THE CLASH FOR CIVILIZATION: STATE CONSOLIDATION AND THE CIVILIZING MISSION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY COLOMBIA
Santiago Rojas Molina1
Abstract
This article is concerned with the history of modern Statehood in Latin America and its relationship with the transnational idea of the civilizing mission of the West. As such, it studies the interrelation between the early process of State consolidation in Colombia during the nineteenth century and the long standing conflict between Liberals and Conservatives, that is read as a clash between competing civilizing missions that came to divide Colombian society. It argues that this clash and the dynamic of otherness by which it operated had both constructive and destructive effects over the process of State consolidation in Colombia; enabling the very emergence of a modern State apparatus while simultaneously undermining those very efforts. ----- El presente artículo trata sobre la historia de la estatalidad moderna en América Latina y su relación con la idea transnacional de la misión civilizadora de occidente. Como tal, estudia la interrelación entre el proceso temprano de consolidación del Estado colombiano durante el siglo XIX y el prolongado conflicto entre liberales y conservadores, que es leído como una colisión entre misiones civilizadoras en competencia, que llegaron a dividir a la sociedad colombiana. Se argumenta que esta colisión y la dinámica de otredad por medio de la cual operaba tuvo tanto efectos constructivos como destructivos sobre el proceso de consolidación del Estado en Colombia; posibilitando la emergencia de un aparato estatal moderno a la vez que subvirtiendo esos mismos esfuerzos.
1 Universidad de los Andes Lawyer. Candidate for a Master’s Degree in International Law, Universidad de los Andes. Currently assistant lawyer to Manuel José Cepeda Espinosa, former Magistrate of Colombia’s Constitutional Court. Email: [email protected]. Unless otherwise stated, all translations to English have been made by the author.
1
Keywords
State, statehood, uti possidetis, civilizing mission, civilization, Colombia, Latin America, bipartisanship, Liberals, Conservatives.
Estado, estatalidad, uti possidetis, misión civilizadora, civilización, Colombia, América Latina, bipartidismo, liberales, conservadores.
Table of Contents
I. INTRODUCTION ...... 3 II. THE CIVILIZING MISSION: THE EUROPEAN ORIGINS OF THE IDEA AND ITS RECEPTION IN LATIN AMERICA ...... 5 III. COLOMBIA AT THE OUTSET OF INDEPENDENCE: THE CHALLENGES OF STATE CONSOLIDATION ...... 13 IV. THE WAR OF THE SUPREMES AND THE ORIGIN OF THE LIBERAL CONSERVATIVE DICHOTOMY ...... 22 A. The war and its legacy ...... 22 B. Liberals and Conservatives in perspective ...... 29 V. THE LIBERAL REVOLUTION OF THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY ..... 38 A. The rise of the Liberals ...... 38 B. The Radical Republic: The United States of Colombia ...... 42 VI. AFTERMATH: THE REGENERATION AND ITS LIMITATIONS ...... 49 VII. CONCLUSIONS ...... 56
2 I. INTRODUCTION
Historical accounts of the emergence of modern States as the primary subjects of international law traditionally begin with the peace of Westphalia of 1648 as the culmination of a gradual process of State consolidation in Europe between the 12th and the 17th centuries,2 paying little attention to the distinct processes of State consolidation that occurred beyond the European sphere. Despite the fact that recent scholarship has shed light on the history of statehood in other continents and particularly in the Latin American region,3 little attention has been paid to Colombia4 as a subject of study. This is somewhat perplexing, considering how the Colombian experience exemplifies the general dynamics and challenges of the early process of State consolidation in the Latin American region during the nineteenth century. As the Colombianist David Bushnell dully notes, the history of nineteenth century Colombia “with its long string of civil wars between Liberals and Conservatives, its retrograde clericalism and radical anticlericalism”5 is paradigmatic of general trends that were common to all Latin American States during the first decades of their independent existence, especially regarding the conflict between Liberal and Conservative factions that characterized this period and had a pervasive influence over the process of State consolidation in the entire region.6
In view of the foregoing, the purpose of the present article is to study the relationship between the early process of State consolidation in Colombia during the nineteenth century and the long-standing conflict between the Liberal and Conservative parties, which I examine as the main agents that undertook this process of consolidation. Most fundamentally, this study is undertaken from
2 See for instance CASSESE, Antonio. States: Rise and Decline of the Primary Subject of the International Community. In: FASSBENDER, Bardo and PETERS, Anne. The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. p. 49-70. p. 49-50. 3 See for instance DUNKERLEY, James. Studies in the Formation of the Nation State in Latin America. London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2002. p. 54-76. 4 It should be noted that the modern day Republic of Colombia, known as the Viceroyalty of New Granada throughout the colonial era, underwent numerous changes of its official name throughout the nineteenth century. For the sake of simplicity and in order to avoid any confusion, the name “Colombia” will be used throughout the entirety of this article. 5 BUSHNELL, David. The Making of Modern Colombia. A Nation in Spite of Itself. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. p. viii. 6 EAKIN, Marshall C. The History of Latin America. Collision of Cultures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. p. 204.
3 a new lens; the transnational idea of the civilizing mission of the West, as received, interpreted and executed by the Latin American elites of the nineteenth century. In this connection, I argue that the early process of State consolidation in Colombia as in the rest of Latin America was profoundly intertwined with the conflictive civilizing missions of the Liberal and Conservative criollo (or creole) elites; a clash between diverging notions of ‘civilization’ inspired in Western European models, that became entrenched in Colombian society and caused a major ideological split between both groups. Ultimately, this division would pit both national elites and the common people of the emerging State into antagonistic factions.
In this regard, I propose the existence of a paradox, according to which the reception of the Western idea of the civilizing mission played both a constructive and a destructive role in the process of State consolidation in Colombia. Certainly, while the conflicting civilizing missions of the Liberal and Conservative elites enabled the very emergence of a modern State in Colombia, they simultaneously undermined those very efforts of State consolidation as a consequence of the bitter and often bloody conflict between both factions.
From the perspective of international legal scholarship this study results relevant since it hopes to add to the discussion on the processes by which the primary subjects of international law, States, have come into being. In this regard, I will show how in the Latin American and specifically in the Colombian case these processes resulted very distinct from the ones experienced in Europe, stressing the impact that the legal principle of uti possidetis had over this distinct outcome. In so doing, I intend to highlight the need of studying the history of modern statehood in international law from a perspective that is not centred on the European experience. Moreover, by focusing on the Western idea of the civilizing mission as a driving force behind this process of State consolidation, this article seeks to shed light on the pervasive effects that this transnational idea of European origins had in the formation of the Colombian
4 State. In this connection, while studying the effects of the civilizing mission in Colombia as a case study, this articles hopes to identify general trends that may result useful for the study of the relationship between the civilizing mission of the West and modern State consolidation in the Latin American region as a whole.
For the abovementioned purposes, I will first address the notion of the civilizing mission of the West, examining the European origins of this idea and its reception in Latin America, as well as the dynamics of otherness by which it operates; establishing an essential and irredeemable dichotomy between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘uncivilized’, that in the Colombian case became profoundly entrenched in the society of the emerging State. I will then turn to an overview of the process of State consolidation in Colombia during the nineteenth century, focusing on the specific periods that best highlight the paradoxical relationship between the Liberal-Conservative civilizing dichotomy and State consolidation. With that aim, this article will study (i) the context of Colombia at the dawn of independence and the challenges it posed for the consolidation of a modern State therein (1810 onwards), (ii) the emergence of the Liberal-Conservative dichotomy in the aftermath of the so called ‘War of the Supremes’ (1839-1842), (iii) the period of the Liberal Revolution of the mid-nineteenth century (1849- 1885), with particular emphasis on the so called ‘Radical Republic’ of the United States of Colombia, and finally, (iv) the period known as the ‘Regeneration’ and the turn of the twentieth century (1885 onwards), highlighting both the constructive and the destructive legacies that the Liberal and Conservative civilizing missions of the nineteenth century had over the process of State consolidation in Colombia.
II. THE CIVILIZING MISSION: THE EUROPEAN ORIGINS OF THE IDEA AND ITS RECEPTION IN LATIN AMERICA
The term ‘civilization’ is of recent European origin, only coming into use in the mid-eighteenth century to refer to the idea of progress and the possibility of human perfection that European societies believed they had attained at the
5 time.7 Toward the end of the eighteenth century, European States began to consider that civilization had been attained within their own societies, and began to regard themselves as bearers of a finished and universal civilization that became an element of the national self-consciousness of the West.8 As noted by Liliana Obregón, this European self-understanding gave rise to a situation in which “those who believed themselves ‘civilized’ assumed a missionary project which self-legitimized them to enslave, conquer, manage or submit the ‘uncivilized’”.9 This is the origin of the Western idea of the ‘civilizing mission, that can be understood, in essence, as the idea that European culture sets the standard of ‘civilization’ according to which all human societies can be measured, thus justifying the forceful imposition of European notions of civilization over those societies that do not conform to the European norm.
In the realm of international law, the idea of the civilizing mission is not a new one, and scholars such as Martti Koskenniemi10 and Liliana Obregón11 have addressed it extensively. Among these international legal scholars, Antony Anghie stands out for showing how the civilizing mission of the West was central to the process of emergence of sovereign States in the Third World. Anghie defines the civilizing mission from an imperialist perspective, defining it as “the grand project that has justified colonialism as a means of redeeming the backward, aberrant, violent, oppressed, undeveloped people of the non- European world by incorporating them into the universal civilization of Europe”.12 Yet, while Anghie’s historical analysis persuasively explains the role that the civilizing mission played in the emergence of sovereign States in Africa,
7 OBREGÓN, Liliana. Between Civilization and Barbarism. Creole Interventions in International Law. In: Third World Quarterly. 2006. Vol. 27, No. 5. p. 815-832. p. 822. 8 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Civilization and Violence. Regimes of Representation in Nineteenth- Century Colombia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. p. xiii.; OBREGÓN, Liliana. Between Civilization and Barbarism. Creole Interventions in International Law. Op. Cit., p. 822-823. 9 OBREGÓN, Liliana. The Civilized and the Uncivilized. In: FASSBENDER, Bardo and PETERS, Anne. The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. p. 917- 939. p. 918. 10 See for instance KOSKENNIEMI, Martti. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations. The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870-1960. 5th ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001 11 See for instance OBREGÓN, Liliana. Completing Civilization. Creole consciousness and international law in nineteenth-century Latin America. In: ORFORD, Anne. International Law and its Others. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. p. 247-264.; Between Civilization and Barbarism. Creole Interventions in International Law. Op. Cit.; The Civilized and the Uncivilized. Op. Cit. 12 ANGHIE, Antony. Imperialism, sovereignty, and the making of international law. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007 p. 3.
6 Asia and the Pacific, it is not extensible to the emergence of the sovereign Latin American States. As Anghie himself recognizes, Latin America’s history is “distinctive” 13 from that of the aforementioned regions, thus calling for a separate analysis. In effect, while the idea of the civilizing mission was certainly present in the process of State consolidation in Latin America,14 it did not manifest itself as a foreign imposition resulting from European imperialism, but rather as a self-imposed civilizing mission by which the criollos –the American- born elite of Spanish and Portuguese descent15- that took the reins of the newly independent Latin American States sought to transform their native societies in accordance with European ideals of civilization.16
As has been pointed out by Obregón, the European notion of ‘civilization’ was appropriated by the criollo elites of Latin America, that from the nineteenth century onwards have shown a ‘will to civilization’ according to which they felt heirs of a European tradition of civilization, that nonetheless had failed to transform and fully civilize American lands during the colonial era. As indicated by Obregón, “[n]inetheenth-century Creoles argued that, if the civilization of Europe was unified and perfect, theirs was left half-way or lacking after the end of Spanish colonial domination. The Creoles’ national mission was to do everything necessary to complete civilization that the Spanish colonizers had brought with them.”17
Certainly, the Latin American elites that saw themselves as bearers of the civilizing mission felt that only by becoming ‘civilized’ would their States be able to stand on an equal footing with the States of Europe; a goal that demanded
13 Ibid., p. 209. 14 It should be noted that some legal scholars that have studied the idea of the civilizing mission in the Latin American context such as Liliana Obregón and Cristina Rojas have termed this idea as a “will to civilization”. For the purposes of the present article, the term “civilizing mission” has been chosen instead in order to highlight the connection of this article with international legal scholarship that has used the latter term outside of the Latin American context. 15 OBREGÓN, Liliana. Completing Civilization. Creole consciousness and international law in nineteenth-century Latin America. Op. Cit., p. 248-249. 16 OBREGÓN, Liliana. Between Civilization and Barbarism. Creole Interventions in International Law. Op. Cit., p. 823.; ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. xxvi. 17 OBREGÓN, Liliana. Completing Civilization. Creole consciousness and international law in nineteenth-century Latin America. Op. Cit., p. 252.; OBREGÓN, Liliana. Between Civilization and Barbarism. Creole Interventions in International Law. Op. Cit., p. 824.
7 their admission into the so called “community of civilized nations” and the realm of international law. As noted by James Crawford, during the nineteenth century International Law was regarded as existing solely among civilized States, therefore, being perceived as minimally civilized was an essential condition for the emergence of the Latin American States as bearers of rights and duties under international law.18 Further, during this period not even recognition as a State assured equality within international society. Indeed, L.F.L. Oppenheim noted as late as 1905 that “[a]s the basis of the Law of Nations is the common consent of the civilized States, statehood alone does not imply membership of the Family of Nations”.19 Therefore, the idea of civilization entailed a hierarchy between States, with those that were regarded as civilized -and were therefore subjects of international law- on top, and those States that were regarded as uncivilized -and were therefore beyond the protection of international law- at its bottom.
