| Summary: | Article in Spanish, Abstracts in English and Spanish.As it is well known, Humboldt and Bonpland ended their almost five-years-journey throughout the American continent with a short but intense stay of nearly three months in the USA.As it has already been studied in a previous paper (‘HiN’ nº 3, 2001), Humboldt’s political and economical thesis predicted the role and the place that would most probably correspond to the newly born American nations within the new post-Napoleonic world order.Afterward, Humboldt explicitly stated that not only the future but the present of the USA seemed very different to the one of the Latin American countries due to the many ethnic, social and cultural barriers, and specially to the many historical ‘vices’ that these had inherited from the colony. This conviction was shared with other ‘illustrated’ German thinkers of his time, such as G.F. Hegel, who thought that after the full consummation of the Iberoamerican independence from Europe a confrontation, even military, will be unavoidable and even necessary between the North and the South of the America as precondition for the rebirthing of the ‘idea’, ‘reason’ and ‘spirit’ into the ‘new world’; it is, as precondition for the continuity of ‘History’; in other words, for avoiding the ‘end of History’. After 200 years of a complex and difficult coexistence between the USA and the rest of the continent, and after at least two failures of Iberoamerica to achieve a full reinsertion within the Western politics, culture and economy, the USA, having been a super world power for several decades, have offered, and even forced, a great continental alliance (‘ALCA) ’that will lead in, a very short term (2005), to a unique and preferential continental market and, in some way, to a unique American economic culture. One of the many questions that arises about such a challenge is if the Iberoamerican countries have yet been able to overcome the mentioned historic and structural barriers and colonial ‘vices’ referred by Humboldt. And, if in despite of these barriers, would Iberoamerica, by the hand of the USA and Canada, finally be able to find an appropriate and deserved ‘place’ and ‘role’ within the ‘new world order’ of the so called ‘globalization’ era. This questioning is a new challenge for the Humboltian science and a possibility for it to analyze the ‘present time’ with the same premises used by Humboldt at his time to criticize the Hispano-American reality and to certain extent, predict its immediate future. This is what, with the required humbleness, this paper tries to formulate.
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