Liberalism originally developed in opposition to all kinds of traditional authoritarianism (royal, aristocratic, church) as a burgeois ideal of equality and freedom.

In South America, the overthrow of old landowner elites happened early on in the 19th century, but there was only a very narrow pool of city-dwelling citizens, so they quickly transformed into another pro-elite movement, one that supports and depends on super-rich businessmen, and hence is rather authoritarian.

In North America, tough many Founding Fathers had an agrarian utopia in mind, the Revolution was in fact a liberal victory. Thus liberals didn't have to focus on authoritarian traditional elites - instead, they had to notice how new elites form and opress people. US  liberalism noticed that equal rights by law aren't enough, because various factors (like inherited wealth, education, preconceptions on race and sex) prevent equal opportunities. US liberalism discovered the state as a vehicle to create equal opportunities, and thus became identified with Big Government. But, there were also the extreme liberals, the libertarians, who in opposition to the liberals' changeover focused on economic freedoms, and in the seventies they spawned neoliberalism (which uses the state to destroy the state's role in the economy).

In the more industrialised West Europe, liberals fought on and dismantled the old autocracy until WWI, then became victims of their own success and the rise of socialistic movements. But before, differing concepts of liberalism evolved: individual vs. collective freedoms, the latter explains how some liberals (for example the German FDP) are nationalistic. On the mainland, since conservatives were for economic control by the state too (but for authoritarian and nationalistic reasons, not for redistribution), until recently they could maintain a quite distict platform of their own, on the economy. In the UK, I think Thatcher's makeover of the Tories into neoliberal revolutionaries was what turned the local liberals into fence-sitter centrists, and neoliberal economic policy into 'conservative'.

In Eastern Europe, the development was more complex. First, due to feudal societies, it started with enlightened aristocrats dreaming about industrialisation and a burgeoise. In the ninteenth century they were halfway between South American and West European style liberalism. But then came fascism and communism, and liberals defined themselves in opposition to those. Regrettably, as lately neoliberalism became accepted to some extent in almost every political family, liberals in former communist countries and many Western European ones became its cheerleaders, abadoning much more broad concepts of freedom.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}