Forging a Peripheral Inter-nationalism: The Argentine Socialist Party’s Relationship with the Internationals (1889–1940)

Abstract

This article examines the relationship of the Argentine Socialist Party (PS) with international socialist organizations between 1889 and 1940. During this period, the PS emerged as the leading Latin American social-democratic organization and one of the few non-European members of both the Second International and the Labour and Socialist International. The article argues that the PS’s unique trajectory is best understood through the concept of “peripheral inter-nationalism”. This framework analyses how a socialist party in a non-colonial state built by mass European immigration engaged in a competitive nation-building project. The PS sought to construct its own version of the nation for a largely immigrant working class while simultaneously confronting the official nationalism being forged by the Argentine state. By analysing this dual challenge, the article complicates existing understandings of socialist “inter-nationalism”, revealing a distinct path to reconciling national and international loyalties. Drawing on archival research on the PS and the Internationals, the article shows how Argentine socialists actively translated and contested European norms, ultimately contributing to the historiography of international socialism by addressing the underexplored role of non-European parties.

Introduction

Shortly after disembarking from the steamship that brought him back from Europe in November 1910, Juan B. Justo (1865–1928), the leading figure of the Argentine Socialist Party (Partido Socialista, hereafter PS), wrote a report to the party’s executive committee expressing his admiration for the progress of the European socialist movement. The congress of the Second International held in Copenhagen, which he had just attended, reflected “the rapidly growing size of socialist and workers’ political organizations throughout the entire civilized world”. It had been, he added, a meeting “worthy of the powerful organization of the universal proletariat, whose lofty aspirations found in it a grand and beautiful expression”.¹ Nine years later, after returning from another political trip to a socialist conference in Europe, Justo penned a markedly more sombre report. “The Bern conference,” he described, “differed profoundly from the Copenhagen congress […]. Under the rigors of winter, the scarcity of food and clothing, and the dense web of police restrictions hindering the movement of individuals”, delegates arrived “with the fresh impression of the long and terrible war they had been unable to prevent, and amidst revolutions that were tearing socialist parties apart”.²

Significant transformations had indeed occurred within the international and local socialist movements between these two reports. However, Justo’s participation in both the Copenhagen and Bern conferences also highlights a notable continuity: the enduring connection of the Argentine socialist movement with international social democratic organizations and European socialist parties. For the leader of Argentine social democracy, these international allegiances were not incompatible with, but rather complementary to, his efforts to root socialism in the history and politics of Argentina. In a speech commemorating May Day in 1918, Justo emphasized that “in strengthening our international conviction”, socialist militants were simultaneously affirming their “national character”. He dismissed as absurd the notion that socialism “sought to destroy the healthy and solid aspects of nationalism”.³ Four years later, in a lecture delivered in May 1922, Justo reaffirmed Argentina’s unique position as “the international country and people par excellence”, insisting that, for this reason, the Socialist Party should assert its “eminent internationalism”.⁴ In 1925, when the party press published an edited volume of Justo’s writings on internationalism and nationalism, they chose the title Internacionalismo y patria (“Internationalism and Fatherland”) as an apt summary of the leader’s approach.

From its earliest days, the PS sought to firmly root itself in Argentine historical and political life, while maintaining an active dialogue with European socialists and disseminating propaganda materials produced in Europe. Argentine socialists – emerging first in Buenos Aires and gradually expanding throughout the country – saw themselves as the proud and autonomous expression of an international, fundamentally European, movement. This self-perception was grounded in the material reality of their social base. The “international” character of the PS was a direct reflection of a membership composed largely of European immigrants. Rather than a nationalist turn, the project of rooting the party in Argentine political life was a strategic necessity: the complex task of forging a unified political actor out of a diverse and mostly disenfranchised immigrant proletariat.

This reconciliation of national and internationalist sentiment had concrete organizational manifestations. Argentine social democracy, by far the largest in Latin America until at least the 1930s, was one of the few non-European groups to participate in the Second International and later in the Labour and Socialist International. This membership, which included sending delegates to the congresses, paying regular financial dues, and having a seat in international executive bodies, was a source of political pride and self-affirmation. For the Internationals, in turn, having the Argentine socialists on board was a valuable addition that demonstrated the expanding global reach of the movement.

For a long period, historians of socialism took the internationalism of pre-war social democracy for granted, focusing on its alleged “betrayal” in the summer of 1914. Over the past twenty-five years, scholars have challenged this interpretation. The pioneering work of Kevin J. Callahan showed how various socialist parties reconciled their national ideologies with their commitment to internationalism, coining the term “inter-nationalism” to understand their practices.⁵ Other scholars have followed suit. Pierre Alayrac argued that the congresses of the Second International not only aimed to build a transnational identity, but were also an opportunity to strengthen national movements and increase the political authority of its leaders.⁶ Elisa Marcobelli rejected the notion of 1914 as a definitive failure, describing instead successive crises through which the International developed a “learning curve” for dealing with diplomatic tensions.⁷ Jean-Numa Ducange offered a compelling analysis of the German-speaking socialist movement’s complex relationship with the concept of nation, highlighting its ideological flexibility in reconciling national and internationalist loyalties.⁸ Exploring the debates about migration and colonization, Sebastian Schickl, Lorenzo Costaguta, Daan Musters, and Lucas Poy have shown that the internationalist resolutions adopted at the congresses of the International barely concealed complicated tensions and the coexistence of cosmopolitan and nativist sentiments.⁹

Talbot Imlay extended this perspective to the Labour and Socialist International of the inter-war period. He acknowledged that European socialists “were strongly attached to their nations”, but claimed that this was “not incompatible with the sense of belonging to a larger international community”.¹⁰ Similarly, and drawing on Callahan’s concept of “inter-nationalism,” Aurelio Martí Bataller has recently shown how, in the 1920s and 1930s, the Spanish PSOE positioned Spain’s national identity as both central to its socialist project and compatible with internationalist ideals, opposing regional nationalisms such as Catalanism while framing the defence of Spain’s unity as integral to its internationalist commitments.¹¹

A prevailing consensus in the historiography of international socialism thus suggests that we should not see internationalism as a mere incline towards pure nationalism in disguise; rather, social democratic parties, both before and after 1914, exhibited a complex interplay of nationalism and internationalism, the latter complementing rather than contradicting their allegiance to their respective nations. Although socialist parties in different countries undoubtedly increased their tendency to operate within national frameworks and even to join the governments of their respective states, cross-border links with other socialist parties and with transnational organizations continued to play an important role. While this historiographical renewal has broadened our understanding of European socialism, it has paid less attention to how these dynamics functioned in settler societies built by mass immigration, leaving the Argentine case in particular under-analysed.

