Scarfi, in The Name of The Americas

juan pablo scarfi
In the Name of the Americas: The Pan-American

Redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine and the Emerging
Language of American International Law in the Western
Hemisphere, 1898-19331
Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

INTRODUCTION
The Monroe Doctrine and Pan-Americanism epitomize different aspects of the

complex history of U.S.–Latin American relations. The Monroe Doctrine has
traditionally symbolized the long-standing attachment of the United States to
unilateralism and a nostalgic aspiration to isolation from global geopolitics,
coupled with paternalism in the Americas. Though after 1889 Pan-Americanism
was a U.S.-led policy, it conveyed a commitment to a set of values that were
consistent with continental cooperation, and which consequently held consider-
able appeal for Latin American states from the turn of the century until the late
1930s. But this is to state the case far too starkly. In the 1890s, when the U.S.
modern policy of Pan-Americanism was originally formulated, the Monroe
Doctrine was revived and even reinvented. In other words, it may be said to
have been Pan-Americanized.
The turn of the century was a moment when U.S. and Latin American inter-
national lawyers, politicians, and intellectuals promoted a sustained continent-
wide debate over the meaning and scope of the Monroe Doctrine at the very
time when the United States was attempting to redefine and legitimize the hemi-
spheric hegemony that would later allow it to become a world power. As I will
show throughout this article, its meaning and scope shifted in four different di-
mensions: 1) from a principle of intervention to one of non-intervention; 2) from a
unilateral to a multilateral doctrine; 3) from a political to an international law
principle; 4) from a national to a hemispheric principle.
The leading voices in these debates were politicians and intellectuals, many of
whom combined legal expertise and high office in their respective countries.
Among them were U.S. Secretaries of State, Elihu Root (1905-1909) and
1
I would like to thank Charles Jones, José Moya, Ricardo Salvatore, Duncan Bell, Joel Isaac,
Greg Grandin, Olivier Compagnon, and Brendan Simms for their helpful comments. An earlier
version of this article was presented at the Institute of Latin American Studies, Columbia
University, in April 2011.
Diplomatic History, Vol. 40, No. 2 (2016). ! The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University
Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. doi:10.1093/dh/dhu071
Advance Access publication on December 30, 2014
189
190 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y
Charles Evans Hughes (1921-1925), Root’s legal advisor, the jurist James Brown
Scott and President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), as well as leading Latin
American international lawyers and politicians, such as Alejandro Álvarez
(Chile), Luis Marı́a Drago (Argentina), and Baltasar Brum (Uruguay). It is not
coincidental that Root, Hughes, and Scott were prominent figures in the promo-
tion and development of the discipline and practice of international law in the
United States and in the Americas as a whole, serving as presidents of the American
Society of International Law (ASIL), the first U.S. academic society of interna-
tional law created in 1906. They played leading roles in the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace (CEIP), founded in 1910, and contributed to the founda-

tion of a Pan-American organization, the American Institute of International Law
(AIIL), which joined together all the national societies of international law of the
continent. Álvarez, Drago, and Brum were foremost among Latin American jurists
and statesmen most active in the Pan-American movement and, even more, in the
promotion of international law in the Americas to the extent that Álvarez–along
with Scott–founded the AIIL and they all became its members.
The emergence of global history has renewed debates regarding the hemi-
spheric and comparative history of the Americas.2 At the same time, recent schol-
arship has contributed to a re-examination of the Monroe Doctrine in the
nineteenth century. On the one hand, Gretchen Murphy has examined the flexible
nature of the doctrine and its cultural roots and legacy in the formation of U.S.
imperial and hemispheric imagination by studying literary and popular texts.3 On
the other hand, Jay Sexton has explored its diverse evolving meanings in U.S.
history and the concrete imperial foreign policies it entailed.4 However, there is
still a lack of investigation into the role of the Monroe Doctrine on a larger hemi-
spheric scale, and in the history of international law in the Americas, particularly
regarding its redefinitions as proposed in the early twentieth century.5
In a pioneering and classic study, Arthur Whitaker has shown how the ideolo-
gical imaginaries and political manifestations of what he termed “The Western
Hemisphere Idea,” notably the Monroe Doctrine, the Drago Doctrine, and
Pan-Americanism, have shaped the history of U.S.–Latin American relations.
2. See, for example, Charles A. Jones, American Civilization (London, 2007); Greg Grandin,
“The Liberal Traditions in the Americas: Rights, Sovereignty, and the Origins of Liberal
Multilateralism,” American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (2012): 68-91; Lester D. Langley, The
Americas in the Modern Age (New Haven, CT, 2003); Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Americas:
The History of a Hemisphere (London, 2003).
3. Gretchen Murphy, Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S.
Empire (Durham, NC, 2005).
4. Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America
(New York, 2011).
5. As Ricardo Salvatore has observed, Gretchen Murphy’s nineteenth century analysis of the
Monroe Doctrine as proposed in Hemispheric Imaginings has notably glossed over some alternative
interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine advanced outside the United States, “in the other
Americas.” See Ricardo D. Salvatore, “The Literary Construction of the Monroe Doctrine,”
Diplomatic History 31, no. 4 (2007): 759-60.
In the Name of the Americas : 191
This article draws on Whitaker’s study, particularly on his insightful exploration

of the connections and differences that existed between two important re-inter-
pretations of the Monroe Doctrine, the Theodore Roosevelt Corollary, and the
Drago Doctrine.6 Nevertheless, though he has touched in detail on the subject
of Pan-Americanism, he has paid little attention to the Pan-American networks,
institutions, and hemispheric spaces of interaction between U.S. and Latin
American international lawyers that began to emerge in this period, such as the
AIIL, the CEIP, and also the ASIL. As shown in this article, these networks and
interactions, particularly the AIIL and the CEIP, were extremely important during
the first three decades of the twentieth century, because the progressive Pan-

Americanization of the Monroe Doctrine was proposed and discussed primarily
by Latin American jurists and politicians who engaged in these newly-created
hemispheric networks.
Classic scholarship on the history of the Monroe Doctrine has tended to em-
phasize the role of the doctrine as a principle for legitimizing U.S. interventions,
disregarding its relationship with Pan-Americanism.7 Indeed, the period analyzed
in this article has been described both as Pan-American and interventionist, com-
bining cooperation and the so-called “dollar diplomacy.” More specifically, there
is considerable agreement that, from 1898, the United States embarked on an
expansionist and interventionist policy toward Latin America until the 1930s
with the rise of the so-called Good Neighbor Policy, which led to the expressed
commitment of the United States, in the context of the Seventh Pan-American
Conference (1933) and the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of
Peace (1936), to stop intervening in the Americas.8 The final U.S. commitment to
the principle of non-intervention in the 1930s has often been interpreted as a
redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine along the lines of a continental and multi-
lateral principle. In this same period, the U.S. policy of Pan-Americanism was
formally institutionalized with the creation of the Commercial Bureau of
American Republics, founded in 1890, and the promotion of regular meetings
and conferences in the Americas.9
Firstly, this article shows that long before the 1930s, a series of re-interpret-
ations of the Monroe Doctrine arose, proposing it as a hemispheric and multilat-
eral principle primarily in South America. U.S. reaction toward these initiatives
6. Arthur P. Whitaker, The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline (Ithaca, NY, 1954).
7. See Walter LaFeber, “The Evolution of the Monroe Doctrine from Monroe to Reagan,” in
Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic History in Honor of William Appleman Williams, ed. Lloyd C.
Gardner (Corvallis, OR, 1986), 121-41.
8. See, for example, David Healy, Drive to Hegemony: The United States in the Caribbean,
1898-1917 (Madison, WI, 1988), Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S.
Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA, 1998), Peter Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of
U.S.–Latin American Relations (New York, 2000).
9. See David Sheinin, ed., Beyond the Ideal: Pan Americanism in Inter-American Affairs
(Westport, CT, 2000), Gordon Connell-Smith, The Inter-American System (London, 1966), and
Jesús Marı́a Yepes, Philosophie du Panaméricanisme et organisation de la paix (Paris, 1945).
was ambivalent, because U.S. international lawyers, politicians, and intellectuals

supported a wide range of interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine. Indeed, for the
most part U.S. politicians and jurists sought to retain a right to enforce the Monroe
Doctrine unilaterally in the Americas and thus resisted the Pan-Americanization
of the doctrine until 1933, but at the same time they tended to promote Pan-
Americanism. Nevertheless, these hemispheric redefinitions of the doctrine
allowed the United States to begin a progressive but still difficult and slow tran-
sition from interventionism to multilateral Pan-Americanism.
Secondly, I argue that the reframing of the doctrine as a hemispheric principle
played a fundamental role in redefining U.S. hegemony in the Americas through

the emerging language of “American international law.” In the context of Pan-
Americanism, U.S. hemispheric hegemony entailed the use of police power and
interventionism in Central America and the Caribbean, and more importantly, a
cooperative approach towards the ABC countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile) and
Uruguay based on hemispheric intellectual exchanges and the assistance and me-
diation of South American jurists and politicians who, like Álvarez, Drago, and
Brum, occupied important positions in the fields of law and government. They
sought to moderate U.S. interventionism and unilateralism in the Americas by
advocating a redefinition of U.S. hemispheric hegemony and the Monroe
Doctrine along the lines of Pan-Americanism, multilateralism, and non-interven-
tion, promoting a continental language of American international law. As an in-
formal empire, the United States was not concerned with territorial control, so
these exchanges and assistance became central features of hegemony in this Pan-
American period.10 As an innovative Latin American jurist, Álvarez was indeed
reframing a U.S. unilateral declaration that was foreign to Latin American legal
and diplomatic tradition, into a legal and hemispheric principle. His engagement
with Scott and the institutionalization of the AIIL contributed significantly to
legitimizing his approach and, as a result, confirmed the Monroe Doctrine as a
hemispheric principle of “American international law.” Nevertheless, this process
of redefining U.S. hemispheric hegemony through the languages of international
law and Pan-Americanism was certainly slow, for some of the pioneering ideas of
Álvarez were resisted by U.S. politicians and were not formally institutionalized
until the 1930s.
Finally, this essay contributes a new perspective on the hemispheric exchanges
and discussions about the meaning and scope of the Monroe Doctrine. Though
the complex relationship between U.S. hegemony and the foundations of interna-
tional law has begun to be explored in the field of international relations and
10. For an analysis of the role of mediation played by Latin American intellectuals in the
construction of U.S. hemispheric hegemony in the era of Pan-Americanism, see Ricardo D.
Salvatore, “The Making of a Hemispheric Intellectual-Statesman: Leo S. Rowe in Argentina,
1906-1919,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 2, no. 1 (2010): 1-36. For a brief overview
of U.S. hegemony in Latin America, see Alan Knight, “U.S. Imperialism/Hegemony and Latin
American Resistance,” in Empire and Dissent: The United States and Latin America, ed. Fred Rosen
(Durham, NC, 2008), 23-52.
international law, it deserves more attention among historians.11 A hemispheric

intellectual history approach–focusing primarily on debates and interactions be-
tween the United States and the ABC countries (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile) and
Uruguay–might contribute, in turn, to a re-examination of the role that this emer-
ging language of international law, framed during this period by the Monroe
Doctrine, played in the redefinition of U.S. hemispheric hegemony.
THE MONROE DOCTRINE, PAN-AMERICANISM, AND

