← New Books Network
New Books Network
Luis L. Schenoni, "Bringing War Back In: Victory, Defeat, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Latin America" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
01:01:30
Loading summary
Transcript71 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello everybody and welcome back to New Books in Political Science and to the New Books Network. My name is Sebastian Rojas Caval and today I will be speaking to Luis Escenoni who is Associate professor at University College London or ucl. We'll talk about war in Latin America and specifically about how winning international awards in the 19th century was critical for countries to enter a long term trajectory of state building. Luis provides a comprehensive account of the relationship between war and state building in his new book, Bringing War Back, Victory, Defeat and the state in 19th century Latin America. Luis Escanoni, welcome to the show.
- [01:47]
C
Hi Sebastian. Thank you for having me.
- [01:49]
B
It's an honor.
- [01:49]
C
It's a privilege.
- [01:51]
B
Now let's start by talking about how this project came about.
- [01:55]
C
I think the inceptions of the project were when I was taking a course on the state with Victoria Hui. She wrote about the formation of the Chinese bureaucracy after the so called warring state period in the fourth century before Christ. She was a student of Charles Tilley himself in Colombia and she was teaching this course on the state and University of Notre Dame where I did my PhD where basically we went through all of the regions of the world week by week. Every person that came from that region had to prepare an assignment in that region and all of the regions of the World seem to fit this Italian narrative of the war. Making the state in all of these regions, of course in Europe, which was perhaps the first two weeks, but then there were weeks on Africa where there was a bit much of a focus on Jeffrey Herbst, another week on Russia, another week on India, another week on East Asia, et cetera. This theory seemed to work everywhere but in Latin America. So that was when I thought, okay, maybe there is a dissertation here to be written about how in some way Velis's theory actually might work. I wrote the paper for that class, building mostly I am Argentinian in background, so building mostly on kind of history books that I've read throughout my life about Latin American history, Argentinian history, that has made me aware of how this theory could work in certain ways. And that's how it all started, basically by serendipitously finding this, this kind of niche in this literature and the contribution that could be made from Latin America and for the understanding of how this theory might apply to the region.
- [03:41]
B
Before we go deep into the argument of the book, please just walk me through very briefly how war makes states, because that is the kind of the fundamental idea that the book is grappling with.
- [03:58]
C
Yeah, so the Tilly and two census is about how war makes the state. And people might have different interpretations, but I think it's fundamentally through what Miguel Centeno actually I think coined as the coercion extraction cycle, which is this idea that. Or extraction coercion cycle, which is this idea that you need to, for the war, to pay for the war, you need to extract revenue from the local population, that that's needed for mobilization. That mobilization itself also requires extraction in the form of conscription of soldiers. And that all of that extraction requires the building of bureaucracies. And all of that extraction at the same time will generate reactions from your local population against mobilization. Because people don't want to get conscripted or they want to pay taxes. And that also requires that the state develop some sort of coercive apparatus, domestically oriented during this kind of foreign wars. That is I would say, at the core of the development of bureaucracies. And also of course the military and taxation and tax morale and nationalism. A lot of things that are related to what we might call ultimately state capacity during wars. After that there are additional potential mechanisms like the out selection of weak states or post war processes that I develop more in this book that might add to that core set of mechanisms.
- [05:26]
B
Now the book is called Bringing War Back in, which of course implies that it was somehow taken out or left out. And a good portion of the book is dedicated to talking about what you call or like has become kind of the anti bellis tradition, at least in Latin America, or what is known as the anti Bellassist tradition for scholars of Latin America. Walk us through this taking out of war in Latin American, like state building literature.
- [05:59]
C
Yeah, so the title is obviously a play on bringing the state back in this famous work by Ruschmeyer and Evans and Scotchbowl. And as you said, and it implies that war hasn't been talked about as much as in political science. We used to talk about the state in the 70s or so. And I think this is a very good depiction of where the literature about the state in Latin America had gotten in the past 30 years or so. We're now at Princeton and Miguel Centeno is one of the leading scholars of the state in Latin America. He wrote this Fantastic article in 1997 Journal American Journal of Sociology, explaining in which way the theory of war making the state would apply to the region and how broadly speaking, in Latin America in particular in the 20th century, wars were absent and there wasn't much state, much state making in that era. And everyone, of course, I myself agree with that broad picture of Latin America, but I think everyone that came after in the last 30 years took it as meaning that Tilly doesn't work in Latin America. One approach could have been to go farther and dig farther into how Tibelic's theory actually works and whether in particular, if it works in the 19th century. And one interesting aspect of this literature is also that in the past 30 years, book after book after book have made the point that our states were built. And this we know also. You're also from Colombia. You know that when we study the history of our countries, we think of the late 19th century as the period of state building, or we call it like that in many history books. So it doesn't take much knowledge to know that our states were built in the 19th century. And yeah, basically I realized that this anti, what I call in this book the anti Bellis approach, this discarding of Bellis's theory wasn't paying too much attention to this correlation between wars being far more prominent in the 19th century and our state building taking place in that era, and therefore exploring the Tilean hypothesis, let's say. But unlike the way Miguel did it, which was across 200 years of history and explored that in particular in these periods of heathen warfare. So I think there was an anti Velasis consensus and potentially this book closes Kind of a circle or an arch that started with Miguel's statement in the late 1990s and brings war back in therefore in some way.
