In many Latin American countries, criticism and even hatred of the USA is widespread. At the same time, the yearly convoy of migrant caravans demonstrates how the colossus in the North is a dream destination in the minds of many Latin Americans. What are the historical roots of this ambivalent and complicated perception? Could this perception already be observed as a reaction to the speech of James Monroe on December 2, 1823, in which the U.S. president declared implicitly the Americas from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego to be a U.S. sphere of influence? On the other hand, what transatlantic references to Monroe’s and other visions of the Americas can be identified over the last 200 years? The 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine provided an ideal occasion to grasp historically the spatial patterns of order in which people in the Americas have learned to interpret the continent they live in.
The bilingual conference examined various visions of the Americas conceived in the 1820s. In this decade, a completely new situation had arisen in the Americas after the end of the Spanish colonial empire and the emancipation of Brazil from Portugal. The conference went far beyond the 1820s, discussing the political, cultural, and social contexts of the visions of America and seeking to analyze their long-term effects. In his introduction, CARLOS ALBERTO HAAS (Munich) developed three guiding questions. First, he suggested analyzing references to the visions of the Americas globally and considering how they interacted with developments in other regions. Second, to provide a social-historical counterweight to questions of political history and the history of ideas, he asked who the visions of the Americas were addressed to. Finally, Haas noted the connection between visions of the Americas and various models of order such as monarchism, republicanism, liberalism, conservatism, and the role of modern nation-state within this context.
The event addressed these questions in three panels: firstly “The End of The Old Order: Revolutions in the Americas”, secondly “The 1820s as a formative period of the Americas?” and thirdly “America's Backyard. The Monroe Doctrine in the 20th century”. VOLKER DEPKAT (Regensburg) stressed the significance of researching socially constructed systems of meaning, and the notions of identity in foreign policy. He raised the American ideology that perceives the experiment of liberty in the U.S. as exceptional as a key example. Depkat pointed out that American exceptionalism motivated, guided, and justified U.S. foreign policy in the Early Republic and influenced the formulation of the Monroe Doctrine. The question of what kind of foreign policy would stabilize and perpetuate American democracy – as well as the way of life it was built on – triggered intense debates on the direction of U.S. foreign policy and the ‘essence’ of post-revolutionary American identity. The Monroe Doctrine combined a policy on non-entanglement in European affairs with hegemonic claims upon the whole Western hemisphere.
In his paper about the success of the Black Revolution in Haiti in 1791-94, OLIVER GLIECH (Berlin) dealt with the impact of different notions of liberty among Haitian black plantation workers on the United States. More specifically, Gliech examined who was actually considered the subject of freedom in the Americas. Haiti's victory over slavery sent shockwaves throughout the American hemisphere, leading to black insurrections in other countries which stirred fear in states with economies dependent on slave labor. This fear, together with reports of violence against white colonists in Haiti, led U.S. governments to distrust Haitian policies and refuse to recognize its sovereignty. Gliech also described in detail how the Black Revolution in Haiti fostered the emigration of waves of planters to the Southern United States, while attracted Afro-American immigrants to the island at the same time.
XIOMARA AVENDAÑO ROJAS (El Salvador) investigated the plans to establish a “moderate” monarchy in Spanish America to represent and defend Spanish interests on the continent. After the Iguala Plan by Agustin de Iturbide failed in 1823, the provinces of the late Captaincy General of Guatemala, faced with British occupation in the Caribbean, called themselves the Federal Republic of Central America and recognized the United States as a necessary ally. The Monroe Doctrine rendered the function of the U.S. as a potential supporter useless though, as the Monroe administration refused to intervene in territories already occupied by European powers. Only after interest in trade and free navigation in Central America had arisen by 1825 did the U.S. change their view towards the isthmus countries, adopting a “peacekeeping” role in the area. In doing so, they cooperated with Central American elites for the first time – it would not be their last.
Taking a transatlantic perspective, MILAGROS MARTÍNEZ-FLENER (Castellón) talked about the position of Austria in relation to the independence of Spanish America. The US’ decision to recognize newly independent Latin American countries confronted European empires with the dimensions of the Monroe Doctrine. This stance put the U.S. at odds with European powers, who rejected the recognition of these new nations as a threat to the old order and the principle of dynastical legitimacy. Austria's chancellor Metternich believed that such recognition would set a dangerous precedent. Furthermore, he was convinced that the diplomatic decisions of the US in the former colonies only camouflaged their desire to increase their economic power. Metternich feared that new revolutionary ideas would spill over from the Americas to post-Napoleonic Europe.
