Latinamericanism after 9/11

1. Latinamericanism after 9/11

chapter one Latinamericanism after 9/11 Let me begin by recalling the well-known passage in The Philosophy of History where Hegel, writing in 1822, anticipates the future of the United States: Had the woods of Germany been in existence, the French Revolution would not have occurred. North America will be comparable with Europe only after the immeasurable space which that country presents to its inhabitants shall have been occupied, and the members of the political body shall have begun to be pressed back on each other. North America is still in the condition of having land to begin to cultivate.Only when, as in Europe, the direct increase of agriculture is checked, will the inhabitants, instead of pressing outwards to occupy the fields, press inwards on each other . . . and so form a compact system of civil society, and require an organized state. . . . America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of theWorld’s History shall reveal itself—perhaps in a contest between North and South America. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe.1 Following Hegel, should we believe that the future of Latin America will necessarily involve a conflict with the United States “in the ages that lie before us?” I think that the answer is yes. If September 11, 1973, marked the beginning of a long period of conservative restoration in the Americas , including the United States, it seems clear, as I suggested in my introduction , that Latin America has entered a new period in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, 9/11. If the tonic of the previous period was the 18 chapter one integration of Latin America with the United States under the banner of neoliberalism—the idea of the so-called Washington consensus—the new period portends an increasing confrontation between Latin America and North American hegemony, in several areas: cultural, economic, and, perhaps, military too.2 That prospect brings to mind Samuel Huntington’s idea of the “clash of civilizations.”3 Huntington suggests that new forms of conflict in the world after the Cold War would no longer be structured along the bipolar model of communism versus capitalism, but rather would crystallize along heterogeneous “fault lines” of ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious differences, which generate potentially antagonistic geopolitical blocs: the United States–United Kingdom–British Commonwealth; Europe (a Europe divided between east and west, “new” and “old”); East Asia (“Confucian”) and the Indian subcontinent (“Hindu”); sub-Saharan Africa; and the Islamic world in all of its extension and internal complexity , stretching across Asia, Africa, and into Europe and the Americas. In Huntington’s taxonomy, the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean are, like Turkey or Russia with respect to Europe, “torn countries.” Will they define their future by a symbiotic and dependent relationship with the cultural and economic hegemony of the United States, or can theydevelop, individuallyorcollectively, as a region or “civilization,” their own projects in competition with or in the place of that hegemony?4 But, one might ask, what is the point of talking about Latin America as a “civilization,” or, for that matter, about Latin America, which is a doubly colonial double misnomer (first, for the name of the Italian navigator, and second, for the idea of “Latinity” promulgated by the French Foreign Office in the nineteenth century to try to displace U.S. and British hegemony )?5 Shouldn’t we be concerned instead with marking the limits of intelligibility of concepts such as “civilization” or “nation?” My question, however, is a different one. From a sense preciselyof these limits, in which the authority of concepts of nation, identity, or civilization —perhaps even of “culture” itself—is brought into question, what would be the form of a new Latinamericanism, capable of confronting U.S. hegemony and expressing an alternative future for the peoples of the Americas? For Hegel, what delayed the coming to fruition of the United States as a nation was the continental frontier, because the expansion of the frontier did not allow the formation of a coherent civil society among its inhabitants. What has delayed, not the confrontation between Latin latinamericanism after 9/11 19 America and the United States (because this already has a history of more than three hundred years—the “immense space” that Hegel refers to was precisely one...