The Argument: War, Polities, and the Rural Poor

Once a development path is set on a particular course, the network externalities, the learning process of organizations, and the historically derived subjective modeling of the issues reinforce the course.—DOUGLASS C. NORTH, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance

Before delving into the book's main thesis in detail, we must place Latin America in a broader context of state making. Good reviews of literature on the state do exist, and it would be redundant to repeat them here. Literature on Europe, Asia, and the Middle East has correctly defined state formation as the process by which state makers overcome entrenched opposition from their populations and subdue regional political bosses. The challenge from a comparative perspective is to explain differences in the timing of the centralization of power, to spell out the conditions under which state makers succeed or fail, and to detect the rationale behind more democratic or authoritarian outcomes.

1.1. Lessons from Europe and the Empires

Perhaps the first and most logical place to go for comparative clues is Europe, which enjoys a wealth of theories on state formation. Some of the most widely used variables to explain types of states and authoritarian or democratic outcomes include the commercialization of agriculture, the rise of a bourgeoisie, the formation of the working classes and their incorporation into politics, the growth of the industrial sector, the preexistence of medieval forms of "constitutionalism," labor relations under feudalism, and even the pervasive influence of "Roman law" in Western Europe. Most of these theories have a structural or, to a lesser extent, an institutional leaning.

Which of these theories best illuminates the paths we observe in Latin America? Some seem of little relevance, for while the dynamics of class alliances were similar, the class actors and the international contexts of state making differed. Latin America lacked an entrenched nobility, confronted very different international pressures, underwent no industrial revolution, formed a rather weak and late industrial bourgeoisie, held no colonies, and experienced colonial rule. To these, one must add differences in demography, culture, and factor endowments. But it is precisely these contrasts that both mark the limits of theories emerging from the European experience and contribute to a sharper picture of state making on both sides of the Atlantic.

Many, including John A. Crow (1992:255–63), have found a strong conceptual linkage between theories of state making in Latin America and Europe in the strong "feudal" character of Latin America. Crow's application of feudal categories to Latin America remains one of the most convincing; nonetheless, Crow ends up admitting that feudalism in the new world remained very "different" from the European variety. The degree of difference remained quite unyielding, and the concept-traveling unresolved. Although structurally one could detect some "feudal" features in the new states, politically and institutionally the new nineteenth-century republics did not resemble feudal Europe. Moreover, there was really a world of difference between the accepted notions of the two feudalisms. Those who saw feudalism in Latin America perceived it as a sturdy obstacle to democratic practices. Those who studied feudalism in Europe, however, saw it as a predecessor to the industrial revolution and, for all its dark features, also as a noble precursor of capitalism and democracy.

The chapters on Uruguay, Colombia, and Argentina show that the "feudal" characteristics of rural life that can be detected in these societies, however defined, are poor predictors of state making. Moreover, culturally, politically, and institutionally, one finds little resemblance between the historical evolution of these Latin American cases and the European varieties of feudalism. In the new world, reasons other than feudalism explained the hardy predominance of some "feudal" features, such as the preponderance of agricultural enterprises with low technology requirements, limited access to credit, poor communications, and frequent wars.

Although ideal for comparing long historical processes, mode-of-production arguments about Latin America are of dubious value when explaining the rise of new states after independence. If mode-of-production explanations do have some relevance, it is in a sense somewhat similar to Perry Anderson's (1974:421–22) interpretation of the rise of the absolutist state in Europe. He claims that the political, institutional, and juridical transformations that accompanied absolutism were not preceded by substantial reorganization of the feudal mode of production: "Contrary to all structuralist assumptions, there was no self moving mechanism of displacement from ... [the feudal] to the capitalist mode of production, as contiguous and closed systems." Indeed, Anderson's argument about Europe seems less contentious when applied to Latin America, for although most scholarly literature agrees that in Latin America structural transformations were minimal, an analogous consensus has not been reached regarding Europe.

Comparing Europe and Latin America, we come to the conclusion that although the pace of economic development and differences in factor endowments undoubtedly affect state formation and influence democratic or authoritarian outcomes, to stress these variables alone does not necessarily facilitate the formulation of a more encompassing theory. Factors related to war and conflict resolution, on the other hand, seem to create an easier and more common ground for comparison. All theories suffer from a margin of error, yet when purely structuralist or institutionalist variables make up the theoretical picture without including factors related to conflict resolution and collective action, that margin of error significantly increases. The following chapters, among other things, show how different types of conflict shaped phenomena that most other theories have associated exclusively with structural changes. Conflict and the concomitant collective action determined access to the means of production, altered property relations, created new classes, and displaced old monopolies in land and trade. North's (1981) argument about the importance of property rights, prices, and transaction costs in state formation is well taken, but I take more to heart his insistence that customary economic models do not suffice. Huntington's (1968:6) conclusions that economic development and political stability remain two separate and independent goals, and that progress toward one does not necessarily lead to the other, fit the cases studied in this book quite well.

Conflict and State Making

Michael Mann (1993) and Charles Tilly (1990) have suggested that...