Liberalism

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Liberalism

Liberalism was at first a European and later a worldwide intellectual and political movement whose aim was to promote greater freedom and liberty for the individual. It had its roots in the struggle for power between church and state during the Middle Ages. Liberals tended to see both institutions as inimical to the interests of the individual and therefore wanted to limit their power. The political agenda of nineteenth-century liberalism was to liquidate the remaining power of the medieval church, already broken in northern Europe as a result of the Protestant Reformation, and to promote individual economic and political power, under the doctrine of laissez-faire, against the political power of the state. Liberals hoped that the economic growth from such reforms would expand the size of the middle class, increase the number of citizens admitted to political power, and thereby bolster the ranks of liberalism.

Latin American liberalism was part of this wider movement. Since the Iberian world had been untouched by the Protestant Reformation, its liberals faced a far more powerful church antagonist than the liberals of northern Europe, a reality that explains the primacy of anticlericalism in the liberal movement in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. Moreover, Europe's experience with economic development, civil war, and revolution was such that the state's power to impose corporate and economic restraints on the individual was much weaker there by the nineteenth century than in the Iberian/Latin American world.

The battle against the power of the church was pan-European and began in the Enlightenment, whose secular and optimistic vision of the future greatly molded liberal thinking. In Iberia, the opening round was the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Portuguese and Spanish empires in 1759 and 1767, respectively. Their properties were confiscated, for a brief time administered by the state, and eventually auctioned off. The second round took place during the Napoleonic Wars, when the state's economic problems produced similar results. In 1798 the Spanish Bourbons ordered the forced sale of all church property in Spain that sustained chantries and pious foundations. In 1804 the measure was extended to Spanish America. Already in the air, therefore, were some of the components that would mark future liberal thinking.

The seeds of other liberal issues of the Iberian world—greater economic and political freedom—also go back to the Bourbon Reforms of the eighteenth century. While the goal of many was greater absolutism, the particulars of the agenda could just as easily be pushed forward in the name of individual freedom. Free trade, for example, advanced on various fronts by fits and starts, so that by the end of the century mercantilism was in decline. On the political front, the introduction of the Intendancy System and local militias gave the central government a real presence at the provincial level, but it also created the regional organizational structures that enabled regions to resist central authority and set the stage for the federalist-centralist struggles of the nineteenth century.

Much of liberal ideology was crystallized in the Spanish Constitution of 1812. The constitutional crisis brought on by the 1808 French invasion of Spain prompted an immediate "modernization" of the political system. The constitution severely limited monarchical government, ended the Inquisition, restricted the military and ecclesiastical fueros, created provincial deputations and militias as a counterweight to centralized authority, and provided for universal manhood suffrage. The constitution also went into effect in Mexico and Central America, where elections were soon held. The constitution was annulled in 1814 by Ferdinand VII, but was forced on him again in 1820. Mexican and Central American leaders broke definitively with Spain in 1820 in order to avoid a return of its version of liberalism. The 1812 Constitution socialized a generation of Mexican and Central American liberals and accounts for some of the virulence of the federalist-centralist struggles there.

Liberals identified with federalism and the separation of powers because they provided a check on the absolute power of the centralized state and tended to enhance the autonomy and freedom of the individual. The problem of what the proper balance between central and provincial authority should be occupied liberals from early on. They were not always consistent in their answer. They frequently acted illiberally and imposed their own views on others. Liberals were often selective in what principles they chose to support; their decisions usually depended on the political, economic, and social context of their own region and what was in their personal interest and/or what was politically possible. Pragmatic considerations such as survival, self-defense, access to power, and domination often won out over ideological consistency in the liberal agenda, especially in the area of the federalist-centralist debate. This debate was especially intense in Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina.

Regarding the economic order, liberals wanted to liquidate much of the colonial legacy of state control, state taxation, and church, corporate, and state interference in economic matters. In general, liberals supported the movement toward free trade and a lowering of the tariff. They believed that these changes would produce more trade and commerce, which in turn would prompt the economic growth that would transform the whole economy. An end to state subsidies and monopoly rents like tobacco and aguardiente were logical parts of the liberal program. But where falling government revenues endangered the ability of the central government to pay its soldiers and bureaucrats, or where the reaction from sugar, tobacco, and cotton growers or artisan producers was too great, liberals usually moderated their principles.