In Colombia too, the criollo elites of the nineteenth century shared the perception that civilization established an international hierarchy between States. As noted by the Colombian Conservative ideologist and leader Mariano Ospina Rodriguez:
“We call a society civilized if it has an advantage over another in knowledge, morality and wealth From the horde of savage nomads, without laws, authority, principles, almost without distinction from animals, to those nations admired by all because of their enlightened and material development, there is a vast hierarchy of nations, each one naming, as civilized, those with a better condition and, as barbarian, those behind.”20
Furthermore, this was coupled with the perception that the Latin American States were lagging behind the European ones within the hierarchy of civilization. As put forward by the prominent Colombian Conservative Sergio
18 CRAWFORD, James. The Creation of States in International Law. 2 Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. p. 14. 19 Quoted in CRAWFORD, James. Op. Cit., p. 14-15. 20 Quoted in ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. 5. Original translation by Rojas de Ferro.
8 Arboleda, the outcome of the Latin American wars of independence of the nineteenth century had produced States that were not truly equal to their European counterparts, for they represented “societies that were still inexpert (...) weak by their age, by the organization that they were forced to adopt, by their backwardness in the sciences and the arts”.21 As a result, upon their entry into international society the new States had found themselves in disadvantage to the powerful States of Europe, for these States were “strong by their antiquity, their civilization, their richness and the stability of robust institutions.”22 Civilization then was considered as the gap that separated European States from their Latin American counterparts, and ultimately assured the predominance of Europe.
Consequently, Latin American elites of the nineteenth century felt that the lack civilization of their societies placed their States in a subordinate position that could only be overcome by means of the civilizing mission. In that sense, as Obregón has shown, the civilizing mission was considered necessary both in order to obtain European recognition as sovereign States and members of the ‘community of civilized nations’, as well as to procure the advancement of Latin American societies into modern Nation-States.23 Thus, the civilizing mission in Latin America did not manifest itself as a project of imperial expansion as conceptualized by Anghie, but rather as a project of State-making on the part of national elites that followed the attainment of independence from Spain and Portugal.
However, despite the fact that Latin American criollo elites agreed on the need to civilize their nations according to European notions of civilization, there was very little agreement between them as to what were the values of civilization according to which they should transform their native societies.24 This difficulty arises from the very notion of ‘civilization’, which has no fixed content and is
21 ARBOLEDA, Sergio. La República en la América Española. Bogotá: Biblioteca Popular de Cultura Colombiana, 1951. p. 105. 22 Ibid. 23 OBREGÓN, Liliana. Between Civilization and Barbarism. Creole Interventions in International Law. Op. Cit., p. 823. 24 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. xxvii.
9 entirely dependent on the question of ‘otherness’, meaning that the content of “civilization” can only be ascertained by fixating upon its opposites: the barbarian or the ‘uncivilized’.25 In that sense, the idea of civilization establishes an essential dichotomy between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ that denies the possibility of comparison or mutual recognition among them.26
Among Europeans, this otherness was provided by the cultural differences that separated Europe from other regions of the world, allowing Europeans to deem cultural differences as a sign of barbarism. As pointed out by Martti Koskenniemi, for Europeans “[t]hat civilization was not defined beyond impressionistic characterizations was an important aspect of its value. It was not part of some rigid classification but a shorthand for the qualities that international lawyers valued in their own societies, playing upon its opposites: the uncivilized, barbarian, and the savage”.27 In that sense, the construction of the European identity operated through an act of negation; by pointing to the cultural differences of non-European peoples to ascertain the existence of an “otherness” that gave the European “self” concrete substance as its opposite, whatever that may be. 28 In relation with the definition of ‘civilization’, the definition of ‘barbarism’ operates by the same dynamic of otherness. As Valentin-Yves Mudimbe explains, “[t]hese bodies [those of the ‘Other’] can be defined through a cutting away, or separation, or even rejection, through that which expresses a gap, as from the norm. Thus, marginality is, all at the same time, (historic) accident, (religious) malediction, and fortunately also (eschatological) promise of a possible reconciliation with the center norm”.29
However, in Latin America, the emergence of a dichotomy between the civilized and the uncivilized was quite distinct. Rather than defining ‘barbarism’ by recourse to a foreign referent, the criollo elites turned to their own societies to
25 OBREGÓN, Liliana. The Civilized and the Uncivilized. Op. Cit., p. 917. 26 ANGHIE, Antony. Op. Cit., p. 4.; OBREGÓN, Liliana. The Civilized and the Uncivilized. Op. Cit., p. 918. 27 KOSKENNIEMI, Martti. Op. Cit., p. 103. 28 KOSKENNIEMI, Martti. Op. Cit., p. 103. 29 MUDIMBE, Valentin-Yves. The idea of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. p. 10.
10 ascertain the existence of a barbaric otherness that needed to be overcome by means of the civilizing mission.30 Prior studies have shown how the criollo elites of European descent undertook the mission of civilizing the subaltern classes of their societies, which were by and large of a mixed racial and cultural heritage that was perceived as uncivilized or barbaric by the Westernized criollos.31 The studies of Liliana Obregón,32 Cristina Rojas de Ferro33 and Marshall C. Eakin,34 among others, have studied this aspect of the civilizing mission in Latin America extensively, and for the purposes of the present article there is no need of examining it further. Rather, what I intend to study is the reception of competing ideals of civilization in Latin America as exemplified by the Colombian case, examining the manner in which divergences of opinion regarding the best means to assure the advancement of civilization came to divide the criollo elites into competing factions.
Certainly, while the criollo elites agreed that the source of civilization was the European continent and concurred on the need of civilizing their native societies according to European ideals of civilization, there were sharp disagreements among them as to how this civilization could be attained. 35 These disagreements created a great political divide among Latin American elites that resulted in the emergence of Liberal and Conservative parties all over the region, which I argue were divided by diverging views on the content of ‘civilization’, and consequently sought to advance conflicting civilizing missions within their States.36
As Cristina Rojas de Ferro has shown, Colombian Liberals and Conservatives fought over the route to civilization as the unifying force in whose name political
30 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. 9. 31 EAKIN, Marshall C. Op. Cit., p. 210. 32 See OBREGÓN, Liliana. Between Civilization and Barbarism. Creole Interventions in International Law. Op. Cit.; Completing Civilization. Creole consciousness and international law in nineteenth-century Latin America. Op. Cit.; The Civilized and the Uncivilized. Op. Cit. 33 See ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit. 34 See EAKIN, Marshall C. Op. Cit. 35 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. xxvii. 36 EAKIN, Marshall C. Op. Cit., p. 204.
11 reforms were made.37 Consequently, she argues that the antagonism between Liberal and Conservative factions and the recurring violence amongst them was embedded in a “mimetic desire to civilize each other”,38 in turn premised on the perception that the opposing party was an absolute enemy, an obstacle to the attainment of civilization. 39 Thus, the struggle between Liberals and Conservatives was perceived by contemporaries as a battle over the attainment or preservation of civilization itself.
As Maria Teresa Uribe de Hincapié and Liliana López Lopera have shown, the Colombian civil wars of the nineteenth century between Liberals and Conservatives were “wars of civilization”, meaning by this that they were “wars that were justified as a means to unify the nation (unify the difference) and to give nationality shape under the jurisdiction of the State”;40 highlighting the intrinsic relationship that existed between the project of the civilizing mission and the project of State consolidation during this period. Similarly as in the European case, ‘civilization’ became an element of national self-consciousness in Colombia, with the important difference that patriotism was not identified with the Nation-State itself, but rather with the affiliation to a given party, the true bearer of civilization.41
The foregoing, allows for the argument that -at least in the Colombian case- the ‘otherness’ that gave rise to the essential dichotomy between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ was not established by recourse to any foreign referent. Rather, it was established by reference to Colombian society and, most significantly, in the mutual perception of Liberals and Conservatives, who saw a barbaric ‘Other’ in the members of the opposing party. As will be shown, the ideas on the civilizing mission that stemmed from these diverging notions of civilization incited conflict between Liberals and Conservatives, ultimately driving them to a
37 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. 2, 25. 38 Ibid., p. 24. 39 Ibid., p. 40-41. 40 URIBE DE HINCAPIÉ, María Teresa and LÓPEZ LOPERA, Liliana María. Las palabras de la guerra. Un estudio sobre las memorias de las guerras civiles en Colombia. Medellín: La Carreta, 2010. p. 30. 41 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Medellín: La Carreta, 2006. p. 35, 190; SÁNCHEZ GÓMEZ, Gonzalo. Guerra y Política en la Sociedad Colombiana. Bogotá: El Áncora Editores, 1991. p. 24.
12 contest for the attainment of State power as the best means to advance their respective civilizing projects. In time, this long-standing conflict between Liberals and Conservatives would come to act as both a driving force for the consolidation of modern statehood and, at the same time, an obstacle to that very project of State consolidation.
III. COLOMBIA AT THE OUTSET OF INDEPENDENCE: THE CHALLENGES OF STATE CONSOLIDATION
When considering ‘States’ as the primary subjects of international law, international lawyers are in fact referring to what could be more precisely termed as ‘modern States’, consisting of centralized power structures wielding exclusive political and moral authority and a monopoly of force over a population inhabiting a given territory. 42 This exclusive moral and political authority and monopoly over force amounts to the notion of State sovereignty, understood as the State’s government’s exclusive authority to impose and enforce commands on any individual living within the sovereign’s territory.43 In this sense, as noted by Karen Knop, “the state is defined in terms of power: effective control by a government over a population and territory”.44
Among Latin American elites of the nineteenth century, the State was similarly defined in terms of effective power over a population and territory. As noted by the Venezuelan jurist Andrés Bello in the 1844 edition of his influent treatise on International law, Principios de Derecho de Gentes, “[a] State or Nation is a society of men that has as its purpose the conservation and happiness of its associates; that is governed by positive laws that emanate from itself, and is owner of a portion of territory”.45 According to Bello, in order to exist a such, a
42 CASSESE, Antonio. Op. Cit., p. 49. 43 CASSESE, Antonio. Op. Cit., p. 51.; AXTMANN, Roland. The State of the State. The Model of the Modern State and Its Contemporary Transformation. In: International Political Science Review. 2003. Vol. 25, No, 3. p. 259-279. p. 260. 43 Ibid., p. 260. 44 KNOP, Karen. Statehood: Territory, People, Government. In: CRAWFORD, James and KOSKENNIEMI, Martti. The Cambridge Companion to International Law. (95-116). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. p. 95-116. p. 101. 45 BELLO, Andrés. Principios de Derecho de Gentes. Nueva edición revista y corregida. Madrid: Librería de la señora viuda de Calleja e hijos, 1844. p. 24.
13 State should therefore be both independent and sovereign, noting that independence consisted in “not receiving laws from another [State]”,46 while sovereignty consisted on the existence of a “supreme authority that directs and represents”47 the State, whose power and authority “derives from the nation [meaning by this the associated people], if not by positive institution, at least by its tacit recognition and its obedience.”48 Sovereignty then entailed two aspects: “immanent sovereignty”, 49 understood as “that which regulates domestic matters”, and “transitory sovereignty”50 understood as that which “represents the nation in its dealings with other States”.51 In Bello’s view, the new Latin American States could emerge as international legal persons and subjects of international law only by becoming independent and sovereign in the abovementioned sense, consequently achieving both immanent and transitory sovereignty. In Bello’s own terms:
“The essential quality which makes a nation a true political body, a person that deals directly with other persons of the same species under the authority of international law, is the faculty of governing itself, that constitutes it as independent and sovereign. Under this aspect transitory sovereignty is no less essential than immanent sovereignty; if a nation lacked it, it would not have true personality under international law.”52
The foregoing highlights that the consolidation of States entails both internal and external aspects that result essential for their emergence as subjects of international law. In effect, studies on the consolidation of modern States point to the fact that emerging States must be able to overcome both an external and an internal challenge in order to attain an effective sovereignty, which encompasses the notions of “independence” and “sovereignty” as understood by Bello. As Miguel Ángel Centeno has pointed out, to overcome the external
46 Ibíd., p. 25. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 The original Spanish reads “soberanía inmanente” 50 The original Spanish reads “soberanía transeunte”. 51 BELLO, Andrés. Op. Cit., p. 27 52 Ibid., p. 48.
14 challenge a State must be able to defend its right to exist vis a vis other States, thus asserting its exclusive authority over its territory and population to the exclusion of any foreign authority.53 Further, States must be able to overcome the internal challenge by assuring obedience to its laws within its territory and consequently obtaining internal recognition of its domination from the population.54 As pointed out by Centeno, overcoming this internal challenge in turn requires the attainment of two interrelated goals: pacification –understood as the monopolization of the legitimate means of violence by State officials- and centralization –understood as the superiority of central State institutions over their regional or local competitors-.55 In this regard, Centeno coincides with authors such as Charles Tilly56 and Norbert Elias,57 who have pointed out that the first steps towards modern State consolidation are intimately linked with the struggles in which local and regional leaders engage for the monopolization of the economic, military and political resources that exist within a given territory.58
In the Latin American context, the new States that arose out of the independence process of the early nineteenth century faced considerable obstacles in order to overcome both the external and internal challenges to their effective sovereignty, and consequently, to their consolidation as modern States and subjects of international law on an equal footing with European States.
