A Turn to Empire?

A quarter-century ago, Mehta (Reference Mehta1999, 1) argued that while rooted in “an intellectual tradition and experiences that were substantially European,” liberalism owed its development to interactions with the wider world. British liberals’ universal language was belied by parochialism and complicity in expanding colonial ventures. Canonical liberal thinkers not only rationalized imperialism, but also frequently derived personal benefits from it—from John Locke’s stake in American settler colonialism to John Stuart Mill’s career in the British East India Company (Jahn Reference Jahn2013; Mehta Reference Mehta1999; Pitts Reference Pitts2006).

Scholars debate whether liberalism’s imbrication in empire during the nineteenth century represented a shift in liberal thought or merely revealed intrinsic imperialist tendencies. Pitts (Reference Pitts2006) posits that liberalism took a “turn to empire” in the mid-nineteenth century—leaving behind the greater pluralism of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Benjamin Constant. By contrast, nineteenth-century liberals adopted an increasingly dichotomous vision of the world, infused with growing confidence in the superiority of European civilization.

Rather than seeing a singular “turn,” Bell (Reference Bell2016) argues that liberals’ entanglements with settler colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suggest a more consistent endorsement of empire. Armitage (Reference Armitage2004) and Jahn (Reference Jahn2013) contend that colonial expansion was intrinsic to Locke’s understanding of liberty and property. Colonialism permitted a shared political project among white men, but that liberal project was premised on the appropriation of supposedly unimproved land from indigenous peoples in North America. Liberals’ support for settler colonialism, these critics posit, was more persistent and uniform than their attitudes toward imperial rule over foreign polities (see also Mantena Reference Mantena2010, 182–5; Mehta Reference Mehta1999, 47–9).

Despite these disagreements on the timing and extent of imperial entanglements, most scholars agree that Europe’s wealth and power inspired a growing sense of superiority among the continent’s liberals during the nineteenth century. Understandings of history as progressive and stadial grew more cohesive, leading many liberals to believe in their societies’ civilizing mission. This idea represented “the most fully developed moral justification of empire in nineteenth-century Britain” (Mantena Reference Mantena2010, 21). The hardening of civilizational categories responded to, and then justified, coexisting support for liberalism at home and imperialism overseas (Pitts Reference Pitts2006).

Liberal imperialists codified these justifications through what was later dubbed the “standard of civilization.” For John Stuart Mill, Europe’s progress almost demanded an exercise of power over non-European others—at least until they had advanced to full membership in the family of civilized nations (Mehta Reference Mehta1999, chap. 3; Keene Reference Keene2002; Pitts Reference Pitts2006, 11–20). In “A Few Words on Non-intervention,” Mill ([1859] Reference Mill and Robson1984, 118–9) defended British and French actions in India and Algeria, respectively. Reciprocity, the basis of the international legal order, was conditional on civilizational status. “To characterize any conduct whatever toward a barbarous people as a violation of the law of nations,” Mill wrote, “only shows that he who so speaks has never considered the subject. … [B]arbarians have no rights as a nation.” European “civilizing missions,” then, were at the heart of liberalism’s fusion to empire.

While British thinkers remain the most studied, scholars also have re-examined French imperial liberalism. Alexis de Tocqueville defended French rule in Algiers, and many French liberals supported imperial expansion in the ensuing decades (Pitts Reference Pitts and Muthu2012, 262–3; Todd Reference Todd2021). For de Tocqueville, colonial ventures allowed for stabilizing liberal rule at home (Saada Reference Saada, Koskenniemi, Rech and Fonseca2017). Later French thinkers added to these justifications an emphasis on France’s cultural prowess and material progress. This was the case of Michel Chevalier, Napoleon III’s advisor, and chief ideologue of the Mexican intervention. Chevalier left a mark in liberalism’s history as an architect of the Anglo-French agreement (1860) that heralded a shift toward free trade. As a Saint-Simonian, Chevalier believed in states’ active role in fostering social and economic change (Drolet Reference Drolet2008). Interest in large-scale infrastructure projects drew Chavalier’s attention to Mexico as a potential site for an interoceanic canal (Galeana Reference Galeana2006a). After a visit there in the 1830s, he argued France should exercise tutelage over “lethargic” Latin peoples (Chevalier Reference Chevalier1836, xii–xiii). Writing about Panama in 1844, Chevalier echoed Locke’s theory of property. Superior civilization entailed a “law of confiscation against those states that do not know how to make use of the talent that God has bestowed upon them” (Chevalier, quoted in Drolet Reference Drolet2008, 1270). While Chevalier recognized Spanish American polities as independent states, he nonetheless insisted that France had a duty to exploit the region’s resources for the cause of human advancement. Such arguments about reform and progress allowed European liberals to justify intervention to “help” unfamiliar societies climb the civilizational ladder (Mehta Reference Mehta1999, 77–8).

Where Mexico and Spanish America fell in this civilizational hierarchy—and with what consequences for the legitimacy of intervention—was “eminently debatable” (Middleton Reference Middleton2023, 376). But the region was consistently portrayed as backward and in need of some external tutelage (Schulz Reference Schulz2014). Advocates of the intervention emphasized Mexico’s political disorder and supposedly deficient population to justify Europeans’ right and responsibility to uplift those they considered “uncivilized.” Mexico’s liminality made it an important, and hotly contested, case for hashing out the limits of liberal imperialism (De la Rosa Reference De la Rosa2022; Middleton Reference Middleton2023; Salomon Reference Salomon1975).

