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He should take a lead from Chavez example and purge the military as happened after the failed 02 coup. Take this as an opportunity to strengthen the defenses against future America lead interventions.
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Oct 29, 2020 13:14
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It's probably not a good strategy by MAS to start the recriminations immediately, gotta boil the frogs slower, but they're not really being given a choice, considering the fash have already started murdering MAS leaders and openly calling for a second coup. Now, how much outside help can they get? The US is kind of distracted right now, but once the state department reformulates, will Biden try and turn this into Grenada/Chile as part of his reflexive foreign policy hawkishness?
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Oct 29, 2020 13:33
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It's going to happen regardless because Bolivia made the US look stupid. At least if they go in hard now their enemies are on the backfoot and in disarray.
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Oct 29, 2020 13:48
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I read a rumour that MAS actually did have the support of the top brass in last year's coup, like General Kaliman was loyal to Morales and the MAS project, but they were basically couped themselves by a group of junior officers who more or less told them "if you don't go on TV and demand Morales resign, we'll murder you and do it ourselves". Which would explain why Kaliman was himself removed by Anez shortly after the coup. If true, this really means MAS can't rely on replacing a few generals to do the trick, they would really have to do root-and-branch reforms of the entire military, which will take a lot longer and be a lot riskier.
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Oct 29, 2020 14:03
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vyelkin posted:I read a rumour that MAS actually did have the support of the top brass in last year's coup, like General Kaliman was loyal to Morales and the MAS project, but they were basically couped themselves by a group of junior officers who more or less told them "if you don't go on TV and demand Morales resign, we'll murder you and do it ourselves". Which would explain why Kaliman was himself removed by Anez shortly after the coup. That's not a rumor, that's literally what the coup organizers from Santa Cruz dictated into the pro coup microphones everywhere. Most of the top brass was loyal, especially the head of the army, but one coup supporting general was happy to tell the heroic story of how he forced Kaliman to depose Morales by threat of "the colonels are outside with their guns ready if you say the wrong things" before his TV announcement
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Oct 29, 2020 17:40
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vyelkin posted:I read a rumour that MAS actually did have the support of the top brass in last year's coup, like General Kaliman was loyal to Morales and the MAS project, but they were basically couped themselves by a group of junior officers who more or less told them "if you don't go on TV and demand Morales resign, we'll murder you and do it ourselves". Which would explain why Kaliman was himself removed by Anez shortly after the coup. there was also the weird saga of the notionally-MAS attorney general which i stopped following a little ways in, but sorta felt like there might need to be some department of justice (or whatever the bolivian equivalent is called) housecleaning too which makes sense because cops
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Oct 29, 2020 18:34
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Is there a good article about the chilean reform? As in, with the specifics of what changes are wanted. I imagine that with 80% support not everyone is in agreement, but anything would do. Every single article i've seen (admittedly not rom chilean media) has been extremely vague. Basically "get rid of the pinochet consittution to help reduce inequality". But HOW? What's the plan? What phrasing or constitutional guarantees do they what to add? Or what far right stuff is there to remove? I can imagine that guaranteeing a 0 cost higher education for everyone is a priority, but what else?
