Mexico: Biography of Power

I recently finished reading this excellent book by Enrique Krauze. It should be a compelling question to every student of political and economic history: Why do two countries, with similar gifts of natural resources, and where the poorer of the two’s development began some 150 years earlier, have such different levels of wealth and stability?

The book shows several key differences between Mexican and American political history and culture that explain these disparate outcomes.

First, Mexico, unlike the United States, had a more dramatic independence movement that was coupled with extremist anticliercalism and egalitarianism. These ideas gained footing in the long history of arbitrary behavior by Mexico’s rich and powerful, particularly the haciendos. The anticlericalism found its roots in the ambition of individual men from the lower ranks of society, as well as the intellectual movements of the late 18th Century. In other words, Mexico’s independence movement–as well as subsequent movements–had more in common with the French Revolution than the American, and thus they shared its unhappy outcome.

Two, Mexico has a long history of political violence. Until the triumph of the PRI in the early part of this century–and even after that–coups, assassinations, peasant uprisings, as well as the mass murder of the rich, the Indians, the poor, and clerics litter the modern history of Mexico. This penchant for romantic, political violence retains some currency today, ranging from the Zapatista revolt in Chiapas, to the periodic student riots in Mexico City. Political violence can lead to legitimacy in Mexico in a way that it cannot in the United States.

Three, Mexico has less social consensus on the role of religion in public life. While less pronounced in more recent times, a strong suspicion of the Church and its involvement in politics persists to the present day. (American politicos are simply blind to reality if they think Mexican Catholics will somehow all vote like American evangelicals). This either/or tension between the state and the Church in a country where nearly everyone is nominally Catholic remains unresolved.

Four, Mexico’s nationalism is pathological. Mexico has traditionally been, at one and the same time, fearful, envious, and suspicious of the United States. This paranoid impulse–common throughout the third world–culminated in a kind of quest for autonomy through national socialism, protectionism, and the expropriation of foreign capital in mid-century. This tradition is what is often appealed to as against the more modern trend towards “neoliberalism.” Mexico’s mixed results with free trade, in particular its displacement by China, may revive this tradition and undo NAFTA.

Five, Mexico’s leaders have chiefly been men of great ambition and achievement, who aimed to pull the country up to some similar standard of modernity and capability. This desire to force modernization often took the form of forceful and coercive measures of property redistribution, public education, and anti-religious efforts. This preemiment and unconstrained role of the state has reduced the role of private institutions and corroded “civil society.”

Six, from roughly the middle of the 19th century any authentic conservative politics has disappeared from Mexico. The PRI’s nationalistic socialism always retained the admixture of leftist egalitarianism and anti-clericalism. The fights within the institution–such as the long power struggle between Pancho Villa, Carrenza, and Zapata–were more matters of emphasis and tactics than the expression of any authentic conservative politics. It remains to be seen whether the reform-minded Vicente Fox can shake the strong, leftist tradition in Mexican politics.

Seven, one must conclude that the intertwining of Mexican history with leftism, socialism, and the politics of the “Great Man” has prevented the nurturing of respected institutions such as the rule of law, stable property rights, fair elections, peaceful transfer of power, and protection for individual liberty that are necessary for the creation and sustainment of wealth among different social classes. Instead, as in 1910, an apparently placid political and social scene masks deep instability that may again erupt in an explosive (but likely fruitless) conflagration. And, for America, one must wonder to what extent individuals nurtured in this tradition, which bears superficial similarity to America’s, will transform America’s political culture to resemble Mexico’s, along with its train of problems and abuses.

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