The New Pan-Americanism and the Structuring of Inter-American Relations

Juan Pablo Scarfi, David M. K. Sheinin, Juan Pablo Scarfi, David M. K. Sheinin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000547320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'America Latina e dei Caraibi

What is Pan-Americanism? People have been struggling with that problem for over a century. Pan-Americanism is (and has been) an amalgam of diplomatic, political, economic, and cultural projects under the umbrella of hemispheric cooperation and housed institutionally in the Pan-American Union, and later the Organization of American States. But what made Pan-Americanism exceptional? The chapters in this volume suggest that Pan-Americanism played a central and lasting role in structuring inter-American relations, because of the ways in which the movement was reinvented over time, and because the actors who shaped it often redefined and redeployed the term. Through the twentieth century, new appropriations of Pan-Americanism structured, restructured, and redefined inter-American relations. Taken together, these chapters underscore two exciting new shifts in how scholars and others have come to understand Pan-Americanism and inter-American relations. First, Pan-Americanism is increasingly understood not simply as a diplomatic, commercial, and economic forum, but a movement that has included cultural exchange. Second, researchers, political leaders, and the media in several countries have traditionally conceived of Pan-Americanism as a mechanism of US expansionism. This volume reimagines Pan-Americanism as a movement built by actors from all corners of the Americas.

1 Imperial Pan-Americanism

Aida Rodríguez

DOI: 10.4324/9781003252672-2

There are two ways of looking at Pan-Americanism as informal imperial expansion. Pan-Americanism and its attendant objectives of commercial and financial investment advancement can be seen as a US response to late nineteenth-century overproduction in the US industrial sector and an imperative to ship surplus production overseas. In addition, Pan-Americanism underscored a predominant US racial and cultural discourse. The putative inferiority of Latin Americans stood as a basis in the United States for US hegemony in the hemisphere, with Pan-Americanism as an organizing framework for an ordered inter-American system.¹ After 1889, Washington promoted hegemonic Pan-Americanism as a weapon of realpolitik to reaffirm its positions as a local, regional, hemispheric, and global power. By contrast, a radical Pan-Americanism emerged in the Americas to counter the US hegemonic narrative, rooted in the history of anti-colonial struggle that opposed the US attempts to undermine Latin American sovereignty. Drawing on a common Latin American history of US exploitation, radical Pan-Americanism focused on greater economic, cultural, political and infrastructural cooperation that might overcome inequality and political oppression.² That version of the movement held little sway.

In 1823, responding to Venezuelan independence leader Simón Bolívar´s initiatives to establish a union of newly independent countries in the Americas, the US presented itself unilaterally as the guarantor of independence and integrity in the Americas. US political leaders launched a narrative of shared struggle from North to South America against European colonialism. They often adopted Bolívar as a symbol of early Pan-Americanism,³ with particular reference to his Jamaica Letter (1815) asserting that those in the Americas were different from Europeans and should free themselves from the absolutism of the Old World.⁴ A congress of nations was held in Panama in 1826 to consolidate a stable confederation of states in the hemisphere and to eliminate the threat of former colonial powers reasserting control in the region.⁵ Participant states were limited at first to the new Spanish-American republics.⁶ But Francisco de Paula Santander, vice-president of Gran Colombia, subsequently invited the United States to send delegates. Congress of Panama attendees agreed that their governments would continue meeting every two years to maintain good international ties, promote peace and conciliation, and consolidate treaties, where useful. Tangible results from this moment of Pan-American enthusiasm were almost nil, though the Congress of Panama functioned as a historical and mythological foundational episode for Pan-Americanism.

As elites and national governments consolidated power domestically in many countries, the movement languished for decades. After the US Civil War, US business, military, and political leaders began to link Pan-Americanism to opportunities stemming from exponential industrial growth in the United States and an anticipated opportunity to convince Latin American countries to align themselves with US interests.⁷ After 1880, the term “Pan-American” was always controversial, and associated by many with US imperialism. In fact, the evolution of formal conference nomenclature reflected that legacy. A series of inter-American meetings held by South American countries between 1847 and 1888 were called “American Conferences.” Those initiated by the US in 1889—the flagship enterprise of the Pan-American movement—were officially called “International Conferences of American States.” But this nomenclature soon became interchangeable with the popular term “Pan-American Conferences.” The term “Inter-American Conference” was introduced in the 1930s,⁸ as an antidote to the word “Pan-American,” increasingly associated with US imperialism. New York City business and political leaders played an important role in promoting this imagined Pan-American community, fashioning the city a Pan-American trade center in order to attract Latin American industry, naming Sixth Avenue as the Avenue of the Americas, and planning for (but never completing) the construction of twenty-one skyscrapers, one for each Latin American country.⁹

