Changes in Latin American Attitudes

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THE main feature of the relations between Anglo-Saxon America and Latin America since the states of the latter won independence is the eternal conflict between economy and ideology. For more than a century the two Americas have been accustomed to the word Pan-Americanism; but sincere Pan-American sentiment has not synchronized with the reality.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century a romantic "continentalism" dominated the Americas. The feeling originated in the spirit of that epoch, the age of revolutions against European states, when the New World was maturing and the air was full of idealism. This continentalism was a part of the general romanticism of that epoch, of its Sturm und Drang, much as the exodus to America had in itself been a protest against European conditions and habits. The New World wanted to become independent, to build a new structure on a new soil, and to avoid any interference from the Old World.

After their emancipation from the Old World the thirteen original states that formed the federal union of the United States began to pay more attention to their distant neighbors in the Western hemisphere than they had done previously. Their new attitude was based on the thought that all the American countries had been following a parallel development from relatively sparsely-populated colonies to the status of free states, and that all of them alike were unburdened by historical or racial prejudices. Thus the Western World seemed, in comparison with Europe, a new and isolated phenomenon, providing a common basis for the development of the common interests of the young states. Among these states there could never be strife in the way that there had been strife between the states of Europe. The attitude was well expressed in the famous letter of the Brazilian student, Maia, to Jefferson: "Nature in making us inhabitants of the same continent has united us in a common lot, in bonds of common patriotism."