Cooperation and Hegemony in US-Latin American Relations

Though it has been a key underlying feature in the history and histonography of US-Latin American relations, the Western Hemisphere idea has received very little attention. Originally formulated by Thomas Jefferson in 1813 and later recovered by historian Arthur Whitaker, it is the idea that “the peoples of this [the Western] Hemisphere stand in a special relationship to one another which sets them apart from the rest of the world.”¹ Despite the recent revival of global history and comparative American and hemispheric studies, this category has long been dismissed, forgotten, or even perhaps misinterpreted. This book revisits and problematizes this notion and shows that it can be conceived as an illuminating and flexible conceptual framework through which we can gain new and enriching insights into the history and politics of US-Latin American relations, especially into the long-standing tensions between hegemony and cooperation in this relationship.

To those familiar with the extensive scholarly literature on international relations, the hommage contained in the title of this chapter will be readily apparent. Almost 40 years ago, Stanley Hoffmann argued that academic International Relations, “born and raised in America,” had been crippled at birth. “Without the possibilities that exist in this country,” he declared, “the discipline might well have avoided being stunted, [but] only by avoiding being born.”¹

In one of three 2012 presidential debates, US Republican candidate Mitt Romney argued Latin America was a region that the United States could do business with. “Latin America’s economy is almost as big as the economy of China … Latin America is a huge opportunity for us—time zone, language opportunities.”¹ And he left it at that. No other reference to Latin America came up in an hour-and-a-half-long debate on US foreign policy. The most that was said about the region was that it collectively had a large economy, was vaguely in the same part of the globe, and had ambiguous linguistic potential. Romney at least mentioned Latin America, which is more than President Barack Obama did. And yet these two presidential hopefuls cannot be blamed singlehandedly for US neglect of the region. A glance at recently published works on US Grand Strategy illustrates a more widespread pattern: at best, Latin America, and the Americas, or the notion of a Western Hemispheric community, appear as brief asides or footnotes.² With the “War on Terror” and Asia consuming increasing attention since 2001, policymakers and international relations experts appear to have forgotten to look South.

Standing before a meeting of the American Luncheon Club in London in 1916, the Chilean Minister to Great Britain, Agustín Edwards, offered his thoughts on Pan-Americanism. “I am an American,” he began, “a South American, and I have won my spurs as a businessman.”¹ In this, Edwards targeted the commerce-minded men that were the majority of his listeners and granted authority to the statement that followed. Edwards spoke with more than the authority of a businessman. He was the founder of one of the most important newspapers in Chile (El Mercurio, Santiago edition), an alumnus of Chile’s National Congress, a former Chilean foreign minister, and a scion of one of the wealthiest and most influential families within Chile’s oligarchy. In sum, he was closely attuned to the attitudes of his government and the ruling elite in Chile. Within this context, Edwards made a bold claim: Argentina, Brazil, Chile (the so-called ABC nations) and the United States were called to be the “vanguard of Pan-Americanism.” This may have been merely an example of Edwards’ rhetorical exuberance (he also saddled the Americas with the epithet, “the reservoir of humanity”). Yet Edwards’s statement was a genuine reflection of Chile’s official foreign policy.

In an essay on the origins of the Western Hemisphere idea, Arthur Whitaker proposed that the Americas were united by a special relationship—“a large cluster of related ideas”—whose similarity was defined in opposition to Europe.¹ This special relationship was based on the belief that the American nations shared an historical experience substantially different from that of Western Europe. Paradoxically, the idea of a continent apart was European in origin. At first, America appeared as a “New World” to the extent that it was a newly discovered continental mass, whose parts were deemed congruent and similar. The intellectual, commercial, and political revolutions of the eighteenth century deepened the separation America/Europe until this tension became antithetical. From these radical transformations emerged a quite parochial form of nationalism—a sort of creole patriotism—that advocated belonging to Virginia, the River Plate, New Granada, or Peru. Only later, during the struggle for independence, Americans from north, center, and south started to develop an incipient sense of continental belonging and solidarity. Facing the menace of a monarchical Europe determined to recolonize the Americas, North and South Americans started to call themselves “Americans/Americanos,” and to consider their struggles part of a continental movement.

Since its inception in the 1880s, Pan-Americanism aimed to be a US policy of economic, legal, political, and intellectual cooperation toward Latin America. As such, it promoted the creation of continental institutions of cooperation and common values, and it claimed legitimacy as a continental policy. However, as David Sheinin has affirmed, “Pan Americanism has always been US-led, the friendly face of US dominance in the hemisphere.”¹ In his pioneering book, The Western Hemisphere Idea (1954), historian Arthur Whitaker associated the rise of modern Pan-Americanism in the first three decades of the twentieth century with the institutionalization of what he termed the Western Hemisphere idea, the continental conception according to which “the peoples of this Hemisphere stand in a special relationship to one another which sets them apart from the rest of the world.”² While Pan-Americanism contributed significantly to legitimizing the Western Hemisphere idea, Whitaker argued that between 1904 and 1929 there was a conflict between the hegemony of the United States in the Pan-American movement and the critical reactions that the subordination of the movement to the interests of the United States generated in Latin America. This chapter revisits this foundational and critical Pan-American moment, exploring its continental inception in the field of international law in the Americas. It thus explores the rise of American international law and Pan-American legal designs, the debates over intervention and nonintervention it provoked and their legacy for the Inter-American System.

The Inter-American Human Rights System (the IAHRS) has been an integral part of the regional institutional landscape of the Americas since the mid-twentieth century. The regional human rights system has evolved in the light of the specific conditions prevailing in the region. A progressive development of regional human rights jurisprudence is reflected in the way the system struggled in its adolescent form during the early period of the Cold War to promote human rights in the region and how it judged the political calculations of transitional governments. Such developments received a boost with the return to democratic rule in the region and in this sense the direction of the Inter-American System as a whole became bound up with the maintenance and progress of political democracy. But, of course, democratic rule as such is not a guarantee for the respect of human rights, as the system has turned its attention to the challenge of ensuring the quality of democratic rule. The system has established the legal obligation under regional and international jurisprudence of states to protect the rights of citizens, and in the light of the failure to do so, the international obligation to hold states accountable. The IAHRS, therefore, has gradually evolved into a transnationalized regime as the system has opened up space for transnational political activity.¹