Latin America and the League of Nations

Abstract

At the moment of its founding in 1920, the League of Nations enjoyed the solid support of Latin American countries, whose early and extensive participation helped legitimize the new international system and facilitate the functioning of its institutional representation. While this support was tremendously valuable for the Geneva-based League, it continuously suffered temporary, though significant, lapses on the part of nations that were particularly representative of the region, such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Despite the characteristically pacifist rhetoric enunciated by this group of states, Latin American support cannot be called disinterested or sincere. Indeed, their collaboration with the multilateral and universalistic pretensions of the League was notoriously reserved, to such an extent that in the 1920s the organization’s General Secretariat granted them special treatment and prerogatives, while simultaneously ensuring that the League would continue to exert its influence in the Western Hemisphere. This reality was confirmed, sadly, in the context of two conflicts, the Chaco and Leticia wars, during which Latin American loyalty to the League became seriously questioned. With few exceptions in the decade that followed—one characterized by complicated crises that would lead to a new worldwide conflagration—the general tendency with respect to the system of collective security described in the Society’s Charter was scarred by dissatisfaction, incompliance, and increasing disillusionment that undoubtedly contributed to the weakening and eventual collapse of this organization so emblematic of the interwar period.

Republican internationalism: the nineteenth-century roots of Latin American contributions to international order

“…IR's historical narratives regarding the development of multilateralism trace its roots to the 1815 Congress of Vienna and grant minimal consideration to the contributions of the Global South (Acharya and Buzan 2019, 159). Latin America's regional multilateralism is sometimes mentioned in passing (see Ravndal 2020;Reinalda 2009), but it is only in relation to the League of Nations that a cohesive body of scholarship on Latin America's multilateral involvement exists (Herrera Le on 2016;McPherson and Wehrli 2015).…”