliberalism as visions and combinations of state and economy. The political philosophy backlighting revolutionary republicanism privileged a balanced plurality of passions constraining both governmental power and the excesses produced by the interplay of private interests. In the early republic, political pluralism deemed a very limited role for the Federal Government as the source of rudimentary nation building, of commercial law, and of the very ecology of pluralism. This early Jeffersonian equipoise of governmental reach, public obligation, and private passions was equally at home with nineteenth-century slavery as it was with a political economy of free labor.

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At the same time, capitalism in the early republic did not rest on an unchanging social order. During the nineteenth century, capitalist tendencies to expansion were fully operative. Marx and Engels’ observations on the United States linked the societal logics of settler-immigrant societies to developments after the Civil War. The concentration of capital resulting from consolidation of the national state realized in full the bourgeois character of this formation, on their account. I would add that oligopoly capital is here associated with the figures of individuation, particularly in the figure of the heroic entrepreneur. This deeper insight goes directly to the imaginary significations that Castoriadis highlights. Of course, heroic capitalists were embedded in institutionalization. Later tendencies to the amalgamation and oligopolization of capital fostered a distrust of trusts, which became itself a countervailing force during the last decades of the century (Beckert 2001). As labor conflicts rose in the 1890s, the balance of passions and societal forces came into question and were widely debated. Two conflicting interpretations of the capitalist imaginary enlivened the political landscape at this time. Both represented differing combinations of state and polity. Vying for adherents, advocates of free trade and bimetallic currency exchange rates confronted opposing protagonists championing protectionism and retention of the gold standard (Hopkins 2018, 362). This was part of the two decades of rethinking the state’s legitimacy in capitalism. A pragmatic university intelligentsia exposed to theoretical debates in continental Europe debated the character of the political institution, adding a North Atlantic dialogue to the debate. Much of it had to do with the relationship of the polity to the overall institution of society and the anthropological reconstruction of the figure of Homo economicus. Original doctrinal interpretations arose from this process. What also emerged was a new kind of corporation and periods of intensified state activity. Progressivism in the early decades of the century and populist traditions from the nineteenth century feature in the liberal background to Roosevelt’s administration and program (Greenberg 2001, 62–66; McKenna 2007, 240–42). They were powerful traditions that informed the coalescence of New Deal politics in the Depression. New Deal political economy was not Keynesian. However, New Deal politics did embrace a central proposition of Keynesianism that the state should act to curtail private concentrations of private sector power in the name of the public interest. Once in power, the Roosevelt administration established an institutional architecture led by liberal cadre riding the boundaries of state, university, and business (Dickter 2004, 17–33; Brinkley 1998; Fraser and Gerstle 1989). They introduced a vision of development in the planning apparatus, opening the utopian horizon of quantifiable planned development. They also built on the living social laboratory of New Deal-style reform in the City of New York under Fiorello La Guardia. The famed three-term



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mayor crafted a brand of municipal reformism, which provided a model for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s national reform package. FDR’s overarching moral purpose integrated new virtues of cooperation, restraint of excess, and neighborliness into a modified spirit of capitalist endeavor. New Deal virtues were programmatic and aspirational and yet were fashioned on ideological and programmatic antecedents. Roosevelt integrated a broad coalition of forces at the beginning of World War II. The New Deal’s major policy and institutional successes brought renewal of infrastructure, enlargement of the Federal public service, social security, and deficit financing in defiance of monetarist orthodoxy. Vast programs of investment and support for industry stimulated a wave of urbanization in the South (Knöbl 2006, 151–52). Along with the boost from World War II procurement programs, subregions of the South received a lasting economic boost. Roosevelt sent New Deal cadre and extended some policies to the United States’s overseas territories by restructuring the main Federal divisions responsible for extramural administration (Hopkins 2018, 526–30). With the expanded scope of state activism stimulated by World War II and the extension of administration into its overseas possessions, the US state achieved a zenith in governmental intervention significantly above its predecessors (Fraser and Gerstle 1989; Blaney and Inayatullah 2010). Consumer affluence became a democratic goal after the Pacific War ended, but it did not come immediately, or for all. A critical compromise by unions in the late 1940s tied wage increases to improvements in productivity, a principle that the Marshall Plan extended to Europe in the heady days of the early Cold War (Maier 2006, 200–3). The activist New Deal regime did not spread the fruits of growth until the Fordist American economy produced the right conditions for it. Produce those conditions, it did. The direction did not fundamentally change during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations with the active support of a generation of cadre raised in Depression years (McKenna 2007, 259–70). Even for those excluded from the outgrowth of democratic consumption, a feeling of greater material well-being and improved living standards prevailed (Freeman 2012, 113–42). Johnson’s Great Society measures went farther, declaring poverty the enemy, a different kind of goal. The impact was to bring down measured poverty levels. Alongside of these achievements, the Great Society exposed education, health, legal services, and social security to greater levels of state activism (Abrams 2006, 44–45). While the United States maintained a New Deal regime domestically, it came to enjoy the fruits of a hegemonic dollarization of global finance and supreme position as a Fordist industrial power (Maier 2006, 225). The institutional accumulation of the New Deal was not to last. Two developments heralded the coming of Reagan’s supply-side revolution. First, instead of regaining political space for liberal policies, Gerald Ford’s

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initiatives and Jimmy Carter’s tax policies and initiatives in deregulation conceded political space to the forceful arguments made by New Right think tanks for market orthodoxy (Freeman 2012, 328–30; see also Perusek and Worcester 1995).4 Once again, New York City was a social laboratory, but this time for proto-neoliberal policies in the mid-1970s. The municipality was subject to novel monetarist antipathy toward the public sector and welfare (Dunn and Woodard 2003, 30–31, 154–57). This is evident in the record of Reagan’s administrations. His verbal war on “big government” was loud and unambiguous. In the end, it amounted to little substantial erosion of state capacities. Rather, Reagan’s administration reshuffled state priorities from welfare to military expenditure. In addition, neoliberal ideology brought into being in its formative years was a corrosion of public goods and the spirit of the social. Other transformations of the relationships of business and labor, financial patterns of accumulation, and the reorganization of capital were the far-reaching results of the “second business revolution” (Abrams 2006; Perusek and Worcester 1995; Brinkley 1998). Labor, having grown under the New Deal regime, was scoured by greater legal regulation and further erosion of real purchasing power (Freeman 2012, 387; Perusek and Worcester 1995), adding up to a loss of the social compact arrangements of Keynesianism, but not Keynesianism’s deficit financing (Maier 2006; Rocco 2014, 9–10). For business and finance, much the opposite occurred, creating the misleading public impression that neoliberalism only entailed deregulation. Finance was the area of greatest impact, and the ramifications were global. The reversal of the New Deal-era Glass–Steagall Act released financial capital from regulatory constraints. Castoriadis’s vision of the imaginary signification of unlimited rational mastery finds a close match in the financial instruments issued from deregulation. Frequent mergers of larger firms raised fears of unaccountable monopolistic companies of the kind that had inspired antitrust laws at the end of the nineteenth century. The outgrowth invited transnationalization of the economy. Foreign capital imports skyrocketed from the 1980s through to the beginning of the twenty-first century (Maier 2006, 257–58). The American economy was re-globalizing on the back of transnational investment. The 1990s brought a remarkable pattern of transnationally energized growth. On the back of this, the United States, or more precisely New York, could indisputably claim by the century’s end to be the premier center of financial capital. With globalization central to Clinton’s program in the international arena and the Americas, the final decade had a governmental champion enthused about a neoliberal agenda colliding with globalizing tendencies in the world economy and in social and cultural life. Canada and Mexico, the other North Americas, would be part of it.



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CANADA Canada’s capitalism is a useful contrast in each of its stages of development. Historians and historical sociologists have interpreted Canada’s history through the prism of juxtaposition to the United States (Gibbins 2002; Lipset 1989; Grabb and Curtis 2005; Francis 2002). They mirror the popular trend of continuous interpretive comparison with the United States, a contrapuntal source of national identity. Possessing a border with asymmetrical effects on each state, Canadian preoccupation with its Anglophone neighbor is met with an equal dose of neighborly inattention (Gibbins 2005). Anglophone Canada’s contrapuntal position has existed since the American Revolution when Canadian governments had to grapple with the problem of nation building in a large territory within an expansive British Empire. In such circumstances, the benefits of collectivism and those of free trade were always debated matters in Canadian political economy. Canada’s political institution has consequently rested between social democracy and Toryism. An automatic contrast with the United States was thus evident in a version of capitalist spirit that tempered individualist energies with communitarian goals of collective capitalist expansion. Like the United States, albeit in significantly different conditions, Canada set itself the problem of continental nation building. A unified Federation would entail a coherent political economy based on state-led initiatives in nation building (Axworthy 1988). Arguments for capitalism couched in liberal terms of delimited state agency therefore balanced the collective goals and individual liberties. Local interpretations in political economy provided counterweights to lessons learned from the United Kingdom and the United States. The staples theory that formed the mainstay of local thought set and interpreted economic problems pragmatically, normatively designing solutions suited to local social and cultural institutions. In this respect, staples theory was a body of ideas in creative political economy. Around the 1940s, the dominant current of political economy was associated with the iconic Harold Innis. Part of a generation of Canadian thinkers engaged in a mid-century Western reconsideration of the direction of modernity, Innis approached political economy from an internationalist angle, keenly sensitized to the plurality of modernity (Francis 2002). His political economy drew interest for his analysis of capitalist development as an economic dimension emerging from intercivilizational engagement with First Nations. He addressed the questions about the longer-term formation of social and cultural habits mobilized in economic action through a study of the material world of staples and technologies. The emerging nation had an unusually symmetrical relationship between colonizing and colonized civilizations (a point of view that might

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be re-questioned now). This historicist angle sensitized his thinking toward North American and even global patterns of civilization in which he found great contrasts. The staples theory and the image of civilization informing it were controversial in Canada and elsewhere. The infrastructure of the continental nation was in public hands and as such acted as a resource in negotiations over the integration of different provinces. Federalism framed the emergence of the national model of development. Successive federal governments used Canada’s stock of infrastructure purposefully to reach and incorporate remote regions, most memorably rail and later modes of national transport. They helped develop Western Canada and its rich resource base by providing network connections, which in turn stimulated diverse regional town economies. A model of industrialism circumscribed by protectionist measures supported nation-building initiatives. Growth resulted from lively intra-imperial trade and trade with the United States (Belich 2009, 414–18). Across the course of the twentieth century, the latter has steadily grown to a more prominent relationship. Notwithstanding protection and an activist state, Canada sought international trade. Debates about the United States centered on issues of a potential common market and how trade and monetary policies could serve Canadian national interests. Despite growing concerns about US economic power, both trade and foreign investment continued to climb, suggesting unbroken growth in connections (Anastakis 2008). At the same time, Western Canada expanded US trade alongside of outgrowth in trade with Asia and elsewhere internationally (Berdahl and Gibbins 2014, 117–22). With greater economic leverage in global capitalism, successive Canadian governments began to see the nation as a middle power, and they had public support for that view (Hurrell 1995, 269). When the government struck further bilateral and multilateral deals within the hemisphere and with other countries around the world, the momentum for greater engagement in the Americas grew. Yet this also provided further impetus for process of North American integration underway in the second half of the century. Growing export trade over this period gave impetus to a revitalized liberal position in Canadian politics. Values flowed across the border as well as goods and services (Gibbins 2005, 157–58). Concerns over the US-Canada relationship did not abate. On the contrary, intensification of economic engagement enlivened the debate considerably in the 1980s and 1990s. The formation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) brought this to a head. NAFTA materialized on the back of the integration of the regional manufacturing zones of the United States and Canada (Axworthy 1988, 147–51; Lipset 1989, 129–34). Economic activity between Canada and the United States had a significant impact on Canada, while a corresponding impact on the US is not evident. Differences in price structure, the value of



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currencies, and consumer taxes made the United States attractive for Canadian consumers and industrialists alike. Additionally, there is not a strong level of mutually instituted interdependence between the two states in terms of shared communities around the border, labor mobility between the two countries, or a Canadian contribution to the values and cultures of the United States (Gibbins 2005, 162). Integration with Canada was a lesser concern in the American debate on NAFTA. In contrast, the fear of convergence overwhelmed Canadian debate (Gibbins 2005, 154–56). At this level of public discourse, the two countries mattered to each other in the most disproportionate manner. NAFTA had ramifications for the economies of the entire Western Hemisphere. This included migration. Although NAFTA established barriers to undocumented immigration, the actual results of integration of trade and investment have been the enlargement of transnational labor markets (Burgess 2009). Importantly, NAFTA brought about common rules of economic engagement, which impinged significantly on the policy capacity of states. This was, furthermore, not limited to trade but touched on environmental, labor, and other kinds of political regulation. In this regard, NAFTA crystallized the terms of neoliberalism on the back of short-term processes of integration in production, exchange, migration, and consumption. To understand this more, let us turn from Canada to Mexico. MEXICO Historically, Mexico’s entanglement with the United States has even deeper and wider (Bow and Santa-Cruz 2012, 166; Hart 2002, 9–17). The relationship has, however, been framed in purposive terms since the Diaz regime of the nineteenth century. Mexico grounded the imaginary significations of capitalism in an exceptionally nationalistic and populist version of protectionism, one well placed to endure, for instance, the Depression better than many countries (Knight 1990, 8–9). Harnessing the capacities of a centralist state to intensify intervention and regulation of capital and labor, successive Mexican governments built up a North American capitalism, accommodating both states and networks around the region. Consequently, economic nationalism survived longer in Mexico than elsewhere (Hamnett 2006, 246–52, 266–76), before a turn to neoliberal measures in the 1980s and 1990s to dilute the populist figuration of state and economy. There were two causes of prolonged import substitution. First, Mexico had one of the largest public sectors in the hemisphere. Most of the more than 1,100 state enterprises were nationalized in the 1970s. At the heart of public ownership were large energy companies, representing a corporatist set of

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interests. This gave the state considerable leverage in strategic management of the economy. Second, a mode of development based on import substitution guided political economy. While this was a commonplace in Latin America, the model in Mexico was particularly pronounced, although also distinctly adaptive in the short term. An oligopolistic oil industry, built up as state property during the 1920s and 1930s (Knight 1990, 41–46), lay at the heart of a species of export substitution. Mexico could cope with cyclical downturns in international export markets by strategically using oil resources to offset the deleterious effects of lost foreign currency. It did so in the 1973 oil crisis. Rising fuel prices presented Mexico with the opportunity to continue import substitution with the industry at the head of a new spurt of growth. Public ownership seemed too important to future prosperity to endanger with privatizations, such as those emerging in Chile at this time, or strategies of intense vertical integration, such as those unfolding in Brazil. Interim plans for restructuring delayed the promised political and economic reforms. An oil boom for Mexico held the status quo up until 1981. By then, however, the state of foreign debt and inflation had grown to alarming proportions precipitating the emergency introduction of neoliberal “shock” policies. Sharp currency devaluation and IMF intervention to restructure debt repayments left little of Mexico’s export income for investment. The regime confronted the crisis in an authoritarian fashion without risking its own system of patronage. Harsh austerity measures and jarring privatizations that exacerbated unemployment and poverty under Carlos Salinas (1988–1994) found no corresponding initiatives in the reform of Mexico’s political system. As pressure from opposition parties began to threaten the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI)’s monopoly on government, calls for political reform mounted. Reorganization of the state was on the public agenda prior to the Zapatista rebellion in 1994, but it was blocked. Mexico’s initiative in suggesting NAFTA to the United States was an outlet of reform of a sort. In the end Salinas’s advocacy of the formation of NAFTA brought an agenda of neoliberal restructuring to the fore. Privatization of telecommunications giant Telmex and reversal of the 1982 expropriation of commercial banks were major initiatives to attract foreign investment. Agreements with the United States were his next more ambitious aim. Achieving NAFTA can be counted among his legacies. Some elements of Mexico’s version of substitutive importation continued, especially the country’s reliance on oil exports and the government’s ownership of oil resources. However, the watershed of NAFTA and the neoliberal turn faced no likelihood of reversal when Vicente Fox assumed the reins of government in 2000. How did NAFTA effect the country? North American integration reflected an asymmetrical pattern of intercivilizational engagement in the economic dimension. In this, Mexico’s fate has not been as bright as that of its northern



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partners (Hart 2002, 437–51, 478–79), despite the growth in trade. Industry flourished, but agriculture languished. The northern provinces grew manufacturing, light industries, and cultural production; the southern states became poorer and more rebellious. Whatever intentions the Bush-Clinton, Salinas and Mulroney governments may have had, the results unevenly furthered trends of inequality. Mexico’s variously maligned and variously vaunted maquiladoras gave a glimpse to contemporaries of a future world of work, building up a workforce of women workers. The regions even included hightech industries. Neoliberal settings around trade, monetary policy, and labor regulation were accompanied by the synchronization with the US business cycle (Mendoza and Dupeyron 2020, 70). The flows between California and Baja California lifted phenomenally (Mendoza and Dupeyron 2020, 58). Some maquilador industries upgraded the sophistication of their production processes. Yet Mexico suffered losses elsewhere: in agricultural selfsufficiency (and thus food security) and local state industries. There was an explosion of jobs, but the real value of wages fell dramatically toward the end of the 1990s. As a result, Mexico’s regions are more highly differentiated and more socioeconomically disparate. NAFTA removed the final economic borders between the three countries involved but reinforced the already ineffective border between the United States and Mexico. CENTRAL AMERICA In the same era, Mexico’s connectedness to Central America was increasing. However, Central American capitalism has a longer history of economic engagement. Central America’s insertion into capitalism centered on the monopoly position American companies captured in a sixty-year period from 1870 to 1930. Good conditions for expansion of export agriculture prevailed under consolidated liberal governments in the region. National infrastructural development in Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, coupled with good prices for agro-export commodities, encouraged American investment, thereby stimulating further integration. A second later spurt in growth in agriculture in the postwar period renewed the pattern of dependence through to the late 1960s. At that time, a process of incremental diversification and regionalization expanded national economies beyond established agriculture and manufacturing. The United States has been a domineering force in this process of integration. At the dawn of World War I, the US companies found themselves in an ascendant position among contending interests.5 To be sure, French, German, and British interests remained and even increased their net investment. However, there are few contemporary equivalents of foreign economic dominance

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to match that of constantly increasing US capital and market share. Alongside of this penetration, US investment in the Panama Canal area and in rail and communications had preconditioned caudillo and liberal elites to extensive American involvement (Hart 2002, 89–91; Ninkovich 2001, 104–19). This strategically favored private investment and mass trade but also bore Americanism into the region. With heavy investments in agriculture, rail, and mining, US enterprises (notably the United Fruit Company) spread corporate culture, entrepreneurial ethos, and work disciplines to agrarian sectors in Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua (O’Brien 1996; Hopkins 2018, 448– 49). Yet their greatest, and at times unintended, impact was bringing political instability, which in turn necessitated military intervention (O’Brien 1996, 47–54; see also Roniger 2011, 63–65). For the United States, preventing the infiltration of communist influence was a strategic priority as important as direct commercial interest. At their least intrusive, American interests merely maintained disproportionate involvement in national policies on taxation, prices, and wages. Often, American interests were expressed in more direct and militaristic terms. Waged labor prevailed in export industries. However, slavery and debt peonage were common enough and often were the fate of Indian laborers, immigrants from the Caribbean, and day laborers. Union disputes and general discontent erupted in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica in the 1920s and 1930s. The consequent labor struggles and civil war in Nicaragua with Augusto Sandino’s rebel army—along with an uprising in El Salvador in 1932—turned on an axis of colliding worlds. The entrepreneurial spirit and Taylorist practices of US companies directly challenged the self-sufficient agrarian imaginary of peasant life. US companies had launched what amounted to a civilizing project of subsuming the agrarian imaginary of peasant cultures. In the depths of the Depression, all these battles eventually turned in favor of United Fruit and their smaller counterparts on the Atlantic Coast (O’Brien 1996, 100–6). This is not to say that multinational labor struggles and political conflicts relaxed. Before and after World War II, labor unrest and political conflict in the region’s three largest countries continued, notably in Guatemala in the early 1950s. However, a definitive outgrowth in direct US economic involvement continued, amply abetted by military aid and diplomatic and intelligence assistance. American companies were helped by labor migration as well as hindered by labor conflicts. Costa Rica’s endemic labor shortages did much to shape its unusual path to postwar democratic rule. However, immigration also posed challenges. The status of Chinese and West Indian migrants brought up questions of citizenship after the 1948 upheaval introduced a new civic and political order. Immigration mattered elsewhere also. Over time, West Indians drawn to the workforce on the Caribbean coast of Honduras and Nicaragua



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due to the declining conditions at home (O’Brien 1996, 91) formed part of a “circum-Caribbean area populated by ‘British West Indian Blacks’ ” (Roniger 2011, 96). Culture diversified, with immigrants bringing investment or seeking work, irrespective of whether conditions of stability prevailed (as they did in Costa Rica) or not (as they did not in Nicaragua). In contrast, patterns of segregation in Panama blocked West Indian interaction with locals. Instead of intermingling West Indians maintained different community cultures across different islands. Mostly, intercultural and political encounters arose from transregional migration, but it also furnished foreign capital with labor. With a more extensive and diverse workforce, governments pursued strategies of economic diversification with mixed results. Mindful of the Depression, some governments after World War II experimented with ISI methods to diversify domestically while continuing to expand exports. National economies grew to be sure, as did manufacturing. Yet imports of raw materials and components also increased. Related strategies of regionalization propelled substantial growth in this phase, especially for governments willing to experiment with ISI. Yet regional initiatives hampered by national rivalries and associations produced fewer results than might have otherwise been the case. For unions, the Central American Labor Council remained important. A driver of regional expansion was the Central American Common Market (CACM), the most significant initiative. Even so, the latter still struggled with interstate disputes, one of which erupted into the so-called Soccer War between Honduras and El Salvador. US endorsement of the CACM certainly made a difference. Content to support dictatorships in the region, as it had in Mexico and the Caribbean, most American administrations frequently put reliable allies first and did so for regional groupings also (Hart 2002, 502–3). Through its endorsement, the United States was promoting a vision of developmentalist modernity, which corresponded with the program of many national governments and the most optimal conditions for transnational investment. Furthermore, it built on a steady increase in regional trade as a proportion of foreign trade. Not all states were dictatorships. Demilitarized and democratic Costa Rica received levels of foreign aid high enough to cultivate loyalty. International trade and investment agreements had greater impact later in the century. But they also animated a neoliberal spirit of capitalism. To single the main agreement out, the Dominican Republic – Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) free trade agreement resembles NAFTA in all critical respects: open market access, significant tariff reduction schedules, and carryover of export subsidies. The effect was to bring neoliberal disciplines rather than—unlike NAFTA—expand the region’s overall trade (Roniger 2011, 158). NAFTA’s market disciplines were extended well south of the North American states, placing similar demands on the region’s governments to change their policy practices to conform with a common

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corporate environment. Labor market reform was one requirement. Alongside of increased pressure for neoliberal reorientation, maquiladora investment and job creation brought a new kind of US influence into the region. But neoliberalism’s effects are conditioned by local figurations of polity and economy as well as multigovernmental coordination. Other sectoral organizations formed regional groupings that acted as a counterweight to neoliberal tendencies. Civil society responses like the Central American Agricultural Producers for Cooperation and Development had this effect. Regionalism also substantialized economic diversification of agro-export production, bringing new telecommunications and transport services, a tourism sector, new purchasing power based on remittances and extended instruments of credit, growth in light textile production, and new regional companies. Where Latin America had poor experiences of neoliberal policies in the 1990s, Central American economies all grew in that decade, as governments sought to exploit evident strengths. Labor was more mobile across borders. Even so, vulnerability remains. The growth had followed a “lost decade” of disastrous contraction in the 1980s. Informalization of the workforce and underemployment accelerated. Debt was a problem for all, even for Costa Rica (Kendrick 1988, 248–49). Smaller economies were still remarkably exposed to global fluctuations. Moreover, the effects of cross-sectoral growth bear major implications and policy challenges for regional capitalist development, particularly in ecological sustainability (Girot 2005). How this can pan out is a topic for another project. COMPETING POLITICAL ECONOMIES IN LATIN AMERICA Latin America’s relationship with world capitalism and its spirit is one of greater engagement than it has been credited for. Engagement, however, is marked by high levels of vulnerability. We see this in the stages of capitalist modernity, the schools of political economy specific to the region, and the radical experiments with neoliberalism that took place in the 1990s. The relationship of the region and the varying engagement of its states follow the transformations of its figuration of modernity. One sociologist has reframed Latin American modernity as a three-phase analytic of restricted liberal, state-organized, and “mixed articulated” (an uneven and combined development of neoliberalism and directive states) (Domingues 2008), while another perceives a unifying and singular “oligarchic modernity” giving way to phases of populist modernization, industrial expansion, dictatorship, and neoliberal modernization (Larraín 2000, 22–24). Instantiating the spirit of capitalism in national variants entails the political institution of capitalism as



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liberal oligarchic, populist, “mixed articulated” under dictatorship, and then neoliberal, to paraphrase both typologies of modernity. As typologies, they generalize diverse historical experiences of intercivilizational engagement in the economic and political dimension. For a point of comparison, I turn to a historian who poses a different yet compatible approximation of stages of modernity. From a transitional perspective, Moya identifies four areas of transformation (Moya 2007, 183–15): 1. The changing magnitude of the Atlantic economy and realignment of trade routes meant that centers that had prospered during the colonial era were replaced by entrepot cities with quite developed transport and communications infrastructure. 2. A minor phase of small-scale industrialization and urbanization left Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Cuba in the forefront. 3. Integration into the Atlantic was accompanied by higher volumes of migrants, an obvious complement to the integrating effect of British and North American investment and finance. 4. Waged employment began to gradually supplement coercive forms of labor. Different versions of modernity construed in these works suggest variants of the spirit of capitalism. For governments in the region, a distinct position in the world economy, negotiating the imaginary significations of capitalism was difficult. Most oligarchic states more or less operated in a mediumvolume trading environment at the outset of the twentieth century and limited both their range and degree of activity to cross-Atlantic and intra-hemispheric trade. This changed dramatically with the 1930s Depression, which quickly persuaded political elites of the advantages of strategies of protected diversification. With the global downturn, finding substitutes for imported manufactures was a frantic necessity for nationalist governments (Larraín 2000, 100–4). This was evident in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, with the Central Andean states following the path of others. A shared consensus around import substitution industrialization gave commonality to governments, which were otherwise ideologically divided from one another. Under the banner of import substitution industrialization, most countries experimented with protectionist policies, including import rationing and exchange controls. More complex economies were able to entrench ISI into the institutional apparatus of developmental states. What was initially a reflex reaction to the impact of the Depression soon became strategy, an orientation lasting for decades. In this context, the related notion of dependency found programmatic expression in the documents of Raul Prebisch, director of the United

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Nations’ (UN’s) Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) (Prebisch and Alburquerque Lloréns 1989). ECLAC responded to the imaginary significations of accumulation by envisaging a different variety of capitalism. Categories of core and periphery were brought to life in Prebisch’s historic reports in the late 1940s. The peripheral or semiperipheral position of Latin American states was presumed, even though he prescribed greater connection with international finance and investment. Prebisch’s Centre provided the intellectual architecture for import substitution. ECLAC saw the main challenge for the southern periphery lying in defiance of the inevitable deterioration in the terms of trade for agriculture by diminishing the exposure to fluctuations in world commodity prices and promoting local manufacturing. Prebisch perceived in protectionist policies goals of industrialization, growth of national markets, balanced public sector expansion, greater self-reliance, and diversification—the very opposite of the creed of the economics of comparative advantage advised by free trade advocates. Under protectionism, consumer markets initially fostered within a primary stage of development gave way to patterns of vertical heavy industrialization. This was again contrary to neoclassical counsel. Even with the strategic focus on industrialism, it was obvious in the 1950s that investment in heavy industry was limited. A minor turn to provision of the infrastructure necessary to attract foreign investment occurred. Hosting transnational corporations became a major part of the pattern of accumulation, and it prolonged the existence of import substitution. Industry developed most in Mexico and Brazil but at rates comparable with industrializing states in Asia. The benefits were far from one-sided. For transnational corporations, Latin American operations were highly profitable, despite state bureaucratism and hostility to foreign oligopolies. A solid example is Peronist Argentina. A coherent strategy of ISI development, with origins in the Depression (Rock 1987, 231–38), combined with a populist program of social reforms was implemented. These were no mere economic policies; Peron’s government remade Argentinian politics. An imposing species of national integration was maintained by a relatively autonomous regime through the corporatist networks of the Peronist coalition of unions, business, and party (Cavarozzi 1982, 160–61; McGuire 1997, 56–59). Peron’s anticommunism gave nationalists many reasons to support his robust attitude toward wealthy industrialists (Rock 1987, 253–58). For this coalition, import substitution became a more logical brand of policymaking after ECLAC’s work became public. During the Peronist phase, a particularly nationalistic form of developmentalism reigned. Light industry was encouraged, imports were restricted, large firms were expropriated, and agriculture was taxed. While this occurred, Peron railed against foreign interests. By the 1970s, the historical choices had narrowed considerably following decades of



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economic decline and political upheaval (Cortés Conde 2009). One does not explain the other. But over these decades they were mutually dependent in Argentina’s case, a dual feature of general crisis (Portantiero 1989). The oil crises of the 1970s produced various responses from Latin American governments. Many borrowed; some did not and concentrated instead on reducing the demand for oil and petroleum-based products. Venezuela was one country not in a position to reduce its high dependence on petroleum exports. International loans flowed from banks heavily capitalized by large oil revenues. In this environment, four decades of ISI development, technological modernization, and diversification began to atrophy. The benefits of stable employment, steady incomes, and an apparatus of welfare provision dissipated. Apart from the small middle classes and an elite aristocracy of labor, protectionist developmentalism had ultimately failed to make consumers of Latin Americans grounded in diversified protectionism (Domingues 2008, 44–45). ISI developmentalism slid into protracted decline. Its successor was neoliberalism, which came as a policy program from outside and from above. Neoliberal policies did not sweep the subcontinent in one wave nor did it follow a single blueprint, and it was always necessarily incomplete and in excess of a multidimensional modernity. Often, its policies were most effective where the populist or “national-popular” regime of state and society had prevailed earlier (Touraine 1994, 64–66). Neoliberal policies drew heterogeneous feedbacks, raising new questions around citizenship and social agency at a time of re-emerging democracy, all the while sharpening contradictions in social and economic lives (Burdick, Oxhorn, and Roberts 2009; Silva 2009; Svampa 2005, 120–25). However, the reforms resulted in a far-reaching recomposition of private and public spheres, introducing flexibility and reinvention as new virtues of a capitalist ethos. Furthermore, the role of governments changed. State agencies adopted new legal and market disciplines. The neoliberal recomposition of public and private dramatically altered the purpose and spheres of government intervention, marketizing the former and limiting the latter while also shifting itself from welfare for the poor to regulation of the poor. A perception that the national economies of the South were internationalized also oriented states and their successive bureaucracies to new or renewed regional organizations (Hurrell 1995). There is more than a little generalization in these observations. But they approximate national experiences of the largest states. Chile and Argentina were the first to radically reconfigure the relationship of polity and economy. A battery of privatizations put Chile in the regional lead, at least until it stalled with the economic crisis in 1982. In comparison, the range of historical possibilities faced by Argentina had been unarguably wider. The developmental trajectory of the Argentine Republic always provided opportunities for internal modernizing strategies to succeed. When they ceased succeeding,

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the compulsion to change confronted Argentina’s ruling elites at a time when the state had moved ahead of opinion in elite circles. Following Chile’s early example, the regime signed on with the IMF’s program of trade liberalization and monetary stabilization. Like Chile, Argentine governments privatized, driving a concentration of industrial wealth and devastation of agriculture (Svampa 2005, 108–9, 113–14, 225–26). Most of the selloffs had been completed by the time Carlos Menem divested the state of the Post Office and air traffic control services in the 1990s. With Argentina’s refusal to service debt repayments in 2002, this phase ended. The Brazilian pattern was different. The military government lacked the muscular zeal of Pinochet’s Prussianmodeled army and were reluctant to marketize the highly protected economy. The decline in import substitution as a model could not be held back, especially deindustrialization hit Brazil’s metropoles (Domingues 2008, 60). Attempts to re-engineer developmentalist strategies through connections with ascendant Japanese and Korean capital and its rising informatics sector did not hold off the atrophy. Inequality in Brazil, already one of the worst measured, worsened (Mendes 2008, 533–38). When the 1990s came, policies and results changed. However, the bureaucracy remained entrenched, and business adapted to the imperatives of competing for access to government and the central elites of bureaucracy with other sectors (Schneider 1997). The landscape resembled pluralistic democracies, with several peak organizations competing for influence. Even so, when neoliberal policies were implemented, they were done so in just as much a technocratic fashion as ISI strategies had been. Throughout Latin America, neoliberal policies found constituencies of support among the business federations and new generation technocracy employed in universities, government departments, and international agencies. General indicators suggest a picture of failure of neoliberal policies, scarcely matched by any other part of the world (Andrews 2004, 191–201). Growth was slow and spasmodic compared with the high-velocity growth of postwar decades. At the beginning of the 1990s, overseas investment dried up, marking the onset of a decade that wiped out the industry that protectionism had created. Manufacturing as a proportion of GDP fell in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. The impact fragmented the middle classes in the largest countries, while dismantling the basis of security for the working classes.6 Neoliberal policies may have appeared to bring destruction of the social fabric. Yet there were moments of institution-making. One that lasted was the regional trade bloc of Mercado Común del Sur (MERCOSUR), which emerged in 1991 from the conciliatory gestures and improved relations between Argentina and Brazil (Hurrell 1995). Opposition, protest, and backlash were common, although never cyclical (Silva 2009). No politician or party would openly champion free market policies as a result. Equally, no politician or party evaded them when in



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government. Although successful in consolidating democratic institutions, even the Center-Left struggled to maintain electoral credibility when it joined coalition governments implementing neoliberal policies in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Chile. Only in the new century would new developmental paths and projects of regional realignment take a turn in political economy toward “post-neoliberalism” (Burdick, Oxhorn, and Roberts 2009; see also Plot and Seman 2007) and social-democratic reform. Then, regionalism acted as a strategy through which states launching post-neoliberal initiatives could modify the deepening marketization of life. If there was some evidence of the latter in Latin America, there was less in the Caribbean. CAPITALISM AND REGIONALIZATION IN THE CARIBBEAN The Caribbean had particularities of its own in the historical institution of capitalism: the long and deep impact of slavery, a sharp form of regional dependence (and a body of theory and scholarship to accompany it), combinations of state and economy across the region, and a smattering of neoliberal policy changes aligning the region with neighboring coastal states in the 1990s. Dependence issuing from a high level of connectivity with the world economy has been central to the historical grounding of the imaginary significations of capitalism. Dependency theory and sociology may suffer from one-dimensional analyses in Latin America, yet dependence on export-led development as a pattern has been more ingrained in the Caribbean. For this reason, specialists find world neo-Marxist systems and dependency critiques more compelling paradigms for a region dominated by external powers (Richardson 1992, 3–4; Rose 2002). Looking at the past six decades in focus in the current work, some of the smaller and more markedly monocultural countries produced protectionist regimes that revolved around enduring single personal or dynastic dictatorships. Where it occurred, the practice of import substitution brought northern investment with the perverse effect of entrenching dependence on foreign industrial and commercial interests (Pons 1990). However, levels of investment could and did fluctuate, sometimes wildly. The 1970s proved a challenging period to entrench manufacturing. But subsequent structural adjustment programs made foreign-funded industrial and technological development even less likely. Following orthodox economics gave organic development of local strategies of political economy little chance of developing. No institutional center of gravity like Prebisch’s ECLAC emerged with an alternative paradigm. Being in this position, governments acted on perceptions of possibility set within prevailing economic thought. The effects and

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trajectory of dependent development are distinct enough. Yet even here, there is latitude available to governments, especially in economic pacts that bypass neoliberal objectives. Furthermore, there have been phases of social reform aimed at limiting the exigencies of world capitalism by toning countervailing logics of local sectors. There are also unexpected developments since the 1970s that do not square with earlier assumptions of economists and sociologists. Patterns of dependency, complexity, and spaces of economic autonomy come first in this section, which ends with a review of attempts at regional consociation. Let us begin with some varying combinations of dependence and selfdetermination. It is easy to read tourism as an industry demonstrating the region’s dependence and vulnerability (Richardson 1992, 124–27; Rose 2002, 76, 80–81). To be sure, the fluctuations of the various islands’ fortunes in this area are evidence of a “turbulence” and variation characteristic of monocultural dependence (Duval 2004; Mandle 1984). For instance, on Latin America’s Caribbean coast, initial benefits evaporated as communities become dependent on a low-wage workforce, while housing and environmental conditions decline (Andrews 2004, 193). Looking elsewhere, we find nuances in tourism and its impact. The tens of billions of dollars of value in the industry in the 1990s capture a wide variety of activities, settings, practices, and impacts. Beyond beaches and resorts, cultural tourism showcases music, dance, cuisine, and art. Although there were significant investments, governments could arguably have done more to strategize around capital accumulation, especially given the variability of impact. The services and settings are greatly various, but so also are the tourists. Not all fit the troupe of “tourist,” particularly those from the diaspora on journeys of return (Stephenson 2002). If two generalizations are possible, it is that environmental degradation and conditions of urban deprivation and poverty represent the greatest threats to tourism. Remittances bring about a more complex pattern than dependency theories would suggest. In the last decade of the twentieth century, remittances to poor countries grew dramatically (Burgess 2009; Rocha 2015). Defying critics’ expectations that they would have short-lived impact, continuous and increased volumes have brought about a redistribution of income.7 Yet the situation is complex. As an economic dimension of kinship relations of transnational reciprocity, they are a vitalizing aspect of international migration. Skilled workers and professionals from the region select themselves as emigrants (James 2002), providing a long-term family base for remittance income. According to James, the second generation does well in the United States, although the high-income professional status of their parents would predict even stronger outcomes. Transfers in the form of savings, investments, and pensions from British-based West Indians did much to offset the



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fluctuations of tourism (Goulbourne 2002, 200–4). Also, it must be remembered that many financial contributions are not well accounted for in government statistics. Similarly, goods on consignment (also a feature of diaspora travel) elude public accounts (Richardson 1992, 150). With some methodological improvements to reporting, more of the goods and finance flow was increasingly brought to book toward the end of the 1990s. Strategic regionalism is another area. The strategies of Caribbean states reflect a developmental approach based on statehood in a zone where tiny nation states alone are unable to marshal the industrial, financial, political, and cultural capital necessary to engage international trends. One experiment or association is often not like another, and comparison can turn up divergences as much as similarities. For example, the US launched Caribbean Basin Initiative in 1983–1984 to modify the developmental path of the island economies. Its timing was not propitious, and it floundered on poor commodity prices and the debt crisis—making dependency look entrenched (Richardson 1992, 101–5). Moreover, it projected Reagan’s Cold War foreign policy into developmental strategies of the region (Molineu 1986, 30–31, 114–15). Despite this—and like the Central American Initiative—the association did help diversify the sources of exports. Other early experiments in regional integration commenced—like the intergovernmental agreement of CARICOM struck in the 1960s, which brought Costa Rica together with the Caribbean and North America. Motivated by hopes of a regional version of the ISI model, the results of these projects were uninspiring at best, often limited by entrenched divisions between subregions and island states. Trade discussions with the European Economic Community and later with the European Union bore a little more fruit (Goulbourne 2002, 67). However, the Association of Caribbean States is an example of Caribbean states gaining leverage. Envisaged as a greater and more far-reaching version of CARICOM, this project of regional trade liberalization was a response to the consolidation of NAFTA and the continental shift it implied. Otherwise, existing appetites for regionalism have mostly resulted in bilateral agreements (Roniger 2011, 160). Whether or not regional formations brought greater intergovernmental capacity to foreign policy issues or increased cooperation in economic management, they are local projects attempting to expand efficacy and domains of state power. Given the region’s reliance on tourism (Duval 2004), it seemed to make sense to governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to develop regional initiatives. Not all are economic of course, and some that are formally economic are not based on competitive principles or growth mania. Yet even most of those that are trade-based do represent local initiative rather than foreign imposition. South-South agreements accelerated transnationalism in the Caribbean. This “regionalist option” proved an attractive alternative to a comprehensive

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free trade zone for the whole hemisphere, which would likely have been a vehicle for the Washington Consensus (Hurrell 1995; see also Domingues 2008, 57). More than thirty such agreements were struck in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1990s (Katzenstein 2005, 233). Furthermore, transnational cooperation seems to be even greater in the era of open multilateralism (Hurrell, Fawcett, and Hurrell 1995; Serbín 1998). This has led to new blocs like ALBA (2004) and MERCOSUR (1991), which have provided a basis for porous multilateralism (Katzenstein 2005, 228–33). Very different in underlying philosophies of the governance of capitalism, both promote closer intergovernmental relations and enlarged trade networks. Although both fall short of the visions of their makers, ALBA’s political economy has attracted countries from the Caribbean to the original core alliance of Andean American states. Being part of ALBA includes obligations for Caribbean states. In turn, ALBA has had ramifications of Commonwealth Caribbean states also in CARICOM. Both kinds of regional consociation would develop further in the late 2000s, but that takes us further beyond the present discussion. CONCLUSION This chapter aims to test a theoretical position combining Castoriadis’s conception of a capitalist social imaginary with formulations of the notion of the spirit of capitalism. To make the economic sovereign, primary elements of money and wealth characteristic of capitalist endeavor find their ground in several elements. They are the combinations of polity and economy; doctrinal interpretations of operative economic action, production, prices, exchange, trade, and labor; the institutional complex of organized protection, regulation, and productive enterprise; and the stimulus provided by multigovernmental trade pacts, financial agreements, and regional associations. For the United States, Canada, Mexico, the countries of Central and Latin America, and the Caribbean, there have been different answers to the questions of how “activist” the state is in grounding capitalism’s imaginary significations and how particular national and region figurations of polity and economy ground a capitalist spirit. In taking this approach to imaginary of capitalism, I have referred to ideologies at only five separate points of the analysis. Yet ideologies are central to the doctrines of political economy considered as part of this chapter. There are overlaps of the capitalist imaginary and political imaginaries in the institution of the modern Americas. The latter is the subject matter of the next chapter.