The historiography of Argentine socialism has also witnessed significant advances in the last two decades. As elsewhere, the first histories were written by party leaders and militants in the form of essays, memoirs, and biographies. In 2005, when Hernán Camarero and Carlos M. Herrera published an exhaustive review of the historiography of Argentine socialism in the twentieth century, academic production on the subject was still scarce.¹² Since then, there has been significant development, with scholars exploring the party’s intellectual history, its links with the labour movement, its internal tensions and ruptures, its cultural life, its role in organizing women workers, and its regional development.¹³ Important work has been done on the PS and the “national question”. Building on earlier work regarding Justo’s idea of the nation and on socialist approaches to national commemorations,¹⁴ Francisco J. Reyes has shown how the PS moved from criticizing patriotism as a form of religion to developing a much more nuanced approach that embraced the idea of a “healthy nationalism”.¹⁵ Other scholars have demonstrated that this tendency deepened through the 1910s and 1920s, with growing vindication of national heroes and a “patriotic” reading of history that aligns with the liberal tradition.¹⁶ In a recent work, José Benclowicz delved deeper into this line of research analysing previous tensions and identifying an important turn towards a “bourgeois” nationalism in the mid-1930s, condemned by the PS until then.¹⁷

The international dimension of the PS’s history, however, and in particular its relationship with the Internationals, has remained largely unexplored. Jacinto Oddone’s canonical history barely touched on the subject, and only scattered references to international congresses or trips to Europe can be found in books and memoirs of early leaders.¹⁸ More recently, scholars have examined the role of German immigrants in the movement’s early years,¹⁹ the influence of French socialism, the politics of translating and editing works of European socialists,²⁰ and the visits of Enrico Ferri and Jean Jaurès,²¹ but the organic connection with the Second International has remained neglected. For the period after 1914, studies focused on the interpretations of the war rather than on the relationship with European parties.²² There are various studies on the development of a leftist tendency that eventually formed the Communist Party,²³ but we still know little about what happened between the PS and European socialists in the period up to 1923. The relationship with the Labour and Socialist International has only recently been dealt with.²⁴

Thus, we have, on the one hand, a revived interest in exploring the “inter-nationalism” of social democracy that has neglected studies of socialism and the nation outside Europe, and, on the other, a lively historiography of socialism in Argentina that has not paid enough attention to the PS’s relationship with the Internationals. In an attempt to fill these two historiographical gaps, this article reconstructs the political and organizational relationship that the PS maintained with international social democracy over a fifty-year period. It argues that Argentine social democracy’s unique trajectory is best understood through the concept of “peripheral inter-nationalism”. The PS participated in what was fundamentally a white, European socialist community shaped by an “inter-nationalism” that defined itself partly through the exclusion of colonized and non-white peoples. The PS occupied a peripheral position within this community: geographically and economically distant from Europe’s core, yet firmly within its cultural and ideological boundaries. Furthermore, unlike their European counterparts, who accommodated established nations, Argentine socialists faced the challenge of forging a unified “national working class” from a diverse immigrant base and competing with a ruling class that was itself busy constructing an emerging nation – both using European ideological templates.²⁵

Drawing on extensive research in archives in Amsterdam, Ghent, London, and Buenos Aires, this article analyses local sources – such as newspapers and brochures produced by the PS and its leaders – alongside materials from the Internationals and European parties. The remainder of this article is organized chronologically: the first section examines the international relations of Argentine socialism during the years of the Second International (1889–1914); the second focuses on the tumultuous period from the outbreak of World War I to 1923; and the third analyses the connections with the Labour and Socialist International until its demise in 1940.

Argentine Socialism and the Second International

The era of the Second International was foundational for the Argentine PS, marking its evolution from a relatively marginal recipient of European socialist thought to an autonomous political actor on the national stage. This section analyses how the party, initially shaped by European exile communities with a staunchly “anti-patriotic” internationalism, was forced to grapple with the challenge of forging a unified identity for its immigrant base while competing with the ruling-class nationalist discourse. It examines how the PS gradually learned to deploy its transnational connections as a tool for domestic legitimacy, a process that culminated in the party developing a distinct political identity that reconciled its internationalist principles with what it termed a “healthy patriotism”.

The connections of the Argentine left with international organizations go back to the era of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA), or First International. In early 1872, some twenty exiled communards formed a French section of the IWMA in Buenos Aires. Shortly after the Hague congress of September 1872, which marked the split with Bakunin, Marx and the General Council sent the Belgian delegate Raymond Wilmart to Buenos Aires to counteract potential anarchist expansion.²⁶ The experience was short-lived, however. By mid-1873, the Argentine section was in terminal decline, leaving no lasting organizational legacy.

In 1882, German socialist exiles fleeing Bismarck’s repressive laws established a club named Verein Vorwärts in downtown Buenos Aires. This group played a key role in the early development of the Argentine labour movement in a context of economic crisis and growing labour unrest. The group of German socialists intervened in labour disputes, reported on them and provided space for workers’ meetings.²⁷ Their activism attracted the attention of pro-government media, which launched a sensationalist campaign accusing the socialists of instigating strikes.²⁸ In 1889, these German socialists active in Buenos Aires, as well as a smaller group of French activists, asked Wilhelm Liebknecht and Alexis Peyret to represent them in the congress that founded the Second International.²⁹ The most important decision of that congress, the resolution to commemorate May Day, was honoured in Argentina. On Thursday, 1 May 1890, in parallel with activities and commemorations in different parts of the world, some 1500 people gathered in Buenos Aires to listen to speeches in Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Dutch.³⁰ The multilingual commemoration encapsulated the fundamental challenge of the early socialist movement: the need to forge a unified political class out of a fragmented, cosmopolitan proletariat. Despite its modest proportions, the event became a milestone in the history of the Argentine labour movement.

