Nothing more than an introductory chapter

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The future

The disputes, controversies, and mysteries surrounding the history of the Argentine Republic’s development have been as intense as they have been numerous. Theories abound, the divides widen, and consensus seems conspicuous by its absence on the question of what or who is to blame for preventing this South American country from reaching its full potential.

Over the decades and across the political spectrum, this seemingly unanswerable question has unleashed a widespread sense of frustration with the country’s situation and frequently leads to declinist views of our national odyssey. However, setting aside analyses of the past and present (undoubtedly a great Argentine passion), I want to take this opportunity to focus on the future, specifically the second half of the 21st century. Despite many things, I, personally, am very optimistic about this country’s future. Far from seeing a country in decline, moving ever further away from a lost Golden Age, I believe that, from 2050 onward, Argentina will enter a period of economic prosperity and international importance that is currently difficult to imagine.

My argument is based on a geopolitical analysis of Argentina, taking into account its structural conditions, long-term opportunities and challenges, and the broad trends in the global context. I acknowledge that geopolitics is itself a cold, Machiavellian, and calculating discipline, and my analysis carries that spirit. As far as possible, I will seek to set aside my preferences, wishes, and biases and stick to objective factors in an attempt to forecast their potential consequences.

The task before me may seem contradictory. I am, above all, a historian, and this is a book about the future. However, I believe that historical perspective, structural analysis, and long-term trends are more relevant than ever precisely because they allow us to glimpse a promising future for our country.

To exist

My first argument is that Argentina will exist in 2050. And the reason Argentina will exist is the simple fact that this country does not currently face a single problem that could lead to its disappearance, an advantage not many countries in the world possess. Consequently, I believe Argentina is a country that will survive the 21st century and enter the 22nd century while many others will fall by the wayside.

This observation is not intended to downplay the severity of the whole host of problems we currently face as a nation, such as the economic crisis, foreign debt, high poverty, growing inequality, brain drain, capital flight, tax evasion, the informal economy, political polarization, corruption, rising crime, or institutional deterioration. But, I must point out, none of these problems, individually or collectively, can cause Argentina to disappear. And this is a fundamental point. People can, and often do, have very different definitions of the purpose of politics or governance, but, ultimately, the fundamental condition for any project of governance is the perpetuation across space and time of the human community it represents. The loftiest ideas and most laudable intentions are not worth much if the community that upholds them is wiped off the face of the Earth, as happened to the Sumerians, Scythians, Trojans, Carthaginians, Babylonians, Soviets, and Yugoslavs, among so many others. In turn, the longer a nation exists, the greater its chances of experiencing more favorable historical eras. If the chronicles of millennia-old empires offer any kind of guide, one can conclude that, sooner or later, life really does give you another chance.

Territory

Another fundamental basis for Argentina’s endurance lies in its physical structure: Argentina is a geographically well-anchored country, with clear natural borders such as the Andes mountain range, the plateaus of the Altiplano, the forests and jungles of the north and northeast, and the Atlantic Ocean. These natural barriers enclose a truly immense territory: excluding its Antarctic territories, Argentina covers some 2.8 million square kilometers, making it the eighth-largest country in the world. If we add its location at the southern end of the continent to these factors, we can see how Argentina is a virtually impregnable territory in military terms. In other words, Argentina is so large and so far away that any advance on our country would be a titanic, complex, and expensive military adventure. And there is simply no power with both the capabilities and the motives to undertake such a campaign of conquest.

The Southern Cone is also very far from the main flashpoints of conflict, and it is highly unlikely that a war could reach its shores. Added to this is another layer of geopolitical security: Argentina has no plausible conflict scenarios involving its neighbors, no extraterritorial military commitments, and no one is targeting it with nuclear weapons. In fact, even in the event of thermonuclear war, the Southern Cone would be among the areas notably less affected by this catastrophic scenario.

Today, part of Argentina’s sovereign territory remains under military occupation by the United Kingdom: the Malvinas Islands, South Georgia, the South Sandwich Islands, and the surrounding maritime areas. On this issue, too, Argentina finds itself in a situation where time is on its side. When the United Kingdom illegally invaded the islands in 1833, it was the leading global power and headed an empire that spanned six continents, encompassed more than 200 million people, and covered some 20 million square kilometers. Almost two centuries later, the United Kingdom is no longer even among the world’s five largest economies and faces growing domestic problems, an aging population, a complex international reality balancing Europe’s interests with those of the United States, and an ongoing process of decolonization, as demonstrated by the recent loss of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in 2024.

