Pan-Americanism

PAN-AMERICANISM. - A term coined toward the end of the last century, on the occasion of the first International Conference of American States (1889), which entered the political vocabulary to denote the community of interests and the consequent solidarity among the 21 Republics of the New World.

I. OLD Pan-Americanism

Unlike Pan-Slavism (v.) and Pan-Germanism (v.), Pan-Americanism has no ethnic or cultural substratum (as is well known, in fact, it comprises peoples of different race, language and religion), but is founded on exclusively geographical grounds.

Its origins are to be sought in the early 1800s, when the countries of the Americas, freed from Europe and having become aware of their own individuality, tended to coordinate their policy and to create a continental defensive system as a guarantee of the independence they had achieved, in the face of the attempts made by the European states, during and after the Holy Alliance, against the New World, to re-establish their supremacy there. Having arisen in the period when, following the example of the United States and harking back to the ideal justification that these had given to their war of independence, the Latin American colonies were struggling to free themselves from the mother country (1816-24), the movement had at its beginnings an idealistic inspiration, founded on the contrast between the values that America represented (peace, liberty, democracy) and those that were held to be the calamities of Europe (war, absolutism, monarchy). For this reason, in the period 1826-89, the Pan-American movement belonged to the Hispanic American countries, inasmuch as the United States, after having recognized the new Republics that had arisen south of the Rio Grande and having established normal diplomatic relations with them (1822), and after the proclamation (1823) of the Monroe Doctrine (v.), remained for half a century extraneous to any continental understanding, engaged as they were in their expansion toward the west. To this time belong the Conference of Panama, of 1826, convened by Simón Bolívar; that of Lima in 1847 and in 1864; the continental one of Santiago in 1856, from which issued as many agreements and treaties, which aimed to unite the states of Latin America in leagues or confederations for a common defense against foreign aggressions and for the peaceful settlement of their disputes. The agreements were all motivated by various enterprises, whether European (interventions in the Rio de la Plata between 1842 and 1850; the French invasion of Mexico and the ephemeral Empire founded there by Maximilian between 1863 and 1867; the Spanish occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1860 to 1865; the attempt to re-establish Spanish sovereignty in Peru in 1865), or United States (war against Mexico in 1847; certain aggressive expeditions in Central America between 1857 and 1860), which threatened the sovereignty and independence of the Hispanic American Republics; only some of these agreements were ratified and none was put into practical effect.

The Conference of 1867, at Lima, was the last of those called political, rendered useless after the independence and territorial integrity of the Republics were no longer threatened by Europe. The others that followed aimed to resolve questions of a juridical character, in order to standardize rules of private international law, of commercial international law, etc.

With the first International Conference of American States (1889), held in Washington on the initiative of the United States, Pan-Americanism became a properly continental movement, comprising all the independent countries of the Americas, except Canada and the colonial possessions, and took shape in the Pan-American Union (originally the International Union of American Republics), with the task of promoting economic, cultural, social, etc. relations among the member countries; and in the Commercial Bureau of the American Republics, the executive organ of the Union, with its seat in Washington, which arose as a center for the compilation and publication of statistics and commercial information, until its functions were broadened, to the point of comprising every sphere of activity and of becoming the permanent secretariat of the Pan-American conferences.

Two principal problems occupied the Washington Conference and those that followed at almost always regular intervals of 5 years: the maintenance of peace among the American States, by means of the peaceful settlement of their controversies, and, above all, the development of economic relations among the members of the Union. In fact, once the direction of the movement had passed to the United States, which were eager to intensify exchanges and other commercial initiatives with Latin America, political questions were deliberately neglected so that the movement might develop without obstacles in this new direction and bring about numerous and fruitful understandings in every field of activity.

II. NEW Pan-Americanism

The threatening situation created in Europe, with the advent of Nazism and with Japanese expansion in the East, raised anew the necessity of a close continental political solidarity, more than once compromised by the economic hegemony and the expansionist tendencies of the United States, which, in the first decades of the century, had made use of the Pan-American movement for their commercial initiatives.

This renewed solidarity - the so-called "good neighbor policy," implemented by President Roosevelt - found expression in the eighth Conference of American States, held in Lima in 1938, which, with the Declaration of Lima, determined 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 and security of one of them were threatened (three of these inter-American conferences were held during World War II); in the Act of Chapultepec (1945), which reaffirmed the principle of continental solidarity, while political, as well as administrative, functions were attributed 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 considered an attack against all; and, finally, in the ninth Conference, held in Bogotá in the same year, which inserted 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 with regard to 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