Latin America and the West's 'Big Bang'

Carlos Alberto Montaner

In mid-December 2005, two institutions -- the Konrad Adenauer Foundation of Germany and FAES (Foundation for Analysis and Social Studies) of Spain, the latter presided by José María Aznar -- brought to Berlin a group of politicians, historians, journalists and thinkers to begin a cycle of meditations about the values that define the European identity. The initiative had been proposed and defended by former Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio for a year and a half, until it was realized. In effect, the question was to define what Europe is and what are the shared moral principles on which it rests, hardly an idle debate, especially when one considers that countries like Turkey or Ukraine today are knocking at the door of the European Union, while others are proposing Israel's candidacy, and some speculate about the hypothetical incorporation of Russia in the near future. Which, then, are Europe's geographic, cultural and historical boundaries? I was asked to voice a reflection on the subject, from the Latin American perspective.

Let us begin these papers with a theft. Let us pilfer an expression from astrophysics: big bang. Arbitrarily, just so we can understand each other, let's call it a "Western" phenomenon, a questionable adjective when we realize that we stand precariously on a sphere that spins dizzily through space. In any case, several thousand years ago, in the so-called Asian Mesopotamia, in a Semitic cultural environment, approximately between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where the Bible locates Paradise, a singular cultural explosion occurred that created a still ongoing shock wave. It was the confused beginning of the Western big bang.

Spontaneously, and without anyone programming or realizing it, the fates of different peoples, more or less neighbors, began to intertwine in parallel directions. With the passing of time, of a great deal of time, Sumerians, Chaldeans, Acadians, Jews, Arabs, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, Etruscans, Romans and a dozen more ethnic groups and civilizations shared myths and information, findings and discoveries, ways to wage war, theogonies and theodicies, ethics and esthetics, behaviors and values, until they constituted, in an imprecise form, the foundational nucleus of what we today call the West and in the past called Hellade, Rome or Christianity, because the definition changed shape and could successively be applied to cultural expressions of diverse nature that synthesized and subsumed in an exquisitely rich process of assimilation and mixture.

Later, in due course, the Celtic, German and Slav people were drawn into the shock wave that in slow motion swept, and somehow unified, the European space and much of Asia Minor and Africa, but the essential feature of the culture being gestated was to retain its multifaceted and multiblooded nature as a basic sign of identity. In included the Gilgamesh Chronicles and Homer; Ziggurat and the Parthenon; the Bible; the Book of the Dead, and the Nordic sagas. Everything was within grasp and useful. The Egyptian hieroglyphs gave birth to the Greco-Latin alphabet, with the Phoenicians as intermediaries. Centuries later, the Hindu signs were smuggled out by the Arabs to forge a new numbering system. The disquisitions of the Stoics gave Judeo-Christianity a new ethical dimension. Century after century, Aristotle and Plato died and were reborn with each generation that peered into their writings from any Indo-European language.

At some time, St. Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus and Descartes appeared as heralds announcing the arrival of Kant, Husserl or Ortega y Gasset. Copernicus and Galileo prolonged into Newton and Einstein. Leonardo and Caravaggio became Picasso after stopovers in Velázquez and Manet. It is easy to discover Locke's antecedents: they come from the Jew Zeno of Cittium, who in Athens preached the doctrine of natural rights, and from the Romans, who engraved their laws in bronze centuries before the birth of Christ, outlining our modern-day constitutionalism. The West is always filiation, tradition and continuity. It changes, at times precipitously, to remain faithful to its origins.

"Europe" is not the start of the big bank but one of its more significant stages. At some point, the heart of the shock wave was in Ur, where the phenomenon may have begun. Eventually, it moved to the Egypt of the pharaohs, to Athens, Carthage, Rome, Constantinople and Charlemagne's Aquisgran. At a certain moment in the late 15th Century, historic chance and the evolution of cartography in the Mediterranean, plus the techniques of navigation perfected by the Portuguese, placed on the Atlantic Ocean, unnamed at the time, three fragile little ships commanded by a visionary and stubborn mariner born in Genoa. His name was Christopher Columbus and, sponsored by the Castilian queen, he was intent on reaching the Spice Islands near China to enrich himself with a cargo of those appreciated condiments, then considered medicinal, or maybe with gold nuggets, if luck smiled upon him and permitted him to return alive to Europe with his welcome merchandise.

America appears

What happened next is well known by all. Suddenly, a continent appeared, until that moment unsuspected from the perspective of the Old World, and the millenarian big bang -- in the fashion of hurricanes over the Atlantic -- gained renewed impetus when it touched American lands. Almost immediately, an ancient and unceasing deluge of animals, plants, artifacts and cultural constructions rained incessantly over America. Christianity, horses, the alphabet, books, Roman, Gothic and Baroque styles, the design of cities into square blocks, European languages, gunpowder, cannons, cathedrals and convents, universities, all these arrived like an unstoppable torrent that swept away the profile of the pre-Columbian peoples until it washed the survivors onto an insignificant and melancholy strip of history. It happened to all the autochthonous peoples: in the north, to the Comanches and Apaches; farther to the south, to the Aztecs and Mayans, Incas and Guaranis. There were hundreds of peoples who spoke -- it is said -- thousands of languages and dialects.

