CPS 5.2 Dieter Plehwe - Argentinien PDF

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Transnational discourse coalitions and

monetary policy: Argentina and the
limited powers of the ‘‘Washington
Consensus’’
a
Dieter Plehwe
a
Social Science Research Centre, Berlin, Germany
Available online: 21 Jun 2011
To cite this article: Dieter Plehwe (2011): Transnational discourse coalitions and monetary policy:
Argentina and the limited powers of the ‘‘Washington Consensus’’, Critical Policy Studies, 5:2,
127-148
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Critical Policy Studies
Vol. 5, No. 2, July 2011, 127–148
Transnational discourse coalitions and monetary policy: Argentina

and the limited powers of the ‘Washington Consensus’
Dieter Plehwe *
Downloaded by [University of Birmingham], [Ms Helen Hancock] at 01:30 19 September 2011
Social Science Research Centre, Berlin, Germany
Why, in the era of neoliberalism, Argentinean monetary policymakers rejected the kind
of flexible monetary exchange rates recommended by the ‘Washington Consensus’
remains a puzzle. The literature has mainly contrasted external and internal factors
of influence and constraints to explain the country’s peculiar road to neoliberalism. In
this paper, discourse coalition theory is developed further to more fully capture the
transnational configuration of the transnational discourse coalition behind the policy
mix chosen under President Menem. In the course of deconstructing the Washington
Consensus alliance and reconstructing the particular agents and agencies behind the
currency board, apparently contradictory positions turn out to constitute a specific
combination of neoliberal agents and agencies that are firmly embedded in the larger
universe of the hegemonic discourse coalition of the Washington Consensus era, which
has to be considered more heterogeneous than has been recognized by most observers.
Keywords: neoliberalism; discourse coalition; currency board; Washington
Consensus; think tank; expert network
1. Argentina’s exceptional road to neoliberalism

Argentina embraced neoliberal reforms in a peculiar way in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Many of the policy recommendations spelled out in the so called ‘Washington Consensus’
(WC) were followed, but the country did not heed the recommendation to adhere to a
regime of flexible exchange rates. Relying instead on a currency board, in 1991 Argentina’s
government pegged the peso to the US dollar and established the US dollar as legal tender
in order to permanently control inflation and severe debt/credit problems (Viguera 2000).
Fixing the exchange rate as the decisive means of monetary stability was then celebrated
as the centerpiece of economic reforms by the Menem government (Birle 1995, pp. 270f.).
Just a few years after the beginning of full convertibility and fixed exchange rates,
the resulting overvaluation of Argentina’s currency contributed to a massive erosion of
Argentina’s domestic industry and to continuously high levels of unemployment and
poverty. Monetary rigidity eventually aggravated and prolonged the deep recession of
1999, which triggered the financial collapse of 2001 (Boris and Tittor 2006). Monetary
policy reform in Argentina during the last decade of the twentieth century was, as a
result, consecutively considered the greatest success and an abysmal failure. Just 10 years
after the introduction of the currency board, the economic miracle of the early years of
the Menem presidency had become all but a faint memory. After a run on the banks in
*Email: plehwe@wzb.eu
ISSN 1946-0171 print/ISSN 1946-018X online

© 2011 Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham
DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2011.576521
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128 D. Plehwe
2001, and amidst widespread rioting across the country, the 1:1 peso–dollar exchange rate
parity was abandoned, and the currency board was finally dissolved in 2002, under newly
elected President Eduardo Duhalde. With the return to flexible exchange rates, the peso
quickly depreciated. A rapid loss of 75% of its value displayed the extent of the previous
overvaluation of the Argentine currency (O’Connell 2005, pp. 295f.).
Why and how Argentina came to rely on a currency board solution to its monetary
problems, in spite of the objections of most policy experts, remains puzzling. Argentina
was the only country in Latin America that introduced a currency board. Elsewhere,
only Hong Kong and a few states in Eastern Europe choose to revive this colonial pol-
icy institution (Schwartz 1992, 1993). Although Argentina wholeheartedly embraced the
reforms prescribed by the so called ‘Washington Consensus’ (Williamson 1990, 2004),
the country took exception to the recommendation to employ a flexible exchange rate
regime. The political development of Argentina in the early 1990s is not easy to explain.
Scholars have described the course of events as a ‘miraculous’ turn in general (Pablo 1990,
p. 128), and observed ‘magic’ at work several times (Beltrán 2006, pp. 11, 23) because of
what are considered unlikely outcomes in terms of positions and coalitions among local
actors.
While prevailing models of policy analysis employed to explain (radical) change are
inclined to stress either the background conditions (external shock like hyperinflation),
interest groups or advocacy coalitions in the domestic sphere, and possibly external con-
straints when explaining particular policy choices in developing countries, I hold that the
decisions made in Argentina remain a puzzle that cannot be solved unless the transnational
dimensions of discourse coalitions involved in the national formation of political power in
general and in specific decision-making processes are duly considered. The post-positivist
discourse coalition approach (Fischer 2003, pp. 94f.) needs to be further developed to this
end, with a particular focus on think tank and expert networks in order to sufficiently con-
textualize both general orientations and specific political choices like the currency board
in the era of neoliberal hegemonic constellations (Plehwe et al. 2006).
1.1. Limited understanding: external versus domestic causes

Standard accounts of the decisions of the Argentinean government with regard to economic
policy tend to offer only partial explanations of this particular puzzle, focusing on either
internal or external factors. Particularly after the crisis in 2001, many analysts have on the
one hand blamed external factors for Argentina’s state bankruptcy in 2001. In line with
structural perspectives of the capitalist world market emphasized by world system theory,
Argentina at this point in time has once again been considered a prominent victim of exter-
nal constraints and policy recipes imposed by global financial institutions and the United
States. Almost regardless of the particular domestic circumstances (since they are basically
held not to matter much), the externally dictated policy agenda of the Washington–Wall
Street alliance is charged with responsibility for the colossal failure of Argentina amongst
others (Peet 2003, pp. 215f.).1 Since Argentina did not comply with the WC policy pre-
scription of flexible exchange rates, the agenda or rather agendas of Washington and Wall
Street seem to be in need of further examination and explanation.
Domestic factors, on the other hand, including the composition of local factions of
capital interests and the peculiarities of domestic political institutions, are emphasized by
experts on the country (Birle 1995). Because foreign multinational corporations and other
influential actors from abroad are observed as domestic actors only, methodological nation-
alism yields limited perspectives on the causes and mechanisms at work across borders.
Critical Policy Studies 129
This observation holds also for discourse sensitive presentations focusing on the individual
qualities of the ‘technopol’ Domingo Cavallo in the case of Corrales (1997) or on a small
group of domestic neoliberal think tanks in the case of Beltrán (2006).2 While Beltrán con-
vincingly rejected the idea of external imposition of neoliberal policies, his focus on three
think tanks remains incomplete as an account of local roots of neoliberalism, and fails to
recognize the linkages between domestic and foreign intellectuals, organizations and ideas.
His social construction of the priority of the local cannot sufficiently account for the rise of
general dimensions of the neoliberal discourse (the overarching storyline of the superiority
of markets) and the specific narrative of the primacy of monetary stability.
Although Ramirez (2007, 2010) has provided an excellent account of the transnational
dimensions of Washington Consensus politics in Brazil and Argentina, with a particular
focus on the role of a number of key think tanks, he suggests that local factors were respon-
sible for Argentina’s choice of a currency board. If the history of the earliest generation of
neoliberal think tanks in Argentina founded by Mont Pèlerin Society circles is duly con-
sidered, however, the foreign sources and forces involved in the agenda setting and design
of Argentina’s currency board can also be fully appreciated.
In order to dive deeper into the transnational dimensions of the domestic history of
Argentine neoliberalism in general, and to explain more precisely how Argentina came
to rely on a currency board in particular, a discourse coalition approach introduced to
advance policy studies will be discussed next (section two). Section three will reconstruct
the transnational formation of the neoliberal discourse coalition in Argentina before and
during the military dictatorship of 1976 and 1983, which also marked the transition from
modernization to globalization strategies in development politics. Tracing different roots of
neoliberalism in Argentina provides for a more complete picture of the confluence of local
and foreign participation, and sheds further light on the extent of local participation in the
transnational move towards the WC discourse coalition, which will be further explored in
section four. The years between 1983 and 1989 were used by neoliberal forces in Argentina
to develop a broader base in society. Section five examines the international history of the
currency board and provides the first clues about how it became a part of the local roster
of neoliberal policies in Argentina. In the concluding section we will reconsider the value
added by the transnational discourse coalition approach to studying policy outcomes and
point towards the need for future research to incorporate the role of transnational think
tank, research, consulting and advocacy networks.
2. New frontiers in discourse coalition research: transnational dimensions