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NOTES 1. See the discussion of Taylor in the first chapter. 2. On variations of the singularity of capitalist imaginary, see Joerges, Stråth, and Wagner (2005). 3. Swedberg argues for a Tocqueville-inspired reading of US capitalism to render Weber relevant (Swedberg 2007). Importantly, according to Swedberg, Tocqueville added a political dimension to the formation of capitalism—an element conspicuously absent from Weber’s interpretation (Swedberg 2007, 64–65). 4. The shift in the Democrats was marked and kept going. By the Reagan years, The Economist could state that Democratic liberalism had shifted to the right of all of Canada’s major parties (Lipset 1989, 141). 5. Monopoly prevailed even if the Americas were still a “battleground of business imperialism” (Fernández-Armesto 2003, 135). 6. On Argentina’s decollectization and polarization of the middle classes, see Svampa (2005). 7. Remittances seem to have more simply tracked the paths of foreign investment more closely in Central America than in the Caribbean (Rocha 2015; Roniger 2011, 160–62).

Chapter 4

Political Imaginaries, Political Traditions Ideologies and State Formation

To this point, the book has theorized and profiled metropolitan imaginaries in the Americas (chapter 2) and synthesized a theory of the capitalist imaginary exploring concrete variants of figuration of polity and economy (chapter 3). This chapter adds an examination of the ideological, political, and nationalist imaginaries that condition nations and their ideological terrains and analyzes the ideologies inhabiting those terrains. My purpose is to foreground a social imaginaries approach to the varieties of political ideologies in the Americas and examine how collective action and social and political movements interact with those ideologies. It is a contention of the chapter that the Americas’ ideological varieties differ from Europe and from each other in important ways. After discussing the ideological imaginary, I integrate perspectives on political imaginaries developed by Lefort and Castoriadis with examination of nationalist imaginaries and nationalisms via Calhoun, Árnason, Olson, Domingues, and Taylor. Moving from the theoretical framework, I examine the institution of republican states and their nationalisms and federalisms in the context of state formation. I then turn to traditions of liberalism and conservatism as sometimes-competing and sometimes-overlapping currents. Moving to socialist ideologies, I separate the United States and Canada from Central and Latin America and the Caribbean. The subsequent section posits populism as a historically specific national-popular regime of Latin America by mobilizing perspectives from Touraine and others to sharpen a distinct conception of populism as a regionally and historically specific configuration of states. Each tradition has variously formed frames of reference for original doctrines of political thought and action. This chapter concludes with a summary of findings. 87

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The specific notion of ideology invoked in the subtitle of this chapter refers to the traditions of liberalism, conservatism, populism, and socialism. However, this necessitates some theoretical foregrounding to set out how this is elucidated within a social imaginaries approach. In the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, Ricœur theorized the ideological imaginary as a symbolic dimension and interpretive means of “intergration”; intergration referring to the operative terms of social life (Ricœur and Taylor 1986; see also Thompson 1990; Adams 2015). Thus, Ricœur asks “how ideology operates,” rather than what its drivers are (Ricœur and Taylor 1986, 10). The direction he takes diverges from negative iteration of the term originating in the late Marx—and which is developed as ideology-critique reducing ideology to only the dissimulation of real life—and thus carries positive as well as negative connotations in respect of representations of “real social life.” Ricœur is also diverging from Mannheim’s sociological reconstruction of a relationship of ideology and utopia, although Ricœur makes use of Mannheim and indeed the humanist Marx in constructing an encompassing picture of the ideological imaginary. From Ricœur, it becomes possible, following Adams, to reconstruct several levels of symbolic and interpretive meaning relating to political power (Adams 2015, 141). At a high level of abstraction, one is the symbolic institution of the social order; another is the interpretation (in images and representations) of that symbolic institution. Together, symbolic institution and interpretations prefigure and structure a worldly articulation of narratives about social life (“[W]e think from these anticipatory structures, not about them”). They are essential to ideological representation (in whatever form) and enable the practical domain of society, or action. Put otherwise, they facilitate praxis as another indispensable level of the ideological imaginary. While there are more levels discernible in the notion of ideological,1 I wish to bring one level in with this chapter to defend its central contention. Along with the ideological imaginary and the symbolic dimension of praxis is a level of ideology as doctrinal political traditions—the interpretations framing agency. I wish to focus on these as well as the symbolic and political imaginary institution of the political. The ideological imaginary prefigures doctrines and founds in doctrines a form of grounding or instantiation of thought and action. Doctrines and the agencies that express them are, as Thompson reminds us, not the only sites of ideology, giving social theory a need for a wider understanding of ideology that sheds light on the social-historical (Thompson 1990, 8–9). However, as sites of state, parties, and collective movement, doctrines address political power. Thus, as well as symbolic institution, representation and interpretation, and dissimulation of “real social life,” this chapter addresses ideologies as roughly coherent set of ideas providing understanding of the world and normative and programmatic guidance for action in contexts of power. Even when they appear inchoate,



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ideologies remain approximately coherent in an interlinkage of ideas and political action. As they entail action, they have social agents who give voice to the interpretive representation of ideas. Their approximate coherence, moreover, is sufficiently resonant that they cross generations and last for many years drawing on core imaginary significations of modern meaning shared with competing ideologies. Since ideologies interpreted at this level as doctrines emerge in national states, we also need to sketch associated concepts of political imaginaries and national imaginaries which, first, help theorize the institution of the political and the ground of politics as combined thought and collective action and, second, the backdrop of meaning of nationhood, which gives nations a spectrum of nationalisms. This is the next step. THEORIZING POLITICAL IMAGINARIES IN THE AMERICAS This section appraises theories of the political imaginary in Castoriadis, Lefort, and others. Political imaginaries, in the understanding of the present author, institute sovereignties and the noninstitutional ground on which politics can take place. They background, complement, and overlap with the ideological imaginary as the horizon of meaning, informing the relation of real social life and representation. Castoriadis and Lefort’s varying theories of politics and the political are seminal texts in the social imaginaries field and may well be known to readers (Castoriadis 1991; Lefort and Thompson 1986). Rather than recounting their general points, I want to explore each thinker through the prism of their views on the Americas, which are principally on the United States. Both take the United States as paradigmatic of a new world revolutionary modernity that problematizes social orders of hierarchy (Browne 2019). In Lefort’s eyes, the United States is the figuration that most completely disperses power through the polity (Lefort and Thompson 1986). Its revolutionary character lay in skepticism directed at representative institutions. The ongoing principle of self-critique has been essential to democracy’s living activity. As part of this, the Constitution instantiated the principle of unending rejuvenation of political space. This principle of self-critique was more powerful than the principle of representation for the taxed, often celebrated in liberal political thought. The revolution instituted a republic that could not survive without divisions. Though there is a constitution and a revolutionary political memory, there is no foundational moment for this form, just the abstraction of the sovereign people seemingly from nowhere. The character of this political imaginary is generative, stimulating constant activity and self-limitation. Because the

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republic is self-limiting by character, the polity is structured around checks and balances and dispersal of authority symbolically inserted in the Constitution. This ensures a polyarchy of form and an unmonopolized center of power which is always contestable. Castoriadis sees the 1776 revolution as a breakthrough to autonomy and democracy. However, he holds an opposing view of the Constitution’s place in the revolutionary process to that of Lefort. The Constitution did not confirm the substantive moment of autonomy crucial to democracy—lucid and explicit reflexivity in political practice—rather it smothered the rebellious impulses of the revolutionary movement and thereby brought about a closure of critical thought and action (Castoriadis 2007). The last vestiges of creative radicalism that flourished in the revolution atrophied in the early nineteenth century. A polity of civic equals (at least for unenslaved males) was still sufficiently visible in the 1830s for Tocqueville to paint a vivid picture of the equality of conditions culturally characteristic of agrarian republicanism. However, by this time the Jeffersonian figuration was already vanishing. By mid-century, industrialization in the North and oligarchization of the South was putting at risk the egalitarianism of petty producer cultures that had succeeded the ascriptive British imperial order. Democracy after the Civil War had its patrician critics, especially once the franchise expanded. Other critics saw a corruption of democracy in the growth of moneyed interests. As far as Castoriadis is concerned, this only touches on the problem. Politics by this time was becoming proceduralist. The result is underlying slide toward liberal oligarchy over a long period of time. In the context of the post-Cold War world at the end of the twentieth century, democracy in the United States denoted little more than proceduralism (Castoriadis 2001). For Castoriadis, “politics” in the United States was the worst kind of heteronomous “non-politics,” or what Howard calls “antipolitics” (Howard 2013). Each view has shortcomings worth briefly enumerating. Lefort leaves unanswered questions of heteronomous logics in the US polity. Castoriadis lacks a nuanced construction of constitution-making (see Blokker 2019) and a wide enough apprehension of lucidity in politics to account for critical articulations of politics. Neither have any sustained comments on other polities in the Western Hemisphere or indeed the ideologies of the United States or other countries. Many of these lacunae are the interest of this chapter. Taking on board these observations, let us consider other points of view on the US Constitution and political imaginary. Castoriadis’s dismissal of the Constitution risks needless disregard for an important source of political contestation. For most political philosophy of North American republicanism, the unparalleled creation of the Constitution as an imaginary source of sovereignty is crucial. Indeed, in US politics, the Declaration and the Constitution



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are so foundational to the moral purpose of the Republic that they acquire an air of the sacred. Through the Constitution and the Declaration, republican revolutionaries articulated the a priori impermanence of government as a political condition. Building on Lefort, and Castoriadis, as well as Arendt, Howard argues that the American Revolution was the modern republican institution of democracy (Howard 1989). His “intuitive” hermeneutical method draws attention to the political meaning of the institution of a novel kind of polity in the Declaration and the Constitution.2 As a political model generated at the cusp of natural and positive law, the instruments of a declaration of independence and inscription of a constitution were widely and quickly disseminated into the law of nations—an aid to its adaptation throughout the Western Hemisphere in the fifty years following its signing (Armitage 2007). Americans had invented a means by which they could endow their states with a popular sovereignty invested in a written form. This had a wider impact in shifting the foundations of sovereignty from exteriorized origins in the ancient rights of Britons to the present (Olson 2016; Taylor 2004, 110–13). In the Americas, sovereignty could be declared and constituted and felt in the present. In the United States, this meant creating an “unoccupiable, an empty (and) symbolic place,” as Howard contends (Howard 1989, 78). Made in this manner, democracy in the United States set problems for which Americans could often not find solutions. However, maintaining division around the key problems of government (including the separation of powers) acts to constrain a heteronomous closure of public issues. Pluralism and division are thus indispensable fixtures of a self-limited democracy. Without them, “antipolitics” threatens; that is, trust invested in leaders promising unlimited expansion of freedom and prosperity (Howard 2013; see also Gauchet 2017). Tendencies to centralize authority in one area of government pose a danger to the equilibrium of the diffusion of power in the US polity.3 As I argue in the first chapter, Trump’s Presidency, and the universe of self-certainty central to its politics, corresponded to this very sense of antipolitics. All this makes the Constitution itself a source of political contestation, a point Castoriadis gives little regard to. In considering the creation of constitutionalism, it is therefore important to distinguish between the imaginary significations of modernity riding this tension (and symbolically giving liberal notions of freedom, rights, and equality) from the ideologies variously competing on the ground over the practices of freedom, rights, and equality. The competition of ideologies includes contestation over constitutions and the juridical instantiation of freedom, rights, and other political goods. Ideologies also generate competing ideas of nationhood and thus competing nationalisms. They do not emerge without overarching significations, however. Let us next examine nationalist imaginaries instituting the ideological ground of nationalisms.

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NATIONALIST IMAGINARIES How nations are imagined is interrogated by social theorists from Benedict Anderson to Taylor (Olson 2016). The differentiation of state and nation is central to the creation of popular sovereignty and therefore democracy. Imagined nations can give rise to nationalist commitments to the unity of the nation that merge into majoritarian and undemocratic ideologies and practices, yet do so only in specific instances. Whether they do so or not, nationalism remains a banal identity and overarching visceral and affective sentiment. This is because, as Calhoun argues, nationalism is pervasive as a social imaginary (Calhoun 2007). It thus ordinarily takes many discursive shapes that ideologically cultivate solidarity. The doctrines and the discursive formations are possible because of the social imaginary of nationalism itself. Thus, nationalisms—as they are discursively expressed—sit on a changeable spectrum of ideological and moral positions encompassed by this imaginary. Moreover, nationalists find the language, imagery, and banal symbolism of nationhood itself through the imaginary of nationalism. The nineteenth century marks the beginning of era of the nationalism and the Americas were a major theater in which nationalisms coalesced. It remains to explore the nationalisms and state formation in this phase before turning to the twentieth century’s ideological landscape. From here, I outline nationalism and state formation in two separate moves. As a first move, I focus on Latin and Central America and the Caribbean. My second move comes in the next chapter, where I address the formation of the US continental nation state. The contents of that chapter aren’t foreshadowed here. Ever since Bolívar’s efforts to construct Gran Colombia failed, a paradox has governed nation state formation in Latin America. On one hand, centrifugal tendencies decentralize state capacities, often along patrimonial lines, and thereby limit the authority of central agencies representing the national state (Roniger 2011; Eisenstadt 2002). The result is an image of heterogeneous population, territory, and communities—the very opposite of the imagined nation in which territorial space is paramount (Domingues 2008, 99–105). On the other hand, unity of the nation has been a central theme of major political movements. If the second side of the paradox belongs to the past century, the first was an abiding feature of the nineteenth. Although built unevenly, territorial republican states in Latin America did not govern uncontested territories. Border, island, and maritime disputes were hardly unknown. More significant was the instability of the colonization of further territory and indigenous lands within states. These were symptomatic of unstable centralized rule. Overall, territorial integrity, strong instruments of state, and collective identity eluded states for much of this period.



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For many countries in Latin America, the institution of the symbolic fabric of nationalism is best described as a long post-revolutionary process (Annino and Guerra 2003). Far from a solely endogenous creations, nationalisms formed in connection to transatlantic shifts in modernity (Mota 2014). This is evident in the international outlook of major leaders from Bolívar to Martí. The US example of declared republican statehood translated well into Iberian America (Armitage 2007, 117–19). International connection appears in the symbols of the nation. Anthems, flags, coats of arms, and public celebrations formed a poetry of symbols, including symbols of the United States, Spain and France, and occasionally Amerindian icons (Domingues 2008, 79–80). Some countries absorbed indigenous traditions by creating a longer pre-Hispanic lineage for the modern nation (such as Chile). The ratiocinating language deployed in establishment of the symbolic substance of the republics prefigured positivism, which became a vital part of nineteenth-century nationalism in larger states. There was therefore a strong relationship between currents of the Enlightenment and the discourses of nationalism animating the national imaginary (Quijada 2003). Out of a host of collective identities, the notion of nación unequivocally connoted modernity with a restricted conception of national emancipation. This included a singularized model of liberal citizenship, which appealed in coalescing yet distinct metropolitan public spheres. Although these were corporatist rather than unbounded, public spaces pushed back the domination of private, oligarchic and authoritarian forces (Guerra and Lempérière 1998), creating additional sites in which nationalists could ideologically ground the imaginary. A particular kind of memory emerged: a myth of origins and a cult of heroes shared across many countries conferred legitimacy on national states (Quijada 2003, 303–5). On the back of cultural development in metropolitan public spheres, large segments of the urban and governmental elite in the major states adapted European positivism as a philosophy of progress. In the twentieth century, the connection of public spheres and national identities became a prominent feature of Latin American modernity, particularly in the tension between utopian ideals and existing social and economic conditions (Roniger and Sznajder 1998). Struggles within the public sphere pressed the boundaries of citizenship and the rules of access to the centers of decision-making. In this context, corporatist institutions widened the reach of national states by bringing in working class, subaltern, and indigenous sectors (to a lesser degree, women). Political parties obtained some social ballast, as did unions. During the twentieth century, nationalism would feature in major political conflicts. In countries where populism most visibly circumscribed politics and political action, nationalism brought high levels of organized mobilization (Spektorowski 1998; Senkman 1998). Elsewhere, in countries in which the military overthrew populist governments, or simply succeeded

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them, demobilization would often follow to suppress these very processes of class and migrant integration. Conversely, where populist movements lifted worker militancy, popular resistance to military rule proved more widespread. Central America’s institution of nationalism bore similarity yet was separate. The region’s states could not keep pace with the outgrowth of linkages across the North Atlantic. While new national identities may have come late to the isthmus, collective identities as such were not delayed for the region. Transnationalism had a greater hold on collective identity than national loyalty during the early decades of independences. For the five states forming the United Provinces of Central America (1823–1839), unionism overcame factionalism for a substantial period. This is not to argue that there were not profound or bitter conflicts; indeed, there was internecine warfare for decades revolving around Guatemalan domination, particularly after the liberal interlude of 1837–1840. The conflict entailed Mexico too (Campbell 1988). However, the reunification of the region remained a dream for liberal nationalists. Nationalism thus emerged in a dialectic of national institutionalization and regional connectivity. Roniger writes that transnationalism “emphasized Central American solidarity and patriotism” in this period in which nascent nationalism lacked the integrative capacity that even Argentina and Mexico could harness (Roniger 2011, 48; see also Girot 2005, 251–53). Transnational cooperation between armed opponents of US interventions as a regional phenomenon had a significant political impact at the local level. From their inception, regional independence movements took opposition to North American hegemony to the heart of their collective self-understanding (Hopkins 2018, 717; Thier 2012, 167). In the twentieth century, nationalist historiography inputted these patriotic tropes of nineteenth-century resistance heroes into collective memory. Although patriots, they were also regional heroes. Consequently, commemoration of the foundation of Central America’s republics programmed the regional dimension into national myths, particularly into the myth of heroic armed resistance. The nationalist imaginary manifested in the nineteenth-century Central American republics in the myths of solidarities that were simultaneously Pan-American and national. In this sense, regionalism has been a co-determinant of nationalisms in America for political and economic elites and social movements even though interstate rivalry re-emerged from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Yet there were phases of further intergovernmental cooperation and transitional solidarity (involving political movements, civil society organizations, and later NGOs). A point of geographical comparison is Brazil—large in area but integrated as a stand-alone federal state. It is remarkable that this nation made the transition to nationhood with its larger territories intact. Colonial Brazil’s forces of decentralization could have seen it go the way of larger contemporary regional formations, like the United Provinces (Roniger 2011, 30–31). Yet it



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formed peaceably enough and without loss of territory. This unusual path to statehood was conditioned by the ruling elites’ declaration of a constitutional monarchy formally separate from Portugal in 1822. The separation raised the hopes of slaves for freedom from bondage (Andrews 2004, 55–56), a hope soon disappointed, with further rebellions and conflict ensuing. Collective actions aligned with a political imaginary of inclusion that sat in direct contradiction with the dynamics of segmentation and marginalization (Mota and Wagner 2021, 107–10). In these respects, Brazil resembles other nascent Latin American republics. However, the chronology of the nation’s foundation diverged from rest of the subcontinent (Arruda 2014). Complete independence took longer, and slavery lasted longer than elsewhere. The formal independence of the country had no base in nationalist sentiment and depended perilously on provincial powers. Lacking public spaces and extensive public spheres, the state’s early development rested in the hands of private elites. This favored a passive conservatism up until the republican ascendancy and the force of abolition loosened the nexus between the state and the oligarchic establishment. Republican opposition in Rio and Sao Paulo did grow, although the commitment of republicans to popular sovereignty was circumscribed by a conception of “the people” that occluded race (Carvalho de 1992, 146, 156–57). Republicanism was interlaced with positivism and liberalism. The opposition of slavers to the monarchy worsened steadily as the latter’s support for slave rights and abolition became steadily more evident over time (Andrews 2004, 112–13). Nationhood looked like it would have an oligarchic cast. When the Republic was declared in 1889, the conservative strategy of statecraft became entrenched. Despite rebellions, ongoing disquiet from Jacobins and Monarchists, and a military coup in the 1890s (Topik 1978), the republic emerged intact and remained so. Canada’s imaginary institution was quite different. Modern Canada emerged through comparison with the United States and with extant Francophone and First Nations civilizational traditions. Since 1867, Canadian continental state formation has been a process of linking provincial territories to a transcontinental infrastructure of government. Gradually, national belonging and collective identity developed out of this process, incorporating the provinces into an imagined Canadian territory. Centrifugal political forces strained the potential for confederation reserving great influence for the regions and provinces (Axworthy 1988). In the early decades, economic upsurge in the United States not only positively demonstrated the benefits of nationhood but also signaled the perils of having a powerful southern neighbor. Politicians perceived the United States as a threat. In this atmosphere, imperial loyalists had additional arguments to marshal in favor of a stronger relationship with Britain. Theirs was not the only position in debates about

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the form and direction of nation building. For all engaged in such debates, fear of the vulnerable border was central to the politics of nation building (Gibbins 2005, 152). Recruitment to the project of Federalism during the 1860s and early 1870s therefore depended on the use of persuasion and fear of outside powers. All this resulted in a problematic national identity in the nineteenth century. Meaningful symbols of nationhood came late to Canada and summoned a highly reserved form of patriotism (Lipset 1989, 46). Furthermore, national identity is continually disrupted by the social-historical of a three-point foundation in First Nations, French America. For First Nations, formal citizenship left unresolved the multifaceted problems issuing from the expropriation of their land. In respect of the other point of Canada’s social-historical, the nonresolution of one of the nation’s foundational conflicts leaves a national identity in an uncertain state caught between Anglophone and Francophone cultures (Gagnon and Iacovino 2007)—the “two solitudes” as it is known. Overall, unresolved tensions over Canada’s civilizational conflicts are refracted today through the prism of race and ethnicity, a history of dishonored treaties with First Nations, and a regime of biculturalism. Such circumstances of state formation define the particularity of the social-historical in Canada. This is one legacy of federalism and the dynamics of state formation. Another involves the compromises struck by contending levels of governments, and the intergovernmental operation of federal and provincial bureaucracies (Drummond 1982; Gagnon and Iacovino 2007, 57–90; see also Smiley 1987). Canada’s constitutional evolution reflects this interplay of provincial and national institutions, most notably in reforms since the 1970s and negotiations around the Meech Lake Accord aimed at resetting the constitution. The reforms of the so-called Quiet Revolution of the 1960s leading up to the 1982 settlement stimulated Québécois nationalism (Gagne 2016; Smiley 1987, 68–81). Led by Pierre Trudeau, the Liberals undertook thorough bicultural reform of the public sector. Although arrested to a degree by subsequent governments, the reforms had a devolutionary effect on Ottawa’s powers, which consequently encouraged a species of executive federalism as a countertrend to democratic reforms (Axworthy 1988, 139–44; Smiley 1987, 83–99). The result was a reconstructed centralist federalism. Later, the 1982 Constitution Act was purposed to claim full legislative sovereignty while also settling a unifying compact with its founding and conflicting peoples. A “hierarchy of political identities” has ensued (Gibbins 2002, 137–38), including ethnic identities. Since that period, debate around identity has echoed enduring tensions between dominant Anglo-Canadians and Quebecker’s traditions and between the heirs of colonial settlement and the First Nations. Complicating the public



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debate further is the conflict between national multiculturalism and Quebec’s policy of integration (Juteau, McAndrew, and Pietrantonio 1998; Taylor 2012). Anglophone Canada’s view is that biculturalism and multiculturalism entrenched pluralism. However, by cementing Quebec’s special status in the Constitution, Canada limited the implementation of multiculturalism. By the 1990s, the two Canadas had come to perceive the era after Trudeau’s reforms through different prisms (Taylor and Laforest 1993). How this has developed is certainly in contention and has remained so since. Unity of the state seems relatively fragile, even while the nationalist imaginary remains deeply felt. I have more to say about this specific conflict in chapter 6. LIBERALISM AND CONSERVATISM When it comes to liberalism, there are different layers of meaning to consider in respect of the ideological, political, and nationalist imaginaries. First, the ideological imaginary creates a symbolic horizon that makes ideology (in all its connotations) operative. For liberalism, this incorporates basic goods in politics as well as the doctrinal contents of liberalism. Second, political imaginaries in the Americas supply states with a liberal form of sovereignty and a form of statehood. We can, for instance, speak of a “liberal state” in respect of the United States and Mexico and Latin America in the nineteenth century (as we shall see). Third, the nationalist imaginary institutes national republics (and not new imperial states) and a horizon of meaning for nationalisms. In retrospect, this seems obvious. However, the creation of modern republican nation states was a great novelty of modernity in the nineteenth century. With mention of modernity, one cannot help but observe that liberal conceptions of liberty and tyranny also resonate with modernity’s imaginaries (Rundell 2017). In the imaginary dimension of modernity, progress and autonomy supply such conceptions with meaning in different historicocivilizational contexts (Árnason 2020, 43–45, 71–72). Variations on core imaginary significations of freedom, progress, equality, and rights are the order of the day for the political modernities of the Americas. For example, Latin America’s configuration of political modernity produced its own variants. Liberalism set the telos of rights as an imaginary goal of a restricted liberal modernity (Domingues 2008, 3–7). In this scenario of engagement with modernity, rights confer inclusion in the political community as a precondition, but also a problem for state to grapple with. How this transpired is important. In republican constitutions, this problem is defined by a juridical category of “citizen” inscribed into fundamental legal discourse. However, neither constitutions nor states could substantively resolve the liberal problem of inclusion they posed for themselves, since they did not accommodate the

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collectivist traditions of creole or indigenous nations already embedded in the social-historical. Liberal statehood remained a constitutional abstraction removed from practical politics. This was not unique to Latin America. However, the courses Latin American polities took in addressing it were distinctive and diverse and entail liberalism as a doctrinal ideology and more or less grounded in liberal political parties. Along with conservatism, this liberalism and others are the object of this section. A starting point is the observation that conditions of the many Americas create distinctive contours of ideological diversity (Eisenstadt 2002; Eisenstadt 2013). But there is something in the character of liberalism and its relationship to conservativism and socialism also informing the diversification of new world liberalisms. They are competing ideologies, even when they inform each other’s development in the Americas. I start with Latin America, Mexico, and Central America before turning to the United States and Canada. Six feasible generalizations are laid down. First is the bipolar contest of liberal and conservative parties in most countries (Larraín 2000, 80–82). In the first one hundred years, each party-type forged specific constituencies. Liberal values of civic equality appealed to those with less or no access to the centers of decision-making, while conservativism privileged a stable social order attractive to the powerful. Both sides variously favored abolition and freed blacks in an effort to garner support (Andrews 2004, 65–67). An elective affinity of class alliances and worldviews is generally evident. While parties competed, a party system only really took shape in the twentieth century. Even then, corporatist networks structured the life and activity of parties. This was the case where the two types of party competed, but also in instances of power-sharing arrangements such as Colombia’s National Front coalition, following years of la violencia in which interclass, plebian, and inter-elite conflict intensified. Clientelism applying in a LiberalConservative axis was heightened when national-popular regimes took root. Second, liberalism framed a problematic basis of legitimacy that posed questions of inclusion for Latin American states (Mota 2014, 267–68). This was a problem of modernity to address and remained largely unresolved at the dawn of the twentieth century. The franchise expanded to include formalized sectors of the urban working class. Women and most indigenous people were excluded. Liberal traditions were particularly pronounced in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina (Roniger and Sznajder 1999, 8), although in the latter prey to authoritarian and conservative competitors. A variant of liberalism had a strong phase in Mexico but was destabilized by the 1910 revolution. In the ideological contest that took place, inclusion of peasant and indigenous peoples in the political community became a central question. Some collective rights were solidified in the 1917 Constitution. After that, the modernizing goal of incorporation was adapted to a populist figuration.



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Third, liberalism played an important part in the project of singularizing nations in the circumstances of weak nationalisms (Annino and Guerra 2003). Institutionally, states lacking the resources, instruments, and apparatus of stable rule suffered a deficit of legitimacy. The caudillo model of strongman rule filled the gap in several places. Often, they were conservative governors with a military background, although economic liberalism might have suited them well in the nineteenth century, facing as they did a shortfall in state capacities and national cohesion. Many states lacking strong loyalties were caught in a tension between popular conceptions of patria and nacion, in other words between national and communal identity (Quijada 2003). Competing and overlapping loyalties for relatively intact indigenous communities further compounded their condition of exclusion. Provincial identities unassimilable to the nation state also fueled the distance from national belonging. Liberal citizenship could only partially bridge this tension, which it attempted by connecting abstract citizens (conceived in constitutions) to a national communal good. Fourth, in this atmosphere, liberalism and positivism sought “mental emancipation” from Hispanic and indigenous heritage, as the Mexican positivist Gabino Barreda puts it (cited in Larraín 2000, 77). Liberalism went hand in hand with modernist notions of progress in culture, science, and industry, leaving little room for the legacies of the past. The doctrinal landscape of many countries assimilated positivism as the philosophy of state and a guide for church and education. Some such as Mexico and Brazil adopted positivism more fully. A positivist modernization program suited the more interventionist state in both countries. This would come into question as critiques of the fetish of progress began to diminish the scientistic edge of nineteenth-century liberal modernity in Europe and indeed Latin America (Coletta 2018). Some recuperation of pre-existing Hispanic traditions occurred in the fin de siècle period of cultural production. Fifth, conservativism tracked liberalism as an ideological alterity, triangulated with socialism as the other major ideological compass point. Conservative parties dominated Latin American states once the revolutionary era had ebbed. Generalizations around this phase are complicated by national variants. A strong variant is Brazil where conservatism’s coalesced in an unusual relationship with modernity. Conservativism was exceptionally authoritarian, patrimonial, and distant from a universalizing pattern of modernity. This is not to say that other states were not conservative. Patrimonialism blended with conservative Catholic values also in Argentina, Paraguay, and Chile. However, in Brazil it sustained a long hegemony. In the twentieth century, Christian conservativism would be routinized in political parties.4 Last, the fate of liberalism in the Cold War era and after was one of suppression. Where dictatorships took hold, they were brutal and illiberal. In

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the democratic resurgence and the ascendancy of human rights movements and networks, liberalism at most rematerialized in the most attenuated forms. Civil society struggled to make political space and then retain it. The experiences of civil society varied due to the different paths that different countries found out of authoritarianism, consequently confronting different structural limitations to the autonomous development of associational life. Human rights advocates in the Southern Cone focused on historical memory of abuses and repression in the hope of insulating democratic gains against authoritarian resurgence and deepening democratic practices (Feinberg, Waisman, and Zamosc 2006; Roniger and Sznajder 1999). With those six generalizations outlined, let us also examine the historical pattern of conservative rule giving way to liberal government in Mexico and many Central and Latin American countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Mexico, liberal and conservative rivalry in the early republic gave way to heightened conflict with a transnational quality to it. US influence decisively favored liberals over conservatives from the outset (Hamnett 2006, 163–71). However, the Americans’ own intervening Civil War added to the disruption and provided enticement enough for the French and then the British to involve themselves. In the context of “dual crises” in North America, the French invasion favored conservatives and the prospects of peaceful order, a choice that can be partly attributed to strong French attachment to Mesoamerica (Sexton 2011, 137–46; Thier 2012, 177). This was a direct challenge to the United States whose military actions proved enough in the end. When the government fell in 1867, the Conservative Party vanished from serious contention. Liberal political economy and republican commitment to separation of church and state had made the Liberal Party an attractive ally for the United States. In turn, the liberals had little choice than to ally with the United States. With enhanced state capacities, the succeeding Diaz regime could act more extensively than its predecessors in augmenting Mexican modernity. Even so, citizenship entailed little more than the right to vote, and patrons controlled large vote banks diminishing this right significantly. Political pluralism had few guarantees. Diaz’s appearance of a monopoly over the seat of power only grew with the creation of the Liberal Union, which excluded factional opponents. This technocratic seizure of the center of government intended to secure the undermined legitimacy of the regime and constitution to a point where neither could continue. An endemic crisis ended Mexico’s nineteenthcentury experiment with liberalism (Hamnett 2006, 186–91), and any successors could claim “liberal” as a creed in name only. The 1910 revolution unleashed a host of competing forces and revolutionary programs. Once formally settled in 1917 with a new constitution, the



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revolution brought substance to the liberal pretensions of the 1857 Constitution, with inclusive measures affirming the peasantry in membership of the nation and communal lands as a component of the national economy. Bringing less transformation to its economic settings than many revolutions of its day, the revolution ushered in major social and political changes (Knight 1990, 1–7). Mobility remained high. Education programs, heavily invested with hopes for social change, brought greater access to knowledge. Indigenism culturally accompanied affirmation of the right to communal lands. New families rose to prominence in industry and politics. The revolution brought new factions and factional leaders to the fore based on anticlericalism, thereby giving a radical tinge to the new regime in the 1920s while continuing the aspects of fin de siècle Mexican modernity (Hamnett 2006, 207–16; Knight 1990, 16–17, 26–34). If this was at a distance from liberalism, the sectoralism of social relations would further dampening liberal hopes. Set up for corporatism, the Mexican polity would fall to a populist figuration dominated by the PRI as the heir to the revolution.5 With decisive oligarchic and clerical support, conservative politics sustained power for three decades in Central America after the demise of the five-nation Union (Woodward 1985). With remarkable effect, conservatives reversed the civic, clerical, and legal reforms of the federation in each of the five republics. With Church privileges restored and the military well-funded, the aristocratic elites took firm control through caudillo rule, setting a clear pattern for the region. Eager to protect local interests from the threat of republican resurgence, conservatives favored national caudillo rule, as they perceived that to be the best vehicle for organized defense of the multifamily oligarchic order. Conservatives promoted controlling limits on capitalist development, even though they enjoyed cozy relationships with foreign interests. Although still minor at this stage, US interests were increasingly visible in gunboat diplomacy and William Walker’s brief usurpation in Nicaragua. Seeking to edge out rival British finance and trade, US intercession increasingly favored liberal forces over wary conservatives better disposed toward Spain and Britain. After this period of conservative successes, liberalism began a long phase of dominance from 1871, even where the rule of liberal parties was punctuated by occasional conservative government. Central America’s new political class invested in Spencerian evolutionist doctrines, reflecting hopes for moderate progress. Their modernization programs were highly receptive to European positivism. As such, they reformed education, taxation, laicized relations of Church and State, and formalized constitutions. Budding US interests welcomed the reforms. The kind of monocultural dependence on coffee and banana exports familiar to twentieth-century observers began to take shape under liberal rule (Roniger 2011, 62–64). In an important, perhaps

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ruinous, continuity with conservative predecessors, they did so through a dictatorial caudillo mode of government. Liberal attempts in the 1890s to relaunch the federation foundered on opposition from Mexico, the United States, and Britain. From Guatemala’s Barrios to Nicaragua’s Zelaya, liberal republican Presidents fell on the gamble of renewed unification. Mexican involvement colored this conflict with the effects of external interference, supporting Zelaya to displace US influence (Campbell 1988, 230–32). The impact in Nicaragua was to lead to a pattern of alternation of liberal and conservative rule disrupted by US interventions. Even so, in Nicaragua and in other republics of the Isthmus, redistribution of ecclesiastical lands was modestly successful, primarily benefitting liberal elites and foreign companies (see O’Brien 1996, 47–55). By this act, they weakened the social base of the conservative aristocratic oligarchy without bringing much change to the lives of the popular and agrarian classes. Further legal reforms introduced waged labor on a wider scale. These measures, along with privatization of some customary communal lands, weakened the peasant communities and produced bases of opposition from below. In the 1920s and 1930s, liberals and conservatives struggled to attain autonomous state capacities gained by major states in Latin America. Even where elections took place (and elections did continue), two-party contests were overdetermined by caudillo direction. Honduras maintained the best record through to 1932, but after that incumbent President Carías Andino forged a personal dictatorship. More generally, civil conflict, institutional breakdown, and then the deleterious impact of the Depression contextualized authoritarian rule. At one extreme, outright dictatorship prevailed in Nicaragua after Somoza’s coup in 1932, while at the other Costa Rica had some democratic procedures within a limited institutional framework and toleration of opposition. More generally, the liberal parties pre-dated any semblance of democracy and have a problematic relationship with democratic principles and practices (Colburn and Cruz S 2007). Liberal caudillismo thus came easily. With neither conservatives or liberals imagining politics to entail the principled contest of parties, the separation of powers, or the transparent transfer of power, no country can be said to conform to a democratic ideal. Liberalism’s varieties could not be realized in Central America (Colburn and Cruz S 2007). One possible late exception is Costa Rica. The republic enjoyed benefits of relative isolation from the regional turmoil of the 1830s. From there, it fashioned a model of export agriculture in coffee and bananas for other states to simulate (Roniger 2011, 62–63). In the nineteenth century, this was the only country where the liberal rights in the constitution were realized in political life. Costa Rica in the twentieth century gained the distinction of rebuffing oligarchic modernity in unusually sharp liberal turn. The 1948 Revolution



