With the publication of this revised Ph.D. dissertation Jonathan Eastwood contributes to the literature on the origins of nationalism. Venezuela from roughly 1780 to 1830 is his case study, although only two of his five chapters discuss Venezuela in detail. The author defines nationalism as a perspective that conceives of a sovereign people who are equal members in the nation. The twin notions of equality and sovereignty must be present. Eastwood follows the work of his dissertation director, Liah Greenfeld, to suggest a typology of nationalisms, depending on whether the nation is conceived as a reified, collective whole or as an association of individuals; and whether membership in the nation is based upon characteristics acquired at birth (ethnic) or simple citizenship (civic). Collective forms of nationalism, the author posits, lead more easily to authoritarianism than is the case with civic individual nationalism.
Eastwood takes issue both with Marxists and with the work of Benedict Anderson on the origins of nationalism. To him, nationalism is an independent cultural construct and not just an epiphenomenon in the process of capitalist development. Anderson failed to define nationalism clearly, mistakenly believed that nationalism first emerged in nineteenth-century Latin America, and overemphasised the role of newspapers in spreading nationalism. By contrast, Eastwood uses Max Weber's concept of status anxiety to explain why Spanish and Venezuelan elites adopted the new idea of nationalism in the face of changing political and economic conditions.
Liah Greenfeld has argued that modern nationalism originated with England's sixteenth-century civic nationalism. A different kind of nationalism, of the collective variety, emerged in eighteenth-century France. Eastwood builds upon this European work by asking when and what kind of nationalism emerged in Latin America in general, and in Venezuela in particular.
The author begins with a discussion of Spain's absorption of modern ideas in the eighteenth century, focusing on the writing and art of intellectuals like Benito Gerónimo Feijóo and Francisco Goya. Since the masses were usually illiterate, Eastwood considers them to be irrelevant to the development of the radical idea of citizen sovereignty and equality. Eastwood concludes that the troubles of the late eighteenth century and the 1808 invasion by Napoleon spurred more leading Spanish intellectuals to embrace nationalism.
Latin American intellectuals became familiar with Enlightenment ideas through reading Spanish writers like Feijóo rather than by direct encounters with Montesquieu or Rousseau. After a brief survey of the Spanish colonial period, Eastwood concludes that Spanish Americans had no concept of national identity prior to the late eighteenth century. The Bourbon administrative reforms tightened the colonial reins on Spanish America and did indeed produce status anxiety among the creole elite. Caracas and its surrounding areas experienced a surge of cacao prosperity in the eighteenth century, although the elite railed at and rebelled against the Basque Company that ruled them. The crisis was followed by creole pride in the 1770s when the company collapsed, and the colony acquired an enhanced administrative status and freer trading opportunities. Even so, Eastwood finds little expression of a Venezuelan nationalism that would satisfy his definition, prior to 1808 or so. The precursor Francisco Miranda was a nationalist of sorts by the time of his ill-fated invasion of Venezuela in 1806, but his ‘nation’ could have been all of Spanish America. Not until Napoleon overran Spain in 1808 did the Spanish and American elites begin to express nationalistic ideas.
Eastwood analyses writings by Venezuelan patriots, especially Juan Germán Roscio and Simón Bolívar, and the newspaper Gaceta de Caracas after 1808. The newspaper expounded the French collective variety of nationalism, but at least until 1814 the focus was on a nation of Spaniards, not of Venezuelans. Similarly, Simón Bolívar, an early radical nationalist, considered all of Spanish America and then Gran Colombia as his ‘nation’ before he narrowed his scope to Venezuela. The long series of wars and Spanish reaction after 1814 gradually made it impossible for Venezuelans to see themselves as Spanish nationals. After 1814, the idea of a sovereign nation of equal citizens gradually jelled around the person of Bolívar himself. The association of personalism with collective nationalism, Eastwood speculates, provides the origin of a Venezuelan tendency to accept authoritarian leaders from José Antonio Páez to Hugo Chávez.
Eastwood's approach flies in the face of much contemporary cultural history that analyses both elite and popular attitudes. Few historians today would explore the origins of national identity with no reference to the general population at all. Even illiterate slaves understood the themes of the French Revolution, and Simón Bolívar's speeches reached many Venezuelans. Bolívar himself famously had no military or political success until he enlisted the aid of the illiterate llanero José Antonio Páez and his followers in 1816. Common sense would suggest that Páez's views must also have been important to the development of the concept of nationalism among Venezuelans.
The author pragmatically limited his research and conclusions to Venezuela. Still, European sources of the idea of nationalism came to all of Spanish America at roughly the same time and under roughly the same circumstances. Eastwood's conclusions implicitly suggest that Venezuelan nationalism may be distinguished from that of the rest of Spanish America. Are we to understand that Venezuela is unique in Spanish America in embracing collective nationalism and authoritarian leaders? In fact, it is difficult to name a single Spanish American country that has not had authoritarian, personalistic leaders, although we might quibble over the frequency and the degree of authoritarianism. To leap from Bolívar's personalism to the rise of Hugo Chávez seems highly debatable.
In sum, Eastwood's provocative theoretical work adds to the literature on the origins of nationalism, but leaves much undone. He, and others, should consider other Spanish American case studies. Did they all exhibit the same kind of collective nationalism? If so, have they all equally embraced authoritarian leaders? If not, why not?
