Pan Americanism

Pan-Americanism PAN-AMERICANISM Pan-Americanism was a transnational movement advanced by prominent entrepreneurs, political leaders, and diplomats from throughout the Americas. It was firstly a US-led policy promoting hemispheric economic integration, and secondarily a forum before 1880, then again after 1930, for the criticism of US imperialism by Latin American diplomats. Its legacy persists in institutions like the Pan American Health Organization, the Pan American Institute of Geography and History, and the Pan American Games. Even so, the movement’s significance diminished quickly after World War II (1939– 1945) with the de facto replacement of the Pan American Union by the Organization of American States (OAS) as the Washington-based, hemisphere-wide cooperative governance body. THE FACE OF US DOMINANCE IN THE AMERICAS Pan-Americanism was conceived in the late nineteenth century as a project to organize the republics of the Western Hemisphere into cooperative bodies—the Pan American Union and its affiliates. Though imagined and developed as a multilateral organization, in practice the Pan American Union was financed and dominated by American political leaders and bureaucrats. While cast as a movement for the promotion of international cooperation and cultural exchange, Pan-Americanism was always defined by an American agenda for US-led political, strategic, and particularly commercial and financial stability in the hemisphere. From the 1880s through 1948, Pan-Americanism was the friendly face of US dominance in the Americas and a movement whose first objective was hemispheric economic calm. The latter was to dovetail with new opportunities for US business and financial expansion in the region, facilitated in part by economic stability in the United States after 1895 and by Progressive Era regulations that permitted expanded international roles for American banks. The Monroe Doctrine and the Congress of Panama (1826) were precursors of Pan-Americanism, as were a series of nineteenth-century meetings of Latin American diplomats. The latter often incorporated an anti-US organizing theme; at the Congress of Santiago (1856), for example, Peru, Chile, and Ecuador signed a defense pact anticipating possible US military action. In 1881 US secretary of state James G. Blaine (1830–1893) began to characterize Pan-Americanism as the facilitation of inter-American trade and cultural cooperation. He proposed the First Conference of American States (1889–1890), whose objectives integrated ambiguous notions of peace and cooperation with more sharply defined goals for the standardization and simplification of inter-American trade terms. The latter would form the 820 backdrop for Pan-Americanism through World War II. The dichotomy between lofty ideals of peace and a workaday agenda for the elimination of trade and financial barriers caught the eye of Latin American nationalists, including José Martí (1853–1895), who attacked Pan-Americanism as a smoke screen for US imperial expansion. The First Conference created the Commercial Bureau of American States (later renamed the Pan American Union). Latin American delegates made the Second (1901–1902) and Third (1906) Conferences of American States forums for criticizing US military intervention in the region, but stopped short of any action against Washington. Seeking distance from President William Howard Taft’s (1857–1930) dollar diplomacy, the administration of President Woodrow Wilson (1856– 1924) revived Blaine’s association of benign cultural ties with commercial cooperation in a Pan-American ideal. In the end, though, Pan-Americanism and the US-funded Pan American Union, which oversaw the conferences of American states and other inter-American meetings, including the First Pan American Financial Conference, continued to stress the normalization and stabilization of economic relations in the hemisphere. LEO STANTON ROWE From 1920 to 1946, Leo Stanton Rowe (1871–1946), a former US assistant secretary of the treasury, loomed large in shaping Pan-Americanism as director of the Pan American Union. His ideas dovetailed with the growing tendency of the US government to trumpet Pan-American cooperation while stressing a more subtle emphasis on economic cooperation. Rowe found Latin America backward and saw Pan-Americanism as a means to modernize the region. Rowe’s vision for the Americas was at once culturally sensitive, ethnocentric, a reflection of US Progressive Era ideals, and a program of US investment in Latin America toward what he believed would be economic development throughout the hemisphere. He had a missionary faith in Pan-Americanism that highlighted a shared commitment to US democratic values. PEACE AND SECURITY The Clark Memorandum (1928) and the Good Neighbor Policy made priorities in US foreign relations of the cooperation and peace components of PanAmericanism values. They helped prompt several key Pan-American achievements in the 1930s, including the nonintervention resolution passed at the Seventh Conference of American States (1933) criticizing the interference of one state in the internal affairs of a second. Anticipating both World War II and the 1947 AMERICA IN THE WORLD, 1776 TO THE PRESENT COPYRIGHT 2016 Charles Scribner?s