THE ABC COUNTRIES
The ideological roots of the Monroe Doctrine had certain precedents that could be

traced back to the international thought of Thomas Jefferson, who by 1813 fam-
ously referred to the Americas as “a hemisphere to itself.”12 In its original formu-
lation, the Monroe Doctrine synthesized ideas of anti-colonialism and
imperialism. Drawing on the classic interpretation of William Appleman
Williams, Jay Sexton has used the expression “imperial anti-colonialism” to de-
scribe these two components of the doctrine in the nineteenth century.13 The
doctrine was anti-colonial since it set limits to European imperialism and inter-
vention in the Western Hemisphere. It was imperial in the sense that it was
applied, especially by President James Polk in the 1840s, as an expansionist prin-
ciple over the Americas and associated with the “manifest destiny” of the United
States. As soon as European colonialism and interventions in the Americas were no
longer perceived as a threat in the context of the First World War, the doctrine
became progressively a specific hemispheric matter of debate rather than a limit to
European colonialism.14
Although the doctrine was a political affirmation and was not defined as a
principle of international law by James Monroe, it made an indirect reference to
the international law principle of uti possidetis, for the United States affirmed that it
was entitled to have its territorial integrity and its legal claim of national
11. See Michael Byers and George Nolte, eds., United States Hegemony and the Foundations of
International Law (Cambridge, 2003). For a recent historical exploration of the international legal
thought of James Brown Scott, see Benjamin Allen Coates, “Transatlantic Advocates: American
International Law and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1898-1919” (PhD diss., Columbia University,
2010). For a different historical analysis exploring the impact and dissemination of Scott’s inter-
national legal thought in Latin America, see Juan Pablo Scarfi, El imperio de la ley: James Brown Scott
y la construcción de un orden jurı́dico interamericano (Buenos Aires, 2014), and Scarfi,
“Reconfiguraciones del saber jurı́dico. James Brown Scott reflota la obra de Vitoria desde
Estados Unidos en años de entre-guerra,” in Los lugares del saber: Contextos locales y redes transna-
cionales en la formación del conocimiento moderno, ed. Ricardo D. Salvatore (Rosario, 2007), 269-93.
12. Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, 1813, quoted in Whitaker, Western
Hemisphere, 29.
13. Sexton, Monroe Doctrine, 5-8. See also William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of
American Diplomacy (New York, 2009), 18-57.
14. As Nancy Mitchell has observed, U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America was oriented
by ideological perceptions of a German threat to the Monroe Doctrine and U.S. hegemony in the
Western Hemisphere, not founded in real evidence. See Nancy Mitchell, The Danger of Dreams:
German and American Imperialism in Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999).
sovereignty respected by other nations.15 As a U.S. political and national declar-

ation, it made an indirect reference to international law and to Latin America. It
was a national principle, but it could be extended to the hemisphere. It was a
political affirmation, but it could be reshaped into an international law principle.
In the nineteenth century, Latin America maintained an ambivalent attitude of
both support for and rejection of the Monroe Doctrine. In the 1820s, though the
doctrine was resisted by Lucas Alamán (Mexico) and Simón Bolı́var (Colombia),
for the most part it was positively received as an expression of support for the
newly-achieved independence of the region and some nations made requests for
U.S. collaboration in the struggle for independence from Spain.16 Much later,

Latin American politicians continued to invoke the doctrine to protect the contin-
ent from European interventions. For instance, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, in
1865, and Vicente Gregorio Quesada, in 1887, expressed adhesion to the doctrine
when acting as delegates in Washington, D.C.17 The latter went so far as to use it as
an instrument to claim the Argentine right to the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, which
were, according to him, illegitimately occupied by Great Britain in 1833.18
Latin America’s rejection of the Monroe Doctrine tended to be expressed
through the language of Latin Americanism. The history of Latin Americanism
has often been traced back to Simón Bolı́var’s projects for a Latin American Union,
as proposed for the Panama Congress (1826). Originally Bolı́var did not want the
United States and Brazil to take part in the initiative and there was also substantial
resistance in the United States to sending delegates. Only Peru, Colombia,
Mexico, and Central America sent delegates.19 The Bolivarian ideal for a regional
confederation of states persisted in the memory and policies of Latin American
statesmen and intellectuals and went through a process of revival after the
Mexican–American War (1846-1848) and the U.S. annexation of Texas. Along
with the notion of Hispanic-Americanism, the idea of Latin Americanism began to
be adopted in this period as a defensive reaction to U.S. ascendancy and expan-
sionism.20 These notions and ideals were revived in a series of continental
15. The status of the Monroe Doctrine as an international law principle has been analyzed
by Donald Marquand Dozer, “Introduction,” in The Monroe Doctrine: Its Modern Significance,
ed. Donald Marquand Dozer (New York, 1965), 4, 23.
16. Arthur P. Whitaker, The United States and the Independence of Latin America, 1800-1830
(Baltimore, MD, 1941), 533-538; LaFeber, “Evolution of the Monroe Doctrine,” 127.
17. See Domingo F. Sarmiento, “La doctrina de Monroe,” Address at the Rhode Island
Historical Society, October 27, 1865, in La República Argentina y el caso de Venezuela, by Luis
Marı́a Drago (Buenos Aires, 1903), 304-12.
18. Ernesto Quesada, “La Doctrina Monroe: su evolución histórica,” Anales de la Facultad de
Derecho y Ciencias Sociales 20 (1919): 87-91. See also Isidro Fabela, Las doctrinas Monroe y Drago
(México, 1957), 97-99.
19. See Judith Ewell, “Bolı́var’s Atlantic World Diplomacy,” in Simón Bolı́var: Essays on the Life
and Legacy of the Liberator, eds. David Bushnell and Lester D. Langley (Lanham, MD, 2008), 35-54,
and John Lynch, Simón Bolı́var: A Life (New Haven, CT, 2006), 212-17.
20. See Arturo Ardao, “Panamericanismo y latinoamericanismo,” in América Latina en sus ideas,
ed. Leopoldo Zea (México, 1986), 157-71, and Aimer Granados, “Congresos e intelectuales en los
inicios de un proyecto y de una conciencia continental latinoamericana, 1826-1860,”
Congresses. Three continental Conferences were held in an attempt to create

some form of Latin American continental integration, in Lima (Peru) in 1847-
1848, Santiago (Chile) in 1856, and Lima once again in 1864-1865. In the late
nineteenth century, there were other important initiatives for regional Congresses
in Lima (1877-1880), Caracas (1883), and Montevideo (1888-1889). None of the
treaties produced throughout the nineteenth century were put into effect, except
for the conclusions of the Montevideo Congress.21
Unlike the Monroe Doctrine, Pan-Americanism sought to be a policy of eco-
nomic, legal, political, and intellectual cooperation promoted by the United States
toward Latin America. In its modern assertion, it promoted the creation of con-

tinental institutions of cooperation and common values, and it claimed legitimacy
as an all-American policy. Yet, as David Sheinin has noted, “Pan Americanism has
always been U.S.-led, the friendly face of U.S. dominance in the hemisphere.”22
The term “Pan-American” was first used in 1882 by The New York Evening Post just
after Secretary of State James G. Blaine made his first frustrated attempt to
promote the celebration of an inter-American conference to discuss questions of
continental arbitration among the American countries, and to strengthen com-
mercial ties between the United States and Latin America.23 Blaine had to wait
until 1889-1890 to see realized his original project of holding the first Pan-
American Conference in Washington, D.C.
A few years after the celebration of the First Pan-American Conference, the
Monroe Doctrine was invoked to extend and legitimize U.S. hegemony in the
Western Hemisphere. The British–Venezuelan boundary dispute over British
Guiana (1895-1896) offered a perfect scenario for asserting U.S. leadership in
the Americas, for Secretary of State Richard Olney (1895-1897) redefined the
doctrine as a principle of U.S. hegemony and control over the rest of the
Americas. Olney famously proclaimed: “Today the United States is practically
sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law.”24 This led in turn to the recognition
by Great Britain and other European powers of U.S. leadership in the Western
Hemisphere.25
Pan-Americanism also overlapped with the policy of U.S. interventionism,
because the 1890s was also the era of the Spanish–American War (1898) and the
U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Cuba. Though it was U.S.
in Construcción de las identidades latinoamericanas: Ensayos de historia intelectual, siglos XIX y XX, eds.
Aimer Granados and Carlos Marichal (México, 2004), 39-69.
21. Jorge L. Esquirol, “Latin America,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International
Law, eds. Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (Oxford, 2012), 562.
22. David Sheinin, “Rethinking Pan Americanism: An Introduction,” in Beyond the Ideal, ed.
Sheinin, 1.
23. See Whitaker, Western Hemisphere, 74.
24. Richard Olney to Thomas F. Bayard, July 20, 1895, Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of
the United States, 1895, I, 545-562, quoted in Sexton, Monroe Doctrine, 203.
25. Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898
(Ithaca, NY, 1963), 242-83; Joseph Smith, Illusions of Conflict: Anglo-American Diplomacy toward
Latin America, 1865-1896 (Pittsburgh, PA, 1979), 205-09.
President William McKinley (1897-1901) who initiated this policy of aggressive

