2 - American Geopolitics in the New Century (1898–1914)

Summary

It's only hatred you shall get

From all my folks and me.

After 1492 there had first been four worlds—America having been added to Asia, Europe, and Africa—and then just two: the old world and the new. America was ‘new’ to the old world in part because that old world was determined to ignore what was old in the ‘new’ world; but the designations stuck and maps of the world were organised into two halves. Politically, the American continent began in the late eighteenth century to free itself from European control: first the USA gained its independence, then Haiti, then most of South and Central America. The new American creole nations had much in common, and the USA offered a secular, republican, and materialist model that the rest of the continent was eager to emulate. However, the relationship between the USA and at least its closest neighbours to the south soured considerably during the course of the nineteenth century as a result of the US–Mexico War of 1848 and of the recurrent attempted invasions of Cuba from the USA aimed at establishing an insular extension to the slave system. Alongside US military, political, and commercial initiatives, there developed an ideology of Pan-Americanism around a set of institutions dominated by the USA. The Spanish–American War of 1898, which resulted in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines passing from Spanish hands into US control, concentrated minds and clarified dividing lines. Nearly a century after independence for most South and Central American countries, the cultural and linguistic ties to Spain—and through Spain to the rest of Europe—again began to tug; and the example of US materialism began to pall, at least for some. The period between 1898 and 1914 was dominated by Theodore Roosevelt and the implementation of his interventionist American policy, which enormously increased US influence in the countries to the south of the USA. In the face of US power, and against the official ideology of Pan-Americanism, Hispanic America produced a set of competing ideas about the continent and its identity which were still in ferment as the old world erupted into conflict in 1914.