Regarding the external challenge, it has already been pointed out that the civilizing mission of the Latin American elites was to a certain degree motivated by their fear of not being admitted by European States into the community of civilized nations because of a perceived lack of civilization.59 This fear was certainly justified in view of the principle of dynastic legitimacy that the European Powers of the Holy Alliance defended at the time, understood as the inalienable right of sovereignty of the legitimate ruling dynasty, which could only
53 CENTENO, Miguel Angel. Op. Cit., p. 57. 54Ibid., p. 57. 55Ibid., p. 57. 56 See TILLY, Charles. Coerción, Capital y los Estados europeos, 990-1990. Madrid: Alianza, 1992. 57 See ELIAS, Norbert. El proceso de la civilización. Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987. 58 URIBE DE HINCAPIÉ, María Teresa and LÓPEZ LOPERA, Liliana María. Op. Cit., p. 44-45. 59 OBREGÓN, Liliana. Between Civilization and Barbarism. Creole Interventions in International Law. Op. Cit., p. 823.
15 be lost by voluntary renunciation or extinction of the dynasty.60 Thus, so long as the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns continued to claim sovereign rights over American lands, the principle of dynastic legitimacy menaced the very right of Latin American States to claim independence, and resulted in a permanent threat of forceful re-annexation by their former colonial masters.61
In effect, such a will of re-annexation certainly existed at the time, as can be ascertained from the correspondence of Spain’s ambassador in London during the Latin American wars of independence, who in 1817 pleaded for a joint European endeavour to quell the American Revolutions. To the effect, he hinted that the triumph of said revolutions would amount to a surrendering to barbarism, arguing that:
“[w]herever usurpation sets up her throne, wherever the sacred principle of [dynastic] legitimacy is profaned, it becomes necessary to stifle the evil in its very bud. The interest is general, the cause is common, and the means ought to be uniform, expeditious and decisive (...) This interest greatly increases by the reflection that America will be metamorphosed (...) on the theatre of organized subversion, usurpation and domination, and under the auspices of that hateful family, who have carried the destruction of legitimate thrones and of public welfare through all the recesses of Europe. Nothing but a confederacy of great powers, a sincere and strong manifestation of their intentions and a determination to exert their power, should it become necessary, will put down the empire of the factious, stimulate the loyal and consolidate the political edifice constructed by means of so many sacrifices, and on whose duration depends the happiness of the human race”.62
Moreover, the principle of dynastic legitimacy was coupled with the European perception of the Latin American “race” as one that had not yet attained a
60 TALMON, Stefan. Recognition of Governments in International Law. With particular reference to governments in exile. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. p. 54. 61 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. 8. 62 Letter of December 10, 1817. Quoted in FABRY, Mikulas. Recognizing States. International Society & the Establishment of New States Since 1776. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. p. 53. Original translation by Fabry.
16 sufficient degree of civilization, and was consequently unfit for governing the emerging States.63 An example of such a perception can be found in the writings of the British sociologist Benjamin Kidd, who in the aftermath of Latin American independence acknowledged the richness in natural resources of the Central and South American continent, but pointed to the lack of civilization of Latin Americans as an impediment for the recognition of their exclusive authority over said territories. In his own words, these States:
“have exhibited a general absence of the public and private feeling characteristic of the countries with highest social development. (...) The lack of the most elementary qualities of social efficiency on the part of the races would lead to the waste of natural resources of one of the wealthiest regions on earth. We can acknowledge the right of property, but not the right to impede [our] use of the vast amount of resources under their custody.”64
Understandably then, the criollo elites feared the European perception that Latin American societies were uncivilized, for it threatened their right to exercise exclusive authority within their territory and over their population, and ultimately threatened their very survival as sovereign States. Consequently, this perception would incite them to undertake the civilizing mission in order to appear as civilized before European eyes, especially during the seven decades that would elapse between the commencement of the Latin American wars of independence and the act of Spanish recognition of Colombia’s independence of 1881, when the principle of dynastic legitimacy finally ceased to threaten Colombian statehood.65
On the other hand, the internal challenges to the attainment of effective sovereignty resulted even more daunting for the emerging Latin American States. It has sometimes been argued out that the principle of uti possidetis,
63 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. 8. 64 Quoted in ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. 8. Original translation by Rojas de Ferro. 65 CLEMENTE BATALLA, Isabel. Colombia en el mundo. In: POSADA CARBÓ, Eduardo and CASTRO CARVAJAL, Beatriz. Colombia. Tomo 2 – 1830/1880. La construcción Nacional. Madrid: Fundación Mapfre, 2012. p. 77-127. p. 93; ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. 8.
17 originally developed by Latin American States upon the attainment of independence, contributed to the stability and consolidation of Latin American States by consecrating pre-existing colonial boundaries as the international frontiers of the new States. For instance, Jörg Fisch has pointed out how this legal principle allowed Latin American States to become more stable than their European counterparts, since it protected the new States from the centuries-old border conflicts that were so frequent in Europe.66 This is indeed true, for international wars were certainly a rare occurrence among Latin American States. 67 However, the emphasis placed on the stability provided by the principle of uti possidetis tends to obscure the fact that the State territory carved out by recourse to said principle rarely corresponded to underlying realities of power, where centralization of power and pacification of the enclosed territory where still largely absent.68
Uti possidetis not only defined the international frontiers of the emerging Latin American States, but also, and more fundamentally, defined a ‘national’ territory and population that fell under the authority of the governments that had arisen out of the wars of independence, albeit only in a nominal fashion. Thus, national Constitutions of Colombia throughout the entire nineteenth century would define the ‘national’ territory simply as that which had belonged to the colonial unit of the Viceroyalty of New Granada until the outbreak of the war of independence, despite the fact that national governments in fact lacked the power to exercise meaningful authority over the totality of the territory they claimed.69 Yet, the effective expulsion of the Spanish authorities and the semblance of a national territory and population falling under the authority of a government that the principle of uti possidetis provided prompted international recognition of
66 FISCH, Jörg. Peoples and Nations. In: FASSBENDER, Bardo and PETERS, Anne. The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. p. 27-48. p. 36. 67 CENTENO, Miguel Angel. Op. Cit., p. 61. 68 Ibid., p. 57-58. 69 For a detailed examination of the evolution of the territorial definitions of the Colombian State see OROZCO C, Cecilia, MARTÍNEZ T., Pedro Martín and PERDOMO C., Lina María. Del territorio heredado de la Colonia al de la República. Procesos de Conformación de los límites internos y externos de Colombia. Santiago de Cali: Programa Editorial Universidad del Valle, 2010.
18 Colombia as a State, even before it could in fact be asserted that it had overcome the internal challenges to the attainment of its effective sovereignty.70
Thus, while United States recognition of Colombia came in 1822 and British recognition would follow in 1825,71 Colombia had yet to attain centralization of power and pacification of its territory in order to truly emerge as a modern State. Uti possidetis then enabled the emergence of the Colombian State as a subject of international law, albeit only as a legal fiction where effective consolidation of the State was still absent. To put it in Bello’s terms, international recognition of Colombia simply acknowledged the attainment of transitory sovereignty, despite the fact that immanent sovereignty was yet not fully attained by the Colombian government.
In effect, while in the aftermath of independence the authorities of the new Latin American Republics agreed to recognize the relevant administrative colonial divisions as their mutual frontiers, political power within those frontiers was in fact acutely fragmented. As has been noted by Centeno in the case of the Spanish American Republics, the separate parts of the Spanish Empire were connected to the metropolitan centre and the Crown as the real source of sovereignty, but the separate regions and cities within it where poorly articulated with each other.72 Consequently, the collapse of the Spanish Empire revealed the inherent weaknesses of the links maintaining the different colonial regions together, and led to what Fernán González has called an “explosion of sovereignties”73; a situation in which the separate cities and regions behaved in practice as city-States or region-States, and struggled with each other for the attainment of power over the national territory that was loosely defined by recourse to the principle of uti possidetis.74
70 CRAWFORD, James. Op. Cit., p. 378, 382. 71 Ibid., p. 377. 72 CENTENO, Miguel Angel. Op. Cit., p. 64. 73 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Poder y Violencia en Colombia. Bogotá: Odecofi – Cinep, 2014. P.525. 74 Ibid.
19 This situation led to a process of State consolidation that was very distinct from the one experienced in Europe, for European States were built from the "inside- out", where a given region or province would assert its dominance over others, thus building States at the same time that the territory was acquired.75 By contrast, in Latin America the struggle was about assuming control over the already defined State territory, over which no single political centre held dominion, and large areas of the formally defined States lacked the exercise of any meaningful authority.76
In the case of Colombia, there was no pre-existing Nation-State that attained independence from the Spanish Empire.77 Thus, while State authorities rapidly adopted a formal constitution and a new set of legal institutions, these institutions directly affected the lives of only a small minority of the population. 78 As noted by Bushnell, “[e]ven among those who were active participants, the nation as an abstract entity usually meant less than the provinces or regions where they lived and in which they conducted their business and professional affairs.” 79 This was a consequence of the fragmentation of the territory and the disarticulation of the regional elites that was inherited from colonial times, for colonial settlements did not constitute an integrated urban network but rather a series of urban centres that were very isolated from each other and had very scarce mutual commercial exchanges.80 These urban centres in turn exerted influence over their rural hinterland and subaltern villages and towns, creating regional units with whom the populations identified and to whom they owed their allegiance rather than to the central State.81
75 CENTENO, Miguel Angel. Op. Cit., p. 66 76 Ibid., p. 60-61, 66. 77 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 17 78 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 74. 79 Ibid., p. 74. 80 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Poder y Violencia en Colombia. Op. Cit., p. 535; BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. La Vida Política. In: POSADA CARBÓ, Eduardo and CASTRO CARVAJAL, Beatriz. Colombia. Tomo 2 – 1830/1880. La construcción Nacional. Madrid: Fundación Mapfre, 2012. p. 27-75. p. 28. 81 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Poder y Violencia en Colombia. Op. Cit., p. 535; PALACIOS, Marco. Op. Cit., p. 1669.
20 The foregoing explains why the independence movement in Colombia quickly transformed into a series of complex civil wars between Colombia’s cities and regions, in which neither the national capital of Bogotá 82 nor any of the provinces was strong enough to impose its hegemony over the others or to completely detach from the State.83 As has been aptly pointed out by Marco Palacios, in nineteenth century Colombia “neither the “centre” nor any important provincial focus attained the legitimacy to exert what Weber has called the monopoly over violence.” 84 Based on the foregoing, Uribe de Hincapié and López Lopera have argued with reference to Thomas Hobbes that the Colombian civil wars of the nineteenth century were intrinsically related to the lack of an effective sovereignty; a consequence of the absence or fragility of a State apparatus that was able to impose itself over the groups and individuals in conflict.85
Consequently, it can be argued that despite the early definition of its national territory and international frontiers by means of the principle of uti possidetis, the emerging Colombian State of the nineteenth century was still far removed from being a modern State, since centralization of power and pacification of the territory where still largely absent. Consequently, effective sovereignty over the State had yet to be attained.
This was the context of acute political fragmentation that characterized Colombia and Latin America as a whole in the aftermath of independence, in which Liberal and Conservative factions would soon emerge throughout the entire region. These factions would eventually come to play a key role in overcoming of the fragmentation inherited from colonial times. However, in order to study this process in Colombia we must jump forward to the year of
82 Bogotá was actually called Santa Fe until the end of the colonial era, when its name was changed by the Republican authorities. To avoid any confusion, it will be referred to as Bogotá throughout the entirety of this article. 83 PALACIOS, Marco. Op. Cit., p. 1668-1669; CASTRO CARVAJAL, Beatriz. Las claves del periodo In: POSADA CARBÓ, Eduardo and CASTRO CARVAJAL, Beatriz. Colombia. Tomo 2 – 1830/1880. La construcción Nacional. Madrid: Fundación Mapfre, 2012. p. 13-26. p. 19-20. 84 PALACIOS, Marco. Op. Cit., p. 1669. 85 URIBE DE HINCAPIÉ, María Teresa and LÓPEZ LOPERA, Liliana María. Op. Cit., p. 42.
21 1839 and the so-called ‘War of the Supremes’, where Liberal and Conservative identities first emerged and took hold among the Colombian population.
IV. THE WAR OF THE SUPREMES AND THE ORIGIN OF THE LIBERAL CONSERVATIVE DICHOTOMY
The year of 1839 came as a major shock to the government of the emerging Colombian State, when a generalized rebellious outbreak that came to be known as the ‘War of the Supremes’ (Guerra de los Supremos) imperilled the central authority that had been established during the wars of independence, leaving a pervasive legacy of bipartisan division that would profoundly affect the Colombian State throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.86
A. The war and its legacy
The War of the Supremes consisted of an armed insurrection of many of the different provinces of Colombia against the central government of the State. The immediate spark that ignited the uprising was the promulgation of a law by Congress that ordered the suppression of four monasteries in the southern city of Pasto, with the justification that they had too few members.87 This angered the people of Pasto (Patusos) who regarded the law as a blow against religion itself and an undue interference in the local affairs of the province, so they rose in rebellion and were quickly suppressed by the government of President José Ignacio de Márquez.88 Then, in 1840 José María Obando –one of the military leaders who had risen to prominence during the wars of independence- came to the support of the Pastusos, who rallied around him to reignite the uprising.89
While Obando was closely aligned with the political factions that would soon give rise to the Liberal party and was certainly no pro-clerical reactionary, the Pasto region was one of his main bases of support. Consequently, Obando saw it fitting to adopt the cause of the Pastusos and declared himself ‘Supreme
86 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 91; BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 39. 87 Ibid. 88 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., 91. 89 Ibid.
