Nation, people and democracy: new meanings in the democratic transition. UNIDOS magazine and the project of a democratic Peronism

Abstract

In this late modernity in which capitalism rests on globalising cultural models that tend to erase national identities, it would be convenient to keep away from the attemps to restore a “national unity” which ignore the contradictions and conflicts that cross Argentina’s history. A critical exercise of memory is undoubtedly healthier to do than an identity reconstruction.

What seems to be important nowadays is to draw attention to “the national issue” by keeping distance from irritated reactions but, at the same time, to consider the challenges which are inherent to the construction of a national project.

As a contribution to this issue, this paper attempts to recover recent series of debates on this topic in our country. The way in which “national issue” is reexamined by the new democratic approach; and the apparent distance between how this issue was analized in the ’60 and ’70, different to that of the democratic transition period.

From the abundant series of discourses of those decades, this paper deals on the production of UNIDOS magazine. It was the editorial experience of a group of intellectuals and politicians of the left of Peronism who wanted to appeal to traditional identity, so that it would comply with the demands of a society that pronounced itself on a deep revaluation of democracy.

In this late modernity in which capitalism rests on globalising cultural models that tend to erase national identities, it would be convenient to keep away from the attemps to restore a “national unity” which ignore the contradictions and conflicts that cross Argentina’s history. A critical exercise of memory is undoubtedly healthier to do than an identity reconstruction.

What seems to be important nowadays is to draw attention to “the national issue” by keeping distance from irritated reactions but, at the same time, to consider the challenges which are inherent to the construction of a national project.

As a contribution to this issue, this paper attempts to recover recent series of debates on this topic in our country. The way in which “national issue” is reexamined by the new democratic approach; and the apparent distance between how this issue was analized in the ’60 and ’70, different to that of the democratic transition period.

From the abundant series of discourses of those decades, this paper deals on the production of UNIDOS magazine. It was the editorial experience of a group of intellectuals and politicians of the left of Peronism who wanted to appeal to traditional identity, so that it would comply with the demands of a society that pronounced itself on a deep revaluation of democracy.