An Emerging Liberal Internationalism

Scholars of International Relations place liberal internationalism’s consolidation as a self-conscious worldview in the early twentieth century (see Ashworth Reference Ashworth, Bukovansky, Keene, Reus-Smit and Spandu2023; Sluga Reference Sluga2013). Foundational liberal internationalists argued that the moral principles of domestic liberal society should be applied internationally through the expansion of democracy, free trade, and international organization. Doing so would promote human progress and peace—including by eliminating war among democratic states. Although contemporary theorists suggest a similar period of consolidation in the interwar interregnum, they diverge over the tradition’s antecedents and trajectory. For instance, Doyle (Reference Doyle1983) places the roots of liberal internationalism in the three definitive articles—republican government, pacific union, and cosmopolitan right—of Kant’s Perpetual Peace. Footnote ¹ In contrast, Ikenberry (Reference Ikenberry2020) emphasizes liberal internationalism’s evolution as it passed from British to U.S. leadership. The U.S. promotion of international organization and free trade after both world wars converted liberalism’s abstract aspirations into an increasingly constitutional liberal international order. The progressive development of this order, Ikenberry suggests, has ameliorated liberal internationalism’s vestiges of imperialism. In response, numerous scholars have criticized liberal International Relations theory for downplaying historical and ongoing imperialism (Jahn Reference Jahn2013; Morefield Reference Morefield2005).

The fusion of state power with liberalism was central to the emergence of liberal internationalist thought in the United States and Europe. As Bell (Reference Bell2016, 19–20) writes, “By 1860 liberals of different stripes were beginning to converge on a relatively stable ‘internationalist’ doctrine that championed the benefits of conjoining international commerce and international law.” Despite those shared tenets, early liberal internationalists disagreed on many other points—and quite centrally on the place of empire. Liberal critiques of empire crystalized in the mid-nineteenth century, including from the British free trader Richard Cobden, who negotiated the 1860 trade treaty with Chevalier (Howe Reference Howe2009; Sylvester Reference Sylvester2009). Among international lawyers, Fitzmaurice (Reference Fitzmaurice2012, 124) argues, “even at its most pro-imperial, liberalism was characterized by conflict over empire, rather than doctrine.” Yet this recognition of liberal internationalism’s multivocality foregrounds U.S. and European voices. To the extent that “peripheral” contributions have been recovered, they are often approached as anti-imperialist dissent instead of as constitutive of the liberal tradition.

In this article, we claim a space for Mexican liberals’ contributions to this anti-imperial liberal critique. Not only did juaristas add a voice from those who found themselves on the receiving end of imperialism, but their vision of international order differed from their European contemporaries in important aspects. For instance, Cobden opposed formal empire and the intervention in Mexico, but he nevertheless saw Mexicans as racially inferior: “the people of that Country are sunk in a state of degradation & demoralization which incapacitates them for self-government.—They are a mixed population of negroes, Indians, & Spaniards, intermarried until the European race is in a minority with only one bond of Union—the Roman Catholic faith in its very lowest development” (Cobden Reference Cobden, Howe and Morgan1863, 415; see also Phillips Reference Phillips2012). These views mirrored the justifications of British and French imperialists. Crucially, while many juaristas accepted stadial ideas of human progress, they vehemently rejected the view that differences in societal development justified foreign impositions.

Peripheral Liberal Internationalisms

If canonical liberals’ views of the world have received longstanding attention, studies of a genuine liberal internationalist tradition outside Europe and the United States have only recently gained traction (e.g., Hiruta Reference Hiruta2023; Holley Reference Holley2024). “Despite the rich, diverse and newly available critical histories” of liberalism, Thakur (Reference Thakur2021, 12) explains, “we do not yet have many narratives that center non-western actors as co-creators, or protagonists in their own right, in advancing and reforming the liberal international project. The typical non-western actor in these histories is absent, or petitioning (usually being spoken on behalf of by western interlocutors), or staunchly resistant to the liberal international order.”

There are important exceptions, however. Classically, Albert Hourani ([1962] Reference Hourani1983) pointed to late Ottomans and the Egyptian Rifa’a al-Tahtawi as figures who sought to fuse liberalism, nationalism, and education in an Arab political context. Scholars, including Howland (Reference Howland2001) and Fung (Reference Fung2010), examined the reception of liberalism in China and Japan. C.A. Bayly (Reference Bayly2011, 10) noted that Indian writers drew on liberalism and international law to contest the British colonial state. Indian liberals deployed John Stuart Mill to criticize the overreach of state power, but “cannily ignored” his notion that Indians were “like children, in need of direction by benign imperial authority” (13). Scholarship highlights the role of Rammohan Roy in these early intellectual exchanges (Zastoupil Reference Zastoupil2010). Recent accounts have pointed to the influence of liberalism in shaping views of world politics from the peripheries of international order—for instance, Martin Bayly’s (Reference Bayly2023) work on International Relations in India (see also, Thakur Reference Thakur2021). Likewise, Fung (Reference Fung2010, 145) argues that the Chinese liberal nationalist Liang Qichao “conceived of an ideal international community grounded in the basic liberal ideas of equal rights and autonomy.”