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brought a civic polity, pluralist democracy, a social-democratic state, conflict resolution through arbitration, and political stability characterized by routine transfers of power. On this basis, the political institution crystallized its own myth. According to Cruz, a foundational consensus around collective identity and civic institution framed the nation’s trajectory of peaceable development since 1948 (Cruz 2005). Out of experiences of violent social conflict and agonistic ideological contest, a shared objective emerged. The nation’s prosperity could only be secured through stable and legitimate government (without an army) which, in turn, would immunize Costa Rica against regional tendencies to fragmentation and its own authoritarian past. A policy of neutrality would help sustain Costa Rica’s decoupled position in the region’s conflicts (Kendrick 1988). If all the elements were in place, then economic development would result. This did bring about a significant rupture in the polity, ending caudillo rule but also creating a polyarchic political center balanced on a contest of political forces. With conservative support, the 1948 revolution brought liberalism and polyarchy, undoing the remains of oligarchic government. The new order’s “normative scheming allowed rival elites to impose and depose rulers while subjecting them to the central injunction of national preservation and development” (Cruz 2005, 111). A lot is promised in this. In the end, Costa Rica’s divergent experience of modernity could not completely match its own potent myth of exceptionalism. For instance, its pattern of incorporation into capitalism accorded with modern oligarchy, evident elsewhere in the isthmus. Furthermore, numerous breaches of its policy of neutrality since 1948 suggest that it is applied only selectively and on key issues was skewed by the US priorities (Kendrick 1988, 245–46, 257–58). From the latter, Costa Rica also receives a large volume of aid, underwriting and sustaining its developmental pattern. Nevertheless, its imaginary still holds, setting it apart from much of the region. In Central America, therefore, Liberal and Conservative forces competed within a larger configuration of structurally and ideologically limited liberalism. In US Republic, liberalism and conservativism were operative in an environment in which the contest for power was indefinitely open. This was the US position relative to Latin and Central America. However, American liberalism and conservativism also diverged from conventional European interpretations and interacted with one another in different ways (Eisenstadt 2002, 57–58; Wagner 2008). There are two traits of US liberalism that set it apart from European counterparts. The first is the logic of uneven but definitive inclusion at the heart of republican liberty (Taylor 2004, 148–53). From liberty, other political goods could be inferred (freedom, equality of opportunity, individualism etc.), expressed, and debated. The political imaginary supplied a conceptual range elastic enough to accommodate a positive and

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negative version of liberty to inform these political goods. As parties formed, the ground was laid for fierce competition between Federalists and Whigs, Democrats and Republicans in the symbolic theater of state power. While American liberals borrowed heavily from the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australasia (Hopkins 2018, 250), they also had original antecedents in Protestant and civic republican thought. Observing a diversification and expansion of the political community, liberals spoke a language of inclusion. A dark side of exclusion complemented the logic of inclusion until the interwar period. The second trait was commitment to state activism from the Depression onward also (Greenberg 2001, 56; Fraser and Gerstle 1989; Brinkley 1998). The advance of state intervention had precedents in phases of reconsideration of democratic legitimacy and the limits of state capacities. Progressivism, the Social Gospel Movement, and Populism as delimited ideologies had laid the groundwork. Indeed, much of the rhetoric of Roosevelt’s New Deal had Populist overtones. But New Deal liberalism went further in articulating legitimate governmental activism as the vehicle of a positive conception of liberty (in Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”). Moreover, the New Deal gave US politics equilibrium and a wide alliance of interest groups, ensuring largely bipartisan support for a liberal consensus up until Reagan. Above all, New Dealers claimed liberalism itself as their creed and their label (Brinkley 1998, 283). It set them in favor of a state with capacities in many domains and legitimate powers to enhance and enforce antitrust laws. All that said, there can be no denying divisions in the Democrats, which revolved around liberal endorsement of specific policies (Freeman 2012, 72–78; see also Dickter 2004), or indeed Republicans when anti-statist figures gain prominence. However, the principles enjoyed a broad consensus in wake of the economic expansion during World War II. Despite a phase of heightened class and union conflict following the war, liberalism coalesced as a stable mainstream of US politics with the Right and Left sidelined (Greenberg 2001; McGirr 2001). By the 1950s, liberal politics had secured American trust in a future of enhanced quality of life and an equitable social order. Trust in progress stretched from business interests to the leaders of growing black American organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples. This was the stage in US political history where key aspects of liberal and conservative politics intersected and garnered the broadest support. The next decade dawned with a new generation at universities that was prepared to engage in politics in a different way. Coinciding with the worldwide exhaustion of organized modernity (Mota and Wagner 2021, 76–79), new social movements challenged cultural conservatism with aesthetic critique, and political conservatism with alternative visions of the social order. Qua decade, the 1960s were liberal and Democrat (McGirr 2001, 48; Freeman 2012, 187–218). They were more liberal in the expansion of politics and



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Democrat in the continuities of the Kennedy and Johnston administrations— through collective agency women, black Americans, First Nations, gays, and the impoverished practiced liberty (Reynolds 2009, 407–39). Social movements challenged liberal interpretations of the Constitution and liberal democratic practice to incorporate the marginalized American society. Legislation changed as new acts in health insurance, welfare, civil rights, education, immigration, occupational safety, and environment were passed. Conditions changed, but only incrementally and partially (Greenberg 2001, 73–75). Some areas of Johnson’s Great Society program did not see the light of day, including urban and labor reforms. Subsequently, the change seemed too slowly for many, who oriented to radical activism from the mid-1960s onward. In the 1960s, “liberal” as an epithet acquired unambiguous progressive connotations it bore on an ongoing basis. Later benefitting from the outgrowth of liberal cultural values, the Clinton administration was able to introduce neoliberal policies into domestic policy settings, while wholly supporting free trade in the international arena. Liberalism’s logic of expansive inclusion continued, particularly in the enhancement of multiculturalism. Clinton had been weaned on the dreams of Kennedy’s politics (Brinkley 1998, 263–64), including incorporation of the excluded. But the political economy of the New Deal had already been abandoned. From the beginning, Clinton’s administration was also undermined by a New Right assault on the legacy of the 1960s, despite his biographical distance from the radical Left and association with mainstream Democrat liberalism (Lyons 1996, 181–91; Abrams 2006, 306–11). Nevertheless, his Presidency survived this and the Lewinsky scandal to bounce back in midterm elections in 1998. The Republican and religious right’s cultural assault on liberalism reached a momentary impasse ahead of Bush’s victory in the 2000 Presidential elections. Some liberals found solace in Tocqueville. Yet we would be mistaken to miss the Tocquevillean echoes in US conservatism’s positioning; such was the fertile ambivalence of the French thinker whose thought could serve different causes. In other ways, it was aspects of European liberalism that reverberated with American conservatism while, on the other side, the organic collectivism of European conservative philosophy might sit better with American liberals. What then are the specific contents of American conservatism? Contemporary conservative ideology has a first grounding in cultural critique of the loss of moral compass and intellectual capacity associated with countercultural values and romantic Third Worldism.6 The second grounding for conservatism is social and political critique of the conformity and homogenization of societal and geographical diversity brought about by the increasing institutional power of the New Deal regime. Elements of classical liberalism come to life in American conservatism. Seeing the state as a

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generator of attributes across both sets of critique, the American species of contemporary Republican conservativism assumes a conspicuous mistrust of government, a disposition normally reserved for liberalism (Lipset 1989, 35). Conservativism took shape from the 1960s onward. Conservatism has been divisive in culture when it came to progress and neoliberal in political economy. Conservative in values and deeply Christian in disposition, a new Republican Right (“New Conservatives”) accumulated new force during the Cold War. More visible in the 1980s under the epithet of “the New Right,” ultraconservative networks in fact had coalesced from tiny cults in the 1950s into a low-profile suburbanized current undergoing a refinement of creed (Brinkley 1998, 285–92; Dunn and Woodard 2003; Abrams 2006, 279–82). Evangelical traditions originally aligned with liberalism underwent “a great reversal” by knitting together theological and political conservativism (McKenna 2007, 284–90). In Southern California, Texas, and Arizona, the doctrine of ultralight government intervention coupled with Christian Fundamentalism in communities revolving around high-tech and defense industries (McGirr 2001, 44–51; McKenna 2007, 304–5; Dunn and Woodard 2003, 8–9). They reacted aggressively to the 1960s subcultures and politics that they perceived as impious, culturally iconoclastic, and subversive. Transformation was the stated intention of the New Left, but all Republican conservatives saw was an attack on the imagined unity of the nation. As the signified collective identity incorporated more diversity in the political community and public sphere, liberty increasingly became the provenance of conservatives. Furthermore, for those on the Right, the constituted nation had contents. Economic and cultural conservatism closely paired traditionalist family values and the Christiansacred, on one hand, while promoting small government and the freedom of the figurative entrepreneur, on the other. Thinking about the periodized 1960s as a political divide, as well as a generational, gender, and race divide, is important in balancing the historiography of the decade’s legacy to write in the surge of conservativism overlooked for some years after events (Lyons 1996; Klatch 1999). Like Trump in this century, this mostly suburban movement could throw up peripheral or “outsider” Republicans. For example, Arizona propelled Barry Goldwater to Republican candidacy, while California made Reagan as governor and then president (Freeman 2012, 195–99, 367–89; Klatch 1999, 82–83). The surge in Right-conservative politics cohered a movement across Western, Southern, and Southwestern states. The turn to Reagan was a turn to neoliberal economics and arch conservative values. In his wake, conservative critics steadily became shriller in the opposition they expressed to the perceived slide in conditions of urban life at home and America’s standing abroad, coupled with vigorous objection to the retreat from the Christiansacred instituted deep in the mythic nation. At its most successful, New Right



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conservativism merged anticommunist nationalism, state-based politics, and visceral suburban communitarianism (Dunn and Woodard 2003, 22–61). Open hostility toward cultural liberalism only seemed to heighten the sense of distance between the Democrats and the Republicans in the 1990s. Comparing US liberalism and Canadian Toryism is one way to approach Canada’s ideologies. Like Eisenstadt (Eisenstadt 2002, 48–49), Lipset finds a muted Axial tension with most Canadian political traditions emphasizing pragmatic political responses to social problems (Lipset 1989, 52–56). If we accept this, then it is an easy step to the conclusion that Canada derives from its political imaginary a democratic center, in which a smooth transfer of power can occur. Problem-solving within the constitutional equilibrium of Westminster institutions kept the center of power open and, in this case, made negotiation the mode of politics. A comparable understanding is expressed by Harold Innis, who sees in Liberal and conservative values a creative balance for Canadian civilization, making negotiation the norm of politics (Francis 2002). An underlying commitment to public welfare and state intervention ensured that politicians pragmatically problem-solved key issues up to the 1990s. Constituted as a binational Confederation, Canada developed a two-party system recognizable in other Commonwealth democracies which, after World War I morphed into a multiparty system (Drummond 1982, 183–88). The Liberal Party’s support has historically coalesced in the Atlantic provinces, while the Conservative/Progressive Conservative Party has held large majorities in central and western provinces up to World War I. Provincial politics tended to generate third parties: the social-democratic New Democratic Party and the Social Credit Party, the latter dominating government in British Columbia for two decades, as well as a slew of provincial parties and fervently provincial Liberal and Progressive Conservative branches (Berdahl and Gibbins 2014, 11–12, 25). Over the course of the postwar period, the major political parties have ideologically lent toward liberalism at the Federal level. Even the New Democratic Party more closely aligned itself with liberal policies, despite origins in the agrarian socialist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). To be quite clear, Canada’s social democracy departed sharply from the language of socialism and a program in which socialism was the articulated objective, in contrast to European social democracy and British and Australasian labor parties. The contest of two parties, punctuated by the periodic successes of third parties at the provincial level, encourages pragmatism in Canada’s main ideologies in two areas. First, faced with the impulses of immigration, Canadians shifted from supporting an assimilationist position on cultural practices to multicultural nationalism. Immigration transformed the cultures of both Anglophone and Quebecker Canada through innumerable changes over time.

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Minority rights became a reference to immigrant rights as well for French, First Nations, and Métis Canadians. This had implications for Canada’s fragile sense of nationhood and put strain on Quebec’s integrationist policy. Second, the ideological makeup of the two parties at the Federal level can often be at variance with their provincial counterparts, making it difficult to maintain political coherence (Smiley 1987, 115–16; Lipset 1989, 194–96). The location of their main constituencies also influenced this pattern. The Conservative/Progressive Conservative, Social Credit, and New Democratic parties drew on rural constituencies, while Liberals drew their support from urban voters (until the Mulroney administration). In the west of the 1970s, parties fought for the loyalty of provinces in the region, often against palpable discontent (Berdahl and Gibbins 2014, 1–2). The fights called for policy differentiation from their federal parties at times. Before World War II, differentiation was of a more ideological nature, with early Progressive and Socialist Parties also gaining footholds across the prairies and in the West. In the postwar era, ideological contents have not defined regional division in the same way. As such, pragmatism has remained the abiding mode of politics, particularly in constitutional debates. Even in the most contentious public issues around which there has been democratic conflict (NAFTA, Quebec, environment, First Nations), the eventual default has been pragmatic negotiation. Under such circumstances, the contest of core doctrinal ideas can be sacrificed to political proceduralism. When this occurs, doctrinal differences become mute or “weak,” giving politics the appearance of short-term consensus, which may turn into a long-term “false” consensus. If we look back to Lefort’s notion of political imaginary, however, the result of pragmatic agreement in politics like this still leaves the seat of governmental authority open to democratic determination. In other words, it is to be periodically vacated and occupied by newcomers, and therefore always contestable. Canada’s political imaginary symbolic retains this fundamental democratic quality. NORTHERN SOCIALISM The political imaginary instituting democracy in the United States through the republican settlement in the Constitution could not a priori preclude any ideological development, including that of socialism. The imaginary institution of the ideological landscape did compose ideologies differently to Europe and the rest of the Americas. I would put the bold argument forward, however, that a contingent path to viable socialist movements did exist for a time and that this has not assumed the weight in debates on northern



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socialism it could have. After prosecuting this argument on the United States, we shall look also at Canada’s restrained social democracy. Before moving to this argument, let us identify the contrary view. In response to Sombart’s historic question as to why there is no socialism in the United States, many scholars have accepted the thesis of American exceptionalism. Eisenstadt’s more nuanced civilizational response deserves critical consideration (Eisenstadt 2002, 56–57). The civilizational premises of state formation diminished the appeal of universalistic socialism while providing institutional paths for the incorporation of protest. Social movements with strong utopian horizons and religiopolitical orientations flourished. But transformational socialism could not find fertile ground. There can be little doubt that class distinctions have not translated into ideological preferences for socialism in the manner that they did in Europe. Class seems less relevant, while race and ethnicity appear more relevant due to the history of slavery and immigration. However, Eisenstadt’s overview does not take account of the element of contingency in the political institution and other possible paths in the political order. The clearest may be the phase of industrialization and urbanization in which collective agency in the labor and social movements posited contingent although ultimately unrealized paths in which socialist ideology may have proven more robust and enduring. I address those and treat the 1960s New Left as a second phase. In both phases, the radical Left was committed to the end of the institutions of class, gender, and race power, and so struck an iconoclastic posture toward the institutions of the polity. Unable to sustain national movements with major impact, its ideologies all showed “something of a moral stance, mercurial and sporadic, suspicious of power, and distrustful of politics” (Diggins and Blum 1973, 16; Buhle 1987, 59–70). The main results were radical humanisms were unable to produce rupture in the liberal consensus of twentieth century. Socialism had opportunities to grow during the historical juncture of mass immigration identified in chapter 2. Immigrants entered an industrializing economy, which was laying the ground for a consociated working class potentially receptive to social-democratic ideas. Migrant leftists, bearers of socialist and anarchist ideas, stoked the embers of radicalism by providing the oxygen of fresh international political know-how to a context of the Haymarket conflict, the rise of unions, and then Socialist Party (Buhle 1987, 20–56). Socialism depended on immigrant interpretations to variations on patriotism (Beckert 2001, 285). The major cities harbored immigrant communities and unions growing in confidence as the years passed. Yet the country was an abundant source of Progressive and Populist politics as much as the city. The frenetic activities and strikes of the syndicalist International Workers of the World (IWW)—some urban, some rural—organized neglected workforces. Widely read tracts on socialism from American writers such

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as Edward Bellamy referenced familiar environments. All influenced the Socialist Party (Buhle 1987, 70–71; Greenberg 2001, 58–62; Reynolds 2009, 261–66). The Socialist Party emerged with broad appeal across an urban and rural working class, farmers, and among early feminists under Eugene Debs (Buhle 1987, 79–120). While not all socialists joined, the party popularized socialist ideas for rural, urban, and immigrant audiences by effectively communicating moral anticapitalist values to millions of readers of its publications. Holding hundreds of positions in city governments, the party had a defined base. National electoral highlights include Debs’s 6 percent win as Presidential candidate in 1912 (and then almost a million votes in 1920), and 17 percent of the vote gained by Robert LaFollette (with Socialist Party and AFL backing) in 1924 and nearly a million votes again in 1934 (Lipset 1989, 202; Diggins and Blum 1973, 60, 121). Many expressed a belief that a labor party would emerge as a result. In retrospect, the prewar era was the party’s peak, however, and it was unreached again by an organized movement with socialist ideas or indeed by any third-party force. After the Socialist Party and the IWW, conditions for socialism proved more propitious. Marxist parties gained ground, especially the two major ones: the Communist Party USA and the Socialist Workers Party.7 With the onset of the Cold War and, for the Communist Party (USA), faithful alignment with Comintern twists and turns left both isolated until the 1960s. Building on the pre-existing socialist and Marxist Left, the New Left renewed twentieth-century radicalism (Brinkley 1998, 223–36). Unlike the era in which Debs’s Socialist Party could command hegemony over progressive politics, there were a variety of organizational centers and none representing a cohered socialist ideology as such. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panthers were organizational variations on Marxism, which had a significant impact and yet were not singularly or expressly socialist as such. The SDS resembled a “gathered church\” of generational rebels (McKenna 2007, 295–303; see also Lyons 1996, 63–64; Klatch 1999). As it expanded, it became broader and more representative. Yet it never lost its generational quality or cultural iconoclasm. The Panthers used the language of revolution and yet were precluded from broad alliance politics by their proclaimed separatism. Otherwise, the 1960s largely belonged to the social movements often led by the New Left (Lyons 1996). The civil rights movement was eruptive and forceful across the 1950s and 1960s. The antinuclear and antiwar movement too was continuously active in both decades, expanding its numbers and outreach around the war in Vietnam. The women’s movement erupted and gained ground quickly, entrenching a position its activists have sought to extend. In a countertrend, the distance between unions and the activist base of students inhibited further growth. The mutual isolation of the New Left and the Democrats



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was plain for all to see and made more obvious by the palaver at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The weakness of a socialism and indeed social democracy should be put into perspective, given this history. To be sure, no large force of workingclass party or movement ever gained the traction in the United States as it did in Europe. Yet socialist and other radical ideologies have had periods of localized growth and impact, especially when resonating with the deeply moral institution of the political and when the collective agency of movements has connected with heightened social conflict. Moreover, this indicates that the axes of political division, although varied and original, still evoke profound inequalities. Canada’s “pattern of elitist and rather ultramontane shaping of political order in Quebec . . . [and] pattern of elitist but responsible representative government in English Canada” left room for third parties and class consciousness (Eisenstadt 2002, 56). Connected with US unions and socialist organizations, the Socialist Party of Canada, other regional socialist and labor parties, from 1921, the Communist Party, and later Trotskyist networks expanded from the 1890s through to the Depression. Western Canada was the strongest region for socialist organizing and cross-border networks with like-minded working-class organizations in the United States, especially British Colombia and Saskatchewan. The Socialist and Communist parties were less factional and divided than their US counterparts. Furthermore, they were regional and local. Their influence faded with the chill of the Cold War in the 1950s. Social democracy was another matter. Despite some historical success, radical socialism could not find a voice within the New Democratic Party as an expression of working-class consciousness (Eisenstadt 2002, 57). Early in the twentieth century, Canada’s trade union movement harbored a fin de siècle belief in the goal of forming a social-democratic or labor party and supported the general aims of social democracy (Lipset 1989, 66–70; Grabb and Curtis 2005, 18–20). The CCF became the closest equivalent to this force (Lipset 1989, 166–70). In the second half of the twentieth century, the social-democratic Parti Québécois challenged the major parties, seizing government in Quebec in 1976 on the backing of campaigns around French language and heritage (Smiley 1987, 85–86, 146–52). Overall, the force and impact of the CCF, New Democratic Party, and Parti Québécois lasted longer and was more significant than any Left organization in the United States due to its commonality with Tory collectivism and communitarianism, thereby speaking a politics that resonated with Canada’s political and imaginaries. In the United States, only New Deal liberalism brought collective resourcing on a scale and of a kind comparable to other new world societies, yet it lacked a Tory collectivist and communitarian spirit of capitalism to relate this to.

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Neither the United States nor Canada had exhibited the doctrinal terms of socialism in the mainstream by the end of the millennium. SOCIALISM OF THE SOUTH Like the Northern socialist movements, there was nothing in the political or ideological imaginaries that a priori precluded projects of socialism from the ideological landscapes of Southern societies. The ideological imaginary laid the symbolic and practical terrain on which socialism would vie with other ideologies in Southern societies which interacted with the rest of the hemisphere and much of Atlantic Europe. Once again, let us look critically to Eisenstadt to bring out key aspects of the political institution in Southern societies. Eisenstadt perceives a tension between political hierarchy and an egalitarian public sphere as the source of socialism’s appeal in Latin America (Eisenstadt 2002, 57). He suggests a strong contrast with North America which presented little succor for socialist visions of the social order. This calls for variation in one respect and some relativization in another. The variation is this: the political institution—that is, the instituted imaginary—generated both the hierarchy and the public sphere(s) Eisenstadt describes as the source of this tension. As such, the terrain on which ideologies contend is circumscribed by the ground created social-historically, including the institution of formally liberal constitutions, official parties, and a limited division of powers. The seat of power itself, however, was easily monopolized by dynastic caudillo families and corporatist networks and too readily seized for indefinite periods by the military forces or controlled by them in a para-state. Right-wing authoritarianism found more legitimacy in the anticommunist atmosphere of the Cold War for dictatorships such as Somoza’s, Trujillo’s, and Pinochet’s. At a national level, anticommunism in the 1950s and early 1960s restricted the political space for social democracy as well as Marxism. Consequently, the periodic vacation of the seat of government was absent or suspended during major phases of authoritarian rule in the South. If the tension needs this variation, relativization comes around Eisenstadt’s assessment of the strengths of Northern and Southern socialist movements. As suggested earlier, the Umited States and Canada had contingent potential for further development of socialist doctrine and organizations. Moreover, identifying the lasting contributions of socialist ideology on countries to the United States’s south is less straightforward than Eisenstadt implies. Social-democracy and Marxism appear in different guises and are sometimes blended with liberalism, progressive Catholicism, and populism. No two countries are alike in their political composition and historical experience of



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democracy and authoritarianism. Thus, socialist doctrines assume different ideological positions in different countries. Through the impact on governments and in revolutions, the expansion of parties, and creative phases of unorthodox rethinking, socialism grounds relevance. To take this point further, let us look at the fortunes of Marxist and socialdemocratic interpretations. When it comes to Marxism, a first observation is that it was an important ideological source in all major revolutions of the twentieth century (Mexico, Bolivia, Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada) and the Colombian protracted civil war with the FARC army. Marxism revived in the worldwide wave of new leftism in the late 1960s, finding a sharp focal point in 1968. Later insurgencies led by the Salvadoran FMLN and Zapatistas in El Salvador and Chiapas were heavily influence by Marxism.8 Yet, of all revolutions and rebellions, only Cuba is Leninist in any comprehensive sense. Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, the other obvious comparison, changed course in the twenty-first century following the loss of government in the 1990s from revolutionary Marxism to a more conventional socialdemocratic alignment. Chile’s attempt at a parliamentary road to socialism under Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular government—also deserving comment here—is another sign of conjunctural momentum of Marxism in the early 1970s. This experiment in alternative socialist developmentalism was quite short-lived for reasons that cannot be explored in depth here. Suffice to say, in its last twelve months, Allende’s coalition suffered from the global economic downturn, amplified political violence, vanishing prospects for compromise, and a growing right-wing backlash. Allende’s government ended in military subversion, with covert US support, leading Chile into years of state terror, recrimination, and repression. The parliamentary road Chile tried was also taken by Jamaica’s Peoples’ National Party (PNP). The PNP shifted from populism in its first term of government (1972–1974) to socialist developmentalism in its second term (Rose 2002, 219–78) Like Guyana (yet without recourse to authoritarian measures) and Grenada later in the decade (yet without a revolution), Jamaica experimented with socialist developmental regime institutions at this juncture (Rose 2002). All four countries had links to Cuba and, as we are considering Marxism to the United States’s South, some comments on Cuba are called for. The survival of the Cuban Revolution appears an anomaly in the context of world events. However, debates on the causes and Cuba’s “exceptionalism” have been contentious, failing to produce a clear consensus (Kapcia 2008).9 A more reflective post-Cold War picture should incorporate factors overlooked or underplayed in the past scholarship of the regime. Valid explanation would seem to best hang on the ability to adequately account for Cuban improvisation, its relatively independent foreign policy, and its willingness to give aid and medical support beyond necessity and proportionally beyond the

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aid commitments of other countries. In the background is its peculiar socialhistorical interconnection with the United States, which should be a central factor in any viable explanation of the country’s trajectory. We can profile the impact of social-democracy and Marxism in parties as well. Social democracy produced major parties in Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Uruguay, and Puerto Rico. Some had the name “socialist”; others did not. Many had populist phases or overlapped with populism. For instance, Argentina’s social democracy had two phases divided by its relationship to Peronism (Lupu and Stokes 2009). Although significant public and welfare sectors were built in the Southern Cone and Brazil, no regional model emerged to parallel Scandinavian universalist social democracies. On the Marxist side, one observation is that pro-Soviet, pro-China communist parties in Latin America did not achieve broad support, aside from a phase at the end of World War II, even though leftism has been diversely more widespread. Some communist parties formed broader blocs of labor federations (Mexico before World War II, Venezuela, Brazil) and joined coalition governments (Chile, Costa Rica in the late 1940s, Ecuador in the 1980s and 1990s, and Peru in the 1930s). These aside, numerous Marxist organizations, groupings, and guerilla units (some Castroist or Trotskyist; others homegrown) had some weight on the Left in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s and 1970s. Across the Left, parties institutionalized socialist perspectives and organizational cadre. Marxism has been at its most inventive and multidimensional when crossfertilized with indigenous, Western Marxist and liberationist influences.10 In particular, Liberation Theology localized elements of Marxism just as extensively as it did Christianity (Ireland 1991; Ottmann 2002). However, following Vatican II, currents of Liberation Theology in Brazil, most of Central America, and to a lesser extent Peru, Chile, Argentina, Haiti, Colombia, and Mexico, also unveiled a spiritual horizon for Marxism commensurate with the Western Marxism of Gramsci, Goldmann, Bloch, and Lukacs. Founders of Liberationism, Leonardo Boff, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Juan Segundo also cross-referenced Latin America’s Marxist thought. As a tradition this has been animated by Protestant inputs (Ireland 1991), the Sandinista revolution, the FMLN, the Zapatistas, and maintenance of base communities in Amazonian Ecuador and Bolivia. Most left-wing movements embraced the opportunities presented by the end of dictatorships to keep centers of power open, provisional, and therefore democratic. The Workers Party (PT) warrants more comment. It emerged as a social-democratic movement in alliance form in the 1980s. In Brazil, democratic resurgence included, first, a broad coalition of organizations, many of which contributed to the PT combining the large Movement of Rural



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Landless Workers (MST) with unions, small democratic parties, and urban movements and, second, concurrent democratic upsurges elsewhere in the continent, not least of which was Argentina’s to its south. The exceptional element was the rise of the PT in the Northeast and out of Sao Paolo as a socialist organization in its first two decades. Those developments fed into the release of democratic energies and depended on the return of collective agency to the political institution. The coalescence of a political imaginary with an inclusive dynamic was a monumental and vulnerable achievement (Mota and Wagner 2021, 119). Whatever the distinctions, and they are substantial, the constellations of parties and movements at the end of century did not foreshadow the spread of New Left governments that would follow (this I covered in chapter 1). POPULISM In populism, there is a condensation of political power-concentrating authority in figures of leader, party, and movement. Political imaginaries frame the symbolic dimension of power as an especially energetic component of the political, giving concrete form to populist utilization of corporatist networks, metropolitan spaces, revolutionary traditions, and representations of nation and movement. Political and ideological imaginaries creating the ground for populisms provide for public expression of populist worldviews, while also circumscribing the form and circumstances in which tensions can become apparent and in which critique is permitted. In chapter 1, I suggest that populism is a context-bound development in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century. How then to define it? Many political scientists and historians define Latin American populism as a style of leadership (Conniff 2012). On this view, populists harness nationalism to enhance their prospects of election and re-election. They are distinguished from authoritarian opponents and competitors by their dependence on electorally verified popular support, using their caudillo position to oblige their parties to offer support. Mobilization matters more than programmatic ideology in this perspective. Empirically, the definition fits many aspects of populisms in the region (Dussel 2012; Torre 2013). However, we can gain theoretical depth and historicized understanding through Touraine’s conception of populism as national-popular regimes (Touraine 1994; Árnason 2018, 197). Touraine’s political sociology singles out the integration of states, social movements, and unions into the political systems of several nations in more or less the same period of world history (Touraine 1994).11 He depicts states with such figurations as “national-popular regimes” to emphasize their historical specificity. One might add that the position of populist states in the

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international arena encouraged the national-popular closure of state-bounded economies at the time. Additional elements of ideological development consonant with Touraine’s conception could be incorporated: the elevation of the social question was central in many instances, and the crystallization of mass political parties as a form of collective mobilization was novel (Larraín 2000, 92–113). All these were context-bound features of regimes of this conjuncture. The concept has the added advantage of delimiting the notion of populism as a distinct strand of regime present in many cases. As such, Latin America appears as a “case where the term ‘populism’ had a reasonable well-defined content” (Árnason 2018, 197). National-popular regimes emerged in Mexico under Cardenas in the 1930s, Venezuela under Acción Democrática in the 1940s and 1960s, Argentina in Peron’s era, Peru with the influential Popular Revolutionary Alliance of the America’s (APRA) under Haya de la Torre, Bolivia during the MNR years of the 1950s, Brazil during Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo, and, I would add, Puerto Rico under the Popular Democratic Party.12 Some countries did not produce populist movements, maintaining instead a dominant Liberal-Conservative axis (Colombia and Costa Rica). Argentinian Peronism, a populism par excellence, and Brazil illustrate these general points about the imaginary, ideological, and institutional aspects of populism. The first example is Peron’s Argentina.13 Selectively mobilizing Castoriadis, Domingues explores Peronism’s political imaginary (Domingues 2016). As an imaginary, Peronism instituted a conspicuous nation building project that simultaneously resubstantialized power and symbolically reconstructed the cultural order. Domingues identified three aspects of Peronist national populism. First, it foregrounded images of justice and plebianism (Domingues 2016, 23–24; see also Portantiero 1989, 20–22). Fusing Catholic and Aristotlean notions of justice, the Peronist leadership produced justicialismo and the promise of a “new Argentina” (see Senkman 1998, 134–35). Its ideals were the “organized community” of unions, manufacturers, and government, and the “compromise state,” which sought to “transfuse particularist class or corporatist loyalities into broader national allegiance, to balance the economic sphere of the state against private enterprise” (Rock 1987, 264). Second, Peronism elevated sacrifice by embracing Catholicism and then taking over its symbols. Sacrifice produced welfare for the unprivileged multitude. Third, through a radicalization of the redemptive caudillo image of Juan Peron, Peronism promoted a heroic nationalist discourse that identified Peron with the core virtues of the nation (Olson 2016, 22). Eva Peron too embodied the nation, but in a different way. She embodied the nation as a figure of justice and an icon of the multitude. In this discourse, oligarchic elites were outsiders to the plebian nation. They were a conflictual other in the constant



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clashes between Peronist forces (including the army) and the establishment. Where immigrants had been the other, they were now internalized into the political community and incorporated into civil society (Senkman 1998). In this way, one can say that Peronism built up a sustained movement more than a party purposed to institutionalize democracy (McGuire 1997). The fate of Peronism as mass movement and party after Peron was balanced on a tension between democracy and the undertow of populism. On the edge of that tension, Peronism morphed into routinized party structures (McGuire 1997, 92–3, 190), with a characteristically populist multiclass supporter base (Lupu and Stokes 2009). In delineating the imaginary of Peronism in this manner, Domingues presents a whole figuration. In terms of its components, we can include the ISI model, corporatist integration, and tendencies to social homogeneity (Svampa 2005, 21–23). Latin America featured several comparable cases that developed protectionist regimes as a political and cultural affirmation of projects of nation building. Brazil features here as a further example. Brazilian populism had important elements in its prehistory. In adjusting to a strong culture of state, Brazil’s political traditions formed three overlapping segments that lasted from the old republic to Vargas and beyond: those working-class institutions and parties in existence, the struggles of its middle class for a public sphere, and indigenous and peasant movements. In the old republic, patrimonialism had bound all three to a nexus of relations with powerful figures from the southern states, and often from the major parties (Bethell 2008, 8–11). By the 1930s, this oligarchic arrangement could no longer hold itself together. Patrimonial lines of coordination combined into a national-popular coalition behind Vargas. Balancing sectoral interests, regional claims, and factions among the officer corps and within the army alongside class-based organizations, Vargas’s government exercised a populist autonomy, enabling the regime to act independently of the ruling class, often facing opposition from Paulista industrialists when it came to social legislation and education reform (Weinstein 1990). At the same time, industrialists of the metropolis were not shunned. They were leading voices of the Brazilian capital, which sat mostly outside of the regime. Beyond this Paulistisa core, Brazilian industry was disorganized and sectoral. Vargas’s resemblance with other populists was strongest in the centralization of national-popular welfarism. Unsurprisingly, this brought in workingclass allies. Union support for Vargas’s welfare initiatives reduced the deficit of legitimacy considerably (see Mota and Wagner 2021, 52–53). Caught in between, the precarious middle class found itself in a condition of profound uncertainty and was not able to find a vehicle of political participation and expression that could vie with state ideology (Owensby 1999; see also Topik 1978). Politically the middle class came to accept “the assurance of progress

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with social peace–unambiguous, unpolitical modernization” (Owensby 1999, 242). This occurred despite its absence from the national-popular regime. For the middle class, greater access to centers of decision-making would have to wait until Vargas was thrust from power, having lost the confidence of the military and the United States.14 The position of national-popular regimes as exceptionally independent institutional actors was as distinct as it was impermanent. As regimes, national-popular movements could not survive the world events that many contemporaries thought that they were remote from. Larraín’s observation that states proved “incapable of channeling and absorbing political turmoil within a framework of stability,” I take as a comment on the fragility of the political imaginary (Larraín 2000, 23). The absence of an unmonopolized institutional theater for the performance of conflict beyond the sphere of seizure by oligarchic factions left Latin American statehood vulnerable to international economic downturns and both populist and authoritarian tendencies. National populism subsided institutionally, even where its parties, networks, and ideologies endured. CONCLUSION I began this chapter expounding concepts of political, ideological, and nationalist imaginaries that frame the horizons of nation state formation, forms of nationalism, and the instantiation of ideological varieties qua political doctrines. From there, I plot the outlines of liberalism, conservatism, and socialism in the United States, Canada, Central America, Latin America, and some Caribbean islands. I find that liberalism and conservatism form as approximate opposites of their ideological counterparts in Europe. With Eisenstadt and Lipset, I find that the opposition is at its most pronounced in the United States, where liberalism is associated with state activism and conservatism (incorporating the Republicans), a monetarist reflex and neoliberal outlook. While Canada more closely resembles European experiences, it does not carry forward socialist traditions important to European social-democracy and laborism into its contemporary party formations. Historical experiences of authoritarian and populist usurpation of democracy in Latin and Central America indicate the complex institution of the political confronting liberals, conservatives, and social democrats. Each of these traditions is, of course, prone to authoritarian tendencies when the democracy is weak, especially where liberalism equates with caudillo rule (Central America before World War II), conservatism when it meshes with anticommunism (Chile), and social-democratic forces where they have engaged populist parties (Venezuela in the 1970s).



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The record that Lefort’s image of democracy has in the Americas is mixed. Aside from the United States and Canada, Costa Rica, Chile, and some states of the Commonwealth Caribbean can lay claim to unbroken traditions of multiparty rule. Otherwise, prior to the mid-1980s, competitive party systems struggled to survive military seizures of the seat of power. Even in countries with long democratic traditions remain permanently in a fragile state of jeopardy as Chile from 1973 shows. The patterns of institution of the political are never solely endogenous, however. Geopolitical contexts often inform, and sometimes overdetermine, political developments. When it comes to much of the Americas, the hemispheric weight of the United States cannot be ignored. The next chapter examines the creation of American regional power consubstantial with its continental nation state formation.