- [08:35]
B
And Miguel's book Blood and Debt becomes pretty canonical for this explanation of Latin American state building. But there are also other important kind of undercurrents there because. And you call them there's like a normative, a more normative anti balletist argument. You talk about like the more logical anti balletist argument and I think there's also an empirical one. Of course, we've discussed it. Could you walk us through these other elements of anti bellism beyond just like actually focusing on the prime state building moment which was the 19th century?
- [09:12]
C
I mean, anti bellissism, the way I put it there, I think yeah, one could think of different motives for it or why it became prominent in the literature. One, as you said, would be like a normative explanation. Of course people in general don't like thinking that all of the good things that we have in life, all of the provision of public goods from health to education to all of the these things actually depended on states expanding their fiscal capacity and the bureaucratic capacity through and for war foremost throughout history. Now some might even think that saying that war makes a state and making a statement in that direction resembles some ideologically fascist kind of ideas of the 1920s or 30s. But I think we can enter into that discussion and whether it's good to be publishing about this for the general public on the press all the time about the virtues of wars and making kind of normative statements about it. But it's different to think about this at an academic level and try to figure out exactly how these dynamics work out. That's one kind of stream of anti bellism. I think there are other reasons for anti bellasism that are more logical or could be presented as counter arguments to the Velis's theoretical argument. One that is relatively common is people that think that Bellis theory only applies, for example to the military revolution in Europe in the 15th, 16th century. And that has to do with kind of military technologies and dynamics that appeared in this particular moment in history and only can explain the formation of the European national state, for example. That's one view that is quite prevalent, I would say, in the social sciences that I think misses the point that this Bellis's theory applies more broadly throughout history. I made a case for the victorious case for it applying to ancient China or the first Qin Empire. And then there are representations of the theory that narrow the scope of the theory to very Specific type of mechanisms, like, for example, people that think that wars make states only when you have incredibly high frequency and kind of severity of wars in an international system, a circumscribed international system, to the point that wars kill states systematically all the time. For example, this is again thinking about the European experience.
- [11:47]
B
This idea that this can only work or you can only test it in a context where you have state death, essentially, or state elimination at the end of wars.
- [11:56]
C
Exactly. But I think that also misses the point that wars make states as they happen. Kind of obviously, this idea that there is a coercion extraction cycle, that states need to tax and conscribe populations to fight these wars, that that will lead to rebellions that they will have to repress and this will lead to the growth of bureaucra for taxation, for coercion, et cetera. That complex mechanism has nothing to do with states dying. So there will be state formation in all of the contenders of these wars, potentially. And I think that is a more correct representation of what Tilly had in mind. But yeah, some people perhaps emphasize these other aspects of state elimination and therefore look at a region like Latin America and immediately come to the conclusion that, okay, because states don't die here, that means the theory doesn't apply. But this is kind of a type of strawmanning of the theory. I think people, perhaps because of these normative underpinnings or for other reasons, may not have taken the theory seriously. And perhaps a last thought would be about a very strong kind of economicist, kind of Marxist tradition in interpretation of Latin American history and Latin America's kind of peripheral position in the world. I think that also undermined the thinking that actually dynamics that apply to Europe could apply to our region. And also that explanations that are more fundamentally political, that are applied to Europe could also apply to our region. That is often more interpreted through the lens of this peripheral kind of economic standing.
- [13:39]
B
Especially because of the history of imperialism in Latin America.
- [13:42]
C
Exactly. In fact, I would say that the main counterargument to Bellis's theory that is out there, that could explain reasonably well. So there's a fair debate to be had with these people, but could explain reasonably well variation in development and state capacity is arguments about colonialism. It's like archimoge Robinson's kind of type of argument about how perhaps the countries that have low state capacity now in the region are the ones that had the bad colonial institutions, like what they call extractive institutions. I think there is a strong tradition in that vein as well, that in a way undermines a diverge the focus from the potential applicability of Velisist theory.
- [14:28]
B
So what you do in the book and kind of like really arguing against kind of the anti velicist vein or traditional among scholars of the state in Latin America, what you do is really recast the Bellis's theory in which like you clarify as classical bellicist theory to show its true analytical and theoretical power. And there you do some very interesting and valuable extensions. What are those extensions and new things you do to shed the theory in its kind of proper light and true potential.
- [15:00]
C
Perhaps it is intuitive when I say it like this, but essentially all wars kind of begin somewhere and then take place and they end in some way and they have some effects after they have passed.
- [15:13]
B
They have a beginning, a middle and an end.
- [15:15]
C
Exactly. So every nice story.
- [15:18]
B
So I don't know if they're very nice stories, I'll say that.