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Oct 29, 2020 22:36
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I'm not a constitutional scholar at all. This is mostly what I've heard in discourse down here. One of the most spoken of problems is the role of health, social security, and education. The constitution remarks that the government must guarantee access to these systems, whether through public or private. There are public hospitals and schools, but of course like in most places, people with money flee to the private system, causing problems for the public systems. As well, things like UHC and Free education are considered unconstitutional. In the words of the Constitutional Court, the constitution "limits state action within society, opening the widest field possible for private initiative." In the case of social security there isn't even a public option (except for police, military, etc). Instead, there is only a private option and the constitution obligates people to pay into it. There is a part about protecting the lives of unborn children in the constitution. Chile is the only Latin American country whose constitution does not mention indigenous people at all. Public and Municipal workers, along with critical industry workers have no right to strike. There are also some quorums to pass laws which make reform incredibly difficult. Many require 1/2 of all elected deputies (whether in attendance or not), others 4/7 and 3/5 for others. This means many of the most controversial parts of the constitution have no chance of being changed, which flies in the face of the right's campaign slogan "Reject in order to reform." The last one I'll mention here, which I'm not really personally knowledgable about, is many say the presidency has way too much power. This has been most apparent during the protests and pandemic, where the president could very quickly have the military out in the streets, meeting with his generals, etc. I feel like a president shouldn't be able to unilaterally keep us under curfew or state of exception for as long as Piñera has All of this built on a base of a constitution written behind closed doors and approved in a plebiscite which most consider fraudulent. There are lots of nice articles that go into detail in Spanish, but this is the only halfway decent one in English I could find https://chiletoday.cl/whats-wrong-with-the-current-constitution/ Redczar fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Oct 30, 2020 |
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Oct 30, 2020 01:11
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People used to called this piracy, I think https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1321935089433935874
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Oct 30, 2020 15:38
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Mr. Nemo posted:Is there a good article about the chilean reform? As in, with the specifics of what changes are wanted. I imagine that with 80% support not everyone is in agreement, but anything would do. Every single article i've seen (admittedly not rom chilean media) has been extremely vague. Basically "get rid of the pinochet consittution to help reduce inequality". But HOW? What's the plan? What phrasing or constitutional guarantees do they what to add? Or what far right stuff is there to remove? I can imagine that guaranteeing a 0 cost higher education for everyone is a priority, but what else? It's hard to gauge to what degree the 80% that voted apruebo is on the same page (I suppose we'll get an idea after the election of the constitutional assembly on april 11), but from what I've gathered the main changes that have been brought up are dispositions relating to natural resources (i.e. water rights, state ownership and exploitation of mineral deposits, etc) and an explicit treatment of indigenous rights and their relation to the chilean state, with the possibility of declaring Chile a plurinational state in the same vein as Bolivia being floated around (the different demographics suggest that this would have a more symbolic than practical effect, though there does appear to be widespread support to include a quota of reserved seats in the assembly for indigenous representatives, which is a good sign). Other than those two fronts, when it comes to constitutional guarantees what I've seen is less about ading new ones and more about working out the ways of actual, practical enforcement of said rights that will be made available to citizens. One of the things that the 1980 constitution has that is an actual good addition (though I think it harkens back to the 1925 text) is the recurso de protección, which is basically a fast-track legal action that's directly sent to the corresponding Court of Appeals to rule over issues that affect specific infringements on constitutional rights by public or private actors, in a much shorter window of time than normal litigation. It's uhhh like habeas corpus, but protecting a broader list of guarantees? The thing is, it wasn't intended to cover a broad list of guarantees. The 1980 constitution has a list of constitutional rights, and the recurso de protección is explicitly mentioned to only cover a narrow subset of them, chief among them the right to property, because that was the original vision of what rights deserved a fast-track option in court. It only evolved into what it is now because at some point attorneys figured out that they could elevate a recurso de protección for infringements on, say, the right to education, if they claimed that their defendants had an ownership over their right to education and therefore infringements on that would also be infringements on their property. It's profoundly stupid, but it's become widespread because there are either no recourses that effectively address violations on other rights, or the ones that are have been redirected to special courts or organs that are chronically underfunded, understaffed, slow or stacked with members with conflicts of interests (for example, the supervisory agency of pension funds is mostly comprised of former members of the board of said pension funds), so people end up simply going for the recurso de protección for everything. But since the recurso wasn't planned to be used for that, it''s a bit