Provincializing International Law: Latin American Legal Practices in the Era of Pan-Americanism, 1890-1933

JUAN PABLO SCARFI

Oxford

Seminario; Oxford University, Latin American History Seminar; 2014

University of Oxford, Latin American Centre

Long before the rise of dependency theory in the 1950s and 1960s, Latin Americans began to put forward a regional vision of world order through the language and practice of an emerging discipline, modern international law. The idea of provincializing international law sounds like an oxymoron: if international law becomes regionalized it loses its character and therefore it is no longer international law, and if international law is really international it cannot be regionalized. The controversy about the existence of a hemispheric or regional international law which arose in the 1880s could be interpreted as a symptom of the anxieties posed by the progressive assimilation of Latin America to a modern international legal order (an international society) dominated by European legal values and real power politics. Does Latin America have to adapt its legal doctrines to European practices and codes or does it have to produce a new body of legal rules and norms? There was even another question, does the region share common norms and legal values with the United States so that we could speak of an American international law? Whether in regional or hemispheric terms, Latin Americans sought to redefine the fundamentals of their international legal practices between 1890 and 1933. In order to explore the Latin American attempt to provincialize international law, I concentrate on the golden years of Pan-Americanism and more specifically on the trajectory of the American Institute of International Law, a Pan-American legal organization founded by the US and Chilean international lawyers James Brown Scott and Alejandro Alvarez and devoted to the construction, development and codification of American international law. The American Institute of International Law was financially supported by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Most of the Latin American figures I will mention throughout my presentation (Drago, Alvarez, Maurtua, Brum, Bustamante, Saavedra Lamas) were part of the American Institute of International Law. This attempt to provincialize international law succeeded to a certain extent, for it led to the rise of inter-American multilateralism. However, the scope of its success was partial and limited, since it also contributed to consolidating US hegemony, and extending or Pan-Americanizing conceptions of US exceptionalism to the Americas.