The Monroe Doctrine in the Americas: Towards a Hemispheric Intellectual History

Abstract

As is well-known, the Monroe Doctrine in its original formulation emerged as a national foreign policy declaration, and it became a core principle of U.S. foreign policy in the mid-nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, in the context of the rise of the United States as an informal empire in Latin America and the emergence of Pan-Americanism, Latin American jurists, politicians, and diplomats, such as Luis María Drago, Alejandro Alvarez, Baltasar Brum, Santiago Pérez Triana, Isidro Fabela, and Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring redefined the Monroe Doctrine as a multilateral doctrine of continental Pan-American cooperation and at the same time denounced its use as a unilateral flexible principle deployed to legitimize U.S. interventions in the region. In fact, they adopted contrasting legal and political approaches to the doctrine, the rise of U.S. hegemony, and the Pan-American movement. As such, they sought to Pan-Americanize the doctrine as a multilateral legal principle, as well as to condemn it as a flexible and unilateral imperialist principle invoked to legitimize U.S. interventions. Therefore, the Monroe Doctrine was discussed widely across the Americas in this context to the extent that its meaning and scope remained unsettled.