This book is about the interaction between nationalism and the politics of history in twentieth-century Argentina. The concepts of ‘nationalism’ and ‘politics of history’ are both contested, but the second is perhaps easier to define. Most historians would agree that knowledge, including historical knowledge, is a crucial means in struggles for the achievement of political power.¹ It follows that interpretations of history, whether consciously or not, are often produced, disseminated, appropriated and used for political purposes. By politics of history I mean the ways in which history was written and mobilised in order to affect the distribution of political power...

Nationalists tend to portray their nation as an indivisible whole, anchored in a common origin. Correspondingly, many nationalist accounts of history gloss over past fratricides and point towards a shared future. From a nationalist point of view, too corrosive a historiography may appear to threaten the foundations of an agreeable national identity. The French conservative thinker Ernest Renan famously argued in 1882 that his compatriots should leave behind the divisions of the past and forget the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day because ‘to forget and […] to get one’s history wrong, are essential factors in the making of a nation;...

Juan Domingo Perón rose to power under the military dictatorship that had been established with the coup of June 1943. Partly motivated by the desire to prolong Argentina’s neutrality in the world war – thus allowing for the continuation of relations with the Axis powers – this government took its guiding ideas fromnacionalismo. Some historians, for example David Rock or Alberto Spektorowski, have interpreted the coup of 1943 as the direct outgrowth and the culmination ofnacionalistaagitation in the preceding decade.¹ Perón himself, both as an officer during the 1930s and as a leading participant in the 1943...

The relationship between the power brokers in the decade following Perón’s overthrow has been described as a ‘stalemate’ or an ‘impossible game’.¹ Both concepts refer to the incapacity of three main political agents (the military, the Peronist movement – especially through the trade unions it dominated – and the Radical Party) to forge a viable political order, since each of these three had the power to block the implementation of the designs of the other two actors. The ‘Liberating Revolution’ of 1955 – initially led by General Eduardo Lonardi, who was influenced by Catholicnacionalismobut who was soon unseated...

The most evident development in Argentine history during the ten years following thecoup d’étatof June 1966 was the rise in political violence, which found an early catalyst in the student-worker riots of Córdoba in 1969 (thecordobazo). These gave momentum to the growth of mostly urban guerrilla groups, which pushed the military regime into allowing the return of Perón in 1973, in the misplaced hope that his leadership would pacify the country. Instead, the cycle of violence deepened, was exacerbated by Perón’s death in July 1974 and eventually culminated in the state terror of the military dictatorship of...

Tired of the manifest incompetence and corruption of Isabel Perón’s government, the majority of the population greeted the coup of March 1976 with ‘relief’, as both the liberal English-language dailyBuenos Aires Heraldand the British ambassador pointed out.¹ Although the regime quickly proceeded to cut itself off from civil society and politicians, closed down congress and, worst of all, embarked on a ferocious campaign of state terror, large segments of public opinion were prepared to put their faith in the dictatorship and its claim that its real purpose was to restore a fully fledged representative democracy in accordance with...

This conclusion seeks to find some answers to this study’s principal questions: what do we mean when we speak of nationalism in twentieth-century Argentina; why has it continued to play a crucial role in the country’s culture and politics; and what can we learn from this for the study of nationalism more generally? Based on the findings of the previous five chapters, three central arguments are proposed. The first is that, in global comparison, in Argentina the demarcations between those who were imagined to belong to the nation and those who were not (a feature common to all sorts of...