False Economy - Alan Beattie [15]
It helped, too, that much less drastic versions of the same philosophy were gaining ground even in market democracies. As the countries of Western Europe rebuilt their shattered economies, many expanded the role of government by nationalizing big industries and promising their people generous welfare states. Some of the money to rebuild, naturally, came from America, thus completing its transition from being Europe's borrower to being its banker, though it was noticeable that the U.S. government itself displayed rather less enthusiasm for occupying the commanding heights of its own economy through nationalization.
In reality, though, the similarities between democratic Europe and Argentina were superficial. While the governments took a bigger role in both, they led their economies in rather different directions. Argentina had a visceral fear of the free market, and the government was running the economy not to direct the market but to replace it. In Europe, government was there to correct the failures of the market, not to abolish it entirely. Capitalism in Argentina was caged; in Europe it was merely leashed. Europe and the United States turned back toward each other economically, not in on themselves.
In July 1944 a meeting of the great economic powers at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, created the eponymous system of fixed exchange rates and controls on capital. The freebooting globalization of the Golden Age was not to be repeated. The footloose money of speculators was to be subordinated to the production of real goods and services. To oversee the system, the conference created the International Monetary Fund—an institution that, as we will see, later achieved demonic status in the eyes of Argentina. The United States and the Europeans also began the first of a series of global talks to reduce barriers to trade, starting to undo the effects of panicked protectionism during the Depression.
Argentina, meanwhile, was heading off blindly in the other direction, defiandy rejecting the tenets of open trade. Peron referred to foreign capital as an "imperialist agent." There was little to stop him. These ideas were common throughout the developing world, particularly in African countries only lately escaping the colonial yoke. American capitalism evidendy did not prove a sufficiendy compelling counterexample. In any case, as the Peronist movement developed its defiant nationalist ideology, anti-Americanism became a useful tool. And America's leading role in the Cold War made it easy to portray as a bully.
You did not have to be one of the many psychoanalysts enduringly popular among the Argentine elite to see this as a badly disguised form of envy and resentment. Argentines were used to seeing themselves as the United States' equals. With every new dollar of income disparity between the two countries, however, this became a harder and harder thing to believe. Argentina found it easy to be self-righteously disdainful of Europe's wealth and stability, built on the historic exploitation of colonies like themselves. The existence of the United States as a rich and successful New World country spoiled this excuse for economic stagnation. It had, after all, gained independence from Europe not long before Argentina.
Writing in 1961, Federico Pinedo, he of the abortive recovery plan of 1940, mourned that Argentina was not a founding member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a club of rich countries. Indeed, it was one of the unfortunates that the rich nations (including, of course, the United States) thought they needed to help. "Among the countries deemed capable of giving aid we find not only little Denmark, a seller of meat and butter,