22 Dictator of the War in Pasto, General in Chief of the Restoring Army, and Protector of the Religion of Christ Crucified’ 90 calling for a national reorganization along federal lines. In so doing, Obando displayed the characteristic traits of the nineteenth century Latin American caudillo. In its nineteenth century connotation, this term of difficult translation to English (approximately meaning ‘little chief’ in Spanish) refers to the strong, charismatic leaders that emerged out of the wars of independence and subsequent civil wars.91 They were often local leaders and they generally belonged to the criollo elites of particular regions, although certain non-elite caudillos did in fact emerge during this period.92 They embodied the martial virtues of the warrior who won the admiration of his fellow men through his ability to lead on the battlefield, and their influence continued to be determinant in the political life of most Latin American States for decades after independence was in fact attained. 93 Unsurprisingly then, the first to voice demands for federalism in the new Latin American States were provincial caudillos like Obando, who found in the defence of federalism the best tool for rallying popular support in their respective regions while maximizing their influence therein and gaining a better footing vis a vis the forces of the central government.94
By that same logic, caudillos in almost all of the populated areas of Colombia followed Obando’s example and began uprising against the government, usually proclaiming themselves as ‘supreme chiefs’ of their respective regions (hence the name with which the conflict is known) and to one extent or the other proclaiming federalism as an objective. 95 However, there was no effective nationwide revolutionary leadership, but rather a series of disperse and disarticulated uprisings in which each caudillo acted by himself.96 In this sense,
90 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., 91; BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 36. The original Spanish title was “Supremo Director de la guerra en Pasto, general en jefe del ejercito restaurador y protector de la religión del Crucificado” 91 EAKIN, Marshall C. Op. Cit., p. 207. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid. 94 MORA, Carlos Alberto y PEÑA, Margarita. Historia socioeconómica de Colombia. Bogotá: Norma, 1985. p. 117. 95 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., 92; PALACIOS, Marco and SAFFORD, Frank. Colombia. País Fragmentado Sociedad Dividida. Bogotá: Norma, 2002. p. 303. 96 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., 92; PALACIOS, Marco and SAFFORD, Frank. Op. Cit., p. 307.
23 the immediate spark of the war resulted trivial, since what it actually expressed where regional discontents with the central government, where each region asserted greater autonomy by means of the use of force.97 The foregoing is symptomatic of the lack of centralization and pacification that continued to challenge State consolidation in Colombia at the time.
In May of 1842 the rebellions where finally supressed by the Márquez government with heavy support from certain regional caudillos, in what turned out to be a long and devastating war that directly affected almost all of the populated areas of the State.98 Most importantly, the war had a significant impact in the consolidation of the political factions and loyalties that would eventually give rise to both the Liberal and the Conservative parties in Colombia.99 In effect, in the aftermath of the war the victorious factions that had supported the government and held office began to refer to themselves as the Ministeriales, later to be renamed Conservatives.100 In contrast, their opponents who were defeated in the war began to claim for themselves the title of Liberals. Though formal party organizations would only emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century, to all intents and purposes the War of the Supremes had given birth to the bipartisan system in Colombia.101
In this connection, it is noteworthy that even at this very early formative stage of the bipartisan conflict the idea that civilization was at stake can already be ascertained in the language of the war’s protagonists. For instance, when the government sent the general Pedro Alcántara Herrán to subdue the rebellion in Pasto in 1939, he rallied his soldiers in the following terms that evoke the image of the rebels as barbarians, whose ultimate destruction resulted necessary for the safeguard of the nation:
97 BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 35. 98 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 92; PALACIOS, Marco and SAFFORD, Frank. Op. Cit., p. 307-308. 99 BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 39. 100 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 92; PALACIOS, Marco and SAFFORD, Frank. Op. Cit., p. 92. 101 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., 92; PALACIOS, Marco and SAFFORD, Frank. Op. Cit., p. 92.
24 “Soldiers: We are going to pass to Juanambú to attack a faction, that bearing the standard of fanaticism have scandalously violated the holy equilibrium of our laws. An effort of your part is enough to destroy the rebels, and repair the injury to the majesty of the national government. Comrades: It is for this situation that we have sworn to spill our blood.”102
In a similar fashion, the would-be Conservative ideologist Rufino Cuervo referred to Obando as a “new Attila” in a 1842 letter he wrote as Colombia’s diplomatic agent to the Peruvian Government, requesting Obando’s extradition by claiming that his actions had violently attacked civilization; understood as a “compelling need of the Hispanic American States”. 103 As put forward by Cuervo when referring to Obando’s deeds, “[i]t may be that among the great excesses committed in the New World, there is no sadder example of malevolence and barbarism”.104
The accusation that the rebels and Obando in particular were barbarians was certainly influential at the time, leading Obando himself to defend the causes of the rebellion in his book Apuntamientos para la Historia (1842), where he attacked Herrán as the true barbarian in the following terms:
“[Herrán] said that “three hundred barbarians had died, while the nation had not lost more than thirty”. That was the language of the candidate drawn from the Ministerial filth to acquire celebrity in massacres unworthy of the century of civilization: If it is true that 300 died, he himself confesses that he murdered 300 surrendered men, despite trying to remedy it by qualifying them as barbarians. (...) Who was the barbarian then? The 300 or Herrán?”105
102 Quoted in URIBE DE HINCAPIÉ, María Teresa and LÓPEZ LOPERA, Liliana María. Op. Cit., p. 103. 103 CUERVO, Rufino. Documentos Oficiales para la historia y la Estadística de la Nueva Granada. Bogotá: Imprenta de J.A. Cualla, 1843. p. 106. 104 Ibid. 105 OBANDO, José María. Apuntamientos para la Historia. Tomo II. Bogotá: Biblioteca Popular de Cultura Colombiana, 1945. p. 65.
25 It should further be noted that as a consequence of the regionalisms behind the war, the emerging division between Liberals and Conservatives resulted profoundly territorial in nature, permanently ascribing certain territories as of ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ predominance from the end of the war henceforth. As would later be remarked by the Colombian President Alberto Lleras Camargo, this war “marked and parcelled out the Colombian territory with the worst stigma of bipartisan violence, deeming villages as Liberal or Conservative for ever”.106 As noted by Bushnell, this can be evidenced from the fact that, from the very origins of the bipartisan split, rural communities tended to lean overwhelmingly to either Liberalism or Conservatism.107 As pointed out by Palacios, the parties “expressed local sentiments, interests and aspirations: regionalism can be dyed of Conservatism or Liberalism according to the conjuncture and the place.”108
However, this territorial aspect of the bipartisan division must not be overstated. Despite the clear differences in their relative strength from one region to another that made each party the predominant force in certain territories, both parties were multiclass and had nationwide presence.109 Further, while rural areas tended to lean overwhelmingly to one party or the other, cities tended to present a greater level of competition between Liberal and Conservative forces, in which neither party could claim absolute predominance.110 Consequently, while there was certainly an important element of territorialisation in the bipartisan split, this was at best a limited one.
Moreover, the evident predominance of the parties in certain regions did not imply a renunciation of their claims to the central power of the State. In this sense, the presence of both parties in all areas of the country forced Liberals and Conservatives to compete with each other at all levels of the State structure: local, regional and national.111 To some extent, this common claim to central power explains why the multiple civil wars of the Colombian nineteenth
106 Cited in BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 39 107 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 94. 108 PALACIOS, Marco. Op. Cit., p. 19. 109 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 93-94. 110 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 94. 111 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Poder y Violencia en Colombia. Op. Cit., p. 537.
26 century did not usually turn into full-fledged secessionist wars, since both parties aspired to control the central State to which the principle of uti possidetis gave concrete substance by defining the national territory and population.112
In intimate connection with this territorial aspect of the bipartisan divide, the War of the Supremes was of great transcendence for the consolidation of the Colombian State since it defined regional and local hegemonies, communicated isolated territories with each other and, most importantly, for the first time articulated regional and local power structures to national-level coalitions: the Liberal and Conservative factions.113 As explained by González, the parties connected the central State bureaucracy with the regional elites who controlled political life in their respective regions and localities, thus also linking the subaltern classes to the parties at a national level under political programs elaborated by urban elites.114 Consequently, during the decades that followed the War of the Supremes, both parties would gradually expand and develop into supra-regional power structures, incorporating populations and territories - including those that had previously been beyond any effective authority- to the institutional State apparatus, while imprinting on the incorporated populations a sense of ‘Liberal’ or ‘Conservative’ identity that transcended the merely local or regional.115
In this sense, the parties that emerged from the war came to act as powerful unifying forces in an otherwise acutely fragmented State in political, geographical and cultural terms.116 This would enable the parties to play a key role in overcoming the fragmentation that afflicted the Colombian State and impeded the consolidation of a centralized power structure capable of
112 CENTENO, Miguel Angel. Op. Cit., p. 60-61. 113 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 30-31. 114 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Poder y Violencia en Colombia. Op. Cit., p. 537-538; GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 30-32. 115 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Poder y Violencia en Colombia. Op. Cit., p. 537-538; GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 30-32; BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p 117. 116 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 93-94; BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 71.
27 exercising its sovereignty over the State territory carved out by the principle of uti possidetis.
However, this process would certainly be a profoundly conflictive one. As noted by Gonzalo Sánchez Gómez, the multiple civil wars of the Colombian nineteenth century between Liberals and Conservatives would be a scenario for the definition of power relations between the Parties and the central State.117 Wars usually concluded with horizontal pacts between Liberal and Conservative forces, leading to new constitutional and legal arrangements, redistribution of bureaucratic participation and the incorporation of excluded political forces to the institutional State apparatus.118 The foregoing explains why the Colombian nineteenth century has been described as a century of wars and constitutions, or more accurately, as a century of “constitutional wars”, in which war acted as a foundational force behind the legal structures of the State.119
Thus, it can be argued that Liberals and Conservatives struggled for the advancement of their respective civilizing projects both by means of war and Law; recurring to war as a means to assert the dominance of one party over the other, and to law as the best tool to implant civilization and overcome barbarism. Both Liberals and Conservatives shared the faith that Constitutions and legal systems were capable of transforming reality,120 accounting for the seven national Constitutions that where adopted in Colombia between 1830 and the end of the century. 121 In this sense, Colombian Liberals and Conservatives engaged in the wider Latin American project of attaining civilization by means of law, which as noted by Obregón was premised on the idea that “through law and its application, barbarism could be eliminated from Latin American societies, or, at a minimum, be controlled. The ideal of civilisation would be in the new constitutions and would justify the new laws; it would privilege certain economic practices, religious choices, educational
117 SÁNCHEZ GÓMEZ, Gonzalo. Op. Cit., p. 17. 118 Ibid., p. 21-22. 119 Ibid., p. 15-16. 120 BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 71. 121 Ibid., p. 71.
28 systems, and ideas about the racial composition of society”.122 Ascertaining exactly what it was that divided Liberals and Conservatives and their respective civilizing missions will be the subject of the following section.
B. Liberals and Conservatives in perspective
The wars of Independence in Latin America shattered the elite consensus, which during the colonial era had been premised on the role of the Crown as the true source of sovereignty.123 In many ways, the subsequent history of State consolidation in Latin America is the history of the struggle for the reestablishment of a new elite consensus that enables political stability and economic growth.124 In most of Latin America during the nineteenth century, this conflict could be reduced to a conflict between Liberals and Conservatives, though the differences between both groups were never clear-cut and there was also considerable dissension within the groups themselves.125
In the case of Colombia, the Liberal and Conservative parties whose essential factions arose out of the War of the Supremes were officially founded on 1848.126 From their very foundation, the objective of defending or attaining civilization was clearly at the forefront of their objectives, evidencing that both parties struggled over the best route to civilization.127 Thus, on that year the Conservative ideologists Mariano Ospina Rodriguez and José Eusebio Caro established a newspaper they aptly called “La Civilización”, on which they published the Conservative Party’s first political program.128 On said program, the defence of “civilization against barbarism” was elaborated as one of the fundamental pillars of the Conservative ideology.129 In a similar fashion, José Ezequiel Rojas -author of the Liberal party’s first political program- defended his
122 OBREGÓN, Liliana. Between Civilization and Barbarism. Creole Interventions in International Law. Op. Cit., p. 823. 123 CENTENO, Miguel Angel. Op. Cit., p. 64; EAKIN, Marshall C. Op. Cit., p. 208. 124 EAKIN, Marshall C. Op. Cit., p. 208. 125 EAKIN, Marshall C. Op. Cit., p. 204, 208; BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 94. 126 BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 42. 127 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. 25. 128 BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 46. 129 Quoted in GAVIRIA LIÉVANO, Henrique. El Liberalismo y la insurrección de los artesanos contra el librecambio. Primeras manifestaciones socialistas en Colombia. Bogotá: Fundación Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano, 2002. p. 149.
29 faith in Liberalism by arguing that “only in freedom can men be happy and nations progress and become civilized; that has always been my conviction; that it why I am a Liberal”.130 As noted by Marco Palacios, in nineteenth century Colombia “no other word surpassed the word ‘civilization’ in circulation”;131 testifying to the pervasiveness of this idea among both Liberals and Conservatives.
