I

“In comparing South America with North America, we observe an astonishing contrast”, wrote Georg Friedrich Hegel in 1830.

All of this, he believed, could be attributed to two things: the difference between a Catholic South and a Protestant North (from the latter of which, in Hegel's view, there “sprang the mutual confidence of individuals”) and the politically more significant fact that “South America was conquered, but North America colonized”. Colonization – the exportation to the Americas of European settlers – had created in the North a stable political base, so that

This had provided the successor state with the cohesion it required to survive the traumas – physical, military, and psychological – of independence. It also required the colonizers to develop the true resources of the lands which they had occupied instead of relying on a defeated indigenous population to do the work for them. The Spanish, by contrast, had taken possession of “South America to govern it, and to become rich through occupying political offices and by exaction”. This had resulted in a brand of militarism which was, by nature, politically unstable, unruly, and ill suited to the kind of cooperative development which any fledgling state required.