like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, particularly since, given that the chilean judicial system does not use precedent in the same way that Common Law countries do, there is really no way to address systematic, repeated violations of constitutional rights via this method other than presenting on every individual instance of constitutional infringement (the recurso de protección can't be normally presented as a class action), and it will have no binding effect beyond that particular case. An example is what happens with healthcare plans - Chile has a system that can roughly be equated to private healthcare with a public option (or the other way around, since about 80% of the population is on the public system). Private healthcare companies have a long practice of unilaterally altering plan fees due to their clients' gender, age, etc. This was declared unconstitutional over a decade ago. So the healthcare companies keep hiking their prices, and clients will file a recurso de protección. The courts will pretty much unanimously, always, every time, rule in favor of the clients, order the price hike (for that individual client) to be reversed, and usually order the healthcare company to cover the client's legal fees. The thing is, the healthcare companies did their math years ago, and decided that since only a portion of their clients will take these price hikes to court, their profits more than compensate their legal costs, so they just keep doing it. And since there is no option to address these systematic practices beyond the individual cases, you end up with tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of recursos de protección every year, always for the exact same infringement by the exact same actors, completely clogging the courts of appeal and causing a significant impact on the ability of the courts to respond to any other kind of constitutional issue. It's been calculated that between 60 and 80% of all legal actions filed in the entire Chilean judicial system are copy-pasted recursos de protección against unlawful private healthcare plan price hikes, despite less than 20% of the chilean population using the private healthcare system, because there is no method to stop these companies from infringing on constitutional rights literally millions of times per year. And when it comes to addressing systematic abuses, the routine has become pretty predictable (and it was presented as such prominently in the recent campaign for the Apruebo): 1. The education / health / pensions / child welfare system comes under scrutiny, or is revealed as hopelessly corrupt or inadequate. 2. A reform is proposed. 3. The reform passes in parliament. 4. The right wing appeals to the Constitutional Court, denouncing the reform as unconstitutional (usually because it would infringe on the subsidiary principle, right to property or right to free economic activity of the Powers That Be). 5. The constitutional court agrees, and the reforms are nullified or neutered. This runs through the entire field of public policy - even the national consumer watchdog agency was defanged, since its proposed ability to impose fines upon repeated offenders was deemed unconstitutional. The 1980 constitution is a strange beast - I've seen it described in a number of international articles summing up the chilean situation as a "far-right" constitution, and while that label most definitely fit the bill in its original form, it's a bit more complicated now. Basically, the original 1980 text was a classically liberal constitution, with a very mild sprinkle of social rights (not in the least intended as a compromise with the left, but rather as a holdover from the previous 1925 constitution) and with a bunch of authoritarian dispositions jammed into it that belied its dictatorial origin. A few extra modifications were added at the last second by the dictatorship after losing the 1989 referendum, in order to entrench Pinochetism in power even after leaving La Moneda. After the return of democratic rule, getting rid of these portions of the constitution that were clearly authoritarian in nature (termed the "authoritarian enclaves") became a priority on the legislative front. This was kind of an uphill battle, since some of the last-minute Pinochet addendums involved things like the election system (binomial voting), appointment of senators-for-life (mainly coming from retired armed forces generals), requirement of increased quorums for constitutional reforms, and assorted fuckeries. Some of the shortcomings of the 1980 constitution were addressed to some degree via international treaties (mainly in relation to social rights - ratifying an international treaty did not add that text to the constitution, but it gave it identical legal preeminence as the constitution at least when pertaining to human/civil/social rights, so it could be considered a lite constitutional amendment), and (most of) the authoritarian enclaves were eventually undone in reforms in the mid 00s and mid 10s. If you for some reason picked up the current version of the 1980 constitution, you'd be hard-pressed to find articles that particularly jump out as the work of an ultra-conservative cabal of Pinochet-aligned jurists intent on enshrining the principles of the free market and securing Chile as a bulwark against cultural marxism for the coming generations - and, to a degree, that's by design, even on its original inception. The 1980 constitution wasn't intended merely as a consolidation of power by the dictatorship, it was also supposed to give it legitimacy both internally and externally, and to create the fiction that the country was once again under the rule of law. From that point onwards, Pinochet was supposed to stop being General Pinochet and become President Pinochet (this was done at a time when Pinochet was really, really starting to resent having become a pariah on the international stage). This was done by sticking really close to the previous 1925 constitution in tone (less so in content) and by avoiding any obvious ideological tells. Of course, the milicos weren't that dedicated to upholding the fantasy of return to civilian rule, so they still stamped a bunch of authoritarian articles into that first draft, but when those got taken out in the 90s, 00s and 10s you still ended up with a text that was pretty innocuous at a glance.
