Monroe Doctrine
President Monroe told Congress in December 1823 that the Americas were closed to further European colonisation, and Britain enforced it for him. The context was the collapse of the Spanish empire. Almost all of mainland Spanish America had won independence by 1822, and the Holy Alliance of Russia, Austria and Prussia had just authorised France to restore absolutism in Spain, which raised the possibility of a similar restoration in the Americas. Russia had also issued a decree claiming the Pacific coast down to what is now Oregon. Canning, the British foreign secretary, proposed a joint Anglo-American declaration, since Britain had no interest in seeing Spanish trade monopolies restored in markets its merchants had just opened. John Quincy Adams argued against joining, on the grounds that it would be more dignified to make the declaration alone than to come in as a cockboat in the wake of a British man-of-war, and he wrote most of the doctrine. The statement had three parts: no new European colonisation in the hemisphere, no European interference with existing independent states, and no American interference in European affairs or existing European colonies. It was ignored at the time. The United States had no navy capable of enforcing any of it, and what actually deterred intervention was the Royal Navy and Britain's commercial preference. It was revived in the 1840s to justify expansion, extended by Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 into a claim to police the Caribbean, and cited repeatedly through the Cold War. The doctrine was never a treaty, never ratified by anyone, and never accepted as law by Latin American states, which have generally regarded it as a claim to a sphere of influence rather than a guarantee. It was invoked again as recently as 2019.
- Year: 1823 CE
- Category: Political
