Between Regional Bolivarianism and Hemispheric Monroism: Contending Languages of Modern International Law in Latin America, 1880-1920

JUAN PABLO SCARFI

Cambridge

Conferencia; Cambridge Conf.: Frontiers in Political Thought: Non-Western, International and Global; 2014

University of Cambridge

Though Latin America cannot be regarded as a mainstream part of the West, it seems difficult to place the region within what is often called the Rest, the Non-Western World or the Global South. The place of the region within these dichotomies has been always ambivalent, since the very idea of Latin America was conceived in the mid-nineteenth century in France. As regards to political thought and international political and legal thought, this ambivalence becomes even more striking. In this paper, I seek to assess the contribution of Latin America to international legal thought in the context of the formation and consolidation of Latin American states and the development of the Pan-American movement from 1880 to the end of the First World War. The paper concentrates on the different hemispheric invocations of the idea of American international law, exploring the legal contributions of Vicente Quesada (Argentina), Luis María Drago (Argentina) and Alejandro Alvarez (Chile). Drawing on a sociological approach to intellectual history and the sociology of the legal field, I will argue that contradictory legal aspirations and languages were invoked: on the one hand, an idea of Latin American international law and defensive regionalism, that is, Latin America in opposition to U.S. supremacy in the Western Hemisphere and, on the other hand, the concept of American international law and hemispheric Monroism, that is, the idea of a shared hemispheric multilateral language based on ideas of U.S. political and legal exceptionalism and continental leadership.