Argentina's Partisan Past is an impressive book on a still vexed question: how to make sense of the political past of Argentina. Goebel cleverly begins this book by quoting Eric Hobsbawm's claim that ‘Nations without a past are contradictions in terms’ (p. 1). But paradoxically the understanding of national history and its implication in the political life of a country is not the focus of political scientists. Nonetheless there is a consensus among historians that the struggle to command the interpretation of history is a contest for the ‘collective memory’, and thereby an attempt to gain political dominance. As a result, ‘historical memory’ becomes an ‘affair of state’. While dominant elites may try to downplay rivalries and strife between groups belonging to the same nationality, challenging oppositions can also mobilise nationalism against the holders of power. At this point, historical revisionism becomes revealing both for historians and political theorists, especially those who study Argentina. Indeed, few can deny that Argentina is one of those countries in which the impact of historical interpretation has been a permanent issue in its political life.

However, as Goebel correctly notes, the debate on Argentine national history has been written almost exclusively by Argentine historians for an Argentine audience. Most studies have made little effort to link the history of revisionism to broader debates about nationalism. This book rightly aspires to correct this omission and attempts to shift the emphasis from discussions about the origins and the content of revisionism towards questions about its changing nature (p. 6). For that purpose the author stresses the interplay between the intellectual field and the realm of politics as the only way by which the dynamics of nationalism can be grasped (p. 17).

In a broader sense this book makes a great contribution in convincing scholars that Argentina's politics is not divided between clearly identifiable political traditions defined as ‘liberals vs. nationalists’. As Goebel argues, instead of a clear-cut divide between an anti-liberal nationalism and an anti-nationalist liberalism we are dealing with different understandings of nationhood whose relationship has been conflictive but also shifting, complementary and mutually constitutive (p. 236). This is an important claim that cast doubts on those works that draw a connecting line between nationalism and Argentina's authoritarian legacy. Some of them, such as Nicolas Shumway's The Invention of Argentina (University of California Press, 1991), have stressed that it is precisely the legacy of Argentina's nationalism and its political culture which accounts for the country's political and economic decline. Other works, such as Carlos Waisman's Reversal of Development in Argentina (Princeton University Press, 1987), even claim that a new brand of authoritarian and economic nationalism shifted the path of Argentina's development from a liberal to a national corporatist one, which ultimately led to economic and political crisis. In more senses than one, Goebel's book attempts to surpass this dichotomy.

Yet the central question is still open. How can we explain Argentina's democratic deficit? How to explain Argentina's confrontational rather than consensual democracy? Does the very process of historical revisionism and debate about its national identity play a role in paving the way for the absence of common rules of the game for all political actors?

By way of comparison, in Uruguay, a society similar to Argentina in its social composition, we can see the violent confrontation of two political factions (Blancos and Colorados) for political power. However, their political projects were not mutually exclusive. That allowed a political arrangement based primarily on territorial distribution and then some sharing in government, which formed the basis of the Uruguayan democratic consensus. In Argentina, by contrast, two political factions espouse exclusivist versions of national organisation and compete against each other about rules and about the content of national identity. The two factions not only cling to different historical mythologies but also present two opposing views of national organisation projects. Liberals, socialists and conservatives, for example, can be considered the side that propounds the liberal model of modernisation. These latter defend the official version of the history of Argentina. Nationalists of both left and right argue for a model of corporatist-populist national organisation and base their demands on the revisionist version of Argentina's political history.

From 1810 to 1852, Argentina was a country divided by the struggle between Federalists (traditionalists, caudillistas) and Unitarists (modernists). Before the final victory of the modernist Unitarians, Juan Manuel de Rosas governed Argentina between 1829 and 1852, with a brief interlude in the early 1830s. His rule and his legacy have provoked deep divisions in Argentine society, and much of the history written about him falls into the extremes of diatribe and vindication. With Rosas' defeat in 1853, Argentina began a liberal process of modernisation, a process idealised in the works of intellectuals such as Bartolomé Mitre, Bautista Alberdi and Domingo F. Sarmiento. According to them, Argentina was a ‘barbarous’, ignorant country, a product of Spanish colonialism, which had to be civilised by means of a new ideology of progress based on positivist philosophy. The important point, however, is that the model of national modernisation relied on the delegitimisation of Rosas' tyranny.

