The chapter engages with Niklas Luhmann’s understanding of the concept of culture, from his critical examination of Talcott Parsons’ concept of a normative culture to ideas about a specifically modern notion of culture. It includes discussions of his ideas about culture forms of different media epochs of human society and about culture as memory of society. Luhmann’s sociology of culture remains a fragment, but it can provide inspiration for a media-theoretical derivation of culture forms of society, as well as for a social theory of values. Luhmann remained sceptical about the concept of culture throughout his life, since any attempt to ‘register’ a social phenomenon, for example, religion or art, ‘as culture’ runs the risk of infringing upon the necessary protection of its latency.

Introduction

Niklas Luhmann tried to get rid of the concept of culture. His relationship to this concept was not only sceptical but also polemical. In the 1980s, he had succeeded in neutralising Talcott Parsons’ use of culture as a set of values able to normatively solve problems of double contingency. He pointed out that mere coincidences, that is, time, would do the same. But in the 1990s, he experienced a rebirth of so-called cultural studies, which did not seem inclined to draw their lessons from the failure of cultural studies in the 1920s; when culture was thought to possibly provide the a priori values, by then lacking, ever since ontological metaphysics had lost its grip (Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann). Luhmann tried to limit the concept of culture as merely ‘historical’, as the product of a specific constellation of modern society – belonging to the past more than to any present, let alone future – but in the process of his examination began to conceive of culture as a memory function of society, to which he devoted ever greater attention. Luhmann’s description of so-called ‘culture forms’ of ancient, modern and postmodern society does not lack irony in being highly speculative, but could nevertheless develop into a fruitful paradigm of future research and teaching in cultural sociology.

Culture versus System

Niklas Luhmann had a not-entirely tension-free relationship with both culture and the concept of culture. Culture is ‘what one finds in the soil not belonging there’.

The concept of Active Non-Alignment (ANA) was initially proposed by Carlos Ominami in a text published in August 2019. The specific reference was to the Chilean case, but the call of “our only option is that of an active non-alignment that puts politics at the center of international action […]. We must defend multilateralism and international law with all our might” (Ominami 2019) was to Latin America as a whole—and even beyond.

The notion resonated. The Puebla Group, made up of former Latin American and European presidents and leaders, declared in its November 2019 Manifesto: “Our Latin America can only assume a position of active non-alignment putting the interests of our peoples first and ensuring uncompromising respect for our sovereignty” (Grupo de Puebla 2019, emphasis in original).

An article by the present authors with an initial approach to the subject was published in Spanish in Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica in July 2020 (Fortin, Heine and Ominami 2020a) and later reproduced in English (Global Policy, 2020), French (IRIS, 2020), and Mandarin (IISS 2020). A subsequent article was published in two international outlets (NUSO 2020; WSI 2020).

In August 2020, Chile’s Foro Permanente de Política Exterior, a think tank, organized a webinar on the subject, with the participation of six former Latin American foreign ministers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru to analyze its viability and scope (FPPE 2020). The stimulating discussion that took place there confirmed not only that the proposal had struck a chord but also that there was the need to explore its content in more detail, both conceptually and in terms of its policy implications.

Thus, this book. Its central objective is to bring together a group of Latin American analysts, practitioners, and Latin Americanists to reflect on the scope and implications of the ANA option to further elaborate its meaning and relevance for the contemporary conjuncture.

The selection of authors and topics was made on the basis of three criteria:

• 1. A wide thematic coverage: The ANA option arises as a response to the conflict between the United States and China, which was triggered by essentially economic (trade, investment) and technological issues (5G, artificial intelligence, semiconductors), but has gone further, to include ideological and military dimensions. It is a hegemonic struggle with a wide scope. The ANA option aims to encompass the full range of foreign policy dimensions and their interrelationships with national development policies.

Throughout its history, Argentina has developed an international position defined by two traditions: on the one hand, autonomy from the great powers and, on the other, a desire to deepen regional integration with the sister countries of the region. Both are relevant for Latin America’s ability to find its own space in a world in transition, something in which Argentina can and should play a central role. Active Non-Alignment (ANA) represents a path that opens numerous opportunities. And although it was not present at the Bandung Conference in 1955 nor at the Belgrade conference in 1961, when the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was launched, Argentina played a pioneering role in the development of the ideas that would inspire Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and Indonesian president Sukarno, among other leaders of what would be called the Third World in that endeavor.

