Forging the American Mare Nostrum

#21

I would also consider the Spanish war of 1898 as the template for the expansion of US hegemony by military means. The legendary and lucrative bounty of the banana trade was secured. Bananas were shipped to Boston and New Orleans from Cuba and the Dominican Republic as well as Jamaica. By 1898 some 16 million bunches were being imported into the US.

In 1899 the United Fruit Company (UFCO) was formed in Boston and began to develop its own plantations in Central America. In Costa Rica, Minor Keith did a deal with the Government to build - with great loss of life - a railway to the Atlantic coast and planted bananas beside the track.

This “methodology” of expansion, refined and finessed was legislated into statute and foreign policy, in 1947 when the CIA and substantial on and off books funding was implemented, the USA went create even more “banana republics” globally. The legacy of which, the world still grapples today.

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#22

I view the Monroe Doctrine through the lens of Carl Schmitt’s. The concept of the Großraum (Great Space or “Realm”). The Doctrine was not just a policy; it was a spatial claim. It declared the Americas a closed, demarcated space from which European colonial powers were excluded. This ended the previous European Nomos of colonial competition in the New World and established a new one: a hemispheric order under the implicit hegemony of the United States.

US went from Doctrine to Mare Nostrum: The Caribbean as the American mare nostrum is the logical culmination of this. A Großraum needs a secure core. The US first had to secure its immediate “inland sea” (the Caribbean) through the War of 1898, the Panama Canal, and the Banana Wars, before it could fully enforce its hemispheric Nomos . The Caribbean became the strategic and administrative heart of the American Großraum.

The observations about the U.S. skipping the crucial, organic stage of cultural gestation are my application of Oswald Spengler to the current situation in America. That is my core intellectual position on the topic.