Beyond Geopolitics: New Histories of Latin America at the League of Nations ed. by Alan McPherson, Yannick Wehrli (review)

Latin America’s participation in the League of Nations (LN) is an understudied topic among English-language scholars in the United States. But as co-editor Yannick Wehrli argues, “Participation in the LN had a real impact on Latin American politics and society” (1). The volume’s contributors hew to the conventional interpretation that the League was a political failure; for example, it did little to mitigate wars in Spain and Ethiopia, to say nothing of World War II. Moreover, despite Latin America’s broad participation, the League remained a Eurocentric body. Nevertheless, the institution “helped to establish a culture of multilateral debate and exchange” on a variety of issues that extended—to borrow from the book’s title—beyond geopolitics. Such considerations included labor, food, health, and science (2). Originating from a 2011 conference in Geneva, this book features an impressive collection of international contributors who draw from research in multiple archives and languages. The result is a rich tapestry of historical perspectives from Latin America and Europe.

The book’s 14 cogent chapters are divided into four sections. The first, Sovereignty and Conflict Resolution, examines Latin America’s (mostly frustrated) attempts to generate League support for its political interests. Co-editor Alan McPherson shows that the League did little to assist member nations—specifically, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic—in mitigating US occupations. Abdiel Oñate similarly demonstrates how the LN bulwarks Great Britain and France offered scant support for Mexico’s diplomatic efforts to help Republican Spain during the Spanish Civil War. At the same time, Latin American countries sometimes rebuffed League mandates. Wehrli and Fabián Herrera León argue in their chapters that Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Mexico were reluctant to carry out LN-designed trade embargos against Italy following its invasion of Ethiopia, for fear of the economic consequences.

In matters such as labor, the topic of the book’s second section, the league provided a framework in which Latin American perspectives about workers’ rights could be shared more broadly. Véronique Plata-Stenger argues that conferences arranged by the League’s International Labour Organization (ILO) created spaces for Latin American interests to be heard globally. Likewise, Patricio Herrera González maintains that despite the ILO’s worldwide scope, it facilitated deeper inter-American collaboration on behalf of workers’ rights.

In the third section, Intellectual and Scientific Cooperation, Corinne A. Pernet, Juliette Dumont, Letícia Pumar, and Juliana Manzoni Cavalcanti show that while the League fostered greater scholarly and scientific collaboration among members, Latin American states were nevertheless caught up in political squabbles and European competition for influence. The work of League bodies such as the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC), the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), and the Permanent Commission on Biological Standardization (PCBS) were affected.

The final section, Economic and Social Activities, reaches ambivalent conclusions about the benefits of Latin America’s participation in the League. José Antonio Sánchez Román argues that Argentina’s delegates became frustrated by the League’s Eurocentric orientation, which for them underscored how the country’s economic health depended upon European whims. Maria Leticia Galluzzi Bizzo, however, notes that, “[t]he League played a positive integrative, invaluable role in building nutrition as a field of science, public services, and training in Latin America” (233). As Amelia M. Kiddle shows in the last chapter of the section, this mixed legacy—one in which regional leaders recognized the League’s technical utility, if not its political usefulness—ultimately compelled many member states to withdraw.

In his concluding chapter, McPherson notes the persistent tension between internationalism and regionalism in Latin America’s experiences with the League of Nations. “Latin Americans showed that their region was ready to integrate into the global community,” he writes. “However, it would do so only if its distinct identity were somehow accommodated” (259...