NOTES 1. See Thompson (1990, 60–67), for five modes of ideology. 2. According to Armitage, the Declaration was not merely the first such act in history; it was the invention of the instrument and the semantics of declaration as a means through which modern statehood crystallizes for newfound states (Armitage 2007). 3. As a provocation, Plot poses the question, “Can we still unambiguously claim that, in America, no social group is consubstantial with power?” as a stage in following the method of interrogation developed by Lefort and Merleau-Ponty to debate the most profound questions of political philosophy (Plot 2012, 52). His responses (from a later work) are rehearsed in chapter 1 of the current work. 4. Aside from Chile, Conservative Christian Democratic parties were influential in Ecuador and Venezuela (unlike Mexico’s opposition PAN). 5. On factional and party rivalry behind the long formation and rightward drift of the PRI, see Knight (1990, 50–79). 6. See Pike for a sympathetic reading (1992, 310–28). 7. The CPUSA had roots in the Socialist Party and SWP in the Communist Party (before the crystallization of Trotskyism and the Fourth International). Both enjoyed spurts of growth during the 1930s. Both remained small with membership in the thousands, especially the SWP. Yet both had impact beyond their numbers, particularly in unions and among student militants. On the Communist Party, see Diggins and Blum (1973, 121–29). On both, see Buhle (1987, 122–54). 8. Liberation Theology was a partnering ideology in both cases also. 9. Historiographic revision of Cuban relationship with the United States is interesting in this regard. Much of the scholarship about Cuba before 1959 has been dominated by two polarized nationalist historiographies (Hopkins 2018, 559–88; Kapcia 2008). On one hand, North American histories pilloried Cuban recalcitrance in the face of the US benevolence in its relations with island. On the other hand, revolutionary historiography has equally denounced the United States for Cuba’s

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retrograde socioeconomic conditions and developmental backwardness. If competing nationalisms have overdetermined interpretation of pre-revolution politics, then recent historical scholarship has done much to restore a wide-ranging understanding of early republican Cuba. José Martí’s contribution to Cuban nationalism is now dispassionately evaluated for its critique of the US record in domestic and foreign affairs. For an example of this, see Pérez (2003, 77–81) and on Cuban nationalism more generally (Pérez 2003, 170–201). 10. From within Peru’s Communist Party, José Mariátegui was one of the most innovative ideological advocates for a blend of civilizational, religious, and indigenist Marxist worldviews with Marxism. 11. Compare with Domingues who critiques Touraine’s work for its light conception of class (Domingues 2008, 83–84). Instead, Domingues confers greater agency and impact on the working and popular classes in his analysis of the populist imaginary in Argentina. 12. Spektorowki contrasts Uruguay and Argentina’s experiences of collective construction of nationalism, arguing that the Argentinian figuration produced a counternationalist ideology (1998). Even so, he deems the greater risk to democracy to come from the dominant authoritarian strains of Argentinian nationalism. Molineu discusses the United States’s uncertain and problematic relationship with Bolivia (1986, 217–22). On Cardenas, see Knight (1990, 7–37), and on the Andean states, see Manrique (2000). 13. Rock admirably narrates the background to Peronism, including the Depression years; attempts by conservatives to maintain status quo (via suppression of the Radical Party); and coalescence of a new radical nationalism (Rock 1987, 216–31). See also Scorer (2016). 14. The later populist interlude of Vargas’s third phase of administration (195154) only served to underline the problem of balancing governability and democratic determination when the franchise is limited.

Part II

TRANSNATIONAL REGIONS OF THE DIVERSE AMERICAS

Chapter 5

The Undeclared Empire? US Power in the Western Hemisphere and Beyond

Prior to this chapter, the book covers metropolitan imaginaries and capitalist and political imaginaries along with their multiple manifestations. The opening chapter also addresses the problem of power, noting Castoriadis’s postMarxist distinction between institutional and ground power. In this chapter, the argument turns to the institution of “imperial” power in the United States. My purpose is to articulate a variation on the interpretation of US relationship to the hemisphere and other regions as a world-oriented power. Focusing on the imagination as much as the imaginary, I argue that the United States developed an informal imperialism of a different kind through its articulation of a monopoly Western position in the Americas, the reimagination of a hemisphere divided between “North” and “south,” and connection of this regional geopolitical hegemony with another unfolding one in Asia and the Pacific. The argument proceeds in two parts. The first part discusses two phases of the continentalization of the US nation state: westward expansion and the Civil War. Connected with the enlargement of nation state institutions, the spread of American interests and culture changed America’s relationship to the hemisphere.1 Through economic, commercial, and foreign policy engagement, and through decades of military intervention in the Caribbean and Central America, the United States sought to shape the Americas according to a revised and appended Monroe Doctrine. With a focus on Central America and the Caribbean, and to a degree Latin America, part one looks at the consequences of this outcome for the region, connecting developments in the Americas to the simultaneous acquisition of possessions in Asia and the Pacific. Not wanting to ignore varieties of imagination of the hemisphere (Kurasawa 2008), the first part of the chapter also explores traditions of Latinity and anti-Americanism. 123

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The second part of the chapter explores American nationalism in relation to the projection of regional power in the two hemispheres. I look more generally at how interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine were used as justification for frequent interventions by the “North” into the southern regions of the Americas. The projection of nationalism is my focus in looking at the interwar period. Following World War II, the global dimension of US state power became more pronounced due to the Cold War and related processes of decolonization of Europe’s empires. I discuss the multilayered conflict with the Soviet Union and its termination, looking at how both impacted on the Americas, before turning to a brief examination of the trans-Pacific relationship with Japan. In examining this relationship as part of a second zone of imperial projection, I suggest that America built an interregional “bridge” between the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific as a crucial juncture between regional hegemonies. Another aim of this chapter is therefore to add a connected region’s perspective to debates on the imaginary institution of American power. AMERICAN POWER AND THE NORTH-SOUTH DIVIDE The division in the geopolitical imagination is associated with the Monroe Doctrine and its subsequent reinterpretations. As well as stating guardianship of the hemisphere, the Monroe Doctrine invoked a civilizational juxtaposition of North and South. In its own image, the United States was the democratic success story of the new world. The imagination of a North-South divide coincided with the reduction of the new world’s promise to this singular exemplar of America (Körner, Miller, and Smith 2012). By the middle of the nineteenth century, external perceptions of the Western Hemisphere pictured expansive America as a progressive state of democratic modernity and industrial enlightenment. In sixty short years, this would change. Many Europeans and Central and Latin Americans would also come to perceive the North American state as an emergent power among Western empires. These were remarkable years of an international power in the making, which many call an empire.2 Whether the rise of an “exceptional” America amounts to the formation of an empire of military and capitalist power predominant in the twentieth century or not is, of course, a question of considerable debate. Thinking retrospectively, how should we characterize this atypical empire? When it comes to the United States, it is hard to know which labels to apply. This is as vexing a matter for scholars on both sides of the Atlantic as it is for politicians in Washington and NATO; hence, the library stacks of books on the subject, especially since 9/11. “Hegemony” is a widely used descriptor. When used to connote a universal or global power,



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however, this alternative to “empire” ends up occluding the enduring civilizational (and often contestatory) forces of the Soviet Union and China in the postwar period, as well as recurring transatlantic tensions with Europe. None of those macroregional constellations was ever under generalized informal US control. Moreover, a properly historical view of American power must situate the United States as something between a delimited empire and “an aspiring hegemon” in the Americas and the Pacific, due to the short-lived experimentation with colonies and the nuanced connotations of empire and anti-imperialism marking its political and intellectual discourses (Hopkins 2018, 32; see also Ninkovich 2001). While my task is not to rehearse the long-lasting debate about labels, let us consider concepts articulated by scholars of civilizations so we might be better able to flesh the dimensions of power operative in intercivilizational engagement. Three stand out. Fernández-Armesto boldly tries “imperial republic” (Fernández-Armesto 2014, 76–81; Fernández-Armesto 2003, 132–40). He presents a cogent case, noting that possession of colonies has never been the sustained central thrust of US foreign policy. Yet the tension between the national republic and US imperialist ambitions underscored by his nomenclature remains in question. Katzenstein characterizes the American imperium by what it does as much as what it is. America vertically integrates interactive world regions and in doing so is altered and constrained as a world power by the very vertical links it produces (Katzenstein 2005, 1–2). Transnational linkage gives the United States fluidity as a kind of civilizational power. The United States is thus unique in the modern world as the only successful regional hegemon because of these linkages to regional orders (Katzenstein 2005, 8). The relative success of hegemony in the Pacific and the Western Hemisphere may be a key to the factor Ninkovich singles out: how Americans understand the larger meaning of imperialism as “civilization, identity . . . civilizing mission, and great power cooperation” (Ninkovich 2001, 2).3 Ninkovich’s conceptual frame allows a more elastic use of the idea of imperialism to go beyond the formal declaration of occupied territories and formal colonies and examine informal as well as formal instances of state agency. The advancement of regional power comes into focus in his analysis. The “civilizing mission” he refers to is the underlying sense of entitlement guiding American action in the international arena, specifically the South and the Pacific (Ninkovich 2001, 93). Thinking on these three civilizational perspectives, along with Hopkins’s consideration of the literature in international relations and history on US imperialism,4 I arrive at the following characterization. To me, US imperialism has created informal power in regional hegemonies through interregional connections, accompanied by an anticolonial stance against Europe’s empires. Overseas territories, which challenge and, in some cases, expand

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America’s political community, extended American culture beyond regional hegemonies it made in the Western Hemisphere. As a basic definition, informal power entails the expansion of capital, entrepreneurial and managerial cultures, diplomatic and political cadre, military and naval bases, and cultural and educational programs and institutions throughout countries in which US authority has some sway. Note that the informal power exists in tension with the political imaginary of democracy described in chapter 4, which promotes the impulse to greater inclusion in the political community. The tension was enlivened by the acquisition of the former colonies of the Spanish Empire and the abiding relationship of their inhabitants to the US polity. Despite this tension with the democratic imaginary, there is a nexus between nation state formation and the creation of informal imperial power with regional hegemony in terms of the making of institutions of the state. This is reflected ideologically in how Americans imagined their place in the world. The United States’s apparent will to imperial power frequently tapped a “hidden reservoir of popular sentiment” in several major overseas interventions throughout the twentieth century (Ninkovich 2001, 41) as another component of imperial power. The sense of entitlement underpinning America’s projection of civilizing mission eased the tension between the domestic imaginary and its hemispheric and international extension. It also came to define the terms of debate between opponents and supporters of imperialism. CONTINENTAL REACH, SOUTHERN CONQUEST The state that achieved such an empowered civilizational vision in the twentieth century had a prehistory of continental state formation in the nineteenth century. “Manifest Destiny” was a popularizing Jacksonian journalistic turn of phrase declaring this intent for a large reading audience (Howe 2007, 702– 4; Maier 2006, 2). The phrase portending further territorial growth remained associated with continental expansion until the late nineteenth century, at which time these words became a better fit for international adventures. As far as many Central and Latin American governments were concerned, “Manifest Destiny” condensed a whole providential vision of a symbolic North-South fault line (Bow and Santa-Cruz 2012, 156). The United States’s geopolitical position was reimagined as spanning the East-West axis of the continent and policing North-South axis of the hemisphere. The republic entered the nineteenth century with three decades of debate on political philosophy and the terminology of politics behind it. Terms like “civilization” and “republic” had become background assumptions through frequent use and debate (Wolfgang Knöbl 2018, 27–28). Yet a new terminology was needed to describe what a new continental nation state would be.



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Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty”—only a few years old in 1803—captured the character and ambition of the westward- and southward-facing republic (Reynolds 2009, 100–4; Sexton 2011, 32–35). Expansion would counter the advance of Spain, France, Britain, and Russia (Belich 2009, 56), but the providential vision supporting it belonged entirely to an American conception of continental statehood and international great power status. Continental conquest only became an unhindered opportunity, once terms with Britain were reached in the 1840s. With agreement reached about the future of Oregon Country, Britain could consolidate Western Canada’s position, while the American government could secure its passage to the Pacific. From there, the annexation of Texas, the war with Mexico, and new colonization of First Nations lands made the rest American territory. With other powers held at bay, the cartographic outline of a continental nation came into sight. The well-known wave of westward migration forced the pace of territorial state formation. With the end of slavery, passages across the continent and seizures of the land increased. This movement fulfilled a logic of continentalization, entailing also the imagination of the land as continental. Swelling an emergent global pattern of increased translocal awareness of territory, the surge westwards singularized continental consciousness for Americans. Using a more extensive time cycle, the size of the demographic movement looks even more impressive. Belich conjectures that 12 million moved westward between 1815 and 1930 (Belich 2009, 66). Within this time frame, he periodizes two sub-booms, some “busts,” and numerous external factors driving migrants from the East and South (Belich 2009, 223–34). By any measure, this transfer is significant. The movement was only completed in the early decades of the twentieth century with immigrants settling in Washington, California, and Montana (Nugent 1992, 152–53). Yet the size is only one aspect. Although an internal migration, the collective effort involved, and the culture shock for so many, would have been as great as the journey across the Atlantic (Belich 2009, 65). While historians and historical sociologists debate the causal complexities impelling westward movement (Mennell 2007, 180–213), two consequences are clear enough. First, colonization uprooted First Nations. Dislocated from their ancestral terrain, many were steadily marginalized into unwanted lands. With their subsistence base rapidly in decline, First Nations people adapted to the passing trade and became a part of the new trading sector. Although adaptive to colonization, the effective loss of sovereignty for First Nations was a deep shock. Second, after 1850, Americans consolidated cities of the eastern seaboard and the Midwest, while further fueling the intensification of rural settlement and farming. The Homestead Act (1862) was a watershed in this process, granting new settlers plots of land. The legislation paved the

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way for industrious Prairie farming based on private ownership. Agriculture and industry mushroomed as did a booming industry of finance and smalltown development (Belich 2009, 334–36). Colonization of the interior from that time revolved around further land settlement, railroad extensions, and repopulation. Rail and ports sprang up on the West Coast to connect California with the Midwest, the eastern states, and with intra-American trade. While the story of the West is broadly familiar, the Pacific side of an Inland Empire beginning in the early 1900s does not find a place in the conventional historiography of heroic expansion. The Pacific domain opened in the mid-century with intercivilizational encounters and engagement with China and Japan. Considerable Chinese migration to the United States during the early years of the gold rush era was followed by Japanese migration from the 1880s onward. Both developed settled communities. Despite positive contributions to American society and economy from Japanese newcomers, the process of trans-Pacific immigration to California and Hawaii heightened diplomatic disagreement between Japan and the United States. A first generation of emigrants responsible for creating a Japanese community in Hawaii had an uneasy relationship with a second partly Americanized generation. Many of the latter headed for California, Washington, and Oregon only to encounter a vein of racism fiercer than any in Hawaii. Japanese immigration had gained momentum in the wake of the 1882 exclusion of the Chinese. However, the 1924 Exclusion Act then closed the door. Two generations of Japanese remained endogenously forming a biracial West Coast community. In between, internment made wartime a jarring and dislocating experience. Despite this, a core community reassembled in California after the War, situated indefinitely in a larger Asian-American constellation. The story of continentalization has an important chapter on metropolitan coalescence, as we see in the discussion of LA in chapter 2. There is, of course, another region the Union had to conquer, not territorially or in war with foreign or First Nation powers, but internally. The first surge of westward expansion coincided with the Union’s subjugation of itself, or more properly speaking the Civil War with the South. The following passages examine a Southern world, national division and politico-religious visions, and the historical memory of the civil war. In the subjugation of the region, one singularly unavoidable dimension becomes magnified: America’s self-recreating problem of race and racism. The Civil War was a conquest inasmuch as it brought a set of social relations and a cultural world under the tutelage of the North (FernándezArmesto 2014, 221). Overcoming and integrating a Southern region central to the republic entailed a conflict revolving around the nature of American civilization. It put colonial slavery into question as an institution originating in the intercivilizational engagement of Atlantic modernity. What it could not



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remake was race as a lived experience of structured hierarchy and exclusion for black Americans, and an imaginary institution impacting on all areas of society and culture. With slavery gone, memory of slave times remained an article of faith for many postbellum Southern whites. Moreover, the legacy continuously differentiated the South as a region in tension with the nation state. The South had sustained a separate cultural world and a set of social relations within capitalism (Kolchin 2009). This was a planter world with a habitus of nobility and honor ethics (with a related culture of violence), on one hand, and a political economy of slavery, on the other. In economy and politics, the region was a central force of American modernity, while being at odds with the modernizing outlook of the North. The South’s weight in the early republic gave it a ballast in federal politics up until the Civil War. Congress was a staging ground for the South and North to articulate political philosophical differences. Congressional debate on slavery figured in a multilingual and international public sphere, in which discourses of abolition and free trade meshed in a political economy of liberation of investment, trade, and subjectivity (Almeida 2011; Beckert 2001, 111–44). Over time, differences became divergence. If the war began as a struggle over the rights of states, it acquired the shrill tones of a religiopolitical conflict over slavery (McKenna 2007, 128–63). Analogies with internecine English religious wars of the seventeenth century were woven into the declarations of enthusiasts on both sides. Puritan devotees of the antislavery cause saw the conflict in moral terms, with the Constitution and liberty at stake. Easily sermonized, set to battle hymn music, and rendered lyrically in poetry, the words of Puritan antislavery advocates provided a rousing call to arms for freedom and the Republic. Abolitionism has its radical wing. For their part, black advocates of abolition were not reluctant to recite the words of the Declaration of Independence back to white audiences to remind the world of the inequities of slavery (Armitage 2007, 97–100). Yet much of Northern Abolitionist opinion seemed moved more by the tyranny of “slave power” for enfranchised Americans than the intrinsic and contingent cruelties of slavery (Reynolds 2009, 172–80). On the other side, Southern Protestant convictions invoked no collective virtue of redemption in acting for freedom. Instead, white Southerners interpreted salvation through religious worldviews aligned with their mannered world (McKenna 2007, 167–68). Little space remained for ambivalence in this polarized atmosphere. The Civil War ended slavery in a bloody terminus for a chivalric culture and, so it appeared, the world of cotton. The South then confronted not only an occupying power but an integrating nation. Looking closely, we can discern a major challenge in nation state formation. For the North, the conflict stimulated industry and state power. Economically, industrialism along with

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all its teething problems had arrived (Hopkins 2018, 695). Its other challenge was the crisis of disunity the Union confronted and for that international expansion served to foster support from constituencies keen to support national prestige. The Union had more resources and new fiscal, monetary, and financial instruments at its disposal as well (Reynolds 2009, 208). In the South, destruction of agriculture undercut the economy. The contrast between the South and the rest of the Union was more conspicuous in the moment of defeat and during the period of Reconstruction than ever. However, while the Union uprooted slavery, social hierarchies leaning on powerful social imaginaries of race were re-entrenched. Bitterness and poverty—the initial fruits of defeat for the elite of white Southerners—were reversed following Reconstruction. For blacks everywhere, the problem became one of feeling like a problem, of nonbelonging even while present, as Du Bois later described it (Du Bois 1986). Black leaders and intellectuals persistently strived to raise the alarm over increasing violence, in part by reaffirming a divergent discourse on the war (Blight 2001). They pointed to racism’s sharper and more violent edge in the South, where the Ku Klux Klan began to meld older traditions of vigilante militia into a new force of anonymous white forms of control. In the new century, the effects of lynching became themselves contrary: for whites, they were a feature of the routinization of brutality, while for blacks they produced terror and trauma. Southern survival came through black communities making a world for themselves away from the public often in churches and families shaped by segregation itself (Brown and Webb 2007, 208–32). These were self-contained places of retreat, yet also communities of gathering strength in which the virtues of mutual aid and moral conduct could be promoted as the means of collective improvement (Brown and Webb 2007, 139–41, 315). The belief in meritocratic advancement may seem naïve or misplaced in current-day thinking. However, the unintended effect was to enhance a kind of autonomy in which agency increased. Hostility between Northeastern America, with a cosmopolitan and marketeer ruling class, and the South, with its coalescing romanticism for the “Lost Cause,” was constantly renewed. The anthropological attitude to slave labor and its legacy in post-Reconstruction Southern racism was morally at variance with the North’s salutation of the dignified free citizen. In this manner, the South still stood as a region at odds with the nation. A singular white identity re-emerged alongside of an institutional figuration of Jim Crow laws, practices, and habits and a counter-memory of the war. At that time, although a conquest had transpired, there was no unified nation modeled on the North, as many Northerners had anticipated. A counter-memory is emblematic of the postbellum South. Rejuvenated white elites steadily rolled back black rights, just as they rolled up black



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politicians, if not by legislative act, then by judicial interpretation and administrative fiat. In the fifty-year aftermath, the Civil War became deeply entrenched in the memory of the South (Wolfgang Knöbl 2006, 147; Blight 2001). According to Blight, three competing versions of race and society vied for a public hearing in that era: an emancipationist black memory of the Reconstruction, a white supremacist narrative resulting in terrorizing violence and a regained monopoly of state politics and legislation, and an emancipatory vision of reconciliation (Blight 2001; see also Brown and Webb 2007, 218–25). The latter surpassed its competitors to become the national memory instantiated in memorials, monuments, marches, paintings, statuary, sculptures, and photography. It did so only through compromise with local Southern memory (Blight 2001, 383–90). The common element of warrior heroism helped to smooth out sectional white interests and paper over divisions. As part of this, the Confederate legacy morphed into a less rigid “southern regional identity,” one never quite on board with the compromised national narrative (Kolchin 2009, 574). Underneath commemoration, and at times enshrined in specific artifacts of remembrance, war memory struggled to reconcile national unity with conditions in the South. Black Americans were at best marginal and most often left out altogether. Never entirely suppressible, black voices nevertheless found it hard to force their way into the public sphere and the historical memory of the war. This divergence along racial lines between a transculturated white identity and black identity left race and racism indefinitely unresolved. MONROE DOCTRINE, NORTH-SOUTH DIVIDE The continental nation bore more than an imagination of itself throughout this process of state formation. America generated a concurrent imagination of the Western Hemisphere as one free of European competitors (Leonard 1988; Molineu 1986, 15–18). The 1823 Monroe Doctrine declared this vision not by claiming an empire, but by affirming an anticolonial position that distinguished Europe as the home of colonial empires and the Western Hemisphere as a republican zone that should be free from the interference of outside powers. Subsequent American governments could infer a notion of civilization from the doctrine one in which informal power and cultural imagination intertwined. For the nineteenth century, the vision focused mostly on the Western Hemisphere and establishing hegemony, with intervention used to assert American authority. Steadily, America would connect the Asia-Pacific to this regional hegemony and then adopt a global agenda during World War II and the Cold War. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, American leaders were most immediately concerned about Spanish, British, Russian, and French threats

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to the stability of the Americas (Howe 2007, 111–16; Hopkins 2018, 211–12; Leonard 1988). With the benefit of hindsight, it appears that, except for Britain, Europe’s major powers had already given up on further colonies in the Americas. Yet by no means did American intentions end European interest in a stake. Aside from the reach of Britain’s informal empire, Europe’s powers together conducted sixteen interventions in the Americas between 1823 and the turn of the century (Molineu 1986, 18). Most noteworthy among these was France’s direct involvement in Mexico’s civil war as a counter to US support for the Liberals. The intervention served as opportunities for the United States to reaffirm the Monroe Doctrine keeping its relevance alive and continuing America’s claim to be the guardian of the hemisphere. Initially admonishing Europe to end interference in the region and thereby recognize the United States as the hemisphere’s premier state, reinterpretation of the Monroe Doctrine over time and absorption into American culture gave the doctrine enduring authority as a tenet of nationalism and a guide in foreign policy. Its remarkable ideological elasticity left it open to further revision and adaptation to help navigate at times uncertain domestic and international conditions (Murphy 2005). Literary references to the doctrine, press reporting, and political discourse together fed a public sphere, already receptive to debates, about America’s role abroad. Through the public sphere, the Monroe Doctrine wound its way into national consciousness and identity. The most significant interpretive shift brought a more belligerent approach. Perceiving a threat of European intervention, Theodore Roosevelt’s administration adopted a policing role for the region (Molineu 1986, 40–41). The 1904 Roosevelt Corollary, as it became known, accentuated America’s anticolonial mission to ensure stability in the hemisphere. Roosevelt’s affirmation of “national interests” in pursuit of this mission made the doctrine adaptable to circumstances (Murphy 2005, 6, 130, 144–45). The Corollary also furnished the doctrine with an air of unifying national purpose, securing, for the first time, bipartisan Democrat-Republican support reflecting a wider ideological popularity (Murphy 2005, 120). Roosevelt’s interpretation grafted onto existing foreign policy an imagined civilizational superiority, making America the model of modernization for the hemisphere (Sexton 2011, 233–48; Fernández-Armesto 2003, 134–35; Collin 1990). Americanization and economic benefits became sufficient reasons to favor the status quo of temporary occupations. Its rising power put the United States in a position where it could exert this kind of informal dominion. More specifically, the Corollary reflected a conclusion that American governments were reaching at this point—colonies were unsustainable, whereas occupations were not (Collin 1990, 53–55, 393). The experience of direct administration over Spain’s former possessions schooled Americans in the



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difficulties of colonial rule. In the Caribbean, occupation of Cuba and Haiti and dominion over Puerto Rico brought together administrators and military officers with varying perspectives on neocolonial government. On the islands, a complex entanglement of hardline imperialists and paternal assimilationists coexisted with a complicit creole elite (Pérez 2003, 66–72, 83–84). In the relationship between American agencies and their Puerto Rican subjects, for example, an asymmetrical discursive assimilation of opinions occurred. American capitalists wanted to invest yet were perceived by administrators keen on liberal reform on the island as a collective source of potential corruption (Go 2000, 351–56). The priority of administrators lay with Puerto Rico’s perceived strategic and military value, as it did in the case of Cuba. There was a tension between administrators’ priorities and private interests. The civilizing project that the US educators embarked on—and felt both entitled and obligated to—mostly failed. In the end, ambivalent administrators were at a loss as to what to do (Hopkins 2018, 657–60) and could readily accept withdrawing. Despite investment in infrastructure and public order, a similar desire to end the occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic was in evidence. Cuba was a prize of war, yet Americans struggled to find an acceptable name for their role there (Hopkins 2018, 395–99, 515–16). Calling it part of an “insular area,” they occupied the island for four years, always holding the option of returning when they deemed that conditions called for reoccupation (Pérez 2003, 86–109). With this orientation and consistent with the Roosevelt Corollary, the United States treated its island territories as though they were domains of informal influence, open to incursion and occupation if circumstances demanded it. Thus, although there were jingoistic enthusiasts for colonization of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico in the United States, even the acquisition of the insular empire was an unsought role. After 1898, the position of Spain’s former island colonies was debated and determined in a string of judicial declarations (Hopkins 2018, 514–16; Go 2011, 54–56; Ninkovich 2001, 55–56). By drawing a legal distinction between incorporated and unincorporated territories, the Supreme Court granted an official status to island possessions that was compatible with the Constitution and acceptable to Congress. Incorporated territories were those deemed capable of acculturation and which, therefore, called for the civilizing programs of American language instruction and education and eligibility for citizenship and statehood. Only Hawaii qualified, even though American educational programs of assimilation had been, at best, only partly successful (Ninkovich 2001, 28–30). The Supreme Court’s judicial decisions extended sovereignty to encompass overseas territories in a self-conscious process of fashioning America’s distinction from its British, French, Portuguese, and Dutch rivals. As a result, the United States gained an insular empire comprising territories constitutionally and

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administratively distinguished from the union of continental states, yet with a legal status. Such conditions had consequences. Decades of intrusion and interference followed the Roosevelt Corollary, during which American leaders interceded with greater impact, often by exercising an untrammeled right to direct military intervention. Colonialism may have been antithetic to the Monroe Doctrine, but this did little to diminish the civilizational superiority that the Roosevelt Corollary affirmed. Assuming Hispanic Americans to be incapable of mature self-determination and international statesmanship, the US Marines and naval forces intervened in Central America and the Caribbean with alacrity during the years that followed. The pattern lasted through to the 1930s, at which time the “Good Neighbor” policy of the later Roosevelt (FDR) confirmed the retreat from military intervention as definitive policy. Preoccupation with the Depression and emergent isolationism in foreign policy gave the United States a greater pause in considering mobilization of its marines. Indeed, ten years’ worth of discussions about noninterventionism in Washington found their realization in the policy shift (Leonard 1988, 12–13; Molineu 1986, 22–24). Cuba and Haiti immediately benefited. Nonetheless, America remained a forceful power in its major zones of interest. As the Monroe Doctrine operationally became secondary to foreign policy, it was sacralized symbolically and placed beyond question (Ninkovich 2001, 142–44; Collin 1990, 411–12). Without obvious operative contents, it could give succor to anticolonial sentiments but also doctrinal cover to rationalized short-term interventions. American nationalism coalesced in this Western Hemisphere. When it came to inhabitants of the former Spanish Empire, racial distinction from white America was unambiguous. In the United States, images of Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, Cubans, and Panamanians emphasized their dissimilarity from Americans, while being easily conflated with black and First Nations Americans (Pike 1992, 182–91). Proposals to include members of the insular empires in the political community thus ran into obstinate opposition. Great hesitation about adding more black voters to discontented Southern black opinion was one reason for not absorbing Cuba into the United States or indeed granting Puerto Rico statehood (Ninkovich 2001, 95). In turn, American white nationalism swelled as informal imperialism saturated politics and culture with a racializing worldview. Dissenting black politicians and public intellectuals struggled to get their message across even more in this environment, scotching for a time any chance of democratic re-evaluation of the empire’s new possessions. In those island territories remaining under US administration, the dissimilarities seemed even more emphatic to administrators, soldiers, and colonizer settlers, even though the everyday engagement with embodied “real” islanders was, to varying degrees, unavoidable.



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World War II disrupted this situation, abruptly terminating all isolationist strategies. Internationally, American nationalism was curbed by its own commitment to the universalism of the UN. Domestically, white nationalism would be constrained by the civil rights movement and the liberal renewal of politics described in chapter 4. I return to these trends later. At this stage, the chapter turns South and turns back chronologically. The North-South divide inhabited the thinking of Latin Americans also and some brief notes are in order. Feelings about the United States were complex, mixed, influenced by French, Spanish, and British as well as local thinking, and often constituted in rivalry with one another (Miller 2012). Prominent intellectuals and leaders were not short of statements of admiration for the United States, especially in the civilizing discourse shaped by European debates contrasting “civilization” and “barbarism” widespread in the Southern Cone (Wolfgang Knöbl 2018; Coletta 2018). Chile’s Francisco Bilbao, Argentina’s Domingo Sarmiento, Costa Rica’s Francisco Iglesias, Mexico’s Matias Romero, and Brazil’s late abolitionists were among them (Sexton 2011, 146–48). Liberal Latin Americans with firsthand knowledge of the United States who were interlocutors in the transatlantic public sphere living in Cuba, Mexico, London, Madrid, and Paris could speak authoritatively about perceived American virtues, cities, and industrial technologies (Miller 2012, 225–30). However, such benign impressions of America vied with attitudes of hostility and Anglophobic worldviews. They would be a cultural companion to radical nationalisms and anti-imperialism. Arguably, it is Mexicans who were most conscious of the division. Mexico was the first country of the hemisphere that the United States had engaged not only in the form of warfare but also economic entanglement, extensive cultural transactions, and mixture of peoples (Fernández-Armesto 2014; Hart 2002; Martínez 1994, 34–38). American investment in Mexico brought managers, industrialists, ranchers, bankers, and miners. Economically, financiers had a quasi-imperial strategy of railroad and communications investment followed by expansion into mining, land holding, and ranching. If imagination of the South helped structure the strategies and choices of the Americans, for Mexicans encounters with their immediate neighbor were not a choice. With a growing American presence, Mexico’s elite and its middle classes could not avoid the cultural assets it brought. Of course, many in fact desired them. Over 150 years, the two intermingled in conflict and in mutual endeavor, while elites in both countries engaged in adversarial encounters relativized by ongoing relations of familiar cooperation. Mexico may have received more attention than Canada, but it did not enjoy the caliber of neighborly diplomatic relations that the United States cultivated with their Northern Anglophone counterpart (Bow and Santa-Cruz 2012). Its elites, perched atop a racial hierarchy of their own, persistently expected better all-round treatment

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and were resentful when it was not forthcoming (Pike 1992, 107–11). Within civilizational discourse, Americans imagined Canada as Protestant, Anglophone, and similar. Mexicans, on the other hand, had only distinct civilizational attributes easily transfigured across all Latin America. If Mexico had an intimate, albeit complex, relationship with the North, the proponents of European Anglophobia imagined America from a more remote position. Anglophobic currents in France, hostile to North American foreign policy and beliefs and customs transmigrated across the Atlantic to the Latin cultures of the Americas in intercivilizational exchange. Combining resentment toward the United Kingdom with doubt about the republican project in the United States, a Francophone intelligentsia generated “a stylized polarization between the Anglo-Saxon and Latin races” in the nineteenth century (Thier 2021, 177; see also Coletta 2018, 31–32). Indeed, more widespread usage of the continental nomenclature of “Latin America” had its origins in this intellectual movement (Braudel 1993, 427–32). Adopting “Latin America” was an intricate process of harnessing the alterity of the North to Latinist discourses (Coletta 2018, 145; Miller 2012, 235–37). Early Latinist worldviews grounded in Anglophobia sustained transatlantic dialogue, connected narratives, and transnational relationships over many decades ahead of the fin de siècle. In such international public spheres, both Anglophobic critics and admirers of America could compare Latin America with the United States within an imagined hemisphere of creole cultures. Easily adopted in Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and the French Caribbean, a brand of Latinism fortified a typology of Northern and Southern cultures, which manifested in both Europe and the new world. Around the turn of the century, Latinism contested Americanization. Joining the nationalist critiques of Martí and Rubén Darío, Latinists questioned the progressive character of “civilization” from the vantage point of culture, including American culture. Latinism was a romantic modernism with a complex intermixing of binaries of progress and decadence, civilization and barbarism, and country and city. In Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina where this interpretation was the most pronounced, Latinists produced a decadent modernity, according to Coletta (Coletta 2018, 3–11). Decadent modernity embodied fin de siècle metropolitan ambivalence insomuch as it critiqued civilization’s excesses while setting Southern Cone countries the problem of modernization to contend with. This was discussed in chapter 2 in respect of Buenos Aires. However, the connections fostering this cultural trend are wider, as is the region it impacts on. As with French American currents in the nineteenth century, French sources supplied the model, but creole elites in Santiago and Montevideo took over and adapted Latinism’s most appealing images. More than an aesthetic interpretation, Latinism voiced the thought of educationalists, sociologists, and party intellectuals. Spanish and Italian cultural traffic brought differentiated influences to Uruguay and Argentina



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sharpening anti-American sentiment in both countries (unlike Chile). Rodo’s Ariel—likely the most major work of Latinism—expressed this poignantly in its celebration of solidarism and rejection of American individualism. This lay ideological sediments of anti-Americanism in what Coletta describes as “Spanish-American national imaginaries” (Coletta 2018, 118). That said, there was also a defined current of receptive American “Arielists” who admired Latin critique, read its works, personally encountered “cultivated” Southerners, and absorbed aspects of romantic modernism in which they saw portents of a larger American transculturation based on resonance with Northern Protestantism (Pike 1992, 192–201). Aside from these nuanced interpretations, I have noted the rivalry of antiAmerican and pro-American sentiments (Körner, Miller, and Smith 2012; Pérez 2003; Kurasawa 2008). Both depended to a degree on America’s own cultural artifacts. Access to cultural artifacts was far from even throughout the hemisphere, however, and certainly not as widespread as it was in Europe (Miller 2012). Access was better in places where institutions and programs of Americanization flourished. At the same time, patterns of Americanization were not uniform. In the Dominican Republic, acculturation produced a relatively benign animus, while in Puerto Rico it spread American cultural tastes and increased dependence, but also singularized Puerto Rican identity, consciousness, and resentment (Fernández-Armesto 2003, 140). Acculturation did not come hard for middle-class Mexicans and newfound entrepreneurs in Central America for whom the popular culture and Protestant virtues of the northern neighbor were well known (Hart 2002, 40–42; Pike 1992, 162–63). Using English and prosecuting business procedures in the routines of daily working life fostered adjustment to American ways. The appeal of an abundant northern consumer culture and its leisure time pursuits promised a degree of freedom not available in other spheres of life (O’Brien 1996, 315). Sport, travel, dance, food, music (first jazz, then rock ‘n’ roll), literature, cinema, and television appealed as individualist recreation. In contrast, habits from the North embraced in South America by political and economic elites often served to accentuate the class dimension of the imagined divide, at least as far as the popular classes were concerned. The latter were likely more reluctant about American culture than their elites. On the other hand, black middle classes in Brazil and Colombia adopted American habits to some extent in the hope of consolidating position in the social hierarchy. Such were some of the variances of Americanism. INTERLUDE An imagination of North-South division may be said to characterize a vital segment of American historicity (O’Brien 1996, 14–15; Kolchin 2009). In

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the political geography and memory of the continental nation, the two poles became a central axis of foreign policymaking. Orienting to America’s NorthSouth axis, other regions also diverged from the historic Northeastern states of the United States. The new West and conquered Southwest connected with the Northeastern core in the creation of capitalist and political power. A long and distinct history of violence and warfare in the West and South toward First Nations civilization and black Americans distinguished the formation of those regions. This was a diversity characteristic of the multiregional nation. From this angle, the Civil War appears as a watershed in the cultural, political, and economic division of the Republic. The Northeastern states continued as the historic core. However, the United States as a continental nation had become a multiregional constellation. Arguing that this included a phase of explosive colonization, Belich observes that the rest of the Anglophone Southwest was not a beneficiary (2009, 88–89). It relied on the expanding economic colossus of Atlantic capitalism, to which it was strongly linked. Under these circumstances, the opening of transportation links through the Panama Canal could not have come at a better time (Richardson 1992, 81–83; Leonard 1988, 8–10). The advancement in oceanic transport it brought enhanced the geographical reach of the continental nation that came with the completion of railroad construction. The continental nation state had a hemispheric presence, which it would develop as informal imperial power. Nationalism, the Cold War, and the interregional dimension of state formation are considered next. NATION AND INFORMAL EMPIRE What appealed to many supporters of expansion about the strong interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine was the masculine exertion of decisive military action. American regional economic power was elevated by military strength in a period where the global expression of US transnational finance was not yet realized (Hopkins 2018, 311–12). Before the 1930s, patriotism was often weaponized in favor of intervention and occupation. But equally, patriotism appeared at the service of opponents. Such domestic constraints were among the few in the first three decades of the century. In debates in Congress and the press, arguments raged for or against the Platt Amendment; for or against interventions in Guatemala, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, or Cuba; for or against civilizational duty. In those controversies, both sides could slide from the domestic domain to the region in summoning nationalism. At this point, we can resume the fourth chapter discussion of the nationalist imaginary, by addressing the postponed subject of American patriotism. My argument is as follows. The American spectrum of nationalist ideologies



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was instituted consubstantially in continental and regional theaters of state formation. In America’s imaginary of nationalism, the Monroe Doctrine naturalized America’s international orientation in the hemisphere and projected it to Asia. The differentiation of two new world civilizations—advanced northern Protestant and decadent southern Latin—was a centerpiece of this worldview. Through construction of a territorial state with an interregional connection between its possessions in the Asia-Pacific and the Caribbean, the United States engaged in state building with a modern nationalist imaginary, accommodating both internal integration and impassioned international mission. The latter would lead postwar America to the causes of, first and more problematically, decolonization and, second, leadership of the pro-capitalist and pro-democracy camp in the Cold War. Let us take the internal and international side in order. As an imaginary-instituted field, American nationalism empassed numerous competing currents. With the onset of the 1880s, mass immigration began a process of ethnic diversification and strengthening the North’s position. The immigrant nation, however, was conflicted from the outset. The reception of migrants was tempered by, on one hand, the group-based mode of assimilation practiced in existing ethnic communities and, on the other, cultural exclusions exercised by a delimited political community (Mennell 2007, 218–23). More specifically, the dynamics of immigration ran aground on the rocks of different strains of white nativism, unifying in the past decade of the century and the first two decades of the new century. As strains of a new “cosmopolitan nationalism,” we can name residual Anglophobia, eugenicist classifications of race, and a resurgent Protestant nativism (Hopkins 2018, 251–54, 316–32; see also Bow and Santa-Cruz 2012). Coalescing in tension, the various strains produced a new kind of anticolonial nationalism “purged of sin” following the end of slavery (Hopkins 2018, 317). Transfigured into a millenarian core of Anglo-Saxonism, American nationalism fused the providential imagery of manifest destiny and reinterpretations of the Monroe Doctrine with scientistic race theory. Within cosmopolitan nationalism, the imagination of Anglo-Saxon dominance could encompass an expansive international power with overseas territories and bases as well as territorial unification and a white nation. Where other neo-Britons identified with Empire and the Commonwealth as a pan-Saxon international order, no such option ultimately seemed feasible to Americans, apart from their own home envisioned internationally (Thier 2012, 167–68). America imparted an image of white citizenship operative in its nationalist imaginary at home and in the regions of the Americas and the Asia-Pacific. In place of the panSaxon order, America projected a historical self-understanding of itself as the essence of progressive civilization, an opposite of discourses of Latin decadence described earlier.

