Argentina’s Partisan Past: Nationalism and the Politics of History

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

Michael Goebel's detailed study focuses on the "politics of history" in Argentina — on how the state, political actors, and intellectuals produced and used particular understandings of national identity. He specifically pays attention to two versions of Argentine history related to cultural and political struggles since the nineteenth century. The first, revisionism, is an oppositional nationalist account that appeared in the 1930s. Rooted in changes in the cultural field and the discipline of history in the early twentieth cen tury, revisionism was initially related to antiliberal and conservative sectors. It was later appropriated and resignified by left-leaning, Peronist, national liberation groups, and since 2003, by the administrations of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. The second version, which revisionists called official or "liberal" history, originated in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was related to the emergence of Argentina's modern state and was adopted by anti-Peronist groups and administrations in the twentieth century.Goebel argues that disputes over the national past, linked to historical circumstances, both explain and reflect the remarkable internalization in Argentine society and politics of divisions between "the national" and "the foreign," associated respectively with "nationalist" and "liberal" political traditions. He joins an already large scholarship on revisionism and nationalism that has noticed the remarkable presence of historical debates in Argentine politics and how that dichotomy was expressed at different moments. Nevertheless, Goebel introduces several elements that result in an innovative approach.Theoretically, Goebel rejects the exclusive association of nationalism, understood as a broader discursive formation, with right-wing, antiliberal movements and ideas, which he distinguishes as nacionalismo. Moreover, he argues that the divide between "national" and "liberal-foreign" embedded in the different versions of national history is more "a matrix of interpretation" than a clear-cut division. These important theoretical distinctions allow a more nuanced perspective on his topic. First, Goebel incorporates the liberal version of history into the study of Argentine nationalism, which, as he notes, has been traditionally reduced to nacionalismo. Second, and based on an impressive mass of primary and secondary sources, he convincingly demonstrates the ambiguities of competing versions of history as appropriated by different political groups at different moments. For example, Goebel shows the influence of both right-wing nationalist and liberal ideas and traditions on the military dictatorship of 1976 – 83. Complementing the studies on revisionism by Alejandro Cattaruzza, Tulio Halperín Donghi, and Diana Quattrocchi-Woisson, he argues that while revisionist nationalism influenced a wide range of groups on the Right and the Left since the 1930s, it was never fully adopted, even during more favorable political circumstances with Peronism in power in 1946 – 55 and 1973 – 76. Analyzing the particular elements involved in the different versions of national history, he concludes that nationalism in Argentina cannot be reduced to either ethnocultural or civic elements but entails a mixture of both.While the book will primarily interest specialists in Argentine history, it offers valuable comparative perspectives. Goebel compares Argentine historical narratives and nationalism to other Latin American cases such as Mexico and Peru and to broader theoretical works on nationalism. His careful analysis of the role of intellectuals and historians in politics can be related to studies such as those by Nicola Miller and Jean Franco on Latin American intellectuals, Claudia Gilman on the connection of Latin American writers to revolutionary struggles, and Daryle Williams on Getulio Vargas's cultural policies in Brazil.Some aspects merit comment and need further clarification. Goebel argues that the professionalization of the historical discipline in the early twentieth century was linked to the emergence of an autonomous cultural field (p. 56). However, as the book clearly shows, Argentine historians and intellectuals became inextricably linked to political and ideological struggles that limited that autonomy, an issue that Flavia Fiorucci has specifically explored in her works on intellectuals and Peronism. Also, while it may be generally correct that the chief common denominator of antiliberal nacionalismo in the 1930s was its opposition to the governments of the conservative restoration of 1932 – 43 (p. 46), prominent conservative nacionalistas occupied positions in those governments, such as senators Matías Sánchez Sorondo and Benjamín Villafañe and Buenos Aires's governor Manuel Fresco. Finally, the book's overall emphasis on revisionism leaves the liberal side with relatively less nuanced treatment. For example, in the 1930s and 1940s Socialists, Communists, Conservatives, liberal Catholics, and intellectuals subscribed to related yet different elements of the liberal tradition, an aspect noted briefly but that could have merited more analysis for these as well as later years.These observations notwithstanding, Goebel offers a well-written, theoretically sophisticated, and empirically grounded work. The creation by the Argentine government of a National Institute of Historical Revisionism in 2011 additionally shows the significant role of history in Argentine political and cultural debates as well as highlights the contemporary relevance of Goebel's work.