A basic premise of liberalism was the right of the individual to be treated equally before the law. Thus it was logical that Indian tribute and communal lands, special categories like ecclesiastical and military fueros, entailed estates, and slavery and other forced labor institutions would come under attack. Freedom of the press and many civil liberties taken for granted elsewhere were not always espoused by, let alone supported by, Latin American liberals. Liberals in multiracial and unequal societies frequently compromised and even betrayed their principles. Such was the case in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, where liberals excluded Indians from their push to increase individual liberties, and in Brazil, Venezuela, and Cuba, where liberals closed their eyes to the plight of the enslaved.

Since the church had been such a close partner of the state in the colonial period, it had held onto functions and powers that the churches of post-Reformation Europe and North America had long since relinquished. The church's role as the recorder of vital statistics, such as births, marriages, and deaths, was a frequent battleground between the Latin American church and its liberal opponents. Religious toleration and church control of education were other areas of conflict. State control of church appointments and tithes, the colonial patronato, was claimed by the liberals, and used to mold and "modernize" the church hierarchy. What to do with the religious orders was a thorny problem. For many liberals, they were a vestige of the Middle Ages. Their suppression had several advantages from the liberal point of view. A sell-off of their wealth would raise money for the state, put property back into circulation that had been in "dead" hands, and eliminate some of the financial support for, and hence the attractiveness of joining, the clerical estate. The church-state conflict was especially bitter in Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia.

The liberal advance in Latin America was anything but uniform. Country-by-country differences are a testimony to Latin America's fabled diversity. The bewildering possibilities for just one country are captured in Gabriel García Márquez's portrayal of the liberal struggle in Colombia in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. But each region is a case study that frequently disproves the general rule. In Central America, liberals from the outlying provinces had won a seemingly definitive victory in their struggle with conservative centralists in Guatemala City in the late 1820s, and thought they would have the power to force Guatemala to share its income and resources with the rest of Central America. Beginning in 1830, the liberal federation president, Francisco Morazán of Honduras, pursued a centralist policy and carried out the most radical liberal program in Latin America up to that time, with the abolition of tribute, the ecclesiastical fuero, regular orders, and compulsory tithes. These measures, as well as a head-tax, making divorce legal, and allowing civil marriage, led to an inevitable reaction.

In Guatemala it coalesced around the proclerical Caudillo Rafael Carrera, who led the conservatives to victory over Morazán in 1840. Guatemalan conservatives, fearing a resurgence of liberal power throughout the isthmus, flip-flopped and adopted a federalist stance. Liberal aid in Nicaragua to the interventionist effort of the American filibuster William Walker confirmed conservative fears and discredited liberals throughout Central America. Walker's intervention plus Carrera's reign until 1865 delayed a return to liberal rule in Central America. When Liberals did recover power in Guatemala under Justo Rufino Barrios in 1871, their disestablishment of the church was even more total than that in Mexico later. With the social control provided by the church gone, liberals ruled Guatemala's Indians in a repressive and exploitative fashion.

In Mexico the colonial church, establishment, and legacy, especially in Mexico City, were much stronger. Liberals were not immediately victorious as in Central America, and had to proceed in a more piecemeal fashion. They had to ensure that the institutional framework protected their liberal base in the provinces, especially against special interest groups in Mexico City like the army. The liberal agenda in the 1820s and 1830s was pushed forward on the federal structure outlined in the 1824 constitution by regional politicians like Valentín Gómez Farías of Zacatecas, José María Luis Mora of Guanajuato, and Lorenzo de Zavala of Yucatán. The individual states had considerable powers, including their own state legislatures, state militias, and state-elected governors.

Liberals finally achieved national power when Antonio López de Santa Anna overthrew the centralist government of Anastasio Bustamante in 1832 and installed Gómez Farías as acting president in 1833. Liberal laws closed down the clerically run national university, secularized Franciscan missions, disentailed church property, and ended compulsory tithes. But other liberal measures, such as ending tariff protection, abolishing the tobacco monopoly, decreasing the size of the army, and ending the military fuero, threatened too many vested interests. Santa Anna sided with the centralists in 1834 and defeated a coalition of state militias headed by Zacatecas. But Texas escaped and became an independent republic in 1836 with Zavala as its vice president. The debacle continued and soured many liberals on federalism.