interventionism, one of its most famous advocates was his successor, Theodore
Roosevelt (1901-1909).26 This approach provoked much resistance in the United
States, leading to the creation of the Anti-Imperialist League, supported by vet-
erans such as former Democratic President Grover Cleveland and the industrialist
and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. As Jay Sexton has noted, the anti-imperialists
invoked the Monroe Doctrine as a principle of anti-colonialism and non-entan-
glement.27 Furthermore, U.S. interventions gave rise to a wide-range of anti-
imperialist and anti-Yankee ideologies in Latin America, emanating from
modernist writers, such as José Martı́, José Enrique Rodó, and Rubén Darı́o, as

well as public intellectuals, diplomats, jurists, and politicians, including Eduardo
Prado, Manuel Oliveira Lima, Manuel Ugarte, and Roque Sáenz Peña.28
Pan-Americanism and the Pan-American re-interpretations of the Monroe
Doctrine, as proposed by Drago, Álvarez, and Brum, emerged at the time when
the United States enforced the Platt Amendment (1901) in Cuba, took control of
the Panama Canal (1904), and occupied the Dominican Republic (1914-1926), but
for the most part these jurists and politicians tended to disregard these critical
events in Central America and the Caribbean. In fact, while Latin American writers
and intellectuals, such as Martı́, Rodó, and Darı́o, for the most part resisted U.S.
interventionism, the Monroe Doctrine, and Pan-Americanism, Drago, Álvarez,
and Brum, who were tied to the AIIL, tended to support both the doctrine and the
emerging Pan-American movement in an attempt to promote multilateralism and
thus moderate U.S. interventionism.
Unlike Cleveland and Carnegie, Elihu Root occupied a mid-position between
interventionists and anti-imperialists. But his approach was predominantly legal-
istic in orientation. Indeed, he was the main architect of the Platt Amendment,
drafting most of its articles, notably article 3, which famously gave the United
States the right to intervene in Cuba and defended it as a “right recognised by
international law.”29 Root was also an outstanding figure of a new style of U.S.
foreign policy promoted by the Republican Party, based on legal diplomacy and
the promotion of peace and international law.30 As such, he contributed, along
26. On the rise of U.S. interventionism in the Caribbean, see Healy, Drive to Hegemony.
27. See Sexton, Monroe Doctrine, 213-16.
28. Nicola Miller, In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in
Twentieth Century Spanish America (London, 1999), 174-209; Oscar Terán, “El primer antiimper-
ialismo latinoamericano,” in En busca de la ideologı́a argentina (Buenos Aires, 1986), 85-97; Julio
Ramos, “Hemispheric Domains: 1898 and the Origins of Latin Americanism,” Journal of Latin
American Cultural Studies 10, no.3. (2001): 237-51; Juan Pablo Scarfi, “La emergencia de un
imaginario latinoamericanista y antiestadounidense del orden hemisférico: de la Unión
Panamericana a la Unión Latinoamericana (1880-1913),” Revista Complutense de Historia de
América 39 (2013): 81-104.
29. Jonathan Zasloff, “Law and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy: From the Gilded Age
to the New Era,” New York University Law Review 78, no. 1 (April 2003): 288-91.
30. For a recent exploration of Root’s ideas on international organization and international
law, see Stephen Wertheim, “The League That Wasn’t: American Designs for a League of
with his legal advisor Scott, to set the basis of U.S. international law and to pro-
mote world and hemispheric peace. At the same time, Root followed Blaine in
making the most decisive contribution to the development of Pan-Americanism.
His visit to South America in the context of the Third Pan-American Conference
held in Rio de Janeiro (1906) aimed to refute the idea, associated with the
Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, that the United States attempted
to establish a protective and interventionist policy in Latin America. Root stated
that the United States did not have any imperial objective in the region, but only
pursued cooperation and friendship.31
Root and Scott were part of the so-called “American Peace Movement” and

both were decisive in the formation and development of the discipline of modern
international law in the United States, founding both the ASIL and its journal, the
American Journal of International Law (AJIL), of which Scott was Editor in Chief.32
Root, Scott, and Charles Evans Hughes were the first three presidents of the ASIL,
founded in 1906, and Root served as the Director and Scott the Secretary General
of the CEIP, founded in 1910, two important national organizations based in
Washington, D.C. As Marchand has noted, these organizations, particularly the
CEIP, were dominated by international lawyers and conservative politicians from
the Republican Party, such as Root, Scott, Hughes, and Nicholas Murray Butler.33
All shared what Boyle has described as a “legalist approach to international rela-
tions” and sought to embed the Pan-American movement of an emerging concern
for the advancement and codification of international law in the Americas.34
Therefore, they were pioneers in contributing, along with Álvarez, to the creation
of important Pan-American networks of international law, such as the AIIL, con-
ceived in 1912 and formally institutionalized in 1916.35
The creation of the AIIL was certainly the product of an auspicious hemispheric
context. Not only were the relations between the United States and Latin America
shifting toward cooperation and the promotion of Pan-American projects, but also
Nations and the Intellectual Origins of International Organization, 1914-1920,” Diplomatic History
35, no. 5 (2011): 797-836.
31. See Elihu Root, “Speech of the Secretary of State,” The Third Conference of the
American Republics, Rio de Janeiro, July 31, 1906, in Latin America and the United States:
Addresses by Elihu Root, eds. Robert Bacon and James Brown Scott (Cambridge, MA, 1917), 10.
32. For an analysis of the importance of Root and Scott in the development of international
law in the United States, see Mark Weston Janis, America and the Law of Nations, 1776-1939
(Oxford, 2010), 144-157. On the history of the early ASIL, see Frederic L. Kirgis, The American
Society of International Law’s First Century, 1906-2006 (Leiden, 2006).
33. C. Roland Marchand, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1898-1918
(Princeton, NJ, 1972), 119-20. On the early history of the CEIP, see also Ellen Condliffe
Legemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy
(Chicago, IL, 1989), and Katharina Rietzler, “Fortunes of a Profession: American Foundations
and International Law, 1910-1939,” Global Society 28, no. 1 (2014): 8-23.
34. Francis Anthony Boyle, Foundations of World Order: The Legalist Approach to International
Relations, 1898-1922 (Durham, NC, 1999), 7-24.
35. On the early years and history of the AIIL, see Stévan Tchirkovitch, L’Institut américain de
droit international: son role et son oeuvre (Paris, 1926).
diplomatic relations between the ABC countries themselves improved consider-

ably in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The long-standing territorial
disputes between Argentina and Chile over the Patagonian border region were
settled and therefore suspended with the so-called May Pacts (Pactos de Mayo).
Similarly, military rivalry and competition between Brazil and Argentina, which
became critical when the so-called “peaceful conqueror” Barón do Rı́o Branco
and the Argentine Estanislao Zeballos served as Ministers of Foreign Affairs
during the 1900s, was finally interrupted in 1912 after the death of Rı́o
Branco.36 It was in this promising context that the Argentine President Roque
Sáenz Peña began to make plans for the creation of a pact between the ABC

countries.37 Though this ABC alliance was originally conceived as an authentic
South American pact and was meant to be an attempt to counterbalance U.S.
interventionism in the name of the Monroe Doctrine, it was not until the possi-
bility of U.S. intervention in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, particularly
after José Victoriano Huerta came to power, that the alliance began to assume a
concrete feature in progressive diplomatic communications between the foreign
ministries of the three southern countries in 1913.38 As Pablo Yankelevich has
shown, the Argentine political establishment held a self-image of Argentina as a
legitimate leader in South America, and the mediation in the context of the U.S.–
Mexican conflict was seen as a confirmation of Argentine “manifest destiny” and
racial superiority in the region.39 U.S. intervention in Veracruz (Mexico) in April
1914 and the subsequent mediation of the ABC countries, which led to the
Conference of Niagara Falls, generated distrust and resentment in Mexico
during the presidency of Venustiano Carranza. Nevertheless, the mediation cre-
ated a great deal of enthusiasm among advocates of Pan-Americanism in South
America and the United States. Indeed, President Woodrow Wilson began to
advocate a Pan-American Pact based on the alliance of the United States and
the ABC countries in order to enforce and legitimize the Monroe Doctrine in
the Western Hemisphere.40 The Pan-American Pact was officially announced at
the Second Pan-American Scientific Congress (1916), in which context the AIIL
was officially created as a hemispheric organization. It was envisioned as “a model
for the European nations when peace is at last brought about” and it sought, on the
one hand, to prevent wars in the Western Hemisphere by creating a system of
collective security and obligatory arbitration based on mutual guaranties of polit-
ical independence under a republican form of government and of territorial
36. See Gustavo Ferrari, Conflicto y paz con Chile (1898-1903) (Buenos Aires, 1968), and
C. Bradford Burns, The Unwritten Alliance: Rio Branco and Brazilian–American Relations
(New York, 1966).
37. Pablo Yankelevich, La diplomacia imaginaria: Argentina y la revolución mexicana, 1910-1916
(México, 1994), 21.
38. Carlos A. Becú, El “A.B.C. y su concepto polı́tico y jurı́dico (Buenos Aires, 1915), 8-28.
39. See Yankelevich, La diplomacia imaginaria, 167-71.
40. Arthur P. Whitaker, The United States and the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay
(Cambridge, MA, 1976), 367-68.
integrity and, on the other, to regulate the arms trade by supervising the manu-
facture and sale of munitions of war.41 However, as will be shown later, Wilson’s
Pan-American Pact was finally abandoned in 1917.
CONTENDING CONCEPTIONS OF INTERVENTION:

LUIS M. DRAGO AND THEODORE ROOSEVELT
In 1902 a significant redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine was proposed in Latin

America. The Drago Doctrine (1902) was certainly one of the most famous
modern hemispheric derivations from Monroe’s original message. Like its precur-
sor, the Calvo Doctrine (1868) set out by Carlos Calvo (Argentina), the Drago