- [15:21]
C
But war stories are often bleak. Yeah, but I think we would agree that every event, even if we want to theorize it, would have all these different phases. And you cannot just focus on the story that I told you just now, the story about mass mobilization or large mobilization for a war that is actually taking place against an enemy. When war becomes kinetic, when war becomes the actual fighting. Every war has kind of a buildup towards it, which sometimes in international relations we call this a rivalry. So there are tensions, but they haven't actually become militarized. In IR we also have this term for militarized interstate disputes, which are episodes of militarization or confrontation of two armies short of war, where they might mobilize the forces below the 1000 battle depth threshold, which is strictly how we measure war in ir. And then of course the war takes place and takes place for a while, but then once there is a settlement, this war will not end having any sort of effects in the future. Obviously there is an effect of the war that protracts into the future. And also there is an effect potentially of the way in which the war is settled. So the extensions, I think in this book to the war making the state kind of idea is to be a bit more granular and specific about how the buildup for war also generates some state building dynamics. And then how the aftermath of war, and I think this is potentially the biggest, the biggest blind spot, how the aftermath of war determines state capacity. In particular, depending on the war outcome. There are good aftermaths of war for state building, which usually have to do with when the policies that were implementing during the war phase consolidate and the actors that grew these bureaucracies, the military also consolidate. This usually takes place after victory in war. And then you have like a bad outcome for the state, which is when the military are defeated, the taxes that you were taxing during the war ended up not paying off and then the citizens don't want to pay more taxes and there's very low tax morale. There is also a low trust on the state or legitimacy of the state, and people distrust the bureaucracies, etc. So states that perform badly in this crucible, which is fundamental for the state, which is providing for this essential public good of security and defense, then ends up having a negative effect that protracts in the post war phase. And I think those things were said, that's why I call this classical velicist theory, were said here and there by people like Otto Hinte and Max Weber and others in the beginning of the 20th century, end of the 19th century, but had been somewhat forgotten in the more recent renditions of a theory particular since the 1980s. But I do believe that Tilly, for example, in the 70s already talks about these processes more or less in this way. The holidays have arrived at the Home Depot and we're here to help bring.
- [18:38]
B
The excitement with decor for every part of your home.
- [18:42]
C
Check out our wide assortment of easy.
- [18:44]
B
To assemble pre lit trees so you can spend less time setting up and more time celebrating.
- [18:49]
C
And bring your holiday special spirit outdoors with unique decor like one of our Santa inflatables. Whatever your style, find the right pieces at the right prices this holiday season at the Home Depot. At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running is all about. Run your way@newbalance.com running and then there.
- [19:36]
B
Are other important elements in the book. For example, to me one is really thinking about battles, events that if you put in kind of the analytical model, really allow for. They do a lot in terms of explaining because of their contingency. Can you walk us through why battles are so important to think with in these ideas of war making the state?
- [20:01]
C
I would say that once you lay out the whole process that I described from the pre war, war, post war, then of course it's worth thinking about what happens within each of them and, and the war phase. Well, it's not simply that both sides will extract and coerce and mobilize continuously. There is a lot happening within that Period. And most of what's happening is the actual fighting and the events that take place there. Most fundamentally, in any war, think of the Napoleonic wars to be like a big one. But also you could have the war of the Third Coalition within the Napoleonic War. So even within the war of the Third Coalition, you would have these individual battles. And battles are moments also where this state is tested and which outcomes will definitely affect this domestic process that we were describing. Right. Naturally, if you were like a French man and you heard that Napoleon had won at Austerlitz and you were planning to rebel against the state because you didn't like the taxes, but now you know that he's coming with a victorious, like, you know, whatever 100,000 troops, you are definitely not going.
- [21:15]
B
You might think twice about rebelling against.
- [21:17]
C
Napoleon in those circumstances or not paying your taxes or, you know, whatever it might be. So the state comes out legitimized. Even if in many cases, you know, this is not the final. This is perhaps a bad example of a final battle that ended a war in a way. But sometimes even these little battles within the wars, they have this little domestic effect as well. So all of that is going on within the war phase. And as you said, battles are, if you read military history, but also, if you think about this intuitively, or even from a rational choice perspective, they wouldn't be fought by the two sides if there wasn't a degree of uncertainty about who is going to win.
- [22:04]
B
Battles are not like soccer, where if you're playing, playing against, I want to say, if you're playing against Brazil, not to say another team, you know you're going to lose, so. But you have to play anyway.
- [22:15]
C
Exactly. So you have a choice there and for both sides in a battle. And this also applies to wars more generally, like the beginning of the war. For both to fight, there has to be a degree of uncertainty about who is going to win. For the most informed actors, which are the ones making the decision with the best information they can have. Well, these wars and these battles, they happen because there is this uncertainty. And obviously, by reading military history, if you're interested in any war, you will notice that historians always agree that these battles were contingent. Then they are often decided by contingent events during the battlefield or by some other, we would call it from a statistical perspective, kind of as if random factor that took place there, which also matches with war theory, like Kalfin, Closets and others that have emphasized very much this idea of war as a card, you know, as a game of cog.
