Britain Differs with the Monroe Doctrine

Great Britain was not advancing a general principle, but maintaining an immediate interest.

Continuing The Monroe Doctrine,
our selection from his article by Alfred Thayer Mahan in Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 16 published in 1905. The selection is presented in five easy 5-minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in The Monroe Doctrine.

Time: 1823
Place: Washington, D.C.

As a matter of fact, she did not in any wise accept this. The American declaration against “the extension of the system of the allied powers to any portion of this hemisphere” was welcomed as supporting the attitude of Great Britain; for the phrase, in itself ambiguous, was understood to apply not to the quintuple alliance for the preservation of existing territorial arrangements in Europe, to which Great Britain was a party, but to the Holy Alliance, the avowed purpose of which was to suppress by external force revolutionary movements within any state — a course into which she had refused to be drawn. But the complementary declaration in the President’s message, that “the American continents are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power, was characterized in the Annual Register for 1823 as “scarcely less extravagant than that of the Russian ukase by which it was elicited” and which forbade any foreign vessel from approaching within a hundred miles of the Russian possession now known as Alaska. The British Government took the same view and in the protocol to a conference held in 1827 expressly repudiated this American claim.

There was therefore between the two countries at this moment a clear opposition of principle, and agreement only as to a particular line of conduct in a special case. With regard to the interventions of the Holy Alliance in Europe, Great Britain, while reserving her independence of action, stood neutral for the time, but from motives of her own policy showed unmistakably that she would resist like action in Spanish America. The United States, impelled by an entirely different conception of national policy, now first officially enunciated, intimated in diplomatic phrase a similar disposition. The two supported each other in the particular contingency, and doubtless frustrated whatever intervention any members of the Holy Alliance may have entertained of projecting to the other side of the Atlantic their “union for the government of the world.” In America, as in Europe, Great Britain deprecated the intrusion of external force to settle internal convulsions of foreign countries but she did not commit herself, as the United States did, to the position that purchase or war should never entail a cession of territory by an American to a European state, a transaction which would be in so far colonization. In resisting any transfer of Spanish American territory to a European power, Great Britain was not advancing a general principle, but maintaining an immediate interest. Her motive, in short, had nothing in common with the Monroe Doctrine. Such principles as were involved had been formulated long before, and had controlled her action in Europe as in America.

The United States dogma, on the contrary, planted itself squarely on the separate system and interests of America. This is distinctly shown by the comments of the Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, in a dispatch to the American minister in London, dated only two days before Monroe’s message. Alluding to Canning’s most decisive phrase in a recent dispatch, “Great Britain could not see any part of the colonies transferred to any other power with indifference,” he wrote.

We certainly do concur with her in this position but the principles of that aversion, so far as they are common to both parties, resting only upon a casual coincidence of interests, in a national point of view selfish on both sides, would be liable to dissolution by every change of phase in the aspects of European politics. So that Great Britain, negotiating at once with the European alliance and with us concerning America, without being bound by any permanent community of principle, would still be free to accommodate her policy to any of those distributions of power and partitions of territory which for the last half- century have been the ultima ratio of all European political arrangements.”

For this reason, Adams considered that recognition of the independence of the revolted colonies, already made by the United States, in March, 1822, must be given by Great Britain also, in order to place the two states on equal terms of cooperation. From motives of European policy, from which Great Britain could not dissociate herself, she delayed this recognition until 1825 and then Canning defined his general course toward the Spanish colonies in the famous words: “I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old. I resolved that, if France had Spain, it should not be Spain with the Indies.” His coincidence with the policy of the United States is thus seen to be based, and properly, upon British interests as involved in the European System, but that, so far from being the Monroe Doctrine, is almost the converse of it.

Nor was it only in direction that the impulses of the two states differed. They were unequal in inherent vital strength. The motive force of the one was bound to accumulate, and that of the other to relax, by the operation of purely natural conditions. An old order was beginning to yield to a new. After three centuries of tutelage America was slipping out of European control. She was reaching her majority and claiming her own. Within her sphere she felt the future to be hers. Of this sense the Monroe Doctrine was an utterance. It was a declaration of independence, not for a single nation only, but for a continent of nations, and it carried implicitly the assertion of all that logically follows from such independence. Foremost among the conditions ensuring its vitality was propinquity, with its close effect upon interest. Policy, as well as war, is a business of positions. This maxim is perennial; a generation later it was emphasized in application, but not originated, by the peopling of the Pacific Coast, the incidental discovery of gold in California, and the consequent enhanced importance of the Isthmus of Panama to the political strategy of nations. All this advanced the Monroe Doctrine on the path of development, giving broader sweep to the corollaries involved in the original proposition but the transcendent positional interest of the United States no more needed demonstration in 1823 than in 1850, when the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty was made, or than now, when, not the Pacific Coast only, but the Pacific Ocean and the Farther East, lend increased consequence to the isthmian communications.

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