Doctrine stressed a political principle according to which those who lived or in-
vested in a foreign country should make their claims and defend their interests
within local tribunals and courts, avoiding resort to diplomatic or military inter-
ventions on the part of states or governments. Calvo was a prominent Argentine
international lawyer and one of the founders of the Institut de Droit International,
founded in 1873 in Belgium.42 The doctrines of Calvo and Drago were both non-
interventionist. As Isidro Fabela reminds us, the doctrine of non-intervention
played a key role in the history of international law in Latin America. Calvo,
along with Andrés Bello (Venezuela), was a nineteenth century pioneering advo-
cate of the idea of non-intervention, particularly European interventions in the
Americas.43 The Drago Doctrine was certainly informed by this Latin American
tradition of attachment to the principle of non-intervention.44 As such, it entailed a
restatement of the Monroe Doctrine as an anti-colonial principle, as well as an
attachment to the Latin American traditional support for the principle of non-
intervention.
The Drago Doctrine was an immediate response to the blockade and interven-
tion of Great Britain, Germany, and Italy in Venezuela for the collection of public
debts. With the aim of limiting such European interventions in Latin America,
Drago wrote a letter to the Argentine Minister in Washington, D.C., Martı́n
Garcı́a Mérou stating very clearly: “In a word, the principle which [the
Argentine Republic] would like to see recognized is: that the public debt cannot
occasion armed intervention nor even the actual occupation of the territory of
American nations by a European power.”45
41. Mark T. Gilderhus, Pan American Visions: Woodrow Wilson in the Western Hemisphere,
1913-1921 (Tucson, AZ, 1986), 50.
42. On the history of the Institut de Droit International, see Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle
Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870-1960 (Cambridge, 2001), 11-97.
43. Isidro Fabela, Intervention (Paris, 1961), 98-101.
44. See Amos S. Hershey, “The Calvo and Drago Doctrines,” American Journal of International
Law 1, no. 1 (1907): 26-28.
45. Luis Marı́a Drago, “Argentine Republic: Ministry of Foreign Relations and Worship,”
American Journal of International Law 1, no. 1 (1907): 4. See also Drago, La República Argentina,
1-10.
As Whitaker has observed, the Drago Doctrine was a corollary of the Monroe
Doctrine.46 Yet, unlike the message of Monroe, Drago’s corollary was intended
to be a “Pan-American principle of inter-continental diplomacy.”47 Since the
Monroe Doctrine epitomized a synthesis between anti-colonialism and imperial
domination in the Americas, Drago was inspired by the first of these notions and
thus invoked the Monroe Doctrine as a principle of absolute non-intervention
in the Americas. He reframed it to protect weak countries from European
powers in such cases in which military interventions to collect debts were involved.
Drago’s note showed a great deal of respect for the leading role of the United
States in the Americas and those U.S.-led ideals, such as the Monroe Doctrine,

which were regarded as crucial for the future destiny and security of the continent.
Indeed, “Martı́n Garcı́a Mérou declared Drago’s statement the first acknowledg-
ment and acceptance of the Monroe Doctrine ‘as a principle of American public
law by a nation of South America.’”48 Drago defined the Argentine position on the
European blockade in Venezuela as “the sincere expression of the sentiments of a
nation that has faith in its destiny and in that of this whole continent, at whose head
march the United States, realizing our ideals and affording examples.”49
Luis Marı́a Drago (figure 1) made two contradictory, although inter-con-
nected, moves. First, he extended the scope of the Monroe Doctrine from a na-
tional principle to a continental policy of absolute non-intervention. Second, in
recognizing the importance of a U.S. national doctrine, Drago legitimized the
Monroe Doctrine as a hemispheric principle. At the same time, he sought to per-
suade the United States to adapt itself to non-interventionist and multilateral
standards. In fact, Drago was extremely anxious about U.S. reactions to his state-
ment and felt disappointed when the U.S. Secretary of State, John Hay (1898-
1905), did not respond expressly to his note.50 Nevertheless, Drago was a pioneer,
for he initiated a slow but important process of redefining U.S. hemispheric he-
gemony along the lines of multilateralism and non-intervention, which led in turn
to the progressive Pan-Americanization of the Monroe Doctrine.
Roque Sáenz Peña, who was one of the most fervent Argentine critics of the
Monroe Doctrine and a former delegate of his country at the first Pan-American
Conference (1889-1890), backed Drago in his defense of absolute non-interven-
tion in the Americas, which was consistent with the Latin American legal tradition.
However, he explicitly asserted his radical dissidence regarding Drago’s
46. Whitaker, Western Hemisphere, 88.

47. Ernesto Quesada, “La doctrina Drago: su esencia y concepto amplio,” Revista de la
Universidad de Buenos Aires 43 (1919): 355.
48. Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1903, 1-6, quoted in David
Sheinin, Argentina and the United States: An Alliance Contained (Athens, GA, 2006), 31.
49. Drago, “Argentine Republic,” 3, 6.
50. Drago to Martı́n Garcı́a Mérou, Argentine Minister in Washington, D.C., March 11,
1903, Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Doctrina
Drago, Legajo 335.
Figure 1: Luis Marı́a Drago. Source: Luis Marı́a Drago, Discursos y escritos, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires,
1938).
understanding of the Monroe Doctrine.51 Sáenz Peña argued that the Monroe
Doctrine “never had juridical nor international existence” and instead of being a
principle of “protection,” it entailed “hegemony over the rest of the States of the
continent.”52
Yet Drago’s note had a positive impact on the U.S. international law commu-
nity. The AJIL published a translation of an article originally requested from
Drago by the editors of the Revue Générale de Droit International Public, the most
prestigious European journal of international law at the time, along with his
note.53 Drago made a more explicit defense at the Monroe Doctrine as both a
hemispheric and egalitarian ideal: “The Monroe Doctrine is in fact a formula

of independence. It imposes no dominion and no superiority. Much less does it
establish protectorates or relations of superior to inferior. Proclaimed by the
United States in the interest of its own peace and security, the other Republics
of the continent have in their own turn proceeded to adopt it with an eye alone to
their own individual welfare and internal tranquillity.”54
Notwithstanding this favorable notice in the United States, President Roosevelt
delivered his 1904 annual message to Congress, enunciating what was soon to
become known as the Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, only two
years after Drago sent his note to Washington, D.C. Roosevelt restated the doc-
trine in order to legitimize U.S. police power in Central America. By the time the
United States was constructing the Panama Canal and controlling the Caribbean
Sea, Roosevelt’s message was consistent with U.S. interests and purposes. He
affirmed: “Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general
loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately
require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the
adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United
States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence,
to the exercise of an international police power.”55
In Roosevelt’s message, it is quite clear that the Monroe Doctrine adopted a
self-defensive character, as it was used to legitimize U.S. protective and civilizing
intervention in Central America. In Roosevelt’s view, the function of the doctrine
was not only to protect the Americas from European interventions, but also to
safeguard Central American countries from their own wrongdoings and impo-
tence. The United States regarded Central America and the Caribbean as sites
51. On Roque Sáenz Peña’s critique of the Monroe Doctrine, see Roque Sáenz Peña, “Los
Estados Unidos en Sud-América: La Doctrina Monroe y su evolución,” in Derecho público americano
(Buenos Aires, 1905), 141-86.
52. Roque Sáenz Peña to Luis Marı́a Drago, Buenos Aires, October 11, 1903, in Derecho público
americano, 212.
53. See Luis Marı́a Drago, “State Loans in Their Relation to International Policy,” American
Journal of International Law 1, no. 3 (1907): 692-726, and Drago, “Argentine Republic,” 1-9.
54. Drago, “State Loans,” 714.
55. Theodore Roosevelt, “Annual Message of the President to Congress,” December 6, 1904
in Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1904 (Washington, DC, 1904), XLI.
of frequent revolutions and financial mismanagement.56 The original message of

Monroe had not traced clearly the boundaries and limits with regard to U.S.
national interests and in which cases these interests were affected. Therefore, it
was possible for Roosevelt to amplify the scope of U.S. interest to include Central
American wrongdoings.
The so-called Roosevelt Corollary has been traditionally understood as an
attempt to formalize the U.S. right to intervention in Central America and the
Caribbean, famously initiated in Cuba and Panama, as well as to consolidate a
system of customs receivership in the Dominican Republic.57 Nevertheless, it was
also a paradigmatic example of intervention presented in “moral terms” and even

as an early precedent of “humanitarian intervention,” invoking a legal right to
“police measure.”58
Roosevelt’s interventionist and unilateral version of the Monroe Doctrine
might be interpreted not only as a message of control and protection directed to
the Central American and Caribbean countries, and of “hands off” to European
nations, claiming U.S. leadership and “protective imperialism” in the region, but
also as an implicit rejection of Drago’s earlier version of the Monroe Doctrine,
which had emphasized instead multilateralism and absolute non-intervention. As
Whitaker has shown, Roosevelt did not comment explicitly on the Drago
Doctrine, but rather he was to contribute, along with Root, to denaturing the
Drago Doctrine.59 All in all, these two contending corollaries of the Monroe
Doctrine contributed to reshaping both its meaning and scope. For Roosevelt
the application of the doctrine should be unilaterally prescribed by the United
States, and the scope of such prescription was confined to Central America and
the Caribbean.
Undoubtedly, U.S. attitude toward the Drago Doctrine had been ambiguous
and contradictory from the time it was first formulated in 1902 until it was dis-
cussed at the Third Pan-American Conference at Rio de Janeiro (1906) and later at
the Second Hague Peace Conference (1907). As Lars Schoultz has noted, after
Root replaced Hay as Secretary of State in 1905, Roosevelt’s administration began
to be more moderate about U.S. intervention in the Americas, for Root promoted
cooperative and friendly relations with Latin America.60 This historical transition
56. See Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar
Diplomacy, 1900-1930 (Cambridge, MA, 1999), Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United
States in Central America (New York, 1993), and James Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus: A Political
History of Modern Central America (London, 1990).
57. See Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries, 31-60, and Gordon Connell-Smith, The United
States & Latin America: An Historical Analysis of Inter-American Relations (London, 1974), 115-21.
58. See Martin Wight, Power Politics, eds. Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad
(Harmondsworth, 1979), 195, and Simon Chesterman, Just War or Just Peace: Humanitarian
Intervention and International Law (Oxford, 2001), 36-37. See also James R. Holmes, Theodore
Roosevelt and World Order (Washington, DC, 2006), 87-130, and Frank Ninkovich, “Theodore
Roosevelt: Civilization as Ideology,” Diplomatic History 10, no. 3 (1986): 235-37.
59. See Whitaker, Western Hemisphere, 86-107.
60. See Schoultz, Beneath the United States, 190-91. See also Sexton, Monroe Doctrine, 234-35.
reflected a shift in U.S. conceptions about both the Monroe Doctrine and Pan-
Americanism. Interestingly, in his 1906 Presidential message to Congress,
Roosevelt sought to detach the Monroe Doctrine from notions of U.S. superiority
and paternalism over Latin America, drawing explicitly on Drago’s own definition
of the Monroe Doctrine in the context of Root’s visit to Argentina.61 More im-
portantly, Root and Scott expressed at least an intellectual and political interest in
the Drago Doctrine. Indeed, Drago’s note could be read as an expression of Latin
American defense of a traditional U.S. foreign policy principle.
For Drago the proper context for the discussion of his doctrine was the Third
Pan-American Conference (1906), for, as it has already been stressed, he presented

