Beyond Geopolitics

New Histories of Latin America at the League of Nations

Bibliographic Data

ID2802181
AuthorsFriedrich E Schuler (Portland State University, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume97
Issue4
Pages767-768
Publication date2017-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-4214603
OpenAlexW2765293520
LanguageEN
Citations received13

Would it help a historian's career to discover the significance of Patricia Espinosa? All she did as executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was clinch the diplomatic compromise that made the global 2015 climate treaty possible. She is an unsung heroine of diplomatic internationalism whose work literally might bring fresh air and cooler temperatures to our world. Alan McPherson and Yannick Wehrli present in their anthology the professional ancestors of such Latin American diplomatic internationalists. In the 1920s and 1930s the League of Nations served as a context where Latin American diplomats contributed as international actors every bit as much as did presidents, peasants, or members of the military.This book of academic research papers first presented at a 2014 conference in Geneva is organized in sections each with a particular focus: sovereignty and conflict solution, labor, intellectual and scientific cooperation, and economic and social activities. Under these headings more particular topics are covered. Chapters investigate culture, religion, natural science standards, taxation, nutrition, and inter-American affairs. Alan McPherson concludes the book with an illuminating essay showing how uniquely Latin American diplomats acted within the multifaceted world community. He emphasizes the emerging distinctiveness of Latin America in international organizations and the tension between Latin American regionalism and the League of Nations' universalism.We know in detail about Europeans reaching into Latin American diplomatic worlds during the 1920s and 1930s. This book offers a look at Latin Americans reaching in the opposite direction. More importantly, their behavior and its impact defy the usual stereotypes. Latin American diplomats who reached into the world through international organizations had global impact during the Chaco War and through the International Labour Organization (ILO), to give just two examples.Particularly rich is the section of the book discussing how parliamentary strategies moved labor history. These strategies should be seen as paralleling labor actions by Trotskyites, Stalinists, autonomous anarcho-syndicalists, social democrats, and members of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The ILO was not just a strategic tool created in panic after World War I to capture Latin American labor organizations before they could organize themselves through nonliberal radical labor organizations. It proved a fruitful platform to sometimes save multinational extractive industries from the foolishness of their own management. Later, the Chilean president Michelle Bachelet would add her gendered answer to such labor questions as head of the ILO.Here scholars will find out about important aspects of the career of the Mexican labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano, for whom there still does not exist a biography with gravitas. Maria Leticia Galluzzi Bizzo's essay pulls the history of food into the world of international negotiations. For me, the book's description of Mexican advocates suggested again how unique diplomats of this country were—even though we still deal with them only as part of the Western Hemisphere, something that Amelia Kiddle's essay on Lázaro Cárdenas's diplomatic outreach to Latin America highlights. In these essays, Mexico possesses a powerful, unique generation of diplomats who, by acting as foreign policy professionals in the 1930s, reached beyond the concepts offered by hemispheric continentalism.Very quietly, this book also subtly demonstrates the profundity of the Swiss–Latin American linkage. Perhaps some have heard of how Swiss military trainers rivaled French and German experts in Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s. In the diplomacy discussed in this book, the Swiss and the citizens of Geneva quietly but crucially offered neutral meeting grounds beyond national partisanship. The importance of Latin American linkages with Switzerland could also be highlighted during World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Scholars would gain much from reading the materials pertaining to Latin America in the Swiss Foreign Ministry's digital archives. Neutrality never meant inaction, disinterest, or a lack of a stance.The Latin American actions and arguments before 1940, so splendidly explored here by scholars from Europe, Canada, the United States, and Latin America, never stopped. Future researchers should explore the work of Mexico's Ezequiel Padilla Peñaloza in the early United Nations and, more recently, of Sérgio Vieira de Mello as high commissioner for human rights and special representative of the secretary-general in Iraq. Tragically, this latter Latin American humanist was killed by terrorists.This is a most important and well-written collection of essays, rightfully taking a place next to monographs about Latin American diplomacy after 1900, that will remain required reading for laypeople and specialists alike interested in what early twentieth-century Latin American cultural and political work consisted of

Economic history · Foreign policy · Geopolitics · International relations · Internationalism (politics) · Latin Americans · League · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Treaty · Brazilian History and Foreign Policy · History · History and International Relations · International Relations in Latin America · Law

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