Recent scholarship uncovers Latin America’s role in the development of the liberal international order, especially in light of the region’s relationship with the United States. A vast literature examines anti-imperialist resistance in the region as a response to great-power interventions—although rarely placing this resistance within the liberal tradition (but see Gobat Reference Gobat2013; Sanders Reference Sanders2014). More directly, IR scholars and diplomatic historians illustrate how Latin Americans have engaged with the creation of norms and institutions, especially through diplomacy and international law (Becker Lorca Reference Becker Lorca2014; Long Reference Long2018; Scarfi Reference Scarfi2017; Thornton and Rodriguez Reference Thornton and Rodriguez2022). In this line of thought, Greg Grandin (Reference Grandin2012) argues that Latin Americans’ concepts of individual rights and sovereignty diverged from those of North Atlantic liberals but nonetheless reflected a liberal worldview. For many authors, Latin America’s peripheral position and “Creole consciousness” is generative of this line of political thought (Fawcett Reference Fawcett2012; Obregón Reference Obregón2006; Simon Reference Simon2017). Hooker (Reference Hooker2009, 68; Reference Hooker2017) shows that these liberals’ experiences with the racial underpinnings of international order sharpened their critique of global inequality. Her work connects with a growing exploration of Latin America as a site of theoretical innovation that is “both Western and marginal simultaneously” (Hooker Reference Hooker2017, 68).

Indeed, liberalism and its cousin, republicanism, were inextricable elements of Latin America’s political development, shaping emancipation from Spain, nation-state building, and the creation of political parties (Aguilar Rivera and Rojas Reference Aguilar Rivera and Rojas2014; Hale Reference Hale1990; Jaksic and Carbó Reference Jaksic and Posada-Carbó2011). Rojas (Reference Rojas2002) and Simon (Reference Simon2017) each demonstrate that Spanish American political elites’ “creole” visions reclaimed higher positions in European-dominated international hierarchies, while simultaneously defending their right to rule over indigenous, black, and mixed-race populations. Sanders (Reference Sanders2014) contends that Spanish America’s progressive constitutions and enlightened reformers put these republics at “the vanguard of the Atlantic world” in the mid-nineteenth century. Sabato (Reference Sabato2018) similarly highlights regional innovations in liberal republicanism. In short, liberals in the region considered themselves to be part of a political tradition that connected them to their peers in Europe and the United States—despite the poverty and political instability that affected their societies.

Before these recent works, Latin America’s nineteenth-century liberalism was long overlooked or denigrated as derivative of European and U.S. models (Aguilar Rivera Reference Aguilar Rivera2012; Jaksic and Posada-Carbó Reference Jaksic and Posada-Carbó2011; Pérez Muñoz Reference Pérez MuñozForthcoming). Even now, the region’s liberalism remains mostly marginal in global histories of political thought (e.g., Rosenblatt Reference Rosenblatt2018). Accounts of liberalism in the period accord little importance to the French intervention in Mexico; when they do, the episode illustrates European imperialism but not Mexican agency (e.g., De la Rosa Reference De la Rosa2022; Middleton Reference Middleton2023; Shawcross Reference Shawcross2021).

Mexicans directly felt the sharp end of liberal imperialism but nonetheless defended their country in the name of liberalism. Yet, their ideas about international politics remain largely underexplored, even in the national historiography and extensive biographical literature on Juárez.Footnote ² This absence may relate to the nature of sources from the period; neither Juárez nor his co-partisans penned treatises on their political thought—even less so regarding international affairs. In reconstructing juarista liberal internationalism, we draw on correspondence, speeches, newspaper articles and pamphlets, and a re-reading of secondary sources. The central source is the thirteen-volume collection, Benito Juárez: documentos, discursos y correspondencia (Tamayo [1964] Reference Tamayo2017); we have complemented this with collected documents and publications of other key Liberals, the main Liberal newspaper El Siglo Diez y Nueve, biographical texts, and archival research.

Under Juárez, we argue, Mexico was an active proponent of alternative liberal internationalist visions. Juaristas supported the expansion of property rights, advocated free trade, and favored many forms of international cooperation that converged, superficially at least, with European liberal internationalist projects. However, juaristas rejected imperialism and civilizing missions imposed from abroad, questioning both the vestiges of “old diplomacy” and rising inter-imperial collusion. European empires’ promotion of unified international rules—on debts, for example—came at Mexico’s expense and without its input. Instead, Mexican liberals foregrounded anti-imperialist values of popular sovereignty, equality, non-intervention, and fraternity.

Rejecting the Civilizing Mission

Juaristas recognized that Europeans had relegated them to a lower rung on the civilizational ladder. In response, they challenged the idea of civilizational hierarchy as an international organizing principle, particularly one that accorded a right to intervene. At the same time, juaristas often found themselves trapped within the same conceptual language and believed that enacting a civilizing mission domestically was imperative for Mexico’s progress.

As scholars of liberalism and empire demonstrate, the British and French employed a racialized, civilizational discourse to legitimate imperial expansion in supposedly “backward” societies. Liberalism’s turn to empire was also noticeable in Spain, which launched interventions in the Americas and North Africa, reaching an apogee during the Liberal Union in the 1860s (Eastman Reference Eastman2021). European diplomats used similar language to assert their right to intervene in Mexico. Their intervention would, they claimed, “raise Mexico from its prostration and give impulse to a regenerating project” (Sierra Reference Sierra1960, 411). European critics assigned various causes for Mexico’s failings: the large indigenous population, racial mixing, Catholicism and colonial legacies, and chaotic republican governments. One British diplomat opined that Mexico’s condition “should be attributed to the bad inclinations of a vitiated people that bears sole responsibility for a state of things which has no precedent in the annals of the civilized world” (Wyke to Zamacona, July 30, 1861, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 4, v. XXXVII, doc. 29). Mexico’s “anarchy” allowed the British to assert their own role as agents of progress.

