Throughout its history, Argentina has developed an international position defined by two traditions: on the one hand, autonomy from the great powers and, on the other, a desire to deepen regional integration with the sister countries of the region. Both are relevant for Latin America’s ability to find its own space in a world in transition, something in which Argentina can and should play a central role. Active Non-Alignment (ANA) represents a path that opens numerous opportunities. And although it was not present at the Bandung Conference in 1955 nor at the Belgrade conference in 1961, when the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was launched, Argentina played a pioneering role in the development of the ideas that would inspire Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and Indonesian president Sukarno, among other leaders of what would be called the Third World in that endeavor.

Juan Domingo Perón’s rise to the presidency in 1946 coincided with the end of World War II and the subsequent start of the Cold War. It was in this setting that Perón drew up the guidelines for his foreign policy under the doctrine known as the Third Position. In a divided world, in which countries aligned with the United States in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or with the United Socialist Soviet Republic (USSR) in the Warsaw Pact, Perón did not understand the Third Position as an equidistant or intermediate policy between two poles of power but as a proposal to overcome two antagonistic ideologies.

On July 6, 1947, Perón delivered a speech that went down in history as the birth of the Third Position. As Fermín Chávez writes: “[…] the Argentine president sent a message to all the peoples of the world, through more than 1,000 radio stations (including the BBC in London), in which he set out objectives of economic cooperation and world peace, discarding capitalist and totalitarian extremisms, whether they were from the right or the left” (Chávez 1985).

The core of this non-alignment or Third Position, as its name implies, is the rejection of bloc politics. It is not a question of denying the existence of these blocs. The problem is that this policy responds to the interests of the great powers.