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Oct 30, 2020 23:54
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I think the most visible criticism of the 1980 Constitution from a (leftist?) constitutional scholar's perspective would be Fernando Atria's, but it's debatable to what degree (if at all) his discourse connects with the chilean population at large. I've seen plenty of socialist and FA politicians giving visibility to Atria, but it's not like the fraction of the electorate that can be influenced by constitutional theory (or by the PS or the FA, while we're at it) is particularly large. People are assuming that Atria will be running for a constituent seat, and if he gets in he could be influential, but since he previously failed to gain much traction as a presidential and legislative candidate, I'm a bit skeptical of his prospects.
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Oct 31, 2020 00:10
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I dunno how to best phrase this so here it goes. A chunk of Latin America's problems can be traced back to the USA loving around with the region, but how has the growth of LA developed differently from the USA (and Canada) that LA was in a susceptible position to begin with? I once saw a glib statement along the lines of "the English were interested in actually building/supporting colonies in the New World so there was a solid foundation for eventual independence. The Spanish OTOH just wanted to strip mine the New World and send everything back to Spain and never cared much about the colonies" Is there any truth to that or is it just a oversimplification?
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Oct 31, 2020 00:25
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:I dunno how to best phrase this so here it goes. A chunk of Latin America's problems can be traced back to the USA loving around with the region, but how has the growth of LA developed differently from the USA (and Canada) that LA was in a susceptible position to begin with? also there was just less... good horizontal conveniently-depopulated space to expand into i'm a big Geography Is Destiny proponent and the Thirteen Colonies were more or less perfectly positioned to evolve into a global powerhouse by finishing off the indigenous nations in a temperate, fertile swathe of the continent not that Spain's colonial propensities were particularly good, but eg Brazil was literally the seat of Portuguese empire for a bit in the 1800s and is currently gigantic, shame about the Amazon existing and all that (and Mexico is pretty formidable, just less formidable than the USA by virtue of being A) less wide and B) further south, leading to being C) so far from God and so close to the United States)
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Oct 31, 2020 00:31
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I'm a bit skeptical of the explanation because America wasn't an uber powerful regional hegemon until this past century, and losing a war against Mexico was a real concern if the later had ever stabilized. Geography and the economy of the elites being focused on things that promoted rapid industrialization as opposed to being dominated by sociopathic cattle ranchers or plantation owners probably had more to do with it. You can't turn coffee and sugarcane into a pair of pants, something of an economic liability in the industrial revolution.
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Oct 31, 2020 00:40
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There was somewhat more of a give-and-take relationship between England and its colonies than Spain and theirs before the 1770s but it's not a major factor in the geopolitical evolution of the Americas.
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Oct 31, 2020 00:46
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:I dunno how to best phrase this so here it goes. A chunk of Latin America's problems can be traced back to the USA loving around with the region, but how has the growth of LA developed differently from the USA (and Canada) that LA was in a susceptible position to begin with? Partly true. I wouldn't say the English were there to build/support colonies necessarily, but the Spanish definitely saw their Empire as a Get-Rich-Quick scheme to be foisted on the far more populous natives in the area. The social and political structures that were put in place by the Spanish definitely lasted in some shape or form in some countries, Colombia's long history of violence can be pretty directly traced from that. The English colonies were certainly different as some, though not all, were meant to be safe havens for unwanted religious minorities, who certainly expected to settle permanently. The Spanish didn't have this issue since their royalty were tightly involved with the Catholic church and their religious minorities had been kicked out of the country during the Reconquista. The lack of major regional power also allowed the colonists in the north to better play off tribes off one another, whereas the Spanish were able to take over much of the existing infrastructure in places like Mexico and Peru and more importantly use the conquered peoples hate of the major powers to their advantage (The Devil you know vs the Devil you don't). Geography is also a good way of discussing some of the issues faced by some but not all the countries south of the Rio Grande. South America in particular has some serious topography to deal with, whether you're discussing the Andes or the Amazon, which makes infrastructure a real challenge, but Central America is swathed with tropical jungles and Mexico itself has to contend with all sorts of difficulty topography, from jungle to mountains to deserts, (remember all the Western US was once Mexico from 1600-1846 so consider the difficulty of keeping all that under-wraps). To take Colombia again as an