it as a multilateral principle of inter-American policy rather than a matter of inter-
national law. This did not coincide with the plans of Root, who wanted to reframe
it as an international law principle. Indeed, “for Root the true course was to request
the Second Hague Conference to consider the subject.”62 In the end, it was Root’s
vision that prevailed, so a resolution was passed at the Third Pan-American
Conference, recommending the discussion of the principles advanced by Drago
at The Hague the following year.63 In fact, Drago was “one of the two most
conspicuous Latin American delegates (the other being Ruy Barbosa of Brazil)
and was appointed to the most important posts for which he was eligible.”64
Drago never conceived his doctrine as an international law principle. Yet Root
and Scott defended it as such at the Second Hague Peace Conference (1907).
Moreover, the U.S. delegation, of which Scott was a technical delegate and
expert in international law, in the end failed to support it in its full length.
Acting as secretary of state, Root outlined in his formal instructions to the U.S.
delegates that the use of force for the collection of public debts “is not permissible
until after” the claim has been arbitrated.65 In other words, Root did not adhere
to the principle of absolute non-intervention and thus did not support the Drago
Doctrine in its full meaning. Root’s instructions led to the so-called Porter
Convention. Therefore, the U.S. delegation managed to adopt successfully
the resort to arbitration to limit the use of military force for the collection of
public debts.
According to the Porter Convention, when the recourse to arbitration does not
succeed, the creditor still maintains the right to intervene and take military actions
61. Theodore Roosevelt, Annual Message of the President to Congress, December 3, 1906,
Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1904, Vol. 1, XLVIII.
62. Thomas F. McGann, Argentina, the United States and the Inter-American System, 1880-1914
(Cambridge, MA, 1957), 248.
63. James Brown Scott, ed., The International Conferences of the American States, 1889-1928
(New York, 1931), 135-36.
64. Whitaker, Western Hemisphere, 104.
65. Elihu Root, “Instructions to the American delegates to the Hague Peace Conferences,”
Department of State, Washington, May 31, 1907, in Instructions to the American Delegates to the
Hague Peace Conferences and their Official Reports, ed. James Brown Scott (New York, 1916), 76-77.
See also Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root, 1905-1937, vol. 2 (New York, 1938), 74.
against the debtor country. This resort contradicts the principle of absolute non-
intervention enunciated in Drago’s original note. Scott was very explicit about the
merits of the Porter proposition over the Drago Doctrine. While the former was,
as Scott was to argue, “legal in that questions of law and fact are to be subjected to
arbitration,” the latter was “political because in ultimate analysis it proclaims the
principle that America is not subject to occupation or annexation from claims
arising out of public indebtedness.” As such, the Drago Doctrine was merely
“a program, a manifesto.”66
The U.S. delegation thus distinguished and separated the Drago Doctrine from
that of Monroe, which served in turn to make the former appear not as a multi-

lateral Pan-American principle of absolute non-intervention that protects weak
countries from military interventions, but rather, as Scott was to affirm, as
“a unilateral, that is, a one-sided statement which does not create an obligation.”
Yet the Porter “convention for the limitation of force in the collection of contract
debts” was, according to Scott, “a contract, entered into by the nations of the
world, and at one and the same time, a solemn and formal recognition of the
Monroe Doctrine.” Scott’s conclusion was certainly peculiar. He asserted that,
“through Drago, the Monroe Doctrine has made its formal entry into public law
as distinct from national policy.”67 If the Monroe Doctrine was recognized as a
principle of public law, it was through Drago, but more importantly via the Porter
Convention. In other words, it reflected in part the Drago Doctrine, but certainly
corrected and reframed by the U.S. delegation as a proper principle of interna-
tional law.
T O W A R D A P A N - A M E R I C A N M O N R O E D O C T R I N E : Á L V A R E Z ,
ROOT, BRUM, AND HUGHES
After Root visited South America in 1906 and proclaimed a new Pan-Americanism
based on hemispheric peace and cooperation, the Monroe Doctrine was revita-
lized. Indeed, the Brazilian ambassador in Washington, D.C., Joaquim Nabuco,
who was a fervent advocate of Pan-Americanism and one of Root’s closest collab-
orators in the organization of the Third Pan-American Conference (1906) held in
Rio de Janeiro, proposed a resolution regarding the importance of the Monroe
Doctrine for Latin America for the Fourth Pan-American Conference to be held in
Buenos Aires in 1910.68 He considered that, in the context of a conference to be
held in the centenary of the independence of the Latin American countries, it was
worth expressing gratitude on the part of Latin America toward the United States
66. James Brown Scott, The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 (Baltimore, MD, 1909),
vol. 1, 420.
67. Scott, Hague Peace Conferences, vol. 1, 420-21.
68. On the role played by Nabuco in the history of Brazilian international relations, see Leslie
Bethell, “Brazil and ‘Latin America,’” Journal of Latin American Studies 42, no. 3 (2010): 471, and
Stephanie Dennison, Joaquim Nabuco: Monarchism, Panamericanism and Nation-Building in the
Brazilian Belle Epoque (Bern, 2006), 143-219.
for the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine, which contributed, according to

him, to the maintenance of peace on the whole continent. Nabuco died shortly
before the Fourth Pan-American Conference was held.
Another Latin American defender of the Monroe Doctrine as a relevant prin-
ciple for the advancement of peace in the Americas was the Chilean international
lawyer, Alejandro Álvarez. A renowned scholar and an advisor of the Chilean
Foreign Ministry, Álvarez started to participate actively in the Pan-American con-
ferences, advocating the recognition of the Monroe Doctrine as a beneficial prin-
ciple for the Americas.69 Indeed, along with the Brazilian delegation, he attempted
to advance the proposal that Nabuco left for the Buenos Aires Conference (1910).

Nabuco’s proposal, slightly redefined by Álvarez along with the Brazilian delega-
tion, was ultimately not backed by all the Latin American countries nor by the
United States.
Álvarez is known for advocating a specific American–continental approach to
international law. He distinguished between the European legal tradition, based
on the notions of monarchical solidarity, political equilibrium, and intervention,
and an “American international law” rooted in a more general idea of solidarity,
non-intervention, and state independence on the grounds that the New World
should not be an object of any form of colonization.70 However, the term
“American international law” was not an invention of Álvarez, since it was
coined in Latin America by the Argentine jurist Juan Bautista Alberdi in 1844.71
However, Álvarez was certainly the most prominent advocate of this idea in its
modern version and thus contributed significantly to its introduction into the Pan-
American movement.
Yet the defense of the Monroe Doctrine advanced by Álvarez is less well known
than his advocacy for an “American international law.” Indeed, the two questions
were inter-connected. Before defending the Monroe Doctrine at the Fourth Pan-
American Conference, by 1905 Álvarez had begun to make a case for a specific
regional Latin American approach to international law in a paper he delivered at
the Third Latin American Scientific Congress held in Rio de Janeiro.72
69. See, for instance, Alejandro Álvarez, “The Monroe Doctrine at the Fourth Pan-American
Conference,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 37, no. 3 (1911): 605-06.
For an account of the discussions about the Monroe Doctrine in the Fourth Pan-American
Conference in Buenos Aires, see Samuel Guy Inman, Inter-American Conferences, 1826-1954:
History and Problems (Gettysburg, PA, 1965), 83-85.
70. See Alejandro Álvarez, La nationalité dans le droit international américain (Paris, 1907),
viii-xv.
71. See César Dı́az Cisneros, Alberdi ante la filosofı́a y el derecho de gentes (La Plata, 1930), 27-35,
and H.B. Jacobini, A Study of the Philosophy of International Law as Seen in the Works of Latin American
Writers (The Hague, 1954), 123. For a recent analysis of the nature and history of Latin American
international law, see Arnulf Becker Lorca, “International Law in Latin America or Latin
American International Law?,” Harvard International Law Journal 47, no. 1 (2006): 283-305.
72. See Liliana Obregón, “Noted for Dissent: The International Life of Alejandro Alvarez,”
Leiden Journal of International Law 19, no. 4 (2006): 991.
Interestingly, when he turned the paper into an article and published it in 1907, he
expanded the geographical domain and included the United States.73 In between
the paper and the article, that is, between 1905 and 1907, Root made his acclaimed
visit to South America. Though it is difficult to identify whether Root’s visit had a
remarkable impact on this conceptual and geographical reorientation in the inter-
national legal thought of Álvarez, it seems clear that the emergence of Pan-
Americanism was regarded by him as at least a positive shift in U.S. foreign
policy, for it shaped and strengthened his increasingly optimistic faith in hemi-
spheric solidarity as an authentic ideal of “American international law.”
Álvarez had the chance to present his views on “specific continental ‘problems

