Simn Bolvars Republican Imperialism
Simn Bolvars Republican Imperialism: Another Ideology of
American Revolution
Abstract:
This article treats the political thought of Simn Bolvar, a
leading figure in South Americas struggle for independence. It
describes Bolvars ideas by reference to both their broadly Atlantic
origins and their specifically American concerns, arguing that they
comprise a theory of republican imperialism, paradoxically
proposing an essentially imperial project as a means of winning and
consolidating independence from European rule. This basic tension
is traced through Bolvars discussions of revolution, constitutions,
and territorial unification, and then used to frame a comparison
with the founders of the United States. It suggests, in closing,
that contextual similarities amongst the American revolutions make
them particularly apt subjects for comparative study of the history
of political thought.
Throughout this second decade of the twenty-first century, the
nations that once comprised the Reinos de las Indias, later (and
now better) known as the Spanish American Empire, will celebrate
the bicentennials of their independence. From Mexico City to Buenos
Aires, anniversaries will be marked with parades, presidential
addresses, fireworks, and an enormous outpouring of literature,
popular and scholarly, describing the movements that brought an end
to more than three hundred years of Spanish rule in the Americas,
the heroes that led these movements, and the ideas that inspired
these heroes. Thus, it is a particularly apt moment for political
theorists to investigate the ideological dimensions of the other
American revolutions, which, like their famous British North
American counterpart, gave rise to abundant and profound reflection
on fundamental questions of legitimate authority, popular
sovereignty, political institutions, and international
relations.
The originality of the Spanish American revolutions political
thinkers makes their ideas a rewarding study in their own right,
but there is more to be gained than deeper knowledge of the period
and place. In text after text one encounters recognizably
republican, liberal, and conservative theories of politics,
variations on nationalism and imperialism, and conceptions of human
rights and natural laws, adapted for use outside the European
context where these ideas emerged and where they have been so
extensively documented and analyzed. The Spanish American
revolutions and early period of independence also provide a
fascinating mirror in which we can re-consider the defenses of
rebellion, doctrines of representation, separated powers, and
federalism, and hemispheric ambitions of the founders of the United
States, long familiar subjects for political theorists interested
in American public law.
Indeed, as I shall try to show here, in certain, important
respects Spanish America provides a better touch-point for
comparative inquiry into the political thought of the United States
Revolution and early Republic than more traditional cases, like
England and France. All too often, scholars identification of the
British North American independence movement with the struggles of
English parliamentarians and French revolutionaries, rather than
with other American independence movements, has led to a
problematic de-emphasis of the fundamental feature which the
American revolutions share and the European ones do not: the
American revolutions were, in the last instance, anti-imperial
rebellions led by colonists that understood themselves and their
rebellion as such. The colonial setting of the American revolutions
contributed strongly to the nature of the claims made in defense of
rebellion, the constitutional designs that emerged after
independence, and the way in which political thinkers treated
questions of territorial expansion and international relations. As
comparison becomes a increasingly recognized approach in the field
of political theory, political theorists will examine
systematically the relation between political thinkers
circumstances and their political ideas; here, I shall argue that
contextual similarities can explain interesting ideological
convergences amongst the American revolutions, making comparison
between these revolutions a productive manner of gaining new
insights into their ideologies.
In the present essay, I illustrate the fruits of this approach
through an analysis of the ideas of Simn Bolvar, perhaps the most
prominent political and intellectual leader of the independence
movements in South America. My discussion is organized so as to
highlight the three areas of convergence in the ideologies of the
American revolutions indicated above: First, I describe Bolvars
case for the independence of Spanish America, which, in both its
classical republican premises and its ambiguous legal basis, bears
a strong resemblance to well-known arguments made on behalf of
independence in British North America. Second, I treat Bolvars
constitutional thought, especially his views on the separation of
powers and on the role of the executive in a republic, which
compare well with those of the early American republics High
Federalists, especially Alexander Hamilton. Third, and finally, I
discuss Bolvars successively more expansive projects for
unification of the former Spanish American Empire, which are, at a
number of points, reminiscent of the arguments made in the
Federalist Papers on behalf of the United States Constitution. In
closing, I sharpen these comparisons and use them to pose some
additional questions about the Americas political thought and
development.
Throughout, I argue that at the center of Bolvars ideas lies a
doctrine of republican imperialism, consisting in a defense of a
renewed imperial project as a means of overcoming the legacies of
Spanish rule and consolidating American independence. Bolvars
passionate and appealing calls for freedom and equality for Spanish
Americans contrast sharply with the exclusivist constitutional
measures he thought necessary to compensate for Spanish Americas
highly unequal, racially-stratified society. Bolvar was quite
conscious of the elite social makeup of his movements leadership
and of the difficulties this implied for both the prosecution of
the revolution itself and the creation of an independent state. His
writings are haunted by the spectre of pure democracy and its
implication, which he termed pardocracia: rule by the free,
mixed-race population that made up a plurality of Venezuelas
inhabitants. He struggled with the possibility that this poor
underclass, disdaining the legal equality his revolution offered,
would demand absolute equality, both public and private, which
would mean the extermination of the privileged class to which he
himself belonged, and the abandonment of the enlightened projects
that he hoped to undertake in independent America. Thus, Bolvar led
armies of liberation across the continent, forcefully annexing
royalist territories, and imposing a highly centralized
constitution that concentrated authority in an American-born elite,
defending these measures as indispensable means of establishing
stable republican government in Spanish America.
In closing I will argue that this paradoxical doctrine of
republican imperialism has bears a strong resemblance to the
political thought of British North American revolutionaries, who
like Bolvar sought freedom and popular sovereignty but worried that
their societies would be incapable of sustaining them. Comparing
the ideologies of these revolutions highlights this important
convergence, and directs our attention to contextual similarities
that can help us understand why it occurred. But this claim will be
better left aside until after I have given a more detailed account
of Simn Bolvars political thought and its particular paradoxes and
tensions.
A Machiavellian Moment in the AndesThe year 1811 found the city
of Caracas in a state of deep division. Three years had passed
since Napoleon I deposed the Bourbon monarchs of Spain and the
Indies and placed his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, on the throne.
Spaniards and Spanish Americans rose against the French imposition,
denying the legitimacy of Bonapartes succession and denouncing the
anti-clericalism of the French Revolution. Between 1808 and 1810,
armed resistance spread from the Iberian Peninsula to the poles of
Spanish America the Viceroyalties of New Spain (present-day Mexico)
and the River Plate (present-day Argentina) where declarations of
loyalty to Fernando VII and assertions of local autonomy mixed in
an ideological atmosphere more clamorous than coherent. In 1810,
Caracass municipal leaders joined their fellows on both sides of
the Atlantic, forming a Junta to govern Venezuela in Fernando VIIs
name during his absence. A young Simn Bolvar, scion of one of the
citys most prominent families, was dispatched to London as part of
a delegation sent to seek English support for Venezuelas fight
against France.
We have only scant, and largely apocryphal, testimony to Bolvars
political opinions prior to this trip, but it is clear that after
he returned, Bolvar became a forceful advocate for a complete and
final break with Spain. Importantly, Bolvars case for Venezuelan
independence was unmixed with loyalty to Fernando VII, doubts about
the legitimacy of Bonapartes accession, or opposition to the
principles of the French Revolution, ideas which recent scholarship
has sought to establish as the central motivations for the Spanish
American revolutions. Nor did Bolvars adherence to the cause of
independence clearly reflect an incipient nationalism Venezuelan,
American, or Spanish as others have presumed. His argument was
different: Why should it matter to us, he asked his comrades in the
Sociedad Patritica, whether Spain sells her slaves to Bonaparte, or
keeps them for herself, if we are resolved to be free? The
half-measures adopted by the citys leadership evidenced the sad
effects of ancient bondage, the reflexive loyalism of people long
denied the right to rule themselves. Venezuelans ought to attend to
the patriotic faction, the center of enlightenment and of all
revolutionary interests, under whose leadership they might lay down
the foundation stone of South American liberty! With this speech,
Simn Bolvar, only twenty-seven years old, propelled himself into
the vanguard of the struggle for independence in Spanish America; a
week later, Venezuela became the first South American colony to
declare independence from Spain.
