Latin America, the Good Neighbor, and the Global Second World War

Andrew Buchanan; Ruth Lawlor

doi:10.5433/1984-3356.2024v17n34p022-050

Authors

Andrew Buchanan University of Vermont https://orcid.org/0009-0002-7979-1652
Ruth Lawlor Cornell University https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3193-4071

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5433/1984-3356.2024v17n34p022-050

Keywords:

Good Neighbor Policy, Great Depression, Second World War, U.S. global hegemony, economic and military agreements, military bases

Abstract

This lecture, presented to the ground-breaking conference on “The Good Neighbor Policy in Time of War” in Rio de Janeiro, seeks to locate the Good Neighbor Policy—and U.S. relations with Latin America more broadly—in the context of the global crisis produced by the Great Depression of the 1930s and the world war that followed. We argue that the Good Neighbor is best understood as a war policy, designed first to advance the construction of a U.S.-led autarkic bloc in the Americas—in parallel to other autarkic-imperial projects developed during the 1930s—and then to leverage hemispheric hegemony to support the creation of Washington’s global predominance after 1945. From this point of view, we conclude that rather than being marginal to historical accounts of the world war—or even absent entirely—Latin America should be placed at the center of the story, functioning both as a ‘springboard’ to the U.S. victory and as the indispensable regional bedrock of Washington’s coming global hegemony.

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Author Biographies

Andrew Buchanan, University of Vermont

PhD at Rutgers University, New Jersey (2011)

Senior Lecturer of History at University of Vermont

University of Vermont

Burlington, VT - United States

Ruth Lawlor, Cornell University

PhD in History at University of Cambridge (2019)

Assistent Professor of History at Cornell University

Cornell University

Ithaca, NY - United States

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