The way forward proposed here for the study of domestic and international dimen-
sions pertinent to the rise of Washington Consensus politics and the peculiar choice
of a currency board in Argentina can be summed up as a relational (conflict theoret-
ical), interaction-oriented and organization-centered discourse coalition approach. The
actor-centered analysis of critical junctures and political entrepreneurship needs to be com-
plemented by an observation of the longer process of the constitution of discourse agencies
and the background dimensions of intellectual entrepreneurship. The resulting focus on the
origins and transformative capacities of the opposition against a dominant mainstream, in
our case neoliberalism, needs at the same time to be sensitive to the constraints of (inter-
national and national) historical and hegemonic constellations. Only in consideration of
the larger historical circumstances it is possible to adequately capture the role of actors on
the one hand and the agency dimensions beyond concrete individuals and their actions on
the other. Scholars have to account of the structural circumstances at the point of departure
130 D. Plehwe
(t0) of concrete actions undertaken to transform or reproduce the circumstances of action

leading to a similar or different configuration at t1. The total time span and the intervals
to be considered depend on the relevant process of discourse formation for the specific
issue to be explained. In order to explain the rise of the particular Argentinean neolib-
eral hegemonic constellations and the combination of policy choices, we need to combine
and interrelate the analysis of transnational and domestic processes that are needed to
ultimately explain the general confines of actor constellations and coalitions in broad
ways with a sufficiently detailed analysis of highly specific discourse coalitions’ capac-
ities to influence (monetary) policymaking in the WC era. This includes the capacity to
influence the devolution and transformation of previous structural dimensions and insti-
tutions (of import substitution and modernization) on the one hand, and the creation of
new institutional and structural dimensions (of free trade, finance-driven accumulation,
etc.) on the other. Organization-centered discourse coalition theory will serve to bridge the
gap between concrete actors and institutionalized agency on the one hand, and between
domestic and transnational domains on the other.
Early contributions to discourse coalition theory grew out of comparative research
in science history studies (Wagner 1986) and policy analysis (Hajer 1993) to address
the dynamics and limits of institutional change. Hajer’s understanding of agency went
far beyond Wagner’s original actor-centered approach. Discourse coalition theory has
subsequently been further developed to study institutional change and structural transfor-
mations beyond national confines, addressing the neoliberal transformation of varieties of
capitalism in Europe (Schmidt 2002, Bieling 2005), and deconstructing the Washington
Consensus (Kellermann 2006), for example.
Discourse coalitions are social forces acting jointly, though not necessarily in direct
interaction in pursuit of a common goal. They are considered capable of developing
transformative power with regard to institutional structures at certain points in time or
during certain periods in time that are otherwise characterized by path dependent repro-
duction. Change agency can be far reaching or limited depending on both the relative
strength of the coalition vis-à-vis opponents on the one hand, and the relative resilience
of the institutional configuration at large. Employing a discourse coalition framework
thus aims to widen traditional studies of advocacy coalitions and policy entrepreneur-
ship in order to address intellectual and institutional dimensions of policy innovations and
institutionalization (Fischer 2003).
While analyzing carefully and thereby emphasizing the role of ideas in the processes of
constitution and interpretation of interests in line with the social constructivist endeavor,
discourse coalition theory does not have to isolate ideas in order to treat ideational fac-
tors as an independent variable like some of the contributors to the constructivist debate
suggest (e.g. Béland and Cox 2011). Most authors who rely explicitly on a discourse coali-
tion framework combine versions of historical institutionalism or historical materialism
and social constructivism to stress historical and structural dimensions of the social con-
struction of knowledge (Jessop and Oosterlynck 2008). It is ‘paramount to emphasize that
social constructs do not “float” in the world; they can be tied to specific institutions and
actors’ says Hajer (1993, p. 46). People live ‘in a world which is real and a society which is
socially constructed but not just of talk’ say Wagner and Wittrock (1991, p. 354), although
the effort of linking (elements of) social constructs to specific institutions, organizations
and individual actors and the dialectical processes involved in ideational development can
still be considerably improved by way of paying closer attention to transnational relations
and supranational institutions in particular.
Hans-Jürgen Bieling (2005) was probably first to more systematically forge links
between a neo-Gramscian approach to international political economy and discourse
coalition theory. To this end the important analytic distinction of transnational histor-
ical blocs, hegemonic blocs, and political projects are related to a discourse coalition
framework. Transnational historical blocs encompass the whole range of structuring ele-
ments – material, discursive, identity building – of a specific historical mode of capitalist
development (e.g. the Fordist era, or the subsequent era of neoliberal hegemonic constella-
tions). Hegemonic blocs denote international and national power arrangements relying on
material compromises and the discursive generation of consent (e.g. welfare state or com-
petitiveness). Political projects are the crystallization of more specific societal interests and
discourses, which take the shape of programmatic language and political practices (Bieling
2005, pp. 180f.).
Whether or not individual political projects (say privatization of public services or pen-
sion systems) become hegemonic is not always easy to ascertain, and certainly requires
closer analysis. Hegemony in the sense of Gramsci requires a certain amount of integration
and consent of political opposition sufficient to avoid extraordinary struggles in society.
But Gramsci’s understanding should not be equated to social harmony and certainly does
not require a welfare state, for example, that did not exist at the time of his writing on the
subject matter (Deppe 2003). Combined and comprehensive programs like the late 1980s’
Washington Consensus agenda of policy priorities for different countries struggling with
foreign debt burdens in any case necessitate transnational efforts of cooperation among
a great many domestic, inter- and supranational institutions, corporate and civil society
organizations in order to secure sufficient support to become hegemonic, although the par-
allel or subsequent ‘translation’ into political projects at the national level can still differ
in significant ways (Campbell and Pedersen 2001). Many different individuals, groups and
organizations or institutions are involved in such a process of agenda setting and in sub-
sequent or parallel processes of policy formulation and execution eventually leading up to
institutional transformations. Such efforts cannot be meaningfully isolated from the rele-
vant societal circumstances at the time they occur. Political opportunities and options are
historically circumscribed by the configuration of the relevant transnational historical bloc,
and the power arrangements of the hegemonic constellations in particular polities. Concrete
actors and alliances can contribute to maintaining the relative stability of such dominant
societal relationships, or develop transformative capacities under particular circumstances.
If a policy or paradigm shifting discourse coalition can be observed, it thus is both a coali-
tion of concrete agents and a change agency beyond the reach of individual actors due
to the provision of institutionalized forms of trans-, inter- and supranational cooperation
(Bieling 2005, p. 183).
Vivien Schmidt (2002) draws attention to the important distinction between coordi-
nating discourse (between cooperating participants, typically elites) and communicative
discourses directed at general audiences. European multi-level network governance appears
to necessitate an extended need for coordinating discourse in the European policy area
system. In the process of financial market integration, for example, transnational and
supranational elite coordination preceded communicative discourses, which were typically
rolled out at the national level (Bieling 2005). If the multi-level EU system is complex
already due to formal governance arrangements, transnational economic policymaking in
the orbit of international financial institutions arguably will display their own range of com-
plexities due to possibly stronger informal relationships in addition to official multi-level
policy coordination. Organizational discourse coalition analysis (focusing on networks of
132 D. Plehwe
think tanks and experts, or professions, for example) is particularly useful to examine a
wide range of less formal relations between political actors on the one hand, and to bridge
the gulfs between structure, agency and concrete actors or actions on the other hand (Lukes
1974, Fischer 1993, Plehwe and Walpen 2006, Botzem and Plehwe 2009).
Focusing on the organizational dimensions of discourse coalitions takes the research
beyond individual authors and works in order to observe the rise or demise of dis-
courses or knowledge regimes across knowledge domains, discourse communities, and
policy issue areas. Organizational landscapes and infrastructures are important elements
of the material and discursive configuration at large. They are best considered to form a
dispositive that needs to be ascertained in order to adequately explain the contextual pre-
conditions and circumstances of specific policy choices and developments (Link 2005,
Bührmann and Schneider 2008).3 Focusing on the organizational networks furthermore
emphasizes the relevance of linkages and thereby helps to guard against artificial dis-
tinctions between private sector and civil society, for example, or between domestic and
transnational dimensions of political processes.
How, after all, did it happen that a very broad Washington Consensus discourse coali-
tion in favor of financial liberalization, export orientation and intensified globalization at
the end of the 1980s replaced the previous modernization (industrialization) coalition in
many countries? And how did the discourse and practice of fixed exchange rates at odds
with the WC recommendations come about in Argentina? To answer these questions both
the formation of key actors and key orientations at home and abroad need to be traced back
a long time before the actual decision making took place in the late 1980s.
3. Elite neoliberalism: early roots and military backing

