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.

The confrontation with the First World War in Latin America went far beyond the exclusive spheres of the diplomats or the elites involved in the propaganda war. In Latin America, the war was above all a highly mediatized event. Although the upper classes produced most of the available sources, these sources nevertheless show that the conflict had an astonishingly wide social impact in many parts of Latin America, especially in its urban areas. These developments attest to changes in perceptions about the world, which were at once immediately connected to, but also greatly transcended, the reception of the war's progress and its tangible repercussions. As a “global media event,” the war affected the global consciousness of many Latin Americas. Through news reports and their own firsthand experience, they developed a stronger sense of the entanglements and the various dependencies that impacted their region of the world. In discussing the war, Latin Americans participated what for the first time became a global public sphere. A form of symbolic delimitation took place that radically reduced, if not entirely eliminated, the distance between the region and the battlefields. The war was thus also a world war because it permeated the everyday lives of many Latin Americans.

THE WAR IN EVERYDAY LIFE

In the Latin American press, the outbreak of the war in August 1914 was the event that overshadowed everything else and filled up the gazettes’ columns. In Latin America's urban centers, the reports could reach a huge audience because the newspaper industry had experienced a genuine explosion in the 1910s. Unlike in the nineteenth century, their readership was by no means limited to members of the national elites, but rather also increasingly attracted readers from the working class and the growing middle class. Even in civil-war-torn Mexico, newspapers like the El Imparcial already had full-page spreads on the events in Europe on August 1. The cables from the news services in Europe followed in rapid succession. The reports, however, did not stay current for even a day and there was a voracious appetite for the latest news. Consequently, the papers in Buenos Aires printed three, sometimes even four, editions daily. Innumerable photographs depicting modern weaponry, military maneuvers, and the European aristocracy heightened interest.

Although the Treaties of Paris formally ended the war, peace remained hard to find on a global scale in 1919. The Latin American eyewitnesses who experienced the transition from a “hot” to a “cold” war watched the developments closely. For instance, Mariátegui remarked six years later in hindsight:

In fact, the war propaganda transitioned into a postwar propaganda, especially in Latin America. The German side, above all, tried to refute the claim from the Treaty of Versailles that Germany alone was to blame for the war. The war remained part of the public consciousness to a certain extent because of the Cult of the Fallen, which foreign communities introduced to their countries of immigration shortly after the war. Memoirs, films, and novels, such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, ensured that the topic did not completely fade from memory. In addition, Latin American writers and artists were inspired by the tragedies of world war and created works of enduring value, such as Carlos Gardel with his tango classics “Silencio” or Heitor Villa-Lobos with his symphonies. By the same token, it is not possible to speak of a national culture of remembrance, even in countries like Argentina or Brazil. This is even more the case in other national contexts. Such a processing of the past remained too haphazard.

Nevertheless, the war undoubtedly meant a decisive turning point in the experience of Latin Americans of different nationalities, classes, generations, and genders. The outbreak of the world war initiated a crisis of dramatic proportion. The entire region could only look on helplessly, for the foundation of its economic development broke away along with the collapse of the liberal world economy. The export sector, which was critical to the lifeblood of all countries, went through a period of highly volatile shocks. These trends continued in many places long after the war. Not all countries, though, had the good fortune of being suppliers of war-essential raw materials.