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Introduction: Salinas, the Unmentionable One pp. 3-22
Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5949/UPO9781846316296.002
Introduction
Salinas, the Unmentionable One
mantra of the bloated bureaucratic regime that would be thrown into disarray
by the reformists of the 1990s. Accordingly, Lpez Obrador pledges a return
to the redistributive and protectionist hearth of Mexican nationalism, and so
strident has been his antipathy to what Salinas stood for that he refuses to
name him, resorting instead to describing him as the Unmentionable One.1
Indeed, a key influence in the PRD candidates political formation was the
example of the former president Lzaro Crdenas (19341940) who, as
George W. Grayson (2007) points out, had been the first to invest real
meaning in the concept of revolutionary nationalism.2
Mexico under Salinas offers a rare and perhaps unique opportunity to
study one of the ruptures in twentieth-century political thought that came to
define an era and left a lasting imprint on debates throughout and beyond
Latin America, which, as the countrys most recent elections confirmed,
remain unresolved to this day.
From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s the conflict between an ageing
nationalism and a youthful and confident neoliberalism permeated the
writing and rhetoric of Mexican politicians, academics and newspaper
commentators. The prominence of the national idea in debates in this unique
period of transformation was the product of the dramatic economic and political reforms based on market principles and free trade pioneered by Salinas
that had been unfolding across the country since 1985. These reforms thrust
Mexico towards one of those key junctures of modernity periodically experienced by all societies, in which the dominant political ideas that had
coexisted in an uneasy developmental synthesis since Mexicos modern state
was forged from the revolutionary conflagration of 19101917 were finally
unleashed to do battle with each other in an ideological clash without precedent. As president from 1988 to 1994, Salinas undertook to substitute a statist
political economy wholly constructed upon revolutionary nationalism hitherto the dominant, official political doctrine in Mexico with one informed
by neoliberal ideas largely imported from the United States. To do so, and
with all the artifice of an inventor, he undertook a comprehensive and sophisticated programme to reconstruct Mexican nationalist ideas by articulating,
from a position of great symbolic power, a new nationalism that could be
reconciled with the liberal economic vision of his slick technocratic regime.
In short, Salinas endeavoured to reinvent Mexico in his own, liberal image.
The fact that more than a decade later, in 2006, Mexican political affiliations
were almost evenly divided between nationalist and neoliberal visions that
can be traced seamlessly to the Salinas era only serves to underline the degree
to which his monumental ambition succeeded and yet failed.
The case of Mexico during the 1990s has important implications for the
study of nationalism: it reveals that the construction of the national idea is
intimately related to the projects of political elites and how these are
contested; that this process of construction is given its most coherent form
and, most importantly, one that can be assessed, in the arena of political
discourse, regardless of other, everyday symbolic manifestations of the
national idea; and that nationalism cannot be explored outside its uncomfortable, yet inevitable, relationship with liberalism. This book addresses
these three key themes and makes a case for an interpretive approach to the
study of nationalism as a discourse articulated against the broader background of liberalism.