example, it has three tenacious mountain ranges that split the country just so, that help fuel the political strife between Liberales and Conservadores (Federalists and Centralists among other things) which again factors in a huge way into that country's history of violence. This is because since you'd get regions that would be cut-off by months of communication to the Emperor, a local caudillo would sort of just de facto rule and would bristle to some degree to get instructions from the higher-ups. Zedhe Khoja posted:I'm a bit skeptical of the explanation because America wasn't an uber powerful regional hegemon until this past century, and losing a war against Mexico was a real concern if the later had ever stabilized. Geography and the economy of the elites being focused on things that promoted rapid industrialization as opposed to being dominated by sociopathic cattle ranchers or plantation owners probably had more to do with it. Had the US lost the Mexican-American War, woah... that would've been wild. The bolded is again everyone wanting their own fiefdom to do what they wanted, which was just how the Spanish had run the place before they were kicked out. Latin America, having fought for its independence after both the American and French revolutions, could've been genuinely radical, and there were radicals present in most countries, but they were beaten back by the powers at be and the Church so that those on top, could continue to remain so. Latin America is actually perfect proof of how moderates are terrible and will always side with the conservatives when push comes to shove for fear of the radicals. It happens time after time after time since the independence to today.
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Oct 31, 2020 00:58
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The English had a lot of religious dissidents that they dumped onto the 13 colonies, and they even beefed up those numbers by exporting a lot of criminals and various undesirables, which they would later do the same with Canada and Australia (Notably not the British empire's big moneymaking colonies, where they maintained more dictatorial colonial control). Britain went through a whole population explosion and had a lot of people to just dump wherever (even after the US went independent, British people would keep immigrating to the US), and those people wound up having ideas about self-organizing into legislative bodies like parliament. Spain didn't have the same policy of dumping off its citizenry, and they had already done a pretty thorough job of making sure that there weren't religious dissidents to put on boats. A whole lot of the population of their empire was just the people they conquered and the people they sent over to keep those people in line, so the Spaniards more effectively could suppress the area. At least until the whole empire was decapitated (metaphorically) by Napoleon and all bets were off. And then by the time most of Latin America emerged into independence, the US had a head start and was older and bigger than most of them. Definitely it was in a better condition than Mexico right after Mexico had fought a couple regional rebellions, and after the war, the US had basically no regional challengers to inhibit its growth and only one major internal disruption, so it had an easier time building up and venturing into international relations to climb its way up to becoming a great power.
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Oct 31, 2020 04:29
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Zedhe Khoja posted:I'm a bit skeptical of the explanation because America wasn't an uber powerful regional hegemon until this past century, and losing a war against Mexico was a real concern if the later had ever stabilized. Geography and the economy of the elites being focused on things that promoted rapid industrialization as opposed to being dominated by sociopathic cattle ranchers or plantation owners probably had more to do with it. The US solidly gained economic momentum across the 19th century in a way that the rest of the Americas couldn't for structural reasons. By 1898, the US was arguably already a "great power" and the first and second world wars wiped the floor with most of the competition until the US dominated the world. A lack of competition in North America helped a lot as well. It isn't to say Latin America had its own growing powers, such as Argentina, but Argentina despite its accelerating wealth during the 19th/early 20th century wasn't able to harness it into industrial like the US was able to (probably a relative lack of coal/iron reserves was a contributing factor). Under Peron there was still development, but once the military got in and then various neo-liberal governments there wasn't anywhere to go. Basically, from the late 1960s to the early 2000s, Argentina didn't really go anywhere. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Oct 31, 2020 |
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Oct 31, 2020 04:48
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i think you can lay 90% of the reason why the us became so dominant at the hands of the location of the population centers of the us vs the population centers in latin america. the spanish colonies were defined by having large colonies interspersed with more or less impassable geographical boundaries as well as native cultures that the spanish culture overlayed onto - what this meant is that latin america had a much, much more significant difference in culture from like e.g. mexico to peru. then, because the population was so spread out, industrialization was much more expensive and slower. the issue wasnt that there werent enough people in latin america - new spain had a much, much larger population than the 13 colonies - but that these larger states were ended up breaking apart due to cultural differences and regionalist tendencies.
