False Economy - Alan Beattie [4]
Almost as unhelpful as historical fatalism is trying to nail down a single turning point where a country, an economy, or a society went one way or the other. The human desire for a story means it is usually possible to find symbolic events that fit the need for narrative moments of crisis and resolution. But tightening the focus of causation on a single event itself invites the misleading "if only" feeling that had one pivotal thing gone the other way, the entire direction of subsequent history would have been different. The old saying has it that for the want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe, the horse was lost; for the want of a horse, the message was lost; for the want of a message, the battle was lost; for the want of a battle, the kingdom was lost. The nail assumes critical importance. But a kingdom that had grown vulnerable to the loss of a single messenger was, perhaps, not long for this world, no matter whether that message got through.
Harper Lee's wonderful novel To Kill a Mockingbird starts with the endpoint of its narrative. Scout, the narrator, recounts that her older brother, Jem, had his arm badly broken at the elbow when he was nearly thirteen. Within the novel they dispute the cause. Scout identifies the key event as occurring a couple of years previously, when the man who attacked him came into their lives. Jem, four years older, reaches back years further, to a first encounter with a new friend who conceives of meeting the recluse who eventually saves Jem from the attack.
Their father, wisely, pronounces both of them right. There was no individual event at which Argentina's future was irrevocably determined or its path 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 nineteenth century, 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 a type equally prominent as the swaggering Americans playing at European decadence in Berlin and Paris.
For a long while the two countries were on parallel paths. Unlike most African and Asian colonies, those in the Americas generally gained early independence from European empires. The colonies that later became the United States declared independence in 1776 and became a new nation in 1789. The viceroyalty of Argentina, part of a Spanish empire that reached across the continent to Peru, was overthrown in 1810 by rebels inspired by the American Revolution. They were then emboldened by the successful repulsion of two British attempts to seize Buenos Aires, the capital. In 1816, Argentina became an independent republic.
Both Argentina and the United States faced internal struggles between those who wanted a centralized government and those who wanted power reserved for the individual states or provinces. In the United States, the separate colonies had existed long before the idea of uniting them, and it was not guaranteed that a republic would actually be realized, nor that it would succeed once formed. The negotiations that led to the writing of the Constitution were long, tortuous, and often ill-tempered, and the various religious denominations, traditions, and constitutions of the former colonies all too evident. Only five of the thirteen founding colonies, later states, even bothered turning up for the first drafting meeting, in 1786. Virginia, the most populous colony, wanted a strong central government with directly elected representatives based on population size. New Jersey, one of the less populous ones, wanted equal power for each state. The U.S. Congress to this day reflects the compromise: a lower house,