Los caminos de la modernidad: comparando a Europa y Estados Unidos con América latina

Abstract

It is argued that Latin America contributed to modernity and the spread of what literature has called «the modern West». Rather than just imitating, reacting, or adjusting to the paradigms of modernity (and globalization), in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, the region elaborated and created modernity. This can be seen in two related but different processes: the formation of the Nation-State and the conceptualization of the Nation. While Latin America did, of course, look at Europe and the United States as possible models and attempted to emulate someof their modernity, no Latin American country seriously believed that they could reproduce Europe or the United States. Rather, in the context of post-colonialism, the region pioneered some of the precepts of modernity. The result was, as these brief comparisons with Europe and the United States suggest, a different path to modernity that later, in the twentieth century, one could find elsewhere in the global system.