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Oct 31, 2020 19:39
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I remember speaking to a Latin American about this and they said that Britain treated their North American nations as "settlements" while Spain and Portugal treated their South American nations like "colonies".
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Oct 31, 2020 21:16
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punk rebel ecks posted:I remember speaking to a Latin American about this and they said that Britain treated their North American nations as "settlements" while Spain and Portugal treated their South American nations like "colonies". That is what we are taught at school, so it is the general consensus.
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Oct 31, 2020 21:27
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Would it be correct to categorize colonialism in Latin America as being a sort of hybrid between full blown Settler Colonialism and the resource colonialism in places like India?
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Nov 1, 2020 01:39
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I can’t speak for India in any way but that would seem correct especially in the later stages of the colonies. The wealth was never meant to stay in the region and for a lot of Peninsulares the goal was to own land to further enrich their holdings back in Spain, which is a part of conflict they would have with American-based Criollos.
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Nov 1, 2020 08:38
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punk rebel ecks posted:I remember speaking to a Latin American about this and they said that Britain treated their North American nations as "settlements" while Spain and Portugal treated their South American nations like "colonies". This is definitely a simplification though. It's not just nakedly the case that the 13 colonies were settled colonies whereas all of latin america were the type of exploitation colonies you saw in India and Africa. I think the degree to which this resulted in the difference in outcome between latin america and the us is usually exaggerated. The difference in geography and the way that the Spanish colonial empire was divided, especially after the Bourbon reforms, had a much more significant impact on political fragmentation before and after the independence wars. After independence, of course, the geography that led to the political divisions of the post independence latin america would also make it much more difficult to engage in the same type of industrialization going on in the us. Having an entrenched land owning gentry obviously also wasn't particularly good for political stability which fed into all the other issues that led to the dominance of the us in the americas.
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Nov 2, 2020 15:52
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The US also still had ties to the uncontested greatest of the great powers while Spain was in a major decline.
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Nov 2, 2020 16:11
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I had the impression that one of the other major differences between the US and Latin America was a the difference between the foundation/set up of the various colonies. The English northern colonies were granted charters and brought in line with royal governors but were set up by the founders while the Latin American colonies were more centrally organised and administered. Perhaps ironically there was a far less central force in the push for independence as well, the US saw the 13 colonies band together to declare independence with a final unified vision of what they wanted. In Latin America you saw instead a more opportunistic push for independence resulting from Napoleon's seizing of the Spanish crown, which weakened the sense of ownership by Spain, and individual actors (primarily Bolivar and San Martin) who had very different visions of what they were trying to achieve without going through the process of coming to an agreement. San Martin specifically thought that the various colonies should maintain independence from each other and without going through the process of hammering out a compromised vision as happened in the US Continental Congress. This was compounded by the geographic spread with the 13 colonies all being relatively close to each other. The expansion to the rest of the continent happened as a project of the newly United States rather than as new colonial efforts driven by the motherland. There was probably an initial similarity but the future USA was united by a single 'enemy' and had a (relatively) smaller and more compact geography. Latin American countries lacked that fundamental bonding of fighting for independence as part of a single group from what I can tell. The fact most countries were 'liberated' at different times and set up their own constitutions really did lay the ground work for staying separate.
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Nov 2, 2020 16:47
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It's also worthwhile to note that probably the single biggest reason for the 13 colonies to have become a single state was the external threat of the various native american peoples to the west. There was never any significant external threat that could cause the former spanish colonies to band together.