That model endured until the early 1930s, the decade when historical revisionism was propounded by a new brand of nationalist intellectuals who, paradoxically, were influenced by opposing – although dialectically synthesising – ideas. On the one side stood fascist-influenced intellectuals who gathered around the journal La Nueva Republica, from where they attacked democracy and especially the rule of Hipólito Yrigoyen. On the other side stood populist intellectuals who originated precisely in the Radical Party led by Yrigoyen. Although the two sides differed in their intellectual ideological conceptions, under the Roca–Runciman Pact, which marked the association of British economic interests with Argentina's conservatives, these opposing sides found a common language against liberalism and economic and cultural imperialism.

Indeed, the pact marked the beginning of an era defined as the ‘infamous decade’, which became the apogee of historical revisionism. During that era, both brands of nationalist claimed to be rescuing the ‘real’ Argentina from oblivion. Both argued that there had been a systematic distortion that had led to an ‘official history’ and which was the result of liberalism. Both defied British imperialism and supported Argentina's neutrality during the Second World War. According to some observers these two types of ‘right-wing authoritarian’ nationalism and left-wing populism set the ideological frame of Peronism.

The question, however, is whether and how this ideological configuration reappeared at different times and at different periods of Argentina's political history. Is Peronism anti-imperialist and an advocate of historical revisionism? Are all liberals anti-Peronist and against historical revisionism? Goebel shows that history is richer than ideological configurations.

Indeed, Goebel makes great efforts to show that historical revisionism has been adopted by various governments of different ideological persuasions. Perón would be a reasonable candidate to adopt historical revisionism, since he could be easily portrayed as a representative of Rosas' anti-imperialist populism. However, as Goebel correctly states, Perón sought to strike a careful balance between Rosas and liberal figures such as Sarmiento (p. 86). In a similar vein Goebel stresses that under Onganía's regime, which represented the opposite of Peronist social authoritarianism, revisionist essayists of left-wing leaning such as Rosa and Hernández Arregui occupied temporary posts at the University of Buenos Aires in place of reformist academicians expelled by the regime after ‘the night of the long sticks’. In more senses than one, historical revisionism and the figure of Rosas could be adopted by populists as well as by liberal authoritarians. The former cling to Rosas' anti-elitist and anti-imperialist cast, whilst the latter praise his authoritarian rule.

As Goebel suggests, although nowadays we can say that nationalism is not as important as it was in the past, historical revisionism is still present for Peronists of the Right as well as of the Left. Indeed the myth of Rosismo was resuscitated by leftist Kirchnerismo as well by neoliberal Menemismo. These represent the right-wing and left-wing faces of Argentine nationalism: the populist and the authoritarian.

However, we get a very different view from the dwindling camp of liberal democrats. During the period of transition to democracy after the end of military rule, the incumbent Raul Alfonsín described the figure of Rosas as incompatible with democratic values (p. 203). This claim is important because it came from a representative of what could be labelled the new democratic ‘political culture’. In other words, despite the fact that Rosas and historical revisionism appeal to all Argentines, they are definitively more appealing to nationalists from the Right and the Left.

Should this distinction be a surprise for observers of Argentine politics? Not at all. The same issues raised by rightist and leftist nationalism in the past have been revived by the Kirchners, for whom Argentina's oligarchy is associated with imperialist interests and the world finance centres and is accordingly protected by the ‘liberal’ institutions of the country. In this sense the Kirchnerista discourse follows the same confrontational path originating with historical revisionism. Although Kirchnerismo governs a large majority, it portrays its elitist political adversaries not as a political opposition but as foes of the nation. In this sense, Kirchnerismo echoes its nationalist forerunners for whom the concept of ‘anti-national forces’ was usually equated with a liberal cosmopolitanism centred in the city of Buenos Aires (p. 17). It is arguable that the imaginary of two Argentinas propagated by revisionists – a liberal cosmopolitan port city as opposed to a traditional rural interior – is an invention. Indeed the boundaries between the two were always blurred and open to dispute. However, as Goebel correctly emphasises, the dichotomy would have failed to strike a chord had it not been recognisable in social reality through differences in economic activities, clothing, food and to some extent ethnicity. In this sense it is not wrong to note that the socio-political and cultural distance between the two Argentinas is as present now as before. Historical revisionism contributes to widening this gap even further.