Juan Domingo Perón’s rise to the presidency in 1946 coincided with the end of World War II and the subsequent start of the Cold War. It was in this setting that Perón drew up the guidelines for his foreign policy under the doctrine known as the Third Position. In a divided world, in which countries aligned with the United States in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or with the United Socialist Soviet Republic (USSR) in the Warsaw Pact, Perón did not understand the Third Position as an equidistant or intermediate policy between two poles of power but as a proposal to overcome two antagonistic ideologies.

On July 6, 1947, Perón delivered a speech that went down in history as the birth of the Third Position. As Fermín Chávez writes: “[…] the Argentine president sent a message to all the peoples of the world, through more than 1,000 radio stations (including the BBC in London), in which he set out objectives of economic cooperation and world peace, discarding capitalist and totalitarian extremisms, whether they were from the right or the left” (Chávez 1985).

The core of this non-alignment or Third Position, as its name implies, is the rejection of bloc politics. It is not a question of denying the existence of these blocs. The problem is that this policy responds to the interests of the great powers.

The year of 1968 in Latin America was marked by upsurges of both hope and violence. From Mexico to Argentina, students and workers united to demand university reforms, higher wages, better working conditions and improved accessibility to public services. These movements would later come to be defined as the ‘New Left’ of Latin America, a generation that mobilised Che Guevara as a symbol of Latin American unity and liberation, emerging in tension with the traditional Left and its reformist and populist predecessors. This New Left cut across traditional class lines to unite around specific political and economic objectives; they shared the goals of ‘anti-authoritarianism, direct democracy, social equality, and opposition to the Vietnam War’ with parallel movements in Europe and North America. But there were crucial, unique dimensions to Latin America’s New Left, which drew inspiration from a range of regional currents and was by no means homogenous: Che Guevara and Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution; Tricontinentalism, Third Worldism, anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism; political exile; liberation theology; armed urban guerrilla action; and Salvador Allende’s ‘democratic road to socialism’, to name a few.

Compared to their Western European counterparts, Latin Americans were met with much more severe repression. An often cited example is the student massacre of Tlatelolco, where, on the 2nd October, hundreds of students were shot dead by police during a peaceful protest in the heart of Mexico City. In Uruguay, a breakthrough in Left-wing student militancy was met with severe police brutality. In Brazil, 1968 marked the installation of Institutional Act Number Five (AI-5), setting in motion what would become known as the ‘years of lead’ – os anos de chumbo. AI-5 legitimised the use of extra-legal repression against political crimes, allowing the regime to clamp down on suspected opposition by suspending political rights and employing torture and execution. In 1970, AI-5 was reinforced with the creation of the Internal Defence Operations Centre–Operation and Information Detachment (DOI–CODI) which spread across the country, acting as one of the regime’s core mechanisms for systematic torture and assassinations.

It is worth emphasising just how broad the remit of supposed political opposition and subversion was for the Brazilian and neighbouring Latin American regimes.

Trade and Navigation between Spain and Its Colonies

Trade rivalry between the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Habsburg regime during the Eighty Years’ War was fierce and concerns expressed by Spanish officials with respect to illegitimate trade in which English, French and Dutch privateers participated and Portuguese merchants assisted in trade between Spain and its colonies were omnipresent in reports sent from Tierra Firme and Hispaniola. In the Preface to The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680, Goslinga (1971) notes that the documentation on the role the Dutch played in the Caribbean region and along the coast of Tierra Firme during the seventeenth century derived mostly from accounts of their foes. To explore the extent and nature of the tobacco contraband trade in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century we will therefore depend to a large extent on Spanish and Portuguese accounts and records most of which are found in the Archives of Seville and Lisbon. Besides a discussion of the Engel Sluiter Historical Documents Collection as a source of information for the study of the tobacco contraband trade in the early seventeenth century, this chapter will thus present a brief discussion about the early history of trade and navigation between Spain and its colonies which was subjected to a strict set of rules and for the most part excluded foreigners. The records of the Casa de Contratacion in Seville reveal the extent of illegitimate trade as documented by Spanish officials responsible for reporting on trade and navigation to and from the colonies. In addition, in the reports sent by the Audiencias to the Crown and Council, there is frequent mention of interlopers and foreigners interfering in Spanish maritime interests and about efforts made by the officials to control colonial trade in particular as it involved Dutch merchants and mariners during the Eighty Years’ War.

