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22 - The Americas at the Time of the League of Nations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2025

By
Juan Pablo Scarfi
General editor
Randall Lesaffer
Edited by
Robert Kolb  and
Momchil Milanov
Randall Lesaffer
Affiliation:
KU Leuven and Tilburg University
Robert Kolb
Affiliation:
Université de Genève
Momchil Milanov
Affiliation:
International Court of Justice
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Summary

This chapter examines the history of international law in the Americas at the time of the League of Nations. It focuses on the pioneering role of the Americas in international organisation through the Pan American Union and the pan-Americanisation of the Monroe Doctrine, the golden years of the US-led tradition of American international law associated with the American Institute of International Law (AIIL) and its codification projects in the 1920s. It also explores the debates over intervention provoked by the codification projects advanced by the AIIL and the tensions that emerged between the continental tradition of American international law linked to the AIIL and a regional and anti-interventionist one associated with the notion of Latin American international law. This latter tradition gained wider popularity in the 1920s and began to adopt a more radical and anti-imperialist posture. These two hemispheric and regional approaches to international law declined in the 1940s and 1950s across the Americas right at the time when the United States adopted a geopolitical and globalist strategy, departing from continentalist approaches to international law.

Keywords

regional approaches to international lawpan-AmericanismMonroe DoctrineinterventionAlejandro AlvarezcodificationJames Brown Scott
Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge History of International Law , pp. 717 - 745
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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Further Reading

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