The Discursive Approach to Nationalism
The study of nationalism has been riven by basic disagreements over definitions, terminology and the most appropriate theoretical approach scholars
should employ. This lack of consensus has extended to what constitutes the
nation and to the complex of ideas that support or advance this type of
community.3 These disagreements pose a significant obstacle to the definition of nationalism itself, rival approaches to which have taken their cues from
the various ways in which the nation is understood.4 The fact that the nation
is understood as both a political and a cultural unit gives rise to the argument
that there are, in fact, distinct forms of nationalism, each informed by these
different conceptions.5 The large variety of phenomena associated with
nationalism adds to these difficulties.6 Consequently, most scholars of nationalism have devoted considerable effort to seeking an acceptable definition of
the term.7 It has commonly been referred to as a political doctrine, ideology
or theory but has been used in other senses to refer to sentiments, consciousness, attitudes, aspirations, loyalties, programmes and the activities of
organizations and movements.8 There has also been widespread disagreement over the characteristics of nationalism as a system of ideas, although it
is most often considered to be a theory of legitimacy and, as such, associated
with the development of the state, state-building.9 This level of discord helps
to explain why nationalism stands in an ambivalent relationship with other
ideologies, belonging neither to the political left nor the right.10
Until the 1990s, the principal analytical schism that existed in the field
concerned the relationship of nationhood and nationalism with modernity,
the new era in social development generally held to have been inaugurated
by the Reformation, the scientific and industrial revolutions and the
Enlightenment that nurtured modern developments such as capitalism,
bureaucracy and secular utilitarianism. The main theoretical division was
between modernist perspectives, which situate the emergence of nations
and the rise of nationalism in the modern era, and those that argue that
nations reflect to varying degrees more enduring and pre-modern characteristics. Modernists differ over periodization, the models they employ and
the weight they attach to different causal factors but all share a belief in
modernization as a distinctive structural process.11 In analytical opposition
to the modernist approach are those termed either primordialist or perennialist, which argue that nationality is a natural and, as such, a universal trait
of humanity that displays ancient and immemorial properties deriving from
ethno-cultural phenomena such as kinship, language, territory, religion and
myths of origin.12 Such positions reject the notion of a radical break with the
past giving rise to modernity as an end state opposed to another homologous system, tradition.13 While the modernist perspective came to represent
an orthodoxy in the study of nationalism, a sustained critique of it was
mounted by a third school, ethno-symbolism, and in particular by Anthony
Smith, who, while accepting some modernist criteria, also pointed to the
enduring role of ethnic symbols and forms in the nationalist complex.14
In the post-modern era, the modernist orthodoxy is neither outdated nor
redundant, for enshrined within it are two important implications. First, at
the heart of the modernist analysis is the need to explain the rupture between
the pre-modern and modern epochs, and so modernists identify discontinuities between nations and earlier communities.15 Implicit in this perspective
is the belief that human collectivities were subject to some fundamental transformation at some point in history that disrupted the established order and
forced them to find new ways of organizing social life under the impact of
changes in economic, political and social conditions.16 Modernism, therefore,
sees nations as contingent communities that are transient and not natural, and
assumes the eventual demise of the nation-state or at least the weakening of
nationalism.17 Second, modernists argue that it became possible and necessary for elites to imagine or invent new forms of community such as the
nation in response to changing economic, political or social conditions linked
to the most potent social forces of the era such as capitalism or new means
of communication.18 For example, the historian Eric Hobsbawm (1994)
depicted the nation in terms of invented traditions peculiar to modernity
and engineered to serve capitalism.19 This and similar perspectives have
drawn attention to the roles played by different social groups in nationalist
phenomena and, in particular, political and economic elites or intelligentsias.20
This academic debate remains of critical importance in a world increasingly characterized by the challenges to assumed and inherited national
identities, borders and economies posed by mass migration, regional integration and climate change. First, by shedding light on the modernity or
otherwise of the nation, the researcher is better able to understand whether
the qualities of national citizenship or membership, nationality, are inherent
or contingent.21 The nation is conceived of in broad terms as a political
community or as a cultural community, and each conception implies a
different principle of nationality.22 As a modern political community the
nation is equated with the people as a whole, and hence premised upon
notions of popular sovereignty; as such, it is held to be a unitary political
formation in which membership is unmediated and equal.23 By contrast, the
nation as a cultural community is seen as an historical and cultural individuality that must be preserved or revived; statehood, if desired, is incidental
or secondary, and membership is determined by cultural values and differentiae.24 Second, the debate that considers nationalisms relationship with
modernity addresses whether in the early twenty-first century one can hope
national identities through popular culture, not only by focusing on communication technologies but also by deconstructing the meanings these
promoted.32
Umut zkirimli (2000) has argued that what has united these new
approaches is the identification of the national idea as a distinctive form of
discourse.33 An important influence upon this and similar perspectives was
the work of Homi Bhabha (1994), who argued that nations should be viewed
as narrative constructions produced from within a range of discourses.34
Discourses are the socially conditioned formulation of ideas specific to a
given historical context that are implicated in the pursuit of power.35
Discourse and ideology have a related genealogy and are often used in
concert, although no single concept of either has commanded universal
agreement.36 Ideology is a contested term often used to refer to a comprehensive and coherent system of political, economic and social values, beliefs
or ideas shared or taken for granted by a social group. In terms of nationalism, discourse can be used to refer to the ideas, arguments, assumptions
and other positions that, taken together, give a certain content to nationhood
and the identity and sentiments that support or are generated by it, together
referred to here as national ideology.