This combination of factors points to a continuation of Britain’s relative decline and increasing difficulties in projecting power around the globe, particularly in the distant South Atlantic. In light of this, its ability to retain effective control over the islands and threaten mainland Argentina will tend to diminish as the decades pass.

Likewise, this scenario has positive implications for Argentina on an intrinsically related issue: its sovereignty claim over the Antarctic Sector, which includes around 1,000,000 square kilometers of land and has the potential to make our country the seventh-largest in the world. It represents Argentina’s greatest geopolitical ambition.

On the other hand, South American Argentina consists of a predominantly flat territory in which most of the population, economic activity, agricultural production, navigable rivers, and seaports are located in its central belt. This territorial and demographic reality substantially hinders any possibility of a viable balkanization¹A term that originated in the 1990s with the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which split into present-day Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia. Since then, it has been used to describe the fragmentation of a sovereign state into a multitude of independent countries. of the nation. In a territory extending primarily from north to south, the primacy of the central belt, its most firmly integrated portion, makes any separatist project unviable.

In turn, a strong tradition of peace with the South American states could allow regional integration processes to continue. This represents a major strategic opportunity in a multipolar world, in which the consolidation of a more firmly established South American regional economy would give its member countries greater autonomy and stability in the face of fluctuations in the global economic system.

Population and resources

In short, this geographical picture shows a country built on firm material foundations and sheltered from the likely storms of the 21st century. However, for Argentina to continue to exist, one central factor is needed: there must continue to be Argentine men and women. On this point, the South American country has an important advantage, since it is one of the G20 member countries with the most favorable demographic structures. Argentina not only has people, but has young people, and that is the key. On the one hand, it has traditionally been a net recipient of immigrants. On the other, decades of subsidies and a robust system of public institutions (primarily in education and health) made Argentina a country where raising a family was comparatively less expensive than in other nations with this level of urbanization. And while it is true that we have witnessed a sharp drop in Argentina’s birth rate in recent years, this South American country still has a “demographic dividend”; that is, Argentina still has a population young enough to sustain a functioning and growing economy until mid-century.

In turn, the projected population growth, which would bring the population to around 50 to 60 million by 2050, offers some particular advantages. On the one hand, population growth will ensure a certain level of inherent, sustained economic growth. On the other, a relatively young workforce will generate economic opportunities in an international environment where labor will become a scarce and coveted commodity.²Some argue that advances in artificial intelligence and automation will eventually solve this problem, but these projections are based on developments that are not guaranteed to materialize, let alone within a definite timeframe.

Finally, this moderate demographic growth also guarantees that, even if the country goes through uninterrupted decades of poor economic performance, Argentina will become a substantially more prosperous society in terms of GDP per capita. Let's run some numbers:

According to the IMF's estimate for 2024, the national economy ended the year with a gross domestic product of approximately 600,000,000,000 dollars, placing it 25th in the global ranking. If the country were to experience average annual growth of 2% over the following 35 years (an abysmal result for a developing economy), it would double in size and end the 2050s with an economy worth 1,200,000,000,000 dollars. Combined with population growth of around 30%, this would mean a GDP per capita of more than 20,000 dollars. In a scenario of average growth of 4% over the same period (a more optimistic figure, but certainly still within reach), Argentina would double the size of its economy by 2042. It would also end the 2050s with a nominal GDP of 2,400,000,000,000 dollars and, under the same population growth scenario, a GDP per capita of more than 40,000 dollars. In other words, we would be looking at an economy comparable in real and per capita terms to Italy's today, currently the eighth-largest economy in the world.

My projections are bold, and I am well aware that the reader will have questions. Let's not shy away from addressing them. The first, undoubtedly, is this: what would drive such growth?

Argentina possesses considerable natural and critical resources for which demand will remain high in the coming decades. Its agricultural sector is among the most efficient in the world, and this production is less dependent on fertilizers than in other regions of the planet. It has an extensive network of river systems and boasts a geographical location and diversity that make it adaptable to climate change. At the same time, much of the production of phosphate and potash fertilizers is concentrated in Eurasia, where most potential conflicts in the coming decades are also expected to occur. A disruption of those supply lines would not only be far from catastrophic for Argentina, but could even represent a major opportunity to expand its domestic fertilizer production, an underdeveloped sector of the economy that could make great strides thanks to the expansion of the energy sector.