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Despite the ethnic pluralism of immigration, the Anglo-Saxon quality of an American citizenship won out. The 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was a direct result. Its impact was instant, thrusting the number of immigrants down from a million a year to less than two hundred thousand. Its intermediate consequence was a closure of the immigrant civilizational logic that had marked post-Civil War America. Moreover, the extensive efforts of the Federal state to Americanize communities through education were boosted by the decelerated flow of new migrants. Ethnic identities fell away as second generations of immigrants sought to conceal their heritage throughout the Great Depression. An environment of protectionist withdrawal of the United States from global trade and isolationist course in foreign policy contextualized coy disavowal of “foreign” identity. Since the end of the nineteenth century, American nationalism had been projecting a likeness of Anglo-American citizenship, even though its social composition was multi-ethnic. Prior to World War II, it became possible to successfully point to a “whitening” of the population due to the self-suppression of ethnic heritage exercised by large numbers of second-generation migrants after the closure of open immigration. To this point, “race” was a given up in America’s national self-understanding. The long process of putting race into question in science, community beliefs, and foreign policy discredited quasi-biological racialization of peoples in the new world and the conflation of races with civilizations. While racialism and unrestricted racism subsided over the course of the twentieth century, race remained enduringly divisive. Encompassing liberal as well as conservative perspectives, the premises of white nationalism conditioned debates about race within the United States and in relation to foreign affairs. The challenge to racism responded to the postwar environment of ethnic diversification. Important reforms in 1965 Immigration Act restored diversity to immigration. North Atlantic routes faded as the mix of programs favored family formation, professional recruitment, and refugee in-take. Migration across the Pacific and within the Western Hemisphere began to matter more as people from East and South Asia, Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America increasingly migrated, while Europeans dominated the numbers less. As assimilationism declined and the last vestiges of the colonial empires disappeared off the world maps, targeted programs became possible as the compulsion to “Americanize” eased. Liberal multiculturalism displaced assimilationism. Despite all this, race remained a divisive feature of debates about national identity and nationalism in multicultural and post-civil rights America. To America’s north, Anglophone solidarity with Canada ensured that kindred commonalities mattered in bilateral relations. Both countries shared cultural origins in British colonization, which conditioned a shared Anglo-American universe of race. Both continued to share in processes of economic integration and a “special relationship” formed in the triangular



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interplay of the United States, Britain, and Canada over time (Bow and Santa-Cruz 2012, 159–64). Canadian debates on nationality, first, and multiculturalism, later, did set Canada at a distance from American assimilation. However, even in debates about nationality, a common image of race was taken for granted. For its part, the United States saw Canada as a partner on very different terms to its other North American neighbor, Mexico, even though modest divergences between the two countries, enacted under the aegis of Anglo-American solidarity, emerged. Aside from differences detailed in chapters 3 and 4, major foreign policy issues (such as the 1991 Gulf War) show little bilateral commonality. All this has taken place unusually alongside of national identity formation in juxtaposition to US culture informed by a different model of multiculturalism. Nevertheless, shared Anglophone heritage automatically furnishes both countries with elements of their imagined nations. What were the global developments that brought America to this position? Americans felt a moment of unprecedented triumph at the end of World War II. Theirs was the only major power untouched by warfare on its soil. More than just surviving the conflict intact, the United States was poised to flourish as a result of it. Most striking of all are four discontinuities with its prewar position in areas where its international authority had been precarious.5 The first is territorial rule. Only a little earlier, American control of the lands it occupied appeared to be insecure. In the lead up to the Pacific War, administration of the insular empire was a troubled affair even to the point where state officials began to question the self-ascribed civilizational mission. Enough islanders under occupation doubted the mission for the issue to reach public debate in the United States. Puerto Rico had stirred civil rights advocates who perceived racist colonialism abroad and comparable oppression at home. The global conflagration disrupted this association of prejudice at home with extramural occupation abroad. A few years would pass before the connections were once again made. Second, the Cold War was brewing in wrecked and divided Europe and East Asia. Allies in both regions came to depend on American military, economic, and diplomatic backing and protection. The dependence lasted into the 1950s. Third, the war was a watershed in the expansion of American power in the Pacific theater. In the gap left by the Japanese empire, US forces were able to step and stay. Although American plans to cement Japan’s imperial territories as a Western defensive buffer had origins in the Pacific War, US acquisitions in the Pacific had ongoing strategic value in the Cold War (Ninkovich 2001, 81). Washington accumulated unprecedented authority in Europe with the Marshall Plan and NATO and through the reconstruction of Japan and protection of South Korea and Taiwan. These were developments that looked imperial, yet were never named as such by American leaders (Go 2011, 2–3, 235; Maier 2006, 24). Finally,

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America and its Western allies soon faced an unexpected surge of national liberation movements. America helped Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal reassemble their empires, in effect suspending anticolonial principles to do so. The strength and contingency of the revolt against colonialism had not been foreseen by the allies (Hopkins 2018, 490–92). Often characterized as neocolonialism, this later looked as a reflex response. From that time on, America would struggle to find a coherent strategy for Third World conflicts occurring in the context of Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union and China. One of the key discontinuities would dominate the next half century: the Cold War.6 Consubstantial with decolonization, the Cold War gained pace rapidly after the United States ended the Pacific War as the sole nuclear superpower. If America’s nuclear monopoly seemed to contemporaries to be an overwhelming fact, then it should not be underestimated from a historical perspective either. Once the Soviet Union achieved nuclear status, and then China also, the ever-present potential consequences of outright conflict grew to global proportions, giving the prospect of confrontation of the two major superpowers an air of extreme geopolitical crisis and a true clash of civilizations (Katzenstein 2010b, 7–11). It was also an indissoluble existential and civilizational threat, encompassing both sides and all nation states. America’s informal imperial power alongside of former colonial powers—transformed during the 1950s and 1960s into postimperial allies—was therefore never singular but always configured in relation to the Soviet Union and China, as is evident in the NATO alliance. The nuclearization of military capability resubstantialized state power at a higher level for the two rival superpowers. Once an atmosphere of pervasive fear had descended, it became a defining feature of two levels of response. First, fear guided direct interaction between the superpowers framing major agreements from the hastily organized settlement of the Cuban missile crisis to strategies of negotiation around détente. Second, fear mobilized support for antinuclear movements too large for governments to ignore. The scale and language of these movements in countries allied to America bears some resemblance to contemporary movements around climate change, which likewise arise from an existential and civilizational threat. But neither the resemblance nor the continuities can be taken further here. If fear of nuclear confrontation restrained American and Soviet powers at a higher level of engagement, then it had less impact in economic and military competition in specific conflicts. With nuclear confrontation and unthinkable option, the Cold War was instead actualized in every world region experiencing decolonization. Through soft power support for partial allies and client regimes, and sometimes as “proxy wars” (which often had an anticolonial nationalist impulse), the two superpowers sought to cultivate influence in Africa, Southeast and East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and the



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Pacific. However, Cold War geostrategic priorities often overrode or conflicted with America’s opposition to colonialism (Ninkovich 2001, 236–40; Anderson 2008). The United States thus had trouble courting support due to apparent lack of coherence in dealing with nationalist movements and governments. For postcolonial states with no definite loyalties, there were opportunities in these gaps. New states had improved bargaining power, especially those grouped in the Non-Aligned Movement. The latter maximized its leverage through association. However, most new states independently played one superpower off against the other. Material support from the United States or the Soviets was welcome. Yet there were limits to soft power. By legacy, the Monroe Doctrine excluded the Soviets as well as Europe’s imperial states from the Western Hemisphere; a point reinforced in the 1947 Rio Pact and subsequent formation of the Organization of American States, as well as later during the Cuban Missile Crisis. De facto Soviet aid was at most curtailed by this position. The Doctrine did constrain the Soviets’ will to undertake covert action. By comparison, Africa was a failure for the United States (Anderson 2008). Washington outsourced its involvement to neocolonial Britain and France to deal with the Cuban and Soviet presence (see Hopkins 2018, 716–17). Defaulting to former imperial allies only seemed to underline American inconsistency. Soviet aid steadily declined in the 1980s to the point where it could not effectively hold its own Warsaw Pact allies inside the camp. A foreign policy offensive during Reagan’s first term was succeeded by a more engaging one in the second, connecting Gorbachev with the President (Reynolds 2009, 513–18). The quick end of the Cold War was greeted in Washington in a similar manner as its beginning, with America pronouncing a unilateral triumph of its own supremacy. As occurred at the beginning of the Cold War, it quickly became apparent that this was fantastic over-projection more than it was analytic perception of the global configuration of states and blocs. If nothing else, the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1991 should have served as a sobering reminder of the multi-actor, multiregional, and multicivilizational character of the international order. Regional and ethnonationalist conflicts were rising features of the geopolitical landscape confronting America. Furthermore, China’s rapid development in the 1990s put pressure on the détente settled under Nixon. If a tense relationship existed at the point of collapse of the Soviet Union, then by the end of the century it would be evident that the decade has witnessed escalation in the tensions. These comments are by necessity brief and general. To provisionally summarize, the Cold War entailed a nuclear standoff and geopolitical contest in specific regions, including those flanking the continental United States. On the Atlantic side, it seemed to protagonists that the Cold War had transfigured the West as a North Atlantic civilization. At the same time, for Americans,

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rivalry with the Soviet Union and China always transpired in the Pacific region as well. The sudden and unpredicted end of the Soviet Union was a sharp rupture with ramifications for both regions. There is a partial exception in the Pacific, where the confrontation of American power with China is much more proximate and less mediated, and it continues in a greatly mutated form (Árnason 2020, 143). More generally, the post-Cold War order no longer had demands for the shrill-pitched millenarianism that had provided gravity and mass for American nationalism. The end of the Cold War brought out more local and regional conflicts in the world as the precise ramifications of the denouement of superpower rivalry. As the next remarks show, there were ramifications for the Western Hemisphere. The discussion has demarcated global discontinuities at the outset of the postwar period. From the vantage point of the Americas, there was more continuity and less novelty. In this transition from prewar to postwar imperium, international relations between Central and Latin America, the Caribbean, and its northern neighbor remained largely unchanged (Katzenstein 2005, 225). US strategic and commercial interests remained powerful in the region, while overt foreign policy and covert policy practice fostered client regimes in several states (Brazil, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile after 1973, El Salvador, and Panama). From the 1950s onward, US administrations varied from this in style of leadership, but not in core foreign policy. One change was to dispense FDR’s prohibition on direct military intervention if Cold War imperatives called for more than simply covert action. As one presidential advisor saw it in the 1960s, “We have to live on [sic] the same world with the Soviet Union, but we do not have to accept communist subversion in our hemisphere” (McGeorge Bundy, cited in Ninkovich 2001, 147). In the 1960s, anticommunism meant commitment to development and reform under the umbrella of modernization. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress may have been short-lived, but it heralded multifaceted developmentalist approaches to the region outlasting the administration. Of course, reform was the high-minded sentiment of the day. In Latin America, it was not the result. Latin America responded to neoliberalism and the end of the Cold War by producing a more complex range of Left governments than previously (Burdick, Oxhorn, and Roberts 2009; Ellner 2014). This complexity exceeded the ill-fit categories of post-neoliberalism, social democracy, and populism. Governments aligned to Venezuela’s project of twenty-first-century socialism brought new political alignments, property forms, and public economic projects distinct from the exercise of customary reforming strategies among the others of the rising Left. A basis for alternative development in reviving social markets seemed to exist. Moreover, the varied projects of regional integration which sit outside of the universe of neoliberalism suggest that alternative developmental projects were being collectively designed by



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movements and governments in the subcontinent. There was every response from disquiet to opposition from the United States, leaving the future of this development in doubt. INFORMAL IMPERIAL POWER AND THE PACIFIC Coming back to the interregional bridge mentioned throughout this chapter, there is further aspect to canvass: Japan and Asia. Multidimensional transPacific interaction between the United States and Japan grew from the 1850s onward. 7 American involvement with the Philippines, Hawaii, China, and other countries in the region was not of the same order as the engagement with Japan in migration, foreign policy and diplomacy, trade and investment, exchanges in science and technology, and development of democratic institutions after the Pacific War. For the United States, the relationship with Japan was a major focus of its objective of hegemony in a contested Asia-Pacific region. With a much denser presence in the region, Europe’s imperial service corps could not help but take notice of America’s ascendancy. The process accelerated following victory over Spain in 1898. With Guam, American Samoa, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hawaii rapidly annexed in a six-year period, the Americans found itself in command of overseas possessions in two major maritime spheres. The United States was unusually positioned to create an interregional bridge between the Americas and the Pacific (Maglia 2016).8 Japan’s emigration programs were already running along this bridge, with emigrants making Japanese communities in Hawaii, California, Peru, Brazil, and later Bolivia and Paraguay. Japanese Americans in California grew in number up until the 1924 Exclusion Act prevented further immigration, to the chagrin of Japanese diplomats (Davidann 2007, 95–104). Both countries had enjoyed congenial yet slightly competitive diplomatic ties to this point. Both used diplomatic channels to try and check each other’s agenda in trade and the rapid development of military and naval forces. Both behaved like empires. For their part, the Japanese could remind Americans that their own possessions in the region were hardly compatible with the spirit or letter of the Monroe Doctrine. With such injunctions, already strained relations became adversarial in the lead up to the Pacific War. Japan’s defeat paved the way for an American reconstruction of democratic institutions, which were then readily Japanized. The recreation of Japan’s model of industrial capitalism benefited from engagement with American science and technology. A pre-existing techno-scientific imaginary made Japan receptive to new scientific inputs. Licensing and technology transfer agreements with Japan had no parallel among America’s Cold War allies and stimulated one of the fastest rates of industrialization in modern history.

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Rapid growth came with cooperation. Cooperation then became competition, even as both states remained entangled in a web of trade, investment, scientific, and security agreements and a pattern of interchange of aspects of labor management and business organization (Morris-Suzuki 1994, 161–244). From the 1970s, Japan’s Asianization strategy took production, science, and trade networks into Southeast Asia and Australia, triangulating Australasia, Asia, and the United States in an enlarged Pacific Rim configuration. As the Cold War ended and Japan’s economy suddenly entered a long phase of relative stagnation, the United States found another Asian power more pressing for its regional engagements: China. However, this engagement cannot be explored here. CONCLUSION Achieving a continental state through conquest of the West, South, and Southwest, the United States quickly enlarged its existing overseas interests. With a North-South imagination, America built an informal empire with regional hegemony through economic, political, and cultural involvement south of its borders as well as the exertion of military, diplomatic, and political force. The interregional bridge between territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific was a basis for the advancement of American interests throughout Asia and the Pacific, particularly in the wake of the victory over Japan. Being empire-like, the United States can command international waterways and ocean shipping routes, particularly with its unmatched global web of communications and naval bases (Maier 2006, 73–74). In the Pacific, direct control over some island territories and through a network of bases, amounts to a zone of hard power that falls short of a formal empire. Some argue that the United States only attained and recognized its imperial power out of World War II (Katzenstein 2005, 209; Hopkins 2018; Maier 2006). Certainly, the United States appeared the heir apparent to Britain as the preeminent power of the Anglosphere. Furthermore, the name “empire” appeared more often during the Cold War years, seemingly confirming its ascendance.9 Yet this was informal power practiced in parts of the world. Recognizing anticolonial nationalists as potential client regimes, American strategy focused on a world of nation states after empires. By 1960, decolonization had eroded the footprint of the old world’s colonial empires, leaving the United States and the Soviet Union as major international powers. Denial of empire is characteristic to the core of informal imperialism. The denials grew louder toward century’s end, especially from the White House during the Clinton years. They were louder still from Bush and Obama in decades that followed. This chapter marshals a limited understanding of the



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construction of informal imperial power, one subject to the contingencies of the Cold War and decolonization. In its historical formation, America has navigated, so to speak, the world regions of the world as well as those in the Americas. The next chapter trains readers’ attention on multinational regions, not ignoring the regions within national states. Asking questions about the institution of regionalism, the line of argument tracks intercivilizational engagement in the Americas. NOTES 1. In this chapter, the generic “America” is used as a shorthand to denote the United States. 2. Instead of detailing relevant titles, I refer readers to the endnotes of the first chapter of Hopkins’s global history on this subject (2018, 742–49). 3. For an Eliasian historical sociology of America’s civilizing process, see Mennell (2007). 4. Hopkins is thoughtful on the informality of empires (especially Britain), although it is not his preference for American world power (2018, 21–25, 31–32, 385). In his eyes, the United States sought to become a hegemon in the twentiethcentury global order, being imperial throughout but “neither a new Rome nor a new Britain” (Hopkins 2018, 41). 5. Hopkins (2018, 691–729) and Freeman (2012) emphasize the discontinuities of the era. Go’s comparison of British and American empires has its best historical sociological insights in respect of a typology of informal imperial power in which Britain and the United States shared characteristics (Go 2011), particularly in Latin America (162–65). However, he goes too far when he rejoins the question, “What was new about America’s informal imperialism?” with the answer, “Not much at all” (Go 2011, 131, see also 117–21). 6. The principal influences in this passage include chapters 5 to 7 of Árnason (2020), Katzenstein (2005), and chapters 14 and 15 of Hopkins (2018). 7. This section is a synopsis of Jeremy C. A. Smith (2021) ‘Encounters and Engagement in the Civilizational Analysis of Japan’ Historicka Sociologie/Historical Sociology Journal (2): 31–46. 8. Hopkins sees this as a juncture of colonialism in the Caribbean and Pacific for the United States (Hopkins 2018, 7). For a comparison of similar governmental techniques, laws, and educational methods in Puerto Rico and the Philippines, see Go (2000). 9. One empirical source is the discourse analysis of the media. An instance of this is the lift in The New York Times usage from Nixon onward (Go 2011, 179–80).

Chapter 6

A Region of Regions Provincializing the Americas

In this chapter, I continue my focus on world regions by proposing a specific understanding of regionalism as spaces invested with social-historical meaning arising from intercivilizational engagement. This chapter sketches two kinds of region: substate territories and larger multinational zones. With the strong focus on world regions, civilizational analysis has overlooked the other side of regional consciousness: regions within states. To correct this imbalance, I apply my notion of intercivilizational engagement to expand understanding of the imaginary institution of regional places qua subnational and cross-border zones. This is a shift away from the hemispheric scope of many historical studies and indeed of the preceding chapter (FernándezArmesto 2003; Körner, Miller, and Smith 2012; Kurasawa 2008). I unpack this problem with three cases studies: the Southwest of the United States, Quebec, and Brazil’s Northeast. When it comes to the second kind of region, world regions, civilizational analysis has a strong track record in analyzing traditionally recognized civilizations. For multinational regions of the Americas, however, civilizational research is underdeveloped. To add to it, I explore the Caribbean, Central America, and Andean America. All three case studies are multicivilizational regions in my estimation, or zones of intercivilizational engagement. For both intranational and international kinds of region, I suggest that the encounters and engagement of civilizations are social-historically central to the imagination of places as regional. Further to this, I suggest that what makes regions regional varies within states and from one multinational zone to another. I outline this argument in analyses of regionalism at the intersection of social theory and history, and in civilizational analysis. 149

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REGIONALISM WITHIN AND ACROSS STATES In an argument relevant to both social theory and civilizational analysis, Knöbl highlights regional consciousness as a contingent factor in shaping the American South (Knöbl 2006). His account draws attention to the indeterminacy arising from the interaction of the instituting and instituted imaginary and the consequent importance of regional consciousness. Without wishing to demote consciousness, I suggest that intercivilizational engagement is also a component of the social-historical in regions. The engagement and encounters of civilizations are vital to the institution of places as regional, particularly in the multicivilizational Americas. Additionally, intercivilizational engagement invokes transnational networks and powers, defining a region by its external linkages, as well as its endogenous creations. Regions are spaces of multiple connections as well as ones of identity. Nevertheless, Knöbl is right to pinpoint consciousness as an important analytic in thinking about regions. His perspective is especially relevant to Quebec and Northeastern Brazil. Knöbl’s notion of region postdates the articulation of regions in the human sciences as complex social constructs. I cannot do justice to a survey of the revisionist reconception of regions that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s (but see Arjomand 2014). However, noting the importance of revisionism in regional studies and borderlands research, I propose to explore regions within states as codetermined by intercivilizational engagement. My three cases cut across two types. First, two regions (Northeast Brazil and the US Southwest) encompass two or more provincial jurisdictions and thus are imagined as supraprovincial places. Second, for two of my cases (Quebec and Northeast Brazil) a pronounced quality of regional consciousness adds to the regionalism of the zones in question. The features of intercivilizational engagement co-instituting the region qua region vary from one nation to another in the United States, Canada, Brazil, and indeed elsewhere. Turning to multinational regions, relevant collaborative projects in comparative and historical sociology have coincided with a renaissance in the investigation of regionalism in international relations (Katzenstein 2010a, 2012a, 2005; Árnason and Wittrock 2004; Arjomand 2014). In this vein, this chapter examines three variations. First, multinational regions are instituted in historical consociation arising from intercivilizational engagement. Second, the density and endurance of specific instantiations of social-historical meaning invested in places and historical encounters can alter the boundaries of politics for a cluster of nations, especially where indigenous civilizations leave a more significant legacy. Third, the historical experiences of intercivilizational flows associated with colonization can create geocultures capable of migrating, as it were, throughout the world. Central America, the Andean American nations, and the Caribbean are cases of each respective variation.



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Before stepping to case studies, let us look at how contemporary civilizational analysis has responded to the rise of manifest regionalisms via the work of Árnason, Katzenstein, and Eisenstadt. CIVILIZATIONAL ANALYSIS AND REGION How do scholars of civilizations conceive of region? For Árnason, “regional clusters of societies” are the essence of regionalism (Árnason 2003, 220). World regions are constellations like civilizations, but not reducible to them. Arguing with and against Durkheim and Mauss, Árnason cautions that the relationship of region and civilization varies widely from one constellation to another. Both region and civilization are dynamically subject to recomposition. There is one further noteworthy feature: encounters between civilizations also occur in regions (Árnason 2003, 217–18). This is one of his distinctive insights in civilizational analysis and he applies it consistently in his comparative and historical case studies. The integration and differentiation of civilizations through intercivilizational encounters creates a variety of regional worlds. Indeed, the backdrop to modernity—actually, the conjuncture of multiple modernities interacting with Europe—entails a collision of regions and civilizations (Arnason 2020, 77–80, 87–92). Árnason’s characterization of the creation of civilizations emphasizes context-dependent instantiations of social imaginaries. Specific regional contexts thereby become more important. From the vantage point of international relations, Katzenstein projects a similar stress on regional specificity. In his characterization of Anglo-America, he critiques Hartz for assumptions about the cultural and political unity of Anglo-America, looking instead to spheres of internationalized influence and disunities of the nation state (Katzenstein 2012b). Arguing that world regions are made porous through political practice, he defines them by their integration into global and international institutions and processes, which in turn can enhance dynamics of provincialization within states (Katzenstein 2005, 2–30). When it comes to the period in focus in the current work, this approach poses questions of transnationalism situated in the social-historical of civilizational identities, empire-building, and decolonization, as well as raising issues of subnational regionalization. The case studies in this chapter illustrate aspects of these. In chapter 1, I outline Eisenstadt’s contribution to contemporary civilizational analysis and his comparative sociology of the Americas. Eisenstadt’s breakthrough theory of multiple modernities insinuates world regions, broadly construed, without risking a conflation with the major civilizations in his scope. Eisenstadt takes the analysis of regional diversity further when

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he posits a diverse Western Hemisphere arising from the radical transformation of the civilizational premises of the Spanish, British, and French empires (Eisenstadt 2002, 2013). Although he confines his analysis to diversities that is split between Latin and Protestant America, Eisenstadt gives preliminary notes on regional variation within the Americas as a whole. Latin America divides into an Andes-based Andean American region, Europeanized south of the Cone, homogenized mestizo countries, and multiracial societies. Local and provincial identities matter in these Latin American contexts in which hierarchical principles structure social life more decisively. The image of a hemisphere of regional worlds grew in Eisenstadt’s sociological imagination over the course of a decade of debate about multiple modernities (Eisenstadt 2013). In the remainder of the chapter, I apply my notion of intercivilizational engagement, variously incorporating points from Knöbl, Árnason, Eisenstadt, and Katzenstein to subnational and multinational regions in the Americas. THE US SOUTHWEST For geographer Donald Meinig, the Southwest is construed more narrowly as New Mexico, Arizona, and El Paso-Juarez (Meinig 1971, 5–6).1 As my reasoning rests on the notion of intercivilizational engagement, I opt for a more expansive vision of the US Southwest (or historic Mexico’s Northwest). For all intents and purposes, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Southern California constitute the Southwest, as this is Hispanic and Anglo-America’s zone of engagement in migration, economic and cultural transfers, and political envelopment within the United States. The case for a larger geography also has support from one world historian of civilizations. FernándezArmesto extensively captures the Hispanic presence in US history and its interaction with Anglo-America (Fernández-Armesto 2014).2 Including First Nations arguably makes the case for a larger Southwest stronger. This was after all a zone of engagement for First Nations, the only civilizational force with a continuous and long history from the Pacific coast to the Rio Grande. Alongside a more extensive geography, I pose a more focused chronology. Two phases stand out. The Southwest’s tumultuous origins in the steady incursion of Anglo-America into northern Mexico is the first. The second concerns the end of the twentieth century. Growing binational links integrated the states of northern Mexico and Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Southern California as a region in which the legacies of Anglo and Hispanic America intermingled. This leads to my tentative contention in this section. Regionalism defines otherwise distinct states as a coherent whole when the intercivilizational heritage of the Southwest is most prominent.



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During the early decades of the century, the sure expansion of AngloAmerica engendered the conditions for war. Migration of Anglo-Americans into Mexico’s northern states had a profound effect, especially in Texas where conflict between border peoples was most intense from the beginning (Howe 2007, 659; Reséndez 2005, 37–45; Fernández-Armesto 2014, 135–38; Martínez 1994, 251–52). Often initially founding ethnic enclaves in rural areas as a preservation strategy, Anglo-Americans over time started to mix more fluidly in established cities. The steady invasion stimulated a developmental logic, which disproportionately benefited the United States (Reséndez 2005, 93–117). Growth of a regional trading system linking what became New Mexico and Utah to merchants in the eastern states secured a chain of supply and exchange for the United States across contested lands (Meinig 1971, 17–20; Martínez 1994, 34). As more Anglo-Americans moved into Texas and the future New Mexico, the density of their presence increased the magnetism of the United States. Since Mexico monopolized economic connections with foreign countries, New Mexicans and Texans had great incentive to trade with their near neighbor. As a result, the most populous part of the whole zone underwent an undercurrent of absorption into the US economic sphere (Reséndez 2005, 4–5). The trajectory of the area changed as the magnitude and fiscal and economic dimensions of the United States enlarged as part of this. New Mexico and Texas rapidly turned from borderland into bordered states, a portent of its imminent future as part of the United States. In the aftermath of the war, the US lorded it over Mexico in negotiations of a very different order to those they conducted with Britain about Oregon and the Northwest (Howe 2007, 733–43, 800–9). Realigned international relations pointedly favored the United States. It delivered the largest single territorial acquisition of any Presidency (Howe 2007, 809; Hamnett 2006, 141–56) Mexico, on the other hand, suffered a contrary fate, even though it was, as a republic, officially equal to the United States. There were other complexities for the United States as well. The region was subject to the interplay of local interests (including pueblo ones) with the Polk administration’s expansionist plans (Reséndez 2005, 240–59). Furthermore, opposition in the legislature and negotiations with Britain complicated dealings with Mexico. What altered the proportions of the region and helped secure the Southwest was the addition of California, which completed the continental reach of the state discussed in chapter 5. With state formation on a continental scale assured, the region could coalesce over the remainder of the century, albeit with uneven fortunes for different areas. I situate the second phase in the last third of the twentieth century, a time when cross-border linkages accentuated the Hispanic social-historical character of the region. The longer history of Hispanic United States rematerialized in the 1980s and 1990s as the Southwestern states produced

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social-historically by the processes of intercivilizational engagement came to include a pronounced border zone. The entry of immigrants from Central and Latin America connected with those legacies. Migration brings new cultural traditions, which travel as a memory of the social imaginary of “home” (Ainslie and Ainslie 2013). Traditions brought variously resonate or find dissonance with traditions found. Cultural engagement of this kind can be found throughout the subregions of the Southwest (Martínez 1994, 53–56). The traditions brought resonate with architectural themes, and then blend in with them in major cities such as Phoenix, LA, San Diego-Tijuana, Albuquerque, and El Paso-Juarez. Architecture is only one trend in this. Identity is another and sociologists have eloquently described such borderland zones as places of multiple and bicultural identities, showing up some of the complexities of this process of re-Hispanicization (Buezas 1991; Martínez 1994). As well as cultural engagement, migrant communities are part of an equally dynamic binational economy distinguishing the Southwest’s border zone. Familiar nation state capacities have less traction in a binational region where the border is, on one hand, enforced and, on the other hand, essentially inoperable in the cross-border zone and the wider region which millions of undocumented workers inhabit (see Martínez 1994, 145–91; Hamnett 2006, 10–17). Although the so-called war on drugs in the 1990s intensified surveillance of undocumented migrants, it also proved an unintended aid to organized crime and gang violence with complex histories in Mexico and Central America (Roniger 2011, 141–44). Paradoxically, the presence of workers and their families is met by a fear of Hispanic “invasion” (and a spread of criminality), on one hand, and a culture of accommodation driven by perceived economic imperatives. Accommodation has been evident in communities from South Texas, Las Vegas, San Diego-Tijuana, and even LA, which continue to live and thrive on migrants, many of whom travel back and forth in the border zone, on the other. No better illustration of sites of interdependence in this zone can be given than the daily interchange of peoples and goods and services in the retail and tourist economies of twin cities and the problems of cross-border governance they generate (Mendoza and Dupeyron 2020). Looking across all states engaged by border zone interactions, it becomes possible to perceive a robust economy of remittances amplifying the binational character of the region (Leal and Limon 2013; Fernández-Armesto 2014, 309–10). As with so many countries, the volume and velocity of financial exchanges has augmented the importance of the remittance sector for economic growth. The presence of Hispano-American citizens and migrants throughout the region has engendered different kinds of civic participation and belonging (McNevin 2007; Rocco 2014). Significantly, citizenship movements reflect and animate the renegotiation of place based on connecting regional identity



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to a political consciousness. Grounded in activism for an expansion of rights to belong, undocumented migrants and supportive labor unions, churches, and student groups have challenged the meaning of US citizenship by claiming migrant rights to stay, access vital services, and participate in civil society—the substance of an imagined associative citizenship (Rocco 2014). The ecumenical Sanctuary Movement brought the historic strength of many churches together to provide refuge and support to migrants. They also had examples of church communities across the border to learn from. Local support for migrants went beyond church groups. City governments supporting their demands inadvertently become partners in consubstantially building up a social movement around migrant-worker communities. Mexican and US labor unions also contributed through broad alliance activism. Solidarities of this kind seized the unprecedented opportunities afforded by North American integration to press claims around community development in the Southwest. They contributed to a common identity of border region people shared by Hispanic Mexicans and Americans and by biculturalists and binationalists across the Rio Grande (Martínez 1994; Fernández-Armesto 2003, 141–42). By the end of the 1990s, momentum was building in LA, Dallas, San DiegoTijuana, Phoenix, San Jose, and other cities in the region. One aspect of belonging is the development of cross-border linkage. Immigrant transnationalism is especially strong in and around Mexican ethnic associations in California and Texas, where the awareness of historical connections and cross-border relations is undoubtedly acute (Portes, Escobar, and Radford 2004; Martínez 1994). Furthermore, from the 1990s, it was evident that Mexican governmental authorities were able to directly aid US-based communities a long way removed from the nation’s political center. Add to that, the invisible transactions and cross-border circuits between immigrants and communities in Mexico and the picture becomes one of a porous border zone. Not all transactions are financial. News, information, and cultural products pass just as well (Pike 1992, 350–58). Mexico has transmitted far more to the United States than the latter could recognize at the time. Altogether visible and invisible border crossings augmented the transnationalism of the Southwest. Across the Colombian history of this vast zone, the United States has been the only imperial power to have integrated this region with a distinct identity (Fernández-Armesto 2014, 78–79). At the end of the millennium, the Southwest was bringing its Hispanic character to the fore with a vengeance. Anglo-America found itself squeezed into minority status in southern California and New Mexico. At the same time, the ascendancy of immigrant mobilization produced conflict with the Republican Right’s large support base. While the struggles for citizenship and recognition have not gone away, the Hispano-American revival has continued to connect the United States with

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inter-American developments. This irreversible situation identifies otherwise distinct states as a region. QUEBEC As chapter 4 indicates, Canada’s regions and provinces formed out of the conflict of Anglo-American and New French forces after the American Revolution and then, more expansively, in the tension-laden and contingent creation of a continental Federation. In both historical phases, intercivilizational engagement with First Nations brought warfare, expropriation, forced removal, and mission-based Christianization, as well as cultural, demographic, and economic intermingling. Although always asymmetrical, inputs from the three distinct sources of intercivilizational engagement (Anglophone, Francophone, and indigenous) influenced the formation of a highly visible federal state. Provinces and regions were crucial in this figuration. As things stood in the late 1980s, there was some justification in claiming that provincialism was higher in Canada than any other industrialized nation (Lipset 1989, 193–201; Katzenstein 2005, 228–29). Provincialism, moreover, often clashes with regionalism qua multiprovincial region and does so in Western Canada (Berdahl and Gibbins 2014). In addition to this, social scientists confront further complexities when it comes to demarcating Canada’s regions. Internal variations in Atlantic, western, and maritime Canada seem to defy regionalism in intergovernmental policy or as consciousness. Yet regionalism broadly understood as identity remained firmly in force, due in great part to the peculiar conditions of decentralization, which can be traced back to the constitution as well as political practice in public administration. Decentralization favored regions as well as provinces. An undertow of centripetal forces has frequently renewed the regional and provincial origins of the state following phases of centralist ascendancy. One such force is the parallel structure of provincial ministerial and governmental conferences, which has been a counterweight to the Federal Parliament and civil service in Ottawa in the postwar period (Lipset 1989, 199–200). Regional identities thrived when cooperation at the provincial level occurred. In this context, I take Quebec as regional and provincial because it can be seen as a spatialized core of Francophone Canada attracting the flows of intercivilizational engagement. A major interest is the place of Quebec as an Atlantic cultural world existing in multinational Canada. There are three further factors shaping regionalism. From the outset, Quebec as historic New France held a special status protected under the Quebec Act. Canada’s solution to the question of national duality lay in consociation, rather than majoritarianism



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as it did for the United States prior to the arrival of multiculturalism. Second, there is a popular sense of Francophone separateness, due to it alternative ethnic roots in the French language and Roman Catholicism. Connection to the French Empire and the Francophone world at large enhanced its Gallic nature. Furthermore, the region’s economy has benefited from connections across the Atlantic and into the northeast of the United States. Its standing as a mediumsized industrial region with highly integrated metropolises in Montreal and Quebec City further underlines religious, linguistic, and ethnic separation. Third, the rest of Canada regards Quebec as a region. Indeed, Western Canadians perceive Ontario and Quebec as regional hegemons in the Federation, a source of some resentment (Berdahl and Gibbins 2014, 19–25). Since the 1960s, a historical shift in the weight of separatism has taken Quebec from a defensive strategy of cultural preservation to a political strategy of asserting “associate” status and biculturalism and bilingualism (Smiley 1987, 131–41). Quebec remained unreconciled to the later 1982 revision of the Constitution. This revision was the product of negotiations aimed at an acceptable consensus for Canada. Models of cooperative federalism inspired it as much as the exercise of executive federalism. The long and highly contentious process of the Meech Lake Accord, purposed to encourage a consensus around a reformed model of federalism, ultimately broke down, first, on the provinces and parties’ disunity around the proposals and amendments and, second, on Quebec’s investment in regionalism as a strategy for renewing Francophone culture. Divided on key proposals, the Liberal and New Democratic Parties particularly suffered. As part of this process, Quebec has used the Constitution’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms to enhance linguistic protections for French (Lipset 1989, 104), and then propel Canada closer to the international Francophone arena (Smiley 1987, 140–41). Further, Quebeckers asserted a strong case for an asymmetrical federalism in which Quebec has additional and special provincial powers. The rejection of the Canadian model of multiculturalism—asserting in its stead a Quebecker notion of interculturalism—and avoidance of possible alternative kinds of interculturalism reinforce its claim to distinction and its stake in separation (Juteau, McAndrew, and Pietrantonio 1998; Taylor 2012). Furthermore, Quebec’s government demanded that the province be allowed the utmost jurisdiction possible under the constitution to maximize the number of French-speaking immigrants entering under economic migration programs (Paquet and Xhardez 2020). Exercising a preference in policies and grants for Francophone members of society, they appeared to have some success. However, the failure of the Meech Lake Accord was a setback and provided impetus for the eventual 1992 and 1995 referenda. Between their position on multiculturalism and immigration, Quebec’s French identity looked entrenched.

