According to the perceptions of many intellectuals and journalists, the center and the yardstick of civilization had shifted to the Americas due to the war. They were of the opinion that it was not enough to merely preserve the prewar European values and norms, but that fundamental change was needed. The topos of international equality, which had been in circulation before the war, and that of the self-determination of peoples, which Lenin and Wilson had helped spread globally since 1917, ignited a lively discussion in Latin America about the future. In 1918, the Peruvian Cornejo put in a nutshell the expectation that accompanied the debate: “By entering the war, the South American states [would] gain the price of admission to world politics.” But what did this mean for a nation and its citizens? What role should and could the continent now play in the global context?

THE RISE OF NATIONALISM

When Flores Magón addressed the positive effects of the Russian February Revolution in March 1917, he referred in the first place to the downfall of nationalism, which the masses had become disgusted with after the many years of war. Flags, the anarchist argued, would soon be found only in museums as souvenirs of barbarism. Flores Magón, however, would prove mistaken. Significantly more accurate was the prognosis from Augusto Bunge three years earlier when responding to a survey from Nosotros on the effects of the First World War for humanity and for Latin America in particular. According to Bunge, the war had unleased the genie of nationalism from its bottle, which was stronger than all of the spirits together in Thousand and One Nights. Taming this spirit, he asserted, would be a nearly impossible task. Indeed, the rise of nationalism had made such an impression on the members of the U.S. Creel Committee in 1918 that they reported: “The South American today demands as his natural right what he would have hesitated to request as a special favor five years ago.” Undoubtedly, as Latin American observers noted, the war had boosted nationalism everywhere.

Certainly, the pursuit of a strong nation was centrally important, just as national power seemed to increase as a result of the war.