To properly understand Bolvars ideology of Spanish American
revolution, it must be considered by reference to the tradition of
classical republicanism traced by intellectual historians from
renaissance Italy, through the Glorious Revolution, the French
Enlightenment, and the movement for independence in North America.
In his writings, Bolvar was certainly more likely to cite
eighteenth-century French philosophers Montesquieu and Rousseau
being the most common references than Machiavelli or the
Commonwealthmen, but even the terms his political theory routinely
employed evidence his clear debts to these classical republican
thinkers. In 1815, Bolvar explained to a correspondent that States
are enslaved either by virtue of their constitution or through the
abuse of it; a people is enslaved when the government, by its
essence or through its vices, tramples and usurps the rights of the
citizen or subject. As Quentin Skinner, amongst others, has
established, the description of political marginalization as
slavery, and the attribution of the term slave to an entire state
or people, were distinctive attributes of English republicanism in
particular. Bolvar was an adept student of this tradition; he
modified its central theories and problems not only to make a case
for Spanish American independence, but also to justify the regime
he hoped to install once independence had been won.
The first argument begins with a characterization of the Spanish
regime in the Americas. For Bolvar the primary problem with the
Spanish American Empire had less to do with its being Spanish than
its particular form of imperialism, which denied even elite
Americans the opportunity to participate in their own
governance.
The position of those who dwell in the American hemisphere has
been for centuries purely passive, their political existence null.
We were at a level even lower than servitude, prevented from
elevating ourselves to the joys of freedom. America was not only
deprived of its freedom but also of an active tyranny [una tirana
activa y dominante].
Bolvar elaborates what he has in mind by active tyranny through
a comparison of the Spanish and Ottoman Empires, describing the
latter as a system of oppression in which subordinates participate
according to the authority conferred upon them. The Spanish denied
Americans even this consolation; in contrast to the politically
active elites of the Ottoman periphery, Spanish Americans occupy no
other place in society than that of servants suited for work or, at
best, that of simple consumers. We have never been viceroys, or
governors, except in extraordinary circumstances; rarely
archbishops or bishops; never diplomats; always military
subordinates. Thus, in Bolvars account, the Spanish Empire was a
system of rule that intentionally and effectively denied a
political role to Americans, thereby rendering them slaves,
servants, or dependents, unable to enjoy the truly human freedom of
the citizen.
There is a notable ambiguity in Bolvars efforts to specify a
legal basis for his claim against the Spanish Empire. In most
cases, he insists that the exclusion of Americans from political
office is a violation of the rights of humanity, a natural law or
laws that do not receive a systematic exposition anywhere in his
writings. However, in a few instances Bolvar decries American
exclusions as an abrogation of a pact made between the Spanish
crown and the discoverers, conquerors, and settlers of America our
social contract which guaranteed Spanish Americans a right to equal
treatment as equal subjects of the Crown of Castile, or even, a
right to preference for offices in their native lands. The space
between these two kinds of claims is important, as they are made on
behalf of different groups of Spanish Americans: while the rights
of humanity would presumably include all human residents of the
region, subjects of the Crown of Castile would likely be understood
to exclude enslaved and even free African-descended Americans, and
descendents of the conquistadors would encompass only the criollos,
the European-descended, American-born elite of the Spanish colonies
to which Bolvar belonged. I will argue later that this fundamental
ambiguity, between natural law and ancient rights, was
characteristic of American revolutionary ideology throughout the
hemisphere, playing an important role in Creole revolutionaries
attempts to defend American independence as a implication of
universal principles of political right, while simultaneously
limiting the extension of political privileges to the lower ranks
of independent societies.
Bolvar employed a distinctively republican manner of reconciling
invocations of universal rights with particular exclusions,
premised upon an analysis of the effects of political dependency on
the character of Spanish Americans:
Under the triple yoke of ignorance, tyranny, and vice we, the
American People, have been unable to acquire, or even to know,
either power or virtue. As disciples of these pernicious masters,
we have only learned the most destructive lessons and studied the
worst examples. Slavery is the daughter of darkness; an ignorant
people is the blind instrument of its own destruction: they adopt
illusions for reality, take license for liberty, treachery for
patriotism, vengeance for justice. A corrupt people can win its
liberty, only to lose it once again.
Under the Spanish Empire, Americans lacked opportunities to
develop the civic virtues which republicans thought requisite to
the maintenance of self-government. Thus, Bolvar worried that even
if they did manage, through momentary superiority of arms, to wrest
independence away from the Spanish, they might be incapable of
maintaining their liberty against internal or external threats.
Here, we have Bolvars version of the classic Machiavellian dilemma
of the new prince: peoples long accustomed to political subjection
display none of the greatheartedness or manly virt that inspire
acts of self-sacrifice for the common good in long-standing stable
republics. Rather, they are consumed by petty, competitive bids for
personal comfort and aggrandizement. This makes establishing and
maintaining a republican constitution de novo a particularly vexed
problem in republican thought. Compensating for the legacies of
three centuries oppression forms, as we will now see, the central
problem of Bolvars constitutional theory and the heart of his
doctrine of republican imperialism.
Bolivarian ConstitutionalismRecently, political theorists have
examined canonical liberal philosophers views on the imperial
projects initiated by Britain in India and by France in North
Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. These
studies have shown that, far from condemning these projects,
several of the periods great thinkers viewed the expansion of
European overseas rule as an indispensable means of spreading
liberal ideas throughout the non-European world. This liberal
imperialism defended European imperial rule as a benefit to
backward subjects, authorized the abrogation of sovereignty of many
indigenous states, and licensed increasingly interventionist
policies in colonized societies systems of education, law,
property, and religion. As Uday Mehta has argued, liberal
imperialism presents a definite paradox: One needs to account for
how a set of ideas that professed, at a fundamental level, to
include as its political referent a universal constituency
nevertheless spawned practices that were either predicated on or
directed at the political marginalization of various people. In
order to accomplish this reconciliation, liberal defenders of
empire in England depended upon strategies of exclusion: conditions
placed upon the universal reach of liberalisms regard that made the
subjects of imperial domination special cases to whom the general
principle does not apply. In John Stuart Mill, famously, this kind
of strategy can be found in the assertion that Liberty, as a
principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to
the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free
and equal discussion. In the broader liberal-imperialist tradition,
the progressive theory of history discernable in Mills claim
grounded a variety of similar strategies of exclusion.
In Simn Bolvars constitutional thought, we encounter similar
paradoxes. Though, as weve seen, Bolvar defended the Spanish
American revolutions by reference to putatively universal
republican ideals of independence and self-government, he favored
institutions that would limit the access of particular groups to
high office and repeatedly subjected cities and regions held by his
opponents to military conquest and forced annexation. In this
section and the next, I will describe Bolvars theories of
representation, separated powers, territorial expansion, and
federalism as a republican imperialism. Republican, because in
Bolvars defense of imperial expansion, a lack of civic virtue,
rather than economic and political backwardness, forms the basis of
a strategy of exclusion analogous to those Mehta describes in the
English liberals. In short, Bolvars argument will be that because,
after years of Spanish domination, Americans lack the political
virtues that characterize the true republican, their newly
independent states should adopt constitutions that insulate
government from popular control. In service to this end, Bolvar
recommended hereditary legislative chambers, special authorities to
control the press, education, and public morality, a lifetime
executive, and other surprising constitutional innovations.