While fixating on different models, both Liberals and Conservatives coincided in their generalized admiration for Western European models of civilization, which meant that their views on the civilizing mission essentially coincided on the perceived need of transforming their societies according to European standards of civilization as expressed in the works of Montesquieu, Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville, among others. 132 Thus, they confronted the extraordinary linguistic, social, cultural and social diversity of their society with the overriding goal to homogenize and standardize it in the image of Europe.133
Turning to a necessarily rough characterization of both groups, it can be pointed out that Conservatism in Colombia as in the wider Latin American context of the nineteenth century was not so much as a political creed, but rather a form of political inertia.134 Conservatism grouped many of the rich and eminent that had been favoured by the Spanish and Portuguese colonial order and who, upon independence, suddenly found their position within the social structure threatened.135 In effect, Conservatism in Colombia tended to be strongest in those areas which at the end of the colonial era were most important politically and economically, such as the cities of Bogotá, Cartagena de Indias and Popayán, while Liberalism tended to be strongest in more peripheral areas of
130 Quoted in LLANO ISAZA, Rodrigo. Historia resumida del Partido Liberal Colombiano. Bogotá: Partido Liberal Colombiano, 2009. p. 22. 131 Quoted in ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. 3. 132 PALACIOS, Marco and SAFFORD, Frank. Op. Cit., p. 283. 133 EAKIN, Marshall C. Op. Cit., p. 208. 134 Ibid., p. 204-205. 135 Ibid., p. 204-205.
30 the State, such as the modern day departments of Santander and Norte de Santander.136
In view of the foregoing, it is not surprising that Conservatives sought to preserve as much of the old colonial order as possible while looking back to Spain as a legal and social model of civilization for their own society. 137 However, while they grouped within their ranks those who wanted to retain old privileges and hierarchies including the preservation of slavery and forced Indian labour, it should be noted that many Conservatives rejected the preservation of such institutions.138 An example of these perceptions can be found in the writings of the prominent Conservative Sergio Arboleda, who discussed the social situation of Colombia at the outset of independence in his book La República en la América Española (1869), arguing that:
“Whatever can be said, the colony inherited us with peoples constituted over very firm bases, and well organized morally, socially and civilly, despite the fact that its constitution and regime as in all human institutions, suffered from faults and blemishes. Without a doubt the country was lagging in the sciences and in the arts; industry and commerce felt oppressed by restrictions; society was divided between classes, and the slavery of the Africans maintained a dangerous ulcer open; nevertheless Spain inherited us with good customs, admirably constituted families, ingrained habits of respect for authority and consideration for women, a virtuous clergy, moral and uniform religious beliefs, Christianised Indians and blacks put on the road toward civilization, and bonds of true fraternity that united all races and merged them into one great family.”139
On the other hand, Liberals looked to France, England and the United States as civilized models for their society, rejecting the preservation of the Spanish
136 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 93. 137 EAKIN, Marshall C. Op. Cit., p. 205. 138 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 98. 139 ARBOLEDA, Sergio. Op. Cit., p. 194.
31 legacy that was so dear to Conservatives.140 These ideas can be exemplified by the writings of the influential Liberal politician and writer José Maria Samper, who called upon Colombians to seek the route to a “new civilization” capable of overcoming the vices of Spanish colonization. As pointed out in his book Apuntamientos para la historia política i social de la Nueva Granada (1853), the legacy of the Spanish colony over the Colombian people had led them to become:
“A people isolated from the universal life, made brutish by tyranny; subject to the pernicious influence of the cassock and of slavery; without commerce, without arts, without schools, without fixed customs or a national character; (...) Having Spain been transplanted to the regions of the Aztecs, the Muiscas, the Chibchas and the Incas, it brought with it, in matter of institutions, clerical omnipotence and the Inquisition; archaic codes and ultramontanist laws; monopolies, slavery, the alcabala [principal colonial tax], centralism, tithes, the most odious taxes over production and consumption; the customs, the audiences, and in one word: the sombre absolutism of Phillip II with all its disastrous consequences“141
In brief, Samper’s perception of the Spanish legacy can be summarized in the following depiction of Spanish civilization:
“Do you want to know what are the most fitting arms for the Spanish flag? Paint a rosary to represent its fanaticism, a chain to express its enslavement, and a bag to demonstrate the greed of an alcabala collector, and you will have a portrait of Spain”.142
As indicated above, Samper called upon the Colombian people to seek out a “new civilization”. However, he did not believe that Colombians should initiate a
140 EAKIN, Marshall C. Op. Cit., p. 205. 141 SAMPER, José María. Apuntamientos para la historia política i social de la Nueva Granada. Desde 1810, i especialmente de la administración del 7 de marzo. Bogotá: Imprenta del Neo-Granadino, 1853. p. 25, 28. 142 Ibid., p. 28.
32 civilization ex novo, but rather, that they should look to England and the United States as representatives of the “modern civilization”143 to which they could and should aspire. As indicated in his book Ensayo sobre las Revoluciones Políticas i la Condición Social de las Repúblicas Colombianas (1861), he believed that the Spanish “race” was incapable of transmitting civilization to their colonies in the same way that the “Germanic races” had, evidencing the need of turning to these latter cultures in order to attain true civilization in Latin America.144 In Samper’s own words:
“In Europe one can observe a curious contrast, that the centuries have never refuted. Germanic or Northern races are the only ones that possess the genius of colonization, that is, of creating civilized societies in barbaric regions. The Latin or Southern races, are the only ones that have the genius of conquest, that is, of domination (through assimilation) over already civilized peoples”145
Throughout the nineteenth century, Colombian Liberals and Conservatives would go to war over a wide array of seemingly disarticulated issues, which shed on light on their diverging views on the civilizing mission. An overview of this century’s bipartisan wars shows that the foremost of these issues concerned the role of the Catholic Church and its doctrines within the emerging State.146 Conservatives regarded the Catholic faith as a fundamental basis for the preservation of civilized society in Colombia. 147 Consequently, the Conservative quest for civilization centred on the dissemination of ‘good doctrines’ that coincided with the principles of Christian morality.148 On the other hand, Liberals saw the pre-eminence of the Catholic institution as an obstacle to the material and intellectual progress of their nation, and often sought to
143Ibid., p. 352. 144 It should be noted that Samper uses the term “Colombia” to refer not only to what would latter become the modern Republic of Colombia, but to the Latin American region as a whole, in reference to the legacy of Christopher Columbus. 145 SAMPER, José María. Ensayo sobre las Revoluciones Políticas i la Condición Social de las Repúblicas Colombianas (Hispano-Americanas). Con un apendice sobre la orografía y la población de la confederación granadina. Paris: Imprenta de E. Thunot y C., 1861. p. 32. 146 SÁNCHEZ GÓMEZ, Gonzalo. Op. Cit., p. 18. 147 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. xxv, xxvii. 148 Ibid., p. xxvii.
33 reduce its influence with varying degrees of anticlericalism.149 The issues of the separation of State and Church, the preservation of ecclesiastical privileges and the Church’s intervention in the private relations of individuals and in public education were among the most outstanding issues of contention.150
In this connection, it must be highlighted that Liberals and Conservatives fought ardently over the content of public education, as evidenced for instance by the intense controversies surrounding the presence of Jesuit educators in Colombia or the inclusion of the works of Jeremy Bentham in the national curriculum for legal education, whose theory on the utilitarian principles on which the State should be edified led to recurring clashes between the Liberals who supported it and the Conservatives who shunned it as an affront to Christian morality.151 Certainly, this acute conflict over public education can be read as arising from an underlying struggle between both parties over the appropriate doctrines that should be disseminated in order to civilize Colombian society.
Another cause of conflict concerned the adoption of the appropriate economic policies to insert Colombia into the international economic order.152 Liberals called for the adoption of economic laissez-faire, in line with their belief that civilization could only ensue from a society of freer and “sovereign” individuals, which demanded the reduction of governmental constraints upon that freedom.153 In contrast, Conservatives preferred the preservation of traditional protectionist policies and rejected laissez-faire and its emphasis on the sovereign individual as an epitome of the pernicious doctrines whose dissemination threatened the Christian values of civilization.154
Finally, many of the wars between Liberals and Conservatives where fought over issues of personal liberties and rights, that can be construed as
149 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 95; ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. xxv. 150 SÁNCHEZ GÓMEZ, Gonzalo. Op. Cit., p. 18. 151 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 88-89, 110; OBREGÓN, Liliana. Between Civilization and Barbarism. Creole Interventions in International Law. Op. Cit., p. 823-824. 152 SÁNCHEZ GÓMEZ, Gonzalo. Op. Cit., p. 18. 153 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. xvii, xxvii. 154 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. xxvii; 154 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 103.
34 divergences of opinion regarding the acceptable limits of civilized conduct.155This included clashes over issues such as slavery and the treatment of indigenous peoples,156 as well as acute conflicts over the acceptable degree of popular participation in the State as a legitimizing element of political power.157
It is noteworthy that for Liberals and Conservatives –much like for the Europeans before them- the concept of ‘civilization’ had no fixed content, and struggles over ‘civilization’ could cover a wide array of issues according to the political conjuncture at any given time and place. Thus, religious and educational matters, economic policies, questions of political theory or issues of rights and liberties, among other topics, were construed by Liberals and Conservatives to be issues that compromised the very foundations of civilization, thus justifying militancy in their defence.
However, despite the existence of the aforementioned differences between Liberals and Conservatives, one cannot overlook the fact that both parties where in fact very similar, and tended to adopt a common set of attitudes and practices.158 In a sense then, each party was each other’s double.159 As noted by Eakin in the general Latin American context, “[o]nce they were in power, it was often difficult to distinguish Liberal from Conservative regimes.”160
In first place, as the quotes from Sergio Arboleda and José María Samper suggest, both parties recognized the need of bringing progress to their society and of overcoming the shortcomings of the colonial legacy. Further, a rough elite consensus existed among them over the fundamentals of the political and legal structure, such as their agreement on the preservation of a democratic
155 SÁNCHEZ GÓMEZ, Gonzalo. Op. Cit., p. 19. 156 Ibid., p. 19. 157 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Poder y Violencia en Colombia. Op. Cit., p. 537. 158 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Poder y Violencia en Colombia. Op. Cit., p. 537. 159 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. 24. 160 EAKIN, Marshall C. Op. Cit., p. 205.
35 system of government, the regularity of elections and the common rejection of military rule in favour of civilian governments.161
Most transcendentally, the idea of the civilizing mission that both Conservative and Liberal factions defended was a fundamentally elite-based project that exerted itself over the subaltern classes of Colombia. At the dawn of independence, the criollo elites of Latin America were constituted by American- born descendants of Europeans.162 By contrast, the large subaltern masses that composed the bulk of the population of the newly independent Republics were of a mixed racial and cultural heritage, fruit of over 400 years of interaction between the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the Africans brought by the transatlantic slave trade and the Europeans who settled in the New World.163 Once independence was attained, the criollo elite that had led the independence struggle took on the reins of the newly independent Republics and assumed the direction of the State consolidation projects that would set in motion their perceived civilizing missions.164Further, the educated men of the criollo elite –indistinctively aligned with the Liberal or Conservative parties- believed that their purer European heritage entitled them to undertake the civilizing mission to the exclusion of all others, who were to be mere subjects of their civilizing endeavours and would also provide the bulk of the armies that waged the numerous bipartisan wars of the nineteenth century.165 Evidence of this self-perception of the criollos can be found in the writings of José María Samper, who argued that:
“Everywhere the criollo is the intelligence of the revolution, without prejudice to his generous blood and his admirable sacrifices, while the indian, the black, the mulatto and the white mestizo are the material instruments. The criollo is the legislator, administrator, judge and caudillo at the same time (...) It is he who guides the revolution and is the depository of its philosophy. The
161 BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 71-74; BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 97. 162 EAKIN, Marshall C. Op. Cit., p. 255. 163 Ibid. 164 MORA, Carlos Alberto y PEÑA, Margarita. Op. Cit., p. 254. 165 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. 10-18; SÁNCHEZ GÓMEZ, Gonzalo. Guerra y Política en la Sociedad Colombiana. Op. Cit., p. 17, 20-21, 35.
36 other races or castes, at first, can do no more than obey the impulse of those who have the prestige of the intelligence, audacity and even superiority of the white race”.166
Unsurprisingly then, the parties served as a mechanism of social control whereby their upper-class leaders exerted control over their subaltern followers, allowing for collaboration across class lines while imprinting Conservative or Liberal identities upon the subaltern population.167
In view of the considerable degree of similarity that existed between Liberals and Conservatives, the bitterness and extension of the conflict between both groups may result bewildering, for in Colombia as in the rest of Latin America the differences between Liberals and Conservatives, while real, “were by and large more of detail than of substance”, and “mainly of tactics and degree.””168 It is posited then, that the idea of civilizing mission helps to explain this paradoxical situation, for once the language and discourse of civilization became entrenched in the very justifications that each faction presented for their cause, the real differences between Liberals and Conservatives became blurred by the perception that civilization itself was at stake. Eventually, this would push Liberals and Conservatives into irreconcilable positions, and would lead to the mutual perception of the opposing party members as absolute enemies, as enemies of civilization itself.
For an adequate evaluation of this perception, we must now turn to the point of highest contention between Liberals and Conservatives in the nineteenth century, coinciding with the ‘Liberal Revolution’ of the mid-century.