The French likewise trumpeted their mission civilisatrice. In the early 1850s, the French filibusterer Count Gaston de Raoussett-Boulbon invaded Sonora, Mexico, to impose progress—only to be executed by Mexicans. The presumption of a potentially rich but “degenerate” Mexico outlasted Rauossett-Boulbon to become a core rationale for intervention. Like his advisor Chevalier, Napoleon III was taken with plans for a French-imposed “regeneration” of Mexico in the name of a Latin race (de la Fuente to Foreign Ministry, Aug. 20, 1861, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 4, v. XXXVII, doc. 48; Barker Reference Barker1979). Claims of a French civilizing mission were infused with portrayals of Mexican inferiority. These depictions equated Mexicans with Arabs as “beneficiaries” of French conquest. As a Zapotec man, Juárez was the target of vituperative racial attacks. The Revue des Deux Mondes described the president as “a short little Indian, agitated and stubborn, of a narrow mind, without talent, and violent” (quoted in Salomon Reference Salomon1975, 24). In line with such stereotypes, many expected servility from Juárez. After Maximilian’s execution, Juárez’s indigeneity was linked to vengeance and bloodlust (Portail Reference Portail and Roldán1994, 50–9).

In the years before the intervention, Mexican liberals rarely questioned the view of Mexico as lagging behind Europe and the United States. While rejecting notions that Mexicans were “barbarous,” juarista efforts to subvert such claims often echoed the racial underpinnings of the standard of civilization. For instance, Juárez once argued that European claims of supposed Mexican anarchy and a need for intervention were “impossible to sustain before a government that is certainly not of Hottentots” (Juárez to Romero, June 5, 1856, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 2, v. VI, doc. 28). Nonetheless, U.S. and European material progress did not confer a monopoly on right or virtue, he countered: millions lived in poverty in England while British colonial ventures in Ireland and India faced great opposition (Juárez, Oct. 31, 1858, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 2, v. XI, doc. 30).

The rejection of foreign imposition resonated with juaristas. Denouncing early schemes to transplant a European monarch to Mexico, Liberal scribe, governor, and juarista foreign minister Melchor Ocampo declared, “the nation…does not need the offices of tutors” (Ocampo, April 28, 1859, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 3, v. XXIV, doc. 17). However, Juárez and his representatives used commonplaces like “civilized nations”—even while contesting Europeans’ right to designate others as “uncivilized.” After the defeat of the French, Mexican diplomat Matías Romero denounced that his country had been treated “as a semi-barbarous state by the European nations,” while praising the United States’ “wise policy of treating Mexico as an equal to all the other civilized nations” (quoted in Hamnett Reference Hamnett1994, 162). Despite using, and at least tacitly accepting, civilizational language, juaristas disdained the notion that civilization could be imposed from abroad, especially in the case of Mexico.

The French intervention prompted juaristas to reconsider other civilizational conceits. Mexican liberals had often been Francophiles, but now questioned whether France truly represented the paragon of progress. Liberal journalist, former foreign minister, and presidential confidante, Francisco Zarco, captured the juaristas’ wartime mood when he wrote, “We can very well rid ourselves of these high lessons of diplomacy and civilization” (quoted in Castañeda Batres Reference Castañeda Batres1961, 226). The intervention also led juaristas to make broader, anti-imperialist critiques. Liberals denounced France’s attempts to make Mexico into a “new Algiers,” condemning aggressions in North Africa in the process. The author of an 1867 manifesto justifying Maximilian’s execution (apocryphally attributed to JuárezFootnote ³) mocked European pretenses: “Holy God! These monarchs are Christian and boast about being civilized!” Rejecting French colonialism, the author decried how “Louis Napoleon ‘regenerated’ the Arabs of Algiers” by applying “a law of extermination against an independent people,” citing an 1852 massacre. The manifesto ranted against the hypocrisy of European imperialism, slave trading, and “disastrous wars” in the interests of monarchs and “diplomacy disguised as the common good” (Reference Juárez2010, 48–53).

Mexican liberals had long boasted of their abolition of slavery in contrast with its continuation in the “more advanced” United States. In the midst of the French intervention and the U.S. Civil War, they reinforced their condemnations of U.S. slavery and stressed Mexico’s relative racial equality. Likewise, juaristas rebuked Europe’s racial logics of international stratification. “I do not believe that Nature has made different sets of rules for each people, or for each family of people called races,” Romero told an audience of New York heavyweights, including Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., in 1868. “It is, in my opinion, wiser to suppose that Providence controls mankind by the same code of rules, which are equally applicable to the Anglo-Saxon as to the Latin races—to the Indians as to the Africans” (quoted in Wilkerson Reference Wilkerson1988, 31–2).

Views of race and indigeneity varied among juaristas, but in the eyes of many Mexican liberals, indigenous communities had been held back by inadequate education and the pernicious influences of the Church and Spanish colonial legacies. Addressing the French foreign minister, Juárez’s envoy in Paris pointed to the achievements of Mexico’s liberal reforms, including the “elevation and fraternity of the races, which the Spanish government for so long had maintained in a state of abject degradation and perfect antagonism” (de la Fuente to Thouvenel, March 7, 1862, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 6, v. XLVIII, doc. 41).

Yet, by emphasizing the national government’s role in advancing progress, Mexican liberals could become ensnared in the logics of colonialism. Many juaristas advocated an internal civilizing mission directed at Mexico’s indigenous communities; some even promoted “whitening” the population through immigration, education, and mestizaje. This ambivalence toward race marked official policy after the war and even influenced the thought of later Mexican anti-imperialists like José Vasconcelos (Hooker Reference Hooker2017). Unlike the anti-imperial tradition that informed decolonization in the twentieth century (Getachew Reference Getachew2019), the juaristas did not make anti-racism a cornerstone of their refutation of civilizing missions. Instead, their rebuttal was closely connected to calls for non-domination and the equality of popularly legitimated sovereign states. As Valdez (Reference Valdez2017) argues with respect to Kant, the emphasis on the rights of republics could be anti-imperial without necessarily questioning racial and civilizational hierarchies in their entirety.

