False Economy - Alan Beattie [3]
Each time, similar lessons have emerged. Countries do not get rich by accident. They make choices that determine the path their economies take. It is not always clear which is the right path at any given point, though some general rules can be drawn. But the countries that succeed are those that are flexible enough to learn from experience and that do not become captured by groups whose interests are sharply at odds with those of the country as a whole.
The United States and Argentina took different paths. Yet that was not inevitable. One short century ago, the United States and Argentina were rivals, starting off in similar places. Both were riding the first wave of globalization at the turn of the twentieth 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 ten richest economies in the world. The millions of emigrant Italians and Irish fleeing poverty at home at the end of the nineteenth century were torn between two destinations: 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 become one of the most successful economies in history. The other was a broken husk, a place where inept, corrupt governments had, time and again, stolen the savings from their own people. And when the flesh of that fruit was sucked dry, they stole from foreign investors foolish enough to recall the promise of the distant past and forget the failure of the present.
Perfect hindsight encourages us—and historians—to imagine that the two countries were fated to diverge in the way they did, that one was bound to fly and the other destined to stall. A superficial similarity over a hundred years ago might have been enough to fool desperate Italian and Irish emigrants, we may think, but surely we can see clearly the fatal flaws that were there to be found beneath?
History invites us to think we are explaining and analyzing when in fact we are retrospectively rationalizing. Things that happened were always going to happen, and the proof that they were always going to happen is that they did happen. Since we know that Argentina was going to fail, we can always pluck some fundamental elements out of the vast thicket of geographical, social, environmental, and political influences that make up its history to show that the failure was inevitable.
An old saying of historians is that until Hons learn to talk, history will always be written by the hunters. There is some truth in that, though not a universal truth; the losers of history have their modern champions as well. Less recognized is the tendency to assume that the roles of lions and hunters were irreversibly assigned at the beginning. This book will argue that the paths taken by different countries largely reflect the decisions they took, even if they were unaware they were making them. Had they made other choices, things might have turned out very differently.
Imagine that the United States had followed the arc that Argentina did, falling from the First World to the Third. How many factors from earlier in its history, fundamental and superficial, would now triumphantly be produced as evidence that it always would? America was a nation whose antecedents traveled across an ocean to establish a colony of religious absolutism, a country whose birth was induced by the rejection of a colonial power, whose revered first president warned against "foreign entanglements," which insisted even on inventing sports alien to the rest of the world. While successful Argentina imported political liberalism from Europe, along with the grace and artistry of association football ("soccer" in U.S. parlance), the isolationist, insular United States invented its own brutal and violent version of each.