More recent discursive approaches have tried to identify the factors that
lead to the continual reproduction of nationalism in the modern world.37
They argue that nationalism is a constantly restated discourse built upon the
belief in the existence of nationhood with a content whose meaningfulness is
determined largely by the context in which it is deployed.38 Amanda Machin
(2007), for example, has provided a contemporary example of such a discursive approach to national identity, arguing that the ideas of Wittgenstein
who suggested that we do not communicate through an abstract predetermined linguistic code but through interactive language-games can be
employed to develop a new approach to national identification that disputes
rationalism in much the same way that the nation appears to defy rational
definition.39 She writes:
This allows us to grasp the paradoxical nature of the nation. A national
identification does not exist primordially, but nor is it rationally chosen.
We are born into language games of the nation, and through participating
in them we re-imagine the nation. The nation is a burden with which we
encumber ourselves []. The multiple meanings of nation contradict
each other yet add weight to its existence. It is both nascent and ancient,
contingent yet solid. It is a puzzle that can never be solved but leads to new
questions.40
Approaching nationalism as a discourse avoids the need to accept the
concrete prior existence of the nation, a central tenet of the nationalist argument, which is advantageous in the study of countries where intellectual
development has been heavily distorted by nationalist historiography. In this
way, studying national ideology in discourse allows the researcher to step
outside the restricted confines imposed upon so much intellectual production by nationalist sentiments themselves, and to examine the content of that
intellectual production in itself as part of the nationalist complex. It offers the
researcher a method of analysis without requiring him or her to take sides in
the inconclusive academic disputes over the origins, existence and meaning
of nationhood. In a related way, such a conceptual-methodological approach
has an advantage over quantitative or ethnographic forms of studying nationalism and accompanying phenomena by acknowledging the dynamic
construction of the nation in political culture. A consequence of this framework is that it requires analysis to be interpretive.41
After construction, a second recurrent theme within the post-modern
analysis of national phenomena has been that of contestation. Not only have
social and political developments the world over thrown into dramatic relief
the challenge to notions of intrinsic identity but scholars have also concluded
that these identifications are constantly besieged by other communities
wanting to absorb or dismantle them. Building upon the trajectory of postcolonial studies, Bhabhas work in particular pointed to contestation, arguing
that the dominant constructions of the nation are challenged by counternarratives that disturb the ideological manoeuvres by which imagined
communities are given essentialist qualities.42
Such approaches are not without their critics, most of whom argue that
post-modernists overstate the extent to which identity can be purely
constructed and relegate the importance of historical context in understanding particular nationalisms.43 Nonetheless, the disagreements within the
established body of theory concerned with the nations relationship with
modernity explain why approaches that examine nationalism as a discourse
have proliferated in an effort to transcend the inconclusive and polarized classical theoretical debates in the field.44 As we have seen, there are also
theoretical and methodological advantages to approaching nationalism as
discourse: a discursive approach avoids the need to agree on the objective
characteristics a community should possess to achieve the status of nation
and, consequently, challenges essentialism, which attributes disproportionate
influence to some criterion held to constitute a defining essence.45
Approaching nationalism as a discursive phenomenon, in which nationhood
and nationality are themes common to a diverse variety of cases and historical contexts, can also account for the dynamic construction of the national
idea and its highly contested nature.46 Thus, the discursive approach reflexively draws attention to the roles of those groups such as politicians,
academics and journalists in the reproduction of nationalism as highlighted
by Billig.47
While it is clear that at a theoretical level the ideas in which the nation is
imagined or invented have gained momentum, what studies have often lacked
and what classical modernism offers is an historically informed context in
which to position discourses of the nation and hence the very real power relations that exist behind their construction and contestation.48
10
One of the principal phenomena of modernity is capitalism, and its relationship with nationalism is of particular relevance to the context in which
the national idea has evolved in Western tradition. Much of the analytical
