Chapter 4 examines Aaron Copland’s Short Symphony (1931–3) in the context of Copland’s friendship with Mexican composer and conductor Carlos Chávez. Short Symphony was partly written in Mexico. Chávez suggested a title for the work, ‘The Bounding Line’, which Copland temporarily adopted, and he conducted the premiere in Mexico City in November 1934. Chávez’s title raises questions about mutuality within a border-crossing American symphonic project, as well as the place in Copland’s classicist symphony of bodily presence, dance, and Hellenic erotics. Copland’s aesthetics of balletic line and bodily motion suggest analytic paradigms of gentle mediation, interdependence, contact, and touch – paradigms that thus spoke to the grassroots pan-American climate of political solidarity across the American continent in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Yet, mobilising an aesthetics of the body to gently utopian symphonic ends in this context proves unsustainable. Copland does not return from this border-crossing encounter acquitted of the colonial charge.

Following the Civil War, the United States exerted its diplomatic, economic, and military leverage to pursue economic and political interests in Latin America, as it believed that what was good for business was good for the country. The emphasis on national security had not disappeared, but the threats to U.S. borders were less dire than in the past as European countries were generally easing themselves out of the region. Latin American leaders had neither the unified political support nor the military strength required to counter U.S. influence. While certain Latin American policy makers resisted U.S. hegemony, both politically and militarily, others welcomed it. Political and economic elites out of power appealed to the United States for assistance because they believed it could provide stability and wealth. The United States stepped neatly and easily into this political maelstrom. The chapter concludes at the turn of the twentieth century, when the era of intervention began in earnest.

Haiti had a singular importance in the life of Frederick Douglass. Like countless other African Americans, Douglass upheld the Haitian Revolution as an unprecedented blow for human rights. He appreciated the symbolism of Haiti, a self-identified Black nation-state. As an abolitionist, Douglass used his platform to call on the United States to grant diplomatic recognition to Haiti and opine on the proposed mass emigration of African Americans from the United States to Haiti. He, after declining an opportunity to visit Haitiat the outset of the Civil War, eventually went there as a U.S. diplomat from 1889 to 1891. In Port-au-Prince, Douglass played a key role in a diplomatic conflict between the United States and Haiti. His experience in Haiti would not only lead to his appointment as one of Haiti’s representatives at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair but also have a significant impact on his political thought.

Pan-Americanism’s promotion of liberal internationalism and pan-Africanism’s appeals to transnational solidarity among African people(s) provided useful frames for critics of non-interference to make it the subject of debate. I argue that the content and political salience of pan-Americanism & pan-Africanism empowered – or even inspired – critics of non-interference in these regions. In this chapter I offer a long-term account of the (uneven) erosion of non-interference at the regional level in the global South, an account centering on the contestedness of this norm within the OAS and OAU compared to ASEAN during the Cold War period. This contestation (at the level of discourse) contributed over time to norm erosion (at the level of law and practice). Pan-Asianism did not serve the same function. Since non-interference was less contested in Southeast Asia (and not on these grounds), it was therefore more robust or resilient over time. Because of the history of norm contestation and erosion, the three regional groupings arrived at the 1980s with different normative priors. This meant that Latin America and Africa were more amenable to the intrusive regionalism trend than was Southeast Asia.

This chapter examines Third World regional organizations’ discursive foundations, focusing on macronationalism as a movement and discourse, and tracing the development of the OAS, the OAU, and ASEAN. Decolonization produced sovereignty-sensitive states. It also, in some cases, produced regional international societies founded on macronational ideologies, like pan-Americanism and pan-Africanism. And because macronationalism appeals to values and solidarities that transcend the nation state, it holds the potential to challenge strict sovereignty norms. In Latin America and Africa, the establishment of regional organizations in some ways culminated pan-American and pan-African movements, but the formation of ASEAN did not culminate pan-Asianism – the latter had long lost favor in the wider region due to its cooptation by imperial Japan. ASEAN’s discursive foundations served more to reinforce strict sovereignty norms – in the long run – than to create openings for contestation of them. Non-interference did not have to compete with transnational pan-Asian discourses or liberal ideas about human rights and democracy that were more prominent in the African and Latin American cases.