When it comes to energy, Argentina is also endowed with vast resources for which demand will continue to grow: it is a country with oil, unconventional oil, gas, unconventional gas, hydroelectric power, and nuclear power, and it is one of the few countries in the world that could harness wind and solar energy on a large scale. It also possesses extensive strategic mineral resources in a global context where demand for certain metals, such as lithium and copper, will remain high for decades.

Finally, Argentina has a relatively high Human Development Index (the second-highest in Latin America, after Chile) and a highly urbanized population (almost 93%, placing it among the 15 most urbanized countries in the world, even counting the city-states of Singapore, Vatican City, San Marino, and Monaco). These conditions would allow it, without enormous difficulty, to expand its manufacturing base, strengthen its scientific and technical ecosystem, and further develop its services sector.

Given all these structural advantages, another question inevitably arises: why hasn't Argentina managed to develop before now, with all this potential? Ah, this is a question that has fascinated and tormented historians and economists around the world for decades. And it is a question I will most certainly not answer here. I'm sorry. What I would like to do, however, is offer three observations that, in my view, can at least help frame these debates from a different perspective.

A very short past

First, Argentina is a very young country, only now reaching 21 decades of independence. To put this in perspective, China had a civil war (the Warring States period) that lasted longer than our entire national history, while a single family (the Ottoman dynasty) ruled for three times as long as our country has existed. This youth means there is no accumulated experience that would allow us to discern the country's long historical cycles. Moreover, this lack of perspective leads its citizens to attach enormous significance to every short-term development the country suffers or encounters. Across Argentina's varied political spectrum, theories abound about the moment when the country's destiny went off the rails. Although the heroes, villains, and turning points change according to people's political preferences, almost all these arguments blame specific decisions or periods for somehow throwing the nation's course off track, without giving much consideration to longer, more complex, and contradictory processes. Instead, I propose that we think about it this way: if we dared to imagine that Argentina still has another 3,000 years of existence ahead of it, a scenario that is by no means impossible, that would mean our entire history up to this point has been nothing more than an introductory chapter.

Immigration and values

Second, we must consider that Argentina is not just a young country with a short history: it also had the distinctive experience of making a major leap in economic growth very early on, attaining a high level of prosperity under the agro-export model of Argentina's Generation of 1880 (1880-1930). Whatever the varied and controversial assessments one might make of that period, the experience of the Generation of 1880, when Argentina briefly had a GDP per capita comparable to that of the United States, has frequently been used as a yardstick for measuring subsequent periods. And the fact that Argentina's GDP per capita is currently around one-seventh that of the United States readily lends itself to constructing a declinist and catastrophist view of national history. Nevertheless, if we take a long-term perspective, the picture becomes more positive. It has been estimated that, at the time of independence in 1816, the country's total population was comparable to the current population of the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo (half a million people), spread across 1.5 million square kilometers of territory under its effective control. Two centuries later, its population is almost 100 times larger, while its territory has nearly doubled. Over those two centuries, Argentina also reached an extraordinary milestone that is often overlooked in public debate, despite being valuable not only as a past achievement but also for the promise it holds for the future. Describing Argentina as a country of immigrants has become a commonplace, and schools teach how our country quadrupled its population in the thirty years from 1880 to 1910 through one of the most significant waves of migration in human history. Such an event, which laid the foundations of Argentina after the centenary of the May Revolution, now seems forgotten when it comes to identifying our strengths and weaknesses, as though it were not a process whose consequences extend well into the 21st century and surely beyond. Taking for granted this historical process, in which millions of people from different countries, cultures, and faiths have successively arrived in our land in search of a better future and integrated into the nation without major difficulties, obscures just how extraordinary this achievement is.

Let's be clear: this was possible because, from its very beginnings, Argentina developed a civic and universalist nationalism, based on shared values and loyalties, rather than an ethnic and particularist nationalism, based on blood ties. Thanks to this, the Argentine Republic had an early and resoundingly successful experience as a multicultural and globalized society. This stands in stark contrast to many experiences of mass immigration elsewhere in the world in recent years, which have been increasingly marked by the rise of xenophobic tendencies and growing social tensions.³The rise of Europe's far right or the U.S. wall on the border with Mexico are sad but powerful reminders of how difficult it is to build societies that are as harmonious as they are multicultural. Although some conservatives may not see it that way, our inclusive and adaptable national identity is a highly valuable resource in a century that will inevitably see greater movements of people for economic, war-related, and climatic reasons.