The immediate international reactions to the Monroe Doctrine were discussed by (THORSTEN KATHKE (Mainz) with a special focus on its practicability. The doctrine was carefully articulated to also represent British interests, as the U.S. lacked military power to prevent British intervention in the region. Kathke also considered the Falklands (Malvinas) Crisis (1831-1833) as the first test of the new policy, in which the United States ostensibly intervened on the side of Great Britain. This went against the spirit (if not the very words) of the Monroe Doctrine, at least in the eyes of many South American observers. Here elements of power politics, economic interests, and expediency influenced political decisions, factors that would continue to dominate the interpretation of the doctrine throughout the years.
A second significant vision of the Americas was then discussed by URSULA PRUTSCH (Munich). Prutsch explored the proceedings and results of the Pan-American Congress of 1826, proposed by Simón Bolívar, with the aim of creating a Pan-American Union. Bolívar invited politicians from multiple Spanish American countries, as well as the US, Great Britain and Brazil, to discuss a strategic partnership against foreign interests and to work towards the end of slavery. Prutsch suggested that the Congress of Panama should not be regarded as confrontational answer to the Monroe Doctrine, but a sign of emerging Latin American nations. While the Congress did not yield an agreement, the reunion symbolized empowerment against the old continent that had lost its dominance as political, economic, cultural and intellectual role model.
WILLIAM O’REILLY (Cambridge) tracked the coverage of the Monroe Doctrine in German-language newspapers. Initially they supported the doctrine as sign of their loyalty to the US, but changed their position when Germany participated in a European Blockade of Venezuelan ports. Invoking its own narrative of exceptionalism, the press proposed German-Americans to be loyal to both the United States and Germany, which resulted in a call to revise the doctrine. Events leading up to the First World War and thereafter led to the most significant change in the German-American press regarding the Monroe Doctrine. O’Reilly pointed out that a close look at these sources opens new avenues of research to consider, what the Monroe Doctrine meant for specific migrant groups in 19th-century United States.
RICARDO CASTELLÓN (El Salvador) argued that the newly independent nations were marked by a conglomerate “we”, which was characterized by social distinctions from the colonial era. Mapping out the difficulties of the 94 percent rural population in Spanish-speaking America by the end of the 19th century, he called attention to trade and infrastructural difficulties of the periphery. Castellón highlighted processes of social and geographical mobility that were defined by interracial marriages and births, and stressed the importance of women as heads of households and potential procreators. The “we” of the periphery herein made up a majority of the population and was edged against the elites and urban civilization in a process of othering, sparked by the independence and the colonial heritage.
JOHANNES NAGEL (Regensburg) argued that the US sphere of influence in the Greater Caribbean emerged mostly by default in the late 19th century, as the United States received little military threat in the region. In the context of the First and Second Venezuelan crisis, U.S. politicians even cemented their political and economic interests through public politicization of foreign policy issues and by reinterpreting the Monroe Doctrine through the Olney and the Roosevelt Corollary. While these corollaries set the scene for US policy in the 20th century, the scope of their application was still that of the 19th century, as the discussion of the Monroe Doctrine revolved around North America and the Greater Caribbean, leaving South America open to other influences.
Carlos Alberto Haas (Munich) focused on U.S. interventions in Latin America during the Cold War, using Central America as an example. Haas indicated that these interventions were the result of the combination of specific knowledge, different conceptions of space, and a certain self-image. He referred to U.S. foreign policymakers, who not only ignored the internal social and political conditions in Central America, but were also driven by feelings of superiority, exemplified in the case study of the 1954 coup in Guatemala. Haas argued for an integrated history of interventions that consistently relates ideological, economic, and geopolitical motives of US-foreign policy and the perception of Latin American populations who experienced the interventions as a trauma. In this way, specifics of historical periods could be determined more precisely and, for example, proportion and impact of ideological components in the Cold War could be better dimensioned.
The indigenous Mayan lawyer HAYDEÉ VALEY Haydeé Valey (Guatemala) spoke about the basic postulates of the Monroe Doctrine and its principle of non-intervention, integrated in Public International Law. But she highlighted how the United States disregarded the principle of its own policies. In her paper she answered the questions of whether indigenous peoples considered themselves part of Latin America or Guatemala, and if they resisted the processes of hegemonic control. Valey stated that there were few changes regarding the social situation of indigenous peoples over time, but explained that greater communication and dialogues between different groups motivated them to reconnect with the past and to adapt to the challenges of modernity. She expanded on alternative indigenous concepts of space such as "Abya Yala" (land in its full maturity) or "Ixim Ulew" (land of maize), which indigenous people use to make their traditional worldview visible in a globalized world.