That Bolvars political thought encompassed such substantial
concern with constitutions at all is in itself remarkable,
illustrating an important point of convergence amongst the American
revolutions. Given his deep reservations regarding the capacity of
Spanish Americans to participate in their own governance, it is
perhaps surprising that he did not join the ranks of Spanish
Americans who viewed absolute monarchy as the only form of
government capable of establishing order after the break with
Spain. But Bolvar consistently denounced absolutism as solution,
because the limits on popular participation in government he sought
to establish were meant to buttress a transitional period during
which Spanish Americans would undergo an education in civic virtue
rendering more and more of them fit for self-rule. Nonetheless, it
is clear that Bolvars constitutional thought provided a
justification, however temporary, for the concentration of
authority in the hands of a small, lettered, and largely creole
elite. In this sense, it performed an ideological function similar
to the one performed by European liberal imperialism, defending, in
this case, creole rule as a benefit to vicious and illiterate
descendents of Africans and Native Americans. I shall suggest below
that a similar description could be applied to the framers of the
United States Constitution.
In Bolvars constitutional thought, the fundamental problem was
always to consolidate American independence with institutions that
could compensate for the legacies of imperial rule. How, he asked,
having broken the chains of our ancient oppression, can we perform
the miracle of preventing their iron remnants from being re-forged
as freedom-killing weapons [armas liberticidas]? In search of an
answer, Bolvar studied classical precedents: Athens exemplified
absolute democracy and evidenced the extreme weakness of this
species of government. Spartas more limited participatory
institutions produced better results than the ingenious work of
Solon, but ultimately neither city-state could provide a model for
Spanish America. Rather, Rome and Great Britain are the nations
that stand out amongst the ancients and moderns; both were born to
rule and to be free; but both were constituted, not for brilliant
forms of Liberty, but on solid foundations. Notably, both Rome and
Great Britain were, like Bolvars Venezuela, societies characterized
by stark social hierarchies, divided between a small, learned elite
and a large, occasionally insurrectionary populace. Bolvar,
conscious as he was of the precarious position of his enlightened
revolutionary cadre within a population mostly indifferent when not
actively opposed to his projects, could not have failed to grasp
this similarity, or to be attracted by the classic balance of the
Roman Republic and the model of gradual, elite-led liberal
reformism that Great Britain in particular represented.
From his study of these precedents, Bolvar derived a number of
specific institutional recommendations: If our Senate, instead of
being elective, were hereditary, it would serve as the base, the
bond, the soul of our Republic. During political tempests, this
institution would deflect lightening from the government and
repulse waves of popular dissent. Such a barrier against the
populace was necessary, because after long experiencing political
domination, men do not know their own true interests. Thus, they
would best served by a system in which their protection is
entrusted to a neutral body, owing nothing to either the election
of the government or the people, by virtue of its being staffed by
inherited right. The proper occupants of this office were also
clear: the leaders of the liberation and their descendents deserved
to occupy forever an exalted position in the republic which owes
them its existence. Bolvars Senate was a republicanized version of
Britains House of Lords; a bulwark against the whims of the general
population, composed of those who have proved their virtuosity
through service to the republic.
As for the Executive authority, in a republic, it must be all
the stronger, because everything conspires against it; a republican
magistrate is an isolated individual in the middle of a society,
charged with containing the impetuosity of the people. Thus, though
one wants to contain the executive authority, the bonds should be
strong while not being too tight. Bolvar thought it important that
the constitution suit the needs of Venezuelan society in its
present state: Let us concentrate the executive power in a
President, and confer upon him sufficient authority that he will be
able to continue to fight against the difficulties that attend upon
our current situation, the state of war that we face, and the sorts
of internal and external enemies that we will long battle. As with
the hereditary senate, then, the strong executive functions in
Bolvars constitutional thought as a mechanism meant to compensate
for the legacies of imperial domination, in the realms of both
foreign and domestic affairs.
Finally, Bolvar thought that the conscious cultivation of virtue
in Spanish America was of such central importance that he suggested
adding new branch of government to the traditional tripartite
system, a fourth power [quarta potestad] whose dominion is
childhood and mens hearts, the public spirit, good customs, and
republican morality. Citing the Athenian Areopagus and the Roman
Censors as precedents, Bolvar thought this institution could
restore to the world the idea of a people who is not contented by
being free and strong, but also wants to be virtuous. The idea of a
fourth branch, or poder moral as Bolvar sometimes referred to it,
was an innovation in American constitutionalism; it was held in
high esteem by other Spanish American constitutional thinkers in
Bolvars own time, and has ever since represented a point of special
interest amongst his interpreters. Here, I think we can see Bolvars
fourth branch as exemplary of his republican imperialism: a
constitutional provision, overtly authoritarian in its design, but
intended, in a sense, to bring about its own obsolescence, becoming
unnecessary once its function of creating a virtuous population has
been discharged. This clearly fraught attraction to educative
despotism, to imperialism itself as a means of overcoming the
legacies of empire, runs through all of Bolvars political
thought.
In 1826, Bolvar had an opportunity to put his constitutional
ideas into practice. After fifteen years of near-continuous
campaigning, his armies defeated the last royalist holdouts of
South America, high in the mountainous region known then as Charcas
or Upper Peru. A hastily-assembled congress named the
newly-independent country Bolvar (and later changed it to Bolivia)
to honor its liberator, and asked that he himself prepare a
constitution for the new state. Bolvar, flattered, took on the
project pronouncing himself overtaken by confusion and timidity at
the prospect of assuming the role of the legislator, in which he
would have to tame two monstrous enemies that reciprocally combat
one another, and which both attack at once: tyranny and anarchy.
With his favorite Lieutenant he was rather less modest, declaring
when he had finished that in the Bolivian Constitution he had
achieved a perfection almost beyond what could be hoped for, a
synthesis [transaccin] of Europe with America, of the army with the
people, of democracy with aristocracy, and of imperialism with
republicanism.
The Bolivian Constitution of 1826 was distinguished by a number
of interesting features: a multi-level system of indirect election,
which we shall consider in greater detail below; a three-chambered
legislature, adopted because two chambers inevitably lead to
perpetual combat, and including a Chamber of Censors, elder
citizens serving a life-term, charged with regulating morality, the
sciences, the arts, education, and the press. More appealing,
perhaps, were the provisions that Bolvar recommended but which were
not adopted by the Constituent Congress: the abolition of slavery,
which he deemed a violation of every law a contradiction that
impugns only our reason more than our justice,; and the
disestablishment of religion, which, being a question of conscience
lying within divine jurisdiction, makes all attempts at legal
coercion both sacrilegious and null. These ideas place Bolvars
credentials as an enlightened, reformist, and even liberal thinker
beyond reproach, but the means he thought necessary to achieve
these ends can only be described as imperial.