External factors

To round out this series of arguments, I would like to point out that Argentina is a notably introspective country, where political and historical debates tend to revolve almost entirely around domestic issues and decisions. Although these debates have great intrinsic importance, the fact that they occupy virtually all of the public discourse represents a certain distortion of the reality of a country whose destiny has always been far more dependent on external factors than we like to admit.

Broadly speaking, we can see how Argentina has lived through three global geopolitical periods and now stands at the dawn of a fourth. Our country was born out of the shock waves caused by the Napoleonic Wars, that last desperate bid to preserve the French hegemony of the preceding 150 years. That world, then undergoing the First Industrial Revolution, lacked the material and technological foundations needed to integrate Argentina more fully into the international economy, as the country sought a model of political organization suited to its vast distances, limited capital, and sparse population.

With the arrival of the Second Industrial Revolution in the second half of the 19th century, Argentina was able to use new technologies both to integrate more fully into an increasingly global economy and to consolidate a truly national government. Railways, steamships, the telegraph, and electricity made it possible as never before to bridge the vast distances of our territory, shortening travel times, reducing costs, and giving rise to meteoric economic growth.

Nevertheless, while there is much that can be said (and certainly much that has been said) about the merits, failures, and limitations of that national model, there is one key geopolitical fact that is almost never mentioned when its eventual crisis and collapse are discussed: the opening of the Panama Canal on August 15, 1914. Before its construction, Buenos Aires was indisputably one of the world’s most important ports, serving as a key logistical hub for maritime traffic between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Once the Panama Canal opened, shipping routes were reconfigured to the clear detriment of Buenos Aires. And there was fundamentally nothing Argentina could have done to prevent this crucial geopolitical transformation.

Likewise, the opening of the Panama Canal coincided with the outbreak of the first of two world wars, which, together with the crisis of 1930, would ultimately destroy the European political and economic hegemony around which our young republic had built its model for the country. The European world system of the Industrial Revolution was replaced by a bipolar division between two great superpowers: a socialist one (the USSR), which offered few opportunities for Argentina’s development, and a capitalist one (the U.S.), which, by one of those quirks of fate, is also one of the world’s leading agricultural producers and exporters. Beyond Washington and Moscow, both of which had little economic compatibility with Argentina, lay a devastated Europe that in the second half of the 20th century adopted much more protectionist policies for its own agricultural sector.

The emergence of the Soviet Union as an industrial-military superpower and the consolidation of a socialist bloc stretching from East Germany to North Vietnam prompted the U.S. to adopt a policy of containment. From that point on, Washington would patrol the world’s oceans, ensuring freedom of navigation on the seas for its allies and enabling the emergence of a globalized economy, with the aim of maintaining a bulwark of allied countries along the edges of Eurasia to prevent Moscow’s supremacy. And so, with the rise of the superpowers, our country entered its third major era in global geopolitics, the most adverse to date.

Faced with this difficult landscape, Argentina reconfigured its national model through various industrialist approaches, the most consequential of which was the Peronist experience. Both in its more autonomous versions, such as Juan Perón’s Five-Year Plans, and in versions more integrated with international capital, such as Arturo Frondizi’s developmentalism, Argentina sought, through import-substitution industrialization, a model of economic development rooted in its domestic market.

Once again, beyond the volumes written about Argentina’s successes, mistakes, achievements, failures, advantages, and disadvantages since the mid-20th century, taking a global perspective reveals an inherently detrimental geopolitical landscape.

In turn, the course of the Cold War also steadily increased the degree of foreign interference in national politics, continuously heightening domestic instability and hindering the development of long-term policies. Meanwhile, the second half of the 20th century also witnessed the process of decolonization, which led to increased competition on the international stage as more and more independent actors emerged, advancing their own models of development.

Thus, Argentina’s strategic importance within the global order suddenly plummeted, and it is hard to imagine that the country would not have faced considerable difficulties, regardless of the policies its governments might have implemented. In turn, this situation was exacerbated by the leap in globalization that came with the end of the Cold War. In this context, our country was swept along by global geopolitical trends and embarked on a process of economic liberalization that culminated in the 2001 economic and political collapse.