The journalist William E. Curtis, a director of the Bureau of American Republics, saw US interests as linked to the First Pan-American Conference (or First International Conference of American States, which he co-organized).¹⁰ Curtis promoted an image of Latin America as backward but with the potential to modernize. This and other manifestations of imperial Pan-Americanism developed a hemispheric civilizing mission based on a putative Latin American inferiority and a US potential for civilizing uplift in the Americas.¹¹ The combination of US superiority notions and the supposed equality of all the hemispheric countries quickly became an ongoing Pan-American paradox. The word “Pan-Americanism” was first used in the New York Evening Post on September 7, 1889.¹² It heralded an ambiguous solidarity and a community of hemispheric interests conditioned by geography and a supposedly unique cultural community. The US assigned itself the leading role in inter-American affairs.

The First International Conference of American States (Washington, DC, 1889–90) aimed to promote peace and trade. The main driving force was US Secretary of State James G. Blaine, who called for trust, respect, friendship, and equality under the banner of “America for the Americans.” At the conference, US delegates won agreement on an arbitration treaty that remained unratified. The delegations tried to create a customs union, but it was blocked by Argentina over doubts about a loss of national sovereignty, and protectionism in the US Congress.¹³ The key success was the formation of the International Bureau of American Republics, on which the US Secretary of State would sit a permanent, influence wielding board member. Delegates also proposed building a library dedicated to gathering historical, geographical, and literary works, as well as official government documents pertaining to the history of the Americas. At the First Conference, varied positions on regional unity became evident. US Americans linked international cooperation to burgeoning US economic predominance and to creating a structure to arbitrate potential trade and financial disputes. In Latin America, however, there was a commitment to continental cooperation, minus the leadership of the United States or any nation.¹⁴

The Second Pan-American Conference (Mexico City, 1902) came in a context of the rapid advance of US military interventionism in the Caribbean. In 1902, the Argentine jurist and foreign minister, Luis María Drago, formulated the Drago Doctrine,¹⁵ following a US refusal to intervene against a European naval blockade of Venezuelan ports over unpaid Venezuelan government debt. To Drago and others, this seemed a US abrogation of the Monroe Doctrine and Washington’s failure to express hemispheric solidarity against European powers. The Drago Doctrine asserted that the use of military force for debt collection was illicit until after an effort at arbitration had been made and unless the debtor nation had made resolution of the conflict unattainable.¹⁶ The Doctrine called for a treaty that would establish the right of countries to non-intervention by a foreign power. Several Latin American governments tried to include this principle in Pan-American agreements; the precept had little echo in the United States, which blocked its advance. At the Second Pan-American Meeting, the US delegates agreed that the use of force should be eliminated in debt collection, save when debtor countries refused to submit to international arbitration. There was a first effort at the Second Conference to codify international law in the Americas and measures were put in place for the arbitration of financial claims. Delegates expanded the economic functions of the Bureau of American Republics and the word “commercial” was removed from the title of the organization, which became “The International Bureau of American Republics.”¹⁷

By the Third Pan-American Conference (Rio de Janeiro, 1906) it was clear to many that the greatest threat to the independence of Latin American countries came not from Europe, but from the US, which had established protectorates in Cuba and Panama and had incorporated Puerto Rico after the Spanish–American-Cuban War (1898). Reacting to the Drago Doctrine, in 1904 US President Theodore Roosevelt formulated the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine; if a Latin American or Caribbean country in what Roosevelt considered the US strategic sphere of influence threatened the rights or property of US citizens or businesses, the US government would be obliged to intervene in the internal affairs of the “errant” country. This new and aggressive foreign policy applied not only to the former Spanish possessions; between 1900 and 1917 the US army intervened militarily in Cuba, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Haiti.¹⁸

The United States reserved for itself the role of a continental police force, legitimizing military intervention on the pretext of preventing European incursions into the hemisphere and presupposing the inability of Latin American nations to manage their own affairs. In the years prior to World War I, the United States violently expanded its interests throughout the Caribbean and Central America. In 1905, the US took over the financial control of the Dominican Republic to guarantee the regular payment of the foreign debt to creditors and to achieve strategic advantage in the region.¹⁹ So-called “Dollar Diplomacy” became an element of informal US imperialism, non-negotiable within the Pan-American movement.²⁰ The Third Pan-American Conference was held at the Palácio do Brasil, renamed at the time the “Palác...