Nations, Nationalism and Borderization in the Southern Cone

ALEJANDRO GRIMSON

Companion to Border Studies

Blackwell

Año: 2011;

This chapter will analyze the historical transformations of the border process in the Southern Cone. After a brief sketch of the colonial period, the analysis will cover the fraught and intense border processes that accompanied the state- and nation-building period in the region. I then discuss the transition from a militaristic, geopolitical conception of borders as the potential cause or objective of war to what is now an ongoing process of regional integration in the Mercosur bloc. On the one hand, to understand borders in the Southern Cone it is necessary to analyze the convergence of the political and cultural histories of these borders, as well as the intellectual history of border studies. On the other hand, it is necessary to distinguish identity borders from cultural ones.