The defeat of the French produced a new self-confidence among Mexican liberals, who insisted on the country’s capacity to chart its own course without any foreign imposition. Mexicans possessed “very many of the virtues which constitute a free people,” fully capable of self-government, Romero exclaimed (quoted in Wilkerson Reference Wilkerson1988, 33). Perhaps this was the ultimate point of the war. Mexican liberals would lead the country on its own path as “faithful guardians of the law, the intransigent defenders of the rights of humanity, and the strong arm of the civilization of this century” (Santos Degollado, quoted in Sierra Reference Sierra1960, 144).

Popular Sovereignty

As the cornerstone of juaristas’ understanding of legitimate statehood, popular sovereignty granted membership in international society and cast French justifications for intervention as a betrayal of the liberal creed. Mexican republicans’ attachment to ideals of popular sovereignty arose during the country’s independence struggles (Chang Reference Chang2023; Sierra Reference Sierra1960, 188), and remained central to the liberal project during the following decades. Ocampo argued in 1858, “Our political dogma is the sovereignty of the people, the will of the majority” (Ocampo Reference Ocampo1901, 28). Liberals waved the flag of popular sovereignty against centralizing conservatives who had the support of the Church, military, and European allies. In resisting the French intervention—an extension and internationalization of the earlier civil war—juaristas again fought in the name of sovereignty, law, and constitutionalism (Hamnett Reference Hamnett1994, 73; Pani Reference Pani2017). This invocation of popular sovereignty foreshadowed the later liberal internationalist emphasis on self-determination.

Juaristas interpreted the intervention as an attempt to revive dynasticism and to deny Spanish American republics their rightful place in international society. The popular will, rather than lineage and tradition, granted governments the right to speak in the name of nations. Napoleon III’s plan to establish a monarchy in Mexico, then, was an usurpation of popular sovereignty and inextricably illiberal. Maximilian was well aware of the challenges his reign would face from a population accustomed to republican institutions. Even before embarking, he insisted that the French and a handful of Mexican monarchists orchestrate some manifestations of popular support, including a petition from Conservative notables and a hastily arranged plebiscite in French-occupied areas. Juaristas mocked these efforts as a farce. Popular sovereignty, they argued, was incompatible with rule imposed from abroad, regardless of how liberal they appeared to be (e.g., Zarco quoted in Castañeda Batres Reference Castañeda Batres1961, 96).

Mexican liberals sought to transform popular sovereignty into an international legal principle. Having been chased from Mexico City during the Reform War and again by approaching French forces, juaristas argued that diplomatic recognition should follow from constitutionality and popular will—not control of the capital or the balance of foreign sympathies (Ocampo to Robles Pezuela, March 2, 1858, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 2, v. X, doc. 49).

Popular sovereignty also justified economic policy, notably the fateful debt moratorium of 1861. Juaristas offered to negotiate with creditors about repayment but not on the authority of the Mexican Congress, Mexico’s independence, or its form of government. When the expected invasion came, Mexican liberals demanded the recognition of the Juárez government as a precondition to talks with imperial forces—a promise the French soon ignored (Bock Reference Bock2017). What was soon impossible for the French to ignore was the fierce popular opposition. As Juan Prim, the commander of the Spanish forces, prepared to abandon the intervention, he impressed upon Napoleon III the poor prospect for the monarchy. Mexico’s proximity to the United States and political independence “had created habits and customs and certainly a republican language that would not be easy to destroy” (Letter to Napoleon III, March 17, 1862, cited in Eastman Reference Eastman2021, 152). Indeed, armed resistance from liberal guerrillas committed to republicanism and federalism made Mexico ungovernable for Maximilian’s empire, converting Napoleon III’s dreams of a rich colony into a boondoggle (Thomson and LaFrance Reference Thomson and LaFrance2001).

After six years of war, juaristas’ victory reaffirmed Mexico’s independence. Popular sovereignty was central to the government’s rationale for putting Maximilian before a military tribunal, and ultimately for executing him. The former archduke was charged as “a usurper of the sovereignty of the people,” who had violated Mexican rights and the law of nations (Interrogatorio, May 25, 1867, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 12, v. CCXIII, doc. 3). In accusations against Maximilian, citations of Grotius, Vattel, and Wheaton were followed by references to clauses on popular sovereignty in the 1857 constitution (Requisatoria del Fiscal Azpíroz, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 12, v. CCXVIII, doc. 20). The tribunal rebranded the intervention’s liberal imperialist proponents as illiberal filibusterers. Meanwhile, liberal Mexico was favorably contrasted with “a modern Europe that has lost the idea of popular sovereignty,” giving free rein to despots’ imperial excesses (Juárez [apocryphal] Reference Juárez2010).

Maximilian’s execution was just in light of his assault on Mexico’s popular sovereignty and international personhood. European powers stood accused of attempted “nationcide” (nacioncidio) against Mexico. They had tried to subject Mexico to the sorts of capitulations forced on the Ottoman Empire and deployed in recent colonial expansions in Algeria and Morocco (Juárez [apocryphal] Reference Juárez2010). For juaristas, the victory—culminating in Mexico’s “second independence” (Pani Reference Pani2017, 586)—demanded a new international order with legitimate membership based on popular sovereignty, equality, and non-intervention.

Sovereign Equality

Juaristas paired their emphasis on popular sovereignty with a commitment to equality under the law. In doing so, they extended into the international sphere their battle against the corporate legal privileges of the Church and military, the so-called fueros (Hamnett Reference Hamnett1994, 96–8, 104–10). Juaristas aspired to reform the law of nations into a tool for equal treatment regardless of a state’s wealth, power, internal constitution, or ascribed civilizational status.

