Introduction

The Centennial of Panamanian Independence in 2003 is no less poignant for the fact that it comes at a time when the future of National Sovereignty itself has been increasingly questioned. The dizzying velocity of global capital and the rise of institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund have led some to wonder whether the era of nation-states has come to an end. Many participants in the so-called "globalization debate" have questioned the capacity and even the propriety of state-led attempts to shape transnational economic processes through trade protection, tariffs, and other measures. The more apocalyptic predictions about the imminent demise of the nation-state may seem hopelessly overblown in the wake of the United State’s war on Iraq. But it is nevertheless the case that national and local governments in many parts of the world have found it increasingly difficult to balance the demands of increasingly mobile capital with the exigencies of local Sovereignty.²

In an era in which the interests of global capital and bordered States seem so often at odds, it may be instructive to investigate how States have struggled in the past to perform this balancing act.³ For the challenge in itself is an old one, even if important aspects of our current condition, such as the rise of the internet, are unquestionably new. Indeed, Panamanians have grappled with different configurations of this problem since winning independence from Spain in 1821. And of all those Panamanians who have written about and attempted to solve or at least ameliorate this problem since that time, none is more justly renowned than Justo Arosemena, the foremost Panamanian intellectual of the nineteenth century.⁴

The Dream of Emporium

The Panamanian declaration of independence from Spain in 1821 implied a recognition by Panama’s mercantile elite that the future of the Interoceanic route across Panama would hinge largely on private capital. Neither Panama nor Gran Colombia possessed either the wealth or the technology to support a massive undertaking such as the construction of a canal or a railroad. And so boosters of Interoceanic communication in Panama looked North to the industrial centers of the Atlantic, including Paris, London, and, by the 1840s, New York City.⁵

In return for foreign investment, the different governments that ruled Panama during the remainder of the nineteenth century offered access to the thinnest strip of land between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Unfortunately for the boosters, however, the thinnest strip of land was not necessarily the most appropriate place to build a canal, railroad or other mode of transport. There were other considerations as well, including not only aspects of local topography such as mountains and rivers but also relative distance to pre-existing maritime routes, political stability, and health risks.

Panamanian leaders were acutely aware that they faced competition from other routes on the isthmus connecting North and South America, even as they extolled what they argued were the superior virtues of their homeland. And so boosters sought to shore up their competitive position by advocating for additional incentives for private investors, including the reduction or elimination of taxes and importation duties as well as grants of Public land. Modeling themselves after the Hanseatic League of medieval Europe, prominent members of Panama City’s mercantile elite called in 1825 for the transformation of Panama into a "país hanseático" or "Hanseatic country"-- diplomatically neutral, open to trade for all, and protected by mutual agreement among the world’s Great powers.⁶ The goal of this and other elite visions of government in the early nineteenth century was to recapture or recreate the importance that Panama had possessed throughout much of the colonial period as an emporium or marketplace for merchants drawn by the promise of easy access to the goods of both the Pacific and the Atlantic—an importance that had all but disappeared by the time of the Spanish empire’s collapse on the American mainland.

But the dream of emporium contained within it a problem that was rarely acknowledged openly by boosters in the early nineteenth century. What if a government succeeded in attracting sufficient foreign investment to revivify the transit route, but then failed to raise the revenue required to govern the route once the traffic began to flow again? This is precisely the problem that provincial officials of Panama faced in the late 1840s and early 1850s, when U.S. and British expansion in the Pacific and then the discovery of gold in California led to a boom in traffic across the Panamanian Isthmus from the United States and other points in the Atlantic World.

