Commentary. Perón's Innovation in 1953: Historical Foundations for Critical Geopolitics in South America

Abstract

Perón's speech on November 11, 1953 is a watershed for at least two historical paths: that of Peronism in Argentina, and that of geopolitical thought in South America. The then Argentine president, who also played the role of the main ideologue of the political movement he led, explains the reasons for his regional integration project, the South American ABC, exposes his viewpoint on the causes of its failure, and proposes a change in strategy, which is the appeal to the people. At that moment, a change occurs in his geopolitical vision: he calls for a break with categories and concepts from the past, and for the adoption of a national-popular (geo)strategy for achieving geographic and social transformations. This change has been analyzed historically, considering the Cold War context that affected South American governments, but also a theory of South American regionalism has been built around it. On this second dimension, we argue that Perón's innovation was not the decision to practice classical (ratzelian) geopolitics from the South, as Methol Ferré and his disciples argued, but his turn towards what we now understand as critical geopolitics: in addition to dissent with the hegemonic order, he discovers the “territorial trap”, the end of conventional geopolitics and the limits of the foreign policy of nation-states.