Alejandro Álvarez Situated: Subaltern Modernities and Modernisms that Subvert

Abstract

Alejandro Álvarez's professional trajectory forces us to rethink the traditional modes of reading and writing the history of international law. Álvarez was central to the development of modern international law. He also happened to be a Latin American international lawyer. Should we interpret his work and life against the background of the intellectual and political history of Europe? Are the contexts that relate to the crisis of the European balance of power or the rise of nationalism the only ones that explain the emergence of a modern international legal discourse? This article situates Álvarez's scholarship within the intellectual, economic, and political history of Latin America. Interpreting Álvarez in the context of a genealogy of modernist Latin American thinkers illustrates the extent to which his work was part of a broader regional effort to appropriate European cultural artefacts in ways that granted them both a cosmopolitan and a distinctively Latin American character. Álvarez's modernism reinvented the meaning and uses of international law as a strategic foreign-policy tool in the interest of Latin American countries, a reinterpretation that contributed also to the construction of a Latin American identity and thought.