North and South America have always been interdependent

Spectator

5 hours ago

In 1797, following a written plea for troops to counter an incursion by an American Revolutionary War veteran into Louisiana, Manuel Godoy, minister to the Spanish crown, made a note in the margin: No es posible poner puertas al campo ('It is not possible to put up doors in a field'). Both literally and metaphorically, Spain could no longer defend the indefensible. In 2017, the 45th president of the United States signed an executive order to build a wall along the country's Mexican border. Its construction, for which he perversely wanted Mexico to pay, was a practical and symbolic one. The United States was turning its back on Latin America.
That the relationship between the United States and its southern neighbours can be changeable is well enough known, but the depth of its complexity is perhaps not. Greg Gradin has spent an academic career investigating the tensions inherent in the 'western hemisphere', from Guatemalan history to Latin America as a proving ground for modernisation theory. In America, América, he expands on his previous work to write an original and outstanding 'new history of the New World'. The proposition he makes is unambiguous:
One can't fully understand the history of English-speaking North America without also understanding the history of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America. I mean all of it…And the reverse is true. You can't tell the story of the South without the North.
Grandin sidesteps the dangers of comprehensiveness – histories of the region can often be prolix – by exploring the hemisphere's 'long history of ideological and ethical contestation'. Divided into 50 short chapters, the structure allows him to cut deftly between colourful anecdote and unfamiliar intellectual history. What emerges is a vital portrait of a New World in which, despite numerous differences, the relationship between North and South has always been symbiotic and not without a similar sense of purpose.
Early on, the English took their lead from the Conquistadors. Captain John Smith saw himself as an anglicised Cortes when he sought to establish Jamestown in Virginia in 1607. Oliver Cromwell's horrific Irish campaign, which Grandin calls a 'prelude to empire', was a foretaste of what might befall the Indians and enslaved Africans of North America. The Spanish Conquest of the Americas, as one English investor stated, had 'awakened' Europe from its 'dreams', only to reveal death and destruction. Yet the nightmare of the Conquest would at least produce something extraordinary.
The moral conscience of this book belongs to the Spanish Dominican priest Bartolome de las Casas (1484-1566), who, from his encounters with the Indians of the New World, declared: 'Todo linaje de los hombres es uno' ('All humanity is one'). He would become the Conquest's most vociferous critic, having seen with his own eyes the 'ocean of evil'. To this day, his universal humanism remains a guiding light for the region, especially among the social democratic left in countries such as Brazil and Uruguay.
Grandin is keen to emphasise that the Spanish empire had 'yielded, by the early 1800s, to a republicanism that was both more inclusive and more activist than its counterpart in the United States'. The torch would later be carried by the Cuban poet Jose Marti, who believed the New World's diversity to be 'a wellspring of spiritual and material strength'. According to Grandin, the reason for this humanist climate can be traced back to Spanish colonialism's early moral crisis, and the fact that when independence finally arrived it was understood to include freedom from 'all forms of oppression'.
The unifying hero of the sweeping narrative is Simon Bolivar. But it is Bolivar the statesman and founder of a league of nations that fascinates, not the disappointed revolutionary who 'ploughed the sea'. The enlightened objectives of the 1826 Panama Congress included publication of a manifesto that proclaimed the abolition of slavery, the ratification of the Monroe Doctrine as international law and the adoption of the Roman legal doctrine Uti possidetis, ita possideatis ('As you possess, so shall you possess'). Roman law for the most part has kept the region's borders intact, compared with Manifest Destiny and the taking of the west. No wonder sovereignty remains so highly prized.
In the 20th century, Franklin D. Roosevelt's policy of the 'Good Neighbour' would become inter-American co-operation at its best. Those meetings between Thomas Jefferson and Francisco Miranda two centuries earlier, in which the seeds of Pan-Americanism were sown, had finally borne fruit.
It is clear where Grandin's sympathies lie (though his discussion of the authoritarian left, especially in Venezuela and Nicaragua might have been more exacting). But with Donald Trump currently taking a Nixonian line in his dismissal of Latin Americans ('We don't need them. They need us'), this magisterial work shows that only within the context of the 'western hemisphere' – and not western Europe – can the United States be fully understood.