Securing the Market-Friendly Transition: West German Conservative and Business Elites and Argentinean Democratization, 1983–90

Argentina’s democratization in 1983 coincided with the return to political power of Christian Democracy, in coalition with the center-right Free Democratic Party, in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Argentina was politically and economically peripheral to West German interests, but the same was not the case for Buenos Aires. Argentina’s new democratic leadership under Raul Alfonsín needed credits, investments, increased trade relations and remission of debts incurred by military rulers with FRG arms manufacturers which were backed by German state exports credits. This situation offered officials in the FRG leverage to temper the so-called excesses of democracy. Throughout the 1980s, FRG political and business elites pressured or strongly indicated to Alfonsín and his ministers their objection to robust punishment for military perpetrators, extensive social spending programs, and any effort to rescind debts incurred by the military regime. The rich scholarship on Argentina’s democratization has highlighted the importance of domestic and transnational anti-military regime social movements, the Falklands/Malvinas War, the 1980s debt crisis, transitology scholarship, and pressure from the Reagan administration in provoking the military regime’s untimely demise which produced Argentina’s “ruptured transition” (Kathryn Sikkink). However, from the FRG’s vantage point, Argentina’s market-friendly transition was remarkably successful in tempering grassroots demands for judicial accountability and an end of the fiscal austerity programs introduced under military rule. This presentation will utilize multi-archival documentation from Argentinean and German state archives, the party archives of Christian Democracy, and the historical archives of Deutsche Bank, to rethink Argentina’s contribution to the making of Germany’s democracy promotion policies in the 1980s and beyond.