For much of the Washington D.C. foreign policy apparatus, Latin America — a region plagued by economic instability, political upheaval, and social calamity — represents little more than a headache or an after-thought.
Not for Greg Grandin.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, and Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft makes the case in a new book that the United States’ unique national identity and foreign policy in fact emerged from a constant and turbulent engagement with Latin America that has molded the contours of U.S. history.
Grandin contends that centuries of turmoil, bloodshed, and diplomacy in Latin America have shaped not only political outcomes in the United States but the laws, institutions, and ideals governing the modern world. Grandin’s original, accessible reinterpretation of New World history also illuminates how Latin America’s deeply held social democratic tradition has, despite profound obstacles, persisted over time, offering lessons for the U.S. and other Western nations.
RS sat down with Grandin to discuss his new book, “America, América: A New History of the New World,” released in April from Penguin Random House.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT: Foreign policy scholars in the U.S. generally tend to look towards Europe to understand the United States' unique national identity and history. Why should they be looking instead to Latin America?
GREG GRANDIN: Well, not so much instead, but also, I would say. I think that the intensity of the relationship within the New World, starting with the violence and horrors of the conquest, created a kind of moral revolution within the Catholic Church that put a lot of questions that we now associate with political modernity on the agenda. It certainly didn't slow the violence or lessen the horrors of the conquest, but it did raise questions about human equality and dignity and rights. More specifically, the United States’ relationship with Latin America was unlike any other relations that an empire — albeit an informal one, one that denies that it's an empire — had with its colonies, or at least that a superpower had with its periphery, given it was so ideologically combative. The struggle was over a shared set of common ideals, starting with the nature of Christianity, working its way up through republicanism and then notions of property, rights, sovereignty and the role of international law. Latin America really was formative for how the United States engaged with the rest of the world.
The book argues specifically of the importance of Latin America for the United States, but it also argues for the importance of that relationship in the creation of, for lack of a better word, the rules-based order, or the liberal international order, which is what got put in place in 1945. Latin America has largely been ignored for a lot of reasons, but the liberal and the republic tradition within Latin America gets downplayed as a result. It hasn’t been a site of intellectual history. When intellectual historians or European historians start to consider global history, they look to Europe and its colonies as the origins of the League of Nations or the United Nations. They tend not to incorporate Latin America into that framework. And that's what I was trying to do in this book.
RS: What are one or two critical moments, movements, historical events or trends in which Latin America helped shape that liberal international order that you mentioned — the legal norms, ideas, and institutions that undergird today's order?
GRANDIN: The book covers 500 years and there are lots of moments and encounters and stories that flesh out in detail concretely what I'm arguing here abstractly. But I would say right from the beginning, think about the origins of Spanish America, which came into the world as a kind of already existing League of Nations, with seven independent republics on a continent that the leaders of the independence movements imagined as already filled up. Contrast that to the United States, which came into the world as a single republic on a continent that they imagined as mostly empty. Obviously, it was not empty. Aside from Spain, there was France, Great Britain, indigenous sovereignties — the continent was far from empty, but it was perceived as empty in the conceptualization of international law. The United States then revived the doctrine of conquest in order to justify its push west. Its thesis of sovereignty was a revitalization of the doctrine of conquest, the right to wage war and to keep territory that you grab in that war.
Latin America didn't — couldn't — do that. As a concert of independent nations, Latin America couldn't come into the world affirming the doctrine of conquest because it would just lead to endless war. What would stop Argentina from saying, “we want to get to the Pacific too, just like the United States does, so why can’t we just roll over the Andes and take Chile?”
They had to learn how to live with each other. And each nation legitimated the other’s existence because each nation affirmed the validity of being able to break and create republics from from the Catholic empire, but they also threatened each other because under the old terms of what we now call international law, they would be engaged in endless wars for more territory for whatever reason they want. So, Spanish Americans rejected both the United States’ revival of the doctrine of conquest and rejected Europe's real-politik balance of power.
Simón Bolívar famously argued that real-politik, in which nations push against each other to pursue their interests, will always lead to war because it's inherently unstable. So one of the transcendent principles that Latin America helped pioneer was the idea that nations had common interests and that cooperation, not competition, should be the guiding principle of international relations. They also came up with laws affirming the sanctity of borders, principles against aggressive war, offensive war — basically all of the principles that one finds in the United Nations in 1945, or even the League of Nations.
One could see these origins in the first decades of Latin American independence as they worked out the norms on how to deal with each other. The moral revolution that rejected much of the violence of the conquest also questioned the legitimacy of the Spanish empire. People like Bartolome de las Casas, who has a large role in the book, went as far as rejecting Spain's claim to dominion and sovereignty in the Americas and certainly rejecting the doctrine of conquest. So Spanish America's independence leaders were already primed with a critique of empire, and once they cast off the Spanish empire, they had to deal with another empire: the United States. So all of the criticisms that Latin America would level at the United States were already in many ways worked out vis-a-vis Spain.
