Spanish Diplomacy and Latin America in the 1920s

Spanish Diplomacy and Latin America in the 1920s

In this paper, I explore the persistence of empire within diplomatic practices by looking at the specificities of Spain’s Latin American foreign policy in the 1920s. Indeed, in a decade in which internationalism and imperialism walked hand in hand, Spanish diplomats developed a keen interest in Spain’s former colonies in the Americas. Analysing this phenomenon through archival material found in the records of the Spanish Foreign Office in Madrid, the US Department of State in Washington, and the League of Nations Secretariat in Geneva, I argue that Spanish diplomats attempted to challenge the very logics of international relations by instrumentalising Latin America as a tool for power. In addition to questioning some historiographical assumptions on power in twentieth-century world politics, I try to recalibrate the role and presence of Spain in the world after 1898, and to situate Latin America as both an agent and an object of world power. I explain that Italy, France, and the United States were also taking part in a ‘scramble for Latin America’ that consisted mostly of cultural diplomacy, and I use the case of Spanish diplomacy to depict the 1920s as a key moment for the transformation of imperialism through internationalism, especially at the League of Nations, where Latin American officials had a considerable - though not always univocal - agency.