debate about the relationship between nationalism and capitalism has come
from within Marxism, which has always had difficulties with nationalism at
both political and theoretical levels.49 The central theme of Marxist interpretations is a belief in the way nationhood and nationalism have been
functional to the economic projects of certain classes, imperialism or internal
colonialism.50 A recent examination of Mexicos political landscape by John
Gibler (2009) made a powerful argument for the continuation of a process
of internal colonialism and class struggle that has its origins in the Conquest,
well before the era of the nation-state. 51 Even one of the most influential nonMarxist approaches to nationalism, that of Ernest Gellner (1996), linked
what he regards as the formative process of modernity, industrialism, to a
capitalist spirit emanating from the Enlightenment.52 One of the explanations for the lack of a Marxist theory of nationalism and the weaknesses of
the class approach is the universalistic ambition at the heart of Marxs original analysis: to Marx, the ultimate objective of socialist revolution was a
single world community in which the liberation of people as human beings
was no longer obstructed by capitalist relations of production, nationality or
religion. This vision of human progress is sufficiently similar to that of the
other great ideological system of the modern era, liberalism, to explain why
both share similar difficulties over the relationship between national community and universal ideal. Both socialist and liberal evolutionist treatments of
nationalism, for example, argue that the nation as a vehicle of progress will
one day be superseded by more powerful units of human association.53
Within the modernist orthodoxy in the study of nationalism, insufficient
attention has been given to its relationship with this dominant source of political and economic beliefs underpinning modernization processes and, in
particular, liberalism. The nation represents a problem for liberalism in all
its forms, and that problematic reflects dilemmas in liberal thought
concerning the ways in which market freedom conflicts with the idea of
national economy; and concerning the difficulties of reconciling individual
liberty with the social or communitarian rights implied by nationalism.
Hobsbawm (1990) undertook one of the few Marxist analyses to examine
nationalism in relation to liberalism and drew attention to the problems
deriving from universalistic notions that the classical political economy of
liberalism had with the national idea.54 The two main sources of tension
between liberalism and conceptions of nationality that Hobsbawm drew
attention to, in particular, derive from the individualism and universalism
inherent in liberal theory. These deny abstract collectivities such as state,
society and nation and envisage criteria of citizenship different to those of
nationalism.55
On the one hand, liberalism championing the free play of market forces
would appear to challenge notions of national economic sovereignty.
11
12
ship in terms of interactions between the realms of the individual and the
social or communitarian.67
Mexico in the early 1990s offers a valuable opportunity to study nationalism at a time when this theme was at its most prominent in the discourse
of politicians, academics and newspaper commentators and in a context that
threw into sharp relief the substrate of liberalism underpinning the countrys
development. The most important ideological issue of the six-year administration or sexenio of President Salinas from 1988 to 1994 was precisely the
need to attenuate this tension between nationalism and neoliberalism.
Mexicos post-revolutionary state had been founded upon an uneasy truce
between these political ideas. It is interesting to note that neoliberalism has,
itself, increasingly become understood, primarily, as a discourse shaping
reform processes that responded more broadly to the so-called Washington
Consensus.68
The forms nationalism has taken in Mexico since Independence in the
early nineteenth century shared the ambition of rival elites to fashion from a
diverse and divided society an integrated and stable citizenry a nationality
in support of their broader political projects aiming to construct a viable
modern state, state-building. The aim of forging a nationality from a divided
and heterogeneous population allows Mexican nationalism more broadly to
be characterized above all as a discourse on nation-building and helps to
explain the importance that has historically been placed upon the shared
cultural attributes of nationality. By contrast, despite the ambition of early
Mexican liberalism to fashion an integral society whose members enjoy full
political equality based upon universal principles, the pursuit of political
rights was, until the late 1990s, subordinated to the dominating ambition of
economic liberalism to establish a modern, capitalist economy based upon
individual market freedoms. The influence of economic liberalism explains
a persistent structural inequality in Mexico that challenges the nationalist
ideal of an integrated national society whose members enjoy full equality.
Following Mexicos 191017 Revolution, the nationalism predominant in
post-revolutionary political culture had a social character deriving from the
popular dimensions of the constitutional settlement, whereas the economic
liberalism that provided Salinas with the theoretical justification to conduct
reform restated aspects of classical liberal political economy premised upon
individualistic, free-market values hostile to the social state. The Salinas
reform process, therefore, exposed a tension between the liberal vision of a
market economy regulated by a minimalist state and partaking in free trade
and an official nationalism traditionally defined by a strong states sovereign
power to attenuate social division by circumscribing market forces in order
to foster the unity required, in theory, for the existence of nationhood.69
Given the above, Mexico in the Salinas era demonstrates the importance
of analysing national discourses against the background of the liberalism that
has been the dominant source of political ideas in this and other Western
countries. Liberalism, the main ideological source of the dramatic changes
13
of the 1980s90s, provides the essential context in which the study of nationalism in discourse in Mexico must take place. As a result, Mexico in this
period also demonstrates why Hobsbawms analysis of nationalism within a
context of liberal ideas is of relevance to the contemporary era in Latin
America more generally a region that witnessed a revival of classical liberal
political economy in the 1980s, as the most identifiable symptom of a new
phase of globalization, attributing societys most intractable problems to
interventionist statism, and that has, in turn, since witnessed a revival of
nationalist sentiments.70 The 1980s90s was a period in which the liberal
political economy restated in the guise of monetarism under such thinkers as
Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek influenced technocratic perspectives
from Mexico to Argentina.71 Both thinkers had laid down the intellectual
foundations for neoliberalism at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and,
in Latin America, their ideas were seen as a counterattack against those that
had justified protectionist policies.72
The evolution of nationalist ideas in Latin America closely resembles that
of other regions to the extent that its socio-political systems have been fundamentally moulded by the development of capitalism within its most
important, transatlantic axis. Latin American nationalisms make cultural
claims similar to those found in nationalisms everywhere, and have the added
advantage as discourses of benefiting from rich and extant cultural resources
originating in both pre-Columbian and European societies. These can
provide a fertile fusion of millennial origins and a glorious antiquity with the
fervour of creole patriotism and subsequent indigenismo in its many forms to
offer cultural criteria with which to distinguish these countries, or the region
as a whole, from Europe and, more recently, the United States, and to unify
their diverse societies. Nonetheless, Latin American nationalisms are primarily political phenomena responding to the priorities of elite state-building
shaped within the prevailing political economy of the region whose complex
cultural mosaic, when seen from sufficient distance, reflects merely the way
in which the nation-state system has developed in an intimate and inseparable relationship with capitalism. That is not to say the need for discourses
that deploy cultural criteria to create plausible national ideologies is trivial,
indeed it may become more important than before in societies that experience new fractures as a result of restructuring.
An early proto-nationalism appeared in Latin America at the time of
Independence and, until the late nineteenth century, leaders in the region
copied the liberal nationalism of Europe, where nationalist ideas primarily
had political implications: popular sovereignty, individual rights and representative and constitutional government. However, Claudio Vliz (1980) has
argued that the republican nationalism of nineteenth-century Latin America
differed from the nationalism of Europe in an important respect: by being
outward-looking through a rejection of its own Hispanic past, combined with
attempts to imitate Britain and France.73 As a result, nationalist ideas were
not a natural development in Latin America as they had been in Europe,
14
and large social sectors were not aware of their potential nationality. This
resulted in an anomaly: in Latin America, the creation of the state preceded a
generalized acceptance of the existence of the nation in ethnically diverse
republics. Independence created states without defined national identities or
borders based on pre-existing cultural divisions. This meant that awareness
of a national consciousness or identity was usually an elite, intellectual affair
long before it became a mass characteristic. Consequently, one objective of
the new states governed by elites became the creation of nations, and in Latin
America as a whole, as in Mexico, a key theme in nationalist thought has been
nation-building the forging of a unified nationality based on a discernible
national identity. Although this varied across Latin America, the process of
nation-building could often be associated with the consolidation of a strong
state in keeping with the centralist tradition.