By far the most notorious feature of the Bolivian Constitution,
and the one that receives the most attention both from Bolvar
himself and his students, is the presidente vitalicio, or life-term
president empowered to choose his own successor. Even though, as
Bolvar insisted, the authority of the Bolivian executive was to be
subject to the severest constitutional limitations ever known, the
institution became the subject of fierce criticism and even open
rebellion in its own time, and has lain ever since at the heart of
analyses that question the sincerity of Bolvar republican
commitments. Most commentators hasten to observe that Frances
Constitution of the Year X (1802), which established Napoleon
Bonaparte as First Consul for Life, must have inspired the
presidente vitalicio, but Bolvar himself named precedents from
closer to home. The life-term president, he noted, also featured in
the most democratic republic in the world, the southern Republic of
Haiti, which had adopted the institution under Alexandre Ption in
1816. After winning its independence, he explained, the island of
Haiti found itself in a state of constant insurrection. After
experiments with all of the known forms of government, and even
some unknown ones, its people was forced to appeal to the
illustrious Ption for salvation. Once Ption was made president for
life, Bolvar claimed, the islands destiny was placed on more secure
ground, and all had gone well since. Haiti, then, provided
triumphant proof that a lifetime President, with the power to
choose his successor, is the most sublime innovation in the
republican system. Of course, the Haitian example carried a very
powerful resonance for Bolvars audience, which was eager to avoid
the islands experience of destructive and bloody race warfare.
For the principle of succession, Bolvar cited an even more
surprising model: the United States, which had recently observed a
practice of naming the first Minister to succeed the President. He
thought that no other method could be as convenient in a Republic;
having the President choose his successor not only assured that the
office would be held by someone experienced in the management of
the State, but also avoided elections, which produce the great
scourge of republics, anarchy. The executive authority quite
clearly occupied a central place in Bolvars thought, and he hoped
the same would be true in his society:
Under our Constitution, the President of the Republic will be
like the Sun, unmoved at the center, giving life to the universe.
.... [A] fixed point around which magistrates and citizens, men and
materials, revolve. Give me a fixed point, said an ancient, and I
will move the world. For Bolivia, this point is the Presidente
vitalicio.
In these subtly mixed metaphors, Bolvars basic argument emerges.
The dilemma he perceived in Bolivia, and indeed, all Spanish
America, the dilemma of Machiavellis new prince, receives a more
famous formulation from Rousseau:
For a young people to be able to relish sound principles of
political theory and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft,
the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit, which
should be created by these institutions, would have to preside over
their very foundation, and men would have to be before law what
they should become by means of law.
Rousseau suggested that this problem could only be overcome by
the intervention of a mystical Legislator, a founding father,
possessed of superior knowledge and virtue, who attracts the
adherence of his people with a quasi-religious authority. Bolvars
presidente vitalicio was a constitutional adaptation of this idea,
a permanent institutionalization of Rousseaus Legislator, the only
means by which young peoples of Spanish America could sustain their
independence. The presidente vitalicio is Bolvars republican
emperor, who rules in order that his subjects will learn to rule
themselves. In this sense, Bolvars most infamous constitutional
innovation exemplifies again the undeniable paradox at the center
of his political thinking.
Imperialism against Empire
It might reasonably be asserted that the term imperialism has
been employed thus far as a description of Bolvars constitutional
thought only in a rather loose fashion, having little to do with
territorial expansion, unequal relations between a metropole and
its peripheries, or other definitive qualities of empires. If
Bolvars presidente vitalicio is a republican emperor, what was to
be the nature of his empire? Bolvars political projects also
displayed these territorial features of imperialism: during and
after the wars of independence, he sought to unify progressively
more expansive portions of the former Spanish Empire, to
consolidate authority over vast reaches of South America in a
powerful national government. Again, paradoxically, Bolvar defended
both territorial expansion and political centralization precisely
as means of winning and maintaining American independence. His
thought was, then, in the most basic sense of the terms, both
republican and imperial.
An early formulation appears in Bolvars famous Cartagena
Manifesto of 1812. The circumstances surrounding the production of
this document are worth briefly recalling: Bolvar, aged
twenty-nine, is in the patriotic redoubt of Cartagena explaining
the recent demise of the First Republic of Venezuela. He tells his
audience that The most consequential error Venezuela committed was
undoubtedly the fatal adoption of a policy of toleration toward a
royalist rebellion originating in the in the city of Coro. Instead
of subjugating that defenseless city, the republican regime allowed
it to fortify itself so that it was later able to subjugate the
entire confederation. This error, Bolvar declares, was grounded
upon poorly understood principles of humanitarianism, which barred
the government from liberating by force a people too stupefied to
recognize the value of its own rights. Here we have a clear
expression of the central argument in Bolvars republican
imperialism, applied to make a case for territorial expansion and
peripheral subjugation. The people of Coro, after years of
domination, are stupefied: corrupt, unable to recognize their own
true interests and lacking the virtues that sustain republican
government. Because their corruption, and the actions and inactions
that follow from it, threatened the stability of the First
Republic, it was not only acceptable but vital that their
allegiance to the patriotic cause be won by force.
Even at this early stage, Bolvar recognized that this doctrine
would carry his revolution across the continent. He submitted a
telling syllogism to his audience: Coro is to Caracas as Caracas is
to the whole of America; in other words, Caracas, in this moment
under Spanish military occupation, now poses a threat to the rest
of South America similar to the one Coro posed to independent
Venezuela. Thus, he presents as an indispensible measure for the
security of New Granada [present-day Colombia], the re-conquest of
Caracas. The basic argument made here with respect to Coro,
attributing inaction or reaction to corruption, and making
corruption a rationale for conquest, would remain fundamentally the
same as the scope of Bolvars territorial ambitions expanded with
the war effort. The result was a progressively larger series of
projected states, culminating in a proposal for a pan-Spanish
American Congress, which has earned Bolvar deserved plaudits as an
early cosmopolitan, but which I shall treat here as the blueprint
for a republican empire.
Notably, as late as 1815, Bolvar still espoused a more
conventional republicanism, holding that the interest of a
republic, properly understood, is circumscribed by the sphere of
self-preservation, prosperity, and glory. Unmoved by an imperial
will, because it is precisely its antithesis, the republic has no
reason to extend its boundaries, and diminish its own resources,
merely in order to force its neighbors to participate in a liberal
constitution. In this period he thought that the former Spanish
American territories would divide into 15 to 17 independent states.
But he already envisioned his own native Venezuela as part of a
larger entity, engaged in an internal civilizing mission:
New Granada will unite with Venezuela if they can agree to form
a central republic, whose capital might be Maracaibo. Or perhaps a
new city named for the philanthropic hero, Las Casas, will be built
near the magnificent port of Baha-Honda. The savage inhabitants
would become civilized, and our possessions would grow with the
acquisition of the Goajira. This nation would be named Colombia in
fair and grateful tribute to the creator of our hemisphere.
Bolvar proved willing to employ military means to see this
vision made reality, deploying Venezuelan troops across the
mountains dividing Venezuela and New Granada and defeating a large
royalist force at Boyoc in August, 1819, thereby assuring New
Granadas incorporation into what would become the Republic of
Colombia.
For Bolvar, however, the liberation and unification of Colombia
did not represent an end in itself, but a mere first stage in a
more expansive revolution destined to establish a new model of
politics for the entire world. With the passage of time, Colombia
would establish itself as the heart of the universe, serving as the
unifier, center, and emporium of the human family. Along with its
precious metals and agriculture, it would export the precious
secrets of enlightened government to the corners of the world. In
1819, Bolvar could already see [Colombia] seated upon the Throne of
Liberty, grasping the scepter of Justice, crowned by Glory,
demonstrating to the old world the majesty of the new. Thus, in
Bolvars thought, American independence assumes a world-historical
importance, initiating a transition from the epoch of European
anciens regimes to an enlightened era of global unity bound
together by a new, American metropole.
