Download Reseña de" Global Intrigues: The Era of the Spanish

Centro Journal
ISSN: 1538-6279
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The City University of New York
Estados Unidos
Stephanson, Anders
Reseña de "Global Intrigues: The Era of the Spanish-American War and the Rise of the United States
to World Power" de Juan R. Torruella
Centro Journal, vol. XXI, núm. 1, 2009, pp. 275-277
The City University of New York
New York, Estados Unidos
Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=37721248022
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By Juan R. Torruella
San Juan: La Editorial, Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2007
224 pages; $21.95 [paper]
reviewer :
Anders Stephanson, Columbia University
There is something stubbornly unfashionable about Torruella’s book here,
which I find appealing. Not for him the cultural turn, the peculiarities of the
constructed imaginaries of this and that identity in question: what excites his
interest instead is the geopolitical game and the “intrigues” that form such a
prominent part of it. The ultimate ground on which he approaches that problematic
is that of law or, rather, international law, which is his professional background and on
which topic he has written extensively. Thus, while he deals in depth with the antagonists
themselves, his central object of inquiry is, technically speaking, the geopolitics of the
“non-belligerents” in the Spanish-American War, the war of many names that took
place in 1898 (or, depending on one’s perspective, perhaps between 1895 and 1903).
The scholarly pitch, as the title suggests, is ambitious, not to say grand. The result
is a valuable addition to the existing (and certainly the current) literature but, perhaps
inevitably, rather less than promised. Torruella wants to evaluate the place and effects
of the War of 1898 in terms of the global balance of power, with particular reference to
what is usually referred to as the rise of the United States. In a given, though changing,
configuration of world power, there appears to have been, at least initially, a regional
conflict between two states over an insurrection in a colony belonging to one of the two.
Everyone, alas, turns out to have some stake or other in this, if only indirectly, and acts
more or less powerfully to defend that interest. Torruella has a great deal to say about
these interests and actions, but less about systemic shifts and the actual nature of U.S.
geopolitics, that is to say, about the ultimate significance of the conflict.
Torruella’s idea is original, even by the standards of the older literature on great
powers, geopolitics, and diplomacy. To be sure, lots has been written about how the
war affected, say, relations between the United States and Great Britain, or, more
accurately, how it became part of the overall rapprochement that had begun earlier and
was only momentarily disturbed by the unpleasantness over the Venezuela-Guyiana
border dispute in 1895. There is also a large literature on the effects, or, non-effects,
as regards the United States. There is little, however, on the specific actions and shifts
that interest Torruella. In short, his concern and problem is the Spanish-American War
as a geopolitical event (to bring in a Deleuzian term).
Thus we get an intriguing overview of the situation of the main (and some minor)
actors of world politics and how the looming conflict fit into the view of things:
Great Britain, Germany, France, Austro-Hungary, Portugal, Russia, the Ottoman
Empire, Japan, China, and of course Spain and the United States themselves. He also
takes proper care to discuss the colonial aspect, what was happening in the context of
Cuba and the Philippines (to a lesser extent Puerto Rico). In drawing this map, he follows
in the empirical and conceptual footsteps of Paul Kennedy and his various accounts of the
resources and interests of the Great Powers in the 19th and early 20th century, all along
the familiar thematic of “rise and fall.” Nothing less than the imperialist transformation
of the whole of the 19th century is brought into view. Torruella’s originality, then, lies not
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book reviews
Global Intrigues: The Era of the Spanish-American War and the Rise
of the United States to World Power
in the geopolitical generalities but in his specific analysis of how the War of 1898 came
into play in that framework. Given the insular nature and the location (the Caribbean
and East Asia) of the places at stake and the potential destabilization of the European
order because of the destabilization of Spain itself, all the European powers of note
had an interest in the unfolding sequence of events, as did, obviously, the very much
ascending Japan.
The catalytic ingredient is undoubtedly the emerging Anglo-German rivalry,
as expressed above all in the naval domain. This, after all, is the heyday of navalism and
the influence of Alfred Mahan’s naval determinism. (It is curious that a U.S. figure at
some remove from the heart of the international order becomes such a towering political
presence, a kind of organic intellectual of naval power everywhere). The increasingly
aggressive German challenge of British world and especially naval hegemony is what gives
the events of 1898 its global meaning and effects. Without that challenge, in other words,
the British would not have conceded with such suave ease regional hegemony to the
United States in the Caribbean. The increasingly fragile situation in China, where British
de facto control was being undermined by several powers but, again, most dangerously by
the Germans, played a considerable role as well.
This is well known of course. Torruella’s central contribution, however, lies in
the precise analysis of the events of 1898 within that context. In particular, he reveals
the breaches of neutrality, along with the “intrigues,” on the part of Germany, Japan,
Great Britain and also, in the end, France. He is a little divided on these moves. On the
one hand, as a renowned international lawyer and scholar, he dislikes transgressions.
For example, he gets quite excited (in terms of details and pages) about the British
steps taken to prevent the Philippine-bound Spanish squadron through the Suez Canal.
