Argentine National State Research Articles

The Political Science Discipline in Argentina: The Political Scientist's National Association's Role

It is very difficult to date the birth of political science in Argentina. Unlike other discipline of the social sciences, in Argentina the first distinction can be made between political thought on the one hand, and political science in another. The debate over political thought—as the reflection of different political questions—emerged in our country in the nineteenth century, especially during the process of constructing the Argentine nation-state. Conversely, political science is defined in a general way as the application of the scientific method to the studies on the power of the state (Fernández 2001).

Nación y nacionalismo en América Latina

This collective volume consists of a heterogeneous and uneven collection of essays dealing with different aspects of the construction of the nation and nationalism in five Latin American countries and Puerto Rico. The organization of the volume lacks structure; the chapters are not grouped in sections. Moreover, the editor’s introduction looks like a general review of the literature on nationalism and does not address the contents of the chapters.Focusing on Mexico, Fernando Vizcaíno’s “Estado multinacional y globalización” shows how globalization has forced a reconceptualization of sovereignty in two different directions. On the one hand, globalization, understood as “the link between the state and society with the world through the economy, law, politics, culture, and technology” (p. 29), has brought to the surface the problem of multinational states. On the other hand, the new international environment has promoted the involvement of global organizations, or even foreign countries, into domestic issues ranging from human rights to local politics. According to the author, in today’s globalized world, sovereignty cannot elude the interconnections between the global and the domestic dimensions.In “El problema nacional: Hispanoamérica, Colombia y Panamá,” Olmedo Beluche discusses the formation of the modern national state from a “Marxist perspective.” Only the last 4 pages of this 22-page essay deal with the cases of Colombia and Panama. The rest of the chapter consists of a general (and rather uncritical and, I would add, incomplete) discussion of the Marxist literature on state formation.Ramón Grosfoguel’s chapter on Puerto Rican nationalism is probably one of the most successful of the collection. It convincingly shows why the options that promote the “status quo” and the incorporation of the island into the United States as a state (estadidad ) has gained the favor of Puerto Ricans in recent decades, at the expense of nationalism. The author argues that the United States has established a unique kind of relationship with the island that has resulted in the introduction of a variety of social benefits unavailable to the rest of the Caribbean, as well as in a multibillion-dollar transfer of income from the metropolis to the colony (a kind of reverse colonialism). According to Grosfoguel, independence would bring the loss of these profits and the establishment of a neocolonial relationship with the United States similar to that of the formally independent islands of the region. In the author’s view, Puerto Rico has a lot to lose and very little to gain if it cuts its ties to the United States.The following two chapters deal with political ideas in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Colombia. Hésper Eduardo Pérez Rivera discusses in detail the ideas of two Catholic Colombian politicians, Miguel Antonio Caro and Laureano Gómez, and their relationships with the Conservative Party and with liberalism. José Enrique González traces the origins and development of the tension between the “tradicionista” and the liberal political traditions in Colombia.Georges Couffignal and Rosaly Ramírez Roa focus on the emergence of neopopulist/neoliberal governments in Latin America during the 1990s. This chapter could be loosely grouped together with the next one by Danilo Martuccelli and Maristella Svampa, which proposes the suggestive hypothesis that many of the problems that contemporary Peruvian society is undergoing could be better interpreted in the light of the incomplete nature of the country’s three “national-popular” political experiences: Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre’s APRA, the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces established in 1968, and the first Alan García government during the 1980s. The authors seem to imply that if these three populist (or “national-popular” as they call them) experiments had been taken to completion, Perú would be today in a much better shape. I wonder if an analysis of the legacies left by other “national populist” experiences in Latin America would sustain this hypothesis.Jurandir Malerba’s chapter is a historiographical essay on Brazilian independence. It provides a complete bibliography and a useful agenda for future research. Finally, Arturo Claudio Laguado approaches a well-worn topic: the place of liberalism in the construction of the Argentine national state. In particular, the author focuses on the ideas of Sarmiento and Alberdi on such issues as education, religion, and immigration. Laguado traces Argentina’s political instability and “constant military intervention” to the system of exclusion promoted by Argentine liberals in the nineteenth century. This conclusion is a bit far-fetched, since before the coup of 1930, whose causes could probably be found in more immediate factors, Argentina had enjoyed almost 80 years of reasonable political stability under a constitutional-democratic system (admittedly imperfect but more than acceptable for the standards of the time). This was a longer period of democratic stability than most European countries can boast of even today.In sum, Nación y nacionalismo should be appreciated more for the quality of some individual essays than for its coherence and structure as a volume.

