(pedantic nitpick: to be first world when the term was coined, they would have to be US-aligned instead of Soviet or non aligned)
Pedantry aside: pre-1900 POD could possibly include
- Earlier reduction of mercantilism in latin america
- Earlier abolition of slavery in Brazil
- Globalization of Quinine as a cash crop would possibly reduce the impact of disease (Peru had monopoly on the exportation of natural quinine into the 1850s)
- Failure of the american filibusters/Monroe doctrine retooled into something more akin american cooperation against european attempts at reasserting dominance, including support to various rebellions and willingness to redirect colonization efforts away from the Rio Grande basin (more cooperation between american powers might lead to a larger Oregon - the gold rush there predates the californian gold rush)
For the rest there's little inherently latin about the situation of rest of the americas, it's pretty typical of third rate powers whenever more politically powerful countries decide to extend their clout into the region (that's part of when you can date Russia's rise as a great power in Europe: the reduction in court bribery by foreign diplomats at the imperial court).
(edit - forgot one which I put in later: less predatory reparations)
Never happen. The South was fine to see potential slave territories expand but Southern intransgience was the major reason the 54 40 line was never accepted.
I've always maintained that the reason that the Latin American countries turned out differently than the US or Canada is because of the different ways the colonies were run. New Spain was basically just a money machine for the Spanish, with the infrastructure specifically designed so Spaniards were on top and getting the profit. Because of this, the ex-colonial countries inherited the encomienda system, the haciendas, the patrones and the peones. Get rid of this taint on the economy and you'll get a much stabler place.
Eh, less that than that a lot of the countries south of the Rio Grande were subject to a lot of foreign influence and occasional uprisings by Indigenous separatists (see: Zapatista War).
And yet only half of the 13 colonies were devoted such. There was also a sizeable manufacturing sector, pre-established industry, wealth distribution, etc.
Actually in 1776 *all* 13 colonies had slavery.
So? There was enough industrialization that the transition from a plantation economy could occur. The conditions in Latin America were more often than not, much too bad for this transition.
Or you can refute all of my personal assertations and imply that Americans are simply superior.
And in the South at least that transition was very, very slow. And in fact even after it started the South remained a bunch of one-party totalitarian states.
...Nigerian oil? Pakistani nukes?
Who's in charge there, now? As far as I know, they've been independent for ages. Nigeria's part-Christian, part-Muslim, Pakistan's mostly Muslim.
Pers'nly, m'boy, I'm British Empire Loyalist...
Anyway, I thought this was a South American thread!
<Waves a handful of flags of South American states>
That would be the Nigeria prone to violence between Christian and Muslim extremists and the Pakistan that's already collapsed once and looks about to do it twice?
No, Hendryk, I don't believe it's a pre-condition. However, you might like to look at New Zealand, Australia and Canada...I'm starting to get rather irritated by pro- and anti-colonial attitudes. What astonished me was the 'Dominion of Honour' concept of Argentina and Chile - and that I was introduced to by Argentinos.
However, you might like to recall that it was US pressure that resulted in headlong 'independence' being given to countries formerly administered by Britain and France. Not at all funny - as far as I can see, it benefited Uncle Sam more than anybody else, destroying the British Empire whilst handing the people over to unscrupulous dictators. There's the bizarre situation where Ian Smith could walk down the streets of Harare and have his hand shaken by average Zimbabweans, whilst Mugabe could only do the same with a regiment of securitymen.
You really want something bizarre? Look at Gibraltar - forced to remain as a colony to prevent a Spanish takeover. MEPs from the South West of England have to represent them in the European Parliament. Closest that Britain's come to the French overseas Departement system.
Both Smith and Mugabe were equally monstrous. Smith just inherited a system directly geared toward whites, where Mugabe inherited one that was wrecked by a long sequence of civil war. Akin to the difference between Tsar Alexander III and Josef Stalin.
...Are the point. An educated and politically stable sector of society with (in many cases) a tradition of public service. India created some highly able individuals, so why should Africa be different?
Trouble is, administrators to the African colonies were generally imports, not locally-produced - some were Hindus, like Gandhi. I write under correction, but I think that the tribal chiefs were more interested in their sons getting military training than civil service experience. Maybe that is one aspect of the de-colonisation disaster. The apartheid-ridden and Afrikaaner-dominated Republic of South Africa did not encourage the emergence of a native African middle class, but it has emerged nevertheless.
