John V. Lombardi
University of Massachusetts Amherst
September 2002

Friends and colleagues, it is a pleasure to participate in this symposium sponsored by the Fulbright Association of Venezuela. My permanent engagement with the history and life of Venezuela began many years ago under the Fulbright name, and for that opportunity, I am continuously grateful. It is also a privilege to participate in this symposium with our Ambassador Charles Shapiro whose distinguished diplomatic career is a model of achievement and with a colleague of many years, Professor Janet Kelly, whose contemporary analysis and commentary have informed us all.

We historians often find ourselves in these circumstances; accompanying experts, whose knowledge of current affairs and whose engagement in the important issues of state greatly exceed our own modest participation. It is an adventure nonetheless to bring the past into the present as a reliable witness for the future. While we historians cannot predict the future, nor are we usually engaged in the management of the present, we can offer an understanding of the power that the past holds over our options for the future.

No country can escape from its past, although it can learn from it. No country can reinvent itself for a different future without understanding the depth of the historical structures that have brought it forward to the present. Often, in our enthusiasm for rebuilding the world in a better way, we underestimate the power of the past, we imagine that we can restart history for our generation, with only a ceremonial nod to the structure history has given us.

Most such attempts fail, not because the participants lack the will or the intelligence, not because they lack skill or commitment, but because the underestimate the strength of the past. They imagine that what is today exists only as an accidental consequence of temporary phenomenon instead of the result of deep structures anchored in the past and reinforced by the history of many other nations.

Today, when Venezuela struggles with a conversation about its future, and when alternative visions of that future occupy the international conversation among Venezuelans and between Venezuelans and their colleagues abroad, a symposium of this kind can help focus some of the conversation, at least that part that involves the United States. My opportunity here is to offer a historical perspective on the nature of the US-Venezuelan conversation about our mutual future.

The Magic Words

Democracy and progress. Fairness and participation. Freedom and opportunity. Wonderful words all. Most of us in the Americas subscribe to these powerful words, embrace them as foundational principles for our lives and nations, object when denied the values they suggest, and clamor for their implementation in all of our societies.

Like all totemic words, these have meta-meanings, powerful content that evokes sharp commitment, action, and movement. Words to fight for. Words to live by. In real time, however, for real people, these magic words have meanings defined by history, nuances of understanding mediated by generations of experience, and possibilities constrained or expanded by opportunity.

When we speak these magic words to each other, we call each other to account, we demand that each of us implement the magic contained in the words. Often, we misunderstand because the magic words spoken in my context have a different meaning than when spoken in yours.

The United States and Venezuela have many magic words in common, derived from the same late 18th century European intellectual sources. Freedom, democracy, elections, opportunity, fairness, nationality, self-determination, the will of the people: all magic words.

In the United States, these words speak to a world of complex and widely divergent economic circumstances, open to individual initiative, originally constructed out of highly independent political entities into a nation with limited and constantly challenged central powers.

In Venezuela, these words speak to a world of tightly specified economic circumstances, originally organized and structured by a Hispanic colonial government for imperial purposes, and dominated by centralized agencies.

The Historical Emergence of the United States and Venezuela

The United States is a country that shares both time and space but not historical context, with Venezuela. Venezuela emerges as a coherent political entity out of the structural readjustments to the Spanish Empire in the late 18th century, coming into existence as a colonial artifact created to serve the economic and military needs of the Spanish commercial system. The United States emerges as the voluntary association of more or less independent and entrepreneurial entities in response to perceived challenges from their nominal British imperial masters.

The United States becomes a minimalist nation state in 1789 by a negotiation among states with a sense of identity and governance that only reluctantly ceded limited authority to a central government. So reluctant are these United States to recognize central authority that the nation sustains a horrific civil war to establish a limited primacy for the national government and resolve the problem of slavery. The United States, central government limited the powers of a central government to the minimum needed to preserve the peace, secure property, and guarantee the opportunity to pursue wealth.

In Venezuela, the central government post independence also appeared weak and limited, but constrained by its lack of resources and its inability to replace completely the centralized authority system that the Spanish imperial regime implanted in Caracas. Multiple civil wars determined which individuals from what region would control the central authority. Venezuela worked to reconstruct a republican version of Hispanic imperial central authority and assigned the central government bureaucracies the task of defining economic opportunities and specifying the rights and responsibilities of its citizens.