Many Mexican liberals, including Juárez, were well-schooled in the law of nations. Although juaristas cited canonical texts, they did not accept the international legal practices of their time uncritically. Instead, juaristas drew on law to make a case for states’ equality and rights as the basis of an order that would supersede the “old diplomacy” of dynastic international society. They used international legal arguments to place themselves in the right, to decry violations of principles, and to demand rectification. Sovereign equality was to be a check on the domination of smaller states by great powers.

A prominent example was juaristas’ denunciation of unequal treaties and the interventions of great powers. For instance, the Juárez government denied the validity of the Mon-Almonte Treaty between the Spanish crown and a de facto Conservative government in Mexico, arguing the pact was so unequal that it “present[ed] the republic as if it were a horde of bandits unfit to belong to the great family of civilized peoples” (Lafragua to Minister, Dec. 14, 1859, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 2, v. XIII, doc. 32). Such a treatment was inadmissible for a state that had won its independence and established a liberal government.

Even before the French intervention, the juarista rejoinder to unequal treaties and gunboat diplomacy emphasized sovereign equality as a general principle, drawing on a republican understanding of international law that had gained traction in the Americas (Fawcett Reference Fawcett2012). For juaristas, the law of nations must apply equally to sovereigns both strong and weak, if it was to be considered law at all. Mexico’s international commitments must be “in accordance with the law of nations, and that the consideration of its weakness or power, of its good or bad political organization, does not influence the settlement of difference. It wishes to be treated as a free and sovereign people” (Juárez et al., Jan. 30, 1860, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 2, vol. XIV, doc. 13.). In a dispute with Spain over a captured frigate the Mexican minister responded that “even a sense of weakness should never make one forget for a moment the dignity and rights of the republic,” before launching into a legal dissertation with citations to Wheaton’s The Elements of International Law, Reath’s Commentaries on American Law, and even the handbook of Spanish naval regulations (de Emparan to del Camino, Aug. 4, 1860, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 2, vol. XIV, doc. 125). Writing a British diplomat, another juarista minister cited Grotius, Wheaton, Corcello, Martens, and Heffter to support Mexico’s sovereign right to suspend debt payments if they conflicted with national survival (Zamacona to Wyke, July 27, 1861, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 4, v. XXXVII, 101–2). Not only would the juaristas insist on equality under international law, but they sought to demonstrate their equal competence as international lawyers.

Juárez continued this line of argumentation in the wake of the intervention, which he denounced in 1862 as a “declaration of war against the Law of nations” (Secretaría de la Presidencia Reference de la Presidencia1976, 82). Juárez was no utopian; he understood that liberals’ aspirations for international law were not reflected in the conduct of the European powers. The French had illustrated international law’s hypocrisies, and armed resistance would have to save Mexico where international law could not (Secretaría de la Presidencia Reference de la Presidencia1976, 79). Zarco set out the Mexican view in stark terms:

Juárez’s defeat of the French moved sovereign equality from the quills of diplomats to the rifles of the firing squad; the execution of Maximilian was justified under international law, as the response of an aggrieved sovereign to a piratical invasion, Juárez and other Mexican liberals argued (Hamnett Reference Hamnett1994, 188–9). Victory against a leading power demonstrated that Mexico’s standing must be respected. To drive home this point, Juárez cut relations with European powers that had recognized Maximilian’s empire (Secretaría de la Presidencia Reference de la Presidencia1976, 87). The balance had shifted, and new relations would be established on a different footing—one of sovereign equality. This insistence on the dignity of smaller states became the core of the Doctrina Juárez, which continued to inform Mexico’s later foreign policy (Cosío Villegas Reference Cosío Villegas1962).

Non-Intervention and National Treatment

At the time of the intervention, legal principles permitted great powers to coerce the small over nonpayment of debts and the protection of foreign nationals. Juaristas rejected such interference as illegitimate. Pecuniary claims from private bondholders were part of the common economic order, “not a government-to-government matter,” and therefore beyond the pale of international law. Private debts could not be a casus belli, because the dispute was “a question of money and nothing else” (Zarco quoted in Castañeda Batres Reference Castañeda Batres1961, 98).

Interventions in Latin America had long invoked the right to protect the private property of foreign nationals. Great power intimidation had illiberal consequences. Writing years before the Convention of London, Mexican liberals were already wary of diplomatic protection. In 1856, Zarco criticized how “European diplomatic missions, with a few exceptions, are reduced to agencies of audacious speculators, of smugglers and profiteers who wrap themselves in the flags of powerful nations” (quoted in Castañeda Batres Reference Castañeda Batres1961, 206). These practices removed foreigners from the purview of Mexican justice, effectively creating another fuero. All the while, juaristas argued, speculators profited from Mexico’s internal upheavals. Europeans portrayed their intromissions as necessary to ensure Mexico met its international commitments, but history showed that foreign interventions disrupted the economy, undermined the means for repayment, and added to the debt (Zamacona to Wyke, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 4, v. XXXVII, doc. 6, 21).

Extending their opposition against corporate legal privileges in Mexico, Juárez rejected the notion that a club of great powers had special rights to police the international order. Because the country possessed “liberal institutions, foreigners in Mexico, without a need for the special protection of treaties, are considered with equality to the Mexicans and they enjoyed the rights and guarantees granted by the law” (Juárez, December 8, 1867, Secretaría de la Presidencia Reference de la Presidencia1976, 86). Foreigners and their investments should be placed under Mexican jurisdiction. Emphasizing the point, the Mexican minister in Paris argued that Mexico should require foreign nationals to “expressly renounce their rights as foreigners [derechos de extranjería] in all results of the contract” to prevent them from invoking the law of nations (de la Fuente a Zamacona, July 30, 1861 in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 4, v. XXXVII, doc. 33).