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By the end of the 1990s, the separation of Quebec still looked conceivable. Those who claimed that the 1960s reforms produced profound division appeared vindicated, especially with a wave of neoliberal government policies. At this point, a review of the controversy around Quebecker claims to independence via Charles Taylor’s position can offer the best insight into the normative and hermeneutical problems at the heart of the conflict. Taylor— himself a founding member of the New Democratic Party and participant in the public controversy—argues for the potential reconciliation, based on a two-sided transformation of the understanding of the conflict (Taylor and Laforest 1993).3 Commissioned by the provincial government with Gerard Bouchard to draw up a report on multicultural Canada, Taylor proposed an intercultural model on negotiation of the conflict around French and AngloCanada. Arguing that the long struggle for an inclusive and shared future faces the additional burden of reconciliation with Quebec on terms of mutual recognition. A rights-based solution sought in the Charter process could not be the basis of a viable compact and negotiated understanding, Taylor would go on to argue (Taylor and Laforest 1993, 66–112). Yet, at the same time, the difficulty is that Canada’s negotiated federalism rests on mutual “historical misunderstanding” on all sides of the overall stand-off (Taylor and Laforest 1993, 103). Until all sides achieve compromise based on mutual understanding of each other and of the conflict between them, the conditions for a new settlement will continue to remain elusive, argues Taylor. At the historical juncture at which the claims for independence had grown to their loudest, the distance between the two Canadas seems narrower than ever (Taylor and Laforest 1993, 156–58). So why not seek compromise based on an allround recognition of the deep regional diversity of the political community? Taylor’s is an earnest and patiently argued case for general political change. Undeniably, cultural differences remain valuable to Quebecker Canadians beyond the French language and therefore strengthen their attachment to the French-Canadian nation (Taylor and Laforest 1993, 56). In this respect, Taylor leaves unresolved the problem of how cultural distinction will be reconciled with federalism. Yet this may not be Taylor’s burden to resolve this issue, but the burden of Canadians as a whole. His position suggests as much. Reconciling a force that believes its culture to be stable with the contingent conditions of political negotiation and of globalization has indeed been the challenge for both Anglophone Canada and Quebec. BRAZIL’S NORTHEAST Metropolitan Brazil has preoccupied general understanding of this America (Le Blanc 2012, 103).4 Yet regionalism is a central feature of Brazilian



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modernity also. The Northeast is the historic foundation of this world—one that matters in the present too. Regions and regionalism rose, first, out of the historical experience of slavery and then, in the twentieth century through intervention of state institutions (Ribeiro 1971, 194–204).5 In this section, I consider the colonial era, and then turn to the intelligentsia’s interpretive activity and the state’s involvement in discerning the institution of regionalism. Slavery was at the heart of Brazil’s foundation. The Northeast was the alighting point for the first enslaved Africans on the subcontinent and birthplace of a large-scale plantation economy (Domingues Da Silva and Ribeiro 2020). Favored by the Atlantic’s oceanic currents, Bahia and Pernambuco proved a suitable landing point for the Portuguese. They quickly spread slavery as a paradigm of development for subtropical production of sugar, tobacco, and cacao plantations. With the decline of the slave trade elsewhere, Brazil became the dominant American destination. At that time, the region played a major role in shaping Lusitanian America. However, as the South developed, the significance of Bahia and Pernambuco declined in relative terms. In a case of “role reversal,” Maranhão became a re-exporter of slaves as a result of this decline (Domingues Da Silva and Ribeiro 2020, 497). Greater development accentuated a growing divide, making the Paulist south the center of economic gravity. If this rupture marked political economy, cultural identity took a less decisive turn. The heavy presence of Africans and the early coalescence of Afro-Brazilian identity—these were the essential features of this variant of modernity (Mota and Delanty 2015). Although new world slavery often jumbled African-origin nations, traces survived in both communities of single-origin African culture and in successor creole cultures (Ribeiro and Rabassa 2000). In contemporary Brazil, around 5 percent of the citizenry identity is “black,” with around 40 to 45 percent “mixed” or “brown” (Domingues 2008, 102–3; Andrews 2004, 154–55). The latter are AfroBrazilian, broadly conceived. The figures are not unproblematic, however. Current-day anthropologists and sociologists point to the inadequacy of census methodology and the ill-informed racial preconceptions backlighting definitions of Afro-Brazilian and indigenous identities (Do Rosário Linhares 2004; Andrews 2004, 153–90). Among Latin America’s censuses, Brazil’s is closer to methodological rigor and epistemological clarity, while still being imbued with the long-standing political myth of racial democracy (Mendes 2008, 477–83; Hernández 2016). Nevertheless, since the 1970s, the myth has been widely critiqued and destabilized. This has brought out Afro-Brazilian identity aligned as it is with colonial Brazil’s social-historical institution. Furthermore, the rise of Afro-Brazilian identity underlines the importance of the Northeast in the nation’s historical creolizing processes.

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Leading figures of the state and the intelligentsia codetermined provincial identities through their respective interpretation of national culture. From 1919 onward, the Federal Government undertook classification of Brazil’s regions into Central-west, South, North, Northeast, and Southeast, which included mapping (Arruda 2014, 17). The imagination of regional political geography coincided with an intellectual and ideological formulation of the Northeasterner (nordestino) as the paradigmatic Brazilian (Blake 2011). Northeastern intellectuals depicted the racially and ethnically mixed region as the essence of Brazilian heroism, beauty, creativity, resourcefulness, and prowess in Football. Some reached back to Euclides da Cunha (in his canonical Os sertoes) for romantic images of the inland zones and the Northeast (Ribeiro and Rabassa 2000, 238–56). Da Cunha reminded Brazilians of the country’s continental mass (the backlands); the world of the majority separated from the metropolitan middle classes of the south. His book unsettled national identity by getting Brazilians to look inland for culture and not only to the Paulist south and the Atlantic.6 Thinking broadly, we can see this as one of many folkloric representations of identity derived from Brazil’s nationalist imaginary, which transculturated regional qualities into the national character (Arruda 2014). Fusions of Afro-Brazilian religion, music and dance genres, and public festivals nourished the imagined transculturated figure of the Brazilian national. Candomblé, Rumba, Samba, capoeira, and carnival were expressions of survival and celebration, even while they were variously absorbed into the national character. Vargas’s regime and its immediate successors warrant some comments in this context. The populists racially neutered the folkloric figure of the Brazilian national (homen do Norteste), denying African heritage in the process. With this step, national identity occluded African origins altogether. Alongside of this, commonality attributed to states of the north became a basis for the orientation of public institutions in forging developmental strategy. Since the regions were so unequal and so variable, and indeed thrived on provincial cleavages, the initiatives implemented in the New Republic marked out the contours of an imagined nation in a strong federal administration coordinating regional areas and intervention in cultural institutions, the education system, and the media to promote national identity (Bethell 2008, 59–62). Lifting regional development through public investment, Vargas succeeded to a great degree in diffusing national culture (Bethell 2008; Mendes 2008). Vargas’s legislation of shared responsibility for areas previously the sole domains of the state further entangled regional and municipal governments in the new national polity. The nexus of the three tiers of government in new Republic remade the polity as the domain through which regional interests could be channeled. If people in more distant areas identified with the central state because of this, then a degree of national cohesion was achieved.



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How was the Northeast regarded? It became an object of scorn for the Paulist south where it was widely believed that the region suffered a deficit of modernization and development. Extensive and expensive efforts by the Kubitschek administration to shift the weight of planning and investment to disadvantaged regions produced little sustained success. Despite all this, poverty and unemployment remained entrenched. Northeastern states found themselves in a state of dependence on pastoralism, agriculture, mining, and energy production. Millions migrated to other regions, often compelled by the unreliable nature of low-wage seasonal work, poverty, and the aging apparatus of small industry. Legal regulation brought formal structure to employment—particularly where paternalistic social relations had prevailed in the large sugar plantation sector. However, precarity on the margins of large cities and degradation of urban and natural environments are problems left untouched and unaddressed. With the consequent erosion of the social, liberation theology found fertile ground for the growth of base communities (Ireland 1991). Political expression and religious vision intersected in movement politics at this time. In Brazil’s Northeast, socio-economic conditions combined with the traditions of Christian leftism gave rise to conflict. Land disputes and union activism arose from the new wave of organization. The Northeast formed a part of country-wide clerical opposition to the military regime. If the relationship of religion and politics was clear, insurgent, and forceful in the 1960s and early 1970s, it is being reinterpreted in the later twentieth-century politics (Burdick and Hewitt 2000; Ottmann 2002). The advance of some Pentecostal congregations and the resurfacing of Afro-Brazilian spiritual celebration have sustained traditions of liberation theology, especially through the CEAS (Centro de Estudos e Acao Social). Early manifestations of Catholic liberation theology, still recognizable in the towns and countryside of the Northeast, have morphed into contemporary social movements and a consolidation of social justice values. Political revival boosted reassertions of identity in the late 1990s. Regional alliances of state governments continuously asserted claims for more authority under the new 1988 Constitution. The extension of suffrage resulting from the Constitution coincided with an upsurge in urban politics. Involving the PT, this favored the MST and other social movements. The growth in the region’s cities also helped (Mendes 2008, 512–13). At a national level, Cardoso’s government ended the excessive blockages of access for the region to the center experienced during the worst years of the dictatorship. Even so, Cardoso’s “moderate conservative reformism” postponed further inclusive reforms (Mota and Wagner 2021, 75). Little of this hampered the forces of the conservative right in the Northeast, which clung on to office into the 2000s, partly due to the deep entanglement their clientelistic networks have

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in civil society (Montero 2012). Countervailing public and community initiatives such as family subsidies (Bolsa Familia) and improved health care integrated Northeastern states into the national state and economy. They served to highlight the contested nature of developmental politics, pitting provincial administrations of the Right against Lula’s PT government and the collection action of social movements. This phase, however, takes us beyond the scope of the present work. INTERLUDE As I pointed out in the opening passages, the axes of creation of multinational and world regions are distinct from the regions within. They do not equate with empires; yet empires codetermine their modernity. Nations are the major state form; yet multinational exchange and coordination are always present. Intercivilizational engagement is also animated in world regions. Following Árnason directly on this point, I contend that Central America, the Caribbean, and Andean America are multicivilizational regions, in other words, zones that are simultanously regional and civilizational. As this is even more pronounced in the case of the Caribbean, I allow more space for analysis of its flows. CENTRAL AMERICA As a region, Central America is coexistent with the flows of the Caribbean, yet also distinct. Empires that conquered and integrated economic life and defined cultural worlds dominated pre-Colombian and then colonial Central America. Following the Union discussed in chapter 4, republican Central America became the geographical center of the interregional bridge between US possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Central America’s regionalism thus issues from a shared experience of Spanish colonialism and then transnational self-government, insertion into the world economy, numerous military interventions by the United States, and reaffirmation of transnational solidarities.7 Here, we look at insertion into the world economy and reaffirmation of regional connections in chapter 3 and aspects of Central American politics, nationalism, and transnational governance in chapter 4. After a few notes on Mexico, international political solidarity and regional cooperation come into focus to highlight aspects of Central American regionalism. Central America’s formation and Mexico’s creation left a question unanswered: Is Chiapas Central American? Note that the circumstances of Mexico’s initial independence in 1821 left Chiapas initially tied to Guatemala



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(Colburn and Cruz S 2007, 23; Woodward 1985, 475–77). It was not predetermined where the region’s fate would lie. Returned to southern Mexico, it remained a mark of the potential and actual entwinement of Mexico with Central America. A medium-range history can illuminate Mexico’s interest and involvement with Central America in the twentieth century (Campbell 1988). This may have lifted since the beginning of the Sandinista insurgency. But, in addressing the question of Mexico’s historico-civilizational position, we cannot ignore its deep engagement with the United States. Modern Mexico was continually bound to the processes of intercivilizational engagement of the United States and therefore North America, and subject also to distinct internal or endogenous process of formation from the Republic’s inception onward. Culturally, both were heavily influenced by Enlightenment trends and were prominent in the era of republican revolutions (Hamnett 2006, 6). As we note in chapter 5, US business interests were vital to the provision of rail and finance while also staking strong claims to land and oil (Hamnett 2006, 216–18; Hart 2002, 106–30). As such, Mexico stands apart from Central America, which, outside of the economic domain, was less enticed by America culturally. Despite a shared history of Spanish colonialism, this categorical distinction seems valid. At the same time, the Mexican Republic developed new intricate ties to Central America in the last three decades of the twentieth century. The flow of migrants and refugees is one visible form of connection. There are unfinished processes of North American integration, and the process has continued. The tradition of unionism derived from the nineteenth century was not the only regional impulse. Contemporary regionalism manifests in transnational solidarities around human rights and fragile citizenship (Roniger 2011). The first additional topic to focus on here is international political solidarity. The living activity of numerous exile communities since the 1970s has included making international links across the world. The links have been instruments through which democratic and revolutionary politics and political models have been communicated. As well as other examples discussed in the current work, I include the international solidarity and human rights networks revolving around emigre communities. The latter sustain the memory of struggles for human rights. Those communities thrived on a host of solidarity activities that enact émigré memory, a kind of transnational recollection and forgetting in which national identity matters even though it is loosened from the nation. Émigré memory transnationally communicates and shares, first, acts of memorymaking from back home and, second, controversies about commemorating the past, particularly in lands of violent repression, such as Guatemala and El Salvador.8 Transnational networks of solidarity were the international foil for direct US support for the regimes in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador and New Right networks operating in the region. Human rights and solidarity

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activism outside of Central America has done more than establish an international sphere of the region’s conflicts. It has unlocked political sites overseas in which emigrants, refugees, and exiles simultaneously express both national and transnational identities. The international spread of solidarity added to global awareness of the region qua region. The second additional topic is regional cooperation. Coinciding political settlements among multiple actors helped end bloody civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Several regional initiatives came from international bodies, including the UN, the Non-Aligned Movement and some NGOs, as well as from governments in Panama, Venezuela, and Mexico.9 The Esquipulas Peace Plan symbolized the region’s termination of civil warfare and political violence and a turn to human rights (Roniger 2011, 121–27). Involvement of the Organization of American States and the UN emphasized the transnational character of the agreement. The path from there became more difficult and uneven as states committed to entrench human rights. Assessment of how far short of the accords’ agreed objectives nations’ application has fallen is beyond the current work. Furthermore, the durability of that spirit of regional cooperation and integration is yet to be determined. The question is, as Luis Roniger observes, whether regional public agencies can extend cooperation to “support an ethos of increasing democratization, citizen participation, and multilevel governance” (Roniger 2011, 183), thereby opening up dimensions of the social and of political participation and sovereignty not subsumed by capitalism. Certainly, demilitarization helped increase the prospects of enhanced sovereignty for states, as well as augmenting peace and security. The process undertaken in the late 1980s and early 1990s to arrive at several agreements for peace, environmental conservation, and security brought a new generation of political leaders to the normative experience of regional negotiation (Girot 2005). Movements of solidarity had given visibility to regionalism. They fueled strong regional identities derived from a spectrum of experiments with multigovernmental organizations (some of which lasted) Together, they advanced regionalism. In the next section, the corresponding stimuli to regionalism were indigenous identities. THE CARIBBEAN The Caribbean is widely regarded as a crossroads in cultural, economic, demographic, and political traffic. While I address economic and some political flows in chapters 3 and 4, here I concentrate on intercivilizational engagement in the dimensions of migration and culture. Broad flows define the island region as a hotspot of intercivilizational engagement, in which Dutch,



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Spanish, French, and British empires all acted and all left their mark. While the Caribbean draws in coastal Central America, the Gulf of Mexico, and the coasts of Guyana and Venezuela, the impulses of those countries are not the central dynamic of Caribbean connectedness.10 What is central is the interconnection of the archipelago with Africa and Europe. Here, that is the focus. The “terra-oceanic” form of the archipelago lends it a unity, even as island societies and national states divide it (Almeida 2011, 7). Looking inward, we find subregional geographical patterns (Fernández-Armesto 2003, 11–12). The Lesser Antilles diverge from the large islands. In the Greater Antilles, Cuba and Haiti produced nationalist and antislavery imaginaries of sovereignty, out of the historical intersections foundational to their institution (Olson 2016, 113). These were “connected histories” attuned to metropolitan developments in Spain and France. A different scenario in Jamaica produced a British response on a global scale. Jamaica for a period following the Morant Bay riot in 1865 was at the eye of the British international storm about slavery (Hall 2002). Left to be an experiment in free black labor following abolition, its failure to flourish put British possessions in question domestically. The debate in Britain at this time was furious in tone and reached a multinational public sphere and developments in the Caribbean were at the center of the controversy. In contrast, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic struggled to overcome Spanish legacies and authoritarian centralism and a fresh short wave of US domination following the US-Spanish War. All the evident diversity begs the question, what unifies the Caribbean as a region? The historical flows of intercivilizational engagement through migration and the creolization of identities, and through intellectual emergence, give Caribbean societies regionalism. I treat each in turn. Migration begins with the devastating depopulation brought about by the six Spanish invasions. Populations entirely transplanted via slavery, indenture, and migration in the wake of the desolation of indigenous inhabitants wholly transformed the archipelago. Slavery drove the settlement of the conquered islands with de-territorialized peoples from elsewhere (Cohen 2008, 127–28). The most complete transformations were St Domingue and nineteenth-century Cuba—the exemplar of the “second slavery” with its grip on sugar and tobacco production in international markets (Tomich 1991; Hopkins 2018, 390–95). While the apparatus, mode of production, and lines of trade are gone, cultural legacies persist. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, new streams of migrants came to the region. Many were from Atlantic Europe. However, Indian, Japanese, and Chinese workers also came to and through the Caribbean in a minor yet overlooked stream issuing from the expansion of Europe’s imperial powers (Hincapie 2016). They joined British, Portuguese, French, and Spanish immigrants. In this period, emigration within the region and to the countries on its rim lifted. In the early twentieth

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century, migrants arrived in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Colombian coastal cities in significant numbers. Along with arrivals from the Middle East, they renewed multi-ethnic populations of the region’s major coastal cities. Constant creolization has been an integrative force in Antillean modernity. It is linked directly to emigration and delimited diasporas (Cohen 2008, 124–35; Maglia 2016). As such, creolization is the intercultural fusion of diaspora dynamics with other patterns of identity creation. This process cuts across segmentation and stratification in the region. In the span of languages and demography and in the influences of diaspora networks, this Antillean modern exceeds colonial modernity (Maglia 2016, 286). Yet it cannot be separated from the social-historical of imperialism. The Caribbean has drawn peoples to it from every continent and uniquely transformed them. To produce such diasporas, people from the region have set migration patterns matched by few others (Chamberlain 1998). They have followed migration routes between island homes and the metropolitan centers of the postimperial First World in a circle of migratory movements (Richardson 1992, 133–34; Goulbourne 2002). Creolization occurs binationally too. Even where migrants strive to re-create home culture through architecture, literature, the arts, religion, and cuisine in places of settlement, underlying beliefs shift in both the place of origin and the place of settlement. Such a binational process of change is a transnational aspect of creolization. Finally, diasporas are increasingly understood as migrations and interconnections between the islands, which have produced dynamics as vital as those of the colonial empires and often going beyond them. The link of former British colonies to the United Kingdom is the strongest transatlantic nexus. Indeed, it is not too bold to claim a transfiguration of national identities into a Caribbean Commonwealth identity in English-language islands and through regional institutions resulting from interconnection (Goulbourne 2002, 29–30). Migrants communicate the experiences of work, sport, unemployment, racism, and belated social mobility in the United Kingdom back through family and peer networks to their place of origin. Regular British West Indian visits to the English Caribbean reinforce family connections across the Anglosphere, giving visitors the opportunity to renew relationships and fulfil obligations (Stephenson 2002). There is a modernist family model in the reciprocity sustaining such international connections, which include care of members of cross-Atlantic families. The strength of connection with family, community, and homeland led increasing numbers of emigrants to return to the West Indies in the 1980s and 1990s (Goulbourne 2002, 184–205). Through circular movements and in the connections sustained in the nexus, the diaspora commemorates its own existence and communicates



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family and social memories of ancestral origins to kin and even to their peers in the United Kingdom. The pattern is not limited to Britain. The circular migration to French, Dutch, and Canadian cities has been far lower in volume but should not be forgotten. In magnitude, connections into the United States are another matter. Prewar immigration brought highly skilled professionals to American cities. They made large ex-patriate black communities, a development underestimated in historical and sociological research and frozen out of public understanding (James 2002). Millions moved in the postwar period. Cubans and Haitians made Miami home. New York and other US cities host Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans, Haitians, and Dominicans in large numbers. Ex-patriate communities there and in Europe came to constitute a major source of tourism by the end of the century, due to the rate of return visits to the Caribbean (Duval 2004). Like their counterparts in Britain, many chose to return to their ancestral homes and in slowly increasing numbers. The flows through the Caribbean characterize ontological aspects of existence as well as structural practices. One does not need to retire to post-colonialism to be able to assess black nationalism and consciousness from a critical and historical sociological perspective. It was in the Western Hemisphere that a black activist intelligentsia began capturing a crystallizing Pan-Africanist consciousness.11 Contact, acquaintance, and encounter between different people and organizations created an alternative regional public sphere of engagement for intellectuals, labor unionists, and black activists in Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, New York, London, the US South, and Mexico (Santiago-Valles 2000). At slightly different times, Edouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire, Martin Delaney, Marcus Garvey, C. L. R. James, Alain Locke, George Padmore, Derek Walcott, and others critically countered civilizational discourses with an energetic creole and Africanist imagination (Shilliam 2012; Maglia 2016). Furthermore, Africanist imagination became an intergenerational black consciousness arising from intercivilizational engagement. As an activist intelligentsia, black intellectuals shared within and across generations, which became an emancipatory tradition, which was also able to recover bodies of knowledge from previous popular movements of abolition and republicanism (Santiago-Valles 2000). Thus, they exercised a regional sphere of exchange, which could be agonistic in tone. Moreover, there were heterogeneous currents. Especially in West Indian versions, the politics of emancipation combined race, nation, and class analytics in their worldview and political practices. Often, this underlined the tensions between African and Caribbean-American tensions in the United States. Differences noted, let us also recognize unifying problematics laid over productive differences and divergences. Even asserting black consciousness and searching for continuity with African origins and observing Caribbean artistic, musical,

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literary, and religious practices were acts of cultural affirmation (Cohen 2008, 131). The practices of this public sphere amount to such an assertion transmitted across generations. C. L. R. James may be this intelligentsia’s most recognized member. His formation as an intellectual represents the dynamics of his generation and so warrants further reflection. He stands out as a well-traveled and encyclopedic representative of the West Indian diaspora who fought colonialism while admiring many of Europe’s cultural goods. While he was a product of both his Trinidadian and English homes (Hall 2002, 8–9), there were layers of complexity to his thought issuing from his wide travels; activism in different countries; and exposure to a broad spectrum of political, artistic, and musical trends (Worcester 1995). Along with his Marxism (Buhle 1987, 201–5), his encounters with other traditions encouraged a universalism in his thought. He wrote Atlantic research, highlighting class, race and ethnicity, and social movements for a broad-based audience. Beyond James, encounters were the lifeblood of the black public sphere. Maintaining them required work to which many contributed. James was particularly active in promoting interwar meetings and congresses. Along with others, he was part of a generation to which future nationalists could look. The vibrant circuit of migrants and expatriates had many roots, but the Caribbean was an important one promoting intercivilizational engagement of a politico-cultural kind. Innumerable migratory movements through the diaspora produced sites through which networks of the intelligentsia could add to regional consciousness. ANDEAN AMERICA Eisenstadt distinguishes the region of Andean America by its hierarchical and corporatist solidarities embracing the Indian lower classes (Eisenstadt 2002, 50). With this definition, he includes Mexico, along with Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. This rightly diverges from a strictly geological definition which incorporates Chile and the latter three countries into a physical geography revolving around the Andes. Partly following Eisenstadt, I opt for a cultural and social-historical geography, refocusing the analytic of regionalism on indigeneity and national-popular histories. Andean America’s multinational regionalism issues from the thick endurance of indigenous nations and peoples specific to Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. The intersections of indigenous nations with historical populism and then late-twentieth-century progressive movements shaped the region’s engagement with Latin American modernity. Throughout this historical development, Euro-America and indigenous America have interacted to generate a multicivilizational region in the Andes. Intercivilizational engagement, especially in the domain of



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political interaction, is the point of my demarcation of a three-state Andean region. I take historical populism and late-twentieth-century resurgence as two phases of state relations with indigenous nations as a focus. In the Andean American region, the struggle for cultural reproduction and revival was more conspicuous and more extensive. Bolivia, Peru, and, later, Ecuador constituted republics in the 1820s in the fallout from Latin America’s revolutions.12 During the revolutionary decades, regions that were in south Gran Colombia, Peru, and Upper Peru devolved into the republics of Andean America. Like much of Hispanic America, the new republics embraced formally liberal constitutions and policies. There is enough commonality in the histories of all three nations to invite comparison. Where preceding chapters cover commonalities of popular corporatism and neoliberalism, I address the ideology of indigenismo and its successor phase in this chapter. The “Indian question” or “Indian problem” was a civilizing discourse present in the whole of Latin America. Often described as indigenismo, and developing from the 1930s to the 1970s, this ideology encompassed a spectrum of perspectives about indigenous civilization and Latin America’s First Nations (Larraín 2000, 98–100; Bonfil Batalla 1987; Stavenhagen 1992, 427–29; Rodriguez 2012). Although its main proposition is the preservation of the tangible heritage of First Nations, indigenismo approximates a more or less integrationist transnational current of modern thought that crystallized in an atmosphere of sympathy for the Mexican Revolution and for Marxism and social democracy. Indigenismo corresponded with myth of mestizaje racial democracy prevalent in other countries in the subcontinent insomuch as it subsumed Latin America’s ethnic multitude under the monocultural sign of “the mixed race,” while assuming the premise that indigenous cultures could not survive modernization. In political terms, the ideology produced a deficit of recognition of enduring cultures. Anthropologists, painters, writers, and journalists too ostensibly used it to defend indigenous values against the European heritage, but within a broadly integrationist paradigm (Manrique 2000). Operative in highly corporatist states, indigenism entails the absorption of living indigenous peoples and cultures into one national people, which in turn inherits an ageless indigenous heritage. What is lost in this is the diachronic impulse of cultural change animated in living indigenous communities.13 Indigeneity intersected populist and other networks of patronage in the era of indigenismo. The clientelistic coordination of politics applied to all three countries, regardless of the government in office (Yashar 2005, 64; Ribeiro 1971, 161–71). Despite regular military seizure of power in the postwar period in Peru, APRA was able to sustain networks of patronage through its control of the lower echelons of the state. Bolivia’s extraordinary experience of MNR government in the 1950s only entrenched clientelism. Velasco Ibarra’s governments in Ecuador fostered network relationships with union

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and indigenous federations and the oligarchic right to sustain clientelism. To designated indigenous peoples, this intersection at this juncture facilitated an autonomy of sorts designed as cultural isolation and self-managed development, even while control over political agency was maintained through formal and informal networks. The trade-off in Ecuador and indeed Peru were integrative laws of ley comunas and a provision in Peru’s 1920 Constitution, which gave legal guarantees that traditional communal lands would be protected. Thus, indigenist laws recognized land in exchange for romantic yet ultimately denigrating denial of the value of indigenous peoples (Manrique 2000, 226–30). In this, we find an example of the legal position under national-popular regimes, which in consequence—intended or otherwise—arrested the expression of living indigenous culture. The tradeoff was not to last. From the 1970s, an increasingly vibrant expression of indigenous politics and differentiated pattern of political organization began to emerge in Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia (Rodriguez 2012; Selverston-Scher 2001). Peru’s record varies sharply from Bolivia and Ecuador’s. The ultra-Maoist and ultraviolent Shining Path had a disproportionate impact up until the 1990s, provoking strong state surveillance of the rest of the population, unions, and urban social movements. Nonetheless, local indigenous federations were able to press claims on state authorities. But in the absence of national coordination, their position remained fragmented and ineffective (Yashar 2005). In Bolivia and Ecuador, indigenous movements have had complex relationships with democracy and civil society (Selverston-Scher 2001; Van Cott 2008; Zamosc 2007; Fuentes 2014), despite their essential contribution to the general resurgence in conceptions of citizenship (Yashar 2005). Furthermore, legal pluralism in the region deepened the potential for radical democratization (Domingues 2008, 30–32), a development favorable to indigenous federations. Overall, movements and their peak bodies are powerful contributors to democracy, legal plurality, and citizenship. They invent base organizations from below, force unusual kinds of alliance politics, and compel reform in existing institutions and parties. Yet their actions and internal divisions can detract from conditions of democratic determination and diminish the democratic temper of national representative politics. With intricate and ambivalent positions in society and relations with progressive political parties that could alter quickly, social movements in the Andes developed a regional dynamic. Greater internal coordination and alliance-building, cross-border linkages produced an intra-regional zone that acted as an exemplar of local participatory politics eroding the legacy of indigenismo. Alliance-making strengthened the position of federations struggling to defend their lands against the attrition resulting from the mining and logging industries. As



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we see in chapter 7, this fueled the revival of indigenous civilization and its nations in the transnational activism of the 1990s. CONCLUSION The conception of regionalism used here takes as its subject some of the most abundant intercivilizational zones of the Americas in terms of the social-historical institution of meaning; the flow of peoples; and the fusions, confrontation, and combinations of cultures. In the way I have elucidated it, regionalism manifests at two levels. First, I see regionalism occurring in cross-border zones and larger regions internal to states. At a second level, civilizations, empires, and republics create multicivilizational and multinational regions over a larger landmass in great part through interaction in the four dimensions of intercivilizational engagement. My case studies here are representative of intercivilizational interaction. It is not my intention to try and capture the full variety of specific contexts in which social imaginaries and the imagination produce regional worlds. That is a task beyond the current objectives, which are focused on a sketch of the relationship of intercivilizational engagement with regionalism and application of that sketch to six case studies. I continue one aspect of regionalism in the next chapter. The indigenous movements in the three countries of Andean America contributed to a wider indigenous modernity at the end of the twentieth century. The socialhistorical institution of indigenous Americas and the collective activity of its surviving peoples, nations, sovereignties, and culture is the topic of the next chapter. Its significance has been great for the past and may well be for the future of the hemisphere as well. NOTES 1. It is hard to see why he leaves Texas out, given the dense engagement of First Nations with Hispanic and Anglo-Americans at least in the nineteenth century. See Reséndez (2005, 37–55). 2. It should be noted that Hispanic America included a neglected Afro-Latin component (Andrews 2004). 3. In the scholarly domain of the controversy, the principal views have revolved around the consequences of intercultural recognition in the context of renegotiated liberalism and the challenge of taking this further in the wake of poly-ethnic state management of language and culture (Kymlicka 1995, 175–77). The debate touched on how liberal conceptions of citizenships stand opposed to communitarian ones.

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Abbey contends that Taylor’s incorporation of a politics of recognition into liberal philosophy and models of government represented an untried interculturalist position in the controversies of the period. Gagnon and Iacovino argue for an open multinationalism in place of the aggressive nationalism of this very period, and in doing so also keep faith with Taylor’s views, as analyzed by Abbey (Gagnon and Iacovino 2007; Abbey 2009). The Taylorian perspectives best transcend the fractious polarities of the end-of-century controversies around multiculturalism, while also illuminating the contingency of Canadian and Quebecker nationalism. See also de Oliveira who extends Laforest and Taylor’s position based on the moral insult implicit in the historical denial of recognition (2002). For a later retrospective, see Taylor (2012). 4. If the current author also centers the readers’ focus on Sao Paolo and Rio in chapter 2, the intention is to redress that imbalance in this section. This is Ribeiro’s focus in his later socio-demography (2000), especially in his discourse on the “constellation of cultural areas” (177). 5. I use the contemporary designation of the Northeast as the states of Rio Grande do Norte, Paraiba, Pernambuco, Maranhão, Piaui, Alagoas, Sergipe, and Bahia. 6. Da Cunha’s voice was that of a conservative in a large, diverse, and influential debate about Afro-Brazilians and the national character (Blake 2011). Evidently, the advocates of nordestino were not the only inhabitants of the cultural public sphere of the 1930s. 7. Earlier rebellions made August Sandino and Farabundo Marti heroes for many in the region, and indeed throughout Latin America. 8. On home memory, see Hatcher (2018), whose research is inspired by Ricœur, Jan Assmann, and Gramsci. Memory in the United States faces challenges in achieving visibility when the position of Central Americans is subsumed in larger latino communities (Rocco 2014, 81–84). 9. On the last, see Campbell (1988, 288–89). 10. Writing as a political scientist, Molineu asks why the Caribbean in lumped in with the rest of the Americas in foreign policy matters and scholarship (1986, 52–53). 11. Thoroughgoing “return to Africa” advocates were few and their projects generally met with little success. Garveyite and Rastafarian efforts were spectacular but unsustainable. More broadly, the whole movement of Pan-Africanism included influential intellectual leaders, social theorists, activists, and literary figures who maintained dialogue between transatlantic and circum-Atlantic Africans and Americans (Santiago-Valles 2000; Anderson 2008, 303–7). C. L. R. James also emphasized the symbolic potency of Africa interpreted as a metaphor (Worcester 1995, 35–38). 12. If we think solely in terms of topography and geological form, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela are in the Andean corridor. However, the circumscribed Andes treated here centers on the social-historical survival of indigenous nations and their impact on state formation, politics, and culture. The picture is different for Chile. 13. Assuming an understanding of diachronic dynamics, Turbino argues that “cultures are conserved through change” (Turbino 2013, 611).

Chapter 7

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Pre-Colombian civilizations were circumscribed by a radically different social imaginary. They were world-ordering cultures that shaped landscapes according to preconceptions, established trade routes, constructed forms of diplomacy, and a developed cosmological order. Not all built cities and empires as Andean and Meso-American civilizations did. But they all ordered worlds in sophisticated and complex ways. As I argue elsewhere, indigenous America replenishes itself through ontological resources and living traditions, even though it is no longer engulfed in its precolonial imaginary (Smith 2009). I imply a unity of sorts prior to the Spanish invasion, a universe of meaning that—in a hermeneutical sense—exhaustively informed indigenous relationships to the world. The unity was sufficient to serve as a whole juxtaposition to the ontology, economy, and statehood of invading European civilization. With this imaginary and with the capacity to ontologically replenish instituted indigenous modernities, indigenous civilizations confronted and continue to confront Euro-American worlds. The vision of two worlds, two civilizing projects, and two potential futures in conflict and competition may simplify the complexity of the imaginary institution of multinational and multicivilizational Americas (see Bonfil Batalla 1987), but it is also a provocation or rather a means of reinterpreting the character of Atlantic modernity in the present. To do so, I invoke the notion of indigenous modernities in this chapter to canvass contemporary forms of agency, politics, and consociation affecting the social and political landscape of nations and regions. Several points of critical reconstruction and addition are necessary in respect of civilizational analysis and historical and comparative sociology, if we are to prosecute this argument. Considering Axial civilizations, Eisenstadt notes the absence of the basic ontological tension of transcendental and mundane planes of understanding from indigenous civilizations (Eisenstadt 2002). 173

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This position is inadequate from both a theoretical and analytical standpoint, and indeed from political and normative perspectives. The position issues from a conception of civilizations are not fully shared in the current work. As such, some additional points are needed to present a different picture of indigenous civilizations qua civilizations. Indigenous cosmologies were immanent and presentist and based on a cyclical ontology of time; indeed, they were not transcendental or teleological. Yet the tension of axiality need not be the exhaustive definition of complexity of cosmological vision and therefore the potential premises of civilization. Pre-Colombian civilizations had sophisticated and complex cosmologies via which indigenous peoples comprehended the universe, their world (Abya Yala in Andean America), and the nonhuman world. Furthermore, those same cosmologies framed the construction of interrelationships between human and nonhuman worlds, between ecology and culture. Those surviving elements, where they have been maintained and encoded as memory in a manner of continuous traditions have civilizational qualities in modernity. The contrast with Western Christianity is plain. Beyond this, the economic forms of life in Mesoamerican, Andean American, and non-imperial social formations also show dissimilarity with the invading forces. Pre-Colombian civilizations variously encompassed noncapitalist patterns of trade, transport, communication, and agriculture. Apart from historic Amerindian empires, the form of structured political authority, as best we might know, bears little resemblance to European states. Overall, the world historic connection of Europe and the Americas was manifestly a collision of radically different imaginaries. European Conquest violently disordered the instituted social imaginary of the existing civilizations in the Western Hemisphere. How have indigenous nations, peoples, and cultures survived? The cultural annihilation of indigenous worlds was far from complete, even if the integrity of their universes of meaning was split asunder. The survival of communal modes of living and recovery of myth, language, memory, and identities are instances of modern renewal. Indigeneity resurfaced with a higher profile in a pattern of independent indigenous politics. In more recent years, since the 1960s, movements have added to indigenous resurgence through struggles for land and ecology, recognition, and social justice (Singh 2005, 2011; Hall and Fenelon 2009; Tully 2000). From a civilizational perspective, the continuity and weight of indigenous presence is now more potent in the Western Hemisphere than at any time since the nineteenth century. Furthermore, with ongoing intercivilizational engagement, contemporary identities, myths, and ethnological visions are transnationalized and brought to others in the present age. The circulation of images of indigeneity after the exhaustion of assimilationist strategies of American states is a process of intercivilizational exchange.



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A notion of indigenous modernities provides a way of upgrading historical, sociological perspectives. The phrase “indigenous modernities” has been theorized in respect of Australian Aboriginal civilization’s collision with Britain and with Australia’s settler society (Rundell 2017, 144–57) and used more widely (Singh 2009, 2011). The multiple environments and dynamics of activism lend indigenous modernities an exceptional degree of diversity (Singh 2011). More specifically, the particularities of this kind of activism generated coalition and alliance politics, which has assisted renewal projects in communities and among peoples heavily impacted by colonialism. Globally, the result is a different language of rights, identity, development, and modernization. In the political expression of indigenous modernities, we can detect a new democratic theater of ideas on sovereignty and political autonomy. This concept has one application in the Americas. As affirmed earlier, the mainstream notion of civilization excluded indigenous peoples from the core of Euro-American societies, marginalizing them territorially and in the popular imagination. The revival of indigenous cultures constitutes a phase of recuperation, reconstruction, and affirmation of indigenous modernities and civilization. Since the 1960s, social movements have increasingly challenged the indigenist romanticization of historical first-people cultures fostered after colonialism in popular culture, the human sciences, and law (Hall and Fenelon 2009). America’s indigenous peoples have declared the term “nations” relevant as their mode of agency. This is not “traditional” in the sense of static and stable. Rather, indigenous movements, through their agency and interpretive expression, enact and replenish the imaginary significations of “nation” and “tradition.” Furthermore, indigenous revival has helped to transform the capacity for modern social agency (Silva 2009; Mota and Wagner 2021). In fact, it is not transformation alone that is characteristic of this modernity but also widespread recognition that belief in cultural states of timeless essence and policies of assimilation are each mistaken. Public mobilization reveals that indigenous societies are dynamic and have always been so. This conception of indigenous agency and the cultural renewal enhancing indigenous civilizations bring the last four decades of the twentieth century into focus as far as an analysis of intercivilizational engagement in the Americas is concerned. In this chapter, I analyze the movements empowering creative renewal of indigenous civilizational and cosmological heritage. Western and American sovereignties stand contested because of the collective agency of indigenous movements asserting autonomy and their own remade civilizational traditions. I want to examine how indigenous movements and civilizational visions envision a plurinational vision of sovereignty counterposed to liberal republican statehood. In North America, this goes

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beyond the scope of juridical determination, while in South America it advances cultural pluralism and plurinationality as a new form of citizenship. Most models proposed suggest a fresh compact with the state as a means to refound coexistence between nations and peoples, indeed between civilizations.1 CIVILIZATION AND COLONIZATION Two features of relations between Euro-America and indigenous America distinguish Latin America from North America. First, apart from the Southern Cone countries, the civilizational balance is fundamentally different. Despite the exercise of assimilationism in many countries (or resolving “the Indian problem”), the presence of indigenous peoples has higher visibility than in the northern continent. Latin American countries—especially in the Andean American region—are better characterized as “nations of nations” in this respect. Numerically, some 90 percent of Latin America’s First Nations are concentrated in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico, and it is in these countries that the greatest level of movement mobilization has occurred (Yashar 2005; Brysk 2000).2 To be sure, their material and cultural well-being has been under constant threat from endemic poverty; environmental destruction; military violence; civil war; and the expansion of capitalist agriculture, logging, ranching, and mining. Despite this—or perhaps because of it—the indigenous resurgence in Latin America has been one of the most striking examples of the late-twentieth-century global renaissance in indigenous politics. Second, the segmented social order—Latin America’s imaginary if you will— has created an enduring public sphere of indigenous spaces (Guerra and Lempérière 1998; Avritzer 2002). While caution is needed before assuming the presence of a deep pluralism, we can conclude that multiracial and multi-ethnic contexts have generated plurality of a kind in which coexistence is possible, even where it is underlined by ongoing civil conflicts and violence. Belief in racial democracy legitimized both coexistence and separation (Hernández 2016). Entire enclaves outside of monopoly control by authorities were important from the start of the twentieth century. Based largely on the example set in the early twentieth century by the Mexican state, autonomy was established as cultural separation consonant with the segmentary logic of the wider institutional figuration. Even the autonomous zones of local control have rarely received full recognition, though they are products of the corporatist strategies promoted by Latin American states (Stavenhagen 1992). Often, these filled a gap that in the United States and Canada was filled by treaty settlements.



