Pan-American Designs and Latin American Resistance: The Projects for a Hemispheric Legal Order and a Latin American Union, 1911-1928

JUAN PABLO SCARFI

Washington D.C.

Congreso; Latin American Studies Association (LASA) 2013; 2013

Latin American Studies Association

Since the emergence of the so-called Pan-American movement (1889) and the establishment of the Pan American Union (1910), a series of U.S.-led hegemonic initiatives to promote peace and international law began to emerge in the Americas. Though these early projects for a hemispheric legal order found some resistance in Latin America, the Latin American legal and diplomatic elites tended initially to engage with such initiatives. Yet by the 1920s, especially since the so-called Latin American University Reform, a wide range of critical reactions and anti-Yankee ideals and projects of integration for a defensive Latin American block arose in Latin America. These two intellectual and diplomatic imaginaries famously confronted with each other at the Six Pan-American Conference (1928). The Latin American and U.S. historiographies have portrayed these common and contending ideals of hemispheric order differently, referring respectively to the notions of "anti-imperialism" and "anti-Americanism". In this paper I propose to review these categories in order to shed some light on the emergence and encounters between these two rival projects for the Americas. These two ideologies and projects for the construction of a hemispheric order and integration, so I will argue, were the result of an intellectual and diplomatic dialogue, driven by tensions, reactions and confluences, between the U.S. and Latin America that deserves to be genealogically reconstructed and examined through the prism of a hemispheric intellectual history.