- [23:12]
B
It's A game of cards. Unless the gods come in your favor. If you're a Greek or Spartan, I guess.
- [23:18]
C
Exactly. Well, the attribution, I guess, of the outcome of a battle to the gods precisely signals that kind of uncertain, you know, who is. Yeah, it wasn't very clear who was going to win this and therefore it must have been this or that other God. And what the Greeks did after the battles have a little footnote about this in the theory chapter is they built this triumph was like a monument, the place in the battlefield where some sort of very contingent event happens, like the leader of the opposite force, opposing forces dies, or something happens that turns the battle around in favor of one of the two contenders. And that's a critical moment, critical event that perhaps can define battle on, eventually a war. So all of these things happen within wars. And the point is that all of these have some impact on the domestic story that we were telling before about extraction and coercion and how the war can make or unravel the state.
- [24:18]
B
And let's talk about those domestic dynamics more and about the non divine actors in this play, which are also part of, I think, some of the theoretical refining that you're doing. You kind of have a different characterization of the kind of groups of elites that are involved in these domestic interactions or domestic dynamics. Walk us through what those actors are and how they're different from the way other authors before you have characterized them.
- [24:51]
C
Some of the literature on Latin America already talks about basically pro state elites and anti state elites. And there is some agreement that this is a story about elites. It doesn't have to do much with the masses. I mean, the masses play a role when, for example, because of conscription or because of very high taxation or indirect taxation, like for example, inflation. There are popular uprisings that take place during these conflicts. But in general, I think people agree in the history of Latin America, there were peripheral elites that were against the state. They wanted to preserve the patrimonial orders and they wanted to preserve their power in whatever peripheral region. They had some power. And you had these more central elites that often were in the capital cities and were the authorities of the national state. And they wanted to extend their powers to the peripheries and in many cases, depending on their political science, sometimes, but politically modernize this state. Now, broadly speaking, what I think my book will do is to match this structure of central and peripheral elites with kind of the elites that are fighting the wars and the elites that are against the wars in this context, in the Tillian story, for example, Tilly puts it more or less in these words. You have the monarch fighting the international war and then you have to tax the local lords, and lords don't want to be taxed. Therefore, they might comply for a while if they fear the other state, perhaps more than the king. But at some point they will not comply or they will rebel against the state. And then the king has to use the cannons to tear down the castles of the lords to make them comply. And in that way, the war that France was fighting against, whatever England or whatever it might be then, also has the effect of consolidating the domestic power of the French king. And in general, even more higher level of abstraction. In every war, you would have people that want to fight a war and want to impose taxes and mobilize an army and people that will be against it. So that's the main kind of cleavage. Now, in general, it tends to happen that the people that are in charge of the state during a war, they want to build a bureaucracy, they want to build up the military, they want to centralize power. And there will be some domestic opposition always that will want for the war to end, for the taxes to not being collected anymore, for conscriptions to stop, and then these wars. And that's why the importance of the war outcome in particular, because during the war, everyone or most people kind of complies if there is a sufficiently large external threat. But the war outcome defines this balance, call it balance of power between the peripheral and central elites in one way or another, and it does it for the long term.
- [27:50]
B
So let's go now to Latin America or get specific about why Latin America, because we've been speaking, of course, about why the Bellasis tradition kind of fell out of favor for scholars of the Latin American state or the state in Latin America. But the book also does this move, which is really say that Latin America is the best place to test Tillich's theory, even better than Europe in a way. So how do this, like repositioning of Latin America as an ideal empirical site come about?
- [28:25]
C
As you can already tell by what you have been saying, the main, one of the most interesting characteristics of Latin America is that you can see the post war phase in the long term. One aspect of it is actually going back to Centeno, that you can see the effects of wars in the late 19th century playing out until today, potentially because we didn't have other wars that could confound those effects. But most perhaps fundamentally, what you can see in Latin America is the winner and the loser in the long Term after the war ends in almost all of the wars. One problem for Tilly, and Tilly is very explicit about this in his 19765 bug and edited volume and other places, it is a huge problem that the losing state in Europe often dies in this period that he's analyzing. This is because obviously you don't have information about the post war trajectory of that state. But it's also kind of a more fundamental problem because usually you don't even have information about the pre war kind of records of that state. Because when this state dies and is incorporated by let's say Prussia, that keeps eating the little states around or the Piedmont or whatever, well, they often destroy the records. There is no historiography of these states and whatnot. So in reality, when we look at the European history, what we're looking at is the history of the winners, the history of the states that survived because they won the wars in general. There are some losers that survive of course in Europe, but the vast majority. That's why Europe went from as still he puts it, from 500 states to 30 states or whatever. They are being killed systematically by this wars. And that creates a lot of what we might call statistics, selection bias. And therefore you cannot really, with that degree of attrition make any inference from looking at that population. So it's a very simple statistical issue that you cannot really compare those groups and you are losing a lot of the population as the process goes on and on and these wars continue to repeat themselves. Latin America is an ideal laboratory in this sense because no state dies.