and conditions peculiar to American international law’” at the First Pan-American
Scientific Congress (1908-1909) celebrated in Chile.74 He was then invited to
present this same paper in the context of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the ASIL,
held in April 1909 in Washington, D.C. Translated into English by the U.S.
Department of State and read by Leo S. Rowe, a leading intellectual promoter
of Pan-Americanism and a future director of the Pan American Union (1920-
1946), the presentation of Álvarez was certainly to have a great impact on U.S.
international lawyers and politicians, particularly on Scott.75
As a result of the successful reception of his ideas at the ASIL, its journal, the
AJIL, included a pioneering article by Álvarez. Anticipating many of the ideas of
his famous book, Le droit international américain (1910), Álvarez again distinguished
the exceptional approach of the Western Hemisphere to international law from
that of Europe. The basic source of his argument was the Monroe Doctrine. The
doctrine served, so Álvarez asserted, as the foundational basis for the formation and
development of “American international law.”76 Defining the scope of the Monroe
Doctrine, Álvarez stated: “no one of the two continents may intermeddle in the affairs of
the other, and on this all America stands united.”77 He concluded that “[the Monroe
Doctrine] is the expression of the will of America.”78
According to Álvarez, the Monroe Doctrine was as an authentic principle
of international law and as such its legal implications were twofold. On the one
hand, in the view of Álvarez, as Esquirol has pointed out, it rejected European
73. Alejandro Álvarez, “Le droit international Américain, son origine et son evolution,” Revue
Générale de Droit International Public 14 (1907): 393-405.
74. See “International Law at the First Pan-American Scientific Congress,” American Journal
of International Law 3, no. 2 (1909): 429.
75. See “Address of Mr. Alejandro Alvarez, of Santiago, Chile,” April 23, 1909, Proceedings of
the American Society of International Law 3 (1909): 206-220. For an insightful analysis of the role of
Rowe in the development of Pan-Americanism, see Salvatore, “The Making of a Hemispheric
Intellectual-Statesman.”
76. See Alejandro Álvarez, “Latin America and International Law,” American Journal of
International Law 3, no. 3 (1909): 269-353, and Álvarez, Le droit international américain: son fonde-
ment, sa nature (Paris, 1910), 125-84.
77. Alejandro Álvarez, “Latin America,” 311.
78. Ibid., 313.
intervention in the Americas. On the other hand, it affirmed that no American

territory was terra nullius, that is, an object of colonization or conquest.79
Álvarez traced a clear distinction between the Monroe Doctrine and U.S.
hegemony in the Americas. Since the two concepts were often confused in Latin
America, he thought it was crucial to distinguish them. He intended to refute the
Latin American view that considered the Monroe Doctrine as an instrument of
U.S. imperialism. Yet he believed that U.S. hegemony was beneficial to the hemi-
sphere. “Far from deserving absolute condemnation, as has been slightly said by
certain publicists, [the hegemony of the United States] should be differently
judged, as having been generally beneficial to America, as it has made this hemi-

sphere respected by the countries of Europe in spite of the acts of intervention that
have been carried out against it.”80
Álvarez was neither an advocate of U.S. imperialism in the Americas, nor a
supporter of Latin American anti-imperialism and “subaltern modernism,” but
rather a promoter of Pan-Americanism and hemispheric exceptionalism.81
As Greg Grandin has observed, “Alvarez was a firm believer in American excep-
tionalism, 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.”82
As such, Álvarez made a pivotal contribution to the intellectual and political
development of Pan-Americanism.
By distinguishing the American approach to international law from the
European one, Álvarez provided a new understanding of the role of the
Americas in international affairs, in which the United States was seen as its legit-
imate leader. If the source of exceptionality of Western Hemisphere international
law was to be found in the Monroe Doctrine, then that exceptionality was a prod-
uct of the exceptional role of the United States in the Americas. After all, the
Monroe Doctrine was a national U.S. invention.
Scott was captivated by the ideas of Álvarez (figure 2). On the basis of his ideas
about the existence of a specific continental “American international law,” they
decided together to create the AIIL, which unified all the national societies of
international law of the Americas. By 1911, Scott and Álvarez met in
Washington, D.C. and decided to send a letter to Root, who was by that time a
Senator as well as the President of both the CEIP and the ASIL, to gain his support
79. See Jorge L. Esquirol, “Alejandro Alvarez’s Latin American Law: A Question of Identity,”
Leiden Journal of International Law 19, no. 4 (2006): 940.
80. Álvarez, “Latin America,” 319.
81. For a different analysis of Álvarez, portraying him as an advocate of Latin American sub-
altern modernism, see Arnulf Becker Lorca, “Alejandro Alvarez Situated: Subaltern Modernities
and Modernisms that Subvert,” Leiden Journal of International Law 19, no. 4 (2006): 879-930.
82. Greg Grandin, “Your Americanism and Mine: Americanism and Anti-Americanism in the
Americas,” American Historical Review 111, no. 4 (2006): 1054.

Figure 2: Alejandro Álvarez. Source: Archivo Histórico del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores
de Chile.
to create this Pan-American network of international law. They stated that “after
reflection and much discussion we came to the conclusion that the best way to draw
the leaders of thought together would be to create an institute of international
law.”83
Financially supported by the CEIP, the AIIL came into being in 1912 and it
joined together the leading jurists of the continent. Most of its members, such as
Drago, Álvarez, Scott, and Baltasar Brum were fervent defenders of Pan-
Americanism. Álvarez was to become Secretary, Scott President, and Root
Honorary President of the organization. The ideas of Álvarez were put into
83. James Brown Scott, “The Gradual and Progressive Codification of International Law,”
American Journal of International Law 21, no. 3 (1927): 425-26.
practice and sponsored by the AIIL and also the CEIP. Therefore, they became
part of the hemispheric policy of the United States.
In 1916, the AIIL held its first institutional meeting in the context of the Second
Pan-American Scientific Congress held in Washington, D.C., and adopted a
“Declaration of Rights and Duties of Nations,” drafted by Scott, stating that all
the countries of the Western Hemisphere have the right to independence and self-
protection as well as the duty of respecting their own territories and jurisdictions.84
It also began a long-standing project for the codification of “American interna-
tional law” that was originally prepared by Álvarez and discussed at both the Rio de
Janeiro Commission of Jurists (1927) and the Sixth Pan-American Conference

(1928) held in Havana (Cuba).
When Wilson became President, differing opinions about the Monroe
Doctrine circulated in the United States. As Mark Gilderhus has noted, by 1913
the term was revived in U.S. political and intellectual debates.85 Indeed, it is fair to
say that the Monroe Doctrine became a subject of debate throughout the Western
Hemisphere. As a result, between 1913 and 1914, a large number of meetings,
conferences, articles, books, and journal issues were devoted to a discussion of the
nature and scope of the Monroe Doctrine in the United States and Latin
America.86
In the context of this revival of interest, an important critical interpretation was
to have a great impact on Wilson and helped to reformulate U.S. policy toward
Latin America. It came from Hiram Bingham, a prestigious professor of Latin
American History at Yale University. Bingham is widely known for discovering the
Inca Ruins in Machu Picchu (Peru) in 1911 and for being one of the founders of
Latin American Studies in the United States. In 1908-1909, Bingham made a series
of trips to South America and participated in the First Pan-American Scientific
Congress held in Chile. As Thomas Karnes has noted, through this visit he became
aware of Latin American Yankeephobia and also developed a special admiration
for Latin American peoples and societies.87 Drawing on his visit to the region, he
published a polemical article in The Atlantic Monthly, which he soon after extended
into a book, asserting that the Monroe Doctrine was perceived among Latin
American political and intellectual figures and the press as selfish and hegemonic.88
84. James Brown Scott, The American Institute of International Law: Its Declaration of Rights and
Duties of Nations (Washington, DC, 1916), 87-88.
85. Gilderhus, Pan American Visions, 15-17.
86. See Proceedings of the American Society of International Law 8 (1914), Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 54 (July 1914): 1-126, and The Journal of Race Development 4,
no. 3 (January 1914): 306-73. See also Gilderhus, Pan American Visions, 15-16.
87. Thomas L. Karnes, “Hiram Bingham and his Obsolete Shibboleth,” Diplomatic History 3,
no. 1 (1979): 42. For an historical interpretation of Bingham’s expedition to the Inca ruins in Peru,
see Ricardo D. Salvatore, “Local versus Imperial Knowledge: Reflections on Hiram Bingham and
the Yale Peruvian Expedition,” Nepantla: Views from South 4, no. 1 (2003): 67-80.
88. A detailed account of Bingham’s trip to South America could be found in Hiram Bingham,
Across South America: An Account of a Journey from Buenos Aires to Lima by Way of Potosi (Boston, MA,
1911).
According to Bingham, even the new “Pan-American” Monroe Doctrine defended

by Álvarez had to be rejected, since in certain Latin American countries, such as
Argentina, even Pan-Americanism was resisted.89 Therefore, he advocated a multi-
lateral model of cooperation among the United States and the ABC countries that
could replace the Monroe Doctrine.90 Bingham went so far as to suggest that the
doctrine should be abandoned. Though he was later to restate the Monroe
Doctrine, asserting that it was no longer obsolete and it should be defended to
limit any potential despotic intervention from the European powers in Latin
America after World War I, Bingham translated rising Latin American criticism
of the United States into a national self-critique that had a great impact on

President Wilson in particular, to whom Bingham sent a copy of his article.91
One aspect of this impact was the attempt by John Barrett, the director of the
Pan-American Union (1907-1920), to replace the “Monroe Doctrine” with a
greater “Pan-American Policy” on the basis of Bingham’s critical interpretation.92
This new meaning implied amplifying its scope from the national denomination of
“Monroe” to the continental signification of “Pan-American,” and replacing its
hard and dictatorial meaning of “doctrine” for the more flexible idea of “policy.”
Yet, as Karnes has observed, both Bingham and Barrett “believed in the necessity
of the greater sharing in the responsibility for the stability of the hemisphere.”93
The leading figures of the ASIL reacted in a very different manner to these
redefinitions of the Monroe Doctrine. By April 1914, a few days after U.S. inter-
vention in Veracruz (Mexico) and in the context of a very critical moment in
Europe, the ASIL devoted its annual meeting to a discussion of the Monroe
Doctrine. In his opening presidential address, Root made only a passing reference
to the European conflict.94 The Committee of the ASIL did not hesitate to invite
Bingham to its annual meeting, where he delivered a presentation about the Latin
American attitude toward the Monroe Doctrine. He suggested that the United
States should be more conscious and self-critical of the resistance that the South
Americans had expressed toward the doctrine. Though Bingham concluded that
the doctrine should be abandoned, his warnings did not contribute to changing the
convictions of the leaders of the ASIL, especially those of Root.95 The view of the
prominent U.S. historian of the Monroe Doctrine, Dexter Perkins, who was also
89. Hiram Bingham, The Monroe Doctrine: An Obsolete Shibboleth (New Haven, CT, 1913), 68.
See also Hiram Bingham, “The Monroe Doctrine: An Obsolete Shibboleth,” The Atlantic Monthly
111 (June 1913): 721-34.
90. See Bingham, Monroe Doctrine, 109, and Bingham, “Monroe Doctrine,” 727.
91. See Hiram Bingham, “The Future of the Monroe Doctrine,” Journal of International
Relations 10 (1920): 392-403, and Gilderhus, Pan American Visions, 16.
92. John Barrett, “A Pan-American Policy: The Monroe Doctrine Modernized,” Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 54 (1914): 2.
93. Karnes, “Hiram Bingham,” 47.
94. See Kirgis, American Society, 37.
95. Hiram Bingham, “The Latin American Attitude toward the Monroe Doctrine,”
Proceedings of the American Society of International Law 8 (1914): 189-90, 195-96.
present at the ASIL meeting, seemed to be consistent with that of Bingham.

