ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the conceptions of national identity conveyed by presidential discourse during the first democratic decade in post-authoritarian Argentina. After the savage dictatorship enforced in 1976 and the absurd war waged against the United Kingdom in 1982, the Argentine society has undergone a process of reconstruction in its collective life. 1 We intend to provide an overview of the two ideological projects that have prevailed in this period of deep political and economic transformation. Let’s point out that the term “ideological” is not used here in a pejorative way—as intrinsically false or irrational—but as a reference to public ideals of the good and the just for society as a whole, or, in other words, the normative models of society’s constitution and goals. 2 In short, our aim is to determine which are the answers given by the two democratically elected presidents to these questions: What kind of country can we have? What kind of country should we have? What kind of country do we want to have? These are not trivial questions in a country where the state has killed its citizens by the thousands, and many citizens have killed each other in the name of a particular conception of the national essence, but they become critical in a democratic transition where the institutional foundations of social order have to be rebuilt. In this context, the analysis of the state’s ideological role is extremely relevant because, as O'Donnell (1993) puts it:
The state (more precisely, the state apparatus), claims to be and is normally believed to be a state-for-the-nation. The state claims, from explicit discourses up to the recurrent invocation of the symbols of nationhood, that it is the creator of the [social] order as well as—in contemporary democracies—of the individual and associational rights that underlie this order.