- [30:36]
B
Something that was really striking to me reading the book is the data you offer to show that Latin America is not an exception in terms of the intensity of warfare, the types of taxation, the modes of territorial conquest or things like that, in the way that's usually been portrayed by anti Bella literature. And I'm just gonna, and I want you to talk about that, I want you to talk about why Latin America is actually very similar to Europe. And I'll start by offering what to me were a couple like very striking numbers.
- [31:12]
C
Just, just.
- [31:13]
B
I'll just say, whereas Europe in the 19th century had 11 interstate wars, Latin America had 17. The fatalities, like relative to the total population, like the relative impact of the war in Europe. It was on average 0.56% of the population would die in a war. In Latin America that number was around 4% of the population dying in a war. So these Latin American wars that the anti bellasis tradition paints as non severe, non frequent, were actually even relative to European cases, which are the poster children of diabelsist tradition, were actually just like much more intense. Walk us through that.
- [32:02]
C
Yeah, it's a very interesting point and definitely there is a blind spot in the literature regarding the intensity of warfare and the frequency in the 19th century. Now why that happened, why people have been missing these wars is a bit of a puzzle. I think one element you pinpointed at when you were talking about the percentage of the population, if you pay attention to basically the absolute numbers, it might look like wars in Latin America were not that big. But if you look at actually the proportion of the population that were dying in these wars and mobilizing, et cetera, you would find that in many 19th century Latin American wars, even in very small countries, that you would have never conceded war was very important, like in Uruguay or Costa Rica.
- [32:46]
B
Costa Rica is a striking number.
- [32:49]
C
Exactly. In both cases, actually the proportion of the population that mobilizes is higher than the Napoleonic France that came up before. So people that were in these armies as a proportion of the total population of these countries were larger than the proportion of the French that were in the Grande Armee of Napoleon, for example, in the famous campaign to Russia. So that has to do with this thinking about the theory in the context, thinking in relative numbers about the severity of these wars.
- [33:22]
B
There's also the taxation element, right? Because there's also this idea that Latin American taxation was wholly indirect and we financed through debt and things like that, which you also show not to really be the case in the 19th century. How was that taxation structure critical for the extraction, coercion cycle? How did that play out in Latin America?
- [33:44]
C
So in terms of the taxation structure and how wars affect taxation in Latin America in the 19th century, what I do in this book is I look at what was the impact of the rising threat to the state, which is in ir we often call this episodes of militarized interstate disputes on how the states react in terms of where the revenue comes that they raise for fighting this external threat. So what is evident is that when they face these external threats, they will increase the size of the armed forces.
- [34:18]
B
Which just to be clear, in the anti bellasis tradition, the insistence is that Latin American, like the wars in Latin America, did not make the states because the states extracted from external revenue sources and did not tax their populations.
- [34:34]
C
Exactly. And that's something that I think had to be put to test and this book does precisely that. So if you look systematically at all of the states in Latin America between the 1830s until the First World War and then you look at how they react to these foreign threats. You see one thing that is just mentioned in past, because it's obvious they increase the size of the armed forces. And then the question is, how do they pay for that? Now, if you look at Latin america In the 19th century, you might think that perhaps they had a hard time getting these foreign sources of revenue because we had a lot of blockades of our ports that prevented foreign trade and because we were in situations of defaults of our foreign sovereign debt during large chunks of the 19th century. So is it true that we had an easy time accessing these resources? Well, again, when tested systematically, what this book finds is that these wars or militarized interstate disputes reduced the likelihood that states will acquire a Newfoundland loan, reduced by around 20%. The income that came through customs also reduced by again around 20% the level of tariffs. So if a charge was on, in a country was charging on average 20% in tariffs, it would have to reduce that lot. So let's say we would go from 40%, on average, 20% to promote trade precisely because these countries needed to fight the wars. They needed raw materials, they needed weapons, they needed a lot of things to fight the war. They had to promote trade. And that reduced income coming from those foreign sources. Conversely, what I find is that these countries tended to tax the local population. And there is evidence for more qualitative for each of the cases that are explored in the qualitative chapters of this. But the one systematic evidence that I find is that these states devalued the currencies during these wars by around 15 to 18%. And this means that these countries were paying the soldiers with paper money that was worth a bit less than it was worth at the beginning of the war. And this devaluation created a domestic inflationary tax, therefore, that was a way of taxing the local population.
- [37:02]
B
So inflation is a tax on people. That's kind of the logic there.
- [37:06]
C
Exactly. So wars were paid fundamentally by local taxes and inflation more than by these foreign sources of revenue, which, compared to peacetime, actually decreased rather than increased. So the political side of this coin is a set of models that test the likelihood of, of rebellions, which is that if this was extraction, that would be coercion. So do people rebel against the central government when they are taxed more? And when that happens, what the models systematically find is that the likelihood of a civil war increases from two to three times, and the likelihood of a coup d' etat also increases two to three times. In context of international warfare, that I just described. So I think looking at this chunk of time, 1830-01. Systematically actually reveals. That the coercion extraction cycle. Was actually triggered by these foreign threats. And then it's worth considering or contemplating. That mobilization might have built states in a similar fashion that it did in Europe.
