Argentina: Colonial Heritage or Liberal Decline?

Between the 1880s and the First World War, Argentina experienced an almost unparalleled period of economic and social expansion that transformed the basic features of the country. The spectacular economic growth prompted by the incorporation of new lands and the subsequent increase in cereal production and exports, the influx of European capital, and immigration, in a relatively stabilized political situation, amazed some witnesses, who predicted that “no bounds can be set to the wealth that awaits enterprise in this fair land.”¹ Population increased from around 2 million to more than 7 million people; railway length grew from around 3,000 kilometers to more than 31,000 kilometers; exports rose from around 60 million gold pesos to more than 400 million gold pesos (with similar figures for imports); and so on. Politically, after a long period of internal strife, the federalization of the city of Buenos Aires in 1880 marked the beginning of an era of relative stability. The effective application of the Constitution of 1853, securing individual rights and private property, and a series of laws organizing the judiciary and fixing a common unit of currency, among others, established an adequate institutional framework.

In The Cambridge History of Latin America, Vol. V (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) two articles (Roberto Cortés Conde, “The Growth of the Argentine Economy, c. 1870-1914,” and Ezequiel Gallo, “Argentina: Society and Politics, 1880-1916”) provide an excellent basis for the understanding of this period in Argentine history.

Cortés Conde’s own El Progreso Argentino 1880-1914, (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1979) is worth noting as a remarkable work of economic history, especially interesting for his challenge of some widely accepted theses, namely, those concerning the structure of land tenure and the evolution of wages during the period. Cortés Conde rejects the interpretation that explains the formation of the structure of land tenure during the nineteenth century as a conspiracy by a landowner elite and instead investigates the economic factors that influenced the origins and development of a market in land. The author also argues against those, such as Hobart Spalding (La clase trabajadora argentina [Buenos Aires: Editorial Galerna, 1970]) and Adolfo Dorfman (Historia de la industria argentina [Buenos Aires: Escuela de Estudios Argentinos, 1942]), who claim that during the period of great economic expansion the wages of workers deteriorated in real terms. Based on new evidence, Cortés Conde finds that during those years—and despite fluctuations within the period—there was a sustained increase in real wages.

Ezequiel Gallo’s La Pampa Gringa (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1983) concentrates on the colonization of the province of Santa Fe and its impact on the agricultural boom; his “Agrarian Expansion and Industrial Development in Argentina, 1880-1930,” in Raymond Carr, ed., Latin American Affairs, St. Antony’s Papers, No. 22 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) emphasizes the positive connections between the expansion of agriculture and the possibilities of industrial growth. Both articles in The Cambridge History of Latin America provide extensive bibliographies covering the period.

While these authors recognize the importance that liberal institutions had on this process of radical transformation of the country, there are several other interpretations that either deny that this transformation was as dramatic as liberal historians believe, or dismiss the influence of liberal ideas on the process. Some of these studies regard the predominance of liberalism as an intellectual disguise of policies that aimed at the satisfaction of a small elite’s class interests. Unfortunately, these studies tend to base their arguments on the use of rhetorical terms (such as “class interests”) rather than on a strict analysis of historical evidence.² Such an approach, moreover, very frequently neglects the analysis of ideas as important factors shaping economic and political institutions.³

Economic and Cultural Determinism

In “The Reconstruction of Nineteenth Century Politics in Spanish America: A Case for the History of Ideas” (Latin American Research Review, Vol. 8, 1973), Charles A. Hale singled out Latin America’s liberal experience in the nineteenth century as its distinctive feature among developing regions. Hale identified two types of interpretations of Latin American history that underestimate this liberal experience. The “cultural” interpretation, which Hale locates in works like Richard Morse’s “The Heritage of Latin America” (in Louis Hartz, et. al., eds., The Founding of New Societies [New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), stresses the importance of the colonial heritage of a corporatist, hierarchical, and authoritarian socio-political order, as determining all subsequent institutional developments. The liberal experience of the nineteenth century is represented in this cultural interpretation as “an aberration from more permanent patterns.” Similarly, Howard J. Wiarda, in “Toward a Framework for the Study of Political Change in the Iberic-Latin Tradition: The Corporative Model” (World Politics, Vol. 25, 1973), has written of a traditional “corporative framework” that reflects “a historic hierarchical, authoritarian, and organic view of man, society and polity.” Instead of being transformed by the ideological currents of the nineteenth century, this basic colonial structure apparently survived in a different form, merely adopting the new imperative of change and modernization.

