ABSTRACT
Up until the late 1980s, Venezuela was considered exceptional in the region, as it was regarded as the most stable democracy and the most developed and wealthiest country in Latin America, all thanks to its oil industry. To unpack the intersections between statecraft, modernity and culture in Venezuela it is crucial to understand them as inseparable from the oil-based Bureaucratic Power of the state. Venezuela did not become a rentier state with the rise of the oil industry in the early twentieth century, it was born a rentier state from the moment it became a republic by adopting the mining codes inherited from the Spanish Crown. The way the country dealt with the oil industry was akin to how it dealt with modernity through the use of archaic bureaucratic instruments which, combined with the state’s technological and financial incapacities, translated into statecraft built around the notion of property and control over oil rent money. Oil was understood predominantly as wealth that flowed from the soil directly to the state’s coffers and not as a complex technological reality. The consolidation of state formation, modernisation and oil production in Venezuela, as well the state’s modernising efforts, concentrated on the main urban centres, predominantly the capital, which broadly remains the domain of the elite. The transformation of the built environment through strategies of modernisation did not cascade into all sectors of Venezuelan society as oil created an inflated economy that fostered an illusion of progress and modernity promoted from the state, manifested more clearly in the rapid urbanisation in the twentieth century. Oil, the state and modernisation are interdependent phenomena in Venezuela, but tend to be predominantly studied within the disciplines of economics and politics; when reference is made to culture or urban development, these are regarded as the result of direct investment of the oil wealth made available by the state to private enterprise and altruistic elites. This chapter traces state formation in Venezuela back to the postcolonial emergence of Latin Amer ican nations; it explains how the process of independence and the construction of bureaucratic structures was fraught with contradictions, such as the enduring rigid social structures inherited from the colony that perpetuated the social and political power of elites, at odds with the project of national modernisation. This chapter also provides a historical review of the
political and cultural effects of the arrival of the oil industry in the early twentieth century up to Hugo Chávez’s Petro-Socialism. The chapter develops in two parts. Part one contextualises state formation in Venezuela within the postcolonial process of the emergence of Latin Amer ican nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, addressing the enduring contradictions generated by a process of modernisation led by elites that came accompanied by the perpetuation of a colonial structure to preserve their economic and political power. It also explores the formation of the Venezuelan Petrostate from the period of post-independence to the arrival of the oil industry, and the emergence of what Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil has defined as the Magical State. Part two develops a discussion about the historical context of the intersections between statecraft, modernity and oil in Venezuela, exploring in particular the slogan ‘to sow the oil’ coined by Arturo Uslar Pietri in 1936, which runs across historical narratives around oil wealth and modernity, heightened by Carlos Andrés Pérez’s The Great Venezuela project in the 1970s, the subsequent exhaustion of the democratic Pact of Puntofijo accelerated by the collapse in oil prices in the 1980s and 1990s, which laid the foundations for Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution and the re-edition of the ‘to sow the oil’ imperative to build a new type of oil-based socialism.