If it was 'simply a native dictatorship replacing a foreign one', you wouldn't have Zimbabwe in its current non-democratic starvation disaster. The best measure of government success is the level of development and the maintenance of the services required for community life. As it is, Smith's government had to be reasonably effective to retain any loyalty at all - or are you going to turn Mugabe apologist? If so, I'm off.
By not encouraged you mean surely denying them education and being willing to disperse African groups at gunpoint, right? It's a native dictatorship that replaced a white one after a long and devastating civil war which was also one of the big Cold War proxy wars. I mean if you look at the US Civil War rebuilding after *that* was hardly easy in the South, especially given 1/3 of the population was kept economically dependent and denied any and all political rights.
...I hope you don't think I support apartheid? As for fascism, my father fought that creed - and to identify Ian Smith with fascism is rather to over-use the term. There seems to be a tendency for the word 'fascist' to be applied to anything right of centre in politics. My measurement of fascism has in it such things as Gestapo, gas-chambers and anti-semitism.
I have had the experience of a Communist calling me a fascist and a Hitler apologist calling me a communist. I must be getting something right.
Colonial regimes did establish an infrastructure of sorts; the Indian railway and bridge system is a case in point. Where that infrastructure is maintained in good order, the country generally succeeds. I suppose a British example of failure is the Roman road system that decayed and had to be re-invented (as roads and railways) before mass industrial transport could occur.
To get back to the point of the thread, Spanish occupation of South America seems to have suffered from elitism from the start, so when it was overthrown, it required military action by dis-satisfied members of the colonial elite. This probably accounts for the number of Juntas that pepper South American history and make it look like England's War of the Roses. You need a merchant class in power before stability starts to appear - wars on your own doorstep can be ruinous to profits. So we're back to the middle classes. Peasants will fight for freedom, but they have to return to the fields, so it's up to townies to keep that freedom alive.
Smith was a lot closer to fascist than most post-Hitler leaders. What might also account for them is that the United States had a tendency to ensure governments friendly to its interest regardless of what that meant for the people who lived under said governments.
...Had their own mechanisms for repression and fewer Jews to demonise.
Is the Lebanese Falange/Phalange fascist, or not?
Another feature of fascism/extremism/communism is the tendency to manipulate elections to give unrealistic majorities, or to only allow voting for the ruling party.
Would Mugabe qualify as a fascist?
Roosevelt certainly wanted to get rid of the British Empire and was rather taken with both Josef Stalin and Chiang Kai-Shek, with ultimately disastrous results. Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt certainly oversaw a transfer of capital from embattled Britain in both World Wars - Britain's still paying interest to the USA on WW1 debts, did you know? The loss of young men in Flanders was appalling, but the loss of economic flexibility and investment capital is still hampering the UK.
Drat it...back to South America...
Peronism and Allende socialism put up unreasonable expectations and destroyed the economy, allowing in Juntas that mucked matters up further. Still, we can hope that common sense is starting to prevail. I've certainly been impressed by my Argentino contacts, although not by Kirchner. Brazil I've not researched as deeply, but it's a robust country with great potential. Bye for now.
Peronism was a variation of fascism, while Allende was undermined by the little bit of a foreign-backed military Putsch that put into place equally disastrous uber-capitalist policies.
... Archaeogeek, we'll never agree, and I'm no racist. It's just that I see a starving mess in a Zimbabwe that used to be a productive Rhodesia. Mind you, there were some things that the USSR got right that Putin gets wrong. A louse like Mugabe's inexcusable in any culture.
Minifidel, see if you have time to look at the BTdF thread, will you? I've been writing it with a lot of input from Petete123123 and others. Bearing in mind that its most recent part sees the fall of a Junta and the rise of at least one Argentino statesman, it's the closest I've been so far to an Argentowank. The Fuegans have a very tough time, win a war, but almost lose the peace through being exploited in a very odd way...But I'm afraid Chile has a tough time... And Cantref Mawr was a right headache

.
Latin America has been slowly (and often painfully) making its way towards stability. I'll toss another consideration into the forum - would the use of birth control help, by reducing the level of under-age poor liable to political and military exploitation?