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Nov 2, 2020 16:55
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As far as I know, there's also the unfortunate fact of population distribution and genocide meaning North America had a far lower indigenous population. Like even just the Wiki summary gives a sense of this:quote:Given the fragmentary nature of the evidence, even semi-accurate pre-Columbian population figures are thought impossible to obtain. Scholars have varied widely on the estimated size of the indigenous populations prior to colonization and on the effects of European contact.[3] Estimates are made by extrapolations from small bits of data. In 1976, geographer William Denevan used the existing estimates to derive a "consensus count" of about 54 million people. Nonetheless, more recent estimates still range widely.[4] In 1992, Denevan suggested that the total population was approximately 53.9 million and the populations by region were, approximately, 3.8 million for North America, 17.2 million for Mexico, 5.6 million for Central America, 3 million for the Caribbean, 15.7 million for the Andes and 8.6 million for lowland South America.[5] Even though something like 90% of indigenous populations in most of these areas died from disease and genocide, that still leads to wildly diverging populations. If you take those 1992 estimates and do a very simplistic 90% reduction, that means all of North America left with 380,000 indigenous people compared to over a million in the smaller geographic areas of Mexico and the Andes (one estimate puts Mexico's population decline to one million by the end of the 16th century). While that's obviously catastrophic, a million people was still enough to run a society in Mexico with a small population of Spanish rulers above them. As a result, Spanish colonization was comparatively more able to replace indigenous elites with Spanish ones and take over existing patterns of wealth extraction. North American colonization was less able to do that because there was a smaller indigenous population to exploit and a bigger geographic territory to extract resources from. There's a reason North American settlers thought they were landing in a virgin land prepared for them by God while the Spanish thought they were conquering a land full of foreign people, and it's because the smaller population of indigenous people who had lived in North America died and left behind more land with fewer people in it than the larger populations of indigenous people in Central and South America. But that also contributed to differing settlement patterns, because there wasn't a native population to exploit. Culturally it meant settlers were more likely to be people who were interested in founding a colony of their own (if you were British and wanted to just go overseas for a few years to exploit some foreigners and make money before heading back to Britain, you went to India, not the Thirteen Colonies), and demographically it meant instead of exploiting indigenous workers as the Spanish could in Mexico or the Andes, there was a greater emphasis on white settlement and imported slave labour. This is not my area of expertise so I'm open to being corrected, but my understanding is that this differential population distribution was part of what led to the different outcomes. If there was a much larger indigenous population in North America, European settlement there probably would have tended more towards the same extractive-colony settlement model because the resources there would have been more exploitable without importing new populations of Europeans and Black Africans.
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Nov 2, 2020 17:07
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Geography as destiny as well plays in when you consider that British colonies in the Caribbean didn't group together despite being pretty equivalent to the 13 colonies (or at least some of the southern ones such as Virginia or South Carolina). I guess in terms of connection to the colonial centre and indigenous populations, Latin America was probably closer to Africa for European powers engaged there with a couple of centuries head-start for the colonisers. And actually things shook out in a somewhat similar manner to colonial independence there, bearing in mind the relative population differences.
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Nov 2, 2020 17:44
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MrNemo posted:There was probably an initial similarity but the future USA was united by a single 'enemy' and had a (relatively) smaller and more compact geography. Latin American countries lacked that fundamental bonding of fighting for independence as part of a single group from what I can tell. The fact most countries were 'liberated' at different times and set up their own constitutions really did lay the ground work for staying separate. Size and geography cannot be understated. The Empire was already divided into Vice-royalties because they couldn't possible be all controlled by a single ruler in one place. The landmass from Northern California/Washington State to Argentina is HUGE. And while it wasn't all densely populated it just wasn't possible to keep it unified. The 13 Colonies were large, but still rather coastal, and had rather friendly waters to ply amongst them, when the roads wouldn't work. There's no major mountain chains on the east coast, no impassable geography aside from a couple of large rivers and swamplands. Sampatrick posted:It's also worthwhile to note that probably the single biggest reason for the 13 colonies to have become a single state was the external threat of the various native american peoples to the west. There was never any significant external threat that could cause the former spanish colonies to band together. Yep because again, the Spanish had conquered the Continent with only the interior and jungles left to be colonized and with all the Incan gold they had, why bother?