In the years that immediately followed, the organized activity of socialists in Buenos Aires underwent a period of decline, in the context of a severe economic recession and growing unemployment. The second congress of the International, which met in Brussels in 1891, did not include an Argentine delegation, although the socialists active in Buenos Aires managed to send a report. Indicating that the country was “in a state of desperate economic crisis” in which immigration had turned into emigration, the text informed about the weak state of socialist forces and stressed that many militants had been compelled to leave for Brazil or Europe.³¹ At the third congress of the International, held in Zurich in 1893, Argentina was not represented.

From 1894, however, a new period of expansion began, culminating in the founding of the Socialist Party at a constituent congress in mid-1896. In the process, German, Italian, and French socialist groups were increasingly marginalized, making way for a united party that brought together militants of diverse origins, including those born in Argentina.³² A key driver was the newspaper La Vanguardia, first published in April 1894 under the editorship of Juan B. Justo. Convinced that capitalist development was pushing Argentina towards modernity and creating the conditions for the foundation of a workers’ party, Justo promoted the naturalization of foreigners to enable them to vote and insisted that the German, French, and Italian language groups should play a subordinate role in the emerging party. By insisting on Spanish as the language of the movement and naturalization as a crucial step to obtaining political rights, the PS was attempting to create a new, unified political identity that could build a coherent electoral base from a mostly disenfranchised immigrant collective.³³

More than a simple electoral tactic, for Justo this was a cornerstone of his political project to build a unified working class. This endeavour in no way meant questioning the role of European social democracy as a model. Crucially, this was an explicitly Eurocentric project: the working class the PS sought to organize was implicitly white and European, with the party viewing these immigrants as bringing superior education, culture, and organizational capacity. In the first editorial of La Vanguardia, Justo openly celebrated the arrival of European immigrants as a source of progress for both the working class and the nation at large. “One and a half million Europeans have arrived”, he argued, and they “together with the existing European population, now form the active part of the population, which will gradually absorb the old criollo element, incapable of fighting on its own towards a higher social status”. The interests of the emerging labour movement, he continued, inclined it “to side with the European proletariat in its irresistible movement of emancipation”, a process accelerated by “the close economic relations which capitalism has established between us and Europe, the steamships, the cables, the flow of immigration”.³⁴ In 1902, party leader Basilio Vidal claimed that the country needed “the contribution of an intelligent foreign element that can adapt to the country and, through adaptation, regenerate it by engaging in its politics and introducing only the good practices from their country of origin”. Argentina needed “a foreign working class that brings a clear understanding of its vision in the world”.³⁵ This vision aligned the PS with the broader assumptions of the white, European socialist inter-nationalism to which it belonged. It was a framework that defined “organizable” workers largely along racial lines, viewing non-European populations as obstacles to, rather than subjects of, socialist transformation.

Justo made a long trip to Europe and the United States in 1895, where he came into contact with socialist leaders and intellectuals, worked on the first Spanish translation of Karl Marx’s Capital – published in Spain – and was deeply impressed by the development of Belgian socialism, and in particular by Émile Vandervelde.³⁶ During these formative years, “the International” was very present among Argentine socialists, who saw themselves as part of a cosmopolitan and civilizing movement rooted in Europe. La Vanguardia closely followed the political and organizational developments of European social democracy and reproduced propaganda articles written by European leaders and intellectuals (Figure 1). Socialism from Italy, Spain, and France played a central role: in the period 1894–1905, forty per cent of the foreign propaganda pieces that indicated their original source came from Italian, twenty-three per cent from Spanish, and thirteen per cent from French newspapers. Half of all these materials came from a handful of Spanish and Italian newspapers: Critica Sociale and Lotta di Classe from Milan, El Socialista from Madrid, and La lucha de clases from Bilbao. The most important Marxist theoretical organ of the period, Die Neue Zeit, appeared instead in a more distant fifth place.³⁷ In a recent article, Carlos M. Herrera and Francisco J. Reyes have shown that French socialism remained influential for Argentine socialists in this period, for instance through the canonical popularizations of Marxist thought penned by Gabriel Deville, Jules Guesde, and Paul Lafargue.³⁸ Another interesting example is the influence of Italian socialist leader Enrico Ferri, whose pamphlet Socialism and Positive Science, translated into Spanish and published in Buenos Aires in 1895, became a cornerstone of the evolutionist and reformist view of Argentine socialists.³⁹

Source: Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Figure 1. The newsroom of La Vanguardia in 1912.

As the party consolidated and grew, the presence of foreign articles in the Argentine socialist press began to decline. But this did not mean that the party distanced itself from European social democracy. On the contrary, towards the end of the 1890s, organizational links with the International became more important. In 1900, the PS appointed French socialist Achille Cambier, who had lived and been politically active in Argentina for a considerable time, to represent Argentina in the fifth congress of the Second International, held in Paris.⁴⁰ The congress decided to create an International Socialist Bureau (ISB), which the PS joined enthusiastically, sending the annual contribution of 200 francs.⁴¹ Argentina was granted a seat in the ISB, and delegates included Cambier and Manuel Ugarte (1875–1951),⁴² a young Argentine intellectual who lived in Paris, and also participated as a delegate in the congresses of the International in Amsterdam (1904) and Stuttgart (1907).

The PS deployed its new standing within the International to legitimize its domestic struggles, launching political campaigns that leveraged the party’s transnational connections to challenge state repression and influence international debates. No issue was more central to this strategy than immigration. As one of the world’s primary recipients of European migrants, Argentina’s social and political landscape was fundamentally shaped by what historians have termed an “alluvial” society.⁴³ Between the mid-nineteenth century and the Great Depression, Argentina was the second-largest recipient in the world in absolute numbers, after the United States, and the largest in per-capita terms. This influx dramatically reshaped the nation’s demographic profile. By the 1914 national census, thirty per cent of Argentina’s total population was foreign-born. The effect was even more pronounced in the city of Buenos Aires, where, by 1895, the foreign-born outnumbered the native-born.⁴⁴ The composition of this immigrant wave was overwhelmingly European, with Italians and Spaniards constituting the two dominant groups.⁴⁵

This demographic reality presented the party with its defining “immigrant conundrum”. While socialists viewed European workers as a progressive force that would accelerate the formation of a modern labour movement, they also feared that state-sponsored immigration could be used to depress wages and break strikes. The party’s primary recruitment pool consisted of the very workers whose mass arrival, when encouraged by capital, could threaten existing labour standards. The PS, therefore, had to defend the internationalist principle of free movement for its potential members while simultaneously opposing its use as a tool against the working class.⁴⁶ The party leadership chose to denounce only what it called “artificial immigration”, encouraged by companies and governments to weaken the labour movement.