Before Colombia could conquer the world, however, it first had
to consolidate authority in its own territory; even as a
Constituent Congress assembled at the border city of Ccuta to frame
a constitution in 1821, the southern-most regions claimed by the
new state (present-day Ecuador) remained mostly under royalist and
opposition control. After being elected President, Bolvar prepared
to take his armies south, toward Guayaquil, which, while
independent of Spain did not welcome annexation into Colombia.
Bolvar had no patience for this dissent. He argued that the most
secure way of assuring the Colombias independence, was to
cultivate, extend, and multiply the relations that exist between
the various governments and show them the reciprocal advantages
that Union offers them. Finding the residents of the highland city
of Pasto particularly reluctant to enjoy these advantages, Bolvar
addressed them as wayward children in need of direction by
custodial arms before leading his armies into their midst. The
peoples of Guayaquil and Pasto were to be made Colombians whether
they wished it or not; their incorporation into the larger union
was indispensable, in Bolvars mind, to the latters success.
As both cases demonstrate, the primary obstacles Bolvar had to
confront on his way to generating a unified South American struggle
for independence were the local allegiances of the population and
the jealousy of their leaders, who claimed that solid legal
precedents supported their provinces autonomy: When Napoleon
deposed Fernando VII in 1808 the Spaniards and Spanish Americans
who denied the legitimacy of Joseph Bonapartes accession organized
themselves into local governing bodies, or Juntas, citing a
traditional provision that in the absence of a legitimate King,
sovereignty returned to the constitutive kingdoms of the realm.
When the Spanish American independence movements began, these too
were originally carried out in the name of constitutive kingdoms,
and legal theorists of the time, relying on the Roman legal
doctrine of uti possidetis, projected that if and when independence
was won, the territories of these kingdoms would become sovereign
states. Some ambiguity surrounded the question of which
administrative boundaries of the Spanish American empire delimited
the constituent kingdoms, but the limit possibility was that these
were the Viceroyalties, the seats of the Kings personal
representatives in America. By the end of 1822, with Quito
relatively free of royalists, and Colombian unity assured from
Angostura to Guayaquil, Bolvar had achieved the liberation of the
entire former Viceroyalty of New Granada and stretched the claim of
uti possidetis as far as it could be plausibly maintained. His
decision, at this point, to take the battle to the last royalist
holdouts on the continent, in the Viceroyalty of Peru and the
Audiencia of Charcas, previously a province of the Viceroyalty of
the Rio de la Plata, presented, then, a novel legal and
philosophical problem.
Bolvar himself was aware of this distinction, lamenting that The
war in Peru presents difficulties that appear insuperable the
difference is that this is not Colombia and I am not Peruvian.
However, he understood the push into Peru as a continuation of his
general campaign, and justified it, when the Colombian Congress
demanded an explanation, by reference to his own doctrine of
republican imperialism:
I should be permitted to advance on territories occupied by the
Spanish in Peru, because the enemy will come here if I do not
contain him there, and because enemy territory should not be
considered foreign territory, but conquerable territory, just as
New Granada was for Venezuela. Anyone who denies this is a fool,
and a fool is no authority.
Once again, Bolvar hoped that unification would follow conquest.
After finishing his Constitution for Bolivia in 1826, he wrote out
plans for a union of the three republics, Colombia, Peru, and
Bolivia, that his armies had liberated. The Constitution itself
would be adopted by each component state with Colombia re-divided
into Venezuela, New Granada, and Quito and, with some
modifications, by the federal state itself. In this great act of
founding, Bolvar declared, I am giving to the peoples who the army
has liberated a code that joins permanency with liberty, in the
highest degree attainable in a government of men aspiring toward
greater perfection would only bring us ruin. He himself would
assume the title of Liberator-President, and in this role ride on
an annual circuit throughout all of the states, calming their
disorders by his very presence.
In each, progressively larger formulation of Spanish American
unity, Bolvar confronted the critical question of how to organize
sub-national levels of government, and how much authority to grant
them, vis--vis the center. From the first, he was a fervent
opponent of federalism, insisting that only centralized government
could consolidate American independence. Advocates of federalism in
Spanish America were fond of pointing to the example of the United
States, where, they claimed, a federal system was transforming a
former group of colonies into a powerful independent state. Bolvar
stood ready to rebut this argument, insisting that although the
population of the United States was singular model of political
virtue and moral enlightenment, and although liberty has been its
cradle and its nourishment, it is a miracle that a system as weak
and as complicated as federalism has been capable of governing in
such difficult and delicate circumstances. In Spanish America, he
thought, where one could not count on the same advantages, the
federal system was a clear folly.
Thus, Bolvar produced an interesting range of mechanisms for
diminishing the authority of the component parts of his states: in
Gran Colombia, a strongly centralized constitution, with local
officials appointed by the central government, and subject to
removal by the same; in the Bolivian Constitution, an Electoral
Power or system of indirect elections, in which every ten citizens
chose representatives, who in turn named representatives, who would
take part in the election of national Senators and Tribunes.
Through this system, with attributes that approximate those of a
federal system Bolvar hoped to recoup some advantages of
federalism, and the support of federalists, while simultaneously
undermining the traditional provincial political leaders that so
often resisted his plans for unification. As for the projected
federation of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, the absence of a
systematic description makes it impossible to say exactly what
Bolvar meant when he noted that the intention of this pact should
be the most perfect unity possible under a federal form of
government, but we can safely conclude, I think, that Bolvar would
have preferred to institute the greatest degree of centralization
he thought would be politically feasible.
Indeed, the only occasion on which Bolvar seems to have conceded
any ground to federalism was in connection with his most expansive
projection of Spanish American unity, the Congress of Panama. From
Lima, in December 1824, Bolvar penned an Invitation to the
Governments of Colombia, Mexico, Rio de la Plata, Chile and
Guatemala to form a Congress at Panama. This assembly of
plenipotentiary representatives would, he hoped, give the unity of
interests between the American republics, former colonies of Spain,
a firm foundation that will maintain in eternity, if such a thing
is possible, the duration of these governments. Here, Bolvar seems
to describe nothing more than a defensive alliance, but there are
grounds for supposing, as one prominent historian has done, that in
his heart he clearly wanted something much more cohesive than a
loose confederation. Thus, Bolvar proposed that member states be
bound by a common law fixing external relations, guaranteed by a
permanent general congress, that would conserve internal order
between the States and within each one against external enemies or
anarchical factions, specifically mentioning within the ambit of
the latter the monster that has devoured the island of Santo
Domingo, or slave revolt, and the numerical preponderance of
primitive inhabitants, the indigenous peoples of Spanish America.
In sum, he wrote, the consolidated authority of the Panama Congress
would assure that in Spanish America, social reform will be
achieved under the holy auspices of liberty and peace, rather
dissolving into the chaos of race warfare and popular
revolution.
In the end, then, the enlightened defense of exclusion and
expansion that throughout this essay Ive described as a republican
imperialism, receives its limit formulation in Bolvars plan for
Spanish American political unification, a model he thought might,
with the right patrons, evolve into a single, federal, nation
covering the world (una sola nacin cubriendo al universola
federal). Here we have the characteristic dilemma of Bolvars
thought brought into focus: though he dedicated his life to the
overthrow of the Spanish Empire, and much of his thought to making
a case for American independence to the world, even before he had
won, he had already set about building a new empire, defending his
conquest and centralism as means of spreading independence and
republican government throughout the hemisphere and, indeed, the
world. Bolvar and the American RevolutionsA first encounter with
the life and thought of Simn Bolvar is perhaps more likely to leave
an impression of idiosyncrasy than familiarity. Bolvar is a
singular figure, the Liberator amongst liberators, and his doctrine
of republican imperialism is a distinctive contribution to American
political thought. But there are strong analogies between Bolvars
ideas and those of revolutionaries across the hemisphere, including
the United States. Since Bernard Bailyns landmark study of the
influence of English country opposition thinking on the
pamphleteers of the American Revolution, we have known that, like
Bolvar, supporters of British North American independence denounced
English rule as tantamount to slavery, decried the corruption that
the Crowns extensive patronage produced in England and her
colonies, and viewed independence as a path to moral renewal as
well as political reform. Even more interestingly, these British
colonists also appealed to both ancient rights contained in an
original English constitution and their colonial charters and
universal principles, self-evident truths, or natural laws as
grounds for their rebellion. The American revolutions, then, share
a notable quality: while they denounced empires and sought
independence, they did not base their claims on the justice of
national self-determination, but rather an ambiguous mix of ancient
rights and universal principles, bound together in a re-nascent
classical republicanism. Throughout the hemisphere, precisely this
ambiguity allowed revolutionaries to simultaneously proclaim
American independence while leaving many Americans in a decidedly
dependent condition.
