Javier Miley goes out to imitate to the left and to make use of a practice that socialists and other similar ideological currents have used to give strength to their discourse, as well as to help them come to power and stay in government. From the Parisian league of 1834 to the San Pablo Forum and the Puebla Group of the 21st century, leftist activists have fostered internationalist political synergy.
The right or the parties with liberal ideas have not achieved a successful or lasting articulation as the left has, although some organizations survive, such as the Liberal Internationalbut the adhesion of parties has been limited and its diffusion is scarce. Left-wing parties dilute differences and privilege the idea that unity is strength, while those from other currents do not want to “mix” with others who do not think exactly the same as them and accept a “label” that does not reflect their identity as they conceive it. They need to make a match perfect.
The San Pablo Forum included socialist, social democratic, and communist partiesanti-democratic, Christian-democratic and others, who prioritized the articulation between more or less similar actors, regardless of nuances or deep divergences: the key was to unite. But now something new is coming.
Expand the libertarian ideal, fight socialism, confront culture woke and cooperating with North American President Donald Trump in planting right-wing flags in several countries seems to be the goal of the president of Argentina to promote an “international bloc.” History shows that associations of this nature have had positive results in many cases, although not as long-lasting as their promoters intended.
In facts, history lives a kind of courses and appealswith waves that conspire against a linear trend, which in reality becomes cyclical, with swings on both sides. The fact is that political internationalization gave achievements in the near past, fundamentally to provoke a wave of leftist governments in South America, despite the implosion of the USSR in 1991 and the collapse of the bloc known as “real socialism.” The roots are in 1989.
Lula da Silva felt that his political struggle was over and that Brazil was not going to have never a left-wing government; He had suffered defeat against the liberal Fernando Collor de Mello, and simultaneously socialism was collapsing in the world. In 1989, after his electoral defeat, the Berlin Wall fell. Lula went to Cuba to recover; I felt like everything was over. Fidel Castro invited him to talk and raise his spirits: he told him that plans had to be rethought and that this could not be done alone, but with all the left-wing parties in Latin America. It pushed him to hold a forum with them in Brazil and have a common plan in the region. Lula did it in July 1990, in São Paulo: the Meeting of Left-Wing Political Parties and Organizations of Latin America and the Caribbean.
So The San Pablo Forum was born, which was successful in electoral results of parties of the left in the region, and in some way he was the promoter of what was known as “the progressive wave” of governments in almost all the countries of South America. Since 1998, the continent has turned to the left with governments in Venezuela (Hugo Chávez), Argentina (Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández), Brazil (Lula da Silva, 2003-2011, and Dilma Rousseff), Bolivia (Evo Morales), Ecuador (Rafael Correa), Chile (Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet), Uruguay (Tabaré Vázquez and José Mujica) and even so ephemeral in Paraguay (Fernando Lugo). Some of these governments were discredited due to lack of democracy (Venezuela) or excessive corruption (Brazil, Ecuador), so that wave faded and liberal governments returned.
It was then that the Mexican left proposed a “new international” because the San Pablo Forum was “burned”although they did not explain it that way. In July 2019, at the “ProgresivaMente” meeting, the Puebla Group was born, and Latin America experienced a new wave of the left in Mexico (Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Claudia Sheinbaum), Argentina (Alberto and Cristina Fernández), Bolivia (Luis Arce), Chile (Gabriel Boric) and Colombia (Gustavo Petro).
The left came with long experience in the internationalization of political ties. In 1834, German workers and exiled intellectuals took refuge in Paris to spread their ideas in pamphlets and thus the League of the Outlaws was born with the objective “of social and political equality, freedom, civic virtues and popular unity.” Two years later, groups of Germans joined forces in Switzerland, Great Britain and even in German states to found the “League of the Righteous” with the slogan: “All men are brothers.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels formed a group in 1846 in Brussels with “the revolutionary communists of the world” that at the 1847 congress became the League of Communists, which sought to expand to other countries, even with emigrants in New York.
Marx and Engels published in 1848 he communist manifestoand the new league changed its motto to the slogan: “Proletarians of all countries unite!”. In its statutes it indicated “the goal of freeing man from slavery, through the diffusion of the community of goods and its practical realization as quickly as possible.” In 1864, in London, with English trade unionists, French and Italian anarchists and socialists, the International Workers’ Association (IWA) or First International was born, whose statutes established “a center of cooperation and communication between workers from different countries.”. That international held congresses in Switzerland (1866-7), Belgium (1867-8), Switzerland (1869), the United Kingdom (1871), the Netherlands (1872), and New York (1872), and was dissolved in Philadelphia in 1876.
In 1872, the AIT had suffered a split between Marxists and anarcho-collectivists. (Mikhail Bakunin), those who rejected the electoral route to come to power, and they founded in Saint-Imier (Switzerland): “The International of St. Imier”. In 1889, socialist and labor parties founded a Second International in Paris, which promoted the declaration of May 1 as International Workers’ Day. The Russian Revolution of 1917 generated internal differences and in 1920 the Union of Socialist Parties for International Action (Upsai) emerged, which three years later merged with the Second International into the Workers and Socialist International (1923).
The communist triumph in Moscow led to the creation in 1919 of The International Communist, known as the Third International, promoted by the Bolshevik leader Lenin. Leon Trotsky, another leader of the Revolution, disagreed with the Soviet bureaucracy and Stalin and together with several followers created the Fourth International. With the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro promoted a “tricontinental” association in 1966: the Solidarity Organization of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America, created in the famous Olas (Latin American Solidarity Organization). Cuba supported guerrillas throughout the continent, which founded the Revolutionary Coordination Board (JCR) in 1968 with groups from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Bolivia, and as is known, they ended badly.
In recent years, the Bolivarian Alternative (ALBA) emerged in 2004, philchavista, or the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), in 2008, with the Kirchners, Correa, Lula and others, who also promoted a kind of “OAS without the United States”, in the modest and ineffective Community of Latin American and Caribbean States” (Celac), since 2010. Another community of governments is that of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) as an antagonist of the US. There are many examples of society of parties or countries by political or ideological affinity, among which there are no cases of liberal or right-wing successes. How will Milei and his potential partners fare in a new society?
It is not clear what the common banner isbecause free trade and market freedom are not in tune with Trump, who boasts of placing high taxes on imports and who threatens to cap credit rates for individuals. But there is a factor that unites them and that is the rejection and contempt for left-wing parties. Furthermore, they reflect the fatigue of a large part of public opinion with the simplistic discourse of a “progressivism” scripted with fillers, which insists on a partial vision of the past and the present. There is, however, a risk for society in the fact that this contempt for a political current turns into contempt for democracy, and there is a risk for the promoters of the bloc that everything is limited to specific leaders and does not have greater projection.
Now an international match appears of a new, heterogeneous and heterodox right that, for the moment, is a tailored suit for Javier Milei. And it is not clear if the rest will want to court the Argentine president.
