Argentina dumping the African myth in favour of its heritage

Argentina 1516-1982: From Spanish Colonisation to the Falklands War by David Rock (Tauris, £9.95).
WHY didn't Argentina turn out like Australia, or Canada? The question has been asked many times; books and doctoral theses are still ' being written on the subject. At the turn of the century, the argument goes, all three countries seemed to be on the same track, with similar potential. Somewhere along the line, the argument continues, something went badly wrong in Argentina. For many years Argentina's own self-image, as a burgeoning "new republic", fed this line of speculation.
For some time now, though, in Argentina itself people have been questioning part of this
self-image. Their country, they have been realising, is not "new" in the same sense as most African nations, or even of Canada and Australia. They have been rediscovering a hitherto deliberately buried portion of their past: the 300 years of colonial history from 1516 to 1816, when Argentina, under another name, was part of Spain's huge empire.
David Rock has picked up his reassessment of Argentina's past and laid it out for the Englishspeaking public. "To understand contemporary Argentina," he says, "one must know the country's colonial beginnings; here lay the roots of its later strengths and misfortunes."
Rock recognises that information about the early years and up to the mid-19th
century does not allow more than a "personal and highly conditional view". But he works wonders with what information there is — to plough on later into a most comprehensive account of Argentina's development from the 1850s to 1955, the year of Peron's ouster.
His earlier account of four crucial decades in Argentina's political history (Politics in Argentina 1890-1930: The Rise and Fall of Radicalism) has been expended forwards and backwards into one of the fullest pictures available of Argentine history. One cannot but sympathise with the efforts Rock has put. into attempting a balanced assessment of the Peron era (which most Argentines still see in either black or white) and to navigate between two rival readings of
Argentina's ills: the one that blames them all on outside influences, and the one that blames them on some inherent flaw in the "Argentine character".
The even more controversial post-1955 years are treated in less detail, but with no lack of perceptive, challenging interpretations.
A warning: do not be misled by the mention of the Falklands War in the title of the book because the subject comes and goes in less than two pages (for which perhaps we should all be grateful).
Eduardo Crawley
Eduardo Crawley is the author of A House Divided: Argentina 1880-1980 published by Huret last year.