The ideologists of the American Revolution were also as apt as
was Bolvar to attribute a world-historical significance to their
cause, and to expect that their success would have ramifications
far beyond the boundaries of the American colonies. The first
number of the Federalist Papers famously asserts that it seems to
have been reserved to the people of this country to decide the
important question, whether societies of men are really capable or
not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice.
American failure, Publius thought, would deserve to be considered
as the general misfortune of mankind. The Federalist also
anticipates a closely related idea, that it fell to Americans to
disturb Europes longstanding global hegemony, to demonstrate to the
old world the majesty of the new in Bolvars terms: Facts have too
long supported these arrogant pretensions of the European. It
belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to
teach that assuming brother moderation. Thus, in both North and
South America, independence was viewed as a kind of double
vindication, a shift in the global balance of power away from
Europe, and an associated shift in political ideas, ushering in an
era of enlightenment and inclusion.
But however convinced they were of Americas special providence,
and however egalitarian their rhetoric at times appeared, the
founders of the United States were as skeptical of its populace as
was Bolvar of Spanish Americans, and for similar reasons. As Gordon
Wood has shown, these revolutionaries feared the traditional
deference of the people to their established leaders, finding that
the poorer commonalty seemed strangely apathetic to their appeals,
too habitually accepting of the traditional authority, and
attributing this deference to the fact that ideas of government in
the past had too long been rather aristocratical than popular.
Bolvar, of course, could have fully assented to this analysis; as
we saw above, a similar line of thinking provided the basis for his
entire constitutional theory. British North Americans disillusioned
with the virtues of the people availed themselves of similar
innovations, as well, creating a system of separated powers in the
federal government that would check and balance the most immediate
representatives of the people. There is a marked resemblance
between the Bolivian Constitution of 1826 and the high-toned Plan
of Government Alexander Hamilton recommended to the Constitutional
Convention in 1787: both incorporate a life-term chamber of the
legislative branch, a life-term executive, indirect elections by
specially-empowered Electors, and a radical reduction of the
autonomy of the state governments. Like Bolvar, Hamilton insisted
that his plan, far from representing a break with the ideas of the
Revolution, was a means of consolidating its achievements, going as
far in order to attain stability and permanency, as republican
principles will admit.
Of course, Hamiltons plan of government was never adopted in the
United States, and it is clear that the institutional preferences
he shared with Bolvar lay somewhat outside the North American
mainstream. But the basic premise of Bolvars constitutional
thought, that in order to achieve stability within newly
independent societies the direct influence of the masses upon
politics would have to be limited, was widely shared by Hamiltons
contemporaries. James Madisons tenth Federalist, perhaps the best
known text in early American political thought, celebrates the
capacity of an extended republic one characterized by large
territory and population to refine and enlarge the public views, by
passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose
wisdom may best discern the true interests of their country.
Indeed, the Federalist Papers as a whole, in advocating territorial
expansion and political centralization as a protection against
foreign invasion, a spur for economic development, and damper on
factional politics, might be read as a doctrine of republican
imperialism, a defense of a renewed empire as a means of
consolidating the achievements of an anti-imperial revolution. With
the adoption of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, the United States
provided the hemispheres first model of a metropole that gradually
prepared its periphery for self-rule, establishing military
governments in newly-conquered territories to oversee a transition
to statehood, and George Washington proved as willing as Bolvar to
use force to assure the prerogatives of the federal government in
the face of provincial resistance.
It must be conceded that this convergence of both North and
South American revolutionaries on territorial expansion and a
centralized constitution as remedies for the disorders that
succeeded independence was accompanied by an important divergence
in the fundamental aims of their systems. Bolvar, as we have seen,
conceived of the deficits of civic virtue amongst Spanish Americans
as a legacy of Spanish despotism and sought to correct this problem
through education, institutional innovation, and personal example.
He hoped to create the virtuous citizenry that he believed was
necessary for stable, independent, self-rule. In North America, by
contrast, the foremost proponents of constitutional reform had
resigned themselves the fact that Americans, like all men, were
ambitious, vindictive and rapacious, and concluded that Ambition
must be made to counteract ambition. That is to say, they viewed
their constitutional innovations as mechanisms for stabilizing
republican government by economizing on virtue, by aligning
personal interests with public goods or by balancing personal
interests against one another, rather than as an educative regime
designed to inculcate virtue in the populace. As a prominent
scholar has argued, in this important difference, Bolvar and the
Framers of the United States Constitution can be seen as
representatives of distinctly ancient and modern modes of
republican thought, respectively. The comparison prompts us to ask
whether, and to what extent, this point of political-theoretic
divergence can account for the much more enduring tenure achieved
by the United States Constitution.
But not only the divergences between the political thought of
North and South America produce problems deserving further study:
it is not obvious that wars fought in the name of inclusion should
have given way to constitutions premised on exclusion, that
anti-imperial revolutions should have been succeeded by
expansionist ambition. What features of these revolutions produced
this fascinating, and problematic, ideological convergence? Their
writings reveal that fundamentally, Bolvar and the Federalist
advocates of the Constitution of the United States shared a similar
conception of their own relation to the societies that their
revolutions had created. Both conceived of themselves as a natural
aristocracy, an elite class distinguished not by titles,
connections, or even necessarily wealth, but by competence, wisdom,
education, and virtue. Of course, in the context of colonial
societies, whose populations were composed by immigration and the
forced transfer of persons across the Atlantic, this sense of
superiority was inevitably entangled with race and national origin.
In describing the unique character of his own revolutionary cadre,
Bolvar wrote:We are not Europeans, nor Indians, but a species
halfway between aboriginal and Spanish. Americans by birth and
Europeans by law, we find ourselves contending with the natives for
titles of ownership and at the same time trying to maintain our
rights in our birth country against the opposition of invaders;
thus our case is most extraordinary and complex.
That is to say, the American revolutions were creole
revolutions, formed and led by a colonial upper-class, the
descendants of European settlers in a New World characterized by a
deep socio-racial heterogeneity. Creoles were placed, as Bolvar
explains, in the difficult position of attempting to rise above the
marginal status they were accorded as Americans within European
empires without conceding the advantages they enjoyed as Europeans
within American colonies. The structural contradiction that
characterized the position of creoles within the American empires
corresponds rather well to the ideological paradoxes Ive described
in Bolvars thought, and briefly highlighted in that of the founders
of the United States. While further elaboration of this relation
between the shared context of the creole revolutions and their
shared ideas will have to await another essay, this one will, I
hope, have made clear that political theorists interested in one or
another of the American revolutions have much to gain from study of
the others.
