Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONpeasant's wrongs was the universal political ideal. To the rebellionsof men like Kolokotrones, brigand and cattle-dealer, the nationalists ofthe Western type gave leadership and a pan-hellenic rather than apurely local scale. In turn they got from them that unique and aweinspiringthing, the mass rising of an armed people.The new Greek nationalism was enough to win independence, thoughthe combination of middle class leadership, klephtic disorganizationand great power intervention produced one of those petty caricaturesof the Western liberal ideal which were to become so familiar in areaslike Latin America. But it also had the paradoxical result of narrowingHellenism to Hellas, and thus creating or intensifying the latent nationalismof the other Balkan peoples. While being Greek had been littlemore than the professional requirement of the literate Orthodox BalkanChristian, hellenization had made progress. Once it meant the politicalsupport for Hellas, it receded, even among the assimilated Balkanliterate classes. In this sense Greek independence was the essential preliminarycondition for the evolution of the other Balkan nationalisms.Outside Europe it is difficult to speak of nationalism at all. Thenumerous Latin American republics which replaced the brokenSpanish and Portuguese Empires (to be accurate, Brazil became andremained an independent monarchy from 1816 to 1889), their frontiersoften reflecting little more than the distribution of the estates of thegrandees who had backed one rather than another of the local rebellions,began to acquire vested political interests and territorial aspirations.The original pan-American ideal of Simon Bolivar (1783-1830)of Venezuela and San Martin (1778-1850) of the Argentine wasimpossible to realize, though it has persisted as a powerful revolutionarycurrent throughout all the areas united by the Spanish language, justas pan-Balkanism, the heir of Orthodox unity against Islam, persistedand may still persist today. The vast extent and variety of the continent,the existence of independent foci of rebellion in Mexico (which determinedCentral America), Venezuela and Buenos Aires, and the specialproblem of the centre of Spanish colonialism in Peru, which wasliberated from without, imposed automatic fragmentation. But theLatin American revolutions were the work of small groups of patricians,soldiers and gallicized eVolue\ leaving the mass of the Catholic poorwhite population passive and the Indians indifferent or hostile. Only inMexico was independence won by the initiative of a popular agrarian,i.e. Indian movement marching under the banner of the Virgin ofGuadalupe, and Mexico has consequently ever since followed a differentand politically more advanced road from the remainder ofcontinental Latin America. However, even among the tiny layer of the142