The first lecture of the Adventus Amicorum seminar series was held at No. 66 Yannanyuan on June 30, as part of the series of activities commemorating the fifth anniversary of the establishment of the Institute of Area Studies, Peking University (PKUIAS). The seminar, with the theme “Autonomy, Hegemony, and the Spatial Politics of Areas: Lessons and Inspiration from the Global History of the Monroe Doctrine”, was held both online and offline and was led by Zhang Yongle, Associate Professor of the School of Law and Deputy Director of PKUIAS. The seminar was moderated by Prof. Sabrina Habich-Sobiegalla, from the Freie Universität Berlin, and the discussion participants were Prof. Georg Schild, University of Tübingen; Nadja Klopprogge, Assistant Professor, University of Tübingen; Prof. Jessica Gienow Hecht, Freie Universität Berlin; Prof. Urs Matthias Zachmann, Freie Universität Berlin; Prof. Song Nianshen Tsinghua University; Prof. Yin Zhiguang, Fudan University; and Lei Shaohua, Associate Professor, Peking University.

Zhang Yongle began by reviewing the history of the development and dissemination of the Monroe Doctrine and, from there, raised the topic of how to understand the dynamics of regional identity. Two centuries have elapsed since the birth of the Monroe Doctrine. When the Monroe Doctrine was born, in 1823, it was associated with the regional identity of “America” and the “Western Hemisphere”. As a key guideline of US foreign policy, it played an important role in the formation of the regional and global hegemony of the US, profoundly affecting the regional and global order and greatly shaping the intellectual debates on international law. Since the second half of the 19th century, the slogan “America for the Americans”—matching the Monroe Doctrine—has spread around the world, and elites of many areas have borrowed the formulation “X for the X-ans” to actively shape the identity of their own areas.

Zhang Yongle continued that the experience of the US, Germany and Japan shows how the discourse of the Monroe Doctrine was applied at both regional and global levels: The US used the discourse of the Monroe Doctrine to expand its national territory, establish regional hegemony in Latin America and Caribbean, and then, through repeated reinterpretations of the Monroe Doctrine, went beyond the Western Hemisphere, ultimately adjusting the Monroe Doctrine to serve the construction of its global hegemony. After World War I, many German and Japanese elites, while envying the US regional hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, tried to distinguish the Monroe Doctrine of the regional hegemony stage from the Monroe Doctrine of the global hegemony stage, praising and imitating the former while criticizing the latter, so as to justify their pursuit of the project of regional hegemony of their own countries. For example, Japan tried to bring weak nations such as North Korea and China under its domination in the name of “expelling the white colonists out of East Asia.”

According to Zhang Yongle, the trajectory of the Monroe Doctrine discourse in China was fundamentally different from that of Germany and Japan. During the late Qing, China lapsed into a semi-colonial state of being as huge centrifugal forces arose from the inside. The discourse of the Monroe Doctrine in China took an inward and downward turn, resulting in the discourse of “provincial Monroe Doctrines” (for example, “Guangdong for the Cantonese”) at the sub-national level, which reached its climax in a united provincial movement in the early 1920s. Woodrow Wilson’s reinterpretation of the Monroe Doctrine contributed to the proliferation of provincial Monroe Doctrines. However, with the rise of the Nationalist Revolution in the 1920s, provincial Monroe Doctrines gradually faded out. After the formation of a powerful central government in 1949, the discourse of the Monroe Doctrine returned to the “supra-national” level in China and was no longer associated with provincial autonomy. Since then, China’s politico-cultural elites have made their own responses to the Monroe Doctrine discourse of the US and Japan, many envisioning an international order and international discourse that transcends the logic of hegemony.

At the end of his speech, Zhang Yongle posed a series of questions that he hoped the participants would discuss in the seminar: How to understand and evaluate the US Monroe Doctrine after the two hundred years since its birth? Does it still represent a major driving force in shaping international relations? How to narrate and explain the appropriation of the Monroe Doctrine by German, Japanese and Chinese elites before the end of World War II? How did the language of national sovereignty and regionalism influence each other in the last two centuries? What role did the formulation “X for the X-ans” play in this process? How does this thinking relate to contemporary discourses on ethnic and national identity? Could the ongoing Ukrainian Crisis be characterized as the conflict between two versions of the Monroe Doctrine? How to understand the “multi-polarization” of the contemporary international system?

In the discussion session, a series of scholars from China and Germany focused on the origins and essence of the American Monroe Doctrine, the differences between the German Monroe Doctrine and American Monroe Doctrine, the practical role of the Japanese Asian Monroe Doctrine, global history and morphological approaches, the Monroe Doctrine in the transnational spatial dimension, the Monroe Doctrine in contemporary Great Power Competition, and how the Monroe Doctrine might have contributed toward specific forms of multipolarity in the international order. The audience also asked questions and commented on the development of the Monroe Doctrine in China and the practical orientation of the study of Monroe Doctrine in global history. The discussion demonstrated the core issues and academic paths taken by Chinese and German scholars of regional studies and international relations on the occasion of the bicentenary of the Monroe Doctrine, and promoted the exchange of academic ideas.

This event is the first in a series of tripartite collaborations between Peking University, Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Tübingen in which primarily faculty members participated. The core text of the discussion was Zhang Yongle’s book Shifting Boundaries: A Global History of the Monroe Doctrine, which was published in 2021. The book has been included in the Chinese Academic Translation Program of the National Social Science Foundation, and will be translated into English by Brill Publishing House (The Netherlands).