Trade and navigation between Spain and its colonial possessions was dominated by the Seville monopoly; the Casa de Contratacion. The first Royal ordinances for the Casa de Contratacion were issued in 1503 and officials were appointed by the Crown to administer the possessions and issue licenses to trade but it was soon clear that strict schedules and regulations did not work.

Jacobite pamphleteers, spies, citizens in eighteenth-century coffee houses and ideologues such as Cobbett, all in their separate ways, sought to influence public opinion formation long before the self-appointed instruments and individuals of Trollope's Barsetshire.1 What is new, however, is a level of self-consciousness by “spokesmen” who claim to represent and influence public opinion, rather than merely criticize or subvert a preexisting order. As a wealthy surgeon, John Bold has no identifiable material selfinterest or ideological commitment to the causes he champions early in The Warden, only attempting to recover excessive tolls on a turnpike which he seldom uses. His is an ideologically disinterested pro bono advocacy, with only marginal interest in an issue of abstract injustice to which he calls public attention: a crucial distinction.

The infirm pensioners at Hiram's Hospital, socially invisible in their dotage, until awakened to an abstraction by an advocate who lacks even the unanimous support of his plaintiffs. They remain divided about endorsing his effort:

For some impoverished pensioners, apparently, going to law is a rich man's game; for others, possession is already established by historical deed as an inalienable gift.

The intriguing legal case advanced in The Warden hinges on a material revaluation— and hence possible redistribution—of the proceeds from a charitable bequest. The annual return now far exceeds the initial principal of the gift, willed four centuries previously by John Hiram: a bequest now in surplus. At issue is who should benefit from an unforeseeable surplus—an as-yet unrealized inflation in the value of rents. Should it be part of the “living” of the relatively impecunious and aging Warden Harding or to be used to increase the daily welfare allowance of the truly impoverished men in his custodial care? Although the bequest stems from a death contract (Hiram's will), the donor's original intention is no more recoverable than is Madame Neroni's marital status or familial entitlement. The contractual has lost all but historical relevance.

If the path to heaven is as narrow as the proverbial “needle's eye,” a doctrinal idea entirely consistent with the evangelical bent of both the Rev. Obadiah Slope and Mrs. Proudie of Barchester Towers, the traditional channels of gossip appear equally constricted. Because, at least conventionally, the lower classes democratically gossip about the behavior of the upper classes (so as to bring them down to the level where they might be trafficked) rather than the other way around, Bishop Proudie's wife would do a disservice to her pronominal station were she to physically stoop to keyholes or chinks. She remains in posture as well as morally, upright, even if it is a strain. In contradistinction from the eavesdropping posture of the lower-class gossip, Mrs. Proudie misses another communicative channel of political culture: “that friendly pressure,” a little “extra squeeze of the hand” (BT I 167). Such is the inarticulated pressure conveying a bishop's consent to his chaplain's scheme for denying his wife's choice for an impending vacancy for the new warden of Hiram's Hospital. Although escaping the auditory register, it does not escape the omniscient narrator's awareness of a “force” having a formless mediacy.

Her social pride distances her from a lineage of gossips in nineteenth-century British fiction like Mrs. Bates (Emma) and Mrs. Norris (Mansfield Park); Nelly Dean (Wuthering Heights); Mrs. Cadwallader (Middlemarch); or later, the unforgettable Mrs. Bolton (Lady Chatterley's Lover). Not the unmarried singer of a community's hidden songs and secrets, typically beyond the age of marriage, an exemption which liberates them from participation in the marital market, Mrs. Proudie is the spouse of a bishop of the Church of England.

Introduction

In the last section of his 1948 article “Dutch-Spanish Rivalry in the Caribbean,” Sluiter concludes that the policies implemented in 1606 by the Spanish Crown to inundate the Araya salt pans, to prohibit tobacco cultivation along the coast of Tierra Firme, and to depopulate coastal areas and relocate residents of Northwestern Hispaniola, were meant to chokeoff the smuggling going on in their territories. The documents analyzed in the previous two chapters illustrate the process by which this took place. In both Tierra Firme and on Hispaniola, Portuguese residents were key to the contraband trade with Dutch merchants who sailed along the coasts and up the rivers in Tierra Firme and along the shores of Hispaniola to drop anchor and to take tobacco on-board in exchange for cloth or woolen and silk goods, implements, and arms in high demand among coastal populations. From the documents presented we learn that among the crew on Dutch vessels were Portuguese merchants or pilots likely related to or linked in trade with Portuguese resident merchants on shore. In a Cedula issued by the Crown on October 28, 1606, the expulsion of all Dutch and Flemings was ordered in Tierra Firme and in the case of Hispaniola 10 merchants from the Dutch Republic were being rounded up. On November 10, 1607, the Council of the Indies recommended and the King approved that a branch of the Holy Office be erected in Hispaniola which suggests that the Portuguese were suspected of Judaizing. Sluiter (1948) does recognize that in the meantime the first negotiations for a truce between the Spanish and the Dutch had begun and that ports of the Iberian Peninsula would open again for Dutch trade to resume which would take away the incentive to haul salt or tobacco, pearls, and hides from the Caribbean. So, the stick and the carrot approach was applied, apparently, but it did not end the contraband tobacco trade.

