The Closing of the Argentine Mind

La Argentina y la tormenta del mundo. Ideas e ideologías entre 1930 y 1945 (Argentina and the World Storm: Ideas and Ideologies from 1930 to 1945)
By Tulio Halperín Donghi
254 pages, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores Argentina, 2003 (in Spanish)

Argentina is in the throes of an intellectual crisis. A spectacular debt default in 2002, more than five years of recession, and continued political turmoil have not aroused Argentina’s top thinkers and politicians from complacency. The current chaos mirrors the period between the First and Second World Wars, when Argentina faced a similar crisis of intellect and identity, as its economy and democracy crumbled. Fortunately, today’s world poses fewer dangers than the interwar years. But that reality does not justify inaction by Argentina’s intellectual elite, most of which is more concerned with achieving professional success and mindlessly rejecting globalization than with solving Argentina’s enormous challenges.

In La Argentina y la tormenta del mundo (Argentina and the World Storm), historian Tulio Halperín Donghi has written a warning for today’s Argentine intelligentsia. Ideological debate, Halperín Donghi demonstrates, has been central to Argentine politics since the rise of the Peronist political movement in the early and middle 20th century. Halperín Donghi shows how, amidst nationalist movements in Italy and Germany, civil war in Spain, and a Japanese expansionist campaign in Manchuria, Argentine intellectuals eagerly debated the past, present, and future of the country, by both introspection and an ardent evaluation of world affairs.

Born in 1926, Halperín Donghi is widely recognized as Argentina’s best historian, and Argentina and the World Storm does justice to his prodigious talents. A professor at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1971 to 1994, Halperín Donghi attained an unusually high status within Argentina’s intellectual class thanks to analytically merciless books like La larga agonía de la Argentina peronista (The Long Agony of Peronist Argentina) and Revolución y guerra; formación de una elite dirigente en la Argentina (Revolution and War: The Formation of a Ruling Elite in Argentina). Although recent, Argentina and the World Storm has already gained approval from scholars.

Argentina’s interwar debate was driven, as Halperín Donghi’s admirable book shows, by intellectuals who felt their nation lacked a clear sense of self. Various events shaped the identity crisis: the collapse of Argentina’s export-oriented economy, the military coup and subsequent breakdown of democracy in 1930, the expansion of import-substituting industries and accelerated internal urban migration, and the second overthrow of the civilian government in 1943 by Juan Perón’s military coup. During and leading up to the Peronist revolution, Argentina was, in Halperín Donghi’s words, a "nation in suspense" (the title for the book’s final chapter). Intellectual optimists hoped for a return to a calm, bucolic Argentina. Others desired a radical change in Argentina’s political, social, and economic system. Peronism repealed both possibilities. It was at once a departure from Argentina’s past, but not a pure European-style nationalist regime as many expected.

Peronism permanently transformed Argentina between 1943 and 1955. A political movement that mobilized masses of people previously excluded from society (descamisados, or "shirtless ones"), Peronism grew out of Argentina’s failure to redistribute income effectively or enhance democratic participation in the early 20th century. The charismatic personalities of former president Juan Perón and his second wife Eva "Evita" Duarte were central to the movement’s success. Like European nationalist movements, Peronism was not ideologically linear. Brusque, disorderly, and intellectually diverse, Peronism mirrored events in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

Halperín Donghi’s first chapter gets to the heart of Argentina’s debate over Peronism. "Does democracy still have a future?" wondered Ramón Doll, a socialist thinker, and Julio Fingerit, a well-known writer, as well as major anti-modernist, conservative religious thinkers of the time, such as César Pico, Tomás Casares, and Julio Meinvielle. The march on Rome and the rumble of tanks in Spain and Germany provided little hope. The democratic era seemed to be ending and some Argentines, including two prominent nationalist, revisionist historians, Carlos Ibarguren and Manuel Gálvez (not to mention Perón himself), saw Italian-style corporativism (state controlled capitalism) as a natural replacement. Although a Catholic nationalist movement gave intellectual birth to the first Peronists, the actual impact of Hispanic and hierarchical tradition faded as Peronism mixed with other influences to create its own identity. Halperín Donghi appropriately describes how this disorientation allowed Peronism to co-opt nationalism in the early 1940s.

The crisis of a crumbling democracy tested the manifest destiny of economic and political greatness envisioned by Argentina’s founding fathers, including Juan B. Alberdi, Bartolomé Mitre, and Domingo Sarmiento. These men, with the help of a solid educational system, consecrated an official historiography that transformed manifest destiny into fact. The 1930s crisis crushed this self-image, but, as Halperín Donghi points out in his second and perhaps best chapter, prominent nationalist thinkers such as Arturo Jauretche, Raúl Scalabrini Ortíz, and the brothers Irazusta and Julio Barcos stepped in to propose an alternative, antiliberal version of Argentine history. These thinkers rejected the traditional view of Argentina’s success in the late decades of the 19th century and singled out caudillos (political bosses) such as José de Artigas, Facundo Quiroga, and Juan Manuel de Rosas as role models. Moreover, the nationalist academics questioned sacred policies (railroad expansion and the special relationship with Britain) of the previous oligarchical and highly restrictive (but nonetheless democratic) regime, pegging them as contrary to the national interest, in what was a pioneering version of dependency theory.

In this nascent historical revisionism — what Halperín Donghi dismisses as an "implacably ideological manipulation of the facts" — new figures were anointed heroes, including de Rosas, a violent 19th-century tyrant. Thus, a damned hero of the 1880s took a place of honor at Perón’s new nationalist altar, a regime that, at its height, was happy to sweep feverish historical discussions under the rug. After all, it was Peronism that broke the suspense of the nation. Perón resolved, in a precipitous and untidy way, the discussions about the future of Argentina that facilitated his rise to power. Despite this resolution, intellectuals (Peronist and anti-Peronist) continued arguing about history for years. The exchange was vigorous, but it reflected the country’s governmental detour and, at times, descended into intolerance, instability, and difficulty reaching basic consensus.

What surprises, considering Argentina today, is the passion with which the Peronist era’s intellectuals were involved in debates about history, world events, and their nation’s present and future. Beyond mere ideas, their commitment to country and their will to use the pen as a tool in political battles are instructive for today’s generation. Current debates over the Free Trade Area of the Americas, globalization, market reforms, and the role of the state mirror those examined in Halperín Donghi’s book. As in the 1930s, some intellectuals today argue globalization is a zero-sum game, and dependency theory and simplified interpretations of global capitalism are again in vogue. But today’s intellectuals should not ignore the lessons of five decades of democratic and social development. Namely, that the most advanced nations in terms of human development are precisely those in which democratic institutions, the rule of law, and dynamic market economies are respected and allowed to prosper.