Sons, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning WCN 02-200-210 Paris Peace Conference (1919) Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, a bulwark of the US-led Cold War alliance in the Americas, diplomats at the Eighth Conference of American States (1938) declared continental solidarity in the event of war. At the same time, the new emphasis on mutual defence agreements between 1938 and 1945 under the umbrella of Pan-Americanism, along with the 1947–1948 founding of the OAS as a security-based alliance, helped marginalize Pan-Americanism in US foreign policy, which became more concerned with global strategy, warfare, and the purported communist menace. Weis, W. Michael. “The Twilight of Pan-Americanism: The Alliance for Progress, Neo-colonialism, and Non-alignment in Brazil, 1961–1964.” International History Review 23, 2 (2001): 322–344. David M. K. Sheinin Professor Trent University PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE (1919) Spellacy, Amy. “Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor: Geography, Globalism, and Pan-Americanism during the 1940s.” American Studies 47, 2 (2006): 39–66. On January 18, 1919, representatives of more than twenty-five nations convened in Paris for a peace conference. Charged with bringing an end to World War I, the conference represented the greatest diplomatic assembly in world history. At the conference, national delegates wrote the treaties that restored peace, most notably the Treaty of Versailles, and for the first time, recognized the entire planet as one interconnected space. In doing so, the Paris Peace Conference set forth many of the themes that would shape world history during the twentieth century. Although representatives from many countries attended, the conference was dominated by the “Big Four”: Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States. Although all four wanted to create a durable peace while also punishing Germany for starting the war, they did not see eye to eye in all matters. The European powers, and French prime minister Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) in particular, wanted to deal with Germany harshly. France had suffered two German invasions in the last halfcentury and wanted to make sure Germany could not threaten France again. The Europeans blamed the war’s tremendous devastation, both human and material, on the Germans, arguing that Berlin was obligated to make good the damage it had caused. The European powers also wanted to fulfill diplomatic plans outlined in a series of secret treaties made before and during the war, such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), which divided the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France. The Americans, in contrast, tended to take a more idealistic view of the peace. In his “Fourteen Points” speech, President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) emphasized peace and reconciliation rather than victory and revenge, and he called for the global application of democratic principles and popular sovereignty. European leaders like David Lloyd George (1863–1945) of Britain, Vittorio Orlando (1860–1952) of Italy, and especially Clemenceau considered Wilson naive, and they fought for concrete gains at Germany’s expense. Wilson’s message was tremendously popular in Europe and elsewhere in the world, however. Many considered it a clarion call for peace and liberty. AMERICA IN THE WORLD, 1776 TO THE PRESENT 821 POST-1950 After 1950, Pan-Americanism survived as a more culturally and socially oriented remnant of Blaine’s original ideal, at some distance from the commercial, financial, and political priorities in US foreign relations. The Inter-American Indian Institute was a pioneer in advancing first peoples’ rights. The Pan American Health Organization played a crucial role in the control of malaria, Chagas, and other infectious diseases. Perhaps the most important element of late twentiethcentury Pan-Americanism was the work of the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights and the InterAmerican Human Rights Commission. Each reflected the emergence of human rights as a US foreign policy priority after 1975, while remaining outside the influence of US foreign policy makers and breaking new ground in the investigation and prosecution of human rights violators from periods of dictatorial rule. These bodies helped make international pariahs of brutal military officers and offered legal precedent for the prosecution of Latin American human rights violators in US federal courts. SEE ALSO Mexico; Monroe Doctrine (1823); South America BIBLIOGRAPHY Berger, Mark T. “‘Toward Our Common American Destiny?’ Hemispheric History and Pan American Politics in the Twentieth Century.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 8, 1 (2002): 57–88. Coates, Benjamin A. “The Pan-American Lobbyist: William Eleroy Curtis and U.S. Empire, 1884–1899.” Diplomatic History 38, 1 (2014): 22–48. González, Robert Alexander. Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Sheinin, David M. K., ed. Beyond the Ideal: Pan Americanism in Inter-American Affairs. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000. COPYRIGHT 2016 Charles Scribner?s Sons, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning WCN 02-200-210