Connections after Colonialism: Europe and Latin America in the 1820s

1. Themes and Tensions in a Contradictory Decade: Ibero-America as a Multiplicity of States

1 themes and tensions in a contradictory Decade Ibero-America as a Multiplicity of States Brian hamnett the 1820s are as alive as tomorrow. —neill Macaulay, Dom Pedro the most striking feature of the 1820s is the formation of independent iberoAmerican states. this represented a lasting blow to the counter-revolutionary structuresputinplaceatthecongressof viennaof 1814–1815.Despitecounterrevolutionary interventions in italy and spain in 1822 and 1823, the continental European monarchies would never be able to reverse this, not least because of British naval supremacy in the Atlantic ocean. republican forms of government superseded the Bourbon monarchy in all the newly independent, spanish American states, despite an early and unsuccessful experiment in monarchy in Mexico in 1822 and 1823. the Braganza monarchy in Brazil was independent of the Portuguese branch of the same dynasty and ruled a separate sovereign state. issues that would become overridingly important during the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth had their origin in the new political structures of the 1820s. foremost of these were the questions of the distribution of power within the sovereign states, the fiscal relationship between their component parts, and the distribution of wealth within their territories. once sovereignty had been asserted as a bastion of defense against the former imperial powers and the European states in general, this doctrine had to be put into practical effect by the assertion of control over territory. thefeasibilityanddurabilityof allthegreatprojectsof the1820s—monarchy, republicanism, constitutionalism, federalism, nationalism, continentalism— would be harshly put to the test thereafter. somehow the catholic church, integral part of the old regime, defender of the iberian monarchies, and, at the same time, an international institution, had to come to grips with the new 30 / hamnett realities and assess its position. tensions between projects and processes ran continuously through this decade, which combined astonishing transformation of political forms with less ambitious tasks of renovation, innovation, and conservation. unitarism or separatism? t wo key developments defined iberian relations with ibero-America in the early years of the 1820s. they made the old unitary monarchies no longer a practicable proposition and opened the way to the assertion of independence and separate sovereign status. the first of these was the inability of the cortes of Madrid (1820–23) to transform what survived of the hispanic monarchy on the American continent into one “hispanic nation” in any form acceptable to either the American deputies or the power groups within the Americas. the unilateral declaration of self-government by the Mexican elites, tactically aligned with the remnants of the insurgency of the 1810s, under the terms of the Plan of iguala of february 24, 1821, thwarted any such attempt. Although the plan shied away from outright separatism, maintaining the Bourbon monarch as the ruler of a “Mexican Empire,” it repudiated the authority of the spanish metropolitan government within the territory of new spain. the cortes’s rejection of this project led to a separate Mexican monarchy in June 1822 under Emperor Agustín i.1 the second was the decision of the cortes gerais of the united Kingdoms of Portugal, the Algarves, and Brazil in lisbon to reduce the Kingdom of Brazil, proclaimed by João vi in rio de Janeiro in 1815, to a series of separate provinces directly dependant on the metropolitan government. this opened the way for the proclamation of a Brazilian Empire as a constitutional state under Pedro i (1822–31) by the provinces governed from rio de Janeiro and their secession in september 1822 from what had been the luso-Brazilian monarchy. the idea of “federalizing” the entire hispanic monarchy had been since 1810 anathema to spanish liberals, who were dedicated to the preservation of a unitary, though constitutional, state. they similarly resisted American autonomy within the empire as the slippery slope to separatism. Discussion in the Madrid cortes on the “American question” continued that of 1810–1814 but in graver circumstances. the liberal regime’s intransigence, not even prepared to make concessions on the number of American deputies in the cortes, ibero-America as a Multiplicity of states / 31 confirmed the disintegration of the American sector of old monarchy into a multiplicity of weak sovereign states. the spanish liberals and their lisbon counterparts of 1821–1823 failed to understand the dimension of the disputed relationship between the American territories and the home countries.2 within south America, the final achievement of independence produced a more coherent Brazil than the disparate...