Your Americanism and mine: Americanism and anti-Americanism in the Americas

TY - JOUR

T1 - Your Americanism and mine

T2 - Americanism and anti-Americanism in the Americas

AU - Grandin, Greg

N1 - Funding Information: Greg Grandin is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of The Blood of Guatemala (Duke, 2000), which won the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award for best book on Latin America; The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago, 2004); and Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan, 2006). He has served on the United Nations Truth Commission for Guatemala, and has published in the Hispanic American Historical Review, the AHR, Harper’s, The Nation, the Boston Review, and the New York Times. He has most recently been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, Ryskamp Fellowship Program. Funding Information: nationals were unduly denied justice or when a state acted irresponsibly. “Let us face the facts,” said Secretary of State Hughes at the 1928 Havana conference; “the difficulty . . . in any one of the American Republics, is not of any external aggression. It is an internal difficulty . . . What are we going to do when government breaks down and American citizens are in danger of their lives? . . . Now it is a principle of international law that in such a case a government is fully justified in taking action.”50 In response, Latin American legal theorists, in communication with liberal internationalists in the United States, began well before the establishment of the League of Nations or the codification of much international law to challenge the very principles that underwrote Great Power diplomacy. The most famous of those jurists, the Chilean Alejandro Alvarez, began to advocate for what he called “American International Law.” In place of the excessive “individualism” implied in the notion of state sovereignty, Alvarez and others began to insist that nations recognize the importance and legitimacy of values such as interdependence, cooperation, and solidarity in international relations. Alvarez was a firm believer in American exceptionalism, arguing that the common experience of the Americas—constitutional, republican, liberal, democratic, egalitarian, founded on the ideal of popular suffrage— provided a unique opportunity to forge a new system of hemispheric governance, one built on multilateral cooperation and mutual dependence.51Of course, the ideal of absolute nonintervention, based as it was on the principle of sovereignty, contradicted the notion of interdependence. Latin American jurists resolved this contradiction by proposing the establishment of pan-American institutions that could mediate conflicts among American nations, as opposed to mandated arbitration at the Hague, which, they argued, was biased toward European and U.S. interests. With the financial support of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Alvarez founded the American Institute of International Law in 1911, establishing franchises in each of America’s twenty-one republics. The institute, along with a series of ad hoc pan-American committees, advocated not just for the codification of international law but for “judicial progress,” that is, for the creation of new precedents that would legitimate the principles of “American International Law.”52 Washington largely opposed these efforts. Not wanting to give up the right to intervention or to be tied down by Lilliputian regional restraints, its representatives objected to legal innovation as well as the notion of American exceptionalism: “There can no more be an American international law,” argued William Henry Tres-cot, the U.S. representative to the 1889 Pan-American Conference, “than there can be an English, a German, or a Prussian international law. International law has an old and settled meaning. It is the common law of the civilized world, and was in active

PY - 2006/10

Y1 - 2006/10

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=33751514909&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=33751514909&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1086/ahr.111.4.1042

DO - 10.1086/ahr.111.4.1042

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:33751514909

SN - 0002-8762

VL - 111

SP - 1042

EP - 1066

JO - American Historical Review

JF - American Historical Review

IS - 4

ER -