In 1902, the PS submitted a proposal to the ISB to put the issue on the agenda of the next congress of the International.⁴⁷ The proposal made its way into the order of the day of the 1904 Amsterdam congress, where it was met by a counter-proposal from delegates of the Netherlands, the United States and Australia, who defended a much more restrictive stance based on racist considerations.⁴⁸ The debate remained unresolved and was revisited at the Stuttgart Congress, which adopted a resolution questioning attempts to restrict workers’ mobility.⁴⁹ The counter-proposals defended by American and Australian socialists reflected the influence of labour movements built on racial exclusion. The PS, in contrast, championed the mobility of European workers not merely out of abstract principle, but from the pragmatic necessity of organizing a proletariat with large segments of European immigrants.

Yet, this difference should not obscure a fundamental commonality: both positions operated within the same racialized framework of white inter-nationalism. The shared assumption was that only European workers were capable of building labour movements and socialist consciousness. The PS’s internationalism was not forged in opposition to the racial exclusions of its Anglo-Saxon counterparts, but as a variant within the same Eurocentric paradigm. On 19 December 1896, La Vanguardia had celebrated US restrictive legislation, noting that they were a sign of an “intelligent bourgeoisie” that wanted to attract the votes of the working class. The article mentioned the laws excluding Chinese migrants, those under discussion that established restrictions to immigrants who could not read (which would improve the salaries, according to the article, by keeping away Italian and Polish migrants), and the laws forbidding immigrants that had signed a contract before their departure.⁵⁰ A similar argument was deployed by socialist leader Jacinto Oddone in 1901, where he celebrated the restrictive laws enacted in the United States, Australia, “and certain points of France”. The article mentioned these laws as an example of “good protectionism”, for they protected the local working class from immigration of people coming from countries “where workers live in worse conditions”.⁵¹ Argentine socialists even celebrated restrictionist measures imposed in Australia:

We are cosmopolitans, and we want all men to have the freedom to choose the land on the globe that suits them best. But when it comes to the immigration of proletarians, especially when it is funded, in part or in full, by the state, the issue for the country’s workers is not one of exclusivism but of defence. This is how the workers of Australia have understood it, though with some exaggeration, making race the first point of their political program: a White Australia, prohibiting the entry of Chinese people, who, with their minimal demands, the miserable wages they are content with, and the stubborn tenacity with which they evade laws designed to protect workers – that is, themselves – are ruinous and unbeatable competitors for white workers.⁵²

Denouncing the repressive practices of the Argentine ruling class was the second and most important theme in the campaigns launched by the PS within the Second International. The previously unexamined correspondence between the PS and the ISB secretariat reveals how the PS strategically used the International’s moral authority as a tool of leverage in domestic politics. An early opportunity came in 1902, when the Argentine parliament passed a law allowing the government to deport foreigners suspected of disturbing “public order”, and labour organizations faced a severe repressive onslaught (Figure 2). The PS informed the ISB and succeeded in disseminating and denouncing the situation.⁵³ In 1905, in the context of a new martial law, the party leadership went further and called on European parties to organize a boycott of Argentine ships.⁵⁴ The party was in the midst of a serious internal crisis, and the call for a boycott was an expression of the influence gained by a Sorelian revolutionary syndicalist faction within the leadership.⁵⁵ The PS communicated telegraphically with the ISB, and Aquiles Lorenzo, a leader of the revolutionary syndicalist faction, sent a letter to Ugarte to strengthen the campaign in Europe, but the initiative did not bear results.⁵⁶ The ISB disseminated the request but took no practical action.⁵⁷ Between 1909 and 1910, the PS again denounced the martial law declared after Police Chief Ramón Falcón was assassinated by an anarchist. For several months, the PS leadership communicated extensively with the ISB, asking European socialists to protest “against these barbaric procedures of the Argentinian Russia” and requesting “moral and material aid”.⁵⁸ The ISB distributed the information among affiliated parties and included a “Circular on Events in Argentina” in its Bulletin, but admitted that the Argentinians would have to rely “more on moral support than on material aid”.⁵⁹

Source: Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Figure 2. Socialists gathered at the Teatro Verdi in 1908 to protest against the arms race.

When the International met in Copenhagen in 1910, the PS decided to send a local representative, none other than Justo.⁶⁰ The congress unanimously approved a resolution drafted by him, condemning the Argentine ruling class, applauding the work of the PS, and avoiding any reference to a boycott.⁶¹ Justo also intervened in the discussion on cooperatives, harshly criticizing the compromise resolution that had emerged on the topic.⁶² In the plenary, he argued that the text was “insufficient in theoretical terms” and would lead socialists “down the wrong path in their necessary cooperative action”.⁶³ Justo’s report about the congress shows a leader who did not hide his positive impression of European socialism, but who also did not hesitate to criticize the stances of the main parties in the International. The cooperatives created and promoted by Belgian socialists, exalted by Justo fifteen years prior, now represented an erroneous view of how to develop international cooperativism. He also lamented the lack of depth in the German social democrats’ arguments on this subject, as well as the silence of the British.⁶⁴ Justo’s willingness to challenge European orthodoxy at Copenhagen marked a shift from ideological dependence to assertive autonomy. The PS was no longer seeking validation from European socialism but positioning itself as an equal partner capable of independent analysis.

In the years 1911–1914, the PS’s relationship with the ISB became more distant. Whereas the PS had initially sought to rely on the International as a means of advancing its campaigns, it gradually began to assert itself as a more consolidated and autonomous political organization, increasingly integrated into the Argentine political system. The PS leadership had come to advocate a “healthy patriotism”, carefully distinguishing between the oligarchy’s reactionary nationalism and their own vision of a modern, democratic nation aligned with European civilization. Yet, this balancing act revealed crucial limits. Manuel Ugarte, who had been representing the party at the congresses of the International and later developed a perspective that championed Latin American solidarity and anti-imperialism, ultimately severed ties with the party in 1913. His departure was emblematic: Ugarte’s vision of pan-Latin American unity and opposition to US imperialism challenged the PS leadership’s liberal-internationalist view of European (especially British) capital as a historically progressive, civilizing force. The PS’s Eurocentric framework left little room for the kind of continental, anti-imperialist nationalism Ugarte advocated.⁶⁵

By 1914, the PS had successfully navigated its foundational years, transforming from a loose collection of immigrant circles into a consolidated national party with an autonomous voice within the International. It had forged a distinct model of peripheral inter-nationalism, operating at the geographic and economic edge of European capitalism while remaining firmly within its cultural and ideological boundaries. The party’s internationalism was thus doubly constrained: on one hand, by its membership in a white, European socialist compact that viewed non-European peoples and alternative solidarities with suspicion; on the other, by its domestic competition with the Argentine ruling class over which European framework – liberal capitalism or scientific socialism – should define the emerging nation. Both projects shared the premise that Argentina’s modernity required European immigration, capital, and civilization. The PS distinguished itself not by rejecting this Eurocentric vision, but by claiming that only scientific socialism, not oligarchic liberalism, could complete the nation-building project the May Revolution had begun in 1810. Yet, this carefully constructed balance between national ambitions and international allegiances was about to be shattered. The outbreak of the Great War would test whether the PS’s political project could survive the fracturing of the European socialist world itself.

The PS and the “International Question” between War and Revolution

The tumultuous period of war and revolution from 1914 to 1923 subjected the PS’s strategy to a severe stress test. This section argues that the party’s response to the fracturing of European socialism was a defining moment in consolidating its distinct political identity. Its adoption of a pro-Entente neutrality, its opposition to Bolshevism, and its quest for an autonomous voice in post-war socialist reconstruction were not merely reactions to European events but active choices that triggered internal crises, culminating in splits that cemented the party’s commitment to a gradualist and parliamentary road to socialism.

Throughout this period, international events and connections played a decisive role in the history of the PS. Although the country remained neutral, the war created a climate of mobilization, agitation, and public debate.⁶⁶ The PS, which had improved its parliamentary representation after an electoral reform in 1912 and was becoming a key player in public debates, supported neutrality but increasingly leaned towards the Entente. When war broke out in August 1914, Justo described it as a great tragedy that would interrupt the work of millions of men “for months or years” and which had none of the characteristics that, in his view, could justify a historically progressive war.⁶⁷ The conflict was a consequence of the persistence of “archaic forms of government, vanities, and dynastic and caste interests”.⁶⁸ This interpretation allowed Justo to adopt an increasingly sympathetic stance towards the Entente; at the same time, it revealed the depth of the PS’s identification with a particular vision of European civilization. By framing the war as a clash between democratic, republican modernity (France, Britain), and archaic militarism (Germany), Justo aligned the PS with what he saw as the progressive pole of “Western civilization”. This went to the heart of the PS’s peripheral inter-nationalism: Argentina’s path to socialism was conceived as fundamentally tied to the triumph of democratic, parliamentarian Europe. Furthermore, the war reinforced Justo’s attacks on protectionism and his constant advocacy for free trade.⁶⁹

A glance at the pages of La Vanguardia shows that the positions of European socialists were still closely followed, albeit with an increasingly critical perspective, as the political and intellectual authority of the major European parties had been seriously undermined with the outbreak of the conflict. But, again, increasing “nationalization” and critical distance did not mean organizational detachment. In 1914–1916, the PS continued to see itself as part of the international movement, and when the ISB attempted to organize a conference of socialists from neutral countries, in The Hague in August 1916, the PS decided to send a prominent leader like Nicolás Repetto (1871–1965) (Figure 3).⁷⁰ The conference organized two committees: one to discuss political issues and another to deal with economic matters. Repetto concentrated on the latter, for which he was appointed president. The conference resolution, which advocated for a policy of “comprehensive free trade” between nations, reflected the fundamental principles of the PS’s characterization of international trade. La Vanguardia presented the resolution as a political victory, emphasizing that the approval of this proposal was “a legitimate triumph of ours”.⁷¹

Source: Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Figure 3. Juan B. Justo and Nicolás Repetto in 1916.

The PS leadership’s pro-Entente stance, however, led to a serious internal crisis. By 1917, when the United States entered the conflict, the Argentine socialist press endorsed the decision of the “great American republic,” and highlighted the contrast between the “political backwardness” of the German Empire and countries such as France and England, representatives of “political civilisation, the republic, and parliamentary government”.⁷² The situation escalated when news broke that the Germans had sunk an Argentine ship, provoking a strong reaction in Buenos Aires. The socialist parliamentary group, which included nine deputies and one senator, issued a statement calling on the government to use the navy to defend Argentine trade.⁷³

Such a position was rejected by a leftist faction as a departure from the principle of class struggle and an adaptation to parliamentarism and reformism. For these “internationalists”, as they were called, the responsibility for the war lay with all the powers, not just German militarism. In April 1917, these internationalists won an unexpected victory when they defeated the party leadership and the parliamentary group at an extraordinary party congress. In August, they began publishing their own newspaper, La Internacional, which expressed pro-Bolshevik views. The crisis intensified dramatically in September, following the sinking of two more Argentine ships and the revelation of intercepted telegrams from the German ambassador to Argentina encouraging such actions. The national Parliament, with the votes of socialist legislators, requested the executive branch to suspend diplomatic relations with Germany. With the party in a state of turmoil, and aware that the parliamentary group had violated the resolutions of the extraordinary congress, the leadership decided to issue an ultimatum and called for a general vote of the members with two options: support the parliamentary group or accept their resignation. The official newspaper attacks on the internationalists became increasingly virulent, and in November La Vanguardia reported that eighty per cent of members had “rejected the resignation of the socialist parliamentarians and reaffirmed their confidence in them”.⁷⁴ After the inevitable split, the internationalists formed the Partido Socialista Internacional, which, in December 1920, accepted the twenty-one conditions of the Comintern’s second congress and became the Communist Party.⁷⁵

Shortly after the end of the war, on 13 November 1918, the PS published a manifesto reaffirming the key principles it had defended since 1914, and especially during the internal crisis of 1917. The text celebrated the victory of the “social and democratic alliance” and insisted that the key to achieving lasting peace lay in promoting free trade to develop economic and commercial ties between countries.⁷⁶ Furthermore, the PS leadership felt that the time had come to make its voice heard within the transnational socialist community. The opportunity came with the convening of a conference in Bern in early 1919, for which the PS decided to send two of the party’s top leaders: Juan B. Justo and Antonio de Tomaso (1889–1933), a rising figure within the organization.⁷⁷ Justo was appointed one of the vice-presidents of the conference and played a leading role during the proceedings, focusing on denouncing protectionism.⁷⁸ Meanwhile, De Tomaso participated actively in the commission on “dictatorship and democracy” – that is, the Russian revolution and the Bolshevik regime – and aligned himself with the more extreme anti-Soviet positions. De Tomaso made his international allegiances clear when he published a series of interviews he did with reformist leaders, like Eduard Bernstein and Alexander Kerensky.⁷⁹

But the party leadership had not yet weathered the storm. In 1920–1921, a new serious internal crisis emerged, in a context of growing sympathy for the Russian Revolution and disaffection with the reformist leaders of the Bern International, both inside and outside the party. The critics, known as terceristas, demanded that the party join the Third International. One key figure among them was senator Enrique del Valle Iberlucea (1877–1921), who had defended the party leadership’s positions during the 1917 crisis but subsequently took up the cause of the Russian revolutionaries. The internal atmosphere was tense and radicalized, with a profusion of conferences on the “Russian question” where even the leadership had to convey some sympathy for the Soviet regime. At the end of June, for example, Enrique Dickmann (1874–1955), himself born in Riga, spoke of “Lenin the Great” and referred to Trotsky as the “wonderful organiser of the most national army Russia has ever had”, but argued that the “Russian experiment” needed to be studied carefully and could not simply be transplanted to other countries. Dickmann did not hide his anxiety when warning that many socialist centres were more interested “in what is happening in the soviet of Vladivostok than in the City Council of Buenos Aires”.⁸⁰

The PS leadership and the parliamentary group proceeded with caution. In late 1920, they presented a “Programme for International Socialist Action”, written by Justo, which broke with the Second International but rejected integration into the Comintern. The text reveals a quest for autonomy: starting with a critical appraisal of European socialists, Justo suggested that Argentina should have its own, even leading, voice in the concert of world socialism. He argued that the Second International had paid too little attention to economic issues, thus deepening the ideas he had presented in Bern, though now with a more critical tone: “Instead of fostering the rapprochement and mutual understanding of peoples through trade and the reciprocal provision of services”, he argued, “the International neglected that material and measurable aspect of internationalism, and […] got distracted with resounding declarations against militarism and war, repeated ineffectively, and sometimes without conviction, until war finally broke out”. Justo also criticized the Comintern’s twenty-one conditions, noting that they too said nothing about “economic issues”.⁸¹

The crisis came to a resolution in 1921 at the PS’s fourth extraordinary congress, held in the city of Bahía Blanca, more than 600 kilometres south of Buenos Aires. The leadership proposed breaking with the Second International, approving the “Programme for action”, and sending a “warm greeting” to the Russian Revolution. The opposition, meanwhile, called for revolutionary propaganda, a break with the Second International, and affiliation with the Comintern. The break with the Second International was approved by a large majority, while the “Programme for action” was adopted and affiliation with the Comintern rejected by a narrow margin. After their defeat, numerous terceristas left the PS and joined the Communist Party. Others remained in the PS, including Del Valle, who died shortly afterwards, having been expelled from the Senate for his revolutionary positions at the Bahía Blanca congress. The outcome marked the last major split on the left of the PS in these early decades of the twentieth century and cemented its reformist and gradualist profile in the years to come, as well as its renewed affiliation with Western European social democracy.

In sum, global events played a decisive role in the history of Argentine socialism in the period 1914–1921, which was marked by debates and tensions very similar to those affecting other socialist parties around the world. Yet, these were not abstract debates about universal principles but concrete struggles over which European model to follow and, crucially, which international community to belong to. The PS sought to intervene as a leading player in the reconstruction of a social democratic International, yet the tensions caused by the sympathy the Bolsheviks aroused among a significant portion of the party’s rank and file led to a temporary distancing from the various organizational perspectives emerging globally. The crucible of war and revolution ultimately forged a more ideologically coherent, albeit smaller, PS. By purging its revolutionary factions, the leadership resolved the internal tensions that had plagued it for years. This meant remaining firmly aligned with European social democrats who were themselves becoming more integrated into their nation states and colonial systems.

Argentine Social Democracy in the Labour and Socialist International

The PS’s engagement with the Labour and Socialist International (LSI) from 1923 onward marks the final stage in its evolving internationalism. This section examines the party’s mature and often instrumental relationship with the LSI, a connection guided less by ideological deference than by the strategic pursuit of domestic political goals. This instrumentalism was particularly evident in two areas: the party’s successful campaign to deny international recognition to a rival splinter party, and its selective approach to LSI policy debates, which were consistently filtered through the prism of local political struggles and the leadership’s conservative economic principles.

After a few years of greater political demarcation with the communists following the 1921 crisis, the PS re-established its organic connection with the reformist leadership of European social democracy. Following the reunification of German socialism in 1922, most of anti-Soviet Western socialist parties coalesced into the LSI, which held its founding congress in Hamburg in 1923.⁸² Initially reluctant, the PS eventually joined after a year of cautious negotiations documented in an intricate exchange of correspondence.⁸³

For the LSI, the Argentine party was by no means a minor addition. Reflecting its substantial membership and union base, the PS was initially granted three votes at LSI congresses, a number that increased to four in 1925. This was certainly modest compared to the thirty votes of the British or German parties, but comparable to the socialism of Spain or Norway, and four times that of Greece or Portugal. To finance the congresses, the LSI statutes stipulated a fee for each delegate with three differentiated rates based on the economic condition of each country: the PS was placed in the highest category alongside the parties from Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States, among others.⁸⁴ In a context of increasing competition with the Comintern, the LSI used the PS’s incorporation to avoid the image of an exclusively European organization – by late 1924, the only affiliated parties from non-European countries came from Argentina and the United States – and to appeal to workers’ parties worldwide to join.⁸⁵ With nineteen deputies and two senators, the PS was a well-established organization, the only representative from Latin America in the International, and one which also claimed to have close relations with its smaller counterparts in Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay.