I know that birth control brings in the Vatican, etc., but would it help?
Yeah, and after the Brushfire War there was no guarantee regardless of who won of "nice" people taking over any more than after three years of World War I the Tsar was going to be replaced by a bunch o'angels.
... It has progressed towards a more liberal society, judging from the remarks of our Argentino colleagues on AH. 1982 shook up Argentina, as much as the UK and the Falklands. May that continue to everyone's benefit..
Archaeogeek - Kipling made a remark about 'beware my country, when my country grows polite'. I thought it had gone, before 1982. Then, in 1982, the UK reacted like a dog with one bone to defend - at all levels of society but the most supine apologists (e.g. Wedgewood-Benn). I was very surprised. At the time, I recall writing a letter (published by the local paper) that it would be the third battle near the Falklands and the only one really for it - the others had been about Chilean nitrate and Argentine beef and grain. With the prospect of oil, there's a shop-window item to discuss and maybe a joint benefit to the Falklands and Argentina.
As for South America - it has at least a fairly unified religious structure, so has avoided the truly horrific religious and political massacres of the Balkans and Greece. I know and love Greece, but her modern history is written in tankerloads of Greek blood - mostly spilt by the Turks, but (post-1940s) a lot by the Greek factions themselves. By a fluke, in 2007 I was in Greece whilst they had an election - there was a lot of political hot air, but no blood was spilt. Greece is going through modest turmoil as the result of underpaying taxes and public overspending, but it was noticeable that the deaths of a handful of Athenian bank clerks caused the same level of shock as a massacre. That's a good thing. I'm sure a parallel can be found in Argentina and Chile.
Chile is saving a group of miners with a lot of technical skill and national commitment - may their flags wave with justifiable pride, for it is a victory without a war.
South America can be proud of a lot, so don't under-rate them.
As in the US South I daresay such progress is rather more limited than it appears to be.
No, it's not Jingoism, it's literally what I witnessed. Don't read more into it than is there - you'll make me doubt your sincerity.
As for your remark about Morean Muslims - the objective of the Egypto-Turkish army was to exterminate the Greeks of the Peloponnese and replace them with Algerian Muslims. The backlash was horrific and I don't excuse it any more than the hundreds of thousands of Greek civilians killed in the 1922 Smyrna Massacre.
The point of my remarks was nothing to do with wars between Muslim and Christian and everything to do with the Greeks' honorable advance in respect for human life and democratic process. Don't pervert the argument!
Or are you trying to drag a Muslim/Christian hate debate into a peaceful discussion of South America?
That would be Greeks who invaded the region most Turks lived in pursuit of enforcing a treaty that would have destroyed an independent Turkish state. They neither advanced honorably nor has the British Pericles Fanboyism done any more than leave a state perpetually in default.
Light thrown on a difficult subject. And I've found
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12688b.htm which was rather intriguing...
...As for making Latin America less Latin American, I would say racial attitudes were pretty bad all around the globe. The Jesuits could have taught Wilberforce (Britain's great abolitionist) a lot about the importance of economic independence for freed slaves. I wonder if the Guarani Reductions could have triggered an independence movement rather than the colonials doing it?
Hendryk, re-writing history's OK, it's just that I don't like the idea (which seems prevalent in some parts of the Internet) that Muslims=Good, non-Muslims (oh, and all colonials)=Bad. I did mention tankerloads of Greek blood, didn't I? And read up on Smyrna.
Colonialism at its core *is* an evil idea. My country certainly has done precious little good with it, and I doubt that being on the other side of the Pond makes Britons engaged in the same ol' shit any more moral than we are.
...So the results are interesting.
We're obviously not going to agree on Smyrna, but I'm going to suggest you read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_Smyrna and the Turkish remarks about it.
Citing Wikipedia on the Turks is an example of how not checking a source works.
... The Treaty of Madrid lead to the massacre. Maybe the only key point the film got right?
'Geek, if you're stuck in a port with your backs to the sea, you don't burn down your only refuge. It makes no sense at all - and the Allied ships in port should have acted!
They should have thought of that before invading and massacring a shitload of Turks and expecting the Allies to back them up on yet another campaign of RapeLootPillage.