‘South America’, declared the North American Review in the early 19th century, ‘will be to North America what Asia and Africa are to Europe.’ ‘Not quite,’ says Greg Grandin. But also not for want of trying. America, América is the by turns woeful, despairing and ironic tale of the USA’s sustained attempts to turn its southern neighbours into clients or dependencies, if not colonies. But it is also a passionate plea for a re-evaluation of the place of Spanish America, so often shunted off into the ‘Global South’, in the evolution of the modern global order. As with Grandin’s previous books – one of which, Empire’s Workshop, covers some of the same ground – it is written with great flair and imagination, scattered with scintillating turns of phrase and pervaded with a sense of barely suppressed indignation. 

This is the story of how the ‘Western Hemisphere idea’ – the notion that the world is divided into two hemispheres, and that the peoples of the Western Hemisphere stand in a special relationship to one another – has evolved from the earliest encounters between Jefferson and Francisco de Miranda, companion in arms of Simón Bolívar, up to the present. It is also, however, the story of how the USA has consistently exploited the disunited states to its south. Some of the events Grandin describes are familiar: the seizure of the Panamanian president Manuel Noriega in 1989; the more hands-off meddling in the political affairs of Chile in the 1970s. Some, however, seem barely credible. So obsessed was the USA with the idea that it was the sole federation in the Western Hemisphere that in 1858 President James Buchanan sent a fleet of nineteen ships carrying 2,500 soldiers and two hundred guns to demand that the government of Paraguay change the words ‘the United States of North America’, which it had used in a commercial treaty, to ‘the United States of America’. Donald Trump would have applauded. Indeed, in the light of Grandin’s narrative, Trump’s vainglorious policies, from the bid to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the attempts to annex Greenland and ‘take back’ the Panama Canal, make some kind of historical sense. Trump’s global vision, like his tariff policies, is a throwback not so much to the 1950s, as some have claimed, as to the 1850s.

America, América is, however, far more than a series of incredible anecdotes. It is an attempt to show that, for all the arrogant behaviour of the USA towards its southern neighbours, the relationship between the two is far more complex than the simple one of dependency it sometimes appears to be. Grandin’s argument is that, despite the incalculable horrors and disorders of the past two centuries, the USA and its southern neighbours retain a unity of purpose, and that this has had a largely unrecognised impact on the modern world order. 

There are, of course, many differences between the USA and the rest of the Americas – too many to list in a single book. To begin with, as Hegel observed, ‘South America was conquered, but North America colonised.’ The impact of this is still obvious in innumerable ways to this day. Because the original Spanish dependencies in America had far larger and better-organised indigenous populations than the colonies of North America, the peoples of the southern republics are today largely ethnically mixed. ‘We are’, Simón Bolívar told the legislators of the new state of Venezuela in 1819, ‘a sort of middle species between the legitimate owners of this land and the Spanish usurpers.’ In North America, the indigenous were easily driven off their lands and large numbers of slave labourers were imported to cultivate these territories. As a result, the USA remains largely divided along racial lines. The Thirteen Colonies of North America were also far more united and politically self-reliant before independence than the viceroyalties of South America, and thus better placed to form a more perfect union. 

Grandin also highlights another significant, but overlooked, difference between the two Americas. The independent states of Latin America were established according to the Roman law principle Uti possidetis, ita possideatis (‘As you possess, so may you possess’). This meant that the frontiers between the states established at independence would remain in place forever. True, there have been almost incessant conflicts between the various republics over just where those boundaries lie. But none of these were wars of conquest. In the north, by contrast, once the new republic was established, citizens began to move west and then south across the continent, seizing all the territory they could from indigenous peoples, and from French and Spanish colonists. Americans invaded not only Florida and Texas, but also Haiti, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Panama and even Nicaragua, which in 1855 William Walker, a Tennessee mercenary, occupied with a motley crew of fifty-five men, proclaiming himself president after a five‑month war and re-establishing slavery (which the Nicaraguans had abolished thirty years earlier). President Franklin Pierce, in defiance of every possible understanding of international law, recognised the new ‘government’ immediately.

What guided all these acts of aggression was an ill-defined ‘right of conquest’. A ‘white nation settling down’, Thomas Jefferson said, had a right to defend its interests. This, he believed, constituted a ‘kind of jus gentium for America’. In 1823, the same year that President James Monroe articulated the doctrine that bears his name, the US Supreme Court gave implicit sanction to this principle: ‘Conquest gives a title which the Courts of the conqueror cannot deny.’ As the Brazilian diplomat Felipe José Pereira Leal put it, the USA was clearly driven by the ‘dizzying spirit of conquest’.

The true hero of this book is Bolívar. It is not, however, the brilliant general whom Grandin celebrates. Rather, it is the man who dreamed up what he called the Congreso Anfictiónico de América. Bolívar’s idea was that the entire southern continent would be linked by treaties of collaboration and reciprocity with the countries of the north. In 1824, Bolívar invited all the fledging republics of Latin America – and some observers from North America – to a congress in Panama City. His ambition was to create a federation of what he called ‘liberal nations’ (becoming possibly the first person to use the term) that would ultimately be united under a single law in which ‘differences of origin and colour would lose their influence and power’, slavery would be abolished and equal rights for all would be established. No individual nation ‘would be weaker than another, nor would any be stronger’. Although Grandin does not say so, Bolívar was driven by much the same vision as the torchbearer of Italian unification, Giuseppe Mazzini. In Europe, such visions would eventually lead to what, in 1914, Emile Durkheim called ‘cattle-like nationalism’. In South America, however, Grandin says, ‘For many, nationalism is still a gateway not toward rivalry but universalism.’

In the end, despite the signing of a Treaty of Union, League and Perpetual Confederation, very little came of Bolívar’s congress. Latin America in the 1820s was made up of highly unstable republics – ‘republics of air’, Bolívar called them – with an often-fierce dislike of one another. And the USA was perennially suspicious of the whole idea of a southern federation to match its own. But Bolívar’s vision of a perpetual confederation of the southern states (which, in his imagination, might at some remote moment lead to a federation of the entire globe) was to have a lasting influence well beyond America. 

One of the ideas to which it gave rise, and which runs as a thread through Grandin’s narrative, is that of ‘American international law’. Associated with the Venezuelan jurist Andrés Bello, the Argentinian Carlos Calvo, the Chilean Alejandro Alvarez and the Argentine diplomat Juan Bautista Alberdi (who coined the phrase), it was based on the argument that a shared opposition to ‘colonial slavery’ had produced what Alberdi called ‘a unique hemispheric jurisprudence’. They argued for the creation of a decolonised global order, to be pursued, in Grandin’s words, by means of ‘a rejection of doctrines of discovery and conquest; insistence on formal equality of nations despite their size, nonintervention, uti possidetis, and impartial arbitration’. It is surely something of an exaggeration to claim that ‘all the basic principles that would later go into the founding of the League of Nations and the United Nations are present in the early years of Spanish American independence’. Yet there can be no doubt that Latin American jurists have contributed more to a truly ‘international’ conception of what international law should be than have those from most other regions of the world, the USA included, and certainly far more than has been recognised.

Today, every Latin American state, as Grandin puts it, ‘teeters between the dark and the light’. With the return of Trump to the White House, their future, along with the future of the relationship between the USA and Latin America, looks bleak. Even so, as Grandin brilliantly shows, the USA still has much to learn from its neighbours in the south.