The premise of this landmark volume is that the ‘precocious’ experiences of Latin America during the century after colonialism offer both empirical information and theoretical insight that can help to address contemporary challenges of state organisation. The comparable features identified are: foundation after the breakdown of previous authority and the collapse of economic infrastructure; international recognition and a lack of external competition for territory; and a combination of high expectations of public policy with low institutional capability. In post-independence Latin America, formidable additional difficulties existed in the form of deep racial, regional and class divides within extensive, poorly integrated territories. Yet Wolfgang Knöbl's chapter in this book on Western Europe and the Americas gives the reader a salutary reminder that most of the European states from which ideal types have been drawn were less effective during the nineteenth century than has often been assumed. Many of the important measures for strengthening European states, including Spain, were products of the twentieth century. In this revised comparative perspective, Latin American states had made some impressive gains by the early twentieth century, notably successes in public policy and infrastructural development. The problem was that these very real achievements stood alongside a malaise of institutional weakness that eventually became chronic, with the well-known tragic consequences of dire poverty, lawlessness and human rights violations. The editors argue that none of the previous approaches (cultural determinism, dependency theory, theories of factor endowment or limited access) have adequately explained the persistent failure of Latin American states. They therefore shaped their book around an analytical framework, mainly drawn from Weber and Mann, with a not wholly convincing dash of Bourdieu, of four measures of state capacity: territorial, economic, infrastructural and symbolic.
The great strength of this book, which will make people return to it again and again, lies in this integrated approach. The volume brings together a variety of work from diverse disciplinary and/or country study fields, making it an invaluable portal for historians, political scientists and sociologists alike to access each others’ research on state- and nation-making in Latin America. The essays are a fertile mix of comparative surveys, interpretative overviews of country case studies and analyses of new archival findings. There is an unusually broad range of Latin American examples, including Brazil and Central America alongside Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, with the thought-provoking and often telling addition of Spain – although it is a real shame that Portugal was not included, particularly a consideration of the history of the First Republic (1910–26), given the importance attached to early twentieth-century developments.
Perhaps inevitably, the ambitious scope of the collection leaves some methodological differences unresolved. The main variation lies in the extent to which ideas are held to matter. Contributors vary from those who emphasise political history, taking even social and economic factors as ‘context’, to those who assign causal significance to ideas. Little is said anywhere in the book about sovereignty, the founding principle of legitimacy of the independent republics, or about citizenship. More discussion of either could have helped to fulfil the title's promise to discuss the making of both state and nation. As it is, there is more on state than on nation, and there is quite a bit of disagreement among the contributors about how to approach the relationship between the two. The editors were probably right to allow these different approaches to rub up against each other – the friction is mainly creative – but more explicit discussion of them in the introduction or conclusion would have been welcome. Overall, though, Centeno and Ferraro manifest considerable skill and ingenuity in making their book coherent.
It is mainly because the contents of the book are so suggestive that comments and caveats kept coming to mind as this reviewer read it, only a few of which can be raised here. First, the introduction emphasises the role of liberalism and the chronology of the book is defined by its rise and demise. Yet, as several of the chapters make clear, conservatives played their part in nation-building, not only or always in the caricatured mode of opponents of change. So did pragmatists and/or experts who were only in the loosest sense ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’: educationalists, lawyers and geographers. Careful differentiation of those sectors too often lumped together as ‘the ruling elites’ is one of the most promising analytical approaches in the collection. For example, Hillel D. Soifer's discussion of local elites in Peru and their role in blocking educational reform designed by civilista elites in Lima illustrates how a precise understanding of policy implementation can lead to a re-evaluation of the significance of structural factors, such as high social inequality, in explaining poor outcomes. Importantly, too, several of these essays provide detailed evidence that state capacities can decline as well as expand, explicitly refuting rather than merely questioning the implicit narrative of progress that still underlies much of the literature on the history of states. All of this material raises questions about the focus on ‘Liberal projects’ (p. 6). Second, although the book's emphasis on internal factors is welcome, perhaps it goes too far. More might usefully have been said about the role of external powers (which only feature prominently in the chapter on Nicaragua), even if only to challenge oft-made claims about their significance during this period. It is not only a question of how imperial powers were acting, informally or otherwise, but also one of what other Latin American states were doing: from an early stage, Latin American countries were models and anti-models for each other and a web of transnational connections among policy-makers existed, at least intermittently, across the continent, not least because of the frequency of involuntary exile. Third, the arguments would have been enriched by more acknowledgment of alternative approaches to nationhood developed among popular organisations, as documented in what is now a fairly extensive historiography. These, too, are crucial to understanding the close linkages between the histories of state and nation in Latin America. Even so, Republics of the Possible is undoubtedly a compelling achievement of imagination and scholarship.