166 SAMPER, José María. Ensayo sobre las Revoluciones Políticas i la Condición Social de las Repúblicas Colombianas (Hispano-Americanas). Con un apendice sobre la orografía y la población de la confederación granadina. Op. Cit., p. 186-187. 167 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 94. 168 EAKIN. Marshall C. Op. Cit., p. 210.
37 V. THE LIBERAL REVOLUTION OF THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY
A. The rise of the Liberals
Towards the mid-nineteenth century, Liberalism was on the rise across Latin America, where Liberal governments had come to power in virtually every State in the region.169 In Colombia, the rise of the Liberals came with the election of José Hilario López to the presidency on the 7th of March of 1849, who ascended to power with heavy popular support from organized artisans and initiated a period of Liberal reformism that would come to be known as the ‘Liberal Revolution’.170
During this period, Liberals enacted numerous reforms in an attempt to replace out-dated colonial institutions with new Republican ones, that in their view would best advance civilization in Colombia.171 The reforms enacted by means of laws included the suppression of Indian communal lands (resguardos) and the definitive abolition of slavery in 1850 and 1851, respectively, partly undertaken in order to eliminate restrictions on the freedom of movement of property and labour. 172 In line with their laissez-faire ideals, Liberals also decreed the abolition of the State’s monopoly on tobacco in 1850.173 Finally, on that same year they expelled the Jesuits from Colombia,174 whose preeminent role in public education amounted to a “horror for civilization and morality”175 for Liberals like José María Samper. Further, a new Constitution adopted in 1853 consecrated universal and direct male suffrage, following the example of the French revolution of 1848 that had profoundly inspired the Colombian Liberals of the period.176 This Constitution also enshrined freedom of the press and of speech, the recognition of religious freedom, and the abolition of institutions like
169 EAKIN, Marshall C. Op. Cit., p. 219; BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op.Cit., p. 42. 170 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 101, 104. 171 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op.Cit., p. xxviii. 172 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 107. 173 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op.Cit., p. xxviii. 174 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op.Cit., p. xxviii; BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 108-109. 175 SAMPER, José María. Apuntamientos para la historia política i social de la Nueva Granada. Desde 1810, i especialmente de la administración del 7 de marzo. Op. Cit., p. 374. 176 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. xxviii;
38 the death penalty, the special jurisdiction for clerics (fuero eclesiástico) and compulsory tithe collections.177
For the Liberals, their ascension to power represented a magnificent triumph and an unprecedented opportunity for the advancement of their civilizing mission. As interpreted by José María Samper, the “popular victory of the 7th of March” 178 was the successful outcome of a clash between the forces of civilization and barbarism, in which the former was associated with the Liberal Party and the latter with the Conservatives. Consequently, the expansive Liberal reforms were also legitimized as a means for the advancement of civilization. As put forward by Samper:
“The fight had been sustained between two rival principles that dispute the empire over human nature: progress and destruction. Being the former victorious, it was necessary for the triumphant party to bear the banner of reform, to launch itself, with decisiveness and determination, into the path that the spirit of the century and civilization had set out before it.”179
Unsurprisingly, the civilizing reforms of the Liberal administration were met with fierce opposition from the Conservatives, who in 1851 launched a generalized rebellion against them.180 In particular, they were reacting against the abolition of slavery and measures that had sought to expand freedom of thought in Colombia, such as the attempt of abolishing ecclesiastical tutelage over public education and the expulsion of the Jesuit educators.181 Though the rebellion was rapidly supressed by the Liberal government, bitter Conservative opposition to the Liberal reforms would continue unhampered during the following decades.182
177 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. xxviii; BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 108; BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 46. 178 SAMPER, José María. Apuntamientos para la historia política i social de la Nueva Granada. Desde 1810, i especialmente de la administración del 7 de marzo. Op. Cit., p. 458. 179 Ibid., p. 459. 180 BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 49. 181 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 107. 182 BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 50.
39 In a sense, the 1851 Conservative rebellion expressed the civilizing mission of the Conservatives, who saw in the Liberal establishment a barbaric force that threatened to destroy civilization itself, thus justifying the use of force to counteract it. As exemplified by the writings of Sergio Arboleda, the liberal reforms were perceived as a surrendering to the “barbarian element” of society, 183 which justified a battle “not any longer between Liberals and Conservatives, but between civilization represented by the latter, and barbarism”.184
In this connection, it should be noted that the association between President López and the subaltern classes represented by the artisans was seen as profoundly dangerous by many Conservatives of the time. As put forward by the Conservative Manuel María Madiedo in his book Ideas fundamentales de los partidos políticos de la Nueva Granada (1859), this association between Liberalism and the artisans had given rise to a “degenerate socialism”, a terrible monster “that had raised its Hydra head and made everyone tremble”. 185 Further, the reformist movement of the Liberals and its alleged allegiance to socialism was denounced as leading to the suppression of “social authority”186 and of civilization itself. In the words of Madiedo, while he believed that the Liberal “sect” would not ultimately triumph, he argued that it would “be able to achieve something similar to a satanic victory: to barbarize society for some years, to dry all hearts and to drown millions of men in an ocean of blood and tears”.187
To a certain extent, Conservative fear of socialism was grounded on the actions of the left-wing Jacobins of the French revolution of 1848, which overthrew the Orléans Monarchy and proclaimed the Second French Republic. 188 In this connection, Mariano Ospina Rodríguez, would argue that the struggle against
183 ARBOLEDA, Sergio. Op. Cit., p. 128-130. 184 ARBOLEDA, Sergio. Op. Cit., p. 128. 185 MADIEDO, Manuel María. Ideas fundamentales de los partidos políticos de la Nueva Granada. Bogotá: El Núcleo Liberal, 1859. p. 21. 186 Ibid., p. 25. 187 Ibid., p. 27. 188 BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 44.
40 the Liberals was a struggle between “civilization” and the “proletariat barbarism” that had already begun in Europe.189 As put forward:
“Society in France and in the countries that [like Colombia] follow it most closely, appears divided between two large factions that are mortal enemies; the faction of civilization that seeks to subject the other, and the faction of barbarism that seeks to exterminate its contrary. The bloody battles of May and June of 1848 in Paris are only the first skirmishes of this social struggle”.190
Furthermore, the perception that civilization itself was at stake in the struggle between Liberals and Conservatives would drive both factions to a mutual perception of irredeemable antagonism. As put forward by Rojas de Ferro, “[t]he two forces were seen as antagonistic: the triumph of one could not occur without the other’s disappearance.”191 The foregoing can be exemplified by the writings of the Conservative ideologist José Eusebio Caro, for whom the bipartisan conflict was a purely moral conflict, in which the preservation of civilization and morality demanded nothing less than the absolute disappearance of the Liberal Party. In Caro’s own words:
“The last struggle over this question [morality] would not come to an end until the Conservative Party had annihilated completely and absolutely the Liberal Party, that is, until the lack of credibility would be so great that the party lost its capacity to appear (...) The Liberal Party must disappear like crime and licentiousness.”192
On the Liberal side, a similar perception of the Conservatives can be ascertained in the writings of José María Samper. For him, the struggle between the “new civilization” that the Liberals promulgated and the decaying Spanish civilization defended by the Conservatives was nothing but a struggle
189 Quoted in BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 46. 190 Quoted in BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 46. 191 ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. 41. 192 Quoted in ROJAS DE FERRO, Cristina. Op. Cit., p. 40. Original translation by Rojas de Ferro.
41 between two opposing forces: “good and evil, conservation and destruction. The force that fertilizes, that invigorates and sustains living beings; and the power that seeks their stagnation, their repression or their annihilation”.193 In consequence, he believed that the differences between Liberals and Conservatives were unsurpassable, for “an abyss existed between them, that made them irreconcilable, that impeded for ever their union”.194
This mutual perception of absolute antagonism in the name of civilization would come to have paradoxical effects over the process of State consolidation in Colombia. For an adequate examination of these paradoxes, it is convenient to turn now to the period known as the ‘Radical Republic’.
B. The Radical Republic: The United States of Colombia
By the decade of the 1860’s, the Liberal and Conservative parties had come a long way in their consolidation as supra-regional power structures, progressively expanding and articulating more territories and populations into the institutional State apparatus by their intermediation. This bureaucratic expansion is clearly evidenced in the electoral results of the presidential campaign of 1856 that brought the Conservative leader Mariano Ospina Rodríguez to the presidency, in what would be a short-lived Conservative hiatus to Liberal rule in the period of the Liberal Revolution.
On that year, a rough estimate of voter participation indicates that around 40% of adult males participated in the polls, a remarkably high percentage for any democratic State in the mid-nineteenth century, especially one like Colombia in which the great majority of the population was still rural and often lived at substantial distances from the polling places.195 In a few districts, apparent participation even approximated 100%.196 As pointed out by Botero, this turnout is indicative of the great capabilities of popular mobilization of local and regional
193 SAMPER, José María. Apuntamientos para la historia política i social de la Nueva Granada. Desde 1810, i especialmente de la administración del 7 de marzo. Op. Cit., p. 18. 194 Ibid., p. 383. 195 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 116. 196 Ibid.
42 leaders associated with the parties,197 to which the highly competitive politics of the 1850’s and the broadening of political participation caused by the introduction of universal male suffrage added significant impetus. 198 Most significantly, the elections evidence a significant advancement in the process of bipartisan territorialisation, where partisan homogenization of towns and rural areas showed a tendency to overwhelming and even unanimous Liberal or Conservative polling in many areas, following patterns that would prevail even a hundred years after the elections of 1856.199 In effect, by this time, regional patterns of party strength were already clearly fixed, with Conservatism being preponderant in areas such as Pasto, Antioquia and Boyacá, while Liberalism was dominant in many coastal areas and the Eastern provinces of what would later become the modern departments of Santander and Norte de Santander.200 Though the occurrence of electoral frauds should not be dismissed, it has been pointed out by authors like Bushnell201 and Botero that Conservative frauds would have tended to annul the effect of Liberal ones, so that in any case the final results did in fact “give an adequate expression to popular will”.202
The fact that such a strong popular identification with the parties was already evident less than 20 years after the conclusion of the War of the Supremes - where the bipartisan split first emerged- testifies to the rapid entrenchment of Liberal or Conservative identities among the population that resulted from the workings of each party’s civilizing mission. Further, it evidences the successful process of articulation of local and regional powers to the central State apparatus by the intermediation of the parties, in which popular identification with either party served as a vehicle to overcome the fragmentation of political power and the growing bipartisan competition propelled the emergence of national-level power structures gravitating around the parties.203 In this sense, the gradual development and expansion of the State’s bipartisan system
197 BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 56. 198 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 115. 199 BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 56; BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 118. 200 BUSHNELL, David. Op.Cit., p. 118. 201 See for instance BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 116. 202 BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 55. 203 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 30-31.
43 enabled the competing parties to become powerful unifying forces that paved the way for the emergence of a modern State apparatus in Colombia, 204 evidencing the constructive role that the civilizing mission and the bipartisan conflict that ensued from opposing visions on such mission had over the process of State consolidation in Colombia.
By 1860, the growing territorialisation of the bipartisan divide had led both the Liberal and the Conservative parties to a consensus on the benefits of a federal system of government. The reason for this was that a federal system would enable both parties to maintain control over those States in which they were predominant and further advance their respective civilizing missions within them, without relinquishing their competing claims to central power.205 Thus, federalism had begun to impose itself as a matter of fact even before the adoption of a federal Constitution, with the creation by Congress of several federal States that responded to demands for greater autonomy from the concerned provinces.206 In this manner, the creation of the federal State of Panamá (1855) was closely followed by the creation of federal States in Antioquia (1856), Santander, Cauca, Boyacá, Cundinamarca, Bolívar and Magdalena (1857).207 Despite the fact that the creation of these States went against the centralist Constitution of 1853, this situation was rapidly remedied with the adoption in 1858 of the first truly federal Constitution for Colombia, under the name of ‘Granadine Confederation’.208
However, despite the fact that the Constitution of the Granadine Confederation had been adopted under the government of Mariano Ospina Rodriguez, Ospina took a wide interpretation of the powers vested upon the central government, and soon supported a series of reforms intended to enhance the powers of the central authorities in such matters as the supervision of elections and the
204 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 93-94, 115; BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 71. 205 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 73; BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 115. 206 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 115. 207 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 74. 208 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 114.
44 intervention of national armed forces within the federated States, that where adopted against bitter Liberal opposition that regarded them as unconstitutional.209 These measures, coupled with the total exclusion of Liberals from Ospina’s government fuelled a series of regional revolts against the governments of particular States, leading Ospina to declare a public-order emergency in 1859 to justify the use of national forces for the reestablishment of order.210 The consequences of this decision would prove to be disastrous for his administration.
In 1860, general Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera –governor of the State of Cauca and one of the most prominent caudillos that emerged out of the wars of independence- rose in open rebellion against the Ospina administration and assumed the leadership of the Liberal forces attempting to overthrow him.211 Consequently, Mosquera declared that the State of Cauca was reassuming its sovereignty and seceding from the Granadine Confederation.212 His example was soon followed by the States of Magdalena, Bolívar and Santander, that confederated in a Liberal alliance they called the United States of Colombia.213 A generalized civil war soon engulfed almost the entirety of the country.214
Mosquera and his armies were initially repelled by Conservative forces at the city of Manizales in what was then southern Antioquia, forcing him to subscribe a peace agreement that could have brought the civil war to an early end.215 However, President Ospina rejected this peace agreement, and Mosquera rose in rebellion once again.216 This time, Conservative forces would prove unable to contain Mosquera’s, which in July of 1861 stormed and captured the capital city of Bogotá. Ospina, whose presidential term had expired during the war, was
209 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 119; GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p.76. 210 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 119. 211 Ibid. 212 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 77. 213Ibid., p. 77-78. 214 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 119-120. 215 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 78. 216 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 78; BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 59.
