La autonomía provincial en el federalismo argentino. Un análisis Histórico

ALEJANDRO AGÜERO

Chicago

Congreso; Democracy and Memory: XXXII International Congress of Latin American Studies Association; 2014

Latin American Studies Association

The Argentinean constitutional doctrine holds today that the provinces -as parts of the federation- «are not sovereign» but «autonomous» states. This assertion is presented as a dogma of the federal system. However, the distinction between sovereignty and autonomy does not follow from either the Constitutional text (enacted in 1853 and amended in 1860), or the language of the constituent debates or the works by the early commentators of the Constitution. All these precedents, even the sentences of the Supreme Court until 1926, used the concept of «provincial sovereignty» - not that of «autonomy» - according to the American thesis of the «divided sovereignty» that prevailed during the constituent period. Nevertheless, in the late XIXth century, that thesis was gradually abandoned and the notion of provincial sovereignty was quietly replaced by a word of scant tradition, linked to the new administrative language: «autonomy». How was it possible that conceptual substitution without a specific theoretical discussion or a normative reform? In this essay we seek to show how that process took place and how this subtle but effective terminological shift, removing the old provincial sovereignty by the new autonomy, came to enshrine at the symbolic level, the triumph of the political factions that sought to strengthen the national state, imposing a particular reading of the federalism established by the Constitution.(Se adjunta la versión publicad en la revista italiana Quaderni Fiorentini, por cuya razón se informa también en el apartado de artículos de revista)