It was a vast and implacable ethnocide, but that wasn't a new phenomenon. It had also happened within the West's own elastic borders. Of the original Mesopotamian world, only archeological vestiges and some linguistic traits remained. The pantheon of pagan gods had been extinguished under the weight of Christianity without leaving any heritage, except for some learned references for the benefit of poets and philosophers. Certain glorious cultures, such as the Phoenician and the Egyptian, vanished in the mist, leaving some mysterious monuments as homage to themselves. In the European space, dozens of pre-Roman peoples disappeared under the implacable steps of the legions. The big bang was like that -- an irresistible and blind force that, with the same impetus with which it overran peoples and civilizations, facilitated the leadership and elevation of new historical agents.

Because the West, despite the word, is not a geographic concept but an activity and a view of the world, the summit was not banned to anyone. Germans and Anglo-Saxons gradually replaced the Latin peoples as the main engine of history. Later, the Asians wended their way, late guests at the table of the industrial revolution. First, the Japanese vigorously joined the Western busyness. Later, they were imitated by the South Koreans and the Singaporeans. More recently came the Chinese, wise and old, Taiwanese and mainland, who today are installed at the head of the world, or close to it, along with Europeans and U.S. Americans, while the Indians begin to loom on the horizon.

All of them climbed to the top wielding the same weapons developed by the West: rationality, science, technology, a furious trade, cooperation, competition, and devotion for a growing progress. The process was obvious: first they imitated, then they innovated, later they created with originality. Thus do we explain the history of Rome, built on Etruscan and Greek steps. Thus do we understand the glory of the Carolingian Europe, built when the Germanic peoples replaced the leadership of the weakened Latin world, opening the way for the eventual breakthrough of the Anglo-Saxons.

This hurried account is not idle. It serves to illustrate the huge mistake committed when someone judges, with narrow ethical criteria, the effects of the West's cultural big bang on the other side of the Atlantic, as is often done by the so-called enemies of the West, individuals permanently aggrieved by the abuses inflicted on the pre-Columbian peoples after 1492. If it's any consolation, remember that every hegemony had -- and has -- a component of overwhelming force. The complaints of the Latin American indigenists have the same moral weight as if the Spaniards and the Portuguese, humiliated and offended, were to complain to Italy about the extinction of their pre-Roman cultures.

On the other hand, the Western big bang was not even a unique phenomenon, although it was the most powerful and lasting event in recorded history. Something similar occurred in the Americas upon the arrival of the Europeans, albeit on a different scale. The Aztecs, indebted to the Olmecs and Toltecs in Mesoamerica and to the Incas in South America, cannibalized other ethnic groups and American cultures, incorporating them, by force or intimidation, into a civilized nucleus with superior development and organization.

What happened to the autochthonous inhabitants of America after the arrival of the Europeans was nothing else than a variant of the same centripetal tendency observed in the constant interaction between human groups. Traditionally, the groups that have a greater social complexity and a more solid material or intellectual base, impose their model of civilization. Perhaps the only differences in the trajectory of the Western big bang are its uninterrupted continuity in time, its successful implantation, and its worldwide nature, since it encompasses all continents, though with different degrees of penetration, as we can see in certain Asian spaces or in sub-Saharan Africa, areas of the world that until now have been scarcely influenced by the West.

America as a part of the West

Now that we have made these preliminary observations, let us look at today's Latin America. What do we see? Societies that communicate with each other through European languages, that pray mostly to Jesus Christ, and that -- with varying degrees of difficulty, at least theoretically -- organize their states in accordance with the liberal republican model conceived during the 18th-Century Enlightenment, a model that later was mixed and adulterated with components taken from fascist authoritarianism, militarist "caudillism," and Marxist collectivism. Almost everything that happens there -- the good and the bad -- is a throwback to European roots.

The cities were built following the checkerboard pattern proposed by Vitrubius. The churches are of Roman, Gothic or Baroque design, especially Baroque. The modern cities are full of buildings erected with an eye to modernism, to the Bauhaus, to the functionalism that's made of height, steel and glass. The social mentality, or view of the world, comes from the Old Continent. Even the excesses and mistakes share that origin.

What is Latin America (like the United States or Canada) but a derivation of Europe? What are our collectivist populists but anachronistic leftovers from Marx? What are (or were) our military blowhards, or some authoritarian civilians who became dictators, but heirs of European fascism? From where, except perhaps from a misreading of Keynes, did our populist politicians glean their inflationist and statist ideas, so they could justify the ballooning public expenditures? Latin America, then, (even if the indigenists deny it on one side of the Atlantic and some skeptics question it in the Old Continent or the United States) is nothing but one of the largest zones of the West, albeit the poorest, most backward and convulsed.