Ramirez (2007, 2010) traces the local origins of Washington Consensus policies in
Argentina back to the late 1960s and 1970s when several think tanks were founded (see
below). A number of research projects conducted during the 1980s are detailed to under-
line the conjoined effort of local and foreign research institutes eventually supporting the
transnational discourse coalition, though Ramirez points to limits of the ‘Consensus’. In
line with his effort to trace domestic and foreign elements behind the rise of the WC dis-
course coalition rather than stylizing a consensus we can go further to capture another
important group of neoliberal think tanks in Argentina.
Long before the Washington Consensus, neoliberal organizations were formed in
Argentina. In 1957, for example, the Centro Estudios sobre la Libertad (CESL) was
founded by Argentinean businessmen and intellectuals in conjunction with neoliberal
scholars and activists from abroad. The first generation of Argentine neoliberals formed
a prominent group in the early history of the transnational Mont Pèlerin Society networks
around scholars like Friedrich August von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises (Walpen 2004).
Two years after the military had toppled Peron’s original government in 1955, the pres-
ident of the Argentine Chamber of Commerce, Alberto Benegas Lynch, established the
new think tank by forging close relations with the Foundation of Economic Education
(FEE) in Irvington on Hudson in New York. The FEE was the major libertarian insti-
tute in the United States sponsored by the conservative anti-New Deal business alliance
(Philipps-Fein 2009). CESL in Argentina became one of the centers of opposition against
the post-war development paradigms (Plehwe 2009).
There is limited information on the CESL think tank and the early history of orga-
nized neoliberals in Argentina. A few reports from visitors like Leonard Read (FEE)
or Margit Mises (Hornberger 1994, http://www.mises.org/etexts/ecopol.asp) show that
Benegas Lynch enjoyed close relations to the top leaders of the military government in
power. The importance of the local bastions of neoliberalism and their foreign sponsors
is captured by Alejandro Chafuen, presently (in 2010) heading the neoliberal umbrella
organization Atlas Economic Research Foundation:
A small group of Argentines have been carrying the FEE torch in Argentina. To all of them,
dead and alive, I owe part of my liberal vocation. I know that I will forget some, but let me list
Norberto Carca, Rodolfo Vinelli, Enrique Loncan, Enrique Polledo, Admiral Carlos Sánchez
Sanudo, and Meir Zylberberg . . . . (Chafuen n.d.)
Chafuen served as interpreter of his Austrian economics teacher at Grove City,4 Hans
Sennholz (another Mont Pèlerin Society member), in a series of private meetings in 1976,
which led to his acceptance into the rank of the Mont Pèlerin Society as youngest member
according to his own recollections. Here are his reflections on Argentina after the military
coup:
With support from the military and friendly segments of the civil society, Argentines were
able to prevent a Communist takeover of the country. The military, not without fault or sin,
provided some space to liberals who, from a different angle, shared their same determination
to stop left-wing terror. Professors at my Catholic University became ‘gentler’ and despite my
battles with Keynesians, I was able to graduate as planned. I even became a teaching assistant
and young professor. (Chafuen n.d.)
These friendly segments of civil society referred to had gained ground in Argentina’s
upper classes after the founding of the original CESL think tank, which organized lectures
and seminars inviting prominent neoliberals from abroad, published ‘close to 50 books and
issued 49 editions of a magazine which reaches 3,500 readers. CESL also has a scholarship
program’ (Goodman and Marotz-Baden 1990, p. 118). More than 20 scholarships were
provided for students to study (Austrian) economics in the United States.
The most impressive career of members of the original neoliberal circles apart from
Alejandro Chafuen’s calling as global network coordinator at the Atlas Foundation arguably
belongs to Alberto Benegas Lynch, Jr., the son of the founder of CESL. Benegas Lynch,
Jr. was the initiator of an Argentinean business school in 1977. This move was inspired
by a job he previously held at Guatemala’s Marroquin University (UFM), the first univer-
sity organized by a neoliberal alliance of businessmen and academics led by Manuel Ayau
(Ayau 1990). UFM became a key elite university in Guatemala with branches in neigh-
boring countries. Benegas Lynch, Jr. was one of several foreign instructors (Ayau 1992).5
Supported by Ayau, Benegas Lynch, Jr. successfully proposed to a ‘group of distinguished
Argentine businessmen’ the founding of a university ‘based on the Austrian’ tradition in
Argentina (Benegas Lynch, Jr. 1990, p. 125). The Graduate School in Economics and
Business Administration (ESEADE) is a ‘nonprofit private institution financed by 60
corporations, the Argentine Chamber of Commerce, the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange,
and the Argentine Society of Agriculture’ (Benegas Lynch, Jr. 1990, p. 125). Hayek
served as president of the academic advisory council that combined members of the
National Academies of Economic Sciences, Law, and Moral Sciences. ESEADE greatly
expanded the original clusters of Argentinean elites under the influence of neoliberal
thought.
In addition to the think tank and the university, several CESL members started the
Escuela de Educacion Economica y Filosofia de la Libertad (ESEDEC). To attract media
attention, the Circulo de la Libertad has been founded by a group also including CESL
134 D. Plehwe
members in 1975 (Goodman and Marotz-Baden 1990, p. 118). Another key person of the
original group of neoliberals in Buenos Aires, the engineer Alvaro Alsogaray, founded the
Instituto de Economica Social de Mercado in 1964 (Ramirez 2007, p. 231). The name
chosen by Alsogaray cites the model promoted by German Mont Pèlerin Society members
Ludwig Erhard and Alfred Müller-Armack (Ptak 2009).
Much like elsewhere, the ideas inserted into local elite and public opinion circuits by
local and foreign members of the neoliberal discourse community spread beyond the origi-
nal groups promoting them in Argentina. For example, the rhetoric of the superiority of free
markets gained credit over time challenging the import substitution model. Contradictions
and problems of import substitution of course provided ample opportunities for intellectual
entrepreneurs from the new right in Argentina and elsewhere. But in order for neolib-
eral interpretations of the problems of post-war development to obtain authoritative status,
competing interpretations advanced from the dominant institutions and from left wing cri-
tiques of the modernization strategies pursued had to be thoroughly defeated. In the case
of Argentina – much like in Chile – military repression of the left played an important role
in the consolidation of neoliberalism. Still before the military coup, a number of additional
think tanks were founded that would play and important role in the rise of Argentinean
military neoliberalism together with the Mont Pèlerin affiliated organizations.
Fundación de Investigaciones Empresarias Latinoamericanas (FIEL) was established
in 1964 by the manufacturing association UIA, the agricultural Sociedad Rural Argentina
(SRA), Bolsa de Comercio de Buenos Aires and the Cámera Argentina de Comercio. Later
on two banking associations completed a group picture in which all of the different wings
of the Argentinean high bourgeoisie were present. According to Ramirez (2010, p. 193),
the representativeness and orthodoxy of FIEL has been further strengthened by the backing
obtained from other corporate groups, namely the Movimiento Industrial Argentino (MIA)
and the Consejo Empresario Argentino (CEA). FIEL’s constituency can be described as
internationally competitive clusters of Argentina’s financial and corporate world. It is pos-
sibly even more interesting to note that more than half the funding for one of the key think
tank promoting orthodox economic liberalism came from foreign corporations and one
American foundation (Ramirez 2007, p. 204).
Five years after FIEL, the Comisión de Estudios Económicos y Sociales (CEES) was
founded by the local UIA affiliate Asociación de Industriales de Córdoba, (Dezalay and
Garth 2002, p. 120). CEES was the predecessor of Fundación Mediterránea, which was
jointly founded with the Instituto de Estudios de la Economia Latinoamericana in 1977
(IEERAL, renamed 1996 in IERAL). The original initiative came from two immigrant
businessmen (Corrales 1997, p. 56). The foundation subsequently managed to garner sup-
port from 500 businesses and expanded across the country to become one of the most
important research organizations.6 Upon his return from Harvard Domingo Cavallo led the
organization.
In his discussion of the intellectual influences driving IEERAL N’Haux (1993,
pp. 159–163) singles out Hayek and Buchanan’s influence on Cavallo during his studies
with supply side economist and Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) member Martin Feldstein in
Harvard, though Cavallo’s PhD thesis was a critique of monetarism. Likewise, Cavallo’s
colleague Aldo Dadone wrote a PhD thesis in Chicago that ran counter to neoliberal cri-
tiques of subsidies for regional industrial development (N’Haux 1993, pp. 157–159). If
Cavallo and friends came to share key elements of the neoliberal discourse coalition, early
Cordoba neoliberalism entailed a strong element of regional developmentalism, which is
crucial to understand Argentina’s somewhat uneasy neoliberal discourse coalition of the
late 1970s. The key economic interest group behind the Cordoba foundation was UIA’s
Movimiento Industrial Nacional (MIN), for example, which operated in certain distance
to the large corporate faction of Movimiento Industrial Argentino (MIA) backing FIEL in
Buenos Aires (Ramirez 2010, p. 94).
The different wings of neoliberalism – Buenos Aires and Cordoba –combined a range
of quite different interests and orientations (capital versus province, centralization versus
federalism, large corporate and financial interests versus small and medium companies,
priority of financial interests versus export oriented regional development etc.), which
constituted persisting tensions lasting throughout the military years and beyond, though
the competing groups converged on a neoliberal framework (N’Haux 1993, Birle 1995,
Ramirez 2000).
Contrary to those who claim that Argentina turned to neoliberalism under Menem and
Cavallo, much of the neoliberal agenda was realized in the late 1970s by economics minis-
ter Martinez de Hoz with the support of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Schvarzer
1986, p. 31) and corporate alliances like the Council for Latin America, which was backed
by large American foundations (Ramirez 2007, p. 154). Hoz dismantled the import substi-
tution regime, mandated a wage freeze and the decentralization of trade unions. Hoz at the
same time removed capital controls. The currency was stabilized by way of a split exchange
rate system (tablita) stipulating limits to devaluation, which led to the overvaluation of the
currency. An anticipation of sorts of the convertibility regime, the system was designed
to combine capital mobility with monetary stability: the first attempt to establish a regime
of finance driven accumulation in Argentina (Becker et al. 2002). The young Cavallo dis-
solved the regime as head of the Central bank at the end of the dictatorship (Corrales 1997,
p. 58). While he was supported by industrialists who were saved from bankruptcy when
the state assumed debts denominated in dollar and re-inflated the peso, the Buenos Aires
camp of neoliberals attacked him bitterly because the principle of monetary stability was
compromised.
Perhaps surprisingly the neoliberal think tanks continued to thrive in the 1980s despite
their close association with military neoliberalism. Both FIEL and IEERAL contributed
personnel and expertise to the economics ministries of the Alfonsin governments (see
Ramirez 2007 for details), which also suggests a certain amount of economic policy con-
tinuity rather than a complete shift at the end of the decade. Neoliberal experts from
Argentina of course found increasing acceptance abroad due to the turn towards neolib-
eral development perspectives on the road to the Washington Consensus. Quite similar
to the pattern observed in the CESL and FIEL think tanks discussed before, the foreign
education of staff was an important priority for the Cordoba foundation. Ramirez (2010)
emphasized both the community spirit and the technical expertise resulting from the com-
mon experience of a young generation of mostly US trained economists for the subsequent
evolution of the Argentinean participation in the social construction of the Washington
Consensus.
Last but not least, another Buenos Aires based think tank named Centro de Estudios
Macroeconómicos de Argentina (CEMA) contributed to the rise of neoliberals in Argentina
(Beltrán 2006) CEMA was founded in 1978 as a small economic research institute. The
center-left oriented di Tela foundation originally funded the institute in addition to the
Insitituto de Desarollo Económico y Social, which was the think tank of the Radical party.
Guido di Tela spent the years during the dictatorship in England, and later on joined the
Menem government as foreign minister. If the earlier latter institute was typical for the
orientation of modernization and industrialization, CEMA came to represent the new era of
professional expertise ‘very close to the US’ including a strong emphasis on the marketing
of expertise in the media (Dezalay and Garth 2002, pp. 119–122). CEMA introduced a
136 D. Plehwe
Master program in 1980 to educate managers. The institute was eventually turned into a
private university in 1995 (http://www.ucema.edu.ar).
Taken together, the intellectual core organizations in Argentina in support of market-
oriented research, planning and education before the Washington Consensus era included
two universities (ESEADE, ESEDEC) and four think tanks (CESL, FIEL, IEERAL,
CEMA). The different institutions have been founded and supported by partly distinct
and partly overlapping constituencies from the corporate, political and academic sectors.
Some of the local constituencies mobilized foreign supporters and resources. When mil-
itary neoliberalism crumbled in the early 1980s, the think tank capacities in charge of
economic policy orientation remained prominent. In terms of economic policy research