The Federalist Alternative

There was no better diagnostician of this problem in the mid-nineteenth century than Justo Arosemena. El Estado Federal de Panamá, Arosemena’s best known work, was completed in February of 1855 and published shortly thereafter in Bogota. This essay was Arosemena’s attempt to justify his ultimately successful bid to establish Panama as a "federal state"—a special zone within the Republic of New Granada with autonomy in all respects except those relating to foreign relations, military operations ("fuerza public"), and the national treasury.⁷

As Arosemena explained in El Estado Federal, Panama in the late 1840s and early 1850s did become an emporium of sorts, but with unforeseen consequences for governance. The boom in traffic across Panama led initially to a dramatic rise in prices and drew migrants to Panama itself from points in South and Central America as well as the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe. But as Arosemena recognized, this boom was a precarious one. Panama faced competition from other competing transit routes, particularly the Nicaragua Route, which increased in popularity over the early 1850s. The high cost of labor, driven up by the demand for transportation, hurt agricultural production in Panama, while local artisans found it difficult to compete against imported goods. The building of the Panama Railroad, begun in 1850 and inaugurated in January of 1855, reduced the time that travelers spent in Panama and thus weakened demand for other services. Most distressing of all, the national government of New Granada had left the Province of Panama with few means to raise revenue to sustain itself. And when the provincial government attempted to place a tax on ships using Panamanian ports, foreign governments often refused to pay.

The most vociferous resistance to local efforts at taxation came from U.S. officials, who based their arguments in their interpretation of the Mallarino-Bidlack Treaty of 1846 between the United States and New Granada, by which the United States had promised to guarantee New Granadan sovereignty over Panama and the neutrality of the transit route in return for access to the route under the same terms granted to citizens of New Granada.⁸ The combination of foreign intransigence and national shortsightedness led to chronic budget problems for local governments in Panama. The gravity of this situation was compounded by the dramatically increased burdens of governance caused by increase in population and commerce that accompanied the Gold Rush. The provincial government and other local governments in Panama such as the Cabildo of Panama City descended into a state of near collapse, understaffed and insufficiently funded, even as a fortune in gold coursed over the isthmus every year.⁹

Arosemena’s solution to this problem in El Estado Federal was to propose a compromise between Panama and the national government of New Granada. In return for protecting Panama from foreign conquest and representing Panama’s interests in the realm of diplomacy, New Granada would receive a regular subsidy to its treasury from the revenues of the Panama Railroad Company (of New York City) and increased access to foreign markets by way of its special relationship to the transit route. Relieved of the immense cost of its own defense, the Federal State of Panama would fund itself through other means that did not unduly impede the flow of traffic across the isthmus, including the sale of public lands and taxes on the use of its ports.

While Arosemena regarded political independence to be Panama’s "gran desideratum," as he put it in El Estado Federal,¹⁰ he treated the possibility of independence from Bogota not so much as a positive end in itself but rather as the most likely of a number of outcomes that could result if the Congress of New Granada failed to approve his plan for federalization.¹¹ This rather guarded approach to the topic of outright independence was undoubtedly rooted in part in the fact that El Estado Federal was written as an appeal to the New Granadan Congress, whose members might have look unfavorably at overt enthusiasm for a complete break with the Central Government, especially given New Granada’s significant interests in the Isthmus, including its potentially lucrative contract with the Panama Railroad Company. Arosemena was nevertheless insistent about Panama’s right to disassociate itself from the Republic if it so desired, a right that was grounded in the fact that Panama had joined Colombia of its own free will only after winning its independence on its own from Spain. This vision of the Republic as an essentially voluntary association was by no means peculiar to himself or to Panamanians, as Arosemena was at pains to point out. Only a year before, in 1854, the Congress of New Granada had itself declared that any of the Republic’s constituent parts possessed the right to declare independence from the whole.¹²

Arosemena’s doubts about the wisdom of Panamanian independence in the present (if not in the future) arose not from concerns about Panamanians’ capacity for self-rule but rather in his reservations about National Sovereignty itself as a form of governance. Arosemena expressed grave doubts about what he referred to as "la gran nacionalidad," or the concept of "great nationality," which for him implied a large, centralized government that held sway over a number of small nationalities or communities ("pequeñas nacionalidades") with disparate if not competing interests. This form of government was at once too overbearing and too narrow in its interests to meet the needs of a mercantile center such as Panama, which posed special problems of governance that differed from the other regions of New Granada. Too overbearing, in the sense that great nations almost inevitably ignored local interests or subordinated those interests to those of the central government, usually by force rather than by consent of the governed. Too narrow, in that centralized governments posed a threat to the special requirements that were necessary for the prosperity of a world emporium of the kind Panama was destined to become.¹³