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During the last decades of the twentieth century, nearly all states in the subcontinent began to challenge existing indigenous autonomies. That challenge, along with the transnationalization of indigenous organizations described in the third section, stimulated the outgrowth of indigenous-based or -led social movements. Before examining these Latin American developments, I explore contemporary First Nations revival in the United States and Canada as indigenous modernities. INDIGENOUS REVIVAL I: RED POWER AND REVOLT IN THE UNITED STATES In the United States, territorial sovereignty was established through occupation and a chain of legal decisions. The continental republic was territorial and territorializing in two ways. First, in the process of state formation, control of the terrain and conceptual reconstitution of the land related to the institutionalization of military power. The US Federal Army formed in part out of regard for the frontier as a frontline that was difficult to patrol (Mennell 2007, 240–45). Beyond the receding frontline, lay a zone of perceived incivility and warfare that the army constantly sought to pacify. Warfare and westward expansion redefined the Federal Republic’s borders—in other words, the pacified territory in which order could be guaranteed. Boundaries and Indian reserves shifted frequently to the disadvantage of retreating First Nations while their lands subsequently acquired a colonizer identity. Conflict defined the US relationship to First Nations through this historical process of territorializing the republic. Second, evolutionist interpretations of civilization condensed the multifaceted sophistication of Native American cultures into a juridical form and mostly denied them recognition as living cultures with an ongoing ontological connection to the land. Across the history of the Supreme Court, decisions relating to Native American sovereignty have reduced the totality of First Nations cultures to juridical abstraction (Rundell 2017, 144–57). The role of the courts in interpreting the constitution confers upon them special powers in this most critical area of law. In the eyes of US statesmen, the quasi-juridical compacts reached between the United States and different First Nations throughout this process confirmed the First Nations gradual surrender. Many tribes had long practiced treaty-making through oral negotiation and were accustomed to informal settlements. However, the written form of the treaty, together with evolutionist reduction of First Nations civilization, juridicalized this process entirely. As separate peoples, they acquired a legal personality of sorts through three landmark court rulings. The chief consequence of Johnson v M’Intosh,

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Cherokee Nation v Georgia, and Worcester v Georgia was that First Nations were now “domestic dependent nations” charged to the care of the United States and removed from their historic lands (Howe 2007, 355–56, 412–23). The premise came from frontier seizures, which accumulated to give the impression of ongoing occupation. Jackson’s war on the Cherokee backlit judicial decisions, legislative changes, and property creation, legalizing the seizure of lands across the frontier (Hopkins 2018, 199–202). Subsequent expansion across the plains and into the West advanced the imprint of state law on historic indigenous lands, further corroding Native America’s cartographic memory. First Nations sovereignty appeared to fade as the United States strove toward its ambition of a unified continental republic. Framed by a positivist philosophy of law, First Nations were not reckoned to be foreign, at least not in the terms of the US Constitution. If they were political communities at all, they were of a particular kind. They were considered dependent on the paternalism of the United States because they had submitted to its sovereignty in the treaties they determined. Thus, it was deduced that the United States held a duty of trusteeship for them. In situations where First Nations were removed and relocated, the consequences were wretched. The main deleterious consequence of tribal removal was the dislocation of whole nations from their traditional lands and sources of cultural renewal, amounting to little more than enclosure. Although there are widely varying historical experiences of expropriation—from the Mohawk and Lakota straddling the border with Canada to the Yaqui in the south—the reservation steadily become a common feature. Without ongoing connection to lands as sources of ontological essence, First Nations were easily cast as artifacts of the past. As living beings, they remained. However, away from their ethno-cultural environments, their public identities languished until the 1960s. Outside of reservations, projects of Americanization sought to convert individual members of the First Nations with the purpose of saving them. The policies of civilizing education and integration into mainstream dress, manners, and routines grew in force on the presumption that ‘Indians’ were traditional peoples whose survivors would need to be transformed. Pictured in American society as dying races, the First Nations were unable to achieve recognition as modern subjects with presence and agency. This was a conception of civilization that alienated absolutely; it even framed the understanding of philanthropic opponents of removal (Howe 2007, 342–54; Rundell 2017, 154). To have presence in the world culturally and physically, and yet to be denied the ontological security of guaranteed future existence left Northern America’s surviving pre-Colombian peoples as complete absolute others. The memory of the American Indian seemed to be committed to objectification in museums and archaeological exhibits for good. In this mode, they were objects without subjectivity or voice. Public impressions of these lost historical civilizations were instituted, in part, through such representations. In this



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way, conceptions of civilization drawn from a broad civilizational imaginary abetted a long war on North America’s First Nations. Surviving First Nations people steadily acquired citizenship and lost their separate status. Since the 1960s, “property rights| have increasingly passed from the trusteeship of the United States to sovereign tribes. This underpinned reservation governance and established conditions for a model of First Nations developmentalism (Kalt and Cornell 1994). Autonomy of an elementary kind surfaced: separation from the Federal bureaucracy, particularly the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Around this time, protest began. Peaceful protests—epitomized by the “fish-ins”—along with episodes of armed defiance in the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969 and at the BIA headquarters in Washington in 1972 alarmed nonindigenous America. Highly publicized sieges at Wounded Knee in 1973 and at Pine Ridge in 1975 drew public attention even more closely to the glaring stand-off between First Nations peoples and US governments. Each of these events plunged the members of the United Native Americans, Indians of All Tribes, and the American Indian Movement into struggles with the Federal Government and sometimes pitched battles with state authorities. Those conflicts brought indigenous campaigns for sovereignty out of isolation and into the public realm. One unforeseen consequence was greater common cause found by many tribes, which resulted in a new Indian-ness. First Nations utilized the independence declarations to announce a presence and, in some cases, to reiterate it. This coincided with a creation of new legal instruments enshrining indigenous rights into international law and opening new international avenues for representative organizations to campaign through and campaign around. The norms established in international law transpired in the United States and Canada into recognition of a kind of self-government as a model of incorporation of indigenous law (Levy 2000; Day 2001). In those cases, however, recognition involves containment of indigenous autonomy more than its enhancement. It is time to look at Canada as the other Anglophone North American experience. INDIGENOUS REVIVAL II: RED POWER IN CANADA Canada’s past contains parallel uses of such a notion of civilization. Like the United States, there was an erosion of non-extinguished sovereignty and a deepening juridicalization of First Nations cultures. Historic struggles against colonization inspired First Nations claims for self-determination while simultaneously providing a counterpoint to the civilizational vision of Western and Northwestern Canada, which the state regarded as empty wilderness. Implicit in Canadian and United States conceptions of sovereignty is a central principle of exclusion, irrespective of differences in legal tradition informing the

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two systems of law. These are extant similarities relating to common uses of the notion of civilization. In the twentieth century, relations between Canada and the First Nations have been marred by bureaucratic neglect, lack of intercommunal dialogue, estrangement from the mainstream, lack of appropriate infrastructure, and communal poverty. Across these indicators, little social progress could be shown over the period from the late 1960s, when First Nations issues first lodged in public consciousness. Internation compacts and agreements have not mitigated the social conditions of First Nations either on reserves or more widely in urban Canada. To this situation, social movements have brought a new First Nations public presence. The resurgence has centered on both constitutional reform and campaigns for land and water rights. In respect of campaigns, movements began protests and occupations related to resource control and the integrity of First Nations territories. For constitutional reform, movement leaders looked to Supreme Court determinations for legal artifacts of their civilizational status, producing the unintended consequence that First Nations rights are overdetermined by the public law (Tully 2000). In law, the 1763 Royal Proclamation stood as a foundational reference point for legal battles over sovereignty. Notwithstanding the existing constraints of legal avenues, this proved a focal point resulting in symbolic protest and occupations related to sovereign control over resources. Economically dependent on Federal authorities—but also in a state of revolt—Canadian First Nations movements simultaneously sought to gain autonomy within the strictures of constitutional law by exercising their “nations within” status. Ongoing land rights claims have been directed through treaty agreements and through campaigning. In 1969, the publication of the White Paper “Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy” was met with widespread hostility. The White Paper attempted to articulate a model of citizenship in which Native Americans could find a place. Having failed to “civilize” First Nations with assimilation, the government in Ottawa envisioned a shift in the terms of modern citizenship. In the decades following the White Paper, three perspectives within liberal political theory sought to position the emerging idea of indigenous self-government in respect to Federal sovereignty: the 1969 White Paper, a post-assimilationist so-called Citizens-Plus model, and the minority rights approach expounded by Kymlicka and others (Kymlicka 1995). The White Paper proposed erasure of “special rights” for First Nations on the presupposition that this would result in a more fulsome form of social and political participation. The equitable society would be the objective of social policies that brooked no special treatment or programs for First Nations. Whatever its intentions, the effects of this policy direction would have been further cultural erosion and a decrease in public presence, in all a logic contrary to indigenous activism. The White Paper treated “Indian” identity as ethnicity to be erased. The opposition stirred from First Nations galvanized



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protest, which ultimately led to the 1982 constitutional rescission of the 1763 Royal Proclamation. Yet this also suggested that indigenous claims have been dominated by Canada’s constitutional discourse. Significantly, it opened the gateway to a post-assimilationist phase of political philosophy and governmental policy. A first step in the critique of out-and-out assimilationism was the socalled citizens-plus scheme authored and championed by Alan Cairns (Cairns 2000). For Cairns, a third way between integration and separatism lies in a shared conception of citizenship in which First Nations cultures are respected; citizens-plus conceptualizes a privileged place for minority cultural rights (Cairns 2000). Like the White Paper, it ignores the existing political agenda of First Nations campaigns and fixes on the terms of a just coexistence.3 As an event, the enunciation of this model signaled the exhaustion of Canada’s existing form of citizenship. However, its conceptual reach did not step beyond a liberal notion of indivisible statehood. This became the second step. Kymlicka’s “minority rights” version of liberalism is in tension with indigenous policy as it privileges cultural rights as the foundation of a new indigenous self-determination (Kymlicka 1995). However, Kymlicka seeks a reconstruction of liberalism rather than its abandonment. In another critique of liberalism, Day privileges “Native American political theory” based on alternative and diverging conceptions of sovereignty (Day 2001). Three sharp points come from his critique. First, First Nations political theory stands at odds with Westphalian conceptions of sovereignty. The nonrecognition of indigenous systems of government, philosophy, and historicity has put Canada in the position of dishonoring both First Nations customs of intertribal diplomacy and, arguably, Westphalian norms of interstate relations. On this basis alone, it could be concluded that indigenous political theory and philosophy appear irreconcilable with white settler states that “give” multiculturalism to the “nations within.” In those cases where this gift is termed “autonomy,” it comprises a delegation of administrative responsibility, the restoration of some lands, and permission to practice cultural rights and bilingual education. It does not amount to substantive self-determination struck out of the mutuality of intercultural dialogue. In this sense, argues Day, it does not meet indigenous aspirations (I compare Latin American perspectives on intercultural dialogue further on). On the face on it, this appears to represent the practices of differentiated citizenship. Nevertheless, there is an important challenge to national statehood highlighted by Day’s argument. Constitutional recognition has conferred tribal governance, which, in a post-assimilationist Federal state, arguably amounts to another coexisting sovereignty and should be taken as such. Yet, at the century’s end, full exercise of sovereignties-within was realized in a couple of instances only. The Inuit and Nisga’a Nations had signed agreements which enhance land rights, cultural renaissance, and the exercise

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of customary law (Levy 2000, 307–12; Dorais 1997; Singh 2011, 56). Both cases suggest a variety of relationships at law with the Canadian state. Can Canadian constitutional law go further than this? From an indigenous standpoint, Canada’s 1982 constitutional revisions present a better picture than the United States. Canada’s confederal polity can, in law, encompass pre-existing nations self-defined on the grounds of “inherent rights” incorporated within Canadian sovereignty. However, the 1982 Constitution’s provisions sit in the domain of judicial interpretation. While this is necessary, it is far from sufficient. As Taylor’s argument about negotiations between Anglophone and French Canada goes, the basis for deep recognition is lasting intercultural dialogue grounded in all-round mutual understanding. First Nations rights claims were captured within constitutional and legal discourse and governed by an assimilationist and, from the 1970s, multicultural citizenship. The challenge of indigenous modernity in Canada is development of an extra-constitutional and extra-judicial compact on terms meaningful to First Nations, including a concept of sovereignty encompassing responsibility for intercultural relations against a backdrop of historical asymmetries in power (Day 2001, 184–85). This cannot be the final word on the issue of a legitimate future relationship. Both the Western form of statehood and First Nations political philosophy contain traditions of agonic engagement that could be a basis for multinational statehood in which Canadian and Native American traditions could intermingle to the mutual benefit of both (Day 2001). Models of radical federalism and multinationalism offer different perspectives from within the Western tradition that share ground with indigenous perspectives and could feature in intercultural and internation dialogue. The precondition is symmetry and reciprocity and a widespread acceptance of a plurinational and contingent political culture that gives dialogue depth and assurance.4 For that to occur, reciprocal settlements would have to involve not only the language of legally enshrined arrangements but also horizons of mutual recognition and understanding. As one step, Canada would have to acknowledge in full the law-giving faculties inherent in First Nations communal sovereignties, while also recognizing the substantial urbanization of Native Americans. Such a settlement is one contingent factor for Canada. INDIGENOUS REVIVAL III: FROM FIRST NATIONS REVOLT TO ANTI-QUINCENTENNIAL TRANSNATIONAL ACTIVISM AND BEYOND In the 1980s and 1990s, indigenous resurgence brought large indigenous alliances and coalitions into being. In Latin America, an important distinction



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separates this newly instituted activism from earlier indigenous participation typical of populist and class-based coalitions discussed in chapter 4. This connected them to working-class forces to an extent but suppressed indigenous identity and practices. New organizations and coalitions broke with clientelistic relationships in the following way. Regional and transnational dialogue between peoples with little contact between each other steadily grew. Such informal exchanges have been a form of learning about new styles and strategies of organizing. Although the ties of some of the new coalitions spanned the hemisphere, this section concentrates on Mexico, Latin America, and Central America, with emphasis on Andean America. Alongside of the upsurge in coalition and alliance politics, coalitions with an older pedigree found new agency. As a result of this newfound agency, relations between American states and indigenous civilization are being tested. There are two sides to this tension and conflict-laden relationship, especially for democratic regimes (Singh 2009). On one hand, indigenous movements assert alternative values and an overarching worldview against the dominant political culture. As such, they enter the political public and variously relativize cultural norms and national debates on the past. By their example, indigenous organizations bring into democratic deliberation a different tempo of politics to accompany alternative values. On the other hand, rights claims and disputes over native title and sovereignty summon the constitutional and juridical dimensions of states and the normative framework of international law. Broadly speaking, indigenous movements are active on both sides of this tension, where constitutional governments are more familiar with the juridical side. The dynamics they set in train extend the plurinational potential of New World states. The international arena is important in the normative transformation of values and the advancement of claims around sovereignty. The UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations aggregated existing constitutional rights and land tenure and instituted new international conventions and declarations. The Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and ILO Convention 169 conferred a framework of status norms for indigenous peoples and a formal legal personality. Both documents established a principle in international law: sovereignty may be recognized where there is no extant treaty in which it is relinquished. This foregrounded unextinguished sovereignty. With both documents, the UN established a set of legal norms applicable to collectives within sovereign states, which compete with the body of sovereignty that the UN itself recognizes. This has occurred even though the UN is a creature of sovereign states. The main vehicle for indigenous rights was the body established by the Declaration and Convention 169 is the Working Group on Indigenous Peoples. The degree to which these rights apply varies, as we shall see.

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Notwithstanding underlying shifts in international norms and the pluralization of conceptions of sovereignty, nation states remain the chief vehicles of political power when it comes to the status of indigenous peoples. Yet, here too, indigenous rights are asserted in an environment in which citizenship itself is contested (Yashar 2005; Stavenhagen 1992). They are further complicated in North and Latin American states by competing sovereignties, existing native title, and aspirations to land rights, and by deep-seated social problems. In Latin America, the scale of mobilization typically gives greater force to indigenous claims and accentuates a contestatory civilizational dimension (Stavenhagen 1992). Furthermore, the absence of lasting treaty agreements means that the relevant legal framework by default is constitutional. However, it is the scale of mobilization in a core of Andean American countries, in Mexico, and in Guatemala that stood out, especially in the 1990s. Working with transnational organizations and domestically with renewed networks and coalitions, indigenous movements have altered the terms of political engagement with states. Alliance-making in subnational environments also occurred, fueling the outgrowth in transnational and regional developments (Mato 2000). There are four regions worth mentioning (see Brysk 2000). In the Mexican provinces of Oaxaca and Chiapas, unheard-of indigenous organizations went into coalition with one another. With a higher profile, Mexico’s indigenous organizations were able to remind the world at large of Mayan survival. In Bolivia, Aymara organizations in both the highlands and the lowlands increasingly prioritized indigenous claims and the indigenous character of the country’s lower classes in the wake of the decline of the katarismo movement of the 1970s and 1980s. With this switch in political expression, independent regional organizations consolidated a social movement base and higher profile and impact in the public sphere. Large regional federations formed in Ecuador to secure the existing indigenous territories at the peripheries of state control, especially the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONIAE) (Zamosc 2007). They were able to influence state policy in the areas of bicultural education and agrarian reform.5 Later, Guatemala’s Mayan movement emerged from the repression of the 1980s to find new life in the anti-Quincentenary network finding life in 1991–1992. In doing so, Guatemalan Indians forged a new panMayan identity through a syncretic reconstruction of heritage. In response to the announcements of celebrations to mark the Quincentenary of Columbus’s intrusion into the Caribbean, indigenous peoples organized protest and opposition. As plans for national commemorations were publicized, alliances were formed up and down the length of the Americas to protest and oppose celebrations of the civilizational Conquest. The alliances were groundbreaking even where they built on established networks. The triumphalist tone of the original plans for Quincentennial celebrations had the



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effect of setting indigenous activists into motion. Opposition was especially loud in Latin America, where nonindigenous social movements—students, women, the urban poor, antiwar, and environmental movements—provided additional ballast with their escalating hostility toward neoliberalism (Silva 2009). An unprecedented level of cooperation and mutual identification of shared interests resulted in continent-wide coalitions.6 New coalitions and movements surfaced in a “born transnational” state (Brysk 2000, 277).7 An example is Guatemala’s indigenous organizations visibly, which assumed coordination of the momentous Second Continental Meeting of Indigenous and Popular Resistance in 1991 in the lead up to the protest year. Through activity in the UN, the International Labor Organization, and the Organization of American States, the alliances internationalized the politics of opposition to the civilizational Conquest. In doing so, they supported movements with low domestic mobilization by including them in trans-community networks (Yashar 2005, 22). Transnationalization not only broadened the scope for protest but also presented a critical politics of coexistence. Transnational movements articulated a language of autonomy, but not the kind of autonomy permitted by assimilationist regimes (Mato 2000). Responses to the Quincentenary asserted a multidimensional vision of autonomy that referred to the preservation of life, cultures, and the world within a new multinational or plurinational form of governance. In other research, I have conducted a textual reading of the major public declarations of indigenous organizations and alliances about the 500-year Conquest (Smith 2009). More than a mere settlement of territorial borders and administrative arrangements, their programmatic documents proclaimed the dignity of indigenous nations. Going further, they posited a utopian horizon of pluralistic coexistence for all. Prime examples of the texts of autonomy that emerged during this campaign are the Quito and Temoya Declarations. The peaceful, pluralistic coexistence sought by antiQuincentennial coalitions affirm a high order of civilizational rapprochement. Asserting both the utopia of a genuine encounter between Euro-America and indigenous civilizations and a process to achieve it, the documentary materials plot the political expression erupting from protest and organizing up and down the two continents. This message came emphatically in the Zapatista rebellion also. The revolt in southern Mexico in 1994 emerged to renounce NAFTA, neoliberalism, and, as the Zapatistas saw it, continuation of the Conquest (Nash 2001). Commitments made for NAFTA by the Salinas administration and subsequent governments to dissolve long-established indigenous communal land holdings in the short term provoked the revolt. However, the rebellion quickly became national in its character and international in impact. Its connection to the Mayan imagination and to circumstances of Mexico’s indigenous peoples

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is more particular and context-bound than is realized in much of the literature generated during the wave of news about its emergence (Jung 2008; Polanco 1995). Zapatista politics may have coalesced on the back of mobilizations against Colombian commemorations. It may have advanced a call to rebel to the rest of the Americas and indeed to the world’s five inhabited continents. However, the solutions that it sought spoke directly to Mexican society, and the vision that it launched echoed a historic Mayan imaginary in ways that did not recur elsewhere. A more thorough revisualization of citizenship, sovereignty, and power confronted the state’s conception of autonomy as limited regional selfadministration for the purpose of cultural protection. If two further factors are considered, the sharp conflict of societal visions seems less astonishing. First, the rebellion was sparked after a phase of more general peaceful protest by campesino communities in Chiapas, which was met with indifference. Second, the discourse of rebellion spoke to an intact legacy of Mayan cosmology as a cultural background informing resistance (Jung 2008). Indeed, the history of the region after the initial Conquest reveals lasting and protracted resistance to the conquest of territory. If one accepts that Mayan cosmology had a lasting potency as a guide to the Zapatista rebellion, then the contents of Zapatista politics become as important as the form of its broadcasts on the Internet which so preoccupy some Western enthusiasts for the EZLN at this time. The other public sphere overlooked in such moments of enthusiasm is the embodied encounter between civil society organizations, NGOs, supportive intellectuals, and other indigenous organizations. The International Encounter against Neoliberalism and for Humanity injected Zapatista politics with a Mayan background into a specific indigenous forum of dialogue among indigenous and nonindigenous activists. Events in Mexico after the Quincentenary do not simply represent a rupture with the past but unfolded out of a historical base of indigenous coexistence with the state (Hamnett 2006, 17–21). Communal lands, available credit for peasant farmers, and the revival of indigenous identity from the 1960s onward, all contributed to the climate in which the EZLN’s insurgency became possible. In this context, Zapatismo disrupted the older state strategy of integration by aggressively putting the state’s conception of citizenship in question. By defending the ideals of community land and the languages and cultures of indigenous peoples the EZLN asserted values of plurinationality and opposed neoliberal restructuring of land tenure. Furthermore, the Zapatistas’s pursuit of political autonomy for Chiapas is a challenge to Mexico’s revolutionary tradition and the institutional creation of PRI state power. That autonomy too posed problems for the nineteenth-century liberal tradition of republican Mexico.



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Both the 1992 protests and the 1994 Chiapas rebellion brought into question the national state in Latin and Central America. Next, I focus on three further problems of plurinational vision of sovereignty and politics: formal constitutional rights, interculturalism, and the quest for equality and security. Constitutional reform brought varying degrees of recognition that reflected the balance of intercivilizational engagement between Euro-America and indigenous nations. The multinational character of Andean American countries resulting from the intercivilizational constellation established at the point of Conquest is increasingly visible, forming a strong trend in constitutional reform. Most constitutions have incorporated collective rights since 1983, but there is more to the inclusion of indigenous rights also (Almut and Detlef 2012, 347–70; Brysk 2000, 249–57, 276–77; Yashar 2005, 150, 257–58; Singh 2011, 58–59; Van Cott 2008, 134–209). Furthermore, of eighteen countries in Latin America, fifteen have ratified the ILO Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (Almut and Detlef 2012, 347). Table 7.1 gives an impression of change by chronology. Table 7.1.  Years of constitutional reform Years of reform

Nation

Character of reform

1983/1998/ 2008/2018

Ecuador

1985 1987

Guatemala Nicaragua

1988

Brazil

1991

Colombia

1992 1992 1993

Mexico Paraguay Peru

1994

1999/2009

Panama, Bolivia, Argentina Venezuela

Interculturalism and plurinationalism supported. A separate chapter on indigenous peoples included. Later amendments uniquely recognize the rights of Earth. Demilitarization; protections for communal lands Autonomy of Miskito-dominated Atlantic regions with a multicultural framework Reaffirmed communal lands; modernization of ethnic identities and multicultural recognition Indigenous land and cultural rights; parliamentary quotas Parliamentary quotas Titling of land under long-term indigenous occupation Inalienable rights to communal lands reversed. Legal rights weakened, particularly in the Amazon Rights-based provisions for indigenous peoples

1989/2005 2009

Chile Bolivia

Parliamentary quotas; cross-border communities recognized and protected (jointly with Brazil) Late democratization of constitutional law; Plurinational and plurilingual recognition and inclusion, interculturalism supported; environmental provisions around Mother Earth included

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From Ecuador in 1983 and Brazil in 1988 to Venezuela in 1999 and Bolivia in 2009, democratic reform has been widespread. Brazil’s 1988 Constitution, along with the rise of social movements that have flourished in democratic spaces, has certainly enabled activism and a redefinition of ethnicity in Brazil. A section on communal land rights in the 1985 Guatemalan constitution bears witness to indigenous success in a country where the level of state violence toward Mayan descendants has been deeply damaging over a long period. There are rights-based provisions for indigenous peoples in the constitutions of Argentina and Chile where surviving populations are small and marginalized. Some constitutions include affirmative plurilingual measures for use of indigenous languages in state bodies. Colombia’s 1991 Constitution is well regarded for its extensive recognition of the notion of usos y costumbres (the contents of customary law) to many spheres of communal life. At the same time, abuses of human rights in the final years of the civil war compromised the practice of constitutional rights with one exception. The Colombian Constitution included and implemented parliamentary quotas for indigenous delegates. Quotas are accepted in the constitutions of Mexico and Venezuela also. Overall, though the recognized population is small in Venezuela, a relationship with the Bolivarian Left had delivered the strongest protections in the hemisphere by the end of the century (Van Cott 2003), with further revisions occurring in 2009. Peru’s 1993 reform reversed indigenous rights. Constitutional change has been the most contested in Bolivia. Conflict in 2008–2009 over reform of the state produced a constitution which mixes political, economic, legal, cultural, and linguistic rights for the thirty-six identified indigenous nations with liberal norms of citizenship. The conflict signaled a shift from a populist unitary state to a self-styled plurinational and intercultural one. The new Constitution assumes that collective, individual, and environmental rights (or those of Pachamama, or Earth Mother) can coexist with each other and with constitutional provisions for social market reform of the economy. It legislates for plurilingual education and expressly incorporates indigenous forms of memory and knowledge. Much of the process of constitutional reformation was a struggle. If constitutional reforms are pluralist, or plurinationalist in some instances, where does such pluralism come from? Struggles over constitutions “result not from the desire for a general abstract framework that would be previous to concrete social life, but rather as an answer to the concrete dynamics of individual claims, social struggles, and augmented pluralization, which express themselves in other institutions in the state and society, as an answer of social agents (especially, though not only, judges and constitutionalists) to the problems entailed by those elements” (Domingues 2008, 36). This is clearly an “aspirational constitutionalism which envisages social change rather than



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the preservation of order” (Domingues 2008, 33). It reflects the tension of constituent power between the conserving and transformative logics informing constitutionalism (Blokker 2019). Constitutional rule in Latin America has undoubtedly expanded rights and access to political processes for the excluded and thus has, as Domingues observes, reflected a mood of societal change. The extent to which the excluded can influence decision-making and the manner of enfranchisement is thus opened to contestation. The case of Bolivia is illuminating (Turbino 2008, 2013). On one hand, the constitution centers on pluralism in sovereignty, law, language, and culture, the terms of intercultural dialogue, human rights, and rights to live well (buen vivir). It does not sanctify the rights and rulership of oligopolistic capital. On the other hand, the most far-reaching of reforms illuminate limitations on the project of constitutional creation of plurinationality in a re-founded state in which, as Mota points out, power and the use of force are still centralized (Mota 2014, 269). That said, democratization brings spaces for civil society organizations, unions, and social movements entering and making participatory political processes.8 As the rise of contemporary indigenous movements has intersected the wider resurgence of democracy, the inclusion of First Nations into the expanse of citizenship has been an invigorating component of this resurgence. Constitutional reform has put interculturalism on the agenda of several states in this period of conflicts over democracy. What is the conception of interculturalism favored in indigenous discourse? Turbino highlights what it is and what it is not. State-sponsored bilingual education acting as a “manifest discourse” of state-authorized norms and principles for remote indigenous communities has been the mainstream of interculturalism in postwar Latin American states (Turbino 2008, 2013). Although this indigenist model enveloping bilingual education has been reviewed here, there are two further criticisms to briefly mention. First, as a practice, this concept of interculturalism acts to exclude many urban indigenous people. Second, when reduced to language and limited to functionalist versions of education, culture becomes simplified and one-dimensional. The alternative is an emancipatory version.9 Following Castoriadis’s conception of socialization, Turbino argues that actors can reconstruct processes of socialization through intercultural dialogue. If the goal is intercultural education (as it is for the Andean American nations especially), then renewal of educational institutions should be preceded by intercultural dialogue of a symmetrical kind. Such symmetry has potential where the democratic conditions for critique exist, where indigenous people can access the public sphere and a common public culture (Turbino 2008, 171–72). Accessing a common public culture would be essential in realizing the potential for the sort of intercultural dialogue Turbino partly examines and partly advocates as an encounter. To

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this dialogue-as-encounter, indigenous peoples can bring their own rules of conduct where they exercise an autonomy robust enough to form and sustain communities. The emergence of the project of plurinationalism as a postnational state form in the 1990s presupposes autonomy of this sort. Realization of such a model of interculturalism will be more likely where indigenous movements have allies and partners. Relations with democratic, labor, and social movements have been central to the resurgence in the 1990s and beyond, especially at local, regional, and municipal levels where participation was consubstantial with an emergent model of radical democracy in the Andes (Van Cott 2008). Those relationships have brought about “a heightened consciousness of global processes and the broadening of . . . socio-cultural and economic objectives” of indigenous activism (Singh 2005, 64). The reciprocity entailed in intercultural dialogue has produced a twosided transformation of politics for the movements for democracy and for indigenous communities. Such dialogue is widespread in the Andean American countries and is heightened around constitutional reform: The present formal recognition of indigenous rights is often viewed more as integration into the national system than a basic revision of existing legal norms. But it need not be conceived in this way. The title to indigenous land or territory can then be understood as the product of a “recognition space” which emerges between two systems of law with the assumption that traditional laws and customs constitute a legal system. (Singh 2005, 74)

The emergence of the problem of formal rights in an intercultural environment in the 1990s had further repercussions. Formal rights pressed by movements formed the agenda for constitutional reform a decade later in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. In between, further alliance-making with churches, environmental groups, and unions bore an indigenous politics into a wider political domain. There are examples of intercultural dialogue in this democratic process. Bolivia is a lead case in this regard. In Bolivia, indigenous coalitions found a compatible political vehicle in the Movimiento al Socialismo (Fuentes 2014). The level of movement mobilization against privatization in the 1990s (especially water) and at the beginning of the twenty-first century puts the politics of Aymara and Quechua movements on the mainstream agenda. Electoral gains by indigenous parties, or alliances led by them, or by leftist coalitions deeply dependent on indigenous support have cemented proposals for plurinational reconstitution of states on the political agenda of Ecuador (Zamosc 2007). In one vital difference, the express inclusion of plurinationality in Ecuador’s constitution explicitly incorporates a legal avenue (Article 61 and corresponding legal code) for indigenous intervention to protect autonomous lands (Almut and Detlef 2012, 361). In both



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countries, pluriculturalism and plurinationalism are non-negotiable goods as far as many indigenous organizations are concerned. National politics has been redefined by decades-long campaigning and expansion of the span of indigenous intervention. Persistence has kept the contingent potential of these modernities open. By asserting land, life, and language as the sine qua non of existence, most organizations claim cultural and territorial rights as a basis for sustainable development within a plurinational polity. Furthermore, in aiming for a higher point of plurinationality, indigenous movements and have managed to find partners.10 While enunciated initially in Andean America, this is a broader politics, combining critique of neoliberal policies and corruption with principles of solidarity and social justice. It is couched in terms of common objectives of the ontological security of life for communities so that they may flourish in, and on, their own terms. Campaigns for equality and security were more generalized throughout the Americas, as I suggest in this chapter. Furthermore, they are international issues as well as national, regional, and local ones. From a normative perspective, active campaigns for rights over land, subsoil resources, and water—the means of socio-economic security and well-being—should be viewed as equally indispensable to the growth of a democratized citizenship. Land and water are in this sense more than a means or set of resources exploitable under the imaginary of capitalism. They are a wellspring of cultural reproduction and indigeneity itself. This ontology of land and life provided a vision of environmental sustainability in key counter-Quincentennial documents and continues in the politics of indigenous movements in the twenty-first century. Coming at a critical historical juncture, indigenous modernities resonated with the rising of environmental consciousness throughout the world. The protests of 1992 were an important landmark of the hemisphere’s indigenous modernities. CONCLUSION A conspicuous resurgence in indigenous movements has put recognition and the rights of First Nations squarely back on the agenda of many governments, some regional associations, and NGO and UN institutions of the international arena in the last three decades of the twentieth century. National, regional, and transnational alliances acted as important vehicles of activism to bring indigenous peoples into contact with one another and with governmental and multigovernmental institutions in the framework of rights acquired in international law since the 1970s. The confrontation of indigenous civilization with Euro-America in the political arena, in movement campaigns in the public sphere, around reformed constitutions, and conceptions and practices

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of interculturalism brings aspects of indigenous modernities to the fore. Indigenous claims for rights, justice, and land bring an indigenous worldview on ecological guardianship to national and international laws, politics, and economics. In demanding assured sovereignty over land and plurinationality in the polity, indigenous movements seek the basis of economic and ontological security and continuity. In so doing, they summon a cosmology derived from a broader indigenous mythology assailed by colonialism but still with resources to confer a different meaning to the nonhuman world. This politics of indigenous modernities is communicable and in the 1990s sought a genuine encounter with Euro-America. Plurinationality remains on the agenda in Latin America as does the ecological worldview informing it. NOTES 1. In arguing this, I am following Day’s North American perspective on the utopias of New World polities and Turbino’s endorsement of an emancipatory form of interculturalism (Turbino 2013, 2008; Day 2001). 2. The low profile of Peru’s movements is discussed in Yashar’s book in chapter 5 of Van Cott (2008). Added to Guatemala’s Mayan are indigenous peoples in cross-border regions and the Miskito Indians of Atlantic Nicaragua; see Girot (2005). 3. Day (2001) emphasizes Canadian liberalism’s neglect of First Nations. 4. Although not expressed in terms of indigenous collectivities, this is arguably Taylor’s position in the negotiation of plurinational collective identities (Taylor 2004; Taylor and Laforest 1993). 5. When CONIAE conspired a coup in 2000, it found itself disconnected from popular opinion and forces of democratic renewal. The departure from its origins and participation in broader alliance-making in 1992 was substantial. 6. There is an established body of literature on transnationalization of indigenous politics; see, for example, Brysk (2000), Mato (Mato 2000), Jung (2008), and Yashar (Yashar 2005). 7. Silva puts a qualified view on transnationalism, finding only thin evidence on transitional organizing around specifically neoliberal issues (Silva 2009). 8. Yashar characterizes this as ‘political associational spaces” (2005, 75–80). It contrasts sharply with the problem of interculturalism separating Francophone and Anglophone Canada according to Taylor (Taylor 2012). 9. Bolivia better represents the emancipatory in Turbino’s eyes, while Peru is an exemplar of the state-sponsored type (Turbino 2008). 10. In the new century, the unyielding opposition of CONIAE and other indigenous groups to encroachment on indigenous lands led to a break with the Left government of Rafael Correa and former allies when the Correa government supported mining interests and the expansion of the resources sector. The conflict set in train complex dynamics within the state (Bernal 2021; Zamosc 2007).