A divided house was obviously a conquered one, and the loss of much of northern Mexico in the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) confirmed the suspicion that federalism put liberals at a competitive disadvantage both nationally and internationally. When liberals drew up the Constitution of 1857, they made sure it was much more centralist than the Constitution of 1824. It also enshrined the Ley Juárez and Ley Lerdo that abolished the ecclesiastical and military fueros and provided for the sale of corporately owned church and Indian real estate. The church's belligerent reaction and support for the conservatives in the War of the Reform (1858–1861) and French intervention (1862–1867) made the liberals determined to establish the church completely. While the disestablishment was reconfirmed in the Constitution of 1917, the church continued to endure in Mexico.

In Argentina liberals faced a weaker colonial establishment, traded directly with Europe, and resided in the capital of Buenos Aires rather than in the provinces (as in Mexico). Under the leadership of Bernardino Rivadavia and other Porteño leaders, they imposed a Unitario or centralist order, first on the province of Buenos Aires in 1820 and then on the rest of the country with their rigorously centralist constitution of 1826. The liberals' program of modernization was truly impressive. They took the fuero from the army and church, reduced the size of the former, and took over assets and property, and many of the educational and welfare functions, of the latter. In their economic program liberals pushed infrastructure development, greater foreign trade, increased immigration, and new investment. But religious freedom, tax modernization, and the war with Brazil over Uruguay were too radical for the interior provinces, and the liberal experiment ended in 1827 in civil war, Rivadavia's departure, and Juan Manuel de Rosas's rise to power. With the defeat of Rosas in 1852, the Unitario liberals regained power in Buenos Aires, and within ten years they had forced themselves on the rest of Argentina. While the Constitution of 1853 was federalist and the capital was eventually federalized, the constitutional right of the president to intervene in the provinces, and the income and growth of Buenos Aires, ensured a centralization in favor of porteño liberals that would have gladdened the hearts of the Unitarios.

In Brazil the chief force for liberalism was the monarch Dom Pedro I, more liberal than his subjects. Favoring a constitutional monarchy, religious toleration, civil liberties, and an end to slavery, he pushed the Constitution of 1824 on his reluctant subjects. But it was not long before the parliamentary system he created evolved to the point where the majority resisted his liberalism and centralization. As a result he abdicated in 1831 in favor of his five-year-old son, Dom Pedro II. By 1842 a system had developed by which the emperor would dissolve parliament, and the elections would be fixed to favor the opposition party; conservative or liberal made no difference. This sham continued until the monarchy was overthrown in 1889.

In Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, independence colleagues Francisco de Paula Santander, José Antonio Páez, Juan José Flores, and Vicente Rocafuerte provided strong leadership and carried out some liberal reforms without them being recognized as such, and a formal liberal-conservative division was postponed until the 1840s. When Colombia's liberal reform came in earnest in the 1850s and 1860s, it surpassed Mexico's in its laissez-faire and individual and states' rights. With the backing of the relentless Tomás Cipriano Mosquera, it imitated the Mexican example in suppressing religious orders and seizing all church property.

In Chile, too, federalism produced disorder and chaos in the 1820s. While the problems with ultrafederalism were not admitted by liberals until the second half of the nineteenth century, ultrafederalism was out of step with the need for a state to be strong enough to face the world, maintain order, and get infrastructure projects like transportation and port systems developed so commerce and trade could evolve effectively. This was Chile's response under the guidance of Diego Portales and the Constitution of 1833, and the nation's unparalleled success by the end of the nineteenth century was an important lesson for the rest of Latin America. In Colombia, where a shortage of national revenues led to a shedding of national government functions and a turn to extreme federalism from 1863 to 1885, the results were such that the liberal Rafael Núñez Moledo drew the same conclusions Portales had, and orchestrated a rapprochement with the conservatives and the church; together they produced the highly centralized Constitution of 1886.

Toward the end of the century, reaction had set in among other liberals as well. In Mexico under Porfirio Díaz, in Venezuela under Antonio Guzmán Blanco, and in Central America under other liberal dictators, the "order and progress" doctrines of the Positivists brought more authoritarian and centralized rule. Although liberal in economic and religious matters, these dictators and their supporters sacrificed other liberal principles, such as an independent judiciary, a free press, and political democracy, for the economic progress order was supposed to bring. On the other hand, in Chile liberals chipped away at presidential power and moved toward parliamentarism, while Brazil moved toward decentralization. And in Argentina, liberal reform brought the middle class to power for the first time in 1916, when the radicals won as a result of the 1912 Sáenz Peña election law.