See: Publicaciones de artculos, trabajos y comunicaciones
presentadas en congresos, ponencias y revistas con nmeros
especiales y relacionados con las independencias americanas,
Accessed 6 November 2010,
http://www.cervantes.es/lengua_y_ensenanza/
independencia_americana/bicentenario_independencia_publicaciones.htm
Classic comparisons include Burkes 1790 Reflections on the
Revolution in France, Tocquevilles 1835 Democracy in America, and
Arendts 1963 On Revolution. The same grouping of these exemplary
bourgeois or democratic revolutions appears in political history
and historical sociology; see: Barrington Moore, Jr., The Social
Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the
Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966) and R.R.
Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolutions: A Political History of
Europe and America, 1760-1800, 2 Vols. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1959 and 1964). Even as present interest in
Atlantic and Global history has led some historians to include
Spanish America within these broad categories see: Wim Klooster,
Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York:
New York University Press, 2009) and David Armitage and Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.
1760-1840 (Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010) studies of the
American revolutions and early independence, as a distinctive
category, remain rare. Exceptions include Lester D. Langley, The
Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1996), Roberto Gargarella, Los fundamentos
legales de la desigualdad: Constitucionalismo en Amrica, 1776-1860
(Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2005), and J.H. Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic
World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006), pp. 255-402.
The de-emphasis of the American revolutions colonial context is
perhaps most apparent in the intellectual histories which have,
over the last fifty years, re-discovered the ideological origins of
the American Revolution in the English Civil War, Glorious
Revolution, and country opposition, and the Spanish American
Revolutions in the crisis of the Spanish Monarchy attendant upon
Napoleons invasion of the Iberian peninsula. Thus, Gordon Woods
magisterial Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1972) repeatedly insists that the American Revolution
was no simple colonial rebellion against English imperialism (p.
91; see also pp. 128, 395) and Jaime E. Rodriguez O.s comparably
important The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998) deliberately shuns words that might suggest
colonial status, such as colony, colonial, empire, or imperial (p.
xii, emphasis in the original).
Unfortunately, Comparative Political Theory has yet to evolve
into much more than a call for the study of Non-Western political
ideas. See: Fred Dallmayr, ed., Border Crossings: Toward a
Comparative Political Theory (Lanham: Lexington, 1999). For
promising alternative perspectives, see: Michael Freeden,
Editorial: The Comparative Study of Political Thinking Journal of
Political Ideologies Vol. 12, No. 1 (February 2007), pp. 1-9; and
Andrew F. March, What is Comparative Political Theory?, The Review
of Politics Vol. 71, No. 4 (2009), pp. 531565.
For an extended account of Bolvars life and accomplishments,
see: John Lynch, Simn Bolvar: A Life (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2006). The best work on the political history of the period
is still David Bushnells 1954 The Santander Regime in Gran
Colombia, 2nd ed. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1970). For Bolvars
importance, as both a political thinker and an icon, in subsequent
intellectual history, see: Germn Carrera Damas, El Culto a Bolvar:
Esbozo para un Estudio de la Historia de las Ideas en Venezuela
(Caracas: Biblioteca de la Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1973)
and Luis Castro Leiva, De la Patria Boba a la Teologa Bolivariana:
Ensayos de Historia Intelectual (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1991).
With this term, as will become clear, I do intend to reference
the recent and very interesting literature on liberal imperialism
and on the political theory of empire and imperialism in general.
For a recent review, see Jennifer Pitts, Political Theory of Empire
and Imperialism, Annual Review of Political Science No. 13 (2010),
pp. 211-35.
Simn Bolvar to Francisco de Paula Santander. Lima, 7 April 1825.
In Obras Completas, ed. Vicente Lecuna and Esther Barret de
Nazaris, 2nd edition, 3 vols. (Havana: 1950) (Hereafter OC) vol.
III, p. 535. All translations from Spanish are my own, unless
otherwise indicated. For an excellent selection of Bolvars major
works in translation, see: El Libertador: Writings of Simn Bolvar,
ed. David Bushnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). On
Bolvars concerns with pardocracia, see: Germn Carrera Damas,
Venezuela: Proyecto Nacional y poder social, [1986] 2nd ed. (Mrida:
Publicacines Vicerrectorado Acadmico, 2006) and Aline Helg, Liberty
and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770-1835 (Chapel Hill: UNC
Press, 2004).
See Rodriguez, Independence of Spanish America, and
Franois-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e Independencias: Ensayos Sobre
las Revoluciones Hispnicas Revised and Expanded Edition (Madrid:
Ediciones Encuentro, 2009).
The expression incipient nationalism appears in John Lynch, The
Spanish American Revolutions, 1808-1826, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1986), see especially pp. 24-37. Lynchs work was the
central source for Benedict Andersons claim that the American
independence movements pioneered nationalism; See: Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism,
2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 47-65.
Discurso pronunciado en la Sociedad Patritica de Caracas, 4 July
1811, OC III, pp. 535.
An English translation the Acta Solemne de la Independencia of
Venezuela can be found in David Armitage, The Declaration of
Independence: A Global History (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2007), pp. 199-207.
See: Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), J.G.A Pocock, The Machiavellian
Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican
Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), and Paul
Anthony Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism
and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1992). For
republicanism in Spanish America, see: Jos Antonio Aguilar and
Rafael Rojas, eds., El Republicanismo en Hispanoamrica: Ensayos de
historia intellectual y poltica (Mexico City: CIDE, 2002) and
Rafael Rojas, Las Repblicas de Aire: Utopa y Desencanto en la
Revolucin de Hispanoamrica (Mexico City: Taurus, 2009). For Bolvars
republicanism see: Luis Castro Leiva, Gran Colombia: una illusin
ilustrada (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1985), Anthony Pagden,
Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990), pp. 133-54, and David Brading, The First
America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal
State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) pp.
603-620.
Bolvars aide-de-camp recorded a fascinating encounter,
interesting in this connection: a few months before his death,
Bolvar visited me in Cartagena, and seeing on my table a volume of
a new edition of the works of Machiavelli, observed that I should
have better things to do with my time. We discussed the merits of
the work, and noticing that Bolvar seemed to know its contents very
well, I asked him whether he had read it recently; he responded
that he had not read a line of Machiavelli since he left Europe 25
years ago. Daniel Florencio OLeary, Memorias, 3 vols. (Caracas:
Imprenta de El Monitor, 1883) I, pp. 66-7.
Bolvars Contestacin de un Americano Meridional a un Caballero de
esta Isla, is better known as the Jamaica Letter. Kingston, 6
September 1815, OC I, p. 165.
Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, pp. 25-30. Bolvars
metaphorical use of the term slave is particularly remarkable,
given that he himself was an owner of chattel slaves.
Contestacin de un Americano Meridional Kingston, 6 September
1815. OC I, p. 165.
Ibid., p. 165. By presenting the Spanish Empire as even more
despotical than the Ottoman, Bolvar consciously played on
contemporary stereotypes, in which the Ottoman Empire was
considered the very epitome of oriental despotism.
Ibid., p. 166. Bolvars claims here are exaggerated, but they
reflect a notable shift during the eighteenth century from a
Spanish-American bureaucracy populated by numerous Americans to one
in which peninsular Spaniards dominated the highest posts. See:
Mark A. Burkholder and D. S. Chandler, From Impotence to Authority:
The Spanish Crown and the American Audiencias, 1687-1808 (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1977).
Contestacin de un Americano Meridional Kingston, 6 September
1815. OC I, p. 166. See also: Guerra, Modernidad y Independencias,
pp. 78-112.
Discurso pronuciado Ante el Congreso de Angostura 15 February
1819, OC III, p. 677.
Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli on the Maintenance of Liberty
Australian Journal of Political Science Vol. 18, No. 2. (1983), pp.
