Gombrich

1.

On 25th of May 1810, the Argentinean nation was born. Argentina generally denoted during the first half of the nineteenth century a geographical area that was broken up into severalquasi-independent provinces or states, each struggling to wrest power and wealth from its neighbours. The Revolucion de Mayo in 1810 indicated a decade of war waged against both external enemies and internalopposition. The fundamental issue to be settled by any emerging nationstate the formulation of processes of governance and mechanisms for allocating power and resources-would not be resolved until thesecond half of the nineteenth century.
Thus because of the lack of consensus on matters related to the political order, the decade of 1810-1820 was characterised by war. On top of that, Argentina wasborn to the background of a bigger international context. This context is the collapse of Spanish rule produced by an individual that goes by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte. By invading Spain anddeposing its monarch, he severed the links between Iberian and overseas Spain. This opened the opportunity to spark a revolution leading to a debate within the Spanish world over the nature ofsovereignty what degenerated into civil war. The vacuum that was left after the Spanish power left, needed to be filled, and thus started a severe debate which eventually led to the Declaration of Independencein 1816.
In 1810 each individual province had its own historic tradition, culture-pattern, and political institutions and these differences were accentuated by the great distances between centres ofpopulation. The provinces where held together by Spain dominance, but afterwards began to break up in sovereign states. Buenos Aires eventually succeeded in stopping the process of fragmentation byasserting its hegemony over the interior although Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia escaped the tentacles of Buenos Aires. Next to that the states were diverse in their origins, racial composition, and...