45 taken as prisoner and was subsequently sent into exile in Guatemala.217 In the long string of bipartisan civil wars that plagued Colombia’s history, which are numbered in over 14,218 Mosquera’s war against Ospina was the only one that resulted in the seizure of power by the use of force, and would lead to the adoption of an extreme model of federalism that would severely undermine prospects of pacification and centralization of power by the central government. of Colombia.219
The Pact of Union of the United States of Colombia that had been adopted by the seceding States in the early stages of the war provided that –despite the federal link- each constitutive State was “sovereign and independent”, as if they were sovereign States in themselves.220 Furthermore, it forbade the central government from waging war against any of the federal States or from re- establishing peace among them without an express authorization from Congress.221
A new Constitution adopted in 1863 supressed the indication that the federal States were “independent”, but otherwise validated the arrangements of the Pact of Union for the totality of the State, establishing nine federal States222 whose union officially adopted the name of United States of Colombia.223 In the immediate aftermath of the war, Liberals had replaced all federal State governments that had supported the Conservative government of Ospina. However, Conservative forces in the State of Antioquia soon overthrew their imposed governor and replaced him with Conservative one, which was forcefully accepted by the Liberal administration.224 Later on, Conservatives also succeeded in establishing Conservative governments in the States of
217 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 120. 218 SÁNCHEZ GÓMEZ, Gonzalo. Op. Cit., p. 17. 219 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 70. 220 Ibid., p. 84. 221Ibid., p. 84. 222 The federal States were Antioquia, Bolívar, Boyacá, Cauca, Cundinamarca, Magdalena, Panamá, Santander and Tolima. 223 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 84-85; BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 122.; OROZCO C, Cecilia, MARTÍNEZ T., Pedro Martín and PERDOMO C., Lina María. Op. Cit., p. 57-59. 224 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 124.
46 Tolima and, briefly, in Cundinamarca, returning to the pre-war situation in which both Liberals and Conservatives were in control of different States, and defended their autonomy tenaciously as the best means to assure the advancement of their respective civilizing missions within them.225
As noted by Bushnell the system that emerged out of the Constitution of 1863 “took the concept of federalism to the greatest extremes of any American fundamental law”.226 In effect, the federal States were granted sweeping powers that entitled them to retain all powers not expressly delegated to the central government, whose powers were in turn very narrowly defined.227
Under the United States of Colombia, each State was free, for instance, to establish internal conditions to the right of suffrage, had the right to establish their own postal systems and, most significantly, had the right to feely import weapons and establish their own armies.228 Moreover, the passage of an 1867 law expressly prohibited the national president from taking sides in a civil war between federal States.229 Under such an arrangement, it is hardly surprising that federal States would come to behave, in practice if not in principle, as truly sovereign States, with disastrous consequences for the consolidation of a modern State in Colombia.230
Taken to such extremes, the consensus to which both parties had arrived in respect of the convenience of a federal system as the best means to advance their respective civilizing missions led to an acute centrifugation of political power, straining the already weak links that maintained the Colombian State together.231 The absolute weakness of the central government, coupled with the strength of the federal States and the zeal with which Liberals and Conservatives defended their autonomy led to political instability and a situation
225 Ibíd., p. 125. 226 Ibíd., p. 122. 227 Ibid., p. 122. 228 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 122; BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 61. 229 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 125. 230 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 74. 231 BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 61-62.
47 in which the waging of civil wars became the preeminent means to resolve political disputes.232
The foregoing evidences that the civilizing mission and the bipartisan conflict that ensued from it also had a profoundly destructive character as regards the process of State consolidation in Colombia. In effect, the desire to attain and preserve civilization that had led both Liberals and Conservatives to embrace federalism had also driven them to adopt an extreme form this system, exacerbating the already profound divisions that existed between them and ultimately undermining the very process of modern State consolidation.
As regards centralization, the federal system severely weakened the central government while maximizing the power of regional authorities, leading to a perilous crisis of governmental capacity that hindered the central State from asserting its dominance over the authorities of the federal States. The fact that these States behaved in practice as sovereign States testifies to the severity of this absence of central power. In intimate connection with the foregoing, the federal system resulted catastrophic in terms of the attainment of pacification in Colombia. By granting federal States the right to maintain their own armies and prohibiting the intervention of the central government to quell any violence between the States, the central authorities effectively relinquished their right to exert a monopoly on the use of force, surrendering it to the parties that controlled the individual federal units. The consequences of this were an exacerbation of armed violence in Colombia and an even greater marginalization of the central government, which was virtually powerless to exert its authority within the State. In this sense, the federal system was profoundly detrimental to the objective of consolidating an effective sovereignty over the State of Colombia.
Though the extreme federal system of the Radical Republic would eventually be overturned, the dynamic of construction and simultaneous destruction of the
232Ibid., p. 61-62.
48 State that underlied it and which it most clearly brings to light would linger on in Colombia long after the official demise of federalism.
VI. AFTERMATH: THE REGENERATION AND ITS LIMITATIONS
While the centrifugal forces of the federal system endangered its viability in the long term, what would bring the Radical Republic to its demise would be another destructive round of civil warfare between Liberals and Conservatives. The causes of this war were embedded in the federal constitution of the United States of Colombia, which despite granting far-fetching autonomy to the federal States established a lay State with absolute separation of State and Church, to the great dismay of the defeated Conservatives of the war of 1860.233 A wide array of anti-clerical measures adopted by General Mosquera in the aftermath of his victory would further fan the flames of Conservative unrest.234 However, the final straw would come with an 1870 decree from the Liberal President Eustorgio Salgar, which declared primary education free and obligatory, as well as religiously neutral.235 The terms of the decree did not exclude religion from public schools, but simply provided that religion should only be taught by Church representatives to students whose parents requested it.236 However, to many Conservatives this measure was simply the first step towards a wholly godless school system that threatened the very foundations of civilization.237
As put forward by Sergio Arboleda, the lay Constitution of the United States of Colombia had “derogated God”, warning of its disastrous consequences by claiming:
“Annul the attraction and the Universe will return to chaos, loosen the religious beliefs, the only morality of the peoples, and the predominance of the passions will institute anarchy. In the roar and confusion of battles without truce, reason will not be heard, and physical force, that is, the
233 MORA, Carlos Alberto y PEÑA, Margarita. Op. Cit., p. 168. 234 See BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 120-122. 235 BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 65. 236 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 129; BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 65. 237 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 129.
49 barbarian element, the ignorant portion of the peoples, so disgracefully numerous in these [Latin American] countries, will seize effective power.”238
The perception that the Liberal establishment was drifting towards the imposition of a godless society generated a fierce counter-reaction from the Conservatives. Thus, contrary to the terms of the 1870 decree, a few States insisted in the preservation of obligatory religious education.239 Accumulated tension over this issue, more than any other factor, led the Conservative States to declare war on the Liberal government in 1876.240
The war of 1876 has often been described as a “crusade”, in which religious fanaticism exacerbated the destruction it left on its wake.241 The Colombian Church itself played a key role in the development of the conflict, influenced by the Syllabus Errorum published by Pope Pius IX in 1864, on which he condemned lay education, freedom of religion and of thought and, in general, the Liberal’s conception of religion and its place in society.242 In such a context, many Colombian clerics called from the pulpits for the waging of war against the Liberal government. 243 In fact, such was the bitterness of the Church’s opposition, that the Bishop of Popayán stated in a verbal dispute with the Director of Public Education for the federal State of Cauca that it did not matter whether the country was reduced to ruins, so long as religion emerged triumphant from the battle.244 On the other hand, for the Liberals the waging of the war was construed as a legitimate struggle to attain civilization by freeing the citizens from the Church’s control over society, and as a necessary response in order to avert the imposition of a theocratic regime.245
238 ARBOLEDA, Sergio. Op. Cit., p. 116. 239 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 129. 240 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 129; MORA, Carlos Alberto y PEÑA, Margarita. Op. Cit., p. 176. 241 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 97. 242 BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 67; GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Poderes enfrentados. Iglesia y Estado en Colombia. Bogotá: Cinep, 1997. p. 380. 243 MORA, Carlos Alberto y PEÑA, Margarita. Op. Cit., p. 176; GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 97-98. 244 Quoted in BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 68. 245 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 100; BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 69.
50 The war finally came to an end after 11 months of intense confrontation with the defeat of the Conservative forces in the battle of Manizales, in what would be a pyrrhic victory for the Liberal government.246 In effect, their defeat in the war only reinforced the Conservative’s opposition to the Liberals. Most significantly, the war consolidated the growing disenchantment of certain Liberal factions with the radicalism that had characterized the Liberal establishment of the United States of Colombia.247
This profound disenchantment would find a powerful voice in the figure of the politician Rafael Nuñez. While originally a Liberal doctrinaire during the 1850’s, Nuñez had come to develop a more pragmatic way of thinking over the years.248 He believed that the Constitution of 1863 needed to be reformed to counteract all of the centrifugal elements that were leading to the fragmentation of the Colombian State.249 With this aim, centralization of power was regarded as necessary in order to enable the effective administration of the State. Moreover, while a religious free-thinker himself, Nuñez believed in the need of an amicable settlement with the Catholic Church, which in his view -for better or for worse- formed an integral part of Colombian society, and should therefore be accepted and granted a special position of power within the State to quell any further religious disturbances like those of the war of 1876.250 In his view, the reforms he proposed were absolutely necessary to save Colombia from perdition, as evident in his political slogan: “Regeneration or Catastrophe!”.251
Thus, dissatisfied Liberals and important Conservative groups who welcomed his moderate character rallied around Nuñez, who was elected to the presidency in 1884 and inaugurated the period known in Colombian historiography as ‘the Regeneration’.252 When in 1885 radical Liberals launched
246 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 102; BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 70. 247 BOTERO HERRERA, Fernando. Op. Cit., p. 70. 248 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 140-141. Original translation by Bushnell. 249 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 100. 250 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 141. 251 Ibid., p. 142. 252 MORA, Carlos Alberto y PEÑA, Margarita. Op. Cit., p. 183; BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 142.
51 a rebellion against Nuñez in anticipation of his intended constitutional reforms, that gave him the pretext he needed to declare that the Constitution of 1863 had “ceased to exist”, and the rebellion was rapidly suppressed with heavy Conservative support.253 After Nuñez’s victory in the war, a new Constitution was adopted in 1886 along rigidly centralist lines, adopting the name of Republic of Colombia that subsists to this day.254
This constitution, which was construed as a return to the Hispanic tradition, reinstated the Catholic Church to its prior position of social pre-eminence, providing that public education should henceforth be conducted in accordance with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. 255 The ratification of a Concordat with the Holy See in 1887 further served to consolidate the Church’s tutelage over public education and society at large.256 Most significantly, the Constitution abolished the federal system by transforming the federal States into ‘departments’; stripping them of the expansive prerogatives they had enjoyed during the Radical Republic, including most significantly the right to maintain their own armies.257 Moreover, the President directly appointed the governors of said departments, while the governors in turn appointed all local mayors. Thus, this system intended to grant an absolute monopoly over executive power and the use of armed force to the party in power.258 In this sense, it can be argued that the Constitution of 1886 sought to consolidate once and for all the processes of centralization of power and pacification of the territory, that had never been truly attained, and which the excesses of the Radical Republic had further hindered.
As noted by González, the consolidation of a centralized State from the period of the Regeneration onwards would not be an easy one, since the central government would be forced to negotiate with the supra-regional power
253 MORA, Carlos Alberto y PEÑA, Margarita. Op. Cit., p. 181; BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 142. 254 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 143. 255 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 139-140; BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 144. 256 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 144. 257Ibid., p. 143. 258 MORA, Carlos Alberto y PEÑA, Margarita. Op. Cit., p. 168; BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 143
52 structures that had consolidated around the parties in order to exert its authority over the territory and population of the State.259 In this sense, centralization of power would continue to be a legal fiction for many decades to come. However, it can also be argued that, by articulating the power structures with which the government would be forced to negotiate in the first place, the parties had already paved the way for the attainment of centralization in Colombia. In a sense then, central governments from the Regeneration onwards would assume the task of accomplishing centralization by building upon the foundations that the parties had already laid since their emergence in the aftermath of the War of the Supremes.
However, this generally constructive character of the parties would be undermined by the profound division between Liberals and Conservatives, who continued to regard each other as enemies of civilization itself, and consequently, as irredeemable enemies. The bipartisan split had become entrenched in the very foundations of Colombian society, and therefore, the antagonism between Liberals and Conservatives came to act as a powerful divisive force; necessarily limiting the process of articulation of regions and localities to the central State apparatus that their competition had simultaneously enabled.260 As Sergio Arboleda had already pointed out by 1869, in the midst of the struggle between both parties:
“there is no member of society who is not affected by it, and all take part in it whether actively or passively. This division of opinions adopts then an atrocious character: it appears even within the heart of families and it alters and interrupts social and domestic relationships, replacing friendship for the partisan spirit and the frankness of fraternity for the coldness of mistrust.”261
The overwhelming force of this division can be clearly ascertained in Nuñez’s failure to overcome it. After the war of 1885 Nuñez had lost most Liberal
259 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Partidos, Guerras e Iglesia en la construcción del Estado Nación en Colombia (1830-1900). Op. Cit., p. 141. 260 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Poder y Violencia en Colombia. Op. Cit., p. 540. 261 ARBOLEDA, Sergio. Op. Cit., p. 131.