A Century of Possibilities

As we move ever further into the 21st century, global geopolitical forces once again began to affect our country’s destiny. Gradually, the first quarter of the 21st century has witnessed a transition from a unipolar world to a new era in global geopolitics, characterized by the rise of a multipolar system. Yet this century is still young and, in my view, the transformations already coming into view will be even more beneficial for Argentina or, in some cases, far less damaging to our country than to others.

For example, the emergence of a multipolar world multiplies Buenos Aires’s diplomatic options, giving it far greater room for maneuver on the international stage than it had during the bipolar and unipolar periods. As the emerging markets of new powers expand and consolidate, Argentina will find new opportunities for trade and for technical, scientific, and military exchanges. In turn, its remote geographical location (relative to the main continental landmasses and population centers) would allow it to avoid falling prey to competing spheres of influence and keep it at a safe distance from the most likely conflict scenarios.

Regarding this last point, we can see how a series of internal and external problems is simultaneously affecting many of the world’s most important countries, and how this convergence of problems will probably lead to greater instability in the international order and the global economic system; a flashpoint from which Argentina is fortunately far removed.

To this scenario we must add the factor of climate change, where Argentina also has a significant comparative advantage. Unlike many other regions of the world where the adverse and unpredictable effects of climate change pose an existential threat, our country, with its climatic diversity and vast stretches of territory extending along a north–south axis, is not only fairly well prepared to adapt to these transformations, but its geographical location would also shield it from the main sociopolitical conflicts unleashed by the mass displacement of environmental refugees.

Finally, in the coming years many of the world’s leading economies will face a problem unprecedented in human history and with potentially catastrophic consequences: population collapse caused by falling birth rates and population aging. Because this is a phenomenon specific to the present stage of industrial Modernity, there is no solid theory of how it will unfold or whether it can be resolved. This poses an existential threat to the countries that experience it, since the viability of a society and economy in which the population begins to fall steadily for decades remains unclear. Put another way, this kind of demographic collapse has the potential to ruin many of the world’s major advanced economies across Eurasia and North America, triggering a reconfiguration of the global economic and political system as we know it. In turn, the fact that all the crises mentioned above overlap to some extent in time, and that their effects have the potential to reinforce one another, leaves us with the prospect of a 21st century that is more unstable and dangerous than the 20th century was.

Against this backdrop, the Argentine Republic has the opportunity to emerge as a remote island of relative peace in a world that will weather numerous, sustained storms in the coming decades, and once again become a haven for skilled migrants who leave behind Eurasia’s geopolitical storms and seek to build a better future in our lands. To do so, Argentina, through its consolidated democracy, must find a way to use the assets at its disposal to build a model that is economically competitive enough and socially inclusive enough to achieve medium-term stability and predictability.

It is a bold wager, I know. But if we succeed, Argentina has the potential to become a nation with far more future than past and to enter the 22nd century with confidence and its head held high. The historical mandate of today’s generations is to create the conditions that will allow us to reach that destination. In that spirit, the purpose of this book is to present the various structural conditions that will endure over the long term in a world in transition and that give our country a historic opportunity to flourish. Thus, far from being based on naive optimism, this essay aims to provide a realistic account of those advantages that will contribute to the necessary debate about the course our nation must take.

Roadmap

Although the central thesis of this book has already been summarized in these pages, in the following chapters I delve into five specific themes that reinforce my argument.

Chapter 1, “Industrial Modernity”, is the longest in the book because in it I give an overview of how the global system has functioned to date, its current weaknesses, and why it is evolving toward a different configuration that is particularly favorable to Argentina. This establishes the general framework of my position, within which all the other phenomena I will describe converge.

Chapter 2, “Nationalism, Internationalism, Globalism”, describes the tensions between the various forms of identity and organization that humanity has developed, detailing their contradictions and explaining why the civic and universalist nationalism on which Argentine national identity has been built represents a higher synthesis on which vital internal cohesion rests.

In Chapter 3, “Multipolarity”, I analyze the emerging geopolitical chessboard, the positions of its various actors, and the new possibilities this brings for our country.

In Chapter 4, “Population Collapse”, I present the many factors driving this phenomenon, unprecedented in human history, which will first affect the most advanced economies, bringing about a reorganization of the global balance of power.

Finally, Chapter 5, “The Technocratic Dream and the Futuristic Dystopia”, engages with the opportunities, dangers, and challenges that the most significant era of accelerated transformation in our history presents to the world.

And so, by the end of this journey, I will have earned the right to add a couple of pages about this country’s long-term future and how, sooner rather than later, we will have to tackle the task of entering the 22nd century.