Commercial Aviation Policy in Argentina: The Origins of the OACI, ?national air power?, and the ?Argentinean doctrine?

PIGLIA, MELINA

Ciudad de México

Conferencia; T2M International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility, 14th T2M Annual Conference 2016 - Mobilities: Space of Flows and Friction; 2016

T2M International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility

AbstractThe swift transformation of aviation into a means of transport presented the states with a series of challenges and opportunities in terms of sovereignty, national or regional integration and the possibilities for economic progress. The Second World War changed the panorama for commercial aviation. In the new context, the survival of local commercial airlines in the face of overwhelming North American competition depended fundamentally on the protection granted by the states.Paradoxically, this protection would encounter possibilities of existence within the framework of the Cold War, which drove the US to tighten its relations with its political allies, even at the cost of its commercial interests. It is in this context that the impetus given at the end of the war to the constitution of supranational regulatory organisms would give way to the creation of the OACI. This organism, and the documents which gave rise to it, established a new form of regulation of commercial aviation and, at the same time, implied a more complex understanding of the air as sovereign territory. In the process of the constitution of the OACI, the North American pressures which aimed at imposing ?open skies?, encountered a strong and effective resistance. In 1944, Great Britain opposed the pretentions of the USA, proposing instead, the regulation of the use of routes. Going even further, during the meetings in Bermuda in 1946, Argentina successfully put forward the principle of bilateral negotiations and reciprocity as the way of organising international aerial navigation. This took as its basis the equality of the parties in terms of the their rights over the traffic originating in their own countries, and regulating supply in accordance with statistical data relating to demand, so as to guarantee the local carriers a share of the market. The ?Argentinean doctrine?, bilateralism in the management of international aviation, would set the tone until the processes of deregulation during the nineties. This paper analyses Argentina´s participation in these debates from two points of view. On the one hand, the influence of the ?Argentinean doctrine?, elaborated by Enrique Ferreyra, on the resistance to the North American ?open skies? policy, is examined in the context of the possibilities which the Cold War opened up for this kind of resistance. On the other, it accounts for the profound links which this ?doctrine? ? without doubt functional to other major players on the international stage, such as Great Britain ? had with local political processes: Argentina´s aspirations for hegemony in South America, and the emergence, in the context of the coup of 1943, of an air policy which saw commercial aviation as an inseparable part of national air power and air traffic as one source of the wealth of the nation.