53 support and became increasingly dependent on the Conservatives. However, rather than joining the Conservatives he strived to rise above partisan divisions by forming a new party he called ‘National’. 262 However, this attempt to overcome the entrenchment of the bipartisan system would be short lived, and after Nuñez’s death in 1894 the National Party would become little more than another Conservative faction.263The Liberal-Conservative dichotomy had thus imposed itself yet again.
In the years that followed, the profound mistrust between the Liberal and Conservative parties would lead to the total exclusion of the Liberals from the executive power, who would also become targets of varying degrees of official repression.264 In this context, the Liberals would launch an armed rebellion against the Conservative government in 1899, unleashing the deadliest of all of Colombia’s civil wars: the so-called ‘War of the Thousand Days’.265
Fought from 1899 to 1902, the war left a conventional estimate of 100,000 deaths, which in a population of about 4,000,000 at the time resulted in the death of about 2.5 percent of the population, with a much higher proportion among adult males.266 In the final stages of the war outbreaks of brutality and banditry on both sides became commonplace, alarming the Liberal elite who had come to realize they had little real control over the rural bands that were affiliated to their party.267 As noted by Bushnell, sheer exhaustion on both sides helped to force the conclusion of a peace ‘treaty’ in 1902.268
However, paradoxical as it may seem, the War of the Thousand Days has been interpreted by Centeno as a defining moment in the attainment of centralization and pacification on Colombia.269This may be partially explained by the fact that the war clearly demonstrated that local and regional troops were already
262 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 142. 263 Ibid., p. 143. 264 MORA, Carlos Alberto y PEÑA, Margarita. Op. Cit., p. 186;.BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 147-148;. 265MORA, Carlos Alberto y PEÑA, Margarita. Op. Cit., p. 186-187;.BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 148; 266 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 151. 267Ibid., p. 150. 268MORA, Carlos Alberto y PEÑA, Margarita. Op. Cit., p. 187;.BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit, p. 152; 269 CENTENO, Miguel Angel. Op. Cit., p. 57.
54 incapable of defeating a national army, however weak this might still be.270 In any case, the conclusion of the war -coupled with the separation of Panama from Colombia that closely followed it- profoundly shocked the Liberal and Conservative elites, evidencing the need to rise above the bipartisan conflict to assume the unfinished task of State consolidation.271
In the half-century that followed, the two parties would display a significant capacity for coexistence and peaceful competition that brought Colombia its longest period of internal political stability in its independent history.272 In a sense then, one can agree on the point that the conclusion of the War of the Thousand Days, by leading to a mitigation of the bipartisan conflict among the elites, contributed to the effective attainment of centralization and pacification in Colombia, and consequently, to its emergence as a modern State with effective sovereignty both in its internal and external aspects.
However, the profoundly divisive legacy of the mutual perception of antagonism between Liberals and Conservatives would not be easily overcome in Colombian society, especially among the rural masses that throughout the nineteenth century had been subjected to the civilizing endeavours of the elite, both as recipients of the civilizing creed and as the bulk of the armies that had waged the civil wars between the parties. The pervasiveness of this divisive legacy and the challenges it posed for the consolidation of the Colombian State would become painfully evident in the mid-twentieth century, when another generalized armed conflict engulfed Colombia, subverting the apparent pacification of the previous decades and leaving behind a horrific death toll that has been estimated to range anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 victims. This traumatic social experience would pass into history and into the collective subconscious simply by the name of ‘La Violencia’, meaning ‘the Violence’.273
270 GONZÁLEZ, Fernán E. Poder y Violencia en Colombia. Op. Cit., p. 540. 271 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 154; LÓPEZ MEDINA, Diego. El sueño weberiano. Claves para una comprensión constitucional de la estructura administrativa del Estado colombiano. In: Revista de Derecho Público. 2006.. Vol. 1, no. 19. p. 1-42. p. 12. 272 BUSHNELL, David., Op. Cit. p. 155 273 BUSHNELL, David., Op. Cit., p. 205; MORA, Carlos Alberto y PEÑA, Margarita. Op. Cit., p. 181.
55 ‘La Violencia’ was a very complex and predominantly rural phenomenon that was not really a civil war, but rather expressed a wide array of heterogeneous and disarticulated conflicts. In that sense, to portray it simply as a continuation of the bipartisan conflict of the nineteenth century would certainly be an excessive generalization. 274 However, what is clear is that in all of the manifestation of violence it contained, the reference to the inherited bipartisan rivalry was always present, that is, to the perception that the members of the opposite party were irredeemable enemies, or, as put by Bushnell, were “somehow in league with the devil”, 275 thus justifying their ultimate destruction.276
This would be, perhaps, the most destructive legacy of the Liberal and Conservative civilizing missions of the nineteenth century, inheriting Colombian society with the idea of a barbaric otherness that was present, not in a foreign world, but within itself: in the Liberal or Conservative enemies of civilization. As put forwards by Sánchez Gómez, “in a society in which political and social contenders cannot be thought of in terms of rivalry but rather of deviation from a truth or original belief –of orthodoxy and heresy, as in religious wars-, social and political regeneration cannot be attained if not by the proscription or annihilation of those who, according to the predominant historical and cultural parameters, are in a state of transgression”.277
VII. CONCLUSIONS
Throughout this article, I have been concerned with the study of two main subjects of interest for international legal scholarship: the modern State and the idea of the civilizing mission of the West, as exemplified in the interpretation that Colombian Liberals and Conservatives had of this notion, and the practices they followed in its pursuit. Considering how the division between Liberals and Conservatives was common to all Latin American States throughout the
274 PÉCAUT, Daniel. Orden y violencia. Colombia 1930-1953. 4 ed. Medellín: Universidad Eafit, 2012. p. 504; BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 206. 275 BUSHNELL, David. Op. Cit., p. 206. 276 PÉCAUT, Daniel. Op. Cit., p. 504-505. 277 SÁNCHEZ GÓMEZ, Gonzalo. Op. Cit., p. 32.
56 nineteenth century, the study of these groups in the specific case of Colombia hopes to provide insights into the interrelation between modern State consolidation and the diverging Liberal and Conservative civilizing missions that may result useful for the study of this relationship in the wider Latin American context.
Regarding the first subject, the State, it is clear that the emergence of modern States in Latin America and particularly in Colombia resulted quite distinct from the European experience that has traditionally been taken as a referent in the history of modern Statehood. In this regard, the international legal concept of uti possidetis played a key role by displaying a double function that defined these States both internally and externally.
Internally, uti possidetis gave concrete substance to the Latin American States by defining a ‘national’ territory and population that both Liberal and Conservative elites sought to control and civilize, despite the underlying political, geographical and cultural fragmentation that in fact characterized most Latin American States at the dawn of independence. In that sense, uti possidetis established the Colombian State as a legal fiction that both Liberals and Conservatives would struggle to bring into reality from the dawn of independence onwards, progressively developing a modern State apparatus that could assume control over the territories and populations that nominally belonged to the State.
Externally, this principle consecrated the rough international frontiers of the emerging States, thus circumscribing the spaces within which national governments could claim excusive authority over a given territory and population, to the exclusion of any foreign contender. This in turn projected the semblance of a national territory and population falling under the authority of a government, which coupled with the effective expulsion of the colonial authorities prompted significant international recognition of the Latin American States during the first decades of their independence existence, despite the
57 factual absence of centralization and pacification within them that could have otherwise impeded such recognition. Thus, it can be argued that the Latin American States emerged as international legal persons and subjects of international law before having in fact consolidated as modern States internally; highlighting the need of studying the external and internal aspects of their consolidation separately when discussing their emergence as sovereign States and subjects of international law.
As has been argued, the emergence of a modern State requires overcoming both external and internal challenges to the attainment of effective sovereignty. In relation to both challenges, the idea of the civilizing mission that both Liberal and Conservative elites upheld played a key role that profoundly affected the course of modern State consolidation in Colombia.
Regarding the external challenge, the desire to appear civilized in order to secure European recognition of Colombia and admittance into the community of civilized nations on an equal footing with European States would act as a powerful incentive to undertake the civilizing mission, leading both parties to compete for the attainment of central power in order to secure the advancement of their respective civilizing goals. Thus, despite the early international recognition of Colombia by some States, the desire to appear civilized before European eyes would continue to drive the actions of both Liberals and Conservatives throughout the nineteenth century. In this connection, the permanent threat of Spanish re-annexation by virtue of the principle of dynastic legitimacy and the subordinate position that Colombian elites felt their State had within the hierarchy of nations due to its lack of civilization were among the most influential motives that set their civilizing missions in motion.
In turn, and perhaps more transcendentally, the civilizing mission that was undertaken with the purpose of mirroring the image of Europe and of obtaining admission to the community of civilized nations would have definitive effects over the process by which Colombia overcame the internal challenges to its
58 effective sovereignty. In this regard, the workings of the conflicting Liberal and Conservative civilizing missions and the division that ensued from them resulted in a paradox, in which the bipartisan split played both a constructive and a destructive role in relation to the attainment of centralization and pacification in Colombia, and therefore, to its effective consolidation as a modern State.
As has been demonstrated throughout this article, the bipartisan division over civilization played a constructive role insofar as the bipartisan competition became a powerful cohesive force that gradually overcame the acute fragmentation that characterized Colombia after the achievement of its independence. Certainly, while competing with each other to attain central power over the State to which the principle of uti possidetis gave concrete substance, the parties would succeed in articulating local and regional powers into supra-regional, national-level power structures. As noted, they would do so by connecting the central State bureaucracy to the regional and local elites, who in turn exerted control over the subaltern classes in their respective localities; successfully linking all levels of society to the parties and their corresponding civilizing missions. Throughout the nineteenth century, these power structures gravitating around the parties would expand and progressively incorporate populations and territories to the institutional State apparatus, thus contributing significantly to the attainment of centralization in Colombia.
However, the constructive role played by the civilizing missions of the Liberal and Conservative parties would be undermined by the very dynamic of otherness by which they operated, establishing an essential an irredeemable dichotomy between civilization and barbarism. Thus, while regarding themselves as the true bearers of civilization, the members of each party fixated upon the opposite party members as the barbaric or uncivilized element that needed to be suppressed in order to assure the triumph of civilization. Thus, Liberals and Conservatives came to regard each other as absolute enemies, splitting Colombian society into two antagonistic factions that severely undermined the prospects of national unity.
59
As a consequence of the foregoing, the process of articulation of territories and populations to the institutional State apparatus that the parties had enabled was simultaneously limited by the mutual exclusion of those very parties. Taken to its ultimate consequences, the centrifugal forces of this long-standing conflict would hinder the process of centralization in Colombia, as the period of the Radical Republic most clearly exemplifies. Further, in what would be its most pervasive destructive legacy, the antagonism between Liberals and Conservatives and the propensity to civil warfare that it entailed would constitute a major obstacle for the attainment of pacification in Colombia, leaving a legacy of bipartisan enmity that would continue to undermine the consolidation of a modern State in Colombia well into the twentieth century.
The foregoing allows me to draw certain conclusions on the dynamics of the transnational idea of the civilizing mission of the West in its particular reception in Latin America and specifically in Colombia. In the first place, I have demonstrated that the reception of this idea in Latin America would give it a special character that distinguished it from the civilizing mission as conceived by Europeans; serving not as a justification for imperialist expansion, but rather, as a project of State-making that was advanced both by means of law and war, entailing the constructive and destructive effects that I have highlighted.
Further, this dynamic of construction and simultaneous destruction is very telling of the nature of the civilizing mission itself, which acts as both a cohesive and a divisive force by establishing an essential dichotomy between civilization and barbarism. Thus, the civilizing mission acts as a cohesive force between those that perceive each other as bearers of the same civilizing creed, explaining how for the European States it came to act as a unifying element of national-self consciousness, much as it served to unify regions and localities in Colombia under the influence of either Liberal or Conservative civilizing creeds. Conversely, the idea of the civilizing mission entrenches an insurmountable division between those that regard themselves as civilized and those that are
60 regarded as uncivilized, ultimately justifying violence against them and their subjugation. In the European experience, this perception of otherness justified imperial expansion over non-Western societies as the best means to assure the advancement of civilization. In the Colombian case, it justified the waging of bipartisan wars and the total exclusion of members of the opposite party for the same purpose, ultimately fracturing rather than unifying society. Thus, the bipartisan division over the civilizing mission resulted in a fractured national consciousness, where patriotism was not identified with the Nation-state itself, but rather with the affiliation to either of the parties, as Fernán González has aptly pointed out.
The foregoing, suggests that we must refine our understanding of the civilizing mission of the West, going beyond the conception of this idea as one that simply establishes and perpetuates an asymmetrical power relationship between the powerful and the weak; be it the Western world over its non- Western ‘others’, or national elites over the subaltern classes of their own societies. As the Colombian experience adequately exemplifies, the idea of the civilizing mission can establish horizontal as well as vertical dichotomies, cutting across political communities as a whole rather than simply subjugating the weak to the powerful.
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