3-15.
Pitts, Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism, pp.
216-18.
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial
Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2005), pp. 21.
Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century
British Liberal Thought, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999), p. 46.
From his 1859 On Liberty, cited in Mehta, Liberalism and Empire,
p. 85.
Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, pp. 46-114.
Memoria dirigida a los ciudadanos de la Nueva Granada Cartagena,
15 December 1812, OC III, pp. 543-4.
Perhaps the most extensive advocacy of monarchy in the
independent Americas emerged in Mexico, following a war with the
United States that resulted in the cession of over half of the new
nations territory. See: Elas Jos Palti, La Poltica del Disenso: La
Polmica en Torno al Monarquismo, Mxico, 1848-1850, y las Aporas del
Liberalismo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1998).
Discurso pronuciado ante el Congreso de Angostura 15 February
1819, OC III, p. 683.
Ibid., p. 683-5.
See: Karen Racine, Simon Bolivar, Englishman: Elite
Responsibility and Social Reform in Spanish American Independence
in David Bushnell and Lester Langley, eds., Simon Bolivar: Essays
on the Life and Legacy of the Liberator (Lanham: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2008).
Discurso pronuciado ante el Congreso de Angostura 15 February
1819, OC III, pp. 685-8.
Ibid., 688-91.
Ibid., 691-2.
See: David Pantoja Morn, El Supremo Poder Conservador: El Diseo
Institucional en las Primeras Constituciones Mexicanas (Mexico
City: El Colegio de Mxico, 2005) for an account of Bolvars
influence in Mexican constitutionalism.
The Constitution itself and Bolvars important prefatory Address
are collected in El pensamiento constitucional hispanoamericano
hasta 1830: Compilacin de Constituciones Sancionadas y Proyectos
Constitucionales, 5 vols. (Caracas: Academia Nacional de Historia,
1961), Vol. I, pp. 171-221. Unabridged English translations of both
can be found in Bushnell, ed. Writings of Simn Bolvar, pp.
54-85.
Pensamiento constitucional hispanoamericano, pp. 171-2.
Bolvar to Antonio Jos de Sucre, Magdalena, 12 May 1826, OC II,
p. 364, emphasis added.
Pensamiento constitucional hispanoamericano, pp. 173-4.
Ibid., pp. 181-2.
Ibid., pp. 182-3.
Ibid., p. 177.
See: Matthew Brown, Enlightened Reform after Independence: Simn
Bolvars Bolivian Constitution in Gabriel Paquette, ed. Enlightened
Reform in Europe and its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750-1830 (Surrey:
Ashgate, 2009), pp. 339-60 and Helg, Liberty and Equality, pp.
195-236.
The classic source here is Salvador de Madariaga, Bolvar (Mexico
City: Editorial Hermes, 1951); see also Vctor Andrs Belaunde,
Bolvar and the Political Thought of the Spanish American Revolution
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938) for a more
balanced presentation which nonetheless presents the Bolivian
Constitution as a product of Bolvars late decadence, p. 232.
Ibid., p. 175, original emphasis removed.
Ibid., p. 177. By first minister, Bolvar seems to have had in
mind the Secretary of State. When he wrote, the last four
presidents had been John Quincy Adams, who was secretary of state
to his predecessor James Monroe, who was secretary of state to his
predecessor James Madison, who was secretary of state to his
predecessor Thomas Jefferson, himself secretary of state to his
predecessor, once removed, George Washington.
Ibid., pp. 178-9.
Ibid., p. 175, original emphasis removed.
The Social Contract, Book II, Chapter VII in Victor Gourevitch,
ed. The Social Contract and other Later Political Writings
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 71.
See: Luis Castro Leiva, La Gran Colombia: Una Illusin Ilustrada
(Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1985) and Jos Antonio Aguilar
Rivera, En Pos de la Quimera: Reflexiones sobre el Experimento
Constitucional Atlntico (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica,
2000), p. 174.
Memoria dirigida a los ciudadanos de la Nueva Granada Cartagena
de Indias, 15 December 1812. OC III pp. 541-4, emphasis added.
Ibid., pp. 545-6.
See: Simon Collier, Nationality, Nationalism, and
Supranationalism in the Writings of Simn Bolvar The Hispanic
American Historical Review, Vol. 63, No. 1 (1983), pp. 37-64.
Contestacin de un Americano Meridional Kingston, 6 September
1815. OC I, p. 169.
Ibid., p. 171. The indigenous inhabitants of the Goajira
Peninsula, which forms the extreme northern part of the border
between present-day Venezuela and Colombia, were never fully
subjugated by the Spanish. That Bolvar singles out this region for
special mention demonstrates, as well as any part of the passage,
the continuity of his imperial thinking with that of the former
regime.
Discurso pronuciado Ante el Congreso de Angostura 15 February
1819, OC III, p. 696.
By convention, historians refer to this political entity,
encompassing present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador,
as Gran Colombia. For an English translation of the text of the
Colombian Constitution of 1821, see: William M. Gibson, The
Constitutions of Colombia (Durham: Duke University Press,
1948).
Credencial a favor de Sucre, 21 January 1821. OC III pp.
711-712.
A los Colombianos del Sur!, Cali, 17 January 1822. OC III p.
722.
See: John H. Elliott, A Europe of Composite Monarchies Past and
Present, No. 137 (1992), pp. 48-71; Guerra, Modernidad y
Independencias.
See: Suzanne Lalonde, Determining Boundaries in a Conflicted
World: The Role of Uti Possidetis (Montreal: McGill-Queens
University Press, 2002), pp. 24-60.
Bolvar to Francisco de Paula Santander, Lima, 11 September 1823.
OC I, pp. 803.
Bolvar to Francisco de Paula Santander, Lima, 12-14 March 1823.
OC I, pp. 724-7.
Bolvar to Antonio Jos de Sucre, Magdalena, 12 May 1826, OC II,
pp. 363-6.
See: Bushnell, The Santander Regime, pp. 15-17.
See: Belaunde, Simn Bolvar, pp. 235-40.
Bolvar to Antonio Jos de Sucre, Magdalena, 12 May 1826, OC II,
p. 364.
Invitacion al Congreso de Panam , 7 December 1824, OC III, p.
738-40.
Collier, Nationality, Nationalism, and Supranationalism, p.
51.
Un Pensamiento Sobre el Congreso de Panam, undated, OC III, p.
756-7.
Ibid., p. 757.
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American
Revolution, enlarged edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1992). See also Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern.
Bailyn, Ideological Origins, pp. 66-77.
The Federalist No. 1, in Terence Ball, ed. The Federalist with
Letters of Brutus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2003), p.
1.
The Federalist No. 11, Ibid., p. 52.
Wood, Creation of the American Republic, p. 89.
Alexander Hamilton, Plan of Government, in Writings, ed. Joanne
Freeman (New York: Library of America, 2001), pp. 149-59.
The Federalist No. 10 in Ball, ed., The Federalist, p. 44.
See: Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the
Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987).
See: William Hogeland, The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington,
Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels who Challenged Americas
Newfound Sovereignty (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006).
The Federalist Nos. 6 and 51, Ibid..
For economizing on virtue see Bruce Ackerman We The People:
Foundations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 198-9;
see also: Wood Creation of the American Republic, pp. 428-467.
Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination, pp.
133-153.
Wood, Creation of the American Republic, p. 495.
Discurso pronuciado Ante el Congreso de Angostura 15 February
1819, OC III, pp. 676-7.
See: Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 47-65. For an excellent
recent work which describes the British North American Revolution
using a closely related term settler revolution see: Aziz Rana, The
Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2010).
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