The second type of interpretation that underestimates the liberal experience in Latin America is what Hale calls the “economic” interpretation, exemplified by Stanley J. Stein and Barbara Stein in The Colonial Heritage of Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) and various kinds of dependency theories, which focus on Latin America’s dependency on the more economically advanced nations as the key to its historical development. According to this view, it is this economic dependency that determined the structure of Latin American political and economic institutions. The changes that occurred during the nineteenth century are interpreted in some of these studies as reflecting the emergence of a new colonial relationship rather than as a radical historical transformation.

Quite recently, David Rock has combined both “cultural” and “economic” interpretations in his study Argentina, 1516-1982 (London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 1986), considering the country “a classically ‘colonial’ society.” The period of social and economic transformation of the late nineteenth century, says Rock, was not as effective as liberal historians believe. During this period, he argues, “the host society deflected foreign influences to extend and deepen many of its own historic propensities.” Rock’s reliance on “historical propensities” and economic dependency to explain Argentina’s decline in this century shares the deterministic features of the economic and cultural interpretations.

Many of these theories are based on dubious historical evidence (see, for example, D.C.M. Platt, “Dependency in Nineteenth Century Latin America: An Historian Objects,” Latin American Research Review, Vol. 15, 1980). A very recent work by Lance A. Davis and Robert A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860-1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) also casts doubt on the assumption of the “profitability of the Empire,” an assumption very frequently simply taken for granted in dependency theories.

Ideology

In addition, there is very little room left—if any—in these interpretations for the interaction between ideological changes and institutional development. Institutions and historical events appear to be totally predetermined by the colonial cultural heritage, or by the alleged economic dependency of the country. As an alternative to these views, it could be argued that historical developments in Argentina were primarily influenced by important ideological transformations that not only affected liberalism, but ultimately produced its decline and substitution by different mixtures of nationalism and corporatism. In this alternative interpretation, therefore, the interaction between ideas and political action takes a central place; special emphasis is put on the connections between different bodies of ideas predominant in a certain period of time and the resulting institutions, policies, and programs. The focus on economic and social history that has dominated academic literature on Argentina needs to be complemented by more research on the ideological changes that shaped political, economic, and social events.

One of the first ideological changes that affected liberalism in Argentina reflected a pattern similar to intellectual trends in European liberalism. Larry Siedentop has pointed out the importance of Tocqueville and the French Doctrinaires Guizot and Royer-Collard in establishing a tradition of political thought based on a theory of social change and a recognition of the role that social conditions play in the shaping of political institutions. It was this tradition that induced the Argentine liberals of the “Generation of 1837” (Alberdi, Sarmiento, and Echeverría) to abandon Bentham and Rousseau and begin “to learn something of national inclinations, customs and races, and of historical antecedents” by way of Tocqueville, Guizot, and the historians Thierry and Michelet, as Sarmiento put it in Facundo o Civilización y Barbarie en las pampas argentinas (1845; Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de America Latina, 1979). Charles Hale has described this ideological change as “the decline of classic constitutionalism” (“Political and Social Ideas in Latin America, 1870-1930,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, Vol. IV, op. cit., 1986). The new constitution makers were more concerned with existing social conditions in their own countries than with the principles of political philosophy embraced by the men of the Independence period. The ways in which this was reflected in the ideas of the men who inspired the Argentine Constitution of 1853 are dealt with by a small number of works dealing with the history of ideas in Argentina, including José Luis Romero, A History of Argentine Political Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963) and especially Natalio Botana, La Tradición Republicana (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1984) and Tulio Halperin Donghi, “Para que la inmigración? Ideología y política inmigratoria y aceleración del proceso modernizador: el caso argentino (1810-1914)” (Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas [13] 1976).

