La contingencia de la independencia y de la revolución: perspectivas teóricas y comparadas sobre América latina

Abstract

This article compares the U.S. and French-Revolutions in the last third of the 18th with independence and revolution in Spanish America at the beginning of the 19th century under a particular theoretical perspective. Focussing mainly on the initial stages of these revolutionary events it will be shown that: a) in all three cases the path towards a revolutionary break with the Old Regime was anything but predetermined and that b) particularly in the Americas the question of the Nation was not settled at all by the revolutionaries. This is one of the most important explanations why later onwards Nation –and State– building in the Americas, both in Latin America and in North-America, became anything but a smooth and linear process.