Although they viewed the world from different historical perspectives both nations imagined a limitless economic future, based on free trade and the entrepreneurial energy fueled by international finance. Yet as the United States developed and expanded over the course of the nineteenth century, fought its civil war to establish the supremacy of the nation over the individual interests of the states, and conquered large and productive territories, Venezuela struggled to define the basis for the legitimacy of its national government.

For the United States, the issue of legitimacy involved a complicated negotiation that consolidated existing patterns of governance, authority, and legitimacy. For Venezuela, the issue of legitimacy involved the invention of a completely new and untested method for determining and defining the limits of central authority. The patterns of Venezuela's Hispanic past involved more than just the formal elements of government (as important as those might be). They defined the structure of social and race relations, specified the hierarchies of privilege, and organized access to economic opportunity. The post-independence pensadores badly underestimated the power of Venezuela's organic constitution implanted by centuries of Hispanic imperial administration. The elimination of the crown and its authority left an empty space in Venezuela's political structure, filled throughout the 19th century and into the first decades of the 20th with the authority of strong men.

You may wonder why I dwell on this historical moment when all eyes and attention are on today's struggles of political and diplomatic actors. What we see around us plays out a drama whose scenery and rhetoric may appear new, but whose plot and major characters are as old as the republics.

Venezuela has always had to solve one fundamental economic problem. Within the Spanish global empire and ever since, Venezuela has served the world as a raw materials producer and exporter and as a strategic location within the Caribbean. The independence wars left the country without resources to invest in another economic model and international politics reinforced its strategic role, a role enhanced by the emergence of petroleum as the country's primary export product.

Successive regimes after independence maximized the return from this Venezuelan export engine to support the highest standard of living possible for the largest number of the elite. The best-adapted governance mechanism for this process turned out to be a republican version of the Hispanic colonial system. Constitutions, elections, legislatures, courts, and local jurisdictions all appeared, but this apparently distributed arrangement of power rested on the authority of a bureaucracy in the central city of Caracas.

Economic opportunity depended o policies and access controlled by the central government. Prosperity depended on external relationships with world commodity and capital markets, and by managing these; the central government maintained its primacy. Coffee, primarily, defined Venezuela's success in the pre-petroleum era, and oil only increased dependence on the Caracas-centered technical bureaucracies. When exports brought high prices, the country prospered. The government launched public works, invested in education, often attempted to promote a more diversified economic base, and developed democratic institutions. Export commodity prices inevitably decline, however, and when they did, the country always found itself with half finished projects, debt, and insufficient government revenue.

Eventually, the government fell (usually at the hands of impatient and violent competitors). The new owners of the central apparatus rearranged the upper hierarchies of privilege, and, with a renewal of commodity prices, might enjoy another period of prosperity, only to fall victim once again to the commodity price cycle.

The experience of the first century of independence imprinted the commodity export model on Venezuela. The petroleum years of the twentieth century continued this model, but provided sufficient resources to begin the development of sophisticated democratic institutions although inadequate for real economic opportunity for most Venezuelans.

The Conversational Challenge between Venezuela and the United States

These different origins of state and nation, and their widely divergent economic models, underlie the endlessly difficult conversation between the United States and Venezuela. Venezuelans, at various times in their history, found themselves unhappy with policies of the United States, and found the behavior of the United States government duplicitous, inconsistent, and unpredictable. Part of this results from the real behavior of the United States, which on occasion is in fact duplicitous, inconsistent, and unpredictable. Much, however, comes from a mismatch between the Venezuelan and the United States historical understanding of the meaning of our magic words of democracy and fairness.

While the US has a national arrogance displayed in its historical embrace of manifest destiny, and while like all other nations, it seeks economic prosperity for its citizens and international power in defense of its interests, its international colleagues in the Americas often misunderstand the core American philosophy of pragmatism. In the United States, we value democracy and representative government (magic words to be sure) not because we believe them to be correct in some theoretical sense but because we expect them to work. Making things work is the true pragmatic philosophy of the United States.

