Political Culture Institutional Development in Costa Rica and Nicaragua: World Making in the Tropics (review)

Genuine comparative treatments in both political culture and history are challenging because authors must be equally knowledgeable not only in two disciplines but, as in this case, about two countries. Cruz maintains a consistently comparative approach with great assurance throughout the entire book, although each country is discussed in separate chapters. Her deft and absorbing handling of the historical analysis is the highlight of the work. On the other hand, her presentation of the political and cultural theory relevant to the topic is swallowed in dense academic jargon that frequently seems unnecessary and is sometimes baffling.

The author's argument is "that political culture is best defined as a system for normative scheming embedded in a field of imaginable possibilities" (3). Political culture in the book's context in turn derives from a Manichean synthesis created at the time of Nicaragua's conquest, balanced by a Manichean exceptionalism from the earliest conquest history of Costa Rica. This point does not actually explain anything, except to say that the two countries had different histories, but Cruz uses the terms to contrast the two societies from that moment to current times. Cruz argues that political culture or identity shapes politics by forcing participants to engage in normative scheming, which gives rise to different fields of imaginable possibilities and different regimes of arbitration.

To put the argument in historical terms, Cruz points out the way in which Costa Rica immediately following independence from Spain pursued an emphasis on peace and wide landownership, insulating itself from the regional turmoil of Central America by the 1830s. Thus, Costa Rica's "exemplary civility" and its self-identification as an exceptional nation were evident at all times. Nicaragua, however, institutionalized confrontation amid civil wars and struggles for regional preeminence. By the 1920s, Costa Rica's "possibility mongers" sought the emergence of electoral parties, populism, expansion of suffrage, mass literacy, and the secret ballot, while its Institute for the Defense of Coffee served as a long-term mediator between small coffee producers and the processors and exporters, thereby mediating class conflict. In the 1948 civil war, Costa Rica's exceptionalism imploded but was supplanted by a more democratic variant. The outcome was to enhance Costa Rica's sense of political legitimacy, helping to produce the strongest democracy in Latin America.

Nicaragua, with the exception of the so-called Regime of Thirty Years (the conservative republic from the 1860s to the 1890s), has a history of inadequate or illegitimate institutions of arbitration that limited its scheme of imaginable possibilities. Cruz's narrative becomes sharply critical (and revisionist) in her treatment of Nicaragua's history from the Somoza dynasty to the Sandinista Revolution. She focuses on the internal divisions among the Sandinistas, and the Sandinista National Liberation Front's (fsln) differences with labor and peasants, as well as on the tension with capitalist elites, all of which represents a continued vacuum of legitimate arbitration.

The best chapter in the book is the final one, which carries the narrative of Nicaragua beyond the stunning outcome of the 1990 election and into a period when both the Sandinista movement and the rightist coalition rapidly divided internally. Most of the sources in this chapter are from personal interviews that the author conducted with participants and leaders of the fsln and the National Opposition Union (uno) including most of the major figures. It makes for sharp and insightful political narrative that will influence readers' views of the Sandinistas.