I'll just give you one very concrete example. In the early 1890s, the United States organized the first Pan American Conference and for a long time rejected all of Latin America's critiques of international law, what Latin American jurists had already begun to call American international law. The United States representatives kept saying, there can only be international law. There are no regional variations. It has to be universal. So Latin Americans said, “okay, but we’re still calling America international law.” And at that very first meeting, one of the main points of contention was Latin Americans insisting that the United States reject and acknowledge that the doctrine of conquest was invalid and agree to abrogate it. And the United States resisted.
But they finally reached a compromise in which the United States agreed that conquest would be illegal for only two decades, and then revisit the question. Latin Americans went along with it because they didn't have much power in relation to the United States, but still it's an interesting moment in which Latin America is constantly trying to get the United States to reject the doctrine of conquest and the United States refusing.
RS: Many examples are listed in the book, but are there one or two particularly salient examples of Latin American historical figures or moments in 20th century U.S.-Latin American ties that have been most consequential in molding sort of the contours of world history. I’m thinking about the Good Neighbor policy, Latin America’s role in the Marshall Plan and World War II. What bearing did these events and Latin America’s role in them have for what would come later in the 20th century?
GRANDIN: The Good Neighbor policies opened markets in Latin America that gave ballast to the New Deal coalition, incorporating a new corporate sector which didn't mind FDR's expansion of liberalism at home if it meant open markets abroad. One of the key figures of this is Cordell Hull, FDR's secretary of state. In 1933, at the 7th Pan American Conference in Montevideo, he extemporaneously accepted pretty much the whole Latin American agenda of international law more than any U.S. representative had (the rejection of conquest, the rejection of the right to intervention, etc). This is a big thing among Latin Americans because the United States was sending gunboats, occupying Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Mexico, taking Panama, Cuba and Puerto Rico, and then giving back Cuba, but as a kind of informal colony.
So Hull's acceptance of this long standing demand is probably the most successful foreign policy turnaround in U.S. history because it didn't lead to a hemorrhaging of U.S. power, but to a refinement and rationalization of U.S. power in the world. It taught the United States how to be a more effective hegemon within its own region, but then also to ready itself for the coming fight against fascism.
I also look at how FDR’s re-election efforts, his get out the vote campaign, was run by Good Neighbor Leagues, which were consciously borrowed from the Good Neighbor policy. It was a way of creating a new moral worldview in which the acceptance of pluralism abroad, including economic nationalism in Latin America, was analogous to a domestic acceptance of racial and cultural pluralism.
These Good Neighbor Leagues became an alternative to the kind of proto-fascism that was on the rise in the United States, consciously understanding themselves as a response to the Saxon supremacy of the so-called Liberty Leagues. Roosevelt won that reelection with 27 million votes. He won more votes than any human being in world history. And he won on a program of what other countries would call social democracy or socialized liberalism. And the first thing he does within a week of winning is sail to Rio de Janeiro to shore up relations with [Getulio] Vargas. And they both call themselves fathers of the New Deal. Vargas, of course, was not elected. He's a dictator. But it was a moment in which social reform was seen as essential as the vote itself.
There’s a great anecdote where the two pass a protest against Vargas in an open car, and Vargas says, “they call me a dictator.” And Roosevelt whispers, “they call me that too.” And then he continues on to Buenos Aires.
It’s unclear if FDR was trying to shore up the old order destroyed by World War I, or organizing the continent to fight fascism, but either way, it's a bringing together of a kind of hemispheric alliance that was absolutely essential in the defeat of fascism, as I argue in the book. Because one of the things that could very well have happened is Latin America could have become a kind of hemispheric Spain, as many of the variables that led to the rise of Praetorian Catholic nationalism under Franco were certainly present in Latin America: a small landowning class that was deeply Catholic, threatened by militant peasant organizing and the rise of more pluralistic political parties and an expansion of a federal state. There was a backlash to that, and the fascists easily could have won that conflict had the United States not tipped the playing field to the social democratic left or the economic nationalists and basically created a unified front against fascism.
I argue in the book that it wasn't just that Latin Americans thought they were just fighting against fascism, but for social democracy, the idea that democracy entailed something more than just the right to vote — it entailed a dignified life. And that was what created such an effervescent moment coming out of World War II, and then explains the backlash and violence leading into the Cold War when those hopes and aspirations were frustrated, when the United States flips and adopts an anti-communist rather than an anti-fascist foreign policy.
RS: So if the social democratic ideal is so persistent in Latin America, as you argue in the book, why hasn’t it been obtained or maintained in practice? But maybe even before getting there, what are some of the concrete examples in which Latin America has been at the forefront of enshrining these social democratic ideals into their constitutions? I know in the book you cite the example of Mexico.
GRANDIN:Social scientists have spent the last couple of decades asking (and many have given up the question by now): why is democracy so weak and institutions so fragile in Latin America? But I think that question has it exactly backwards. Considering all of the violence that's directed at labor and peasant leaders, feminists, gender and environmental activists, the question should be, why is it so strong? Why does it persist? Why do people keep thinking that history is redeemable?