The democratic style of government that is characteristic of the US is theoretically messy, philosophically thin, and pragmatically effective. In the US, laws, rules, and politics exist to make things work better. We argue about how to fix things and generally, based on our historical traditions, we prefer that responsibility begin with individuals and private enterprises, local and state governments, and as a last resort, the national government. In the US, policy results from solving problems

Fairness is a magic word that underlies the US pragmatic approach to prosperity. Fairness is not an abstraction. Practical success, we believe, requires that everyone should be guaranteed Life (safe and secure), Liberty (the freedom to pursue individually determined goals), and the Pursuit of Happiness (a chance to be prosperous). Fair means, then, that everyone has an equal chance to succeed, but not an equal right to success.

Venezuela, as a primary producer of high value export commodities for world markets it does not control, places a high value on the management of external trade. The purpose of politics, whether labeled democratic or not, has always been to capture the central city's national bureaucracies that distribute the benefits and opportunities of the export economy.

For these historical reasons, many Venezuelan and US commentators confuse the discussions about the issues that divide the countries. Take the magic word of democracy. For the United States, democracy is an instrumental word. It labels a collection of political behaviors that result in economic prosperity and resolves controversies about pragmatic issues. The theory of democracy is not as important as its effectiveness. Central government matters, but change comes from every level. If the central government performs badly, the state and local governments and private individuals and enterprises can continue to perform well. If one state's economy fails, other states may well be unaffected. In the US, the results of most elections do not dramatically change the life chances of substantial portions of the population. Elections determine many temporary winners and losers at many different levels of government in separate independent processes, but for most Americans the outcome of an election is not a life-changing event.

For Venezuelans, however, the practice of democracy has a different practical result. When elections serve as the key determinant of political legitimacy, Venezuela's historical tradition and economic structure make national elections the only ones that matter. The primacy of the central government in the Venezuelan economic model makes national elections a winner-take-all proposition. The winners control the economy; the losers often find themselves excluded from economic opportunity. What matters in Venezuela is whether an election produces a new winner and new economic elite or preserves the previous economic elite. A change due to an election will significantly enhance the opportunities for one group and severely constrain the opportunities for the other.

In such a system, stability and effectiveness are both difficult to achieve. Stability requires a fundamental consensus about national goals and process even as competing interests contend with each other over the details and programs. Effectiveness requires recognition that economic success is a practical matter, a pragmatic concern, not a theoretical proposition.

As a result, the issues in conflict between the US and Venezuela often disappear as we misunderstand the magic words. For the US, what matters is that an allied country succeeds in managing its economy, developing its institutions, and participating in international commerce and trade. For the US, like every other nation, successful governments of other countries are those that do not, at a minimum harm the United States, and at a maximum support the United States. Democracy is desirable, but effectiveness has historically been much more important.

For Venezuela, what matters is to leverage its comparative advantage as an export economy to improve its revenue from world trade to drive national prosperity. Democracy is a method for helping determine how to achieve this goal, but Venezuela has often lacked sufficient wealth to support reasonably abundant economic opportunities for most citizens. Absent these opportunities, democratic processes create true losers, people for whom the consequence of elections is elimination from the game. If the winners prove competent, and economic opportunity expands, then the number of true losers will be less. If the winners prove incompetent and economic opportunity declines, the increasing number of true losers will inevitably create political instability.

Democratically elected regimes that fail to enhance economic opportunity often use the formalities of democratic process to cover their failure. In discussions about such cases, when we use the language of the magic words, we confuse the issue. In truth, life is not about the abstraction of democracy it is about the efficacy of democracy. The United States is a successful democracy not because our elections are the most elegant, not because we have avoided corruption in politics, not because our capitalists are more public spirited than others, and not because our leaders are wiser. Democracy works in the United States because our economy is large and can withstand the mistakes of our government and because our government institutions are complex and no single part ever approaches full control of the nation's agenda.

As we watch and participate in the multi-dimensional conversation that takes place between the United States and Venezuela, the dramatically different historical context of these two nations appears as a constant subtext that gives fundamentally different meaning to the magic words we share. In the United States, we talk about democracy and fairness and what we mean is a political system that delivers prosperity and pragmatic success. Venezuelans often talk about democracy and fairness to refer to the multi’generational campaign to create institutions capable of over coming the social and economic limitations inherited from the historical process of the late eighteenth century.

We would both do better if we talked about how to improve the economic opportunities for all of us in the twenty first century without losing our way amongst the magic words of the early nineteenth century.