Argentina: What Went Wrong

Abstract

This book represents the latest scholarly investigation into the Argentinean riddle: why did a seemingly wealthy, advanced nation veer from its path and become mired in perennial political and economic strife? There is no denying that this subject continues to attract attention, as anyone who has sat next to a tourist on a long flight to Buenos Aires can attest. Argentina’s crisis in 2001 – 2002 has only renewed interest among both scholars and a wider public drawn to the spectacle of the republic’s agony. Yet discussions of the Argentinean riddle are often fraught with problems. They tend toward reductive thinking about “national failure”; they compress Argentinean history into an unyielding story of rise and fall; and they are premised on implicit but uncritical comparisons to models of “success” (the United States, Australia, or a counterfactual, ideal Argentina). When proffered by foreign observers (a group to which I belong), answers to the riddle can be smugly confident in their diagnoses and condescending toward an entire people.Colin M. MacLachlan’s Argentina: What Went Wrong avoids many of the pitfalls of this genre. Readers looking for a simple answer to Argentina’s troubles should not linger, for they will not find herein a stock villain such as an “Iberian cultural heritage.” Instead, this one-volume history explores the multiple forces that shaped Argentina from the end of colonial rule to the Néstor Kirchner administration. This is a work of synthesis based on major secondary works in both English and Spanish. It is pitched apparently to a general public; there are few scholarly notes, but the book supplies a chronology, glossary, bibliography, and lively sidebars on topics ranging from Scottish immigrants to soccer. As suggested by its title, the book has two main purposes: to provide a narrative introduction to Argentina’s history and to explain the paradox of “what went wrong.”The majority of the text is devoted to the first goal, and the author provides a historical account more densely detailed and varied in scope than many surveys. While political and economic history receives primary attention, MacLachlan touches on numerous social and cultural topics. For instance, chapters on the nineteenth century examine not only Rosas’s attempts to forge a caudillo order and the rise of the agro-export sector but also the role of women in public charity and urban working-class life. Of the many themes addressed, particularly noteworthy is the author’s treatment of how intellectuals imagined Argentinean nationhood at distinct points in time. MacLachlan takes seriously the views of figures such as Juan Bautista Alberdi, Manuel Gálvez, and Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz on their society’s flaws. On the whole, the book rejects monocausal explanations of Argentina’s development and embraces a multiplicity of historical viewpoints.This commitment to the complexity of Argentinean history is a laudable strength of the work. But it proves a shortcoming in regard to analyzing “what went wrong.” Through most of the book, there is little sense of how the author will weigh in on the riddle or how his answers compare with those of other critics. The conclusion identifies three main factors behind Argentina’s current predicament: the pernicious influence of a fractious, paranoid nationalism during the twentieth century; a misguided sense of Argentina’s limitless natural wealth, coupled with a lack of a coherent project for industrialization, economic diversification, and fiscal restraint; and finally an inability to establish inclusive, stable democratic institutions, thanks in part to the predations of corrupt politicians and the citizenry’s recent proclivity to wallow in “a sense of chronic, perhaps fatal malaise” (p. 199).MacLachlan thus assembles an array of explanations to bring closure to the narrative. These arguments echo the conclusions reached by scholars who have probed the history of nacionalista thought, economic policy making, and mass politics in relation to the Argentinean paradox. Other specialists in the field will no doubt dispute the weight given to these factors, or question the underlying causes of each problem. Yet this book aims, after all, to be an overview of major themes. One hopes that readers introduced to Argentina through its pages will not only think very carefully about the riddle, but also be inspired to ponder the country’s many other historical enigmas.