Identity and Nationalism in Modern Argentina

Defending the True Nation

Jeane DeLaney

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780268107918
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Nationalism has played a uniquely powerful role in Argentine history, in large part due to the rise and enduring strength of two variants of anti-liberal nationalist thought: one left-wing and identifying with the "people" and the other right-wing and identifying with Argentina's Catholic heritage. Although embracing very different political programs, the leaders of these two forms of nationalism shared the belief that the country's nineteenth-century liberal elites had betrayed the country by seeking to impose an alien ideology at odds with the supposedly true nature of the Argentine people. The result, in their view, was an ongoing conflict between the "false Argentina" of the liberals and the "authentic"nation of true Argentines. Yet, despite their commonalities, scholarship has yet to pay significant attention to the interconnections between these two variants of Argentine nationalism. Jeane DeLaney rectifies this oversight with Identity and Nationalism in Modern Argentina. In this book, DeLaney explores the origins and development of Argentina's two forms of nationalism by linking nationalist thought to ongoing debates over Argentine identity. Part I considers the period before 1930, examining the emergence and spread of new essentialist ideas of national identity during the age of mass immigration. Part II analyzes the rise of nationalist movements after 1930 by focusing on individuals who self-identified as nationalists.

DeLaney connects the rise of Argentina's anti-liberal nationalist movements to the shock of early twentieth-century immigration. She examines how pressures posed by the newcomers led to the weakening of the traditional ideal of Argentina as a civic community and the rise of new ethno-cultural understandings of national identity. Identity and Nationalism in Modern Argentina demonstrates that national identities are neither unitary nor immutable and that the ways in which citizens imagine their nation have crucial implications for how they perceive immigrants and whether they believe domestic minorities to be full-fledged members of the national community. Given the recent surge of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States, this study will be of interest to scholars of nationalism, political science, Latin American political thought, and the contemporary history of Argentina.

PART ONE

Debating the Nation

Part I traces the rise and spread of new essentialist understandings of Argentine national identity during the early twentieth century, understandings that served as cornerstones of nationalist thought after 1930. It begins with a look back at the nineteenth century, with an examination of the ideas that animated Argentina’s independence leaders. These leaders broke with Spain, not in the name of a preexisting ethno-cultural community, but in order to establish a new nation formed on the basis of shared political ideas and loyalties. Despite the influence of Romantic-nationalist currents in later decades, this civic vision of the Argentine nation predominated until the century’s end.

Subsequent chapters focus on the 1900–1930 period, when the rapid influx of millions of Europeans sparked concerns that Argentine traditions and culture were in danger of being erased by the immigrant masses. Inspired by a new wave of Romantic ideas that saw nations as distinctive ethno-cultural communities, rather than as human-created political projects, prominent Argentines began to write and speak about the need to consolidate the Argentine “race” or ethnicity in order to protect it from the tide of newcomers. This idea of a national race, most forcefully articulated by a new generation of intellectuals known as the cultural nationalists, gained greater currency over time, as a growing number of cultural elites embraced the notion that Argentines formed, or were forming, a unitary national ethnicity.

Part 1 also explores the intellectual sources of this new way of imagining the Argentine nation, highlighting in particular the impact of the Romantic philosophy known as Krausism. Based on the ideas of German philosopher Karl Christian Krause, this philosophy dominated Spanish thought during the latter half of the nineteenth century and entered Argentina through two different paths. The first was through the influence of the Spanish Generation of 1898, whose essentialist claim that nations—and families of nations—were organic ethno-cultural communities with distinctive personalities had an enormous impact on the Argentine cultural nationalists. The second route was more direct, as Argentines themselves read Krausist-based Spanish texts. Key here is the figure of Hipólito Yrigoyen, leader of the Unión Cívica Radical party, and the president of the Republic from 1916 and 1922, and again from 1928 to 1930. Owing to Yrigoyen’s overwhelming influence, the Radical Party reinforced the notion—already embraced by the cultural nationalists—that nations were homogenous, organic entities possessing unitary personalities and having unique historical missions they were destined to fulfill. In promoting this essentialist vision of the nation, Yrigoyen helped undermine the long-standing, voluntarist vision of Argentina as a civic community and in doing so served to delegitimize liberal democratic values.

