Latin America's Place in the Global Crisis of Liberalism, 1918–39

The years between the two world wars are commonly seen as a period of receding global connections, escorted by a growing insistence on national cultural particularisms and economic autarky. This is also true for Latin America. Especially in the wake of the world depression, the political and intellectual elites of most Latin American states turned away from the export-oriented models of development that had been underwritten by universalist civilizational ideals. A younger generation of intellectuals and politicians began to hold responsible what they saw as a foreign-imported liberalism for the pitfalls of Western modernity. Political thinkers from Mexico to Argentina sought to solidify “authentic” national identities, denounced imperialist meddling in “their” region and elaborated a myriad of models aimed at strengthening a unified “nation”, which would now also include formerly marginalized sectors of the population.

This paper seeks to carve out the extent to which this broader tectonic shift was underpinned by intellectual exchange between Latin America and Europe. I will focus on the European borrowings of Latin American intellectuals such as José Carlos Mariátegui, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre or Gilberto Freyre in order to problematize the relationship between the transnational circuits of ideas in which their writings were embedded and their efforts at constructing national identities in contradistinction to Western universalism. In relation to the panel’s overarching questions, I will argue that in spite of global socio-economic catalysts such as the world depression, the underlying reasons for the trend towards illiberal modernization projects in Latin America tended to be ideological rather than structural in nature. Furthermore, I will stress that although this trend nurtured itself from a canon of (mostly) European authors whose writings were widely discussed across Latin America, the meanings that such appropriations acquired crucially depended on more local intellectual debates.