organizations, these well-funded institutes did not face much opposition domestically, and
were increasingly strengthened by the demand of their particular expertise from abroad.
Although the larger counter-movement against developmentalism – in Argentina
against Peronism – already started in the 1950s (compare Plehwe 2009 on the work of
Peter Bauer in particular), it gained momentum in the 1970s and 1980s. The shift towards
export orientation, globalization and financialization occurred in the wake of the world
debt crisis, and the changing global hegemonic constellation after the rise of Thatcher
and Reagan in the United States and the UK. Although never complete, the Washington
Consensus won support toward the end of the 1980s to convince the US Congress of the
Brady plan. The financial package was developed to ease the debt burden in Latin America
and of international banks sitting on bad credit in conjunction with supervised pro-market
reforms in Latin America (Peet 2003, pp. 78f., 126ff.). The WC discourse coalition relied
on ‘corporate groupings, a new techno-bureaucracy and international forces both public
and private around economic research institutes, which were charged with the task of con-
ceptualization and going about the program. Without these organizations, the Washington
Consensus would not have been possible’ (Ramirez 2007, 2010, p. 206, translation by the
author).
In spite of a certain amount of ambiguity (compare Plehwe 2009, pp. 7–10) the promo-
tion of the Washington Consensus must be regarded a key neoliberal project in the process
of the general re-orientation of development economics from modernization to liberal-
ization. The massive shift from liberal and social democratic to neoliberal perspectives
has been signaled most clearly by Depaak Lal, presently (2009–10) president of the Mont
Pèlerin Society. A core think tank related to the MPS, the British Institute of Economic
Affairs, published Lal’s ‘Death of Development Economics’ in 1983. Anne Krueger sub-
sequently charged him with the task of reorganizing the research department of the World
Bank. Among the advisors and colleagues at the World bank were MPS members like
the British monetarist Sir Alan Walters and young financial experts from Argentina like
Fundación Mediterránea protégé Joaquin Alberto Cottani.
Argentina’s military neoliberalism preceded the international rise of neoliberalism and
thus had to get by without the full range of stabilizing support from without and within
the domestic institutions and policy arenas available later, though the military was not
isolated. There was a thin layer of domestic elite experts, the IMF anchor, and support
from corporate and foundation circles. Neoliberal reforms were ‘nested’ to borrow a term
from Boyer and Hollingsworth (1997) rather than embedded. The apparent contradictions
between the neoliberal praise for individualism and freedom and ruthless repression in
Argentina certainly could not generate a lot of support for neoliberal ideas in society. The
latter can be considered the Achilles heel of Argentinean neoliberalism when the military
fell while the emerging international constellation was favorable. Neoliberal strategists
in Argentina at this point developed dedicated strategies to generate support in civil