This section ends with an exploration of the very different ways in which Argentines defined the nature of the supposed Argentine ethnicity or race. At stake was the question of immigrants’ role in shaping Argentine identity. Did the nation, as some prominent Argentines believed, already possess a well-defined ethnic profile that the newcomers threatened to deform or contaminate? Or, as others suggested, could the newcomers be successfully absorbed without altering the qualities of the preexisting Argentine race? Alternatively, as some intellectuals argued, would the growing immigrant population play a central role in the consolidation of a new national race that was still emerging? These radically different interpretations of the imagined Argentine race, I argue, established the conceptual groundwork for later nationalist debates over the nature of the (equally) imagined ser nacional.

ONE

Nation and Nationality in the
Nineteenth Century

As early twentieth-century Argentine elites confronted the challenges of mass immigration, they struggled mightily with the question of how to incorporate the millions of Europeans arriving on the nation’s shores. What role should the immigrant play in the country’s political life? What would become of Argentina’s culture and traditions? Could the country assimilate these immigrants, or would so many newcomers irrevocably change—or even erase—the existing population? One of the central arguments of this book is that this experience of mass immigration represented a critical juncture in Argentine history and produced a radical shift in the way in which large numbers of intellectuals and cultural elites conceptualized the meaning of Argentine nationality. In grappling with how to preserve what they understood to be their nation’s identity and to create a unified national community from a newly diverse population, these individuals drew inspiration from European strains of Romantic nationalism, an intellectual movement that envisioned nations as distinctive, homogeneous ethno-cultural communities, whose members were bound by a shared language, religion, and ancestry. The result was a new conceptual framework for imagining what it meant to be an Argentine. Increasingly during this period, key segments of the Argentine elite came to believe that they and their countrymen formed a unique ethnicity or “race” into which the immigrants would somehow be absorbed.

The notion that Argentines formed a distinctive race would have struck the country’s independence leaders as profoundly strange, for in ethnic terms they clearly differed little from their colonial masters. Thus when they broke free from Spain in the early nineteenth century, these men did so not to defend the rights of a distinctive people or ethno-cultural community but to establish a brand new nation, whose founding would require the creation of political institutions to be ratified by the newly empowered citizenry. What would join these citizens together, independence leaders believed, was not a common ethnicity but shared political ideals and loyalties to the new state. This contractual or civic-based view of nationhood would be broadly accepted during Argentina’s chaotic postindependence years, and, despite the strong impact of European Romanticism on midcentury thought, it would remain the predominant matrix for understanding Argentine identity.

This chapter traces the intellectual shifts of the nineteenth century, with special focus on what might be called Argentina’s first Romantic moment. Although rife with contradictions, European Romanticism’s assumptions about nationality and history exerted a powerful influence on the so-called liberal Generation of 1837, a group of thinkers that would play an extraordinarily important role in the nation’s political life.¹ Indeed, two key members of this generation, Domingo F. Sarmiento and Bartolomé Mitre, served as president of the republic, while a third (Juan Bautista Alberdi) wrote a treatise that served as the basis of the 1853 Constitution.² In examining the influence of Romantic understandings of nationality and history on the Generation of 1837, I am not arguing for continuities between these thinkers and early twentieth-century cultural nationalists. Simply put, there were none: the members of this latter group operated in an entirely different context than that faced by the Generation of 1837, and they were drawn to Romanticism’s conceptions of nationality and history for entirely different reasons. What’s more, they imbibed these understandings from different sources.

Despite this lack of continuity, exploring nineteenth-century understandings of Argentine identity is important for two reasons. First, providing a sense of the shifting ways in which Argentina’s nineteenth-century intellectuals and political leaders imagined their nation will make readers better able to judge the significance of the early twentieth-century changes. The second reason has to do with this book’s other major aim—that is, exploring the long-term political implications of the ethno-cultural understandings of national identity that gained traction during the era of mass immigration. As explained in the introduction, central to both right- and left-wing nationalist discourses was the claim that Argentines possessed an enduring, unitary collective character (often expressed as el ser nacional) that was threatened by liberalism, an ideology these nationalists identified with the Generation of 1837.³ According to post-1930 nationalists, this group of individuals had led Argentina astray by imposing an ideology on the nation that was both alien to the national character and opened up its economy to foreign exploitation. Given the outsized role the Generation of 1837 has played in the nationalist imagination, it is important to clarify how these nineteenth-century individuals actually thought, wrote, and spoke about Argentine nationality. While it is undeniable that the members of this generation both embraced liberal economic policies and sought to transform Argentines in order to make them more like the peoples of the United States and non-Spanish Europe, later nationalist claims that these individuals wanted merely to copy these societies—or worse, were traitors who sought to hand the country over to foreign capitalists—oversimplifies a more complex story. Instead, under the influence of Romantic ideas about nationality, the members of the Generation of 1837 continually wrestled with the problem of how to construct a new national culture that would be both distinctly Argentine and would provide the conditions they believed necessary for economic prosperity and democratic institutions. Our analysis of these issues begins with a look at the independence period, as well as the ideas and political traditions that guided those leaders who called for a break with Spain.

INDEPENDENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE NATION

Argentina’s independence from Spain in 1816 was neither inevitable nor universally desired by the inhabitants of what was then known as the Rio de la Plata region.⁴ Long a backwater of the Spanish American empire, this area achieved importance only in the late eighteenth century, when Bourbon reformers established the new viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata with the port city of Buenos Aires as its administrative center. Perhaps even more important was the 1777 decision to route Andean silver through Buenos Aires, a move that transformed the city into one of the most dynamic centers of the Spanish empire. Had these reforms occurred a century earlier, local creoles might have judged them a resounding success. But by the close of the eighteenth century, the Atlantic world had changed, and imperial Spain found itself battling new economic ideas that called into question colonial trade restrictions.

This was particularly true in Buenos Aires, where the economic theories of Adam Smith, French physiocrats, and Neapolitan political economists had gained a wide readership among the educated elite.⁵ Political ideas were also in flux, as sectors of the educated elite began to rethink traditional notions of governance. One source of these new tendencies came from the colonial center itself, where growing numbers of Spaniards began to reject the view, promoted since the time of Philip II, that monarchal absolutism was part of the natural order.⁶ During the late eighteenth century, opponents of absolutism took a new look at Spain’s medieval political traditions, highlighting those that emphasized the popular, contractual origins of the sovereign’s right to rule.⁷ Political currents from the United States and especially France also had an impact. Despite Spain’s efforts to isolate its overseas possessions from revolutionary contagion, literate colonials were well aware of events in those countries and the works of Voltaire, Condorcet, Rousseau, and Montesquieu circulated widely.⁸

By themselves, these new ideas and the tensions over trade posed little threat to Spain’s hold on its American possessions.⁹ In 1808, however, Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula and his imprisonment of Spanish monarch Fernando VII suddenly destabilized the colonial pact. Although a junta claiming to rule Spain and its overseas possessions quickly formed in Seville, news of these events prompted leaders in some colonial cities to declare a limited independence. In May 1810, the Buenos Aires cabildo, or municipal council, appointed its own ruling junta and proclaimed it to be the legitimate political authority of the viceroyalty. It also called on cabildos throughout the viceroyalty to elect delegates to a general assembly for the purpose of establishing “the form of government they consider most convenient.”¹⁰ Many of these councils joined with the Buenos Aires junta, while others resisted. In some cases, local elites remained loyal to Spain; in others, regional leaders established their own provisional juntas but refused to follow the dictates of Buenos Aires. Thus from the beginning, Argentina’s long fight for independence was characterized by a simultaneous effort to cast off Spanish rule and a struggle between regional factions over how much power to grant Buenos Aires.¹¹

For our purposes, the central point of interest is how the revolutionary leaders justified their actions and what kind of entity they sought to form. As noted, creole political thought during this period was nourished by two intellectual streams: one from reformist Spain, and the other from revolutionary France.¹² In the months after Napoleon’s seizure of the Spanish throne, it was the former that held sway. Particularly useful for would-be revolutionaries was the newly revived medieval theory of pactum subjectionis, which held that the “pueblos,” or medieval cities, were originally independent entities that had freely entered into a pact with the king, thereby transferring to him their sovereignty.¹³ Invoking this notion, creoles throughout the Americas, including Buenos Aires, argued that Fernando’s imprisonment meant that the pact between sovereign and subjects was at least temporarily suspended, and that power should “revert” to his overseas subjects.¹⁴ But if the theory of pactum subjectionis initially offered a legal justification for declaring self-rule, it quickly became clear that for many revolutionaries, the rights they sought to defend were more in keeping with more modern understandings. This was particularly true for the revolutionaries based in Buenos Aires, many of whom openly embraced the rhetoric of revolutionary France. During this period, the terms liberty, equality, and fraternity appeared repeatedly in the pages of the pro-Revolutionary Gaceta de Buenos Aires.¹⁵ Also significant was the national coat of arms created by the United Provinces Assembly of 1813, which featured the Phrygian cap of the French Revolution in its center.

While these often competing rationales for independence complicated the task of organizing the new state...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyrights
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One Debating the Nation Introduction to Part One
• Part Two Identity and Nationalism in the Post-1930 Era Introduction to Part Two
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index