Pan-Americanism and the Legal Roots of Continental Justice in the Americas: Discussing the Rise of Inter-American Multilateralism in the 1930s

• In Event: Towards Legal Histories of the Americas

Abstract

In the context of the Montevideo Pan-American Conference (1933), the US began to
bound itself to the principle of non-intervention and sovereign equality, announced
the Good Neighbour Policy and abrogated the Platt Amendment in Cuba. One of the
most significant legal shifts in this context was the transition from Pan-Americanism
to inter-American multilateralism. Was this shift a product of US or Latin American
initiatives? Did US and Latin American jurists act jointly for a Pan-American cause?
Did Pan-Americanism contribute to enhancing continental justice?

This paper argues that Pan-Americanism as both a US-led movement and a
shared hemispheric legal sensibility had contradictory effects, which were expressed
in the context of the Montevideo Conference and led to the construction of a rather
contradictory multilateral and US-led tradition of continental inter-American justice.
On the one hand, some long-standing formal Pan-American aspirations of a number
of Latin American international lawyers, such as the support for nonintervention, the
principle of sovereign equality and state autonomy were achieved at Montevideo in a
rather robust fashion. On the other hand, some dominant imperial approaches, such as
the principle of the Monroe Doctrine as a beneficial principle for the Americas and
the Platt Amendment legitimizing regular US interventions in Cuba, as advocated by
a conservative group of jurists engaged in the Pan-American movement, began to
loose their appeal. Yet Pan-Americanism paved the way for this transition, but it set a
restrictive US-led framework for institutionalizing inter-American multilateralism,
creating a common conflictive still US-led tradition of continental justice.

Author

• Juan P Scarfi, Universidad Nacional de San Martín