ABSTRACT
The societies of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay – known as the core Southern Cone nations – share a history of Spanish colonization, political independence in the early nineteenth century, mass European immigration (more prominent in Argentina and Uruguay than in Chile) since the late nineteenth century, and a basic modeling according to Western institutions and ideas of development. These societies share a dual cultural dynamic. On the one hand, there is a substratum of respect for hierarchy, authority, and order, of Hispanic and Roman Catholic origins, with corporatist leanings. On the other hand, from an early stage, elites have looked to the centers of world development, absorbing from the latter secular Western ideas and ideologies, adapting them as part of their models of nation-building, as befi tted their local structures and realities.