As Arosemena’s proposal for a federal state indicates, and in contrast to a number of other theorists of Sovereignty in the nineteenth century and in the present, he regarded Sovereignty and independence to be distinct concepts. For Arosemena, a state might relinquish certain forms of governmental control without losing Sovereignty over others.¹⁴ Indeed, Arosemena argued that a state’s capacity to conduct its own internal affairs might be heightened rather than weakened by delegating certain aspects of government, notably defense and diplomacy, to another entity, such as a larger State or a confederation of States. The aspect of Sovereignty that mattered most to Arosemena, what he called "la verdadera sociedad," or "True Society," was what he referred to variously as "poder municipal" (municipal power), "el municipio" (the municipality), and "el común" (the commons), meaning the power of cities, small nationalities, and other close-knit communities to rule themselves according to their citizens’ own interests.¹⁵

Arosemena left largely unanswered the question of who within Panama itself would have access to citizenship, although various writings of his in this period do give some indication of this thoughts. What they suggest is that as radical as Arosemena’s theory of Sovereignty may have been, his vision of self-government identified Panama’s self interest with that of Panama City’s male, merchant elite. In El Estado Federal, Arosemena expressed skepticism regarding universal manhood suffrage, implying that a retreat from the expansive franchise provided for by the Constitution of 1853 might be in order.¹⁶ In contrast to some more radical Liberals in New Granada in the mid-1850s, he made no mention of the Political Rights of women in his writings. And like a number of prominent nationalists in twentieth-century Panama, he was critical of the presence of West Indian blacks in Panamanian Society. Arosemena was also an avowed enemy of slavery and criticized what he regarded as the barbaric treatment of people of African descent by "americanos" (meaning Anglos from the United States) both in the United States and in Panama. As for Indians, his lack of reference to them in the present suggests that he saw little or no role for them in Panama’s political future, although he denounced their slaughter by the Spanish during the Conquest.¹⁷

Conclusion

Knowing as we do what happened in Panama in 1903, it may be tempting to read El Estado Federal merely as a rough draft or preliminary proposal for the creation of Panama as an independent nation. But there is a danger that in explaining away Arosemena’s support for federalism we may miss the importance of his trenchant critique of the nation itself as a form of governance. Too often, nationalists and the historians who study them have written of nationalism and empire as if they were polar opposites, without considering either the possible complicity between imperialism and nationalism or alternatives to national Sovereignty such as Arosemena’s vision of divided Sovereignty or confederation.¹⁸

A similarly false dichotomy appears in much of the historiography of nation-formation and regionalism in Latin America, in which the History of nation building or state formation is too often portrayed as a battle pitting the "patria chica" in its various forms against the "nation" or the "state"—the presumption being that the national leaders are somehow broader in their political vision than regional leaders. But from Arosemena’s perspective as he wrote El Estado Federal in 1855, it was the advocates of centralized government in Bogota who suffered from tunnel vision. Limited by their quest to enhance the power of the state under their own nose, they failed to see that Panama was simply too significant to be left to the whims of any single nation.

Before we dismiss Arosemena’s federalist vision as excessively idealistic, let us at least acknowledge that the Westphalian system of independent, sovereign nations is not the only possible nor even necessarily the most desirable world order. Arosemena’s argument that Panama’s great resource, its geographical position, could best be sustained through cooperation and alliances across borders rather than relentless competition among States could easily be expanded today to apply to other issues of global importance that are currently at the mercy of national governments yet are nevertheless of "interés universal," to use Arosemena’s language. One thinks immediately of environmental issues, such as efforts to halt the destruction of rain forests or curb the emission of gasses that contribute to global warming. As blasphemous as it may seem in a world in which the concepts of "nation" and "self-determination" have become hopelessly conflated, we may also have something to learn from Arosemena’s insight that independence in its absolute form is not necessarily the best strategy for the protection of all or even the most important aspects of self-rule.