On the other hand, as a classical realist in international relations, he finds them quite
understandable in terms of national interests. It is indeed on the latter grounds that he
issues verdicts on the pragmatic value of the sundry policies, official and unofficial.
Most saliently, he repeatedly points to the myopia of German brashness. No longer
led by the prudent Otto von Bismarck but the volatile Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Germans
tend throughout to overplay their hand and, detrimental to their own longterm interests,
push the British into embryonic commitments and understandings elsewhere, chiefly with
the United States. Thus, the German navy, like a vulture, appears in considerable force in
Manila Bay and almost comes to blows with the momentarily overpowered Admiral Dewey.
Torruella’s point about German imprudence is no doubt well taken, though it is easier
than he would allow to see why, immediately, the Germans think they have as good a
right as anyone to meddle. Japan, meanwhile, has much more concrete interests at stake
and, once the war proper is over and the U.S. colonial war of subjugation begins in the
Philippines, engages in a series of suspect actions, in semi-private guise, to assist the
insurgency—all well covered by Torruella. And while the concomitant U.S. annexation
of Hawaii is a very serious blow to Japanese prestige and geopolitical concerns in the
Pacific, Japan is ultimately quite willing to let the United States concentrate on the
problems of this theater, rather than the areas on the Asian mainland, where Japanese
expansion is taking place most directly. In creating a Pacific Ring (rather than the
“Rim”), a geopolitical sphere stretching from Alaska in the north to the Pacific island
groups along to the Philippines in the east and the island groups in the middle and south,
the United States nevertheless also opened up a set of vulnerabilities which Japan,
in another epoch, would of course exploit in no uncertain terms.
About the inner workings of the United States, Torruella has nothing much to say, but he
does insist clearly that the war was in fact an American initiative and that William McKinley
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chose deliberately not to reveal the considerable room for compromise that had emerged,
in part through European mediation, in part because of extensive Spanish concessions.
In October, after testing the waters of public opinion, the president decides that the
Philippines will be annexed, a shift eloquently expressed in the treatment of the Filipino
representative. McKinley himself had seen him in early October. Having travelled to Paris,
where the negotiations were taking place, he was then completely ignored by the U.S.
delegation, as he was too upon his return to Washington. The difference, clearly, was that
in the meantime McKinley had decided benevolently that his “little brown brothers” would
have to come under unlimited American tutelage.
All of which is most useful. To reiterate, geopolitical maps of this kind are not at
all the scholarly vogue, but they yield important knowledge. The problem with
Torruella’s opus, in its own terms, has rather to do with the ultimate meaning of that
map. The buildup is massive; the result, not equally massive. The size of the chapters is
indicative. His panorama over the transformed geopolitics of the 19th century is followed
by a detailed account of the Great Powers and the origins of the war and a third chapter
on the beginnings and events of the war. The coda in the form of peace negotiations,
by contrast, is dealt with in a chapter of a few pages, as is the aftermath, followed by an
uncertain reflection on the possible parallels between the role and actions of the United
States in 1898 and those in Iraq, parallels that Torruella ultimately (and wisely) finds
superficial. The book peters out, inconclusively.
How, then, might one distinguish the significance of Torruella’s account? One issue is
to do with the “rise” of the United States and the War of 1898. Torruella, in the end, is not
very clear here. My own view is a revamped version of Samuel Flagg Bemis’s notorious old
convention: the imperialist moment was “a great aberration,” viz. the United States ceased
very soon afterwards to play the great power game and certainly the imperialist one typical
of the late 19th century. It maintained, outside public purview, the imperial acquisitions
and began to play a very active interventionist role (not quite the same thing) in its Latin
American sphere. This policy continued and continues. Indeed Guam remains today a
property, an instrument, of the U.S. Congress, a fact that is enormously important for the
people of Guam but not so for Americans. One might make the same point about Puerto
Rico, whose political status within the U.S. frame is the vital factor on the island but not
at all important in the United States itself except in a minor key in a few localities such
as New York. By the early 1900s, in any case, the United States reverted to the kind of
politics that is always, in many ways detrimentally, anchored firmly in domestic space and
norms. In the First World War, there is another “aberration” represented by the imposing
figure of Woodrow Wilson, but the real and irreversible shift does not arrive until 7
December 1941, at which point the geopolitical effects of 1898 become fully evident.
What strikes one throughout is the extraordinary degree of arbitrariness and contingency:
what the United States does and does not do until the Japanese attack is very largely a
product of what the Commander-in-Chief decides to do. William McKinley, in short,
might well have chosen otherwise. Indeed, William Jennings Bryan would have chosen
otherwise, and so, too, the history of Puerto Rico would have been otherwise. Executive
license when it comes to handling crises, real and imagined, is unsteadily open-ended.
Meanwhile, the effects of the war on the balance of power must be grasped chiefly as
symptomatic rather than decisive. It is hard, in other words, to see that the central actors
ultimately would have followed other strategic directions of large policy had the war
not occurred. That the war was taken to validate the necessity of massive naval power is
certainly true; but this was not news. A more beguiling question is the effects of the war
on “Latin America,” on its place and range of possible meanings.