The poor relative

Let us admit, then, that Latin America is the West's poor relative. What does one do with poor relatives? British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently said something about Spain and Ireland that is worthwhile noting. Referring to the cohesion funds granted by the European Union to those two nations, he concluded that they were justified by the splendid results obtained through the development of the two countries. According to his data, the annual transactions between Britain and Spain had risen to $40 billion. Blair congratulated himself for Spain's success because he knew that a nation's prosperity is good for the rest of the planet. He understood, like any intelligent and well-informed person, that we all benefit from someone else's wealth.

That reasoning is also valid with regard to Latin America. It is to the EU's benefit that the 200 million poor people of Latin America (a frightening number) be brought out of poverty or that their numbers be reduced. The reason that China today can buy 2,000 buses from Volvo in Sweden with a stroke of the pen, or is about to conclude in the West the largest purchase of commercial aircraft in history, is that its market-directed economic reforms and countenance of private property have rescued from misery 300 million or 400 million Chinese, who today follow forms of production and habits of consumption similar to those in the West.

Naturally, even if it were to everyone's benefit, it would be neither sensible, realistic nor feasible to expect a transfer of economic resources from the EU to Latin America to achieve the development of the region, but opening the European markets and making an effort to plug this region into the economic, technologic and -- somehow -- political circuits would seem a wise and universally convenient decision on both sides of the Atlantic, from which hundreds of millions of consumers and thousands of producers would benefit.

It is a mistake to circumscribe Europe solely to its geographic dimension and to circumscribe to it a fair-trade treatment. The cultural distance that separates an Argentine or a Cuban from a Spaniard or an Italian perhaps is shorter than the distance that separates a Dane from a Greek or a Romanian. The differences one can observe between the practices and customs of a Briton and a Portuguese are clearly greater than those between a Portuguese and a Brazilian. These are only shadings of the same and vast family, varied and plural, that -- for the good of everyone -- must make a vigorous effort to strengthen the bonds that unite its members.

In 1993, when the European authorities gathered to establish the minimum requirements to be demanded from the next members of the EU, who finally joined the Union in 2004, they established some basic features that can be summed up in four "musts": a pluralistic democratic behavior; respect for the rule of law and human rights, including the rejection of torture and the death penalty; an economic model that is open to the market and to competition, with control of inflation and public expenditures, and a clear decision to assume the commitments and responsibilities that, on matters of defense and others, came with membership into the supranational organization.

At this point in history, Europe was just that. The Copenhagen Criteria, as the official accord was called, did not include religious or geographic references. There was no mention of language requirements or cultural standards. It seemed a minor matter but wasn't. That Europe, drawn in bold strokes, was the latest synthesis of a great society, open and free, based on rationality and freedom, which -- without eschewing defense -- renounced the aggressive use of force and recognized the full dignity of all persons.

But that Europe -- which in NATO and other institutions, when it invokes the trans-Atlantic bonds, adds the United States and Canada to its historic, cultural, economic and military profile -- will be incomplete or mutilated if it does not integrate in some effective manner the Latin American portion of the planet, as well as Australia and New Zealand, two other offshoots of the European trunk that developed in the faraway Pacific.

None of this has anything to do with a vision of imperial conquest. It seems obvious that the Western big bang, far from losing strength, continues to expand, as stars and galaxies reportedly do in space. But since the mid-20th Century that overwhelming force has acquired a behavior significantly different: the conquest of new territories and the subordination of societies to its practices and customs is no longer by force but prompted by moral conviction and the need for cooperation.

In reality, no one forced the Soviets, East Europe or the Chinese to abandon the Marxist superstitions or the Leninist way to organize the state or economic transactions. What forced them to change course was the overwhelming weight of the results of a global competition they lost. It is true that the English imposed their cultural seal on millenary India, but after that country gained independence we observed not a return to tradition but a growing and successful Westernization of all aspects of Indian coexistence.

In the 1920s, nobody ordered the Turks, then under the strong hand of Attaturk, to secularize relations between society and the state, to change the alphabet and adopt Latin script to bring their country closer to the European cultural fountainheads. They were guided by the conviction that that was the road to defeat the evident process of decadence that had affected Turkey since the 18th Century.

If today almost all the educational authorities in the world, from Kazakhstan to Burundi, make sure their children learn English and computer skills, it's because there is a tacit admission that those are instruments of Western modernity, essential for the acquisition of skills and knowledge that will enable young people to move ahead with greater chances of success. And there is no doubt that along with that knowledge will come a growing need to adopt pluralism, political and economic freedoms, respect for human rights, and the rest of the features that are characteristic of liberal democracy.

It is possible, then, that we are witnessing the definitive triumph of the Western big bang, with a human specie that is increasingly homogeneous in his vital activities and civil behavior. The extraordinary part of this phenomenon is that it's not the triumph of one nation over another but of the hegemony of one way of doing things. While China today looms as the second world power (and who knows if within half a century it might become the first), that title would not belong to it permanently, because the relay of principal protagonism is in the very nature of the Western big bang. Objectively, this opens the door to Latin America's hopes. Whereas 50 years ago China was poorer and more backward than Bolivia or Ecuador, there is no reason to suppose that our countries are inevitably condemned to failure. It all depends on how well they do their jobs during a prolonged period, and nothing would be healthier than if they carry out that task very close to the cultural roots to which they indissolubly belong.

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