Argentine Constitutional History, 1810-1852: A Re-examination

Abstract

L OOKING BACKWARD, the twentieth-century Argentine, justly proud of his country, cannot recall the period of gestation in which his patria, his fatherland, took shape. It is altogether natural for him to believe, as he does, that the Argentine nation was born on May 25, 1810, that the political debate of the next sixty or seventy years centered essentially around the internal political structure of the nation, that is, whether should have a monarchical, federal, or centralized form of government, and that Buenos Aires, with the only port, always dominated the economy of the interior provinces.' This view of the Argentine past assumes that the political leaders of the independence era thought of only one body politic, one patria, the Argentine Republic of today, and differed only in their political philosophies. This is to date Argentine nationalism from 1810, even though the first sign of an awakening national consciousness appeared only in 1813.2 Such an interpretation, however, fails to show how or when the relatively sedentary people of the Rio de la Plata, so different and so isolated from one another, came to desire national unity or to think of themselves as members of a distinct political unit, the Argentine Republic. In reality, while some individuals may have dreamed of a great Argentine nation, a nation which had never existed, the term Argentina generally denoted during the first half of the nineteenth century a geographical area that was broken up into several quasi-independent provinces or states, each struggling to wrest power and wealth from its neighbors. These provinces were tenuously held together, for latent centrifugal forces in the Rio de la Plata region were unleashed with emancipation from Spain, and the loosely governed viceroyalty