A racist international law : domination and resistance in the Americas of the 19th century

Abstract

This essay examines, in relation to one continent –the Americas– the 19th century rise of race as an element in international legal argumentation. Americans from the United States understood international law itself to be the law of the Anglo-Saxon race, justifying not only American expansion over the continent’s ‘vacant lands’, but also the limits of that expansion. Americans argued for segregation, when expansion run into ‘non-white races.’ The newly–independent states of the Americas were not to be conquered but disciplined – through diplomatic protection and military intervention. Spanish-Americans, realizing that the greatest threat to the independence of their Republics was no longer European recolonization, but Anglo-American expansion and intervention, called for both the unity of the Latin race and the enactment of a continental public law, what later became a Latin American international law with non-intervention at its center. But using the idea of a Latin-race confronting the Anglo-race to sustain the former’s claim to sovereignty, redefined indigenous peoples as races to be civilized by assimilation or war. If Latin America was born as an anti-hegemonic project of resistance vis-à-vis Anglo-America, a racialized international law enabled not only Anglo-American continental domination, but also dispossession of indigenous peoples by Latin American states.