Australia and Argentina: On Parallel Paths, distinguished by its clarity and by its forthright, authoritative argument, is the work of a full-time academic, John Fogarty, and of his former student, Tim Duncan, scholar/journalist. We need to be reminded from time to time that Fogarty’s latest book is not intended primarily for an academic audience nor for the information of readers in the Northern Hemisphere. Both Fogarty and Duncan are Australians who have distinguished themselves by their intimate knowledge of (and sympathy for) Argentina. They are writing not for us but for Australians and Argentines; they are explaining matters between themselves, in the South.
One of the great virtues of Australia and Argentina is the powerful defense and rationalization that it provides for the employment of comparison in history, a defense, however, that does not disguise the method’s weaknesses. But the book is valuable, above all, for the stereotypes it attacks and destroys. Even to the Argentines themselves, Australia has often represented some kind of paradise of Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurial ingenuity. Yet as the authors explain, the historical record of the two countries, from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War, shows Argentina performing consistently above Australia at comparable levels of economic activity. Australia drew ahead of Argentina only in the 1950s, and has drawn ahead again since the late 1960s.
Duncan and Fogarty give us a short, straightforward account of both economies, starting from their origins in the early nineteenth century, and taking us almost to the present day. But the focus is recent, and the authors point primarily to the change of direction towards politically enforced industrialization at the expense of primary production; at the damage this has done to Argentina; and at the anxiety they themselves feel that such a bêtise should be permitted to strike deep roots in their own country, Australia. Their book is an attack on the unreflecting dogma of import-substituting industrialization, on nationalist rhetoric, and on the single-minded pursuit of national self-sufficiency. Their objections, as Australians, are sufficiently shown in their later chapter headings: “Killing the Goose,” “Down the Argentine Track,” and, finally, “Lessons for Australia.”
What went wrong for the Argentine economy? The Duncan and Fogarty answer is that ideology’s power over policy making in Argentina was fundamental to Argentine experience. Argentina has been the victim of a standing dilemma—resources cannot, for political reasons, be transferred from the urban sector to the rural sector, and without such transfer (and the improvement of rural productivity that must follow), Argentina has not escaped from economic decay. We are not supposed, as Northerners, to say such things ourselves, but Southerners, talking to Southerners, cannot be accused of displaying a spirit of European elitism. In any case, Australia has experienced similar phenomena in a different way: it has found itself caught in a trap of political rhetoric, and has experienced difficulty in ridding its economy of the “distortions of unwise protection.” The problem, after all, is rather of politics than economics. Australia and Argentina: On Parallel Paths is a wise book, intelligent and thoughtful.
Argentina and Australia: Essays in Comparative Economic Development is published as Occasional Paper 1 for the Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand. It is derived from the papers given at a symposium on “Comparative Economic Development” at the University of Melbourne in May 1982. Like Fogarty’s work over the years, this short collection shows the worth of comparative studies in regions of recent development—more enlightening, perhaps, than the blinkered approach that we tend to make to conventional area studies. Area studies, as we so often find, must comprehend diverse and irreconcilable elements—Argentina and Peru, for example—when we might more properly have been studying, at least among economic historians, the historical experience of Argentina, Canada, and Australia. Are we on the wrong track? Have area studies—Latin Americanists, Africanists, Middle Easternists, Asianists, researchers into Britain’s former Dominions—lived their day and, like Pippa, passed? Should we now, more realistically, consider a shadowy, historical line that stretches from Latin America (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Southern Brazil) to parts of Southern Africa, Australia, and New Zealand with Canada appearing far up North (but nearer to God) as the joker in the pack? Among the contributors to Argentina and Australia (surprise, surprise!) are Fogarty and Duncan, with big guns firing from Kenneth Boulding and C. B. Schedvin. The focus is again on the twentieth century, and long overdue, since the preoccupation of scholars in regions of recent settlement has almost always until now been with the decades leading up to the First World War. The four papers, all impressive, are Boulding’s “Internal and External Influences on Development,” Fogarty comparing the role of the export sector in both Australian and Argentine industrialization, Duncan on the different political experience, and Schedvin in pursuit of national response to instability and industrialization in Argentina and Australia, from 1930 to 1960. This occasional paper is a promising development, and the ideas it expresses deserve to be pursued. “Area-centrics,” beware.