In fact, the ban on tobacco cultivation and relocation of coastal populations encouraged tobacco smuggling and invited mariners and merchants to come on shore and bribe officials and both the Dutch and English mariners continued to trade, raid, or barter.

This volume conceptually began as a response to an exposure to public opinion formation: literary criticism. A reviewer of my Gossip and Subversion in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction: Echo's Economies found, to my pleasant surprise, much to praise. But in the same essay, the reviewer who, like much public opinion, should perhaps remain anonymous, also queried a conspicuous absence: the lack of interest in victims, those gossiped about. Her criticism, as the best criticism always does, initiated self-criticism. For, it was not the first time that my lack of sympathy for the victimized had been queried.

Compassion for the unfamiliar is always difficult, but perhaps particularly so for the critic who risks imaginary detachment (a fictional autonomy masking as objectivity) from feelings that risk sentimentality. Given the expanding population of those who see themselves as victims of some prejudice, sympathy is tempered by the universality of the experience. Ours is an age marked by the proliferation of the presumably sincere account of harm at the hands of unacknowledged institutional or personal aggression.

Although each of us is immersed in it and lives in our negotiated responses and defenses to public opinion, it can be manipulated for temporary or permanent advantage. It seems a medium of existence as well as exchange that we cannot avoid insofar as we have a place in a discursive society, enhanced now by speedier platforms and easier access. In the novels of Anthony Trollope public opinion becomes a master narrative, often displacing other narratives.

In discussing public opinion and how it is formed, negotiated and represented to those who live in it (and are re-represented in their responses to it), we should admit at the outset that it resists easy address as a traditional subject. For public opinion lacks a proper “self,” more nearly resembling a “form,” “structure” and movement of potentially infinite referral (renvoi), as Jean-Luc Nancy once described the non-indexical and nonsignficational modes of listening characteristic of musical performances. When we address public opinion formation in the Barsetshire Novels and the Palliser Novels (often referred to as the Parliamentary Novels) of “our” Anthony Trollope, the Victorian novelist who continually probes how his characters both shape it and respond to its shaping of them, we are really addressing a new kind of philosophical subject in the novel.

The story of the tobacco trade in the Atlantic world in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is a story of entanglement among different merchant groups embedded in trans-imperial connections which transcended political or state boundaries and ethnic associations. The different participants in trade included European colonial settlers, native and indigenous people, run-away slaves, and merchants of various kinds and backgrounds and formed part of a network of contact that had developed over time engaged in tobacco cultivation, trade, and smuggling. In the story, I will focus on Portuguese merchants who straddled the Portuguese, Spanish, and North European maritime Atlantic world and Sephardic or Portuguese Jewish merchants who traded on behalf of the Dutch after they resumed Jewish identity with residency in the Dutch Republic. In some instances, the Sephardic merchants were the key link facilitating Dutch trade in particular in Amsterdam. A good example is Simon de Herrera, a Portuguese Jew who had connections and associations with both English and Dutch merchants and smugglers. He was captured in Hispaniola by the Spanish in 1596 and during the court case against him following his arrest it was discovered that he held documents which implicated him with Dutch interests and contacts as he was offered safe passage to Holland or Zeeland in the Dutch Republic. Being Jewish and charged with trading for the Dutch he became a target for the Inquisition. The Dutch were at war with Spain at the time which did not improve his chances to be let free. He was taken for trial in Mexico and executed in 1604. Herrera had likely been a factor or agent for a Dutch merchant who traded illegally with the Portuguese and Spanish in the Caribbean. Hispaniola had by then become a regular transfer point for Dutch, English, and French privateers engaged in the tobacco trade.

Contraband trade and war is all too familiar in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the case of the Dutch Republic, it were the circumstances dictated by the Eighty Years’ War with Habsburg Spain that explain how trade or exchange was conducted.