As in Peronist Argentina, in the United States and Europe the state decisively intervened, presiding over economic reconstruction and mediating complex agreements between business and labor. But this increasing power of the state – of the interventionist and welfare state – was accompanied by an integration and liberalization of economic relations in the capitalist world.
In 1947, the Bretton Woods monetary agreements established the dollar as the global currency, and capital began to move freely again in the world. Those countries shut off from the outside world grew fewer in number, and multinationals began to establish themselves in markets that had previously been prohibited. For the countries whose economies had grown based on the internal market and in carefully protected fashion, as in the case of the Latin American, particularly Argentine, economy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – a financial entity that had enormous power in the new context – proposed so-called orthodox policies: stabilizing the currency by abandoning unrestrained monetary emission, ceasing to subsidize "artificial" sectors, opening markets, and stimulating traditional export activities
Nevertheless, an alternative policy gradually began to be formulated, elaborated especially bh the United Nations' Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). ECLA proposed that the "developed" countries help the "undeveloped" ones to eliminate the factors responsible for their backwardness through appropriate investments in key sectors, accompanied by "structural" reforms, such as agrarian reform. From that point on, the "monetary" and "structuralist" remedies competed in public opinion and as government policies. It might be thought that both strategies were in the end complementary, but for the time being they had different political representations; whereas the first led to revitalizing the old foreign economic partners, oligarchic sectors, and perhaps dictatorship, the second compelled deep changes: modernization of society that would be crowned by the establishment of stable democracies, similar to those of the developed countries.
To adapt itself to this world of reconstituted capitalism, liberalism, and democracy, it was not enough to restore constitutional order to Argentina and put an end to the vestiges of a regine inspired by the authoritarian governments of the interwar years. It was necessary to modernize and make adjustments in the economy, to transform the productive apparatus. After 1955, proposals to open up the economy and to modernize were shared values in Argentina. But the methods to be used for this transformation generated deep disputes between those who trusted foreign capital and those, from the nationalist tradition that had nourished Peronism or from the anti-imperialist left, who were distrustful of it. The debates, which dominated two subsequent decades, revolved around how either to attract or to control foreign capital. Some local business sectors discovered the advantages of an association with foreign capital, but others that had grown and consolidated themselves under state protection felt they were certain victims, either from competition or from the ending of protection. These firms sought to hinder growth of foreign capital, and they found a welcome reception not only among nationalists and the left, but also among the majority of political parties.
Businesspeople, domestic or foreign, agreed that any modernization needed to alter the status achieved by the workers under Peronism. As it already had indicated at the end of the Peronist regime, business sought to reduce the workers' share of national income and also to increase productivity, rationalizing jobs and reducing the size of the labor force. These aims entailed curtailing the power of the unions and also the power that the workers, protected by legislation, had achieved on the shop floor. Cutting back wages and recovering management's authority in the workplace were the principal objectives in a general sentiment running against the status of greater equality achieved by the workers and the peculiar practice of citizenship on which Peronism had been based. Demands for a certain business rationalization combined with resentments that were difficult to admit but were undoubtedly strong among those who had made common cause against Perón.
Here was the greatest obstacle. As Juan Carlos Torre noted, at issue was a now-mature working class, well defended in a labor market, approaching near full employment, homogenous, and with a clear social and political identify.
