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strongly believed in and adhered to in Latin America that many scholars, inter allia
Whitehead (2000), Baer and Hargis (2000) and Gereffi and Wyman (1990), have argued
that one of the reasons why the East Asian countries were able to shift from ISI to EOM
in right time and amount, while Latin America was not, was because of the latter’s
ideological commitment to dependency theories.
Mairal (1996), who takes an ideological-legal approach to privatization, argues
that Argentina has always had the French model of “service publique” in modeling and
organizing its economic relations, since Perón’s nationalizations in the 1940s and 1950s.
This model was based on the assumption that the operation of public utilities is a
government or administrative function, while the government itself is nothing but a
“cooperative of public services” (136). This principle was incorporated into the 1946 and
1958 Constitutions: “All assets and business whose operation has or acquires the features
of a national public service or of a de facto monopoly, must become the property of the
community at large.” The French model, which also constitutes the principal source of
etatist ideology, is in stark contrast to the United States model that neoliberal
restructuring and privatizations take as their main frame. This model, in turn, views
public utilities as mere private industries subject to intensive regulation on the part of the
state. In other words, the operation of utilities does not constitute a bastion of
government. Both Argentina and Turkey, therefore, can be categorized in the French
paradigm of social state as opposed to the United States’ watchdog state.
It might be that the Turkish military was more successful than the Argentine
military in undertaking structural reforms in the beginning of the 1980s or that simply the
crisis that hit Argentina was much more intense than the one that Turkey had to endure
Convention