The conference ended with a keynote, given by CASSIA ROTH (Athens, GA). She explored the nearly century-long process of abolishing slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil, the last country to end the “peculiar” institution in 1888, and along with the United States, the largest slaveholding power in the Western Hemisphere. Unlike in many Spanish American republics, sovereignty did not serve as a catalyst for emancipatory policies in Brazil. While Simón Bolívar was allying with a free, all-Black Haiti, Brazil was importing hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans in an illegal transatlantic trade. Roth focused on the developments, that enslavers placed increased attention on enslaved women’s reproductive capabilities, hoping to reproduce their enslaved labor force through biological growth. At the same time, they created a robust internal slave trade from the declining sugar-producing northeast to the growing coffee-producing southeast, which disregarded those same reproductive capacities by separating enslaved families. Roth showed, that true abolitionists in Brazil were not the anti-slavery statesmen who put their signatures on the important legislation, but the enslaved people who fought for their own freedom and that of their families in the plantation fields, marketplaces, and courtrooms across Brazil.
The papers were followed by lively and enriching debates between the participants from Europe, the USA and Latin America, who also represented different disciplines Above all, the conference succeeded in overcoming the sometimes-rigid disciplinary boundaries between U.S. and Latin American studies.
Conference overview:
Representative of the Bayerische Amerika-Akademie / Representante de la Bayerische Amerika-Akademie: Conference Opening / Apertura de la conferencia
Carlos Alberto Haas, (Munich): Welcome and introduction / Bienvenido e introducción
Panel 1: The end of the old order: revolutions in the Americas / El fin del antiguo orden revoluciones en las Américas
Volker Depkat, (Regensburg): Foreign Policy as Identity Politics. American Exceptionalism and the Cultural Foundations of the Monroe Doctrine / La política exterior como política de identidad. El excepcionalismo americano y los fundamentos culturales de la Doctrina Monroe
Oliver Gliech, (Berlin): Haiti – the Heirs of the Black Revolution and the American Hemisphere (1804–1830) / Haití: Herederos de la Revolución Negra y el Hemisferio Americano (1804–1830)
Xiomara Avendaño Rojas, (El Salvador): From America Septentrional to Central America: the uncertain international context / De la América del Septentrión a la América Central: el incierto contexto internacional
Milagros Martínez-Flener, (Castellón de la Plana): “Perverse Doctrines”: Austria and the Independences of Spanish America (1822–1824 / “Doctrinas perversas”: Austria y las independencias de la América española (1822–1824)
Panel 2: The 1820s as formative period of the Americas? / ¿La década de los 1820 como período formativo de las Américas?
Torsten Kathke, (Mainz): Liberty and Empire: Reactions to the Monroe Doctrine, 1823–1833 / Libertad e Imperio: Reacciones a la Doctrina Monroe, 1823–1833
Ursula Prutsch, (Munich): The Pan-American Conference of 1826 / La Conferencia Panamericana de 1826
William O‘Reilly, (Cambridge): German-Americans, the Monroe Doctrine and the idea of Empire, 1823–1898 / Los germano-americanos, la Doctrina Monroe y la idea del Imperio, 1823–1898
Ricardo Castellón, (El Salvador): “Us” and the life of “the others” in Ibero-America. The project of the elites and the excluded in the 1820s / "Nosotros" y la vida de "los otros" en Iberoamérica. El proyecto de las élites y los excluidos en la década de 1820
Panel 3: America's Backyard? The Monroe Doctrine in the 20th century / ¿El Patio Trasero? La doctrina Monroe en el siglo XX
Johannes Nagel, (Gießen): Inevitable hegemony? U.S. regional security from the Olney Corollary to the Roosevelt Corollary, 1895–1905 / ¿Hegemonía inevitable? La seguridad regional de los Estados Unidos desde el Corolario Olney hasta el Corolario Roosevelt, 1895–1905
Carlos Alberto Haas, (Munich): Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Chile: US-Interventions in Latin America during the Cold War / Guatemala, República Dominicana, Chile: Intervenciones de los EEUU en Latinoamérica durante la Guerra Fría
Haydeé Valey, (Guatemala): Indigenous peoples of Abya Yala. Alternative visions of the Americas / Pueblos originarios de Abya Yala. Visiones alternas de las Américas
Cassia Roth, (Athens, GA): Slavery and Freedom, Freedom and Slavery: Abolition in Nineteenth-Century Brazil / Esclavitud y libertad, libertad y esclavitud: La abolición en el Brasil del siglo XIX