society.
4. ‘Movement neoliberalism’ and the unique rise of a neoliberal political party

After the return to democracy, the radical party of Raúl Ricardo Alfonsin won the elec-
tions to lead a national reorganization process. Both the Peronist party and the right wing
neoliberals found themselves in opposition to a centrist government, which struggled with
a huge national debt inherited from the military years. Conflicts between the trade union
base of Peronism and the corporate sector hampered the efforts to consolidate the country.
Benegas Lynch, Jr. (1990, pp. 126f.) details the range of ‘small but energetic’ think
tanks across Argentina dedicated to enlarge the basis in favor for free market capitalism
including the Tucuman Foundation, the foundation for Liberty and its Social Order, the
Carlos Becker Center (all located in different provinces) in addition to the Social Market
Economy Institute founded by Alsogaray (Ramirez 2007, p. 231), the Center for the Study
of Macroeconomics, the School of Economic Education and the Philosophy of Liberty,
and the Circle of Liberty (all located in Buenos Aires). The Buenos Aires based neoliberal
think tank movement of the 1980s developed federal dimensions while Cavallo’s Fundación
Mediterránea expanded to the capital (Ramirez 2000).
The enlarged neoliberal discourse community in Argentina strengthened in a certain
distance to the elitist Alfonsin governments in charge between 1983 and 1989, and even-
tually gave rise of the new neoliberal right wing party of Alvaro Alsogaray (UCEDE).
President Alfonsin’s efforts to reform and cautiously align the country with the new lib-
eralization agenda (Viguera 2000) relied in top down manner on the support from a large
coalition of business groups, which were increasingly hard to reconcile with each other.
The broad business coalition eventually collapsed because the government’s monetary and
exchange rate policies were seen to one-sidedly further financial interests represented by
the Chamber of Commerce (CAC) and the interests of export oriented industrial sector
represented by UIA (Birle 1995, p. 268).
Starting in 1987 Domingo Cavallo contributed directly to the failure of government
efforts to stabilize the country. He aligned himself with the obstructionist Peronists, an
affiliation which seemed to clearly set the Cordoba wing of neoliberals further apart from
the Alsogaray camp.
Cavallo the congressmen . . . watched Alfonsin’s Plan Austral and Plan Primavera decay.
These plans collapsed, Cavallo would say, because the government failed to create a polit-
ical coalition on their behalf. Alfonsin’s main saboteurs were of course the Peronists, who
thought that Alfonsin was going too far. Cavallo joined these Peronists in criticizing Alfonsin,
but only because he thought Alfonsin was not going far enough. (Corrales 1997, p. 57)
Cavallo in fact did not join the old populist opposition party. In the late 1980s, a new
direction (Renovadores) emerged within the Peronist party. The Renovadores broke with
populist traditions to promote a citizen party similar to Alfonsin’s Radicals. Another oddity
of Argentina’s road to neoliberalism, Carlos Menem won his candidacy against the leader
of the new direction, but eventually relied on the support of the Renovadores and of the
Radicals in opposition to push through legislation against the votes of the trade union wing
of his own party (Birle 1995, p. 284). Given his long standing and frequent interaction with
Cavallo in Cordoba, Menem probably was not simply a populist himself, no matter his self
representation to win the party vote.
138 D. Plehwe
The hyperinflation and general air of chaos characteristic of the last year of the Alfonsin
government at the same time can hardly be overestimated in order to explain the appar-
ently paradoxical state of mind of many people and leaders in Argentina. Even if the
development of strong neoliberal networks across the country are duly considered as an
independent variable, the difficult economic circumstances likely explain much of the rapid
comeback of neoliberals previously tainted by the dictatorship years. Without the think tank
capacities build up over the years, however, the neoliberal interpretation of the crisis would
have been difficult to develop and disseminate. Benegas Lynch, Jr. (1990, p. 126) provides
information on the impact of the ESEADE University in particular on teaching a new gen-
eration of journalists, business leaders, professors, and economic consultants who drove
public opinion in favor of privatization liberalization (Echegaray 2003).
In addition to the intellectual influence of think tanks on the media and the gen-
eral public, neoliberals scored well in federal elections. In 1989, Alsogaray’s Unión del
Centro Democrático (UCeDé) won 2 million votes (almost 7%) coming in third behind the
Menem-led Peronists and the Radicals. Apart from the party leader, Gerardo Bongiovanni
appears as a key ‘go between’ linking think tanks, private universities and the party
(see Figure 1 below).
The Menem turn to neoliberalism resulted from an integration of different political
forces in the country at the expense of the traditional base of Peronism. The reorientation of
Peronism was orchestrated by Menem’s reliance on Renovadores rather than traditionalists,
and by cooptation of the neoliberal opposition. With this, Menem succeeded in integrating
the Cordoba and Buenos Aires factions of Argentine neoliberalism. With Cavallo first as
foreign minister and Alsogaray as economic advisor (and Alsogaray’s daughter Maria as
University of Harvard University

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Figure 1. Major think tanks/networks behind Menem era neoliberalism.

Source: Adapted from Benegas Lynch, Jr. (1990) and several internet sources.
privatization minister), Menem led the country to become a key adherent to most of the
Washington Consensus policy priorities.
After the initial ambiguity of the first and second ministers of economics who had a
background in the agrobusiness Bunge & Born,7 the Menem government moved decisively
in direction of finance driven accumulation without much concern for (export oriented)
industrial development. When Cavallo was hired he was warmly welcomed by the indus-
trial sector, because of his role in 1982. Alas, UIA had to learn that Cavallo had moved
even further than others in the priorities set for the financial sector and a radical opening
up of the economy by subscribing to the currency board solution. After the decision was
pushed through congress, the leading industrial association quit the neoliberal think tank
FIEL and founded the Fundación Unión Industrial Argentina instead to promote controlled
liberalization in opposition to Cavallo (Birle 1995, p. 344).
Regarding WC contradictions in Argentina, Ramirez (2010) makes an important point
by stressing that national configurations and peculiarities should not be ignored in the
analysis of a transnational discourse coalition. He presents convincing evidence for local
industries behind policies that were at odds with WC prescriptions in the field of patents,
for example. The biggest exception from the transnational WC rules according to him was
the local choice in favor of the currency board. Ramirez in this case fails to recognize the
specific transnational discourse coalition behind the currency board. The last section is
devoted to looking more closely at the national and transnational elements of the currency
board coalition, which also reveals surprisingly strong ideational ties between the Cordoba
and Buenos Aires factions of Argentine neoliberalism.
5. Currency board coalition: Not really a national exception from the WC

The social forces and think tank networks backing Menem–Cavallo–Alsogaray neolib-
eralism in Argentina are closely tied to agencies and think tanks abroad; together these
constitute the national and transnational networks, institutionalized actor constellations
and power relations of the Washington Consensus discourse coalition at large (Kellermann
2006).8 Focusing on Argentina, Figure 1 represents the major neoliberal think tanks origi-
nating from the original Buenos Aires and Cordoba components, which had been somewhat
at odds before the Menem era with regard to a wide range of neoliberal orientations (radical
versus pragmatic, finance driven accumulation versus neoliberal industrial development,
etc.), as well as to their leaders, Cavallo and Alsogaray, who represent foreign-trained elite
technocracy and national oligarchic traditionalism, respectively. The Cordoba and Buenos
Aires camps are no longer geographically confined, of course, as explained in the previous
section.
Scholars are likely to identify further linkages and relationships between the two major
camps of neoliberals in Argentina in the future. Ramirez (2010) observed the ways in
which the Cordoba camp has moved intellectually towards the Buenos Aires faction in the
course of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In spite of this identity shift, Alsogaray objected
to the inclusion of Cavallo in the Menem cabinet. He even predicted (or wished) a short
tenure for him only as minister of economics in 1991 (Santoro 1994, p. 294), two years
into jointly representing the Menem government. Alsogaray’s own party at this point had
nearly disappeared and the aging leader withdrew from his advisory position.
No matter Alsogaray’s distrust, Cavallo came to implement the currency board three
months later. This development more than anything else expressed the adoption of posi-
tions in favor of exchange rate and monetary stability in support of finance driven
accumulation similar to Alsogaray’s agenda. Rumors had been spread earlier about an
imminent move towards dollarization (proposed by CEMA according to Roig 2007 citing
140 D. Plehwe
Llach), but only with Cavallo in control of the economics ministry did the country move
towards the new regime.
Roig (2007) seems to confirm the local exception story of Ramirez (2010) with regard
to the currency board. According to journalistic accounts, Cavallo called in his close
collaborators Horacio Liendo and Juan José Llach one night to tell them of the decision
(presumably in the cabinet) to move forward with the currency board. Roig challenges
arguments relating the solution found to technocratic think tanks in an effort to direct
attention to the overlap between politics and expertise. Liendo had written his PhD thesis
in 1983 on Carlos Pellegrini, Argentinean president from 1890 to 1892, and founder of the
Banco de la Nación Argentina. Liendo’s thesis provided him with extraordinary expertise
on convertibility in the post-Breton Woods era of floating exchange rates. Llach had worked
on development debates on hyperinflation. His work suggested a convertibility regime to
resolve conflicting priorities contrary to those who advocated full dollarization (Roig 2007,
p. 6). Yet in spite of the strong evidence of local expertise, Argentina’s currency board can
hardly be considered to just represent the great tradition of Argentina. A number of impor-
tant aspects of the revival of currency boards have to be systematically eschewed in order
to localize the story.
The statement of Carnegie Mellon Professor Allan Meltzer (Republican Party and
Mont Pèlerin Society member)9 at the WC conference organized by John Williamson
in 1989 provides a first piece of evidence for the extent of currency board deliberations
beyond Argentina:
My solution for Latin America would be to replace the central banks with currency boards. The
boards would not be permitted to monetize debt or change the exchange rate. The exchange
rate would be fixed. The currency board would issue money in exchange for convertible cur-
rencies and would be required to keep the shares of those currencies in its portfolio equal to
the trade weights of the country’s exports and imports . . . Currency boards have worked well
in Hong Kong and Singapore and have contributed far more to the welfare of the citizens of
those countries than the central banks of Latin America have to theirs. (Meltzer 1990, p. 30)
While the currency board solution is only mentioned once in the volume, Meltzer was by
no means the only advocate of currency boards. While he told the author of this paper
in a private communication that he was not personally involved in the Argentinean case,
Meltzer’s colleague at Johns Hopkins University and fellow MPS member Steve Hanke
(2002) has the following information in a chapter on the 2001 financial crisis of Argentina:
I first became seriously interested in economic reform in Argentina shortly after meeting
Argentina’s newly elected President, Carlos Menem, in 1989. At that time, I concluded that,
while stability might not be everything, everything was nothing without stability. To achieve
stability, a cure for Argentina’s endemic inflation and unstable money was required. In con-
sultation with some members of Argentina’s Congress, I developed a blueprint for monetary
stability during 1990 with a fellow economist, Kurt Schuler. In 1991, our proposal for an
orthodox currency board was published (Banco Central o Caja de Conversión? Buenos Aires:
Fundación República).10
Kurt Schuler (n.d., emphasis added) recalls:
In 1990 we wrote a proposal for orthodox currency boards in Yugoslavia, where Hanke was an
adviser to the deputy prime minister, and . . . we finished a similar proposal for Argentina . . .
The Argentine proposal was not translated into Spanish and published until after the ‘convert-
ibility’ system was established in April 1991, but Hanke met President Carlos Menem and
talked to him about our proposal before then. Similar ideas were already in the air but we were
unaware of most of them. The economists Aquiles Almansi and Carlos Rodríguez had writ-
ten a newspaper article in 1989 proposing something close to the convertibility system. Other
Argentine economists, including Gabriel Rubinstein and Walter Graziano, had expressed sim-
ilar ideas; some of them were aware of what had been written before and others were not. In
the Argentine Congress, the deputy José Maria Ibarbia was devising a currency board bill.
Not by coincidence, his grandfather had been the last president of the Caja de Conversión, a
body that had functioned as a currency board on and off early in the 20th century. A think tank
connected with Ibarbia published our proposal, entitled ¿Banco central o caja de conversión?
Menem and Cavallo were latecomers to the idea, but they were the most important figures for
convertibility because they implemented it.11
Schuler points to important aspects of the historical constitution, diffusion, translation and
interpretation of ideas in this short paragraph. As suggested by discourse coalition theory,
story lines and particular pockets of expertise constitute a social experience no matter if
experts and others are personally related or not. The background of the Argentine currency
board represents a confluence of domestic and foreign components of experiences and
ideas: in addition to the old history of the gold standard era in Argentina, the more recent
history of the revival of the currency board in Hong Kong looms large. Hong Kong featured
the first currency board since colonial times (Schwartz 1993). A British expat manager
bridged past and present.
The intellectual and political entrepreneur of the Hong Kong currency board was an
economist named John Greenwood. His work became truly important due to a financial
crisis in Hong Kong. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s move in the early 1980s to
start negotiations with China on the return of Hong Kong triggered a huge capital flight.
Greenwood was in the key position to supply a solution to the financial crisis: a currency
board (Greenwood 2009).
A fellow MPS member of Steve Hanke and Allan Meltzer, John Greenwood was
also recognized in the memoirs of Milton and Rose Friedman (1999, p. 326). Friedman
describes Greenwood as a long term friend who was the chief economist with G.T.
Management in Hong Kong. In this function, Greenwood started the bimonthly journal
Asian Monetary Monitor. As a consequence of his analysis of the financial crisis of 1983 –
Greenwood proposed a currency board to reassure investors who feared Chinese control.
According to the recollection of Milton Friedman, the details of the concrete reform pro-
posal had been worked out on the phone with the British monetarist (and fellow MPS
member) Sir Alan Walters, who was chief advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
and with Milton Friedman. In later speeches, the British citizen John Greenwood primar-
ily praised Alan Walter’s role (Greenwood 2009). While there were previous convertibility
regimes during the gold standard era sustained by the British Empire, the concrete instru-
mentality of the currency board are even more deeply rooted in British colonial history.
Given this background, the revival of the currency board in Hong Kong is perhaps rightly
considered a local story as well if one wishes to tell the history of the colony without the
history of the colonizer.
At least some of the local input in Argentina with regard to the currency board clearly
has come from local (Alsogaray) and foreign (Hanke) Mont Pèlerin Society circles.12 Many
Mont Pèlerin Society members of course have long been leading influential international
discussions on monetary matters (Schmelzer 2010).
The fixed exchange rate advocates express the extent to which there has never been a
Washington Consensus. As demonstrated above, the wing cannot be adequately captured
as US-based since members’ positions in the worlds of business, finance, and academia
142 D. Plehwe
stretch across the world, uniting a great many of individuals who know or know of each
other from Mont Pèlerin Society conferences, for example. Beyond the concrete actors, this
wing of the larger neoliberal discourse coalition certainly exhibits agency characteristics
by way of developing, maintaining and reproducing the story line of fixed exchange rates,
the dangers of government intervention in financial relations and restrictions on capital
flows. To understand how these ideas play out on the political stage in Argentina, a number
of important local dimensions have to be considered.
Corrales (1997) explains how Cavallo used his first three month in office at the eco-
nomics ministry in 1991 to develop a strategy ‘conquering’ the state in response to the
failure of the Alfonsin plans to achieve monetary stability due to lack of political support.
After securing a loyal staff at the ministry13 Cavallo successfully integrated Peronist mem-
bers of Congress. He suggested adhering to national tradition by way of keeping the central
bank under political control. Central Bank independence was considered a Trojan horse of
imperialists advocated by the money doctors from abroad (Babb 2005). Argentina’s cur-
rency board at the same time of course would remove both central bank and congressional
interference with regard to exchange rate manipulation since both the parliament and the
central bank would be constrained to a narrow set of tasks in monetary policy matters. This
self binding rule – Ramirez (2010) refers to the work of John Elster (1984) – was neverthe-
less supported by Peronists hitherto in opposition to the priority of financial accumulation.
Although the trade union wing’s illusion of political control did not last very long, Cavallo’s
strategy can be considered a neoliberal move par excellence to hide a strong state regime,
i.e. remove the government option to exert discretionary political influence in order to
subject monetary and ultimately fiscal policy to rigid discipline.
The currency board succeeded in quelling inflation fears. Financial market actors
believed in the firm commitment of Menem perhaps because they had learned to trust
Cavallo. Precisely because Argentina did not follow the WC prescription with regard to
monetary policy, the WC became a major success in Argentina for a short period of time.
Going further than previous systems, the US dollar became legal tender together with the
peso firmly linked to the dollar. For better in the short- and medium-run and for worse in
the long run, a solid regime of finance-driven accumulation came into being in the spring
of 1991. Many foreign investors participated in Argentina’s privatization bonanza since no