As the twentieth century opened, the worldwide economic development brought by the industrial revolution had created powerful new forces like corporate businesses that threatened the individual. As a consequence, the political agenda of liberalism changed and increasingly had a social program that looked once again, as it had in its struggle against the church, to the state to protect the individual from the awesome economic power of private capitalism. This change in liberalism was evident in the rule of José Batlle y Ordóñez in Uruguay, Hipólito Irigoyen in Argentina, Arturo Alessandri Palma in Chile, and Alfonso López Pumarejo in Colombia.

In many places the demands of the middle classes and the masses were not met by liberalism, and the old order was swept away, as was the case in the Mexican Revolution of 1910. At the same time, economic difficulties and the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s saw the rise of mass-based authoritarian political movements. Fascism and communism spread throughout Latin America while the APRa (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana) appeared in Peru, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institutional) in Mexico, and the Peronist Party in Argentina. Many saw these groups as national and international threats; where liberals held power, they invoked the countervailing power of the state for protection. For some this worldwide struggle culminated in World War II. With the victory of the Allies, the global threat of fascism was virtually eliminated, but the postwar settlement left the world divided between East and West. As the twentieth century came to a close, the perceived threat from international communism was much reduced by the collapse and breakup of the Soviet Union, and many mass-based formerly authoritarian political movements like APRA, PRI, and Peronism tried to gain respectability by transforming themselves into something akin to liberal parties.

Liberals were now more openly divided over the role of the state. Those who focused on economic concerns like the threat of inflation, budgetary deficits, trade problems, and the inability of the state to solve a wide array of social ills were known as "Neoliberals." They called for a reduced role for the state, a sell-off of state-run enterprises, and a return to the laissez-faire principles of nineteenth-century liberalism. Others looked at the same economic problems, the rise of the third world, nuclear proliferation, and environmental pollution as the main causes of an unstable world order and as the chief threats to individual liberties, and they argued for a continued strong role for the state. Whatever the case, all liberalism—whether old or new, right or left—was about restraining power for the benefit of the individual.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For a clearly written and cogently argued survey of liberalism in general, see Harry K. Girvetz, From Wealth to Welfare: The Evolution of Liberalism, rev. ed. (1966). On Latin America, the best survey by far is David Bushnell and Neill Macaulay, The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century, 2d ed. (1994). For church-state relations, see John L. Mecham, Church and State in Latin America: A History of Politico-Ecclesiastical Relations, rev. ed. (1966), which, though overly legalistic, is still serviceable. Individual country surveys in which the role of liberalism is particularly well explained include David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (1993); Ralph L. Woodward, Jr., Central America: A Nation Divided, 2d ed. (1985), and Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (1971). For the role of the Constitution of 1812, see Nettie Lee Benson, The Provincial Deputation in Mexico: Harbinger of Provincial Autonomy, Independence, and Federalism (1992) and Nettie Lee Benson, ed., Mexico and the Spanish Cortes, 1810–1822 (1966). An excellent in-depth political history of liberalism and federalism in early independent Chile is Simon Collier, Ideas and Politics of Chilean Independence, 1808–1833 (1967). The study of liberalism as intellectual history in a single country has no equal to Charles A. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853 (1968) and The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (1989). The crucial Mexican Reform period is superbly handled by Richard N. Sinkin, The Mexican Reform, 1855–1876: A Study in Liberal Nation-Building (1979). The impact of the expropriation of church wealth is analyzed in Jan Bazant, Alienation of Church Wealth in Mexico: Social and Economic Aspects of the Liberal Revolution, 1856–1875 (1971). Although liberalism in the twentieth century has not been adequately studied, the economic issues are outlined in Joseph L. Love and Nils Jacobsen, eds., Guiding the Invisible Hand: Economic Liberalism and the State in Latin American History (1988).

Additional Bibliography

Aguilar Rivera, José Antonio. The Divine Charter: Constitutionalism and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005.

González Prada, Manuel. "Nuestros Liberales." in Horas de lucha with Páginas libres. Cáracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1976: 269-276.

Gootenberg, Paul. Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's "Fictitious Prosperity" of Guano, 1840–1880. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Paim, Antônio. História do liberalismo brasileiro. São Paulo, Brasil: Editora Mandarim, 1998.

Rodríguez O., Jaime E. El manto liberal: Los poderes de emergencia en México, 1821–1876. Jurídicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2001.

Tosto, Milton. The Meaning of Liberalism in Brazil. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005.

Maurice P. Brungardt

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture