Nationalism and University Reform in Argentine during XX century. A look from its birth: Córdoba, 1918

Abstract

The article offers a historical reconstruction of the relationship between nationalism and university reformism focusing two aspects: on the one hand, the reformist cultural universe, and on the other, the positions and practices assumed by peronism and nationalist political spaces. With this aim we analyze the positions of “popular nationalism”, Catholic nationalism, historical peronism and various expressions of the right-wing such as those expressed in the reviews El Caudillo de la Tercera Posición, Leña and Marchar. The article hypothesis is that nationalism built its anti-reformist position in four registers that remain as a common substratum: the defense of a tradition that exalted the Church and the Army as the founders of the Homeland (traditionalist key); the contrast between the middle sectors that had given birth to the University Reform and the masses (plebeian key); the anti-intellectualism (xenophobic key that was linked to the denunciation of the foreign); and the imperative to include universities in an organicist framework marked by the primacy of cohesion, called the “Organized Community” (peronist key). The common denominator that associated these four explanations was anti-liberalism, in the political-cultural sense of the expression.