Much has been written about the corporatist ideas supported by some of the participants in the military coup of 1930. Romero’s book on Argentine political thought, cited above, gives a good description of the popularity that the idea of a corporatist state based on “functional representation” enjoyed during the 1930s. General Uriburu, head of the military coup, declared as President: “When the representatives of the people cease to be merely representatives of party committees, and take their seats in Congress as workers, ranchers, farmers, professional men, industrialists, and so on, democracy for us will have come to be something more than a beautiful word.” Despite the fact that these ideas did not take institutional form, nor were incorporated in the Constitution as some of their supporters desired, they certainly helped to shape the ideological climate of the 1930s. In addition, the conservative governments that followed the military reacted to the problems created by the depression by granting a much more active role to the State in the economic sphere, as exemplified by the creation of the Central Bank and regulatory agencies for agriculture, increases in tariff protection, and expansive fiscal and monetary policies. The attempts that these governments made to maintain the economic relationship with Great Britain during the decade helped to inflame still more the nationalist reaction against foreign capital. When in 1943 another military coup opened the door to the arrival of Juan Perón to power, very little of liberalism remained as a living body of ideas. Peronism accentuated the authoritarian, nationalist, and populist features of a corporatist structure basically created during the 1930s. Rather than the beginning of a new era, in the field of ideas Peronism represented the climax of a process that had begun during the previous decades.

As mentioned, interpretations of Argentine history that underrate the importance of liberal ideas during the country’s impressive development are frequently based on theories that attribute deterministic powers to the country’s colonial cultural heritage or economic relationships with the more advanced nations. The role that individuals, guided by general ideas and principles, have as agents of change and historical transformation is greatly reduced. They almost disappear, as Isiah Berlin put it, in “the night of impersonality, in which human beings are dissolved into abstract forces.”⁸

The study of the successive ideological transformations that undermined the liberal tradition, and its eventual substitution by different mixtures of nationalism and corporativism, could provide the basis of a much needed alternative interpretation of Argentina’s past.

Notes

¹Lloyd’s Publishing Company, Twentieth Century Impressions of
Argentina (London, 1911), p. 82.

²On the rhetorical uses of the concept of “social class,” see P. N.
Furbank, Unholy Pleasure, or the Idea of Social Class. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985), chapter 1, and Francis Korn, “El
Poder de las palabras,” in Liberalismo y Sociedad (Buenos Aires:
Ediciones Macchi, 1984).

³On the importance of ideology in the shaping of institutions see
Douglass North, “Three Approaches to the Study of Institutions,” in
David C. Colander, ed., NeoClassical Political Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1984), p. 39.

⁴Larry Siedentop, “Two Liberal Traditions,” in Alan Ryan, ed.,
The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 153–174.

⁵W. Haggard to Sir Edward Grey, December 16, 1906. Public
Records Office, F.O. 371/194.

⁶Cf. Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (London:
Heinemann, 1980), pp. 229–236.

⁷To a large extent, the nationalist reaction against some of the
consequences of the modernization process, e.g., the influence that
immigration had on the cultural traditions of the country, seemed to
reflect the type of opposition to the values of an “open” society so
thoroughly examined by Popper and Hayek. Cf. Karl Popper, The
Open Society and its Enemies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1945) and F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty (3 Vols.,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973, 1976, 1979).

⁸Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford University Press,
1969), Introduction, p. xxxiv.

Eduardo A. Zimmermann is a Claude R. Lambe Fellow of
the Institute for Humane Studies pursuing a Ph.D. in history
at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.