Feet Notes: The Fancy Footwork of Josefina Ludmer on the Gauchesca

Josefina Ludmer's El género gauchesco: Un tratado sobre la patria (1988) was a key work at a time when Hispanic Studies was opening to critical theory, and remains one of the most suggestive and theoretically sophisticated texts in the discipline. In addition to highly originalreadings of selected gauchesca poems, a genre that is a cultural cornerstone in the River Plate, Ludmer engaged issues of national identity at two crucial sites, the geo-political boundaries of the state and the physical body of its subaltern members, well before these became common concernsin the field.This essay approaches Ludmer's theoretical contribution from the question of her obtrusive footnotes. The notes upend the text in various ways, thus enacting the same rebellion from below that Ludmer discerns in the gauchesca itself.Having discussed the dialogical relationestablished by Ludmer between the gauchesca and the ideology of the Argentine nation-state, the essay then seeks to enlarge the dialogue. The Romantic poetry of Esteban Echeverría, has long since been displaced by the gauchesca as an embodiment of Argentine identity. The proposal ofa sub-genre crucial to both suggests a means for recuperating Romantic poetry for current discussion of national identity in Argentina.

De inclusiones excluyentes. Desierto, otredad indígena y territorialidad nacional en las primeras producciones geográficas de Argentina

Las representaciones territoriales han sido fundamentales en la formación de los Estados-Nación modernos. El presente trabajo analiza los modos por los que destacadas producciones cartográficas difundidas durante la formación del Estado-Nación argentino, contribuyeron a articular una imagen hegemónica del país. Específicamente, indaga los mecanismos por los cuales dichas representaciones fueron definiendo al espacio pampeano-patagónico como desierto y, consecuentemente, como un espacio diferenciado de la Nación. Considerando la tesis de que, históricamente, en Argentina la pregunta por el desierto envuelve un modo histórico y político de indagar sobre la relación con los pueblos indígenas, se reflexiona sobre los procesos de desmarcación de la mismidad argentina y marcación de la otredad indígena que dichas representaciones contribuyeron a articular. De este modo, se busca contribuir con el reconocimiento y contextualización de los procesos espacio-temporales de identificación colectiva y de control político de la diversidad sociocultural producidos históricamente en Argentina.

La nacionalización fallida de la Patagonia Norte, 1862-1904

The study of diverse documentary sources originating from the Argentine national state suggests that the early efforts to effectively incorporate to the nation the new territories of the Pampa and Patagonia conquered in the second half of decade of 1870 were unsuccessful. We propose to support this hypothesis, in the North Patagonia case, through the analysis of National Congress minutes, presidential messages, memories of the Department of Interior and War and memories of the first governors of the National Territories of Patagonia, Rio Negro and Neuquen.

L'image de l'espace scolaire dans les livres de lecture de l'école primaire, Buenos Aires 1853‐1942*

This paper seeks to throw new light on an important source for the History of Education, the Reading school book. Within a larger research project we are carrying out on formation of primary schools in the city of Buenos Aires, the Reading book has surfaced as a key documentary source. Our point is that the Argentine Nation State needed an architectonic dimension in configuring its primary school, a dimension that used readings and images that were distinct from material resources that traditionally signified national importance. In brief, Argentina had to turn the primary school into a place easily recognizable for what happens inside ‐ teaching and learning ‐ and for what that teaching and learning stood for. the Nation‐State in its capital city. Reading books took on an important role in this nation buildingprocess, through both iconographie and textual materials that conveyed various ways of imagining school space, especially a poetic sense of space which signified multiple modes of representation and assertion. The most interesting aspect in the paper is its use of the spatial viewpoint, along side of the material aspect of school buildings. The words and images printed in Reading books, their variance and dominance, go beyond the material and evoke the sense and meaning of space in a broader sociohistorical framework. * Traduction française de Lucia Inés Dorín et Maria Sol Dorin. Pour cet article le prix ISCHE‐2000 a été décerné à l'auteur.