Latin America and How to Tame Empires? Realism and the Failures of Anti-Colonialism and International Law
Had the US not learned to reach out to Latin America in the 1930s, the outcome of WWII would have been very different. Germany would have won the war. Grandin’s America, América: A New History of the New World offers a sweeping, magisterial analysis of 300 years of Anglo-American and Spanish America conflicting geopolitical understandings of sovereignty and history to shed light on the haphazard emergence of international law, first in the hemisphere and then the world. It was ‘Latin America’ that taught a truculent and violent Anglo-American empire the need to accept inter/national institutions to mediate unrestrained claims over lands and resources that belonged to others. According to Grandin it is deeply paradoxical that lands born of Spain’s outlandish claims over entire continents since 1492 came to develop over time theories of sovereignty and international law to limit and domesticate imperial hubris. Dozens of Pan American Congresses, the League of Nations, and the United Nations were all institutions first created to arbitrate conflict between the US and Spanish America, all invented by Latin American legal theorists.
Grandin book has 700 pages divided into eight parts to cover the entirety of US history, from the Mayflower to the Cold War. It is uncannily timely as the current US government hurries to dismantle a host of arbitrating international treaties and institutions the US so adamantly fostered after WWII. Grandin describes a nation that from its very inception saw itself as an expansive empire with the right to trample over the lands of indigenous peoples without any of the moral qualms witnessed in the Spanish empire.
In the first three parts of the book, Grandin contrasts Spanish and Anglo-British theories of sovereignty over indigenous lands. Like Rome, Spain saw itself as an empire in which ‘savages’, ‘barbarians’, captives, and slaves were expected to become Romans themselves. Former slaves became citizens, and so too did ‘Indians’. This very different notions of race and citizenship colored the late imperial struggles of the Age of Revolutions as the Spanish empire incorporated Africans and Natives into armies and militias, luring runaway slaves from South Carolina to Jamaica into Spanish borderlands with the promise of freedom and citizenship. Spain remained a formidable geopolitical rival that defeated the British in Pensacola and Mobile, hastening US independence.
In parts 4 to 5, Grandin explores how this contrast persisted but this time absent a strong Spanish geopolitical rival. The wars of Independence in Spanish America produced a bundle of weaker republics facing an unrelentingly expansive US territorial empire. Spanish Americans were left only with new theories of sovereignty to face the behemoth: Respect indigenous’ and each other’s territorial claims. Behind these ideas lay crucial differences of democracy. In the US democracy meant unrestrained access of millions of Anglo Americans to the lands of indigenous peoples and Mexicans. In Spanish America, democracy was built on slave emancipation and wealth redistribution within, not frontier expansion.
These ideas served Spanish Americans poorly, as the US claimed sovereignty over one half of Mexico in the 1830s and 40s. US southern slaving interests created ideologies and policies to trample repeatedly over Caribbean and Central America sovereign polities. Things got worse after the Civil War. Spanish Americans responded by creating more important yet useless ideas: The cultural category of “Latin America” and new legal theories of international law.
Parts 6 and 7 are the most original sections in the book. Here Grandin explores the complex dialectics of an unfettered US empire that reluctantly learned to accept new institutions of arbitration and international law put forth by Latin Americans. Woodrow Wilson refused to intervene on behalf of aggrieved US nationals whose property was taken or destroyed during the Mexican Revolution. In the process Wilson learned how best to create arbitrating international institutions: The origins of the League of Nations. This same argument applies to FDR. Grandin shows that the way out of Depression was possible when FDR learned to respect and foster the growth of social democracy both at home and in Latin America. Latin American social democracy taught FDR to create Pan American structures of international cooperation to seal the hemisphere from German and Japanese military and economic expansion. Had FDR antagonized Latin Americans as their nineteenth-century predecessors did, the US would have become fascist and Axis powers would have dominated the world.
As Trump dismantles treaties and institutions the US learned to accept after two centuries of relentlessly seeking racial lordship over the entirety of the continent, the relevance of this history cannot be overemphasized. Grandin’s is a deeply moral book. So too are the concepts of ‘Latin American’ social democracy and international law. And yet it has been US power, not justice, what has shaped this continent. The world needs to learn pragmatically that neither new anti-imperial concepts (Latin America) nor international law gets to contain bullies, but power. It was Germany’s ascendent power in WWI and WWII that led both Wilson and FDR to negotiate international treaties with Latin America at last.