- [38:20]
B
To recap, we've done a couple of things already. Which is clarify that Landmark is a prime place to study this link. Between war making and state building in the 19th century. Because you have the survival of states. So you can see what happened with the losers, right. And compared to what happened with the winners. And allows you to really look into this post war stage. And not only the war, like the fighting itself and the preparations for it. And we've also established that it's very similar, if not, let's say, a more dramatic dynamic than the ones we observed in Europe. Because it was more frequent warfare, more severe warfare. And also in a very similar tax structure there. We have essentially kind of the ideal empirical setup before us. Now, let's talk about some cases, Some cases that are actually well explained by the theory. And other cases that are hard. But let's start, for example. And you open your book with kind of this vignette about your. Your own family, I believe, of some people that go from Italy to Paraguay. And some people that go from Italy to Argentina. Because Paraguay was just doing so much better than Argentina in the 19th century. So let's talk about, for example, how war making and winning wars and losing them. Explain the trajectory of Argentina and the trajectory of Paraguay.
- [39:39]
C
This case is explored, or these two cases are explored in the book. Through the narrative of the Paraguayan War. And also some kind of statistical counterfactuals. Of what would have happened to Paraguay. Had the war not ended in its defeat. Essentially, the history of Paraguay until this war, which starts in 1864. Was a history of political stability. Paraguay had been declared its independence, basically. But it wasn't fully recognized by its neighbors. So it had to be in constant state of mobilization. Against the potential threats coming from Argentina, also from Brazil. And that meant that in this constant mobilization. This constant state of foreign rivalry. With all of these neighbors. A very strong autocratic leader called Gaspar Francia consolidated. That imposed high levels of conscription taxation to the Paraguayan elites. And concentrated a lot of power. And started to build what was a relatively strong state by the standards of those times. Because the Paraguayans, for example, very early on had passports which were not present in the rest of the region. But Paraguayans needed it. Because they have all of These conspirators that otherwise would go to Brazil or to Argentina to conspire against. So they needed to have some sort of control of the borders, Control of who was coming in and out. Also the central government of Paraguay in Asuncion. Also needed to have some control over elites. Many of these elites, the ones that were suspicious of being conspirators, ended up in jail. And so there was a high rate of incarceration. Of what we might call, in this context, potential peripheral elites. But also that meant that the state would basically take a lot of their land. And was a huge amount for Latin American standards of state owned ownership. State ownership of land and of means of production and stuff like that. There were great trains. There were great trains in Paraguay. Later on this more with the Solano Lopez dynasty. Because from France here you go to the Lopez. And this is a rare case in Latin America. The only perhaps case like this is Chile, where from independence until this war, there is almost complete stability in the succession from one leader to the next. So the Tulope's then governed for a couple of decades. And in that period, because of the Paraguayan stability, There is a lot of British investment. In particular in these sectors like railroads. But also the state was very strong. And therefore also had a very big imprint in what the British would do. And it was a main partner of these British firms that were going into the country. So unlike in other countries of Latin America. Where perhaps local governments or, you know, private. The private sector would partner for some of these investments. Or with some of these investments. In the case of Paraguay, the state of Paraguay had, for example, the foundry of Ibiqui, which was state owned. And then they would have British engineers that were working in partnership. But mostly for the state to exploit that resource. And also they have their own kind of national. Well, Ministry of Infrastructure. That coordinated all the investments that had to do with the railroad infrastructure. And they even built their own locomotive. So, yeah, it was an impressive state. It was called at the time, in the 1860s, like sometimes they call it the Japan of Latin America. Because, like the Tokugawa Japan, before they opened up to the world. They were very close to the world. They were very suspicious of everyone else, like leaving or entering the country. And they have very strict control of the borders. But at the same time, they were renowned by the domestic political stability. And basically internal, efficient working of the state in the provision of all of these public goods, et cetera.
- [43:40]
B
And then you have Argentina, on the other hand.
- [43:42]
C
Yes, and Argentina, precisely, perhaps because of the defeat in the so Called War of the Brazil, as we call it in Argentina. The Brazilians call it the War of the Cisplatina. Which is the name that they gave to Uruguay in the 1830s. After this war, Argentina central government. That had come out of the independence movement. Because Argentina was. As Colombia's believer in the north of South America. Were victorious after the wars of independence. They had come out relatively stable. And with a very strong central government in Buenos Aires. But after losing this war against Brazil. The Argentinian government collapsed in the 1830s. And Argentinians were living in constant state of civil war. Until around the beginnings of the Paraguayan War. Actually, five years before the start of the Paraguayan War. In 1859. Argentina was two different countries. There was a state called Buenos Aires. Corresponding roughly. To what is now the north part of the province of Buenos Aires in Argentina. And there were. There was another state that was called the Confederation. The Argentinian Confederation. That was made out of all of these other provinces in Argentina. This ended in a fragile kind of reunification in 1859. But the destiny of the country was quite uncertain. When the Paraguayans basically invaded Uruguay. Through the Argentinian territory. And that basically compelled Argentinian. Both the provinces and the center in Buenos Aires. To mobilize against Paraguay. Reuniting them. And beginning this process of state building during the war.
