With this massive volume, Alain Rouquié, a French social scientist and author of an earlier book on Arturo Frondizi, has established himself as a major authority on the political role of the Argentine military. Encompassing a period of over sixty years, this work examines in detail the emergence of the military as an autonomous arm of the state; the interrelationships between the major social and economic groups and the officer corps; and the nature of the political process under each successive regime, civilian or military, from the first Yrigoyen administration to the Peronist restoration in 1973.
As a specialist in comparative politics, Rouquié’s primary interest lies in unraveling the Argentine enigma: why, in a country that once enjoyed political stability and civilian rule, the military plays so dominant a role. Accordingly, the volume is expository and analytical rather than narrative. The fruits of Rouquié’s analysis, presented at appropriate places throughout the work, are pulled together in its third and final section, a 118-page interpretive essay entitled “Anatomie du pouvoir militaire.’’ Here the author examines one by one the various theories that have been put forth in recent decades to account for military involvement, and with logic and facts disposes of each of them. While not claiming to possess a definitive answer himself, he finds the reasons for the phenomenon largely in the failures of the civilian sector: the refusal of the traditional landed families to accommodate themselves to the requirements of democratic politics, and the inability or unwillingness of any other political force, Radical or Peronist, to alter the country’s basic economic structure with its vulnerability to periodic economic breakdowns. Rouquié also finds a major reason in the evolution of the military into a political force with a messianic attitude toward its own role as guardian of the nation’s highest interests. Since 1930 this view, with its assumption of legitimacy for the military coup, has found wide acceptance in the country, and, indeed, as the author correctly notes, there has never been an alliance of all civilian groups against the military. To the contrary, every political party at one time or another in the past forty years has encouraged or supported a military takeover.
As the work of a political scientist, this volume is notable for its extensive use of primary sources. Rouquié has had access to a number of internal military documents, and to private papers provided by such figures as Arturo Frondizi; he has also been able to interview a number of military officers, politicians, and journalists. What the author has not done, and this is evident in his treatment of events of the 1940s, is to seek out the data that are available in manuscript form in diplomatic archives such as those of the United States State Department or the microfilmed records of the German Foreign Office. Nor does he make any visible use of the work by this reviewer, who used those archives.
What gives Rouquié’s work a special value to students of Argentine history is not its treatment of events, which offers few surprises, but its impressive handling of the intellectual currents, or ideologies, that have influenced differing groups of officers. Making excellent use of his knowledge of French nationalist ideas, as well as of his extensive reading in Argentine military publications, he is able to provide useful insights into the various nuances of Argentine military thought. For this reason alone, but also for its comprehensiveness of coverage and the lucidity of its analyses, this book deserves the careful attention not only of Argentine specialists but of Latin Americanists in general.
