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Updated: June 11, 2025
That Pan-Americanism had not meant much more than cooperation for economic ends seemed evident when, on April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. Instead of following spontaneously in the wake of their great northern neighbor, the Hispanic republics were divided by conflicting currents of opinion and hesitated as to their proper course of procedure.
This declaration, designed to give a solid legal basis to the new Pan-Americanism, was as follows: I. Every nation has the right to exist and to protect and to conserve its existence; but this right neither implies the right nor justifies the act of the state to protect itself or to conserve its existence by the commission of unlawful acts against innocent and unoffending states.
Such an attitude would constitute a species of continental provincialism and chauvinism. Hence there is no shibboleth that patriotic Americans should fight more tenaciously and more fiercely than of America for the Americans, and Europe for the Europeans. To make Pan-Americanism merely a matter of geography is to deprive it of all serious meaning.
Though emphasized by American statesmen and publicists in particular, the new point of view was not generally understood or appreciated by the people of either this country or its fellow nations to the southward. It seemed, nevertheless, to promise an effective cooperation in spirit and action between them and came therefore to be called "Pan-Americanism."
This is Pan-Americanism. It has none of the spirit of empire in it. It is the embodiment, the effectual embodiment, of the spirit of law and independence and liberty and mutual service.
It does not matter whether the country is great or small, whether it be Montenegro or Cambodia, it always contains souls who feel constrained to give the world a demonstration of their overflowing superiority. Pan-Germanism, pan-Slavism, pan-Magyarism, pan-Anglosaxism, pan-Americanism grow out of such conceit, systematized by professors and sanctified by bishops.
Above all, the common dangers and responsibilities falling upon the Americas at large as a consequence of the European war seemed likely to bring the several nations into a harmony of feeling and relationship to which they had never before attained. Pan-Americanism, however, was destined to remain largely a generous ideal.
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