Pan-American Legal Designs

Abstract

Since its inception in the 1880s, Pan-Americanism aimed to be a US policy of economic, legal, political, and intellectual cooperation toward Latin America. As such, it promoted the creation of continental institutions of cooperation and common values, and it claimed legitimacy as a continental policy. However, as David Sheinin has affirmed, “Pan Americanism has always been US-led, the friendly face of US dominance in the hemisphere.”1 In his pioneering book, The Western Hemisphere Idea (1954), historian Arthur Whitaker associated the rise of modern Pan-Americanism in the first three decades of the twentieth century with the institutionalization of what he termed the Western Hemisphere idea, the continental conception according to which “the peoples of this Hemisphere stand in a special relationship to one another which sets them apart from the rest of the world.”2 While Pan-Americanism contributed significantly to legitimizing the Western Hemisphere idea, Whitaker argued that between 1904 and 1929 there was a conflict between the hegemony of the United States in the Pan-American movement and the critical reactions that the subordination of the movement to the interests of the United States generated in Latin America. This chapter revisits this foundational and critical Pan-American moment, exploring its continental inception in the field of international law in the Americas. It thus explores the rise of American international law and Pan-American legal designs, the debates over intervention and nonintervention it provoked and their legacy for the Inter-American System.