The arguments anticipated the Calvo Clause,Footnote ⁴ with implications beyond Mexico. Non-intervention should become the cornerstone of a liberal, republican international order. According to Zarco, “the principle of non-intervention of one state in the internal affairs of the others is the only guarantee of sovereignty and the Independence of nationalities” (quoted in Castañeda Batres Reference Castañeda Batres1961, 95–6). The argument was bolder than those of eighteenth-century European jurists and, indeed Calvo, who accepted the right to intervene in “uncivilized” polities. The juaristas knew from experience that European empires would reclass the targets of their interventions as disorderly or semi-barbaric, thereby rationalizing their actions under nineteenth-century international law. Such self-interested interventions, however, were tantamount to piracy and beneath the proper conduct of civilized states.

Republican Fraternity

The liberals of 1848 emphasized the mutual duties of citizens, placing fraternité alongside liberté and égalité in the republican triptych. Responding to the excesses of 1789, fraternity was meant to act as a safeguard against the unfettered pursuit of radical liberty and equality (Ambroise-Rendu Reference Ambroise-Rendu, Berenson, Duclert and Prochasson2011, 115). For many European liberals, fraternal bonds extended beyond borders to the support of republics elsewhere (see Hazareesingh Reference Hazareesingh1998, 248–51). The notion of fraternity played a similar role in how juaristas envisioned relationships and political responsibilities in a community of republican states. As in Europe, their own understanding of fraternity reflected Christian ethics and was influenced by the homosocial conviviality of the masonic lodge. Juárez himself was a dedicated freemason, inducted in 1847 under the pseudonym William Tell, the Swiss national hero famed for executing an oppressive Habsburg bailiff (Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t.1 v. III, doc. 31; Thomson Reference Thomson2018).

The juaristas invoked fraternity in both domestic and international contexts, often in relation to struggles against the reinstatement of colonial domination. Many liberals throughout the Americas understood themselves as part of the same struggle. From Mexico to Chile, republicans argued for closer diplomatic relations to “establish the fraternity of all the Spanish American race,” already linked by history, culture, and familial ties (Zarco 1856 in Castañeda Batres Reference Castañeda Batres1961, 206; also, Santana and Guerra Reference Santana and Guerra2006). Adopting a Kantian view, they argued that reciprocal hospitality and cooperation would foster the development of a republican community of states (Mantilla Blanco, Reference Mantilla Blanco2021; Torres Caicedo Reference Torres Caicedo1865, 6).

Starting with Simon Bolívar’s Congress of Panama (1826), Spanish American diplomats portrayed their countries as a society of equals, connected by heritage and a shared political project. Disunity made republics easy targets for empire; the antidote was confederation. In proposing a continental defensive treaty in 1856, republicans from Peru, Chile, and Ecuador emphasized their “ties of fraternity” as “members of the great American family, linked by common interests, common origin, and the similarity of their institutions” (quoted in Torres Caicedo Reference Torres Caicedo1865, 241). As Colombia’s José María Samper (Reference Samper1859, 358) emphasized, the purpose of confederation was to advance in international society “the cause of the democratic republic, openly opposed to slavery, to the spirit of intervention and of invasion, to the governments of oligarchies or pretend sovereigns.” Following the London Convention, the Peruvian government dispatched a special mission to demonstrate its support and negotiate Mexico’s adherence to the 1856 pact. The mission demonstrated “continuous proof of sympathy” from the “countries of America, with whom we are united by bonds of fraternity,” Juárez noted. “The triumph of Mexico would serve to ensure the independence and respectability of the sister republics” (Juárez, May 31, 1862, Secretaría de la Presidencia Reference de la Presidencia1976, 80).

The French intervention lent urgency to calls for unity. Peru’s President Ramón Castilla warned that European designs went beyond unpaid debts and could provoke a “war of the crowns against the Liberty caps” (quoted in Frazer Reference Frazer1948, 379). Some Spanish American liberals made stronger claims about republics’ moral obligations to mutual aid, most notably the Chilean radical Francisco Bilbao. His La América en peligro [America in danger] (Reference Bilbao1862) called for collective action, appealing to both “fraternity” and “solidarity” with Mexico. Social clubs in South America denounced the intervention, gathered funds, petitioned governments, and called for confederation based on “solidarity of interests” to serve as “a true fortress against aggressions and unjust pretensions on the part of the great Powers” (Sociedad de la Unión Americana de Santiago 1867). Usage of “solidarity” and “fraternity” in the Spanish American context often overlapped, although the juaristas rarely invoked the neologism “solidarity” when discussing relations with “sister republics.”Footnote ⁵

Spanish American fraternity lacked the material means to affect the outcome of the war. But it found symbolic expressions, which Mexican liberals appreciated. When Maximilian sent an ambassador to the court at Rio de Janeiro, Spanish American diplomats refused to receive him or even shake his hand (Nuñez Ortega Reference Guzmán and Guzmán1970, 12–3). Spanish American governments bestowed honors on Juárez as the Benemérito de las Américas [Meritorious of the Americas]. A Colombian senator’s homage reverberated with republican sentiment: “It seems as though Providence, which has created Europe to maintain traditions of monarchism and despotism, also created America for democracy and republican institutions, separating both by an Ocean” (Morales Reference Morales1971). In Brazil—where the royal family had Habsburg blood—liberals, republicans, and abolitionists cheered the cause of Juárez as a model for their own country (Coelho Reference Coelho and Vázquez2010). In later years, Juárez recalled the friendship of the American republics in sharp contrast to the unanimous recognition of Maximilian’s empire by European governments (Secretaría de la Presidencia Reference de la Presidencia1976, 86).

