State Power and Military Nationalism in Latin America

Abstract

Latin America has been plagued by doctrines of exceptionalism, by assumptions that its 'laws of development are different and distinct from those of the rest of the world, including even the rest of the Third World. There are endless naive explanations for the exceptional qualities of Latin America. Historians have posited the sloth of its Indian population, the ruthlessness of Conquistador invaders, subsequent racial miscegenation, forced absorption of the native population into the Roman Catholic faith, and the immediate gratification demanded by Catholics in contrast to Protestants from the Northern Hemisphere who presumably opted for postponed gratification. A barrage of sociological theories has been put forward to explain Latin American underdevelopment: the fact that the hemisphere came later in economic development than European capitalism; the tropical climate which exempted Latin America from the main line of economic development; the point that the area was settled along its coastal regions, leaving interior areas in a backward condition. Because it was primarily linked to Spain and Portugal, Latin America remained outside the grip of the most advanced industrial nations of Europe as well as outside the orbit of formal democratic styles of rule. These theoretical explanations all attempted to show that Latin America is exempt from general laws of social and economic development. There are many variations of the theme of exceptionalism-some too idiosyncratic, others too insignificant to repeat. Each leads to the conclusion that Latin America does not follow any general laws of development. Area specialists have supported arguments for Latin American exceptionalism in some measure because those who concentrate on a foreign setting want to feel that there is something unique about the particular area, something dissimilar from the rest of the world; but also because Latin American studies as a North American profession evolved quite apart from, and antecedent to, Third World studies. However, the psychological propensities of researchers must obviously yield to the social and political realities of the area. In recent years efforts have been made to reintegrate Latin America with the rest of the world. One such scheme is the dependency model which was strongly influenced by a neo-Marxian economic perspective.