Pan-American Conceptions of the Monroe Doctrine: From a US National Doctrine to a Hemispheric Principle for the Americas, 1902-1923

JUAN PABLO SCARFI

Cambridge

Conferencia; POLIS PhD Conference, 2010; 2010

University of Cambridge, Department of Politics and International Studies

In this paper I have attempted to analyse the importance of the Monroe Doctrine in the institutionalization of an American international law for the continent, and in the construction of a legitimate U.S. hemispheric leadership in the Americas in the golden years of Pan-Americanism. This period has been described as a phase of solidarity and cooperation in the Americas. I have done so exploring the intellectual and hemispheric debates over its meaning and scope among US and Latin American political and intellectual figures. Those figures were US President Theodore Roosevelt, Secretaries of State Elihu Root (1905-1909), Charles Evans Hughes (1921-1925), US jurist James Brown Scott, the Argentine jurist and Minister of Foreign Affairs Luis Maria Drago, and the Chilean jurist Alejandro Alvarez. On the grounds of the original flexibility of the Monroe Doctrine since first enunciated in 1823, I discuss how its meaning and scope was at stake in the Pan-American period to the extent that it was shape and re-shaped, defined and re-defined. It is worth presenting this question graphically: Its meaning shifted from a political and self-defensive doctrine to an international law principle. Its scope oscillated from a national U.S. declaration to a hemispheric principle of non-intervention. All in all, the main tendency of these oscillations, as suggested in the title of my paper, was from a national political doctrine to a hemispheric international law principle. To explore these changes I have drawn on the approach of Michel Foucault to the understanding of the relations between power and knowledge, and the notion of legitimacy, as proposed by Max Weber. One of my main hypotheses is that defining and redefining the meaning and scope of the Monroe Doctrine in the period of Pan-Americanism involved relations of power/knowledge/legitimacy in the Americas.