“We are a small human race.”
“Let us bear in mind that our people are neither European nor North American, rather they are a composite of Africa and America, rather than an emanation of Europe”. Simon Bolivar.
The concept of the West has been happily used again in our colloquial language. The West is opposed to the East to affirm that the former is free and democratic, while the latter is despotic and authoritarian. This so-called bipolar world, where we must go from the second to the first, today is no more than a crude ethnocentrism. The current cultural reality is neither Western nor Eastern, but a complex and disoriented reality, whose outcome in a new synthesis, if one can speak of a new synthesis, we do not know for sure what it may bring us. For now, the idea of Europe, which is assigned as the axis of Western culture, is in crisis, and has already lost that condition of beacon of light and progress that it had around its two powerful axes that were the Enlightenment. Greek in times of the Athens of Pericles, and the European Enlightenment of the 18th century. And it is that our 20th century turned out to be bloody and frightening in many aspects, a path not retraced in the 21st century. We must never forget, rather always remember, that the Holocaust occurred in Europe, as well as envision all that is terrible about imperialist colonization and traumatic decolonization, with its consequences in the established disorder and the nightmares that so many peoples still carry today. .
So let us use delicately and carefully the concept of the West. We Latin Americans are heirs of the West, I affirm it, but I emphasize our specificity. Alain Rouquié conceptualizes us as the extreme West, and thus denotes our particularities, just as José Vasconcelos identified us as the “cosmic race”, a peculiar spiritual way of highlighting our miscegenation and its positive contribution to times to come. It is the same amazing lucidity with which Bolívar identified our project for a Latin American nation, that his contemporaries did not understand and it still bothers us to understand.
Leon Trotsky in his brilliant History of the Russian Revolution, to characterize the peculiarities of the historical development of Russia, uses an otherwise interesting concept to explain the phenomenon of transculturation, which is none other than that of uneven and combined development, which refers us to the unequal development suffered by peoples subjected to an abruptly forced acculturation, as the Spanish conquest and colonization and its consequent domination were for us. The domination is material but also spiritual, and the peculiar synthesis that arises from the cultural clash gives rise to new ideas and ways of explaining and interpreting reality, which, furthermore, through reform or revolution, wants to be transformed. That is why I affirm that “our West” has its specificities in ideas and concepts, for which the great challenge is the wisdom in knowing how to empty it into institutions where they flow assertively, and also in the construction of ideologies, which as compasses help us define the paths to travel.