- [45:21]
B
And then you have that thing that's also counterintuitive. Which is the strong state. Or the state that was stronger before the war loses the war. And the state that was weaker before the war. Actually ends up winning. Which is, in this case, the Argentinians. What happens to those two countries afterward?
- [45:42]
C
Well, Argentina traces its kind of golden age. At the end of the 19th century. Which saw Argentina become basically. One of the highest GDP per capitas in the world. By the turn of the century. More or less over there with Belgium. And countries like that. Saw Argentina having the largest railroad network, railway network in the Americas. After the United States. The highest density, I think, around Buenos Aires in the continent. One of the highest in the world. All of those that Argentina. That actually our current president, Javier Milei. Always revindicates. As you know, our glorious past. That came to be after the 1870s. After the end of this war. People have thrown several hypotheses around. About why this might have been the case. If it had to do with importance of the inflows of immigrants Or British capital or other reasons. But what I think is fundamentally true and also intuitive. Is that this would have never happened. If Argentina had continued in a state of constant civil war. If Argentina hadn't had incredible swelling of the size of its national army. And also the abolition of the provincial militias. That happened during the war against Paraguay. Which allowed them for Argentina to come out of this war. With a super strong national military. That then repressed any other rebellion. That happened in the late 19th century quite easily. And started to take control of the country. So basically Argentina, you might know, now has this city of Buenos Aires, like Mexico City. Is like a federal. What was for many years a federal city. And this was federalized actually by the national army. When the province of Buenos Aires in the year 1880. This is an event that is commemorated actually by our obelisk in the middle of Buenos Aires. The famous obelisk. The reason why it's there is to commemorate, I think was like the 50th anniversary of this rebellion. That ended up with the national army of that fought against Paraguay. Repressing the rebellion and just taking the city. And the national army said, look guys, we're taking the port which has all of the custom, revenue, everything. We're making this national. And then the province of Buenos Aires is not allowed to have these militias anymore. And that consolidated the Argentinian national state as we know it. And started this phase of economic growth. That we also tend to glorify. Glorify is a good word in Argentina. And the story for Padua is the complete opposite, right? So the Solano Lopez dynasty, of course, Solana Lopez's son. Ends up dying at the end of the war. And there is no kind of clear succession to that. There's obviously a great delegitimation of everything that had happened in Paraguay. That had less Paraguay to that big war. So the size of the Paraguayan army Is severely reduced to 700 people after the war for decades. That of course leads to a lot of political instability and violence in the country. The killing of several national leaders and presidents. And eventually Paraguay will re. Stabilize after perhaps 20 years after the war. So there's. Paraguay gets hit, of course, because of the reduction in the basically population size. Many people that live either were killed during the war. Or they just leave the country en masse. Because of the poverty that subsequently hits the country, et cetera. But fundamentally, the state cannot be up on its feet again. The big problem with Paraguay, because we have states with lower population that succeed again. We mentioned Costa Rica, Uruguay, that are counterexample. So even the British diplomats and other sources that I reviewed for the book. They clearly say that years after the war. That Paraguay would clear just with the population that he had with economic situations, he had a lot of resources. The problem was a political problem, that it couldn't reorganize, that the state was completely dismantled, that no one wanted to pay taxes anymore, that the state didn't own anything anymore. And that didn't have these security forces that were needed to re. Stabilize the country. So Paraguay then enters this state weakening trajectory in the very long term. And that's why Paraguay looks like it looks today, which is not a country with relatively low development by regional standards. But as you said at the very beginning of your question, my great great grandparents immigrated to Argentina. You know, they. When they arrived to the port of Buenos Aires, well, the one that had still some breath and could. Could continue, decided to continue to Paraguay, because Paraguay was seen at the time, 10 years before the war ended, as perhaps a better destination.
- [50:47]
B
But the thing with the cases of Argentina and Paraguay is that they're also very clean cases. You have a very clean case of state strength or weakness before the war and then like the resulting strengthening of the winner after the war. Tell us about perhaps cases that are less clean that are still explained by the theory. Right. I think it's. You have countries that have a lot of internal strife during the war or where the big war is actually part of another set of skirmishes or conflicts. Right. What are perhaps other messier cases that are still explained by the theory.
- [51:27]
C
So you're right that this is a clean case in the sense that you state that is weak, that results strengthened and state that is strong, results weakened is kind of a great example.
- [51:37]
B
And they're also at the like. If you rank Latin American state capacity from the 19th century till today, they're still relatively in the same point they were a couple of years after the war. Argentina among the top performers or top possessors of state capacity, and Paraguay, sorry, as one of the ones that have the least.
- [51:56]
C
Yes. I mean, perhaps it took Argentina some 20 years to get there in this list, but. Yes, in this ranking. But you're right. So I would say there are complicated cases, or to some extent more interesting cases of winners that keep winning. For example, Chile is a winner that keeps winning. Chile consolidates its state with the War of the confederation in the 1830s and then it enters this trajectories of stability. I mentioned before that Chile together with Paraguay was one of these few Latin American countries that have very high levels of, let's call it domestic political stability of people.
