The Political Culture of Post-imperial Intervention. The case of Spain and the South American republics of the Pacific (1833-1868).

ongoing

The project POST-EMPIRE will analyse the ideas and cultural representations that shaped the interventionist foreign policy deployed by the Spanish Monarchy in the republics of Chile, Peru and Ecuador during the Elizabethan period (1833-1868). I will reconstruct the doctrinal developments of pan-Hispanism, free trade imperialism, (anti)republicanism and navalism to understand how they structured the political culture of post-imperial interventionism, legitimising and guiding Spain's attempts to establish a sphere of influence in its former possessions. By studying a little-considered example of post-imperial interventionism, I aim to stimulate discussions at the academic and media levels that allow comparison with other analogous cases. POST-EMPIRE will achieve the following Research Objectives: RO.1: To explain the geopolitical imaginaries that gave rise to Spanish post-imperial interventionism. RO.2: Assess the weight that the examples of the British Empire, France and the United States had in the strategic culture of informal Spanish imperialism. RO. 3: To gain access to an interdisciplinary training experience that will allow me to enrich my knowledge as a historian of European-American relations with the perspectives of trans-Pacific historiography, political theory and socio-constructivist international relations theory. RO. 4: To contribute to elaborating an interdisciplinary theorisation of the dynamics that have characterised post-imperial conflicts throughout contemporary history. RO. 5: To enrich general social knowledge about the dynamics that govern post-imperial conflicts, seeking to raise awareness among public decision-makers and civil society of their importance for the Strategic Compass for the EU and European Security and foreign policy.