[As I’ve done for the last few years, I wanted to start the New Year by looking back on some prior years that we can commemorate as anniversaries. Leading up to a weekend post with some 2023 predictions!]
On the limits
and possibilities of President James Monroe’s signature policy.
Although the
U.S. in the Early Republic was globalizing
in all kinds of ways, it was to its fellow North American and Western
Hemisphere countries that the new nation was most fully and complicatedly
connected. Many of those links were due to slavery, from the economic dominance
of the Triangle Trade
to the political, cultural, and social effects of the Haitian
Revolution. The relationship between the
United States and Mexico (especially after it gained its own independence
from Spain in 1821, right in the middle of James Monroe’s presidency) also
loomed large over the era. But along with those actual historical events and
their effects on the U.S., I would argue that ideas of our national neighbors
played a consistently central role in how the United States developed and
contested its own narratives of identity in the Early Republic. The
controversial 1854
Ostend Manifesto, which plotted a U.S. purchase or annexation of Cuba as a
new slaveholding state, offers one of many early 19th century
moments when imagined versions of Caribbean or hemispheric connections directly
shaped debates within America’s borders.
No single
governmental statement or action better reflects that set of hemispheric ties
and influences than the Monroe
Doctrine. Co-written by James Monroe and his Secretary of State John Quincy
Adams, first articulated in Monroe’s December 1823 State of the Union
address, and given the name “Monroe Doctrine” in 1850, the doctrine laid
out a perspective of hemispheric independence, arguing both that “the American
continents … are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future
colonization by any Eurpean powers” and that any such colonization efforts
would be viewed “as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the
United States.” That latter clause embodies the most striking limit of the
Doctrine, one directly visible in the Ostend Manifesto among many other
moments: an entirely U.S.-centric view of the Western Hemisphere, one in which
the histories and fates of other nations are significant precisely in relation
to how much they impact our own identity and arc. Besides reducing the colonial
histories and independence movements of dozens of other nations to an extension
of U.S. foreign policy, this side to the Doctrine would become a longstanding justification
for direct U.S. intervention in the affairs of these sovereign nations.
Yet if that kind
of U.S.-centric narrative and overreaching hemispheric presence became the Doctrine’s
effects in practice too much of the time, those are certainly not the only ways
to read the statement and perspective themselves. In its own moment, the
Doctrine was viewed positively by many of the prominent Latin American
revolutionaries then fighting their own battles for independence from European
rule: historian
John Crow writes that leaders such as Simon Bolívar (fighting in Peru by
1823), Colombia’s Francisco de Paula Santander, Argentina’s Bernardino
Rivadavia, and Mexico’s Guadalupe Victoria all “received Monroe’s words with
sincerest gratitude.” What would it mean to connect Monroe’s own history as a Revolutionary
War soldier and officer and Founding Father to these fellow hemispheric
revolutionary leaders? Can we see this as one more manifestation of creolization,
a reflection of interconnections and influences between the Western
Hemisphere’s revolutions and revolutionaries? I’ve written elsewhere about my
desire to see José
Martí as part of (if also certainly separate from) the United States, but
it would be just as important to see James Monroe as part of Latin American
revolutions—not in a U.S.-centric way, but rather as an expression of the
parallels and links between the moves toward independence and sovereignty
around the region. The Monroe Doctrine offers one potent way to make that case.
Next
anniversary tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment