PAN-AMERICANISM. – A term coined toward the end of the last century, on the occasion of the First International Conference of the American States (1889), which entered the political vocabulary to denote the community of interests and consequent solidarity among the 21 Republics of the New World.
I. OLD p. – Unlike pan-Slavism (v.) pan-Germanism (v.), p. has no ethnic or cultural substratum (as is well known, in fact, it comprises peoples of different race, language, and religion), but is founded exclusively on geographical considerations.
Its origins are to be sought in the early nineteenth century, when the countries of the Americas, emancipated from Europe and having become conscious of their own individuality, tended to coordinate their policies and create a continental defensive system to guarantee the independence they had achieved against the attempts made by the European states, during and after the Holy Alliance, to the detriment of the New World, in order to re-establish their supremacy there. Arising in the period when, following the example of the United States and appealing to the ideal justification that the latter had given to their war of independence, the Latin American colonies were struggling to free themselves from the mother country (1816–24), the movement was initially inspired by idealism, based on the opposition between the values represented by America (peace, liberty, democracy) and those regarded as Europe’s calamities (war, absolutism, monarchy). For this reason, during the period 1826–89, the Pan-American movement was characteristic of the Spanish-American countries, since the United States, after recognizing the new Republics that had arisen south of the Rio Grande and establishing normal diplomatic relations with them (1822), and after the proclamation (1823) of the Monroe Doctrine (v.), remained for half a century estranged from every continental understanding, being engaged as they were in their expansion westward. Belonging to this period were the Conference of Panama in 1826, convened by Simon Bolivar; those of Lima in 1847 and 1864; and the continental Conference of Santiago in 1856, from which emerged corresponding agreements and treaties aimed at bringing the states of Latin America together in leagues or confederations for common defense against foreign aggression and for the peaceful settlement of their disputes. The agreements were all prompted by various enterprises, both European (interventions in the Rio de la Plata between 1842 and 1850; the French invasion of Mexico and the short-lived Empire established there by Maximilian between 1863 and 1867; the Spanish occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1860 to 1865; and the attempt to re-establish Spanish sovereignty in Peru in 1865) and United States (the war against Mexico in 1847; and several aggressive expeditions in Central America between 1857 and 1860), which threatened the sovereignty and independence of the Spanish-American Republics; only some of these agreements were ratified, and none was put into practice.
The Conference of 1867, in Lima, was the last of those called political, which became unnecessary once the independence and territorial integrity of the Republics were no longer threatened by Europe. Those that followed sought instead to resolve legal problems by standardizing rules of private international law, international commercial law, and so forth.
With the First International Conference of the American States (1889), held in Washington on the initiative of the United States, p. became a properly continental movement, encompassing all the independent countries of the Americas except Canada and the colonial possessions, and took concrete form in the Pan-American Union (originally the International Union of American Republics), whose task was to promote economic, cultural, social, and other relations among the participating countries; and in the Commercial Bureau of the American Republics, the executive organ of the Union, based in Washington, which arose as a center for the compilation and publication of commercial statistics and information, until its functions were broadened to include every sphere of activity and it became the permanent secretariat of the Pan-American conferences.
Two principal problems occupied the Washington Conference and those that followed it at intervals that were almost invariably regular, every five years: the maintenance of peace among the American states through the peaceful settlement of their disputes, and, above all, the development of economic relations among the members of the Union. Indeed, once leadership of the movement had passed to the United States, which was eager to intensify trade and other commercial initiatives with Latin America, political questions were deliberately neglected so that the movement could develop without hindrance in this new direction and bring about numerous and fruitful agreements in every field of activity.
II. NEW p. – The threatening situation that arose in Europe with the advent of Nazism and Japanese expansion in the East revived the need for close continental political solidarity, repeatedly compromised by the economic hegemony and expansionist tendencies of the United States, which, in the first decades of the century, had used the Pan-American movement for their commercial initiatives.
This renewed solidarity – the so-called “good-neighbor policy,” implemented by President Roosevelt – was expressed at the Eighth Conference of the American States, held in Lima in 1938, which, through the Declaration of Lima, resolved to provide for the common defense of the continent and established that the foreign ministers of the member states should consult one another whenever the territorial integrity, peace, or security of any one of them was threatened (three of these inter-American conferences were held during the Second World War); in the Act of Chapultepec (1945), which reaffirmed the principle of continental solidarity, while political as well as administrative functions were assigned to the Pan-American Union; in the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro (1948), by which it was stipulated that an attack against any American state should be regarded as an attack against all; and, finally, at the Ninth Conference, held in Bogotá in the same year, which incorporated the Pan-American alliance into the orbit of the United Nations as a regional organization.
A Fourth Inter-American Conference of Foreign Ministers was convened in Washington in 1951 to prepare a defensive plan against international communism.
I. F. Rippy, Historical evolution of Hispanic American New York 1932, chaps. XXI–XXIII; J. P. Humphreys, The Inter-American System: A Canadian view, Toronto 1942; S. F. Bemis, The Latin-American Policy of the U. S., New York 1943; M. M. Ball, The problem of Inter-American Organization, Stanford 1944; I. M. Gantenbein, The Evolution of our Latin-American Policy. A documentary record, New York 1950. Gabriele Musatti