CONTINENTALISM: A NEW POLICY FOR THE GREAT AMERICA (2001)

The Continent is now for Americans a different thing than it used to be. For the heirs of the British islanders’ language, the Continent continues -- more often than not-- to be the land across the channel, the firm territory beyond the islands, the European Continent. Now, with the prospect of the Free Trade Area for the Americas, an increasing feeling of a common land blossoms in all the countries of the area. A new idea about the old fact of living on another continent, the American Continent, has emerged both in spirit and language, and in this century Continent and Continental describe a belonging and a new policy.

The Spanish-speaking people, maybe because of their condition of discoverers and conquerors of the new territory, have always been clear about the continental quality of America, about the spatial, cultural and political separation from Europe, and above all, about the unity of the Continent seen as a single geographical entity, subject to a possible geopolitical union. Instead, the English-speaking Americans kept the name of America for only the United States of America and referred to the continental territory as the Americas, in a term that separates more than unifies. The Spanish-speaking people talked confidently about America, with the spontaneity of those who knew that there were two continents in question, Europe and America. Overseas became quickly for them a reversible expression: overseas could be America or Europe, according to where the person was actually speaking. The Canadians, half Europeans through the Commonwealth and half Americans, had a new perception about the Continent, and for them Continentalism, an expression probably inaugurated by Harold Innes, meant, early in the 20th century, every geopolitical movement linking Canada to the United States, movements perceived always as subtle or not so subtle ways to tear Canadians apart from Europe.

Affections, ideas about the national self, and political and cultural wars have surrounded the words America, Continent, and Continentalism --- a word that is not even recognized by the spell-check of computers. All this emotional turmoil breaks out again in the middle of the commercial battle for the Free Trade Area. Like with the North-American Free Trade Area, the Caricom, or the Mercosur, traditional quarrels and friendships between American countries emerge, but this time, since the discussion is about the whole continental area (including the Caribbean Islands-- as American as the rest), the concept of Continentalism raises arguments which certainly involve much more than commercial agreements.

Bolívar and San Martín in South-America had the dream of what they called the Great America. Heroes of the Independence wars, they advocated for an American union. President Monroe in the United States had, with the same independent spirit, the idea of an America just for the Americans, and he meant with this statement to be far more inclusive than what the enemies of the United States want to believe. General Perón, in Argentina, was the first to start a continental association: in 1949 he promoted the ABC, the Argentina, Brazil, Chile agreement, which was intended to start exactly what the NAFTA started in the mid-90s and what the FTAA is supposed to start now.

General Perón, contemporary to the Foundation of the European Community by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, and enlightened witness of the whole process, was probably the first American leader to speak about Continentalism, understood as a special policy dedicated to the union of America not only in a common market but also in a common political, cultural and military association. In the earliest 70s and before dying in 1974, he warned the revolutionary youth about the political sequence for years to come: that nationalism would be followed by continentalism to finally end in a necessary and unavoidable universalism. The foresight proved to be true and in the times of globalization, Continentalism is merely completing its also unavoidable historical routine.

Europe has already completed a political union --- we talk now about the European Union --- and America, as a Continent, is on its way to achieve in years to come its own political unity. The idea of a continental union, which will in the first place install on the planet a market of eight hundred million consumers --the biggest market in the world-- scares Europe, and we can perceive the influence of the frightened European perception on the Americans everywhere. Here and there, projects to split “the Americas” into at least three separate markets, surge in the speech of local American leaders, both in North, Central and South America. The unity is resisted by many other American countries, which fear the omnipresent ghost of Yankee imperialism. The resistance to an American Union is promoted in various ways by European political or economic interests, in a secret war impossible to understand without the concept of Continentalism. For a certain period of time, the two Continents will commercially compete for the markets of the rest of the world and for political supremacy. Though all this will end, as General Peron warned, in a universal market and a universal political union, the continental step will make fall many countries, long before that.

From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego -- to say it with the already famous inclusive formula-- a new patriotism is the challenge for the Americans from here to there. The idea that the Continent is the new motherland --representing a more superior interest than the country land-- and that Americans from everywhere –including the powerful and feared Yankees-- share a dazzling brotherhood, has started to put hearts on fire, minds in thought and hands in action.

Continentalism seems to be the new word for hope to the poor in the Great America, and probably the new word for victory to the United States, as the richest country in the world. Of course, and until the time of the fair Universalism comes, with its promise of final peace on Earth, American Continentalism has become a nightmare to Europe; and as a political idea, an unanswered question to Asia; maybe a clue to the wounded Africa; and an unexpected opportunity for the long denied cultural Americanity of Oceania.