Description
This paper analyses the emergence of the idea of a distinctive Latin American region during the first Pan-American Conferences and at a momentum of American rise to hegemony in the Western Hemisphere (long before its ascension to the category of global superpower).
It argues that the recently independent Latin American countries forged a ‘common front’ and started fostering the notion of a ‘Latin American regional space’ as separate from the construct of an ‘American hemisphere’ that the United States was trying to put forward at the time. Indeed, apart from the fight against new European incursions attempts in the region – embodied in the American-led Monroe Doctrine (1826) – the Latin American republics grew warier and warier of the growing American gravitation in the region, and thus more zealous of safeguarding their national sovereignty conceived as inextricably linked from the regional principle of non-intervention in domestic affairs. As a result, they challenged the US hemispheric ambitions by positing the idea of a regional construct that purposely excluded the United States. Put otherwise, Latin American diplomats saw in regional unity the way to protect and ensure their countries' recently acquired independence and contest an ever-increasing American influence of what they conceived to be exclusively regional, i.e. Latin American, affairs.
Through archival work conducted in the Pan-American conferences' collection of the Archives of the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this paper explores regional notions, understandings, and framings of perceptions of shared threats to national sovereignty and of the region’s role in countering rising American hegemonic pretensions and safeguarding the sovereignty of Latin American republics.