Chapter 8

Conclusion Civilizational Analysis, Multiple Imaginaries, and the Diverse Americas

Living so long inside the research and composition of a book, much seems crystal clear when repeated by author’s inner voice. Yet such clarity can still often elude readers, leaving them unclear on the main arguments. I want to avoid such a situation by providing a summary of insights around the main theoretical propositions and substantive arguments and findings in this chapter. Along the way, I highlight gaps, which point to potential research agenda. AMERICAN IMAGINARIES IN THEORY The main research question is posed against the backdrop of the imperial colonization of the Americas and the creation of a tri-continental Atlantic modernity. I ask how a mixed paradigm of civilizational analysis and social imaginaries might help us to understand the mix of cities, capitalism, nations, nationalism, and politics from both comparative and transnational perspectives? The response includes theoretical innovations across five imaginaries (metropolitan, capitalist, political, ideological, and nationalist) and historical findings across four dimensions of intercivilizational engagement. The book is not confined to these, but recapitulating theoretical innovations and historical findings can constitute a summary and a holistic response to the question. The first imaginary discussed is the notion of metropolitan imaginaries. This specific concept of imaginary pivots on the paradox of urbanization identified by theorists of urban imaginaries (Silva Téllez 2003; García Canclini 1997). At one level, cities are made by their inhabitants with purposeful intent. What appears as disorder can be tamed, subject to urban design, and harnessed to civilizing processes. At another level, cities are complex and uncontrolled ecologies, made so by the collective imaginary institution. The 193

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imaginary complex sits between “chaos” and attempts to order it, generating both the creation and destruction of institutions, identities, social practices, and the material world. This imaginary complex is as operative in metropolitan as much as provincial cities but is characterized by a qualitative shift to metropolitan social life and creativity in its creation. Arising from mass flows of intercivilizational engagement, the impulses of creativity in the arts of city-making are the most prominent in the nine metropolises I examine. In all nine, metropolitan imaginaries variously intersect other imaginaries as well as instituting some of the major metropolitan nodes of Atlantic modernity. This would imply two further challenges for theory. The first is to extend research on how intersections of metropolitan and other imaginaries animate social creation in major cities. I would anticipate that further substantive investigation across the major regions of the Americas and across a wider range of case studies would produce implications for the theorization of metropolitan imaginaries. The second challenge is to continue theoretical work on the relationship of urban and metropolitan imaginaries, and the points of differentiation between them. If this is indeed a gap, more substantive research on metropolitan and regional cities would also inform reconsideration of that relationship. The discussion in chapter 3 aggregates a distinctive social imaginaries approach to capitalism. According to Castoriadis, the capitalist imaginary institutes primary significations of calculability, value, market rationality, and market determinism. Furthermore, the capitalist imaginary creates tendencies to generate class struggle, to pursue the unachievable subsumption of opposition and critique, and to tragically continue the unending pursuit of growth and the conquest of nature. Together, they give capitalism the appearance of a rational system functioning according to the laws of nature. There is little reason to disagree about these points. However—pace Castoriadis’s critique of Weber—the imaginary significations he elucidates furnish economic life with core meanings in the manner that the spirit of capitalism, as understood by Weber, also does. Thus, there are parallels between the two thinkers. To both perspectives, we can add that the capitalist imaginary institutes diversity and diversification of figurations of polity and economy or, in terms used by Joerges and others, the political constitution of capitalism (Joerges, Stråth, and Wagner 2005; Wagner 2008). A supreme abstraction of the capitalist imaginary is to make the economic sovereign in modernity. The instantiation of this imaginary, however, occurs in defined civilizational, regional, and national contexts in which economic life acquires worldly, moral, cultural, and political contents, as Árnason points out. American contexts are among those. In the Americas, we find multiple figurations of polity and economy grounded in divergent institutions, doctrinal interpretations, practices, and



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axes of conflict. However, pondering the ideological imaginary, a gap in the theoretical exposition in chapters 3 and 4 points toward potential revision and further research. Doctrines of political economy are ideological in a sense implicit in Ricœur’s elucidation of the ideological imaginary. They are a domain of political doctrines, understood in chapter 4 as a layer of the ideological and amenable to investigation in relation to liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and populism. How the gap between grounded doctrines of politics and political economy and the capitalist imaginary as elucidated by Castoriadis and others can be closed is a matter of further theoretical work and substantive research. However, integration of the results into theoretical conclusions would likely be necessary. In chapter 4, the discussion turns to three imaginaries. Already mentioned earlier, the ideological imaginary institutes a full operative range of different levels of ideology, from dissimulation to interpretation, according to Ricœur. Structuring ideology in both positive and negative senses, this imaginary prefigures the ground on which ideologies as doctrinal interpretations emerge as thought and action. Ricœur’s elucidation of the ideological imaginary anticipates all levels of operative ideology in “real social life.” Less an innovation and more an innovative application of his insights to American ideologies, chapter 4 traverses the gap between imaginary and ideology in sketches of specific doctrinal interpretations. Political imaginaries, as variously explicated by Castoriadis and Lefort, institute politics and the political. In the illuminating case of the United States, the political imaginary creates a contingent democratic center in which the careful balance of operative dispersal of power is constantly at risk (Lefort), or indeed, as autonomy, has been lost to liberal oligarchy (Castoriadis). Thinking about both theories from the standpoint of the Americas, there is a variety of political imaginaries beyond the United States. Political imaginaries may create democracy as a horizon (Plot 2018) but do not generate democracy as an open center of sovereignty in all polities, nor a straightforward type of heteronomy in all political communities. The extent to which political imaginaries vary is a historical and empirical question, of course, and this includes the variation of constitution-making in other contexts (Blokker 2019). While lines of articulation between political imaginaries and democracy and constitutionalism are, however, clear, the relationship of political imaginaries to the ideological imaginary has yet to be more extensively considered (to the best of my knowledge). Chapter 4 marks the outlines of political imaginaries evident in the Americas, suggesting that more theoretical and substantive research is needed. The nationalist imaginary also generates diversity in the nationalisms it instantiates. Nationalisms generated by the imaginary vary in symbols, rituals, art, and heritage, in other words, not only in more familiar forms

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of discourse and ideological expressions. A strong sense of historicity, of historical purpose, is evident in the singularity of the national collective that emerges in political modernity (Árnason 2020, 41). But the imaginary singularizes nations with different relationships to imperial, civilizational, and indigenous heritage, on one hand, and with different relationships to the Enlightenment and Romanticism, on the other. Like the diversity of political imaginaries, further research could extend to the more theoretical investigation of the singularization of new world states after the overthrow of empires. The theoretical work of the book does not end with these five imaginaries and the questions arising from them. Two other questions have guided my thinking throughout the construction of American Imaginaries. The first is a theoretical question for chapter 6: How is regionalism made? To answer, I suggest that encounters and engagement of civilizations are social-historically central to the imagination of places as regional, which in turn are varied by encounters and engagement (among other factors mentioned in chapter 6). The nature of regionalism in regional places tracks the variation of socialhistorical meaning arising from encounters and engagement. In civilizational analysis, the emphasis falls on the context of civilizational encounters, whether that be one of imperial background and globalization (Katzenstein, Eisenstadt) or multinational regions (Arjomand, Árnason, Eisenstadt). For the Americas, I take multicivilizational regions to be the main context (the phrase is used for emphasis on intercivilizational encounters and engagement). The second question comes into view at the end of the sixth chapter and is the main concern of the seventh. How do indigenous civilizations confront American worlds and with what imaginaries? With original imaginaries, indigenous civilization constructed whole worlds before the Colombian Conquest. Although there is an appreciation of the dismemberment of indigenous cultures in the contemporary human sciences, an ontological focus on social imaginaries emphasizes the loss of wholeness of indigenous worlds suffered in the historic Conquest. At the same time, cultural survival, retrieval, and re-creation do not vanish from sight but occur as interpretive processes in the reassembly of a cosmological worldview at regional, national, and international levels. With these processes, and through collective agency, indigenous nations stimulate their own modernities in confrontation with Euro-America. In social movements and through a different mode of politics, indigenous interpretation of the nonhuman world grounds a different ontology of land and water. I open this problematic of indigenous modernities in an alternative formulation to those of Rundell and Singh while simultaneously drawing on both (Rundell 2017, 144–57; Singh 2011). Further work on the precise civilizational inputs into indigenous modernities from Euro-American and indigenous civilizational sources would extend the picture and give a more



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fulsome response to the research question of confrontation. For present purposes, a suggestive conclusion that there is an imaginary dimension of the confrontation of civilizations, past and present, highlights the cosmological and cultural horizon informing the emergence of indigenous politics and modernities. AMERICAN IMAGINARIES IN MODERNITY The previous section plotted theoretical innovations combining social imaginaries (from its original sources, Castoriadis, Ricœur, and Taylor onward) and civilizational analysis (with inputs from different disciplines). Historical sociology’s encounter with Castoriadis and the wider field of social imaginaries is still new and ongoing. One reason may be the latter’s domain being one mainly of theory, while historical sociology is an historical and empirical branch of a traditional discipline. Stressing commonality, however, there is a concern shared by both in manifold diversity, including multiple modernities. This section arranges the substantive findings of the book according to the four dimensions of intercivilizational engagement and by chapter. Beginning with chapter 2, we see metropolitan imaginaries instituting forms of social creation in cities in which migration, trade, and cultural traffic predominate in building up large urban environments. Emerging from transnational and regional inflows of people, ideas, goods, and inventions, a degree of mass is a precondition for the properties of metropolitan life in the social relations, forms of sociability, and metropolitan memory. In turn, metropolitan imaginaries institute two outstanding features: receptiveness to international and regional flows of the economic, political, cultural, and migratory movement and an especial inventiveness and scale of collaboration in the city-making faculties of architecture, engineering, urban design, and the creative arts. Between 1870 and 1970, new world metropolises themselves not only expanded outward but stretched skywards to breach apparent limits on human powers. More cities and more metropolises followed and continued following, reaching new scales of massification such that some of Latin America’s metropolises became megacities toward the end of the century. The creative arts as one register of metropolitan memory in interpreting the history of migratory, economic, and cultural connections sustaining these developments. Further case studies across a wider range of metropolitan and regional and provincial cities would stimulate extension of these findings but also possible theoretical revision. The capitalist imaginary creates diversity in three areas of the Americas’ economies: institutionalized relations of activist state and economy, doctrines of political economy, and regionalism. The shape and degree of state activism

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varies from country to country, but some generalizations about specific regions are possible. Where federalism is the contour of the polity, provincial relations with federal centers of decision-making assume additional importance. The closest cases to social-democratic regimes are Canada’s Toryist state and the complex federal apparatus built up by New Deal liberalism, although both are self-distanced from explicitly socialist projects of Europe. Moreover, while populism institutionalized welfare in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela, it did not embed welfare states in the robust manner of northern European social democracies. Neoliberalism would undo many regulatory and welfare institutions in Latin and Central America but would also crossover with regional pacts in NAFTA, CAFTA-DR, and to a degree MERCOSUR. American doctrines of political economy go beyond framing and reforming institutional figurations. They add inputs of meaning to the spirit of capitalism, reflecting transatlantic and circum-Atlantic exchanges between the governments, academic centers, and schools of economic thought. In tangible terms, I discuss New Deal liberalism, Harold Innis and staples theory, Raúl Prebisch’s developmental political economy, and late neoliberal programs recomposing institutional arrangements of state and market. Far from thoroughly examined, this range of doctrines does not exhaust the two-century history of economic thought and more expansive research may well produce a rectified view, especially given the gap identified earlier around political economy as a layer of the ideological imaginary in American societies. Furthermore, I generalize in some areas where specificity could discern further kinds of engagement and exchanges in economic and political dimensions (or problématiques, as Wagner and others would have it). As a conclusion, however, we can readily see that there is diversification in the developmental trajectories of capitalist economies in the American new world and doctrines of political economy are part of that. The substantive findings on ideology and nationalism revolve around, first, forms of statehood and processes of state formation and, second, doctrines of liberalism, conservativism, socialism, and populism. In terms of dimensions of intercivilizational engagement, the tension of Enlightenment and Romanticism was a shared influence in European and American nationalism and political thought, although varied significantly in Latin America by the emergence of Latinism. Transatlantic exchanges in political philosophy influenced political doctrines on both sides of the Atlantic in early Atlantic republican thought, conservatism, socialism, twentieth-century indigenism, and liberalism. In terms of state formation, liberalism was a kind of state with a particular range of variants in Latin and Central America in the nineteenth century. Instituting a tendency toward inclusion in modern political community, the results of states in the regions of the South were extremely limited up until



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World War I. As a countertendency, the militarization of state institutions and politics left states in Central and Latin America, and later the Caribbean, vulnerable to the indefinite seizure of government by the armed wing of the state. Liberal inclusion was more a matter of twentieth-century doctrine in the United States and Canada as both states instituted at their foundation a democratic center as a contestable and unmonopolized zone of sovereignty. The institutional balance of state and the balance of federal and provincial institutional powers were issues of common concern to conservatives and liberals alike in the United States and Canada and, of course, the source of frequent differences of opinion. Everywhere in the Americas, inequality appeared in different kinds of social relations, figurations of horizontal segmentation and vertical stratification, and patterns of intersection. Doctrines of Marxist and social-democratic socialism, weaker overall in the United States and Canada than many countries in the hemisphere, also faced periods of contingent potential for expansion on the back of phases of collective action by social and labor movements. The same point applies to Latin and Central America and the Caribbean, but often in vastly different circumstances. In particular, the Cold War had a significant impact on the postwar fate of Marxist thought, organization, and action in the countries to the immediate south of the United States, while populism provided a major competitor in Latin America and to a lesser degree the Caribbean until the 1960s. Overall, the patterns vary from ideologies familiar to Europeans and in some instances involve the reversal of core tenets. Debates about the US imperium are in the background of the book’s treatment of American power. They gained a new lease of life following 9/11. Critiques of American power responded to a seemingly new environment. An appetite for intervention in Afghanistan and then Iraq already existed in the Bush administration, but the general atmosphere of cultural trauma resulting from the impact of 9/11 also contextualized the course of debate (Reynolds 2009, 255–59). Suggestions of renewed global power do not withstand the test of scrutiny of the multi-actor international arena and a complex Middle East, both of which revealed major limits to America’s actions. The findings of the fifth chapter similarly suggest a more circumscribed picture of informal imperial power. If we can speak of an American imperium (Katzenstein 2005), it is one including a regional hegemony created and maintained in the Western Hemisphere and a connected one unfolding in the Asia-Pacific region. Both were context-bound developments. In the latter, the United States encountered competitors, opponents, and a wartime enemy. Alliances constructed in the Cold War (including with Japan) helped the United States create projections of hegemony in a region in which it was otherwise constrained by changing circumstances of decolonization, and rivalry with China and the Soviet Union. Less constrained in the Americas, with power

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substantialized in economic, political, and cultural institutions and imagined beyond them, American authority did not have a major rival to contend with. Its regional hegemony was differentiated, to be sure, and ran into countercurrents (as we see with Latinism). In Latin America, regional hegemony confronted limits in prosecuting foreign policy strategy during the twists and turns of the Cold War. The cultural and political aspects of the institutional apparatus and cultural imagination of informal power were more pronounced there, while in Central America and the Caribbean, the United States acted as a principal economic and political force. Even in these regions in which power was less differentiated than elsewhere, regional hegemony was complex. Late-twentieth-century developments around NAFTA and CAFTA further complicated American power in the process of reintegration of the North American subcontinent, as we see at the end of chapter 3. This allusion to regionalism brings into the picture other findings. Of eleven Americas, which I distinguish in the opening chapter, three are analyzed in chapter 6 as multicivilizational regions. The variations between them are significant, each varying in indigenous identities, imperial heritage, and experiences of unity. Variation with other regions is likely to be greater. Compare the three with the Southern Cone, where the multicivilizational element is less evident. With the partial exception of Chile, indigenous movements and civilizations have a lower profile and less impact. The cultural and political traffic of intercivilizational engagement that demarcates Atlantic modernity is high. Nevertheless, further inquiry would disclose greater divergence from the three cases examined here. The pattern of world regions at a global level is, of course, even more differentiated. The regionalism of areas within nation states forms through a range of exogenous and endogenous factors, including intercivilizational engagement. Such regions matter because of provincial connections and external linkages that they may create. In the expansion of new world nation states, they become part of the sinew of expanding societies. Each case accentuates its own figuration of interaction between the heirs of First Nations, Hispanic American, and Anglo-American civilizations (US Southwest), between the Portuguese, African, creole, and immigrant makers of Brazil who came to exercise a consciousness of its regions (Northeast Brazil), and between Anglophone Canada and a Quebec that relates to a wider Francosphere. Regionalism within nations has prominent civilizational aspects in these three cases.1 Applied to some subnational regions, the notion of intercivilizational engagement would have less traction: regions formed around the US-Canada border would undoubtedly be a case in point. I suggest that the concepts of regionalism crafted and utilized in chapter 6, together with its findings, have relevance to international relations research and regional and borderlands studies.



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Indigenous revival is a late dynamic of the twentieth century. Emerging synchronously in the international arena and in regions and countries where new world settler-colonizer societies displaced indigenous imaginaries, indigenous modernities proved as vibrant in the Western Hemisphere as anywhere else in the world. The book’s findings fall in different areas in which indigenous nations declared their civilizational identity and their visions of sovereignty: public protest and collective agency, alliance-making and political intervention, constitutional reform, and interculturalism. Protest within nation states grew in the 1970s and 1980s. It gained the most attention when there were connections to regional organizations and to the UN, especially in the latter’s recognition of indigenous rights as an obligation of nation states. In the 1990s, wider regional and transnational alliances forged in opposition to the Colombian Quincentenary brought national movements to a mode of politics where greater collective agency could be harnessed. With greater collective agency, indigenous movements could convert protest into political intervention and thereby give additional force to claims for rights and reform. The articulation of visions of plurinational sovereignty has been at its most robust and lucid among the movements of the Andean nations and in Mexico. In these lands where a very large majority of the hemisphere’s indigenous peoples live, collective agency has been densest. In Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela, interculturalism has been concentrated and constitutional changes have gone further in incorporating indigenous rights and plurinational sovereignty. Overall, the prospects for inclusion improved. Even so, these political goods remained contested in political life as do indigenous worldviews of ecology. As manifestations in political engagement, they are prominent aspects of indigenous modernities. At the start of this work, I outlined a historical sociology focused on new world social imaginaries and the intercivilizational encounters and engagement informing their social, state, and capitalist formations. The combination simultaneously highlights relationships of the past and present and those of the past in the present. At times, there is allusion also to future orientation, as it is known in modern temporality. Furthermore, the combination of social imaginaries and civilizational analysis supplies an ongoing framework for pursuing further lines of inquiry. There are other American imaginaries as well, which could be explored. But then there is also another Other: the radical alterity of the nonhuman world (instituted for humanity as an ecological imaginary). There are powerful but surmountable challenges here and pressing questions for the human sciences. High on the agenda are problems of the human condition that are problems confronting the Americas as much as the rest of the world: climate change, dramatic transformations of riverine and oceanic ecology (especially around the two subcontinents, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico), and the environmental difficulties of

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making massified urban environments work for their inhabitants (such as in Latin America). The stewardship, protection, and governance of these oftendeteriorating environments are overarching issues of the twenty-first century. A challenge of basic research is to fully articulate the social imaginaries in the background of the theories, concepts, technologies, and practices of contemporary societies inescapably engulfed in the nonhuman world. The Americas are an important part of this. But that is another project, one for the great challenge of the twenty-first century as it manifests in the Americas. NOTE 1. Other possible candidates include Patagonia, Mexico’s southern regions— Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Yucatan—Alto-plano in Bolivia, and Western Canada.

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Index

abolition, 95, 98, 129, 135, 165, 167 Africa, 27, 142 – 43, 159 – 60, 165, 172n11, 167, 200 Andean America, 18, 21, 77, 149, 150, 152, 172n12, 168 – 71, 174, 176, 187, 189 – 90, 191, 201 architecture, 26, 27 – 28, 29 – 30, 32 – 33, 34 – 35, 36, 39 – 40, 43 – 45, 47 – 48, 50, 52 – 53, 56 Argentina, 18, 27, 77, 78 – 81, 94, 98, 114, 116 – 17, 136 – 37, 187, 188, 198 Arnason Johann P, 5, 14, 16, 64, 87, 151 arts, the, 26, 28, 31, 33 – 34, 36 – 37, 45 – 46, 56, 194, 197 autonomy, 9, 63, 90, 97, 130, 175 – 76, 185 – 86, 189 – 90, 195 Axial civilizations, 4, 13, 173 – 74 Bolívar, Simon, 8, 92, 93 Bolivia, 43, 113, 114, 116, 168, 169, 170, 176, 184, 187, 188, 189, 192n9, 201 Boltanski, Luc, 61, 64 – 65 Brazil, 18, 27, 50 – 51, 63, 74, 77, 78, 80 – 81, 94 – 95, 99, 114 – 15, 116 – 28, 137, 145, 158 – 62, 187, 188, 198,

200; North-east, 21, 115, 145, 150, 158 – 62 Buenos Aires, 28, 41 – 46 Canada, 18, 27, 84, 87, 95 – 97, 107 – 8, 118, 135, 140 – 41, 156 – 58, 176 – 77, 179 – 82, 198 – 99, 200; Western Canada, 70, 111, 127 – 56. See also Quebec capitalism, 9, 27, 31, 43, 58, 61 – 84, 138, 139, 194 – 95, 197 – 98; Canada, 69 – 71, 157; Caribbean, 55, 81 – 84; Central America, 73 – 76; Latin America, 76 – 81, 191; United States, 65 – 68, 69, 73 – 74, 129, 153 Caribbean, the, 21, 41, 55, 81 – 84, 87, 118, 123, 133, 134, 139, 140, 144, 149, 150, 162, 164 – 68, 198 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 4, 8, 11 – 13, 26, 59, 61, 62 – 63, 84, 87, 89 – 91, 116, 118, 189, 194, 195, 197 caudillismo, 98 – 99, 101 – 3 Central America, 17, 21, 41, 73 – 76, 84, 87, 94, 101 – 3, 114, 118, 123, 134, 144, 149, 150, 162 – 64, 198, 199 Chiapas, 113, 162 – 63, 184, 186 – 87 Chiapello, Eve, 61, 64 – 65 Chicago, 28, 29, 31 – 34, 40 221

222

Index

Chile, 43, 80 – 81, 93, 98, 113, 114, 116, 136 – 37, 168, 187, 188, 200 China, 125, 128, 143 – 44, 145 – 46 citizenship, 97, 98, 154 – 55, 171n3, 163 – 64, 170, 179, 180, 182, 186 civilizational analysis, 3, 4 – 5, 13 – 17, 109, 125, 149, 150, 150 – 52, 159, 188, 191, 193 – 202 civilizational discourse, 15 – 16, 167, 169 ‘civilizing mission’, 51, 125, 126, 132, 134, 135, 141 Civil War, the (US), 66, 100, 123, 128 – 31, 138 Cold War, the, 21, 56, 67, 83, 99, 110, 111, 112, 124, 139, 141, 142 – 45, 199, 200 Colombia, 27, 98, 113, 114, 136, 137 colonialism, 3, 11, 13 – 14, 21, 159, 162, 163, 175, 176 – 77, 184, 192n5, 187, 188, 191 conquest, Colombian, 11, 15 – 16, 173 – 74, 176 – 77, 185, 187, 197, 201 conservatism, 21, 87, 98 – 100, 161 – 62, 198; Canada, 107 – 8; Latin America, 98 – 100; United States, 104 – 7, 140 constitutionalism, 22, 89 – 91, 187, 191, 195, 201 constitutions, 38, 89, 90, 96, 97 – 98, 100 – 101, 105, 112, 133 – 34, 161 – 62, 169, 177, 178, 180 – 82, 187 – 90, 201 continentalization, 69 – 70, 123, 126 – 28, 138, 178 corporatism, 16, 51, 101, 112, 117 – 18, 168, 169 – 70 Costa Rica, 74, 75, 76, 83, 102 – 3, 114, 119 creation, social, 4, 5, 6, 7 – 9, 20 – 21, 25 – 26, 29, 31, 34, 40, 46, 59, 90 – 91, 92, 97, 100, 126, 138, 150, 151, 186, 194, 197 creativity, 7 – 8, 13, 26, 28, 32, 34, 47, 51, 57, 58 – 59, 62, 194

creolization, 43, 159 – 60, 165, 166 – 67, 200 Cuba, 77, 113 – 14, 119 – 20, 133 – 34, 138, 142, 143, 165 decolonization, 124, 142 – 43, 146 – 47, 151, 199 democracy, 3, 89 – 91, 92, 102 – 3, 115, 117, 124, 145 – 46, 164, 170, 189, 190, 195 Democratic Party (US), 33, 104 – 5, 132 dependency theory, 77 – 79, 81 – 83 Dominican Republic, the, 114, 133 – 34, 137, 138, 165 Du Bois, W.E.B., 32, 130 Durkheim, Émile, 4, 8, 151 ecology, 11, 22, 41, 62, 164, 174, 187, 188, 191, 201 – 2 Ecuador, 114, 168, 169, 170, 176, 184, 187, 188, 190, 201 Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., 15 – 16, 109, 112 – 13, 118, 151 – 52, 168, 173 – 74 El Salvador, 73, 74, 75, 113, 163 – 64 empires, 3, 12, 123, 124, 131 – 32, 133 – 34, 145, 162, 196; Britain, 6, 69, 127, 132, 133, 147n5, 165 – 66; France, 100, 127, 132, 133, 152, 165 – 66; Spain, 127, 132, 133, 134, 152, 165 – 66 Enlightenment, the, 40, 93, 196, 198 ethnicity, 36, 39, 42, 96, 109, 140, 153, 168, 180 Europe, 3, 6, 15 – 16, 27, 41 – 42, 44, 46, 50, 66, 87, 108 – 9, 118, 165, 167, 174, 176 favela, 27, 41, 52 federalism, 60n7, 70, 87, 96, 108, 156 – 58, 160 – 61, 180 – 81, 182, 198 First Nations, 29, 40, 47, 95, 96, 105, 108, 127 – 28, 134, 138, 152, 156, 169, 171n1, 177 – 82, 191, 200 Fordism, 35 – 36, 37, 67



Index 223

foreign policy, 16, 19, 83, 123, 132, 134, 136, 140, 143, 144, 145, 172n10, 200 French language, 50, 111, 157, 158

Jamaica, 113, 114, 165, 167 James, CLR, 167, 168, 172n11 Japan, 50, 80, 115 – 16, 124, 128, 141, 145, 146, 199

globalization, 20, 49, 68, 69 – 70, 158, 196 Guatemala, 73, 74, 94, 102, 113, 119, 138, 176, 192n2, 184, 187, 188

Katzenstein, Peter J, 14 – 15, 125, 151

Haiti, 114, 133 – 34, 165, 167 Havana, viii, 28, 55 – 58, 59 Hawaii, 3, 128, 133, 145 hegemony, 55, 94, 99, 123 – 25, 131, 145 – 46, 199 – 200 historical sociology, 4 – 5, 10, 12, 25, 81, 127, 197 historicity, 7, 10, 12, 17, 25, 47, 81, 127, 137, 181, 197 Honduras, 18, 73, 74, 75, 102 human rights, 91, 100, 144, 163 – 64, 187, 189, 191, 201 imaginary significations, 5, 7, 8 – 9, 10, 12 – 13, 48, 61, 62 – 64, 66, 71, 77, 81, 89, 91, 97 imperialism, 123, 125, 126, 146, 147n5, 166, 199 – 200 Indigenismo, 93, 101, 169 – 70, 175, 198 indigenous civilizations, 11, 21 – 22, 47, 150, 172n12, 169 – 70, 171, 173 – 92, 196 – 97 Innis, Harold, 69 – 70, 107, 198 intercivilizational encounters, 5, 10, 11, 14 – 15, 26, 28, 128, 149, 150, 151, 196, 201 intercivilizational engagement, 4 – 6, 15, 20, 21, 26 – 28, 30, 59, 61 – 62, 69 – 70, 77, 125, 128, 135 – 36, 149, 150, 152, 156 – 57, 162, 164 – 65, 168 – 69, 174, 175, 194, 197, 201 interculturalism, 10 – 11, 22n4, 28, 31, 157, 171n3, 172n13, 180, 183, 187, 188, 189 – 91, 192, 192n8, 201

language, 11, 13, 26, 47, 50, 157 – 58, 166, 174, 186, 189, 190 Latinism, 123, 135 – 37, 198, 200 law, 12 – 13, 22, 43, 68, 79, 133, 161, 170, 177 – 78, 179 – 80, 182 – 83, 190, 191 Le Corbusier, Charles, 30, 44, 48 Lefort, Claude, 8, 12, 87, 89 – 91, 108, 119, 195 legitimation, 11 – 12, 64, 93, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 117 – 18 liberalism, 21, 62, 87, 97 – 108, 171 – 72n3, 181, 198, 199; Canada, 70, 107 – 8, 181; Central America, 102 – 3; Latin America, 98 – 100, 112, 169; United States, 104 – 6, 140 liberation theology, 114 – 15, 119n8, 161 Los Angeles, 28, 34 – 37, 40, 128 Martí, José, 93, 119 – 20n9, 136 Marx, Karl, 4, 9, 66, 88. See also Marxism Marxism, 62, 81, 110, 112 – 15, 119n7, 120, 123, 169, 170, 199 Meech Lake Accord (Canada), 96, 157 – 58 memory, 12, 34, 35 – 36, 46, 48 – 49, 93, 100 – 101, 102, 113 MERCOSUR, 80, 84, 198 México, 17, 23n12, 27, 41, 71 – 73, 84, 94, 98, 99, 100 – 101, 102, 113, 114, 116, 127, 135 – 36, 141, 153 – 54, 155, 162, 164, 167, 169, 176, 184, 184 – 85, 187, 188, 197, 201 México City, vii, 28, 46 – 50 Miami, 56, 60n4, 167 Mies Van Rohe, Ludwig, 32 – 33, 39, 44

224

Index

migration, 5 – 6, 25, 26 – 28, 34 – 35, 37, 40 – 42, 46 – 47, 50 – 51, 55 – 56, 76, 82 – 83, 165, 197; immigration, 25, 26 – 27, 29, 31 – 32, 33, 71, 73 – 74, 107, 109, 128, 139 – 141, 145, 154 – 55, 166 – 67; internal migration, 27 – 28, 32, 33, 37, 43, 47, 51, 127, 153 – 54 military, 46, 68, 74, 80, 112, 123, 133, 138, 161, 177, 198 modernism, 28, 30, 33, 35, 36, 40, 49 – 50, 52, 54, 57 modernity, 75, 97, 98, 99, 100 – 101, 104, 124, 136 – 37, 151, 159, 166, 196; Atlantic, 7, 20, 25, 59, 62, 128, 173, 193 – 94, 200; indigenous, 21 – 22, 171, 173, 175 – 76, 191, 196 – 97, 201 money, 62, 64, 84 Monroe Doctrine, 21, 123, 124, 131 – 37, 138 – 41, 143, 145 Montreal, 38, 40, 157 monuments, 43, 47, 48 – 49, 131 multiculturalism, 16, 96 – 97, 105, 107 – 8, 140 – 41, 157 – 58, 171n3, 181 – 82, 187 multiple modernities, 4, 15, 54, 151, 197 museums, 28, 30 – 31, 33, 40, 45, 47, 49 – 50, 54, 178 myth, 9, 11, 21, 160, 174, 192 NAFTA, 70 – 71, 72 – 73, 75 – 76, 83, 108, 185 – 86, 198 nationalism, 87 – 90, 92 – 97, 99, 115, 120n9, 124, 132, 134 – 35, 138 – 41, 143, 162, 165, 198 neoliberalism, 67 – 68, 71, 72 – 73, 75 – 76, 79 – 81, 105, 106 – 7, 144, 185, 191 New Deal, the, 66 – 67, 68, 104, 105, 111, 198 New Left, the, 18, 104 – 5, 106, 198 New York, 28, 104 – 5, 106, 109, 167

Nicaragua, 73, 74, 75, 102, 113, 138, 164, 187, 192n2 Non-Aligned Movement, 143, 164 oceans, 12 – 13, 26, 138, 159, 163, 165, 201 oil, 34, 72, 79, 163, 191 ontology, 12, 22, 167, 173, 178, 186, 191, 196 Pacific, the, 21, 28, 37, 124, 125, 127, 128, 133, 140, 140, 142 – 43, 145 – 47, 199 Panamá, 74, 75, 138, 144, 164, 187 Paraguay, 43, 99, 145, 187 Peronism, 43, 44, 78 – 79, 114, 116 – 17 Perón, Eva, 44, 116 Perón, Juan, 44, 116 Perú, 18, 114, 116, 145, 168, 169, 170, 176, 187, 192n9 Pinochet, Augusto, 80, 112 plantation economy, 55, 129, 159, 161 pluri-nationalism, 129, 159, 161, 175 – 76, 192n4, 183, 184 – 87, 188 – 89, 190 – 91, 191, 201 political agency, 45, 88, 175 – 76, 177 – 87, 190 – 92 political parties, 18 – 19, 72, 93, 98, 99, 102, 104, 107, 157, 170, 190; communist, 110, 111, 113 – 14, 114 – 15, 119n7, 120n10; conservative, 100, 107 – 8; liberal, 96, 100, 105 – 6, 107 – 8, 157, 158; populist, 72, 101, 116 – 18; socialist/ social democratic, 107 – 8, 109 – 10, 111, 113, 114 – 15, 157, 158 population, 35, 50, 55, 56, 92, 140, 165, 188 populism, 18, 21, 44, 76, 93 – 94, 104, 109, 112, 114, 117 – 18, 168 – 70, 198. See also social imaginary, populist positivism, 47, 51, 93, 95, 99, 101, 178 post-neoliberalism, 81, 144



Index 225

power, 11 – 13, 21, 88, 119n3, 123, 124 – 26, 184, 195, 199 – 200; explicit (Castoriadis), 11 – 12, 123; ground (Castoriadis), 11, 12 – 13, 123; informal, 21, 123, 124, 125 – 26, 131 – 32, 133, 134, 138 – 46, 147n4, 147n5, 199 Prebisch, Raul, 77 – 78, 81, 198 progressivism, 66, 104, 108, 109, 198 Protestantism, 16, 104, 114, 129, 136, 137, 139 public sphere, 9 – 10, 52, 93, 95, 112, 117, 167 – 68, 176, 184 Puerto Rico, 114, 116, 133 – 37, 141, 145, 147n5, 147n8, 165 Quebec, 21, 96 – 97, 107, 111, 149, 150, 156 – 58, 200 Quincentenary, Colombian (1992), the, 184 – 85, 186 – 87 race, 16, 95, 106, 109, 129 – 30, 139 – 40, 140 – 41, 159 – 60, 167 racism, 32, 35 – 36, 128, 130 – 31, 140 – 41, 159 – 60, 167 railways, 27, 34, 38, 43, 56, 135, 163 Reagan, Ronald, 67 – 68, 82, 85n4, 104, 106, 143 regionalism, 17, 18, 20, 21, 61, 70 – 71, 75 – 76, 81 – 82, 83 – 84, 94, 124, 144, 149 – 71, 183, 191, 196, 200, 201 regions, 81, 128, 149 – 71; border zones, 69, 73, 92, 111, 149, 150, 153, 154 – 56, 171, 200; intranational, 149, 151, 152 – 62, 200; multinational, 81 – 84, 149, 162 – 70, 200 religion, 9, 11, 106, 114, 116; religiopolitical nexus, 106 – 7, 128, 129, 161 remittances, 76, 82 – 83, 85n7, 154 republicanism, 3, 6, 65, 89 – 91, 93 – 95, 100 – 101, 129, 162, 167 Republican Party (US), 105 – 7, 118, 132, 155

revolutions, 3, 6, 47 – 49, 57 – 58, 65, 89 – 90, 93 – 94, 95, 98, 99, 100 – 101, 113, 156, 163, 169 Ricœur, Paul, 8, 11, 88, 195, 197 Rio de Janeiro, 28, 50, 51 – 54, 95 Rivera, Diego, 31, 49 Romanticism, 40, 42, 136 – 37, 196, 198 Roosevelt, Franklin D, 66 – 67, 104 Roosevelt, Theodore D, 132, 133 – 34 Salinas, Carlos, 72 – 73, 185 Sandinistas, 113 – 14, 163 Sao Paulo, 28, 50, 51 – 54, 95, 115 slavery, 5, 26 – 27, 62, 63, 74, 81, 109, 165 – 66; Brazil, 50, 95, 159; Cuba, 55, 57, 165; US, 65, 127, 128 – 30, 139 social democracy, 18, 69, 107, 109, 111, 112, 114, 118, 198. See also socialism social-historical, the, 7, 10, 21, 26, 37, 30, 47, 62, 88, 96, 98, 112, 149, 150, 151, 153 – 54, 166, 171, 196 social imaginaries, 3 – 5, 6 – 13, 21 – 23, 87, 137, 193 – 202 social imaginary: capitalist, 20, 61 – 65, 66, 76 – 77, 84, 123, 194 – 95, 197 – 98; ideological, 11, 12, 20 – 21, 88 – 89, 97, 108 – 9, 112, 115, 118, 132, 139, 195 – 96, 198; metropolitan, 20, 25 – 60, 93, 123, 193 – 94, 197; nationalist, 12, 89, 92 – 97, 138 – 39, 195 – 96; political, 12, 18 – 19, 20 – 21, 89 – 91, 97, 103, 107, 108, 115, 116, 117 – 18, 123, 195; populist, 19, 120n11; urban, 25 – 26, 193, 194, 195 social inequality, 32, 41, 52, 53, 57, 73, 80, 129 – 30, 161, 177 – 80, 199 socialism, 18, 21, 87, 88, 98, 99, 107 – 15, 144 – 45, 162, 198, 199; Canada, 107, 111; Latin America, 18, 99, 144 – 45, 190 – 91; United States, 108 – 11

226

Index

social movements, 19, 30, 80 – 81, 93 – 94, 104 – 5, 109, 110 – 11, 115 – 16, 154 – 55, 163 – 64, 175, 189, 190; antinuclear, 110, 142, 184 – 85; black, 32, 36, 104, 167 – 68; civil rights, 36, 110, 135, 141; indigenous, 21 – 22, 170 – 71, 177 – 87, 200, 201; landless, 114 – 15, 117, 161; union, 67, 68, 74, 93, 104, 109, 111, 114 – 15, 116, 117, 155, 161, 163, 169 – 70, 189 – 90; women’s, 49, 63, 105, 110, 185 Soviet Union, 56, 57, 124, 142 – 45, 146, 199 state formation, 11, 12 – 13, 21, 87, 92, 96, 118, 119, 126 – 31, 152 – 53, 156, 159, 160 – 61, 177, 198 statuary, 40, 43, 47, 48, 131 suburbanism, 31, 34, 36, 39, 41, 44, 106 – 7

United States, 16, 17, 21, 27 – 28, 55 – 56, 71, 72 – 73, 87, 88, 89 – 91, 95 – 96, 100, 123 – 41, 162 – 63, 176 – 71, 177 – 79, 195 – 96, 198 – 200; California, 106, 126, 127 – 28, 145, 149, 152 – 56, 200; South, the, 128 – 31, 145, 152, 155, 167; South-west, 21, 106, 145, 149, 152 – 56, 200 urban planning, 26, 27 – 28, 29, 30, 32, 35, 39, 51 – 52, 57, 197 Uruguay, 17, 43, 77, 98, 114, 136 – 37

Taylor, Charles, 8 – 10, 22n2, 62, 87, 97, 158, 171 – 72n3, 182, 192n4, 197 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 20, 85n3, 90, 105 Toronto, 28, 33, 38 – 40 totalitarianism, 13, 19 – 20 tourism, 35, 56, 58, 76, 82 – 83, 167 transnationalism, 16, 20, 94, 136, 151, 155, 162, 166 – 67, 183 – 85, 191 – 92, 201 Trudeau, Pierre, 93, 96 Trump, Donald, 17, 18 – 20, 91, 106

Weber, Max, 4, 11, 20, 61, 63, 64, 65, 85n3, 194 West Indies, 74, 75, 82 – 83, 166 – 67, 168 women, 39, 46, 58, 73, 98, 105, 110, 185. See also feminism Workers Party (Brazil), 18, 53, 114 – 15, 161 – 62 World War One, 37, 38, 41, 45, 46, 73, 107, 198 World War Two, 30, 31, 49, 67, 74, 75, 104, 108, 118, 124, 131, 135, 140, 141, 146

unions. See social movements, union United Nations, 164, 183, 191, 201

Vargas, Getúlio, 117, 118, 120n14, 160 Venezuela, 18, 27, 77, 79, 114, 116, 118, 144, 164, 165, 187, 188, 190, 198, 201 visual arts, 28, 30 – 31, 36 – 37, 40, 45, 46, 48, 53 – 54, 57 – 58, 169

Zapatismo, 72, 113, 114, 185 – 87

About the Author

Jeremy C. A. Smith is associate professor of sociology in the Institute of Education, Arts and Community at Federation University Australia. His principal research interests lie in the disciplinary fields of historical and comparative sociology and social theory. He has published in European Journal of Social Theory, Current Sociology, Critical Horizons, Thesis Eleven, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Atlantic Studies, and Political Power and Social Theory. He is the author of Europe and the Americas: State Formation, Capitalism and Civilizations in Atlantic Modernity (2006) and Debating Civilizations: Interrogating Civilizational Analysis in a Global Age (2017). He is also a managing editor of the International Journal of Social Imaginaries and the Social Imaginaries book series. His current work revolves around the multidisciplinary fields of civilizational analysis and social imaginaries.

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