Theory and practice of autonomy: illia's foreign policy

Abstract

This article is a summary of Alejandro Simonoffs doctoral thesis. The thesis originated from a number of papers written since the end of the 80s in which a double phenomenon was observed: 1) the existence of political instability which had the consequence of an erratic atttitude to foreign affairs by our country; and, 2) the absence of a proper categorisation of many periods of our present history. The question posed was if this could obey to two reasons or just one of them. In order to solve the dilemma the policy of radical Arturo Illia was analysed. Such government, being weak and showing internal and external conflict, was thus unstable and had trouble in defining the Argentine position in the Cold war from an autonomist perspective. The characterization of Arturo Illia's government as autonomist proves complicated. This could be due to two reasons: either the designation is a result of instability or the models used for foreign policies analysis are inadequate to solve the dilemma. Therefore, our motivation to analyze the issue of autonomy involves both theoretical as well as practical aspects. Our main hypothesis has two parts as a consequence of this ambiguity: the theory itself and its application. Is the autonomist model enough to explain this foreign policy or is it that its limits arise from the events analyzed?