On the domestic front, the PS leadership was keen to highlight its LSI involvement, using its global connections to enhance the party’s prestige. Yet, this was a calculated engagement. The LSI’s lax organizational structure raised questions about its effectiveness, prompting the PS to maintain a somewhat distant relationship in its early years of membership.⁸⁶ This strategic caution was compounded by a fundamental shift in the party’s own political landscape. By the mid-1920s, the working class the PS sought to represent was far more nationalized and integrated than the immigrant-heavy proletariat of the early twentieth century. This demographic transformation – from a proletariat of disenfranchised foreigners to one composed increasingly of their native-born, voting children – altered the party’s priorities. Its central task was no longer to convince immigrants to naturalize, but to compete for the allegiance of a new generation of Argentine-born workers.

The PS appointed Eugenio Etchegoin, a relatively unknown party figure living in Paris, as its delegate for the LSI’s executive committee and for the 1925 congress. Such a detached stance, however, became untenable when the PS was plunged into a new and serious internal crisis. Indeed, when the next congress of the LSI met in Brussels, in 1928, the PS was in dire straits. Not only because of the death of Justo, its veteran and undisputed leader, in January 1928, but also because of the challenge posed by the Partido Socialista Independiente (PSI), a very serious split of the party in 1927. Led by Antonio de Tomaso, the PSI was dominated by young professionals and intellectuals that questioned the hesitancy of the PS to participate in government. The PSI kept ten national deputies out of the existing socialist group of nineteen and outperformed the PS in the elections of 1928.⁸⁷

In this context, the LSI congress became a central arena for both organizations. The PSI hurried to claim its place in the International and sent a delegate; if admitted, it could deliver a fatal blow to the old party.⁸⁸ The PS lost no time and communicated extensively with the LSI secretariat, attempting to minimize the consequences of the split.⁸⁹ The international executive appointed a special committee to address the PSI’s request. A token of the seriousness of the situation is that the PS, which had not previously participated in LSI meetings with top leaders – nor would it do so later – sent Mario Bravo (1882–1944), one of its leading figures. A review of the special committee discussions – reported by La Vanguardia to have lasted three and a half hours – reveals that the PS’s success was not guaranteed in advance. Eventually, the LSI did not take any permanent decision and requested its president, Émile Vandervelde, who would soon travel to Argentina, to prepare a report.⁹⁰

The PS’s mobilization of LSI authority against the PSI revealed how international recognition had become a crucial resource in domestic factional competition. Control over the party’s international identity could determine its survival in national politics. With a decision pending, the PS leadership made a notable effort to strengthen ties with the LSI. This included sending party materials to other members, inviting reciprocal exchanges, and making various extraordinary financial contributions, including one of 1000 francs to help purchase the headquarters of the French Socialist Party (SFIO).⁹¹ Since Etchegoin was now a supporter of the PSI, the PS appointed Bernardo Delom (1884–1956) as a new delegate to the executive, and he did not miss any of the meetings between 1929 and 1931.⁹² It was only in 1932 that the LSI finally decided to reject the PSI’s request for incorporation.⁹³

Although the main reason to engage with the LSI was to settle its local crisis, the PS leadership also followed transnational debates about social and economic policy. Economic crisis, mass unemployment, and the threat of war dominated the 1931 Vienna congress of the LSI, with resolutions advocating unemployment insurance, a forty-hour workweek, and increased state spending to stimulate public works.⁹⁴ The idea was that, in times of crisis, state expenditures should not be reduced but maximized, stimulating public works.⁹⁵ In practice, however, each party was free to develop its own policies and the PS’s approach was among the most conservative and less prone to state intervention: it proposed a controversial “solidarity tax”, consisting of a one per cent deduction from workers’ wages for school construction, and promoted public works to combat unemployment, but maintaining a balanced budget.⁹⁶ While La Vanguardia consistently reported on the global development of unemployment insurance, there was a notable absence of articles considering its application in Argentina.⁹⁷

The PS also relied on its international affiliation to sharpen critiques of the local dictatorship of José F. Uriburu (1930–1932) and to justify its alliance policies. La Vanguardia published an extensive article quoting Vandervelde, denouncing nationalism and fascism as responsible for the crisis and calling for a commitment to defending freedoms, pacifism, and disarmament.⁹⁸ At the time, the PS was preparing itself to abandon a long-standing policy of autonomy to join an alliance with a “bourgeois party”, the Partido Demócrata Progresista (PDP). In this context, Revista Socialista published an article praising Otto Bauer’s speech at the LSI congress, which advocated coalition politics with “bourgeois” parties to defend workers’ interests.

In 1933, after Hitler’s rise, the LSI convened a conference to reevaluate its approach to fascism. Argentine delegates participated alongside over twenty nations.⁹⁹ Adler, the conference secretary, had called to avoid extreme solutions: “Let us defend democracy in democratic countries and use revolutionary means where democracy has succumbed.” ¹⁰⁰ The problem was that the political situation in various countries was not always clearly defined. Was Argentina a democratic country under the repressive regime of Agustín P. Justo (1932–1938), characterized by a ban on candidates from the major party Unión Cívica Radical, electoral fraud, state, and paramilitary repression, but also remarkable growth of socialist representation in Parliament?¹⁰¹ Depending on the accepted characterization, one or another tactic proposed by the LSI was deemed appropriate. The apparent electoral success masked a deeper problem: the PS’s parliamentary growth depended on the UCR’s forced abstention and the regime’s fraudulent practices. When the UCR ended its abstentionist policy in 1935, socialist electoral influence was immediately curtailed. The PS had thus become dependent on an authoritarian, fraudulent regime for its political space, further divorcing it from the popular classes it claimed to represent.

These tensions split the PS between supporting a flawed regime and leftist factions advocating a revolutionary strategy. Cases like that of the PSOE, which abandoned its traditional reformist tactics for a revolutionary stance, were closely followed by the PS’s left wing.¹⁰² Leftist proposals were defeated at the 1934 national congress, prompting some militants to join the Communist Party. At the 1936 national congress, a renewed left opposition managed to impose the characterization of Justo’s regime as a dictatorship and the line of forming a popular front.¹⁰³ But the leadership avoided implementing the resolution, which ultimately led to another rupture, that of the Partido Socialista Obrero (PSO), with a revolutionary and anti-imperialist profile.¹⁰⁴ The expulsion of yet another leftist faction advocating anti-imperialism highlighted the PS leadership’s unwillingness to break with its liberal–internationalist economic framework, even as this position became increasingly untenable.