strings were attached to capital under the new regime.
When the system started to shake, worried neoliberals subjected the ‘unorthodox’ cur-
rency board of Argentina to harsh critique since the government could after all dismantle
it and reintroduce the devil of flexible exchange rates. After a short period as official advi-
sor of Cavallo,14 Steve Hanke became a spokesperson of the opposition to the currency
board under the roof of the central bank. Hanke, Schuler and their partners in Argentina
proposed complete dollarization in the second half of the 1990s (Hanke and Schuler 1999).
The collapse of 2001 ended the debate. The person who was crucial in the beginning
also had the last word: it was the pragmatic neoliberalism of Cavallo again, which led
him to prefer saving capitalism in Argentina rather than the currency board and all the
wealth of those who objected because they would suffer from the inevitable devaluation of
the Peso.
Conclusions
The ‘Washington Consensus’ – that never actually existed – collapsed in the wake of the
financial crises of the 1990s. The currency board regime in Argentina fell apart in 2001.
But the greatly expanded think tank networks comprised of domestic and foreign research
and advocacy organizations sustaining the neoliberal discourse coalition and individual
projects live on. Neither the rise of the broader Consensus agenda nor the drifting currency
board project can be explained without the interplay of domestic and foreign organizations
and experts in the age of globalization and semi-sovereignty.
Domestically speaking, the transformation of the policy research and consulting land-
scape in Argentina and the distribution of experts across knowledge institutions represented
in the public have been far reaching. In 1985, 50% of the experts quoted on Alfonsin’s plan
Austral in three major newspapers in Argentina were related to the country’s political par-
ties. The number of university-based experts quoted exceeded the number of experts based
in think tanks and corporations. By 2001, more than 50% of the experts quoted on the cur-
rency board issue were based in think tanks and corporations instead. Party-related experts
represented a meager 6% of the total cited in newspapers. And the private universities
delivered more experts quoted than the public universities (Camou 2010).
The neoliberal discourse coalition has certainly transformed both policies and politics
in Argentina. Even if not providing expertise for the government in power, think tanks
provide a safe haven for neoliberals in opposition who get ready to return to power (see
Fischer 2010 on Chile). Those who object to overly rationalist and strategic policy models
and prefer Kingdon’s garbage can model of policy solutions, may want to consider think
tank networks to explain which solutions can be found in the bin.
This essay provides evidence for the value of an organization-centered transna-
tional discourse coalition approach for explaining general orientations and specific policy
projects advanced both across and within borders. It can be considered an antidote to
certain parochialism in defense of the endangered sovereign nation in the age of inten-
sified globalization. Beyond the general WC configuration, the specific discourse coalition
involved in crafting and legitimizing the currency board in defiance of specific WC rec-
ommendations exemplifies the need to combine an analysis of the larger institutional
dimensions of discourse coalitions with a more detailed and actor-centered analysis of par-
ticular alliances. The transnational dimensions of Argentine neoliberalism are visible early
on both with regard to neoliberal intellectual and think tank circuits tying Buenos Aires
to Guatemala City, New York and Freiburg, and with regard to the support of the global
financial institutions and corporate foundation circles during the period of military-backed
neoliberalism. Later on, the two major constituencies of neoliberalism in Argentina – the
Buenos Aires and Cordoba factions that grew far beyond their original locations – became
more of a seamless whole, united in the currency board coalition. The origins of this coali-
tion can be traced to the monetarist circles of the Mont Pèlerin Society linking Sir Alan
Walters in the UK, Milton Friedman in the United States, John Greenwood in Hong Kong,
and Steve Hanke in the United States closely together with the Argentine core group of
Horacio Liendo, José Llach and Domingo Cavallo.
Further details to be investigated in Argentina that would be illuminating include the
links to the World Bank (Cottani) and the relationships of Hanke and the Argentinean
congressmen he worked with (referred to as the Alsogaray faction) as well as the founda-
tion that published Hanke and Schuler’s currency board proposal. Schuler has pointed to
more instances of convertibility ideas developed locally. A closer look at the sources of the
authors may yet display more fully the overlap of apparently independent initiatives at the
ideational level. To get a more complete picture of the whole of the transnational currency
board coalition instead, future research has to address the Baltic Republics and Bulgaria.
Interestingly, Anna Schwartz (1992) has cast strong doubts on the viability of all the new
currency boards created in the early 1990s. She observed a lack of concern for the political
viability of fixed exchange rates in the work of Hanke and Schuler.
144 D. Plehwe
Based on the analysis in this paper it is important to emphasize the continuity of neolib-
eral influence in Argentine society rather than observing a sudden shift under President
Menem. As Argentina demonstrates all too well it is extremely important to distin-
guish varieties of neoliberalism evident in the shifts from the partial financialization to
export-oriented national development to a more complete priority of financial accumula-
tion under Menem. The domestic varieties of neoliberalism pursued ended abruptly due
to the catastrophe of state bankruptcy. Remarkably, Domingo Cavallo was at the center of
policy execution in each and every moment throughout the different stages of Argentina’s
extremely rocky roads of neoliberal development.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank two reviewers and Teresa Lynch for many valuable questions, comments and
general advice. I am also grateful to Steve Hanke and Alan Meltzer who liberally shared information.
Remaining errors of course are my own.
Notes on contributor
Dieter Plehwe is a senior fellow at the Social Science Research Institute Berlin, in the
Department of Internationalization and Organization. His main research and teaching inter-
ests are in the areas of international political economy, organization, regional integration
and neoliberalism. He recently wrote ‘The Making of a Comprehensive Transnational
Discourse Community’ in: Marie-Laure Djelic and Sigrid Quack, eds, Transnational
Communities. Shaping Global Economic Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
and published The Road from Mont Pèlerin (Harvard University Press, 2009), edited with
Philip Mirowski.
Notes
1. Simmons et al. (2008, pp. 10–17) discuss coercion as key mechanisms in diffusion processes.
2. Beltrán (2006, p. 11, FN 25) speaks of FIEL and CEMA in addition to Fundación
Mediterránea, which harbors IEERAL, compare section 3.
3. It appears to be a misunderstanding of structural dimensions of power if a fourth ‘postmod-
ern’ dimension is separated by Hardy and Leiba-O’Sullivan (1998) to address discourse in
particular since structure cannot be equated to ‘material’ (Plehwe et al. 2006, p. 23, FN 5).
4. Grove City College in Pennsylvania provides for a good example of the odd combination of
Christian right wing and libertarian values (see http://www.gcc.edu/Faith_and_Freedom.php).
5. Benegas Lynch was sponsored by a right wing Spanish film maker and businessman, Joaquin
Reig. Ayau (the first Latin American MPS president) and Reig belong to the core group of
‘frequent fliers’ to MPS conferences (Plehwe and Walther 2008).
6. N’Haux (1993, pp. 119f.) discusses the economic ideas of the founding father, industrialist and
federalist Pedro Astori at length.
7. Economics Minister Rapanelli apparently refused to succumb to external pressures to priori-
tize international debt servicing at the expense of domestic needs whereas Alsogaray wanted
to immediately resume international debt service in order to build trust with international
finance (Birle 1995, p. 301). Rapanelli’s successor Gonzalez attempted to consolidate the coun-
try with a policy mix of increasing revenue and severe austerity measures (in line with WC
prescriptions).
8. Kellermann (2006) distinguishes laisser fairers, the international financial community, institu-
tionalists, financial market stabilizers and globalization critics. Each group pursues different
reform goals and has different instruments and mechanism of discourse power at its disposal.
Kellermann’s effort needs to be further refined in order to present a sufficiently differentiated
picture of the interaction between different social forces. His US-centered perspective on the
laisser fairers is too limited to capture the transnational neoliberal discourse coalition behind
the currency board, for example. An organization centered analysis of discourse coalitions
sheds additional light on neoliberal groups, which operate under the radar of expert observers
(see Bair 2009).
9. Meltzer was a key person of the Kellermann’s laisser fairer group of the WC era. The Mont
Pèlerin Society’s global reach and capacity of discourse generation and dissemination goes
way beyond discourse power resulting from two level games and US veto power as described
by Kellermann (2006, pp. 126f.).
10. Testimony before the Subcommittee on International Monetary Policy and Trade Committee
on Financial Services United States House of Representatives, 5 March 2002. Available from:
http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-hanke030502.html [Accessed 27 April 2011].
11. If Cavallo was a latecomer to the specific institution of a currency board, the background frame-
work of thinking in which the solution fit was laid long before Schuler’s contributions. Cavallo
completes the documentation of not just Argentine origins of his own orientation by way of
specifying the influence of Hayek on his ideas about monetary systems (cited in Roig 2007,
p. 13).
12. Steve Hanke has alerted me in a private communication to President Menem’s personal encour-
agement in 1989 for writing the original study (Hanke/Schuler 1991), and to Alsogaray’s
particular weight in convincing the president with regard to the currency board. In addition
to the writing of the authors who belong to the MPS circles mentioned so far (see Walters 1987
and Schuler’s homepage), Anna Schwartz’s work is important (Schwartz 1992, 1993).
13. Among the almost 300 ‘Cavallo boys’ hired (Dominguez 1997, p. 65) was Joaquin Alberto
Cottani, for example, who obtained a Yale PhD in 1981. He joined Cavallo in 1991 as
subsecretary for economic planning (Ramirez 2000, p. 173).
14. Hanke became an official advisor to Cavallo in 1995, which was the time of the Tequila crisis
sending shock waves from Mexico to Argentina. His position ended with Cavallo’s resignation
in 1996.
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On: 19 September 2011, At: 01:30

Critical Policy Studies

Transnational discourse coalitions and

Available online: 21 Jun 2011

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Transnational discourse coalitions and monetary policy: Argentina

Social Science Research Centre, Berlin, Germany

1. Argentina’s exceptional road to neoliberalism

ISSN 1946-0171 print/ISSN 1946-018X online

1.1. Limited understanding: external versus domestic causes

2. New frontiers in discourse coalition research: transnational dimensions

(t0) of concrete actions undertaken to transform or reproduce the circumstances of action

3. Elite neoliberalism: early roots and military backing

economic policy orientation remained prominent. In terms of economic policy research

in Argentina at this point developed dedicated strategies to generate support in civil

4. ‘Movement neoliberalism’ and the unique rise of a neoliberal political party

University of Harvard University

(Buchanan), Hayek, Feldstein

CEMA Circle of Liberty

Figure 1. Major think tanks/networks behind Menem era neoliberalism.

5. Currency board coalition: Not really a national exception from the WC

Kurt Schuler (n.d., emphasis added) recalls:

convertibility because they implemented it.11

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