Although he did not express himself in favor of or against the doctrine, he con-
fessed that he was not able to find any historical evidence in French and Russian
archives that there was any European objective of intervening in the Americas in
the nineteenth century. His conclusion was simple, but polemical. Like Bingham,
he believed that the statements about a European potential threat could be applic-
able to 1823, but they were no longer appropriate for 1914.96 All in all, it seems
possible to infer that Perkins, along with Bingham and Barrett, believed that, if not
abandoned, the doctrine had to be at least reconsidered differently in the present
circumstances of 1914.

In his presidential address, Root sought to outline a clear definition of what he
termed “The Real Monroe Doctrine.” According to Root, since its first enunci-
ation by Monroe, the doctrine had been misunderstood by Latin Americans, for it
had been considered alternately as a continental declaration or an imperialist one.
Indeed, he explicitly criticized Bingham in declaring that the doctrine could not
and should not be defended in an alliance with the ABC countries. As an advocate
of Pan-Americanism, Root sought to put forward the argument that there were no
imperialist or interventionist purposes behind the doctrine. He affirmed:
“Thoughtless people who see no difference between lawful right and physical
power assume that the Monroe Doctrine is a warrant for interference in the in-
ternal affairs of all weaker nations in the New World.”97
Root defined the scope of the doctrine as unilateral. Those initiatives coming
from Latin American countries to extend it to the whole hemisphere were mis-
leading. “Since the Monroe Doctrine is a declaration based upon this nation’s right
of self-protection,” so Root stressed, “it cannot be transmuted into a joint or
common declaration by American states or any number of them.”98 Moreover,
Root placed a great emphasis on defining the doctrine’s relation to international
law. As enunciated by Monroe, it appeared to be a mere political principle, since it
was never recognized as a law. However, Root argued that it was consistent with
some basic principles of international law. In his own words, “the doctrine is not
international law but it rests upon the right of self-protection and that right is
recognized by international law.”99
Between 1914 and 1917, Wilson proposed two reformulations of the Monroe
Doctrine. First, as has already been shown, he advanced the initiative of
promoting a Pan-American Pact, along with the ABC countries, in order to
“exercise an international police power in the Western Hemisphere” on a
96. Proceedings of the American Society of International Law 8 (1914): 199. Perkins was to de-
velop further his historical argument about the non-existence of a European threat in the first
volume of his trilogy devoted to the history of the Monroe Doctrine. See Dexter Perkins, The
Monroe Doctrine, 1823-1826 (Cambridge, MA, 1927).
97. Elihu Root, “The Real Monroe Doctrine,” American Journal of International Law 8, no. 3
(1914): 442.
98. Ibid., 440.
99. Ibid., 432.
multilateral basis.100 As Gilderhus has observed, this ambitious multilateral project

finally failed to be supported by the ABC countries and collapsed in 1917.101
Second, shortly before the United States entered formally into World War I,
Wilson invoked the Monroe Doctrine as a global principle in his famous speech
“Peace without Victory.” Rather than a formal restatement of Monroe’s message,
Wilson’s redefinition was more of a proposal. He asserted: “I am proposing, as it
were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President
Monroe as the doctrine of the world.”102
Wilson was the intellectual progenitor of the League of Nations, which incor-
porated a reference to the Monroe Doctrine in article twenty-one of the Covenant.

“Nothing in this Covenant shall be deemed to affect the validity of international
engagements, such as Treaties of Arbitration, or regional understandings like the
Monroe doctrine, for securing the maintenance of peace.”103 As the United States
never joined the League, the status of article twenty-one remained ambiguous.
The long debate in the U.S. Senate over the membership of the League, as Dexter
Perkins has observed, reflected the incompatibility between the Monroe Doctrine,
a principle of “nationalism” in the history of U.S. foreign policy, and U.S. adhesion
to the League of Nations, an ideal of “internationalism.”104 Nevertheless, the
presence of the doctrine in the Covenant served to bar the League from addressing
those questions related to the Western Hemisphere. All in all, the United States
left a mark on the Covenant, where the Monroe Doctrine was vaguely defined as
a “regional understanding.” This vague reference to the doctrine in the context of
a paradoxical attitude of the United States toward the League certainly revealed
the extent to which the meaning and scope of the doctrine remained unsettled.
Shortly after the League of Nations was created, the Uruguayan president and
jurist Baltasar Brum advanced a proposal for the creation of a new international
organization, an American League of Nations, encompassing all the countries of
the Western Hemisphere, including the United States. Undoubtedly, he was
emulating the internationalist ideal of a League of Nations, but along the lines
of the hemispheric language of Pan-Americanism. As an advocate of Pan-
Americanism, Brum believed that membership of that new organization should
have an egalitarian basis among American countries, which, he believed, was one of
the basic pillars of Pan-Americanism, along with the idea of continental solidarity.
100. Mark T. Gilderhus, “Wilson, Carranza, and the Monroe Doctrine: A Question in
Regional Integration,” Diplomatic History 7, no. 2 (1983): 115.
101. Gilderhus, Pan American Visions, 74-77, and Gilderhus, “Wilson,” 115.
102. Woodrow Wilson, “Address to Senate,” January 22, 1917, in Papers of Woodrow Wilson,
November 20, 1916-January 23, 1917, vol. 40, ed. Arthur Link (Princeton, NJ, 1982), 538-39. On
the ideas of Wilson and the legacy of Wilsonianism in the history of U.S. foreign policy, see John
A. Thompson, “Wilsonianism: The Dynamics of a Conflicted Concept,” International Affairs 86,
no. 1 (2010): 27-48, and Thomas J. Knock, To End all Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New
World Order (Princeton, NJ, 1992), 105-46.
103. F. S. Northedge, The League of Nations: Its Life and Times, 1920-1946 (Leicester,
1988), 324.
104. Dexter Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine (New York, 1960), 304-05.
Due to the fact that in its article twenty-one the peace treaty recognized the
Monroe Doctrine as a “regional understanding,” the League of Nations appeared
not to have the capacity to deal specifically with inter-American questions. The
new American League of Nations had to be created precisely to fill that gap.
Brum’s proposal was rooted in a Pan-American interpretation of the Monroe
Doctrine. Like Drago and Álvarez, he sought to Pan-Americanize the doctrine.
He asserted that European imperial aspirations were no longer threatening the
Americas, so the doctrine seemed unnecessary. Yet, unlike Bingham, Brum
believed that it did not have to be abandoned, for “the Monroe Doctrine is the
only permanent manifestation of the solidarity of one American nation with the

others of the Continent.” He thus concluded that with the new American League
of Nations, “the Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed as a present norm of foreign policy
only for the United States, would be transformed into a defensive alliance among
all the American countries, founded upon a lofty feeling of solidarity, with recip-
rocal obligations and advantages for all of them.”105
Brum conceived the American League as an institutionalization of a new
redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine along the lines of continental solidarity, a
standard ideal of Pan-Americanism. This initiative was then discussed at the Fifth
Pan-American Conference (1923), held in Chile, but it failed to be approved.
Unlike the ideas of Álvarez, the redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine as the intel-
lectual basis for the creation of an inter-American organization was not supported
by the U.S. delegation.
Scott did not back Brum’s proposal; indeed he criticized it. He traced a strong
distinction between the Monroe Doctrine and American solidarity. According to
Scott, the United States had an exclusive right to invoke and enforce the former. In
order to settle disputes between American countries and protect them from inter-
American imperialism, which was one of the main purposes of Brum’s quest for an
American League of Nations, Scott believed that American solidarity and not the
Monroe Doctrine had to be invoked. He went on to criticize the very legitimacy of
a continental League. He stressed that such an organization “would have been
necessary if there had been no universal league.” For that reason, rather than
creating another League of Nations or an alternative hemispheric organization,
Scott concluded that it was necessary to strengthen the existing one, the Pan-
American Union, based on “absolute equality” and “composed of official repre-
sentatives of each of the American Republics.”106
As the centenary of the Monroe Doctrine approached, U.S. Secretary of State
Hughes intended to define and review the role of the doctrine in the history of U.S.
foreign policy and its recent engagement with Pan-Americanism. In a series of
105. Baltasar Brum, “Solidaridad Americana,” Conference of the President of Uruguay,

Dr. Baltasar Brum, at the Universidad de Montevideo, Uruguay, April 21, 1920, in Estudios
polı́ticos y de derecho (Montevideo, 1999), 194-95.
106. James Brown Scott, “American Solidarity,” American Journal of International Law 14, no. 4
(1920): 603, 605, 606.
political addresses, he emphasized that it was by all means a U.S. self-defensive and
self-protective doctrine. He asserted, as Root did, that “the Monroe Doctrine does
not attempt to establish a protectorate over Latin American States.”107 Hughes
believed that although the Monroe Doctrine belonged to the United States, it
could be functional for the future development of Pan-Americanism, for he
argued that “it is apparent that the Monroe Doctrine does not stand in the way
of Pan American cooperation; rather it affords the necessary foundation for that
cooperation in the independence and security of American states.”108 Indeed,
Hughes was also to quote the “Declaration of Rights and Duties of Nations,”
drafted by Scott and adopted by the AIIL in its first meeting of 1916, in order