Republicans throughout the Americas long held the belief that the New World’s political institutions would provide the basis for cooperation. While fraternal bonds came more naturally among Spanish Americans, relations with the United States were often strained. This was especially true in Mexico, which had recently been defeated by its northern neighbor, losing half of its territory to the United States in 1848. Under the influence of Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine was increasingly invoked in the mid-nineteenth century as a rationale for opening new land for white settlement and, in some cases, the extension of slavery. Early in his presidency, Juárez felt these pressures directly from the James Buchanan administration. Although Mexicans never forgot the bitter experience of war with the United States, many juaristas held out hopes that political change in Washington would pave the way both for improved relations and a redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine as a principle of republican international society. While Abraham Lincoln’s election and the U.S. war over slavery rekindled these hopes, the French intervention made mutual aid imperative.

The juaristas had suffered the consequences of expanding U.S. power, but also had taken shelter in the United States. Exile fed liberals’ admiration for U.S. institutions, values, and booming commerce, while exposing them to slavery and racism (Hamnett Reference Hamnett1994, 52–4; Santana and Guerra Reference Santana and Guerra2006). Even before the French intervention, Mexican liberals hoped that the United States would counterbalance European empires’ support for their domestic adversaries and serve as a “nucleus” for a genuinely liberal international order (Ocampo to Mata, March 3, 1858, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 2, v. X, doc. 56). As partners, Mexico and the United States could “shape the public law of America” to create a propitious environment for republics (Ocampo, draft treaty, June 18, 1859, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 3, vol. XXIV, doc. 31). In this light, juaristas proposed the redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine, as “a class of permanent principle that impels the obligation of helping one another at all times to reject any European intervention whatsoever in exclusively American affairs” (S. Lerdo de Tejada, quoted in Sierra Reference Sierra1960, 471). Such a partnership would require the United States to look beyond narrow material interests and to “inaugurate a generous and continental policy in America, if they want to give shelter to the other republics and serve the cause of universal liberty” (Matías Acosta a Juárez, May 2, 1859, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 2, v. XII, doc. 23).

After the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Mexico’s lead diplomat in Washington traveled to meet the president-elect in Springfield, Illinois. After the encounter, Romero reported that Mexico could expect Lincoln’s policy to be “truly fraternal and not guided by the egoistical and anti-humanitarian principles with respect to Mexico that have been followed by Democratic administrations” (Romero, Jan. 23, 1861, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 4, v. XXX, doc. 3). Lincoln and his minister Thomas Corwin expressed sympathies based in “mutually advantageous principles that rightly united the sister republics” (Corwin, May 31, 1861, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 4, v. XXXIV, doc. 16). Concrete support would be limited by the U.S. Civil War, which created a window for the European intervention. Napoleon III and Maximilian challenged the idea of a natural unity among the states of the Western Hemisphere and sought to block the application of the Monroe Doctrine (Maximilian to Napoleon III, 1866, Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 11, v. CLXXIX, doc. 16). Fearing war with France, Secretary of State William Seward cautiously enacted neutrality in the Mexican imbroglio while doubting the viability of monarchism on American soil. From the juarista perspective, Washington’s waffling in this clash of competing systems was “offensive to American fraternity” (Terán to Juárez, Oct. 12, 1865, t. 10, v. CLV, doc. 20).

As the North gained the upper hand in the Civil War, the drumbeat of the Monroe Doctrine grew louder. In 1864, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning “monarchical government erected on the ruins of any republican government in America, under the auspices of any European power.” (New York Times 1864; Shawcross Reference Shawcross2021, 140). While European imperialists could be “indifferent to the Monroe doctrine” amidst the U.S internecine conflict, Juárez and other Spanish American republicans believed that the victorious North would aid their cause (Juárez to Romero, June 29, 1864, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 9, v. CXXI, doc. 2; Frazer Reference Frazer1948, 380–1). In personal correspondence, Juárez frequently invoked the Monroe Doctrine to that effect (Juárez to Santacilia, May 25, 1865, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 9, v. CXLV, doc. 13; Juárez to Santacilia, Jan. 12, 1866, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 10, v. CLXII, doc. 11). After Lincoln’s assassination, juaristas expressed sympathies for the Union, pressing Andrew Johnson to put the Monroe Doctrine into practice (Romero, April 24, 1865, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 10, v. CXLVI, doc. 2). His hands now free, Seward (Reference Seward1866, 399, 450) warned France that Maximilian’s presence was an affront to republican sentiments in the Americas. Seward’s references to the Monroe Doctrine were largely unilateral; in contrast, juaristas advanced a distinct vision in which the U.S. policy would become a “continental program” that juxtaposed New World democracy with the Old World’s “aristocracy and monarchies” (Blas Balcárcel 1867, in Tamayo Reference Tamayo2017, t. 12, v. CCXXXV, doc. 6).

This juarista aspiration anticipated later Latin American calls for a multilateralization of the Monroe Doctrine (see Scarfi Reference Scarfi2016). Over and over again these hopes were dashed by U.S. unilateralism and intervention. Growing U.S. power after the Civil War would reshape inter-American relations—although not in the fraternal direction that the juaristas hoped. In the United States, even Juárez’s supporters could not shed their pretensions of superiority. U.S. paternalism was an unsurmountable obstacle in the pursuit of fraternal equality in hemispheric relations. Instead, in the wake of the Mexican victory, the now unchallenged United States gave the Monroe Doctrine an increasingly unilateral and imperialistic meaning.