Paper short abstract:

The objective of this paper is to investigate the use of public opposition movements and discourses in the construction and legitimisation of post-authoritarian and post-neoliberal national identities.

Paper long abstract:

The first decade of the twenty-first century saw what has been called a 'pink tide' sweep across South America. In the wake of the collapse of the neoliberal consensus, a number of nation-building projects explicitly mobilised a public heritage of anti-imperialist activism to legitimise their centre-left policies and construct a concomitant national identity. This paper investigates this process, paying particular attention to how certain opposition tropes have been domesticated while others have been marginalised.

Using the example of Argentina, it will discuss the way president Nestor Kirchner embraced the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, one of the most recognisable symbols of resistance to the 1976-83 dictatorship, and also one of the sources of the strongest critiques of the neoliberal policies of both the dictatorship and subsequent democratic governments. The Kirchner government adopted the symbolic Madres in order to promote a national political identity based on a rejection of economic imperialism in word, without necessarily eliminating its structures in deed.

The paper will go beyond the well-explored topic of the memorialisation of authoritarian-era crimes in the construction of a post-authoritarian national identity and instead look at the shifts that have occurred in the use of this past in the legitimisation of the present. While focused on the case of Argentina and its particular trajectory through dictatorship, democracy and neoliberalism, the paper will also place the example within the context of the region-wide 'shift to the left' and will raise discussion points relevant to other national projects within this emerging tradition.