This year marks the bicentenary of James Monroe’s pronouncement of the famous speech, which has been invoked to outline U.S. expansionist designs, spheres of influence and the principle of non-intervention. This international conference will explore the development, tensions and contradictions of the doctrine overtime across three main themes: 1) the historical background of the Monroe Doctrine in a transnational perspective; 2) the rearrangement and new interpretation of the Doctrine in the 1940s, and 3) the contemporary legacies of the Monroe Doctrine. Speakers, whose expertise ranges from history to political theory to law, will discuss these topics across six panels and three keynote speeches.
When:
- Thursday, November 30, 5 – 7.30 p.m.
- Friday, December 1, 8 a.m. – 8.30 p.m.
- Saturday, December 2, 9.30 a.m. – 5.15 p.m.
Where: Goethe University, Campus Westend, Normative Orders building, Max-Horkheimer-Straße 2, 60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany and online
To receive a Zoom link for the event, please contact the organizers at monroeconference@gmail.com. To register as an in-person attendee, please email your name, affiliation and a short description of your reasons to attend. They will get back to you as soon as possible.
The international conference is convened by Raphaël Cahen, León Castellanos-Jankiewicz and Hendrik Simon. It is organized by TraCe at Justus Liebig University Giessen, with the support of the Asser Institute in The Hague and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt.
Program
Thursday, 30 November
5 – 6.30 p.m. Keynote 1
Liliana Obregón (Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia), ‘The Monroe Doctrine´s First Centennial (1823-1923) in the Americas’
Chair: Raphaël Cahen
6.30 – 7.30 p.m. Drinks reception
Friday, 1 December
8 – 9 a.m Coffee and registration
9 – 9.15 a.m. Opening remarks
9.15 – 11.15 a.m. Panel 1: Tracing the Origins of the Monroe Doctrine: From Ideology to Diplomacy
Chair: Raphaël Cahen
Sandra Rebok (University of California San Diego/Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies), ‘America has a hemisphere to itself: The Jeffersonian origins of the Monroe Doctrine’
Benno Teschke and Jack Edwards (University of Sussex), ‘IR, Geopolitical Marxism and the Making of the Monroe Doctrine: A Historical Sociology of Early 19th Century International Politics’
Horst Carl (JLU Gießen, Geschichte der Frühen Neuzeit), ‘The Monroe Doctrine and the problem of national debts in the 1820s’
11.15 – 11.30 a.m. Coffee break
11.30 a.m. – 1 p.m. Panel 2: The Americas and the Principle of Non-Intervention
- Chair: León Castellanos-Jankiewicz
- Mariano Schlez (Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahía Blanca), ‘La Misión Norteamericana a América del Sur: Diplomacia, Inteligencia e Intereses Sociales en la Conformación de la Doctrina Monroe, 1817-1822’
- Tania Atilano (University of Zurich), ‘The absence of the Monroe Doctrine during the French Intervention in Mexico (1862-1867)’
- Arnulf Becker-Lorca (EUI, Florence), ‘Legal Geopolitics: the Monroe Doctrine’s Rise, Fall and Multiple Meanings’
1 – 2.30 p.m. Lunch
2.30 – 4 p.m. Panel 3: Monroe Doctrine at the Turn of the Century
- Chair: Arnulf Becker-Lorca (EUI, Florence)
- Edward Jones Corredera (Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg), ‘Is political economy incompatible with international law? Monröismo & the Drago Doctrine’
- Christopher Rossi (The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø), ‘Line of Amity, Line of Enmity, Large Policy Men, and the American Großraum’
- Miloš Vec (University of Vienna), ‘Reception of the Monroe Doctrine within Europe in the late 19th Century’
4 – 4.15 p.m. Coffee break
4:15 – 5:45 p.m. Panel 4: Monroe Doctrine between Liberalism and Realism
- Chair: Beate Jahn (University of Sussex)
- Matthew Specter (University of California Berkley), ‘Elasticity and Necessity: The Monroe Doctrine as Leitmotif in Alfred Mahan's Geopolitics and Modern Realist Tradition’
- Jochen von Bernstorff (University of Tübingen), ‘Carl Schmitt on Imperialism, International Law and the Großraum’
- Peter Langford (Edge Hill University, Lancanshire), ‘The implicit Critique of the Monroe Doctrine: Hans Kelsen’s Interwar Theory of International Law ’
6 – 8.30 p.m.Conference dinner
Keynote 2:
- Andrei Mamolea (Boston University), ‘The Latin American Challenge to the Monroe Doctrine: New Insights from the Archives’
- Chair: León Castellanos-Jankiewicz
Saturday, 2 December
9:30 – 10 a.m. Coffee
10 – 12 a.m.Panel 5: Monroe Doctrine and the Transformation of Political Violence
- Chair:Hanna Pfeifer (Goethe University, Frankfurt)
- Christopher Daase and Hendrik Simon (PRIF), ‘On Sanctions Wars – A Genealogy of the Decentralized Military Enforcement of International Norms from the Monroe Doctrine to the Present’
- Thilo Marauhn (JLU Gießen/University of Amsterdam) ‘Current Understandings of “Sovereign Equality” (Article 2 (1) UN Charter) and non-intervention in light of the Monroe Doctrine’
- Lothar Brock (PRIF), ‘Latin American Active Nonalignment as a Late Response to the Monroe Doctrine’
12 – 1.30 p.m.Lunch
1.30 – 3 p.m.Panel 6: From the Roosevelt Corollary to the Mid-Century
- Chair: Sergio Puig (EUI, Florence)
- Ruti Teitel (NYU), ‘Roosevelt's Corollary: Wielding Executive Power for Political and Legal Transformation in the Americas’
- Elena Diaz Galan (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid) and Harold Bertot Triana (UNIE Universidad, Madrid), ‘The Monroe Doctrine and the Principle of Non-Intervention: The Role of Cuba and the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States’
- Daniel Quiroga-Villamarín (Geneva Graduate Institute), ‘The Americas and the UN: Reimagining “Good neighborliness” for a Global Era (1939-1973)’
3 – 3.30 p.m. Coffee break
3.30 – 5 p.m. Keynote 3
- Juan Pablo Scarfi (Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago), ‘The Monroe Doctrine: Towards A New Historiography’
- Chair: Hendrik Simon
5 p.m. – 5.15 p.m. Concluding Remarks
- Raphaël Cahen
- León Castellanos-Jankiewicz
- Hendrik Simon