The desire of elites to win or assert national control over resources and
economies has often found an expression as antiimperialism or taken the
form of a xenophobic anti-Americanism. In this way, expressions of nationalism in Latin America at the dawn of the twentieth century can, in part, be
seen as a product of the developing worlds encounter with the capitalism of
the developed world. Latin American thinkers began to take more idealistic
positions based on cultural arguments in the early decades of the twentieth
century amid a backlash against positivist ideas, partly in response to the
expansion in the region of capitalist development dominated by the US.
Simultaneously, an association between nationalism and economic and social
themes reflected the development of mass constituencies through the integration of new groups into a class structure fashioned by forms of state
capitalism. A nation could not be built without a popular constituency, so
nationalists had to take up the demands of other sectors. As nationalist values,
beliefs or ideas were often shared by social groups, this could allow dominant elites to shape politics and the growth of nationalism as a political tool
in Latin America fuelled the development of its cultural variants.
Since then, the varying emphases periodically placed upon cultural vis-vis economic criteria within Latin American nationalisms have largely obeyed
the vacillations of political economy. For example, the impact of the Great
Depression generated reactions that in countries such as Brazil and Argentina
empowered nationalists to propose programmes of state-led industrialization. By contrast, the bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes of the 1970s
advocated a form of autarkic nationalism founded on distinctive notions of
orderly societies the people that primarily served the interests of oligopolistic private capital in its increasingly close relationship with transnational
capital.74 With democratization in the 1980s, the armed forces were discredited and neoliberal ideas based on universal themes challenged nationalist
perspectives, yet in several Latin American countries in the 1990s, it was the
leaders of parties with a strong national-populist tradition such as the PRI
in Mexico and the Peronists in Argentina that became champions of neoliberalism and employed nationalism to overturn sacred revolutionary symbols.
15
Since the late 1990s, nationalism has again been recruited in the task of
further modifying the model of political economy that best suits the needs of
global capitalism. Far from reversing neoliberal reforms, for example, leftof-centre leaders who have come to power in the region since 1998 have
mostly re-emphasized resource nationalism and renewed statism policies
that, today, find considerable favour among the international financial institutions that regulate global capitalism and advocate second-generation
reforms to correct the excesses of the neoliberal period.75
To the extent that contemporary manifestations of globalization represent
a discernibly new phase in the development of capitalism distinguished,
above all, by transnationalization of the state that is, the process by which
local states adopt strictures required to create the conditions necessary for
the multinational functioning of capital national ideology in Latin America
has followed suit. As William Robinson (2008) points out, globalization
brings about not the end of the nation-state, but its transformation into the
neoliberal nation-state.76 There is much evidence to support this position: the
nation-state remained a central focus of national ideology in Latin America
during the neoliberal period regardless of the aforementioned quandary
posed to the cherished positions of economic liberalism by notions of national
economic sovereignty. This was because, as Robinson suggests, the
continued existence of the nation-state system is a central condition for the
power of transnational capital.
