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

JUAN PABLO SCARFI

Nueva York

Exposición; Talk at Columbia University, Institute of Latin American Studies; 2011

Columbia University, Institute of Latin American Studies

In this paper, I will explore the resonances of the Monroe Doctrine during the golden years of Pan-Americanism, a period of close cooperation and solidarity between the US and Latin America. Approaching its 100 years anniversary, the original declaration of US President James Monroe (1823) acquired a crucial hemispheric significance. Although it proved to be basically a rhetorical principle all over the nineteenth century, at the turning of the century it adopted more flexible and wider meanings for two main reasons. First, the blockade of Venezuela by Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom in 1902 received the intellectual response of the Latin American international lawyer, Luis María Drago (Argentina). Drago sent a letter to Washington D.C., stating that the blockade of Venezuela violated the basic principles outlined in the Monroe Doctrine. The so-called Drago Doctrine, originally conceived as a continental principle, intended to protect weak countries from the military interventions of great world powers for the purposes of collecting public debts. Second, the so-called Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine (1904) formalized US protectorate and control over Central American countries on the basis of a realist interpretation of the doctrine. Providing an insight into the intellectual history of the Monroe Doctrine, I will analyse how it was interpreted by leading political and intellectual figures in the Americas. Although US Secretaries of State Elihu Root and Charles Evans Hughes defended its legitimacy as a US political principle, Drago and Alejandro Alvarez (Chile) interpreted it instead respectively as a continental principle of diplomacy and international law. Therefore, in this Pan American period, the Monroe Doctrine turned to be discussed in a wider hemispheric context. I will argue that these continental discussions over its meaning set, in turn, the basis of a new Pan-American language of international law through which the US legitimized its hemispheric leadership.