Southern Cone Under the
British
The Ultimate Solution to the Southern
Cone’s Problems in Our World
In our world, Argentina and Uruguay, along with the rest of South America, have faced many serious political and economic problems in the past 50 or so years, ranging from hyperinflation to military coups and everywhere in between. Many people see the causes of the problems in the Southern Cone to be Juan Domingo Peron’s government in Argentina in the late 1940s, with his nationalization of industries. They also usually attribute Argentina’s fall from wealthy-country status to weak and corrupt political institutions that became worse after the 1940s, along with IMF and World Bank loans in the 1980s and 1990s that did more harm than good during crippling economic crises.
While all this may be true, the root reason why Argentina and the Southern Cone have faced these problems, along with endemic civil wars and retarded political and industrial development in the 19th century, is because the British did not end up colonizing the Southern Cone the way it did North America or Australia! I am saying this because the British have had a different legal, and thus political and economic system, from the rest of the European colonial powers (like Spain). Among other things, while many Continental European countries like Spain have had Roman-based legal systems (e.g. Naopleonic law), England has had the English common law system. This system has maximized individual freedoms, much more than Roman-based law, in such areas as property rights, civil society, and rule of law. In England and its colonies that were settled by Europeans (i.e. North America, Australia, and New Zealand), this has fostered democracy and prosperous market economies earlier and more thoroughly. As a result, corruption is not nearly as endemic in those places as, say, in our world’s Argentina, and their economies are better able to withstand macroeconomic shocks than, for example, Latin America.
In the Argentina and Uruguay of Auchmuty-Whitelocke World (AWW), which is a scientific parallel universe, there haven’t been as many problems related to the economy and governance (save the Great Depression and a few others) as in our world’s version of those countries. These countries in AWW have benefited from English common law much more than in our world (though even in AWW, Spanish law is used for certain civil matters). As a result, civil society and respect for the rule of law, and by extension the economic and political institutions, are much, much stronger in the Southern Cone of AWW than in our world’s version. AWW’s version of Argentina and Uruguay, therefore, has been spared such severe problems as Peronism of the 1940s and 1950s, the “dirty wars” and military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, and the serious economic decline since the 1950s (including three- and four-digit inflation and the deep depression and massive debt default of 2001-02). The only comparable problem in AWW Argentina/Uruguay since World War II has been continued tensions between the English-speakers and Spanish-speakers, though they have been declining in recent decades; this is the AWW analogue of leftist-rightist tensions of the 1970s.
Having said all this, one can easily blame Argentina's and Uruguay’s problems on the corrupt politicians from anytime in the past 60 years (including Peron), or weak political institutions, or financial loans gone awry. The root of all these problems is the British failure, in our world, to permanently conquer Buenos Aires in 1807, and consequently, no British colonization in that area. What AWW offers is a Southern Cone where the British did settle in southern South America minus Chile, and where there are not as many bad problems – just look at the United States, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand.
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