IV. Constitutional Development in Latin America: A Synthesis

Extract

“Do not give to a people institutions for which it is unripe in the simple faith that the tool will give skill to the workman's hand. Respect Facts. Man is in each country not what we may wish him to be, but what Nature and History have made him.” Bryce, Modern Democracies, I, 206.

With minor exceptions, the panorama of constitutional growth in the Western Hemisphere reveals two main streams. The United States Constitution, the British North America Act of 1867 (which is the Canadian fundamental law), and the organic laws of the various New World British possessions of today all stem, obviously, from English constitutional and institutional ancestry. The constitutions of the twenty Latin American states, on the other hand, all reflect in varying degree the experience and institutions of their three mother countries. These modern constitutions are, it is true, influenced by alien examples at one point or another, but the core is undubitably Latin. More narrowly, the inspiration is Hispanic; and still more narrowly, Spanish.

It is not easy to explain in detail the degree of similarity between French political institutions and those of the Iberian peninsula in the centuries between the emergence of the several national states and the political revolutions in Latin America. At least, the French belonged to a not unrelated family. A much closer relationship is easily discernible among the political institutions of the three main Iberian entities that ultimately became the national states of Spain and Portugal, viz., Castile, Aragon, and Portugal. It is often forgotten that for many generations no political or constitutional “Spain” existed, that Aragon and Castile were as distinct from each other in most ways as either of them was from Portugal, that an easily possible union of the ruling houses of Castile and Portugal—supplanting the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand—might have changed the whole subsequent course of history.