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Nov 2, 2020 18:47
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Chile news: Lol that they canned former interior minister Blumel to appease the far right and his replacement, whose political career started when he was appointed by Pinochet as a mayor, only got 3 months before he was accused constitutionally in the Congress. The senate is a foregone conclusion.  Edit: aaaaaaaaaand he’s already resigned Redczar fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Nov 3, 2020 |
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Nov 3, 2020 20:07
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Interesting discussion. But why did Canada develope then if it was still under British rule and much well less coastally from what I understand?
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Nov 3, 2020 22:57
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Canada gained de facto independence far later it seems. I don't know much about the subject but a quick search reveals that the colonies of Canada (Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia) became Canada and were given Dominion status in 1867, at which point they were essentially free to rule themselves with caveats (own laws and financial and defense independence but still have have a rather powerful appointed Governor-General). They didn't gain full autonomy until 1931 though the British could still amend their constitution until the 1982 it seems, with the English Monarch as their Monarch. The main point is Canada was for a long time ruled under English interests, especially during key moments of the industrial revolution, and I have no doubt that their resources were important to the UK during this time, and so they would've had an interest in upping their infrastructure and keeping things together. At least that's my very quick and un-studied take on the matter.
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Nov 3, 2020 23:09
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Redczar posted:Chile news: Lol that they canned former interior minister Blumel to appease the far right and his replacement, whose political We hardly knew you, Patrick Swayze's mentor from Ghost (1990). And Rozas is still just... there
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Nov 3, 2020 23:20
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punk rebel ecks posted:Interesting discussion. But why did Canada develope then if it was still under British rule and much well less coastally from what I understand? why should canada being part of british rule mean it should not develop?
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Nov 4, 2020 01:03
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Sampatrick posted:why should canada being part of british rule mean it should not develop? I was under the impression that the early a nation undergoes independence the sooner it's development strive begins.
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Nov 4, 2020 01:23
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100YrsofAttitude posted:Canada gained de facto independence far later it seems. I don't know much about the subject but a quick search reveals that the colonies of Canada (Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia) became Canada and were given Dominion status in 1867, at which point they were essentially free to rule themselves with caveats (own laws and financial and defense independence but still have have a rather powerful appointed Governor-General). They didn't gain full autonomy until 1931 though the British could still amend their constitution until the 1982 it seems, with the English Monarch as their Monarch. Canada's Confederation was a mutually agreed upon form of self-rule. The dominions were becoming increasingly expensive for Britain to support, and the provinces (especially the larger ones, what became Quebec and Ontario) wanted to make it easier for domestic trade. There were other issues like the rebellions in 1837 that rocked the political landscape, forcing Britain to send in an envoy to assess the problem (surprise, it was related to land owning families owning all the land!) and try to provide some kind of self-rule legislature. That kickstarted the whole process. The American Civil War, and raids into British North American by Irish nationalists (Fenians) also pushed the various provinces into Confederation. What Canada got in 1867 was full autonomy concerning its domestic affairs. But Britain still determined its foreign policy. 1931 was when it gained formal control over its foreign policy, and the constitution was only formally patriated in 1982 with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Trade with Britain was important but was waning even at the turn of the 20th century. The First World War really jumpstarted Canada's industrial production, as did its proximity to the United States; by the end of the Second World War Canad had the fourth largest navy in the world (a very distant fourth).
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Nov 4, 2020 02:07
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Canada benefited from being not being a big moneymaking colony so that it wasn't strictly controlled by its parent nation and having fairly amiable and peaceful relations with its only neighbor that was busy becoming one of the top economies in the world. And then by coincidence, their oil industry took off right after the parent nation negotiated to give them more autonomy in exchange for military manpower. That probably helped things along.
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Nov 5, 2020 17:22
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Bolivian fascists tried to merc Arce with a dynamite attack tonight https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bolivias-President-Elect-Luis-Arce-Attacked-With-Dynamite-20201106-0001.html https://mobile.twitter.com/KawsachunNews/status/1324555254604668929 mA fucked around with this message at 07:34 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 07:05
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loving hell
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Nov 6, 2020 07:59
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