State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain

"Miguel A. Centeno, Agustin E. Ferraro, Vivekananda Nemana More than 3 decades ago, Albert Hirschman wondered why not enough attention had been paid to Latin America's post-war economic boom, certainly not while it happened. Only in retrospect, from the "lost decade" of the 1980s, did the accomplishments of the developmental era become relatively clear. But even then, the comparison with East Asia that began during the 1980s diminished the region's achievements. If anything, the period from 1945 to 1975 came to be seen as a lost opportunity, when Latin America supposedly took the wrong direction while East Asia cleared the path to its economic success. This perspective could not be more different than the attention paid to the "Spanish Miracle"-with its own Wikipedia entry! Spain's developmental achievements were seen as a victory for the Franco regime, whose replacement by a vigorous democracy made those achievements even better. Much of the criticism of the Latin American cases was directed at the supposed failure of the developmental state in the continent. Developmental policies came to be seen as obstacles to the economic progress of the region, leading finally to the debt crisis of the early 1980s, and the subsequent collapse of the Latin American economic model. In the present volume, we will examine both the achievements and failures of developmental states in Latin America and Spain. We will seek to clarify how developmental state institutions were conceived in the context of far-reaching visions for national affirmation and progress, and how they were designed and established since the early 1930s"--