In Mexico, the intellectual atmosphere created by the restatement of liberal
political economy engendered a polarization between perspectives on the
countrys economic future in the late 1970s between advocates of neoKeynesian expansionism based upon nationalism, and monetarist
orthodoxy.77 This ideological conflict provided the backdrop to an important reorganization in economic decision-making, a key consequence of
which under President Miguel de la Madrid (19821988) would be the effective triumph of liberalism, the dismantling of statist policies and the revision
of prevailing rhetoric on economic sovereignty.78 Until this period, the
Mexican state had been the dominant protagonist in the economy, creating
an import-substituting and protectionist industrial structure that was mostly
uncompetitive in world markets.79 The accession to the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade in 1986 ended 40 years of protectionism. In this period
in Mexico there were more frequent references to liberalism and historical
analyses of it, and the policies of the Salinas administration were influenced
by the revival within the PRI of an interest in liberal ideas.80 The core tenet
of the liberalism of the 1980s was the superiority of market mechanisms and
the maximization of individual freedom at least discursively, if not in practice through the limiting of state intervention.81 Salinas was a key architect
of De la Madrids policy, and later as president he himself accelerated the
reversal of statism and deepened Mexicos unilateral apertura or commercial
liberalization. In 1990, Salinas initiated preliminary talks on a free trade treaty
with the US and agreement was eventually reached in October 1992. The
16
17
magazine articles, from the period under study. It focuses on how they
deployed ideas relevant to the content of nationality, such as the individual,
state and sovereignty. In addition, interviews were conducted with key figures
from the period. A secondary source of material is Mexican academic writing
from after the period, and British and US research on Mexico. The primary
empirical data was collected during fieldwork conducted in Mexico City in
1998 and 1999 and comprised 5,459 separate party documents, published
articles or extracts from them with a bearing on key themes related to the
research topic such as nationalism, sovereignty, free trade, Article 27 of the
Constitution, globalization, liberalism and state reform. These were taken as
extracts from 25 different political party organs, newspapers and magazines
produced regularly during the period under study, from collections, the
Hemeroteca Nacional and the extensive newspaper cuttings archive maintained at the Fundacin Colosio of the then ruling PRI. Party political
material was gathered from publications and documents held by the PRI at
the Fundacin and by the PRD and PAN at their respective archives. Most
records were taken in the form of photocopies or entered by hand into a
computer database, although about 650 were taken from CD-ROM archives
of articles. Academic and official publications, reports and documents from
the period were also gathered. The sample was held to be representative of
material published about the themes under study.
This book also documents and explains the historically significant shift in
nationalist ideas that took place in Mexico in the 1980s in tandem with the
transformation of the countrys political economy. The explanation for this
shift can be found in the extent to which national ideology remained functionally valuable as a legitimizing force to elites steering that process. The
role nationalism has played in nurturing the stability required for capitalist
development in a country characterized by deep social inequality and division cannot be overstated. By challenging the constitutional provisions that
gave rise to the social state, the liberal perspective of salinismo challenged the
formula of nationhood providing the very foundations of post-revolutionary
political legitimacy. The Salinas period reveals the extent to which national
ideology is contingent upon the projects of a reformist elite. This book shows
how Salinas and the political opposition addressed the dilemma inherent in
the revival of liberal ideas between the pursuit of capitalist development based
upon individual rights, and nation-building seeking to restrict individual
rights in order to attenuate structural inequalities and nurture an integrated
national society. It examines the two principal areas in which liberalism and
nationalism conflict, at the level of the individual and over national sovereignty, by analysing constructions of the individual, the state and sovereignty
in the discourse of political actors from this period.
When the relationship between national ideology and liberalism during the
Salinas period is examined empirically, it reveals a continuing role for nationalism as a legitimizing factor within capitalist modernization. This book
addresses how and why Salinas himself resorted to nationalist discourse
18
despite the apparent contradictions in his position. The underlying preoccupation of much nationalist discourse in this period was with the divisions
in the ostensibly unitary nation and the search for a united and inclusive
society free of the social contrast that has been a characteristic feature of
Mexican development. To the Salinas administration, nationalism continued
to offer a way of reconciling competing individual and social claims and in
so doing providing the basis for a stable, unified citizenry free of divisions
that might threaten social stability and hence pose a risk to capitalist development. This represented a continuity with the role of ideology in the
Mexican Revolution, which was crucial to the legitimation of the successor
regime, and with revolutionary nationalism, which was the key to providing
long-term stability.85
By exploring nationalism under the dazzling spotlight of rapid modernization premised upon liberal notions that challenge the national idea, this
book seeks to trace the direction these developments are taking Mexico within
the wider context of both globalization and North American economic integration. Indeed, an examination of the Salinas era provides an opportunity
to discuss the fate of Mexican national ideology itself as the country becomes
more comprehensively integrated into the world economy.
Notes
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