The tension between the party’s Eurocentric assumptions and the rising tide of economic nationalism would find another expression in debates over economic policy. The resolutions of the LSI conference announced, in economic terms, the end of the liberal era and considered that new forms of state-controlled economy could serve as a transition to socialism if power was in the hands of the people. This perspective influenced the Argentine planistas (planners) current led by party theorist Rómulo Bogliolo (1894–1969), editor of the Revista Socialista, against the party leadership that clung to the defence of free trade.¹⁰⁵ After many years of discussions, the planistas would only prevail towards the end of the 1930s. Their delayed victory represented a belated acknowledgment that economic nationalism could no longer be ignored, yet it came too late and remained constrained by the party’s fundamental framework.

As with other socialist parties, the PS’s interest in the LSI, especially after the rise of Nazism, gradually declined without disappearing. By the late 1930s, the LSI was significantly weakened and had lost importance as a frame of reference. Nevertheless, the PS did not neglect its membership and continued paying its dues and sending reports.¹⁰⁶ The interest remained reciprocal: the LSI noted the articles deemed relevant on international socialism published in the PS’s newspaper.¹⁰⁷

Ultimately, the PS’s relationship with the LSI in the interwar years reveals a party confident in its organizational capacity but trapped within an increasingly obsolete ideological framework. In contrast to its early years in the Second International, its affiliation had transformed from a source of ideological guidance into a strategic resource, deployed to manage internal crises and legitimize its domestic policies. Yet, this instrumentalism could not resolve the fundamental contradiction: the PS remained committed to a form of internationalism that tied Argentina’s path to socialism to European models, European capital, and European civilization precisely when economic nationalism and anti-imperialism were gaining popular resonance. The gradual weakening and eventual collapse of the LSI with the outbreak of World War II thus coincided not only with the PS’s entrenchment in the Argentine political system, but with the exhaustion of its political project.

Conclusion

Between 1889 and 1940, the “international question”, as it was usually called, remained central for Argentine socialists, and the party maintained continuous relations with the main international social democratic organizations. The PS viewed itself as part of a global movement, and its political actions were influenced by this conception, resulting in the development of links and dialogues that are an integral part of the party’s history. The PS increasingly acted within national frameworks and integrated into Argentine political regimes, while connections with parties from other regions and with transnational organizations remained an important aspect of its political activity. The available sources examined in this article, from party newspapers to official correspondence, primarily reflect the perspective of the party’s leadership, but this top-down focus is essential for understanding how the PS constructed and projected its official identity on the national and international stage. Tracing how these elite-level debates were received by the rank-and-file remains an important challenge for future research.

The PS’s trajectory illustrates dynamics that cannot be captured by simply framing its history as a vacillation between internationalism and nationalism, or as a choice between tactical instrumentalization and genuine cosmopolitan commitment. Rather, the evidence presented in this article points towards a more specific pattern: the PS participated in what was fundamentally a white, European socialist community, an “inter-nationalist” project that defined itself partly through the exclusion of colonized and non-white peoples. Geographically and numerically, the PS occupied a peripheral position within this transnational project, but well within its cultural, ideological, and racialized boundaries. We have called this pattern “peripheral inter-nationalism” to capture both the PS’s membership in a Eurocentric socialist community and its distinct challenge of forging a unified working class while competing to define an emerging nation.

During the years of the Second International, the relationship between Argentine socialism and its European counterparts showed two complementary trends. On one hand, it became increasingly consolidated and organic. What had initially been a highly unilateral relationship evolved into full membership, with the PS participating in the ISB, deploying international campaigns, and presenting proposals at international congresses. Yet, this integration came at a cost: maintaining respectability within the white, European socialist community meant marginalizing alternative visions. On the other hand, Argentine socialism developed increasing autonomy and a distinct political identity, asserting a “healthy patriotism” by the 1910s. This was not seen as incompatible with closer collaboration with the International; rather, the PS saw itself as mature enough to play a leading role in transnational debates.

Between 1914 and 1923, the “international question” played a key role in multiple crises and splits. The PS characterized the war as resulting from archaic political structures and protectionist economics, with free trade advocacy becoming almost obsessive. This interpretation allowed the leadership to lean toward the Allied side, framing the conflict as democratic modernity versus German militarism. The 1917 split with internationalists, followed by the 1921 defeat of the terceristas, cemented the PS’s reformist profile and its renewed affiliation with Western European social democracy. By purging its revolutionary factions, the PS chose to remain affiliated with the anti-communist, parliamentarian socialist tradition, a position that would increasingly prove at odds with economic nationalism and anti-imperialism gaining resonance in Argentina.

Even after 1923, when the PS became even more “nationalized”, it remained deeply concerned about its international affiliation. The party joined the LSI in 1924 and relied heavily on this connection during the 1927–1928 crisis with the PSI. The relationship had an instrumental component, yet the PS continued engaging with debates about the economic and political crises of the 1930s. The belated victory of the planistas at decade’s end represented acknowledgment that economic nationalism could no longer be ignored, yet it came too late.

Mutual interest between the LSI and the PS remained until the outbreak of World War II, when the International ceased to function. Soon afterwards, the PS’s response to Peronism would seal its fate. Rather than attempting to understand why workers rallied to a movement combining social reform, economic nationalism, and anti-imperialism, the party interpreted Peronism as “totalitarianism” and aligned itself with the oligarchy and military. In the 1946 elections, US ambassador Spruille Braden publicly supported the Unión Democrática coalition that included the PS, allowing Perón to frame the choice as “Braden or Perón”, imperialism or nation. The PS found itself on the side of foreign intervention against a nationalist movement. After Perón’s 1955 overthrow by a military coup, socialists enthusiastically participated in the military’s violent “repossession” of trade unions. When the party finally split in 1958, it fragmented precisely over the question its Eurocentric framework had rendered incomprehensible: how to relate to nationalist, anti-imperialist movements with working-class bases. Argentine socialism’s trajectory thus illustrates not merely the limits of peripheral inter-nationalism, but its dramatic political consequences when European-derived frameworks prevent a party from grasping the challenge of popular bourgeois-led nationalism in a post-colonial world.