- [52:35]
B
They're very good at finding who the next president was and not fighting about.
- [52:38]
C
It and not firing the one in charge while the term was in place. So at some point then, Chile fights this other war, the War of the Pacific. And it might look like, well, Chile was already consolidated state. And of course it was going to win the war against Peru that had been a much weaker state in some regard. Nonetheless, Peru had a very large military, it was a very rich country, because we shouldn't forget that Peru was the center of the viceroyalty of Peru during colonial times. So during a large chunk of the 19th century, was probably the highest state capacity state in the region by some measures. Now, Peru is another case that is not. But it's a bit messy because it keeps losing wars. So if you look at the War of the Pacific, for example, it might look a bit more messy in this regard than the clear cut example that we gave about Argentina and Paraguay kind of reversing their destinies in a way. Then there's the issue that it also pinpointed about the size of wars. And there might be certain wars, smaller wars, even wars that could be reduced to just one battle. And an example in the book is this battle of Guaspud, which was a battle that basically the one battle of a war between Ecuador and Colombia. And actually more like a Colombian caudillo called Mosquera, leader of the Liberal Party, that basically resulted in strictly 1000 Bahaudets, or historians differ a bit about the number, but it was a war, but just there, just about and lasted just one battle, basically. Also mobilization endured a couple of months perhaps. So those kind of wars are not perhaps expected to have a big effect on state capacity. I think, however, that that more or less aligns with the expectation of the theory. So neither Ecuador or Colombia in the last part of the 2020, in the 19th century, in this last 30 years after this war, become a particularly good example of either state weakening or state strengthening. So these small wars, they might look like what you would expect with stalemate, where there isn't much impact of the war outcome. And there is also not much impact of mobilization because it wasn't as. So there are all sorts of war. The thing is that even when, let's say war doesn't bark, right, when the war is not there, you can see the absence of the outcome. So even those cases of lesser wars or shorter wars, less severe, are kind of interesting to look at because sometimes it kind of aligns with expectations.
- [55:28]
B
Now, Luis, this was a huge project. I mean, the book is filled with statistical analyses. You have all the archival work that goes into building the cases. What's next for you. What's the next project?
- [55:42]
C
That's a great question, a daunting question. I think one interesting thing would be to see if this complete Bellis theory, classical Bellis' theory that looks at the war outcomes, actually works in Europe and around the world. Let's see if it's actually a good description of the theory that illuminates some previous blind spots beyond Latin America. I think it would pride Latin Americans to know that perhaps we did have this laboratory for the theory that it can illuminate other regions and the theory can travel from Latin America towards other places and in particular Europe. And I think some European colleagues are trying to do this for the individual case studies, but also by looking at larger samples of European countries. It's not very difficult to do with correlates of war or other projects in IR that have a lot of statistical data for. And these are simple statistical models that can be run on, say, now VDEM also has like 200 years of historical data for some indicators of state capacity and also correlates of war has all of these wars since the Napoleonic wars. So I think that avenue of research is interesting just to see if the theory has merits beyond this context. So this is not just a book for Latin Americanists so that we can learn where these variations the capacity might come from and how Thiele does apply in the end to some period of our history, but also can be a larger contribution. So those lines of research are kind of open and some people are working on them.
- [57:23]
B
And what are you working on now?
- [57:24]
C
Well, with some of these projects, I'm trying to co author or just trying to in a way participate of this. But I'm also interested in other related topics. One that I would mention is, for example, nationalism. And to be very brief, I think nationalism and the origins of Latin American nationalism has also been in slightly understudied in political science in particular. And this contrast with its prominence in some classics of nationalism, like Anderson's, like imagined communities, for example, where essentially there is this idea that these creole societies across the Atlantic created this modern form of nationalism that wasn't based on ethnicity or religion or language or, you know, any particular trade, because, as you know, you're Colombian, I'm Argentinian, physically look the same. We have we pray to the same God, kind of, so we don't have any difference but the flag and the anthem and all of these symbols of nationalism that in a way were created in this era around the French Revolution. But fundamentally, according to Anderson and others, by these Latin American countries. So looking at the impact of wars on that aspect of the state formation, we might call it more accurately called nation building in the 19th century, I think is a very promising avenue for thinking, because also it's the other side of the coin of the state. The compliance with the state has to do with you believing you're Colombian or you're Argentinian. So that is difficult to investigate systematically. It's not as easy as these data sets that I just mentioned to measure levels of nationalists. We don't have surveys, we don't have a lot of things. But I think promising and interesting.
- [59:26]
B
I think that's a great place to end. Luis Escanoni, thank you.
- [59:29]
C
Thank you, Sebastian. It was a pleasure.
- [59:31]
B
That's all for today. At New Books in Political Science and the New Books Network, I am Sebastiano Huscaval.
- [59:37]
C
Until next time.