The Southern Cone and the Origins of Pan America, 1888–1933

Abstract

Set out in forthright style by US Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the misnamed Monroe Doctrine of 1823 asserted common interests between the United States and Latin America based on shared security and respect for independence. Adams condemned future European colonization in Latin America while urging that armed incursions by Europeans be treated as hostile acts against the United States. For a half century, Adams's principles remained lifeless and unheeded. Europeans flaunted the doctrine during episodes like the Anglo-French intervention in the Río de la Plata of 1845–47 and the 1862–67 Franco-Austrian occupation of Mexico.Decisive change, in which Pan-Americanism, the heir to the Monroe Doctrine, played a part, accompanied the Gilded Age and industrialization in the United States and new outward-looking liberal states in Latin America. Once almost confined to imported Cuban sugar and Mexican silver, US trade surged to an apotheosis in the late 1920s, epitomized by exported automobiles. Pan-Americanism originated in the late 1880s under the auspices of James G. Blaine, one of Adams's successors as US secretary of state, with support by entrepreneurs led by Andrew Carnegie, the titan of US industry. The movement developed the Monroe Doctrine's concerns with security into a quest for commercial dominance and for suzerainty camouflaged by altruism and philanthropy. If the United States gradually achieved its commercial goals, the political and ostensibly idealistic objectives of Pan-Americanism fell short. As noted by Mark J. Petersen, in the early 1930s the Argentine diplomat Carlos Saavedra Lamas dismissed the Pan-American movement as falling short, leaving it as little more than a contrived sentimental expression of solidarity.In analyzing Pan-Americanism between the 1880s and the mid-1930s, Petersen concentrates on Chile and Argentina. Although the two countries were geographically contiguous, striking differences between them found reflection in their engagement with Pan-Americanism. Chileans maneuvered, in part through Pan-American channels, to avoid territorial concessions to Peru and Bolivia affecting control over the Atacama nitrate fields wrested during the 1879–83 War of the Pacific. When copper mining developed after 1900, Chileans adopted pro-Pan-Americanism as a public relations device to attract US mining investment. The dismal legacies of that policy appeared during the Great Depression, when plunging copper prices induced catastrophic economic collapse, and for a second time during the early 1970s, in the overthrow of constitutional government by a military dictatorship.Thanks to European trade and British-built railroads, Argentina remained the richest Latin American nation during Pan-Americanism's first half century. Despite the efforts of Pan-Americanists, US-Argentine relations remained fractious. Argentines showed little support for Pan-Americanism on its inception in 1890. In 1917, during World War I, Argentina refused to follow the United States into declaring war on the Central powers. A decade later, during the postwar, recriminations erupted between the two countries over Argentina's lack of access to US markets for meat and grains; meanwhile, the Argentine market became a magnet for American exporters, whose share of the Argentine import trade eventually surpassed that of all competitors. By the late 1920s, Argentina's trade imbalance and US dollar shortages contributed to outbreaks of anti-Americanism, initially during the 1928 Argentine election, in a populist campaign against Standard Oil, and then in 1929–33, in the form of support for a discriminatory pro-British bilateral trade treaty. Throughout such controversies, Pan-Americanism maintained an ineffectual background presence.While noting the principal issues affecting relations between the United States on one side and Chile and Argentina on the other, Petersen relegates these issues to the background. His index widely references items such as “trade” and “tariffs” but makes too few references to the leading constituents of trade from Chile and Argentina respectively affecting bilateral ties with the United States. While the author recognizes the standard critique of Pan-Americanism as imperialism decked in rhetoric and paternalism, this issue too remains incidental to his discussion. The book's positive features include a good synopsis of the birth of Pan-Americanism in 1889 under Blaine's auspices. At that time Roque Sáenz Peña, Argentine delegate to the First International Conference of American States, rejected calls for a customs union and counterproposed internal Latin American ties that he called americanismo. Early aspirations for de facto US political control ceded to the less ambitious pursuit of intermittent diplomatic leadership and the creation of networks of cultural exchange. Pan-Americanism left positive marks in fields including international law and medicine while contributing to a continental women's movement with accomplishments in education.Petersen demonstrates expertise in many topics of Chilean and Argentine history but fails to integrate Pan-Americanism with them: too commonly, the movement surfaces in his text as a digression into side issues. In all, The Southern Cone and the Origins of Pan America, 1888–1933 represents a solid discussion of the cultural and diplomatic features of Pan-Americanism set alongside semicompartmentalized historical discussions of Chile and Argentina.