Peron, Whitlam, Argentina and Australia.(History)

SINCE ABOUT 1900, Argentina and Australia have convincingly re-enacted the roles so memorably performed centuries earlier by their respective British and Spanish imperial progenitors. At the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee it would have been impossible to exclude either from a short list of the most prosperous nations on earth; a little over a century later Australia is still very much up there while Argentina is decidedly elsewhere. This striking divergence echoes the fate of the heirs of the Spanish and British empires in the northern and southern regions of the American continent, which owes much to the cultural baggage carried by emigrants, but also to the lasting consequences of their responses to the populist excesses and economic incompetence of the hand at the helm, be it that of General Juan Peron, in Argentina, or Mr Gough Whitlam, in Australia.

The Spanish and the British empires embraced the globe with expeditions and settlements responsible for the greatest cultural transplants in world history. By the time of Napoleon, the confines of the two empires had been staked in the antipodean territories of New South Wales and the Rio de la Plata. These became respectively Australia and Argentina, remote from each other and from everything else, but settled by immigrants who went diligently about the business of reconstructing the institutions and the social ambit they had left behind. (1)

They succeeded so well that nineteenth-century movements for independence notwithstanding--the one from Spain distressingly sanguinary, the other exceptionally polite and free of trouble--it is none the less true today that the silhouette of the Escorial crowds the cultural and political horizon of Buenos Aires, while even on misty mornings the white cliffs of Dover can easily seen from downtown Canberra. Every day that passes, Australia is less like England and Argentina less like Spain, but it can safely be assumed that in three or four centuries the kinship of Aussies with England will be more convincing than, say, with Greece, Turkey or Indonesia, and that of the Buenos Aires portenos closer with Spain than with France, Lebanon or Italy.

Overwhelmingly conscious of a divinely ordained responsibility to oversee the good order of the seaborne empire, the Spanish crown retained a strict control over emigration to ensure that the Indies remained unpolluted first by Muslims and Jews and, later, of course, by Lutherans. With insignificant exceptions, those allowed to cross the Atlantic were creatures of a Castilian Counter-Reformation that saw the world as a wisely designed, carefully structured and centrally controlled administrative entity by definition intolerant of the instability brought about by erratic individualism, unrestricted social mobility and baronial pretensions. (2) The world they reconstructed in the Indies was therefore emphatically centralist, intensely religious, exceptionally bureaucratic, legalistic and socially stratified, reserving special and deferential status for those who did not find it imperative to work with their hands.

From its inception, the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata lived up to its name, "fiver of silver", as the efficient route for the shipment of specie and bullion to Spain as well as local agricultural produce destined for the Peruvian mines. Its economic buoyancy was confirmed when an ephemeral 1806 British invasion produced well over one million pounds sterling in booty, subsequently paraded through the streets of London in eight wagons, each drawn by six horses and decorated with banners reading "Treasure". The eventual disastrous defeat of the British expedition at the hands of the local militia is also consistent with the good economic and political health of the Viceroyalty, whose subjects were more than ready to risk life and limb to defend their king and their country. (3)

The lot of Australia's settlers was quite different. Drawn from the less affluent layers of British society, their demographic preponderance resulted in an unintended homogeneity which taken together with expectations of continuing economic prosperity encouraged intimations of movement towards a society of equals. This social climate was certainly compatible with the self-reliant individualism, dislike of bureaucracy and legalism, resistance to centralised administrative structures, frugal domestic arrangements and suspicion of conspicuous indulgence characteristic of the makers of the Industrial Revolution in Britain and its enduring extension to North America.

Such character traits served the settlers well during the decades between the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet and the end of the Napoleonic Wars when, unlike the Spanish Viceroyalty, New South Wales was not only penurious, but at first scarcely managed to feed itself. Of course, once permanently established, the Australian settlers lived and worked as their forebears in England and their cousins in North America. That is, they got their hands dirty clearing the land, growing crops, husbanding herds of cattle and sheep and prospecting for mineral deposits--which they found in great abundance. (4) A century later they were as wealthy as Argentina, where a small working population encountered no major difficulties in extracting a generous living for all concerned from the legendary pampa, extending endlessly over some of the most fertile natural prairies on earth.