As Panamanians know better than any other people in the Americas, and as Arosemena argued so eloquently in El Estado Federal, Sovereignty is the work not of a single day or year but rather an ongoing process that must be continually redefined and reevaluated if it is to retain meaning. When nations disregard the interests of their citizens and diminish the lives of those living outside their borders as well, can people be blamed for seeking to transform not only the internal organization of a given state but the very nature of geopolitical order itself? This is the question that Arosemena posed in El Estado Federal, and it is no less relevant now than it was in 1855 or 1903.

vuelve 1. I would like to thank the Comisión Nacional del Centenario for sponsoring a series of three talks in Panama City in November 2001 in which I presented a preliminary version of the following essay. I received extremely helpful suggestions on a later draft from Dr. Guevara Mann at the meeting of the Latin American Studies Association in Dallas in March 2003. I would also like to acknowledge a special debt of gratitude to Alfredo Castillero Calvo, Alfredo Figueroa Navarro, Argelia Tello Burgos, and the Torres Moreno Family.

vuelve 2. For a useful compilation of different perspectives on the question of globalization, see David Held and Anthony McGrew, The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).

vuelve 3. Among other formulations of this problem in the present, see David Harvey’s discussion of “flexible accumulation” in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry in the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

vuelve 4. For a sampling of some of the most important scholarship on Justo Arosemena, including selections by José Dolores Moscote, Octavio Méndez Pereira, Ricaurte Soler, Argelia Tello Burgos, Nils Castro, Humberto Ricord, and Miguel Candanedo, see the special issue of Tareas 92 (Jan.-April 1996).

vuelve 5. Alfredo Castillero Calvo is the preeminent historian of the transit route from the sixteenth century to the present. Among other works, see his recent synthesis, La Ruta Interoceánica y el Canal de Panama (Panama City: Colegio Panameño de Historiadores e Instituto del Canal de Panama y Estudios Internacionales/Universidad de Panama, 1999).

vuelve 6. On early formulations of the idea of a “país hanseático,” see Alfredo Castillero Calvo, “El movimiento anseatista de 1826: La primera tentativa autonomista de los istmeños después de la anexión a Colombia,” Tareas 4 (May-July 1961); Alfredo Figueroa Navarro, Dominio y sociedad en el Panama colombiano (Panama City: Editorial Universitaria de Panama, 1982), 243-244; and Celestino Andrés Araúz and Patricia Pizzurno, El Panama Colombiano (Panama City: Primer Banco de Ahorros y Diario La Prensa de Panama), 25-35.

vuelve 7. On the troubled relationship between the military and democracy in Panama, see Carlos Guevara Mann, Panamanian Militarism: A Historical Interpretation (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1996).

vuelve 8. Arosemena, El Estado Federal de Panama (1855; Panama City: Editorial Universitaria de Panama, 1982), 75-79.

vuelve 9. Arosemena, El Estado Federal, 75-77.

vuelve 10. Arosemena, El Estado Federal, 39.

vuelve 11. Arosemena, El Estado Federal, 39, 68.

vuelve 12. Arosemena, El Estado Federal, 36-37, 71-72.

vuelve 13. Arosemena, El Estado Federal, 9-10.

vuelve 14. Arosemena, El Estado Federal, 74.

vuelve 15. Arosemena, El Estado Federal, 14-15.

vuelve 16. Arosemena, El Estado Federal, 85.

vuelve 17. On the racial limits of Arosemena’s political imagination, see McGuinness, “Searching for ‘Latin America,’” 101-102.

vuelve 18. On the complicities of nationalism and colonialism, see the work of Partha Chatterjee, including Nationalist Through and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986), as well as Martha Kaplan and John D. Kelley, Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), which takes a more favorable view than does Chatterjee of the possibilities of liberalism in the context of decolonization.

*Dirección: Associate Professor Mary Addis*