The Omnipresence of the State? The Twentieth Century

Abstract

Described recently as an ineffectual "Paper Leviathan," 1 the nineteenth-century Latin American state was hardly an omnipresent figure. As we shall see, two distinctive features of the region's historical development appeared as obstacles to the construction of an efficient state administrative machinery. First, despite the alleged centralist colonial heritage, 2 many observers lamented the structural weakness of the Latin American states that obstructed minimum acceptable levels of administrative control. Second, the new disciplines of public administration and administrative law, two bodies of knowledge born in European monarchical settings, and its institutions, such as a separate administrative jurisdiction, seemed to be incompatible with the fervent republican and democratic spirit that ran through the new nations, notwithstanding the Brazilian empire.Despite numerous difficulties, however, by the early twentieth century, the Latin American states had gone through considerable transformations. Traveling through South America at the time, James Bryce, author of the renowned American Commonwealth, stated that "the growth of property and the development of industrial habits" brought about by economic modernization in the region had a stabilizing effect and served as a motor of progress. His conclusion was positive, "taking the eleven South American states as a whole, their condition is better than it was sixty years ago," and comparisons with European ideal types of state development appeared unfair: 6