{"id":21156,"date":"2023-12-20T08:00:38","date_gmt":"2023-12-20T07:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/?p=21156"},"modified":"2023-12-20T11:49:27","modified_gmt":"2023-12-20T10:49:27","slug":"200-years-of-monsters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/200-years-of-monsters\/","title":{"rendered":"200 Years of Monsters"},"content":{"rendered":"

This essay argues that the legal implications and geopolitical meaning of the Monroe Doctrine can only be understood in relation to its respective antagonists. The Doctrine\u2019s internal mechanism of hemispheric hegemony, discussed by Juan Pablo Scarfi in his opening lecture<\/a> to this symposium<\/em>, is the flip side to its external mechanism of spatial exclusion. Thus, it effectively vanished in the global Pax Americana after 1991. With the demise of the so-called liberal international order today on the horizon, the Monroe Doctrine is making all but a return. <\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The Viennese Order and its Enemies<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1822, the Holy Alliance in Verona mandated France to invade Spain, where Ferdinand VII was (again) forced to accept a liberal constitution in 1820. After the Napoleonic Wars, the great powers of Europe attempted a comprehensive restoration of the monarchical order under the leadership of Prince Metternich. The Alliance\u2019s policy was to aid beleaguered monarchs against constitutionalist ambitions.<\/p>\n

Francois-Ren\u00e9 Chateaubriand had been sent to the Congress of Verona in the service of France, and yet the great conservative romantic and diplomat\u2019s focus in the run-up to the conference was not on France, Spain or Europe, but on the young United States. He knew the country well, having traveled there only four years after its founding, and therefore took note of the increasingly mission-conscious policies of the Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. On Independence Day in 1821, Quincy Adams had already declared<\/a> that liberal struggles around the world had the blessing of the United States, \u201cbut she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.\u201d Notably, the domestic counterpart to this \u201cabroad\u201d refers not to the territory of the United States, still open in the West anyway, but to the entire hemisphere of the \u201cNew World\u201d.<\/p>\n

In a letter to his foreign minister in May 1822<\/a>, Chateaubriand sensed that the fate of the Old World would be decided in this new one. The Holy Alliance had to unconditionally support the monarchies in the Americas. Otherwise, there would run a merciless clock for the order of the Congress of Vienna: Should the New World ever be governed entirely by republics, the monarchies of the Old World would perish.<\/p>\n

\u201cLe P\u00e9rou vient d\u2019adopter une constitution monarchique. La politique europ\u00e9enne devrait mettre tous ses soins \u00e0 obtenir un pareil r\u00e9sultat pour les colonies qui se d\u00e9clarent ind\u00e9pendantes. Les \u00c9tats-Unis craignent singuli\u00e8rement l\u2019\u00e9tablissement d\u2019un empire au Mexique. Si le nouveau monde tout entier est jamais r\u00e9publicain, les monarchies de l\u2019ancien monde p\u00e9riront.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Veronese Congress brought with it a second major geopolitical shift: Great Britain, of Europe but not in Europe, began to distance itself from the continent\u2019s political sphere with far-reaching consequences. The new Foreign Secretary George Canning implemented the policy of \u201csplendid isolation,\u201d expressed his concern about the invasion of Spain, and sought contact with the US administration. A joint declaration was intended to stifle French encroachments on the Spanish parts of America. This attempt failed, not least due to the vehement opposition of the American Secretary of State Adams. The United States should not be a \u201ccockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war,\u201d but should assert its position independently. Above all, however, Adams feared for the territorial expansion in the American West and suspected Canning of seeking to sabotage the desired annexations of Texas and Cuba. As I have argued elsewhere,<\/a> it was not primarily republican convictions that prevented collaboration with the British Empire, but the nationalist imperative of imperial conquest on the frontier.<\/p>\n

The Monroe Doctrine and its Corollaries<\/strong><\/p>\n

Two hundred years ago, on December 2, 1823, President Monroe outlined two directives of American foreign policy<\/a> in his annual address to Congress. Firstly, he rejected any further colonial advancements and corresponding European influence in the Western Hemisphere. From now on, the two realms would have to part ways. A (first) strategy of containment was laid out:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe political system of the allied powers is essentially different in this respect from that of America. [\u2026] We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers, to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was linked, secondly, to a new policy of recognition under international law. It was to be neither monarchical nor democratic but instead cultivated an explicitly neutralist attitude. In diplomatic practice, the \u201cnon-entanglement\u201d ideal meant: a policy of recognition on the basis of the effective monopoly on the use of force, \u201cto consider the government de facto<\/em> as the legitimate government.<\/a>\u201d The illusion of genuine neutrality<\/a> emerges here impressively, as the principle of de facto effectiveness directly counteracted the legitimist intervention doctrine of the Holy Alliance. Conscious of the need to preserve the torch of freedom from the darkness of the Old World and to close the dangerously frayed border in the West for the time being, the nation of providence was to remain in its very own \u201csplendid isolation\u201d.<\/p>\n

As this symposium\u2019s opening text has also highlighted, the defensive character of Monroe\u2019s doctrine \u2013 the rejection of all colonial claims on the American continent \u2013 was thus only one side of the program. The other made history in international law: the equal territorial sovereignty of all states regardless of legitimacy<\/a> on the one hand, the principle of sovereign equality<\/a>, including (former) colonies, on the other (cf. nowadays Art. 2 (1) UN Charter).<\/p>\n

