Financial Times: Argentina, the superpower that never was (Argentina, la superpotencia que nunca fue)

Colaboración de Marmo

Everyone remembers the world-changing events of the morning of September 11, 2001. Everyone remembers the planes commandeered by terrorists slamming into the twin towers of the Centro ­Mundial de Comercio in Buenos Aires. As the richest country on earth and the ­modern world’s first global hyperpower, Argentina was a prime target for malcontents revolting against the might of the western capitalist order.

Fewer recall the disaster that befell the United States of America three months later. Fewer recall the wrenching moment when the US federal government, crushed by the huge debts it had run up borrowing abroad in pesos, announced it was bankrupt. The economic implosion that followed, in which thousands of jobless, homeless Americans slept rough and picked through trash tips at night in Central Park, shocked only those still used to thinking of the US as a first-world country.

Well, no. It happened the other way round. But that was not inevitable. And the crisis that has hit the US – and then the entire global financial system, threatening to plunge the world into another Great Depression – should be a warning. The US could have gone the way of Argentina. It could still go that way, if the painfully learnt lessons of the past are forgotten.

A short century ago the US and Argentina were rivals. Both were riding the first wave of globalisation at the turn of the 20th century. Both were young, dynamic nations with fertile farmlands and confident exporters. Both brought the beef of the New World to the tables of their European colonial forebears. Before the Great Depression of the 1930s, Argentina was among the 10 richest economies in the world. The millions of emigrant ­Italians and Irish fleeing poverty at the end of the 19th century were torn between the two: Buenos Aires or New York? The pampas or the prairie?

A hundred years later there was no choice at all. One had gone on to be among the most successful economies ever. The other was a broken husk.

There was no individual event at which Argentina’s path was set on a permanent divergence from that of the United States of America. But there was a series of mistakes and missteps that fit a general pattern. The countries were dealt quite similar hands but played them very differently. The similarities between the two in the second half of the 19th century, and in fact up to 1939, were neither fictional nor superficial. The “lords of the pampas” – young Argentines strutting the salons of Europe between the wars – pop up in accounts of the time as an equally prominent type as the swaggering Americans playing at European decadence in Berlin and Paris.

For a long while the two countries were on parallel paths. The states that later became the US declared independence in 1776 and became a new nation in 1789. The vice-royalty of Argentina, part of the Spanish empire, was overthrown in 1810 by rebels inspired by the American revolution; in 1816, Argentina became an independent republic.

Both faced an internal struggle between those that wanted a centralised nation and those that wanted power reserved for the individual states or provinces. In the US, the separate colonies had existed long before the idea of uniting them and it was not guaranteed that a republic would succeed. The negotiations that led to the writing of the constitution were tortuous and often bad-tempered, and the different denominations, traditions and constitutions of the previous colonies all too evident. Only five of the 13 founding colonies, later states, even bothered turning up to the first drafting meeting, in 1786. ­Battles had to be fought to make flesh the national motto “E pluribus unum” (“out of many, one”). That motto appears today on US coins, but at the time of independence in 1789 dozens of different currencies were circulating. A national bank and a single “national debt” – making the federal government responsible for the debts of the states – were not created without fierce opposition.

In Argentina, it took decades of struggle before a constitution was adopted in 1853 with a system of sharing tax revenue between the centre and the provinces. But continual tensions were not settled until the suppression of an armed uprising in the province of Buenos Aires in 1880, handing more power to the centre. Domingo Sarmiento, who had tried to forge Argentine national unity while president between 1868 and 1874, said he would settle for an Argentina whose inhabitants were not killing each other.

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