To answer that question is really the charge of the book. I tried to wed intellectual, legal and social history together to understand the endurance of this ideal. And a lot of it has to do with a kind of holism associated with Catholicism, a notion of the dignity of the individual.
The Spanish Empire understood that it was presiding over people that they felt responsible for, which they had to justify rhetorically. Native Americans and African descendants were the center of the Spanish imperial project. Their wealth was extracted, but also they were the moral center in which the whole project was justified. And that's a lot different than what happens in the United States where the English and Protestant colonialism are about evasion and denial. But that ideal in which the individual exists within a larger sociality over time, I argue, manifests itself as what we call social rights and social democracy.
For example, Mexico’s Constitution was the world's first social democratic constitution, the first constitution to recognize not just individual rights, but social and economic rights. The right to dignity, to a pension, health care and education. And you can even go back further. The whole set of independence constitutions affirmed what we call negative or individual rights, in which the virtuous state is one that stands back and allows individuals the greatest area of liberty. But at the same time, and this goes back to this earlier point, these independence leaders were operating in the shadow of the conquest, which they thought was vile, illegal and morally abhorrent, unlike Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who had no problem with English settlements. So the independence constitutions all insisted that you can only have individuality if you also had society.
To give you an example, the Venezuelan Constitution uses the word social and society dozens of times, whereas that word doesn't appear once in the U.S. Constitution. So there's a real sense that what democracy means is some form of social democracy. To the point where reformers, in the early 19th century weren't that concerned with suffrage, believing that it would just really lead to the strengthening of the landed class. They thought that you had to actually have social reform before the vote truly mattered. So Latin America has this long tradition of social rights and social democracy that manifests itself in all sorts of ways, from a kind of lived experience of sociality to legal expressions that affirm that democracy is defined by not just political rights, but social rights.
So why does this not translate into institutional stability? A lot of it has to do with the social nature of Latin American independence. Bolivar would have loved to have had a republic based on the freeing of individual pursuits of their own ambitions, but we have a small landed class, an enormously servile population, three centuries of Spanish colonialism, and at the same time states that were deeply in debt right from the beginning. The banks in London were sending invoices in 1820 for shipments of arms and cloth that they sent in 1810, and these new states felt like they had to honor those debts. The social structure didn’t allow the political coalitions to form that could manifest this social vision of democracy over any length of time: a political project. You have these moments of reform, and yet they often can't last because there's no reform coalition that could establish a kind of electoral and rhetorical hegemony for any length of time, the way the New Deal did, for instance.
RS: Your book underscores the history of how U.S.-backed coups and military invention in Latin America has fomented a distinct sense of nationalism in the region rooted in respect for sovereignty and non interference in domestic affairs. What lessons might this history offer policymakers who are grappling with how to respond to these shared security challenges across the hemisphere?
GRANDIN: It's difficult to see how the history of Latin America and U.S.-Latin American relations translate into useful policy positions because I think the lessons learned are more intuitive and about embracing transcendental values. And we know how when values get folded into foreign policy, they're often twisted in a way that justifies existing power relations.
For example, Latin Americans don't really like realism. They tend to be more idealistic. I mentioned that Bolivar's critique of realpolitik balance of power was that it always leads to war, and that you need to have transcendent values. What history does teach is that resistance to empire is essential to holding empire accountable to some degree, if not reforming it, at least holding it accountable.
At this current moment, the United States is locked into this kind of conspiratorial fever in which the leaders of the opposition party refuse to confront power with their own moral vision. The Democrats trim and triangulate to such a degree that it creates a vacuum for the conspiratorial world-building of some parts of Trumpism to continue to grow and grow and create more nooks and crannies to build bigger coalitions.
In some ways, I think what we can learn from Latin America is that the left in Latin America understands itself as ideological and understands itself as defending a set of ideological beliefs and values that it uses to confront the right, and with great success. That's how you beat fascism. You don't beat fascism by calling them fascists. You beat fascism by offering an alternative, a moral alternative that is not procedural but that actually has a vision for what a just society looks like. And that's one of the reasons why the left keeps coming back despite the fact that more environmental activists are killed in Latin America than in any other region in the world, more trade unionists are killed in Latin America than any other place in the world — they keep fighting back. It’s a certain kind of worldview and insistence on human dignity that is inextinguishable.
Reformers in the U.S. could look to Latin America, the history of the New Deal and the way New Dealers made common cause with continental reformers over issues related to wages, equal rights for women and health care, and forged something like a common front against reactionary forces. Certainly today there's plenty of people in Latin America the United States could ally with, and we saw this, frankly, when Biden supported Lula's re-election campaign and pushed back against the coup attempt against him by Bolsonaro in 2022. Now we're living in a different moment where the Trump administration is actively trying to promote Bolsonaro's reelection in next year's election, and there doesn't seem to be movement among those who oppose Trump’s approach framing what is happening in Brazil as somehow having a bearing on their own fortunes.
