Over the course of the nineteenth century, Latin American jurists developed a body of thought—“American International Law”—that they believed would help the region, including by embedding principles of nonconquest, nonintervention, and formal equality among nations into treaties and international systems. These ideas became cornerstones of anti-imperialism in the region, which had to manage an increasingly powerful and interventionist United States—understood as the region’s dominant power by the end of the nineteenth century.
The Latin American “social-democratic” tradition that Grandin is tracing made its next advances not with diplomats, but with a social revolution. The Mexican Revolution, which had its armed phase between 1910 and 1920, produced the world’s first social-democratic constitution: promising a host of labor rights and defining property not as inherent to individuals, but granted by the nation for social purpose. Mexico’s new constitution limited the ability of foreigners to own property in the country, and reserved subsoil resources as common property. In 1938, Mexico’s progressive President Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized the country’s oil resources. That time, the U.S. government did not intervene.
That it did not was due to both changed thinking in Washington and the fact that Europe was on the brink of war. After years of frequently brutal military occupations by the United States of various countries in the Caribbean Basin, it adopted a “Good Neighbor Policy” in the 1930s and 1940s, swearing off military intervention and channeling influence through other means. There was mutual respect and mutual admiration. Franklin D. Roosevelt threw some U.S. social democrats into the diplomatic mix along with more traditional foreign service corps, and they had more sympathy for the economic and social reforms taking place in Latin America. Rural organizers in the U.S. South visited Mexico and drew inspiration from Cárdenas’s land redistribution. U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace spoke of a coming “century of the common man.” And maintaining friendly relationships with Latin American countries, through the multilateral institutions these nations had long demanded, taught the United States how to use power peacefully. “It was Latin America, including the fear of losing Latin America,” argues Grandin, that steered FDR toward internationalism.
For Grandin, the era of the Good Neighbor is the high point of inter-American cooperation, institutionalizing multilateralism, and a shared commitment to the expansion of both social and political rights. It offers an example of consensual leadership, which Grandin argues left its mark on the United Nations as it created international bodies to look after common prosperity. Latin America’s social-democratic diplomats, like Chile’s Hernán Santa Cruz, helped to advocate for the social claims (such as the rights to housing, health care, and education) represented in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.