National self-determination.: Issued under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs by Cobban Alfred

Author:Cobban, Alfred
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press

statesmanship met the challenge of the Havana Conference in a constructive way and with remarkably little delay. The need to free the INIonroe Doctrine and American policy from their accretion of inter-ventionism was clearly put in a Memorandum by the Under-Secretary of State in 1928. ^ This Memorandum was accepted as the basis of his policy by the new Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, in 1929, and by 1930 the Roosevelt corollary had been specifically repudiated. The right of intervention had not so far been abandoned, but it had been divorced from the Monroe Doctrine.^

A further step was announced in a speech by President Roosevelt in December 1933. 'The maintenance of constitutional government in other nations', he said, 'is not, after all, a sacred obligation devolving upon the United States alone. The maintenance of law and the orderly processes of government in this hemisphere is the concern of each individual nation within its own borders first of all. It is only if and when the failure of orderly processes affects the other nations of the continent that it becomes their concern: and the point to stress is that in such an event it becomes the joint concern of the whole continent in which we are all neighbours.''' This was a repudiation of the whole policy of unilateral intervention, whether it took the form of the imperialism of Theodore Roosevelt or the paternalism of Woodrow Wilson. It was put into the form of a convention on nonintervention at the Pan-American Conference at Montevideo, and in June 1934 this was ratified unanimously by the Senate.* Nor were these declarations mere pious aspirations. A few months before the Conference the United States marines had been withdrawn from Nicaragua. In 1934 the military occupation of Haiti came to an end, certain limitations on the sovereignty of Cuba were abandoned, and in 1935 financial intervention in Nicaragua, Haiti and Salvador was restricted, s Finally, a protocol signed at the Buenos Aires conference of 1936 declared that intervention 'directly or indirectly, and for whatever reason' was 'inadmissible.'^

It may seem that our tale is now ended. Manifest destiny, paramount interest, the policy of the big stick, dollar diplomacy, Wilsonian paternalism, anti-revolutionary intervention—all have passed. The United States has abandoned, apparently, all its direct or indirect attempts to infringe the political sovereignty of the lesser American states. Is there then any remaining problem involved in the maintenance of the right of national independence, or self-determination, in the Americas, it may be asked. Why, indeed, have we troubled to go into this question if its interest is purely historical? The answer is that the whole problem of self-determination has now expanded beyond its traditional political framework. We have so far omitted those aspects of American relations with other nations which are the crux of the whole matter. There are, first, the actual possessions of the United States,

1 Perkins, p. 24.3-4. 2 id. p. 344.

3 C. L. Jones, The Caribbean since rgoo, 1936, p. 477. * Perkins, p. 346.

^ Survey of International Affairs, 1936, p.

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