PAN-AMERICANISM. – A term that, having arisen toward the end of the last century on the occasion of the first International Conference of American States (1889), entered the political vocabulary to denote the commonality 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 encompasses peoples of different races, languages, and religions), but is founded exclusively on geographical reasons.Its origins are to be traced to the early 1800s, when the countries of the Americas, freed from Europe and having become conscious of their individuality, sought to coordinate their policies and create a continental defensive system to guarantee their newly won independence in the face of attempts by European states, during and after the Holy Alliance, to re-establish their supremacy over the New World. In the period when, following the example of the United States and drawing on the ideological justification that the latter had given to their war of independence, the Latin American colonies were struggling to free themselves from their mother countries (1816–24), the movement initially had an idealistic inspiration, based on the contrast between the values that America represented (peace, freedom, democracy) and what were seen as the calamities of Europe (war, absolutism, monarchy). For this reason, in the period 1826–89, the Pan-American movement was characteristic of the Spanish-American countries, since the United States, after recognizing the new republics south of the Rio Grande and establishing normal diplomatic relations with them (1822) and after the proclamation (1823) of the Monroe Doctrine (v.), remained aloof from any continental agreement for half a century, being preoccupied instead with their westward expansion. It was in this period that the Panama Conference of 1826, convened by Simón Bolívar, took place; as did those of Lima in 1847 and 1864; and the continental conference of Santiago in 1856, from which emerged various agreements and treaties aimed at uniting the states of Latin America into leagues or confederations for mutual defense against foreign aggression and for the peaceful settlement of their disputes. All these agreements were motivated by various enterprises, both European (interventions in the Río de la Plata between 1842 and 1850; the French invasion of Mexico and the ephemeral empire established 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 American (the war against Mexico in 1847; and some 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 were ever put into practice.
The Conference of 1867 in Lima was the last of the so-called political conferences, rendered unnecessary once the independence and territorial integrity of the republics were no longer threatened by Europe. The subsequent conferences aimed to resolve legal issues, such as standardizing norms of private international law, commercial international law, and so on.
With the first International Conference of American States (1889), held in Washington at the initiative of the United States, Pan-Americanism became a truly 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), with the task of promoting economic, cultural, and social relations among the member countries; and in the Commercial Bureau of the American Republics, the executive organ of the Union, headquartered in Washington, which began as a center for compiling and publishing commercial statistics and information, but whose functions expanded until it encompassed every sphere of activity and became the permanent secretariat of the Pan-American conferences.
Two main issues occupied the Washington Conference and those that followed at almost regular five-year intervals: 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 the leadership of the movement had passed to the United States, which was keen to intensify trade and other commercial initiatives with Latin America, political matters were deliberately neglected so that the movement could develop unhindered in this new direction and achieve numerous and fruitful agreements in every field of activity.
II. New Pan-Americanism
The threatening situation that arose in Europe with the advent of Nazism and the expansion of Japan in the East, once again highlighted the need for close political solidarity on the continent, which had been 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—found expression in the Eighth Conference of American States, held in Lima in 1938, which, with the Declaration of Lima, resolved to provide for the common defense of the continent and established that the foreign ministers of the American states should consult whenever the territorial integrity, peace, or security of any one of them was threatened (three such international conferences were held during World War II); in the Act of Chapultepec (1945), which reaffirmed the principle of continental solidarity while assigning political as well as administrative functions to the Pan-American Union; in the Rio de Janeiro Treaty (1948), by which an attack on any American state was declared to be an attack on all; and, finally, in the Ninth Conference, held in Bogotá in the same year, which brought the Pan-American alliance within 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 draw up a defensive plan against international communism.