The Monroe Doctrine, as it was known from 1850 onwards, evolved in line with the changing geopolitical interests of the United States until the frontier was officially closed in the 1890s. Later \u201ccorollaries\u201d to the Monroe Doctrine were by no means mere derivations. As early as 1845, President Polk stated that the Republic of Texas could only be temporarily independent of the US; that European objections in the name of a \u201cbalance of power\u201d had become invalid and void due to the Declaration of 1823. In 1895, the Olney Communiqu\u00e9<\/a> also became known as a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Commenting on South American border contestations, Secretary of State Richard Olney bluntly informed the British government that the US \u201cis practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition\u201d. Theodore Roosevelt finally confirmed this view and promptly added to Monroe\u2019s declaration the dimension of investment protection by military action. The United States reserved the right to intervene for the purpose of securing the claims of American creditors \u2013 as well as to prevent the destabilization of states in South and Central America resulting from excessive indebtedness to European ones.<\/p>\n

Woodrow Wilson still sought to \u201cteach the South American republics to elect good men\u201d in 1913. Yet, after the First World War, he and Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted the \u201cgood neighbor policy,\u201d which relied on inter-American consensus. This change came, however, at the precise point in time when, on the one hand, US territory was firmly consolidated and its borders internationally recognized and, on the other, the (economic) dominance of the United States over its hemisphere was wholly beyond doubt. As Ernst Fraenkel noted<\/a> in a later lecture (p. 934), the Monroe Doctrine had basically outlived its purpose with the completed colonization of the West.<\/p>\n

The Doctrines Death and its Timely Resurrection<\/strong><\/p>\n

The status of the doctrine was therefore uncertain until the end of the Second World War. There was much debate as to what legal nature could be attributed to it at what point in time or whether it was merely a political declaration. Given the looming systemic conflict following the October Revolution of 1917, the United States oscillated between the restriction to isolationist trade policy, which wanted commerce without politics and was bound to fail due to the country\u2019s overwhelming economic weight as well as its European presence<\/em> as a creditor, and Wilsons liberal universalism. After the Second World War, the now acutely antagonistic tensions with the Soviet Union forced the shift to international interventionism. The Truman Doctrine of 1947 \u2013 a most radical but thoroughly coherent corollary to the Monroe Doctrine \u2013 replaced the republican hemisphere with the capitalist West. Several directives in line with the principle of anti-communist containment ensued. As late as 1984, President Reagan invoked<\/a> the terminology of 1823 when he spoke of the danger of \u201ccommunist colonies\u201d in North, South, and Central America.<\/p>\n

After 1991, the Monroe Doctrine had become a thing of the past. Neither republicanism nor capitalism were rooted in any distinctive part of the world. Hence, the restrictive \u201cabroad\u201d of Adams\u2019 maxim of 1821 no longer applied. The earth was now open to \u201cGlobal Governance,\u201d and monsters have always been plentiful. The 2nd Iraq War, the Yugoslavian War, the Global War on Terror beyond Westphalian forms \u2013 in times of Western hegemony over both hemispheres, exclusions became unthinkable. Secretary of State John Kerry thus shelve<\/a>d the Monroe Doctrine for good in 2013. Without the geopolitics of systemic competition, it had lost its meaning.<\/p>\n

However, in light of the rapid rise of China and Russia\u2019s revitalized imperialism in the 2010s, this pronouncement already marked the twilight of the globalized \u201ctransatlantic moment\u201d<\/a>. Five years after Kerry, Secretary of State Tillerson reminded<\/a> Latin America of the Monroe Doctrine in an all-around remarkable statement. China\u2019s influence on the suddenly once again contemporary \u201cWestern Hemisphere\u201d had to be resisted: \u201cLatin America does not need new imperial powers that seek only to benefit their own people.\u201d Moreover, the \u201ctroika of tyranny\u201d (John Bolton), consisting of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, was declared by President Trump<\/a> with reference to Monroe as the sole responsibility of the United States. China\u2019s neo-imperialist ambitions have today resulted in an odious redesignation<\/a> of South and Central America from \u201cback yard\u201d to \u201cfront yard,\u201d as President Biden called \u201ceverything south of the Mexican border\u201d in early 2022.<\/p>\n

Whether front or back yard, lines are being drawn again in the face of new global divisions. It is widely noted<\/a> that on the other side, China is striving for supremacy in the South China Sea; in addition to absolute sovereignty over Taiwan, it claims over 90% of Indo-Pacific waters. The resulting geopolitical rifts of \u201csystemic rivalry,\u201d to use the wording of the German China strategy<\/a>, also pose a considerable threat to the liberal international order. Its at least nominally universalist postulations are in grave danger of succumbing to this profound fragmentation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Under this and especially under the impression of October 7, Anne Applebaum recently wrote<\/a> that the \u201crules-based international order\u201d of the Pax Americana is dead and buried. That may not be entirely accurate. Rather, it is on its deathbed while a new order struggles to be born.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This essay argues that the legal implications and geopolitical meaning of the Monroe Doctrine can only be understood in relation to its respective antagonists. The Doctrine\u2019s internal mechanism of hemispheric hegemony, discussed by Juan Pablo Scarfi in his opening lecture to this symposium, is the flip side to its external mechanism of spatial exclusion. Thus, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6639],"tags":[7340,7150,5920],"authors":[7341],"article-categories":[3572],"doi":[],"class_list":["post-21156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-america","tag-international-relations","tag-law-and-capitalism","authors-victor-loxen","article-categories-symposium"],"acf":{"subline":""},"meta_box":{"doi":"10.17176\/20231220-111113-0"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21156"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21161,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21156\/revisions\/21161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21156"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=21156"},{"taxonomy":"article-categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-categories?post=21156"},{"taxonomy":"doi","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/doi?post=21156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}