to affirm that the United States, as an advocate of Pan-Americanism and
“American international law,” had expressed its commitment “to respect the ter-
ritorial integrity of the Latin-American Republics.”109
Though the views of Hughes on U.S. interventionism in Latin America became
more controversial in the late 1920s, his interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine
was to remain influential. At the Sixth Pan-American Conference (1928) held in
Cuba, Hughes famously justified U.S. interventionism in Latin America as a “prin-
ciple of international law.”110 At the same time, he was asked to write a special
article on the Monroe Doctrine for the Fourteenth Edition of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica published in 1929.111
Álvarez was also commissioned to write a book and to lecture in U.S. univer-
sities on both the modern significance of the Monroe Doctrine and American
international law by the CEIP and Scott.112 Moreover, in 1924 Álvarez drafted a
memorandum for the AIIL, which was also signed by the treasurer of the organ-
ization, Luis Anderson, in which he recognized the extent to which the Monroe
Doctrine shaped his ideal of “American international law”:
For a long time, in effect, we have spoken in America about the utility that an
agreement on a continental declaration of the Monroe Doctrine would have
had. But, since such an expression would lend itself to misunderstandings, both
in the United States and in some Latin American countries, it is thus more
107. Charles Evans Hughes, “Observations on the Monroe Doctrine,” American Journal of
International Law 17, no. 4 (1923): 618.
108. Hughes, “Observations,” 626.
109. See Charles Evans Hughes, “The Centenary of the Monroe Doctrine,” Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 111 (1924): 15.
110. Hughes, “Speech at the last Plenary Session,” in Report of the Delegates of the United States
to the Sixth International Conference of American States, held in Havana, Cuba, January 16 to February
20, 1928 (Washington, DC, 1928), 14.
111. See Charles Evans Hughes, “Article by Charles E. Hughes on the Monroe Doctrine for
the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” 1928, Papers of Charles Evans Hughes, box 31, Columbia
University, Rare Books and Manuscript Library; and Hughes, Relaciones de los Estados Unidos con
las otras naciones del hemisferio occidental (Princeton, NJ, 1929), 18-26.
112. See Alejandro Álvarez, The Monroe Doctrine: Its Importance in the International Life of the
States of the New World (New York, 1924), and Álvarez, International Law and Related Subjects from
the Point of View of the American Continent (Washington, DC, 1922).
convenient not to speak of it, and to speak instead of “fundamental Principles

of American Public Law.”113
In later years, especially after the official publication of the Clark Memorandum
on the Monroe Doctrine by the U.S. State Department in 1930, interventions in
the name of the Monroe Doctrine began to be denounced. The Clark
Memorandum did not condemn interventions as such, neither did it seek to
depart from the classic U.S. unilateral interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine; it
only reframed the doctrine as a case of the United States vs. Europe, rather than the
United States vs. Latin America, and criticized its legitimacy as a principle to
enforce U.S. interventions in the Western Hemisphere, thus repudiating the

Roosevelt Corollary.114 Nevertheless, in later Pan-American Conferences cele-
brated subsequently in 1933 and 1936, a series of declarations of hemispheric
security, multilateral cooperation, and more importantly non-intervention, finally
declared interventions to be forbidden in the Americas.115 These declarations were
consistent with, and very much framed by, the influential hemispheric idea of the
1910s and 1920s of Pan-Americanizing the Monroe Doctrine. All in all, the dec-
laration on non-intervention derived from the projects for the codification of
international law, originally prepared by Álvarez, and advanced by the AIIL in
the early 1920s.116
CONCLUSION
Though the Monroe Doctrine remained unsettled from 1898 to 1933, it went
through significant shifts regarding its scope and meaning. As soon as it began
to be discussed in the context of Pan-Americanism, it made a transition from a
national to a hemispheric principle. It has often been argued that there were dif-
ferent attempts to globalize the doctrine. First it was Wilson in 1917 who at-
tempted to internationalize it as “a doctrine for the world.” Much later, between
1933 and 1940 in the context of a series of Pan-American Conferences, the doc-
trine was said to have been broadened and generalized as a multilateral principle of
non-intervention. These attempts have been described variously as processes of
113. Memorandum of Alejandro Álvarez and Luis Anderson for the members of the American
Institute of International Law, January 24, 1924, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Records, vol. 298, (1924), 3434, Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
114. J. Reuben Clark, “Memorandum on the Monroe Doctrine,” in Monroe Doctrine,
ed. Dozer, 115-22.
115. See “1933: The United States Accepts the Non-Intervention Principle,” in Latin America
and the United States: A Documentary History, eds. Robert H. Holden and Eric Zolov (New York,
2000), 146-48.
116. See Alejandro Álvarez, La codificación del derecho internacional en América: trabajos de la
tercera Comisión de la Asamblea de Jurisconsultos reunida en Santiago de Chile (Santiago, 1923), and
Scott, “Gradual and Progressive Codification.”
internationalization, broadening, and generalization of the doctrine.117 Yet, as

shown throughout this article, long before this series of efforts to globalize the
doctrine, it was Pan-Americanized and thus regarded as a continental principle
before it was proposed as a global one.
Further, the doctrine shifted in its meaning. Its status as a mere principle of
foreign policy was questioned, although Root still defended it as such, and it was
seen instead as a principle of international law. In this respect, first through the
Porter Convention at The Hague in 1907, then through the ideas of Álvarez and
his understanding of an “American international law” in 1909 and later through
the proposal of an American League of Nations advanced by Brum in 1920, the

Monroe Doctrine began progressively to be regarded as an international law prin-
ciple, or at least a principle of inter-American organization. Complementing such
a shift, the doctrine began to be considered by Latin American jurists and diplo-
mats as a multilateral ideal of the Pan-American movement, rather than a unilateral
principle of U.S. foreign policy. In this sense, the note of Drago was a pioneering
initiative to Pan-Americanize the doctrine, despite the fact that for the most part
U.S. politicians resisted these initiatives. Finally, the most complex transition faced
by the doctrine in its intellectual history was that from being considered primarily a
principle of intervention to one of non-intervention. As soon as the United States
began to expand in the Caribbean and Central America in 1898, it was seen as both
an interventionist and non-interventionist principle. While the advocates of the
Anti-Imperialist League in the United States invoked the Monroe Doctrine as an
isolationist and anti-colonial principle, the so-called Roosevelt Corollary forma-
lized it as an interventionist and unilateral principle involving Central American
and Caribbean wrongdoings. Since Drago set out his doctrine, the Monroe
Doctrine began to be conceived progressively as a principle of inter-American
multilateralism and non-intervention. In the 1930s, it was finally reframed as a
continental and multilateral principle of non-intervention.
As I have shown, the United States fluctuated between a nationalist and self-
defensive version of the Monroe Doctrine and a Pan-American one, that is, from
Root’s version to those of Barrett and Álvarez. Furthermore, it oscillated between a
political meaning of the Monroe Doctrine and one that adopted a formal definition
similar to that of a principle of international law, from Roosevelt to Root, Scott,
and Álvarez. In other words, the United States shifted from unilateral to multilat-
eral uses of the doctrine and from interventionist to non-interventionist versions.
Indeed, the attitude of Root and Scott toward the doctrine was very ambivalent, for
they resisted extending it to all the Americas and, at the same time, promoted Pan-
Americanism and American international law, and created Pan-American net-
works of international law. The more the doctrine was connected to international
law, the more legitimate it would be in the international system. However, if it was
117. See Laura Garcés, La mondialisation de la Doctrine Monroe a! l’ère wilsonienne (Lausanne,
1988), Perkins, History of the Monroe Doctrine, 347-70, and Philip Jessup, “The Monroe Doctrine in
1940,” American Journal of International Law 34, no. 4 (1940): 704-11.
totally redefined as such, it would be less instrumental to U.S. hemispheric inter-

ests. It should be a perfect balance between a formal international law principle and
one that could be controlled and redefined only by the United States. The idea of
the Monroe Doctrine as a founding principle of “American international law” and
Pan-Americanism seemed to reach that balance.
At the same time, Latin American international lawyers and politicians con-
tributed considerably to Pan-Americanizing the Monroe Doctrine and therefore
to redefining U.S. hegemony in the Americas. In this regard, the AIIL played a
central role in forging a common set of hemispheric aspirations toward multilat-
eralism and non-intervention. Nevertheless, it also operated as a hemispheric net-

work of interactions where contradictory aspirations between Latin American and
U.S. jurists and politicians tended to prevail. While the Latin Americans sought to
redefine the Monroe Doctrine in order to moderate U.S. interventionism and
unilateralism, those from the United States were reluctant to renounce U.S. uni-
lateral aspirations and interventionism on the continent. In fact, the transition
from unilateralism to multilateralism and non-intervention was certainly slow,
since the progressive institutionalization of a Pan-American interpretation of the
Monroe Doctrine was not fully completed until 1933.
When the Monroe Doctrine was finally institutionalized as a multilateral and
Pan-American principle of non-intervention in the 1930s, the languages of Pan-
Americanism and “American international law” were already deeply rooted in the
United States and Latin America. The wide range of versions and shifts regarding
the status of the Monroe Doctrine did not lead to the construction of unitary and
fixed hemispheric meaning before the 1930s, but rather to begin to forge and
envision continental conceptions of international law and a new Pan-American
legal language in a progressive attempt to speak differently but still jointly in the
name of the Americas.

Scarfi, in The Name of The Americas

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Scarfi, in The Name of The Americas

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

juan pablo scarfi

In the Name of the Americas: The Pan-American

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

The Monroe Doctrine and Pan-Americanism epitomize different aspects of the

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

This article draws on Whitaker’s study, particularly on his insightful exploration

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

was ambivalent, because U.S. international lawyers, politicians, and intellectuals

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

international law, it deserves more attention among historians.11 A hemispheric

THE MONROE DOCTRINE, PAN-AMERICANISM, AND

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

sovereignty respected by other nations.15 As a U.S. political and national declar-

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

Congresses. Three continental Conferences were held in an attempt to create

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

President William McKinley (1897-1901) who initiated this policy of aggressive

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

diplomatic relations between the ABC countries themselves improved consider-

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

CONTENDING CONCEPTIONS OF INTERVENTION:

In 1902 a significant redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine was proposed in Latin

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

46. Whitaker, Western Hemisphere, 88.

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

of frequent revolutions and financial mismanagement.56 The original message of

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

for the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine, which contributed, according to

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

intervention in the Americas. On the other hand, it affirmed that no American

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

According to Bingham, even the new “Pan-American” Monroe Doctrine defended

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

present at the ASIL meeting, seemed to be consistent with that of Bingham.

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

multilateral basis.100 As Gilderhus has observed, this ambitious multilateral project

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

105. Baltasar Brum, “Solidaridad Americana,” Conference of the President of Uruguay,

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

convenient not to speak of it, and to speak instead of “fundamental Principles

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

internationalization, broadening, and generalization of the doctrine.117 Yet, as

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

totally redefined as such, it would be less instrumental to U.S. hemispheric inter-

Downloaded from http://dh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on August 24, 2016

You might also like