Can Mexico Be Mexico? : With Economic Integration in Vogue, Democracy May be all that Protects the Country from becoming the 51st State

The Mexican wound today, after many others in its history, is called lack of democracy with lack of development. How to fill both vacuums, and in what order this should be done, is the problem at the center of the current Mexican debate.

It is an open wound. Adherences are broken. Questions remain: Nationalism or internationalism? Isolation or integration? Political democracy or economic development?

A recent survey conducted by a Mexican magazine reflects the pain of an open wound. Yet instead of creating an alternative identification born of Mexican problems, our problems are displaced toward the worst and most dangerous of our historic illusions: Let others take care of our problems; we are not capable of solving them. This, in bad theater, is the Deus ex machina solution: A god will descend from the sky and save the hero from his predicament. The cornered hero, in this case, is Mexico. The god who descends in this machine, the United States of America.

The majority of those surveyed are not proud of their Mexican nationality, and would like to be a part of the United States if it means a better quality of life. In contrast, more than 70% are still willing to fight for Mexico (compared with 80% in the United States), and in both countries those who would do away with the borders are still not the majority.

The lack of pride and the willingness to form a single country with the United States bring us back to the Mexican wound. Since 1968, at least, this wound contains bad political management and bad economic management.

In democratic countries, the failures and successes end up being distributed somewhat equally between the parties that alternate in power. In Mexico, all the successes and all the failures are attributable to one party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI. And for the last 25 years, vices have overwhelmingly suffocated virtues. National unity has been used to justify the party-government hegemony, but also to respond to an external motivation. Mexican nationalism, or its absence, is defined to a great extent by the proximity of another nationalism: North American.

The United States has been the bearer of a nationalism as aggressive and self-satisfied as any European imperial power. But until now, North American nationalism, aggressive outside its own borders, has maintained a democratic system within them. I have sometimes compared the United States to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: the man and the beast, benevolent national democracy, aggressive foreign monster.

Sometimes, Mexicans have seen the face of Mr. Hyde: Manifest Destiny, the Big Stick, Dollar Diplomacy. At other times, many Mexicans prefer to see Dr. Jekyll’s face. This is true today, as the survey reveals, and the reason is fundamental, although passive.

We live a national failure next door to the greatest success story of modern times: the North American empire, democratic, powerful, rich and free. How can we not see in this neighboring power a new center of identity that will protect us and heal, once and for all, the national wound? We do not closely examine the defects of North American society, the serious moral, economic and social cracks, because compared to our pneumonia, the United States’ problems seem the common cold.

The type of internationalism and futuristic critique in vogue today warns us that national economies have ceased to exist. We live in a global economy, where the dominant tendency is rapid integration determined by a new international division of labor. No one can avoid this process--not even the largest economy in the world, that of the United States. The United States depends more and more on the goodwill of Japanese and European investors and bank-account holders. Without them, the deficit-oriented policy that this northern economy has followed since the Vietnam War will collapse.

Apart from this, transnational corporations have become indispensable for global integration. They are the owners of the investments, information and technological breakthroughs. Free trade, open markets, elimination of trade barriers, capital flow: Mexicans cannot be anachronistic Luddites, determined to maintain outdated national structures.

Many of these points are valid, and they create pressure, visible in the actions of the current Mexican government, to accelerate our integration processes. We cannot be left out, left behind in the race toward integration. We have multiple and complementary options. Integration with Europe and the Pacific Rim, no doubt. Latin American integration must be undertaken as well.

But obviously, all eyes look first toward the United States. We have an advantage over all other developing countries because we share a border with one of the largest markets in the world. We should take advantage of it.

But our advantage is relative, from two points of view. The first has to do with the nature of the United States, which, although one of the major participants in the global economy, is still a nationalist country. Are we going to be asked to stop being nationalist while our powerful neighbor increases its own nationalism to dangerous levels that--why not--could be unleashed on Mexicans first?

Aside from diverse technical and economic, social and cultural reservations, which in good faith can contribute to opposition to integration, I would like to emphasize this: The United States is the most nationalist country on Earth today.

The victory in the Persian Gulf has swept away many of the psychological barriers created by the defeat in Vietnam. Before Iraq, the United States ignored international law and organizations in Nicaragua and Panama. Now the United States has learned to manipulate them in its favor. How will they be used tomorrow? Does President Bush’s new world order include the respect of political rights created by nationalisms that are weaker than that of the United States--Mexican nationalism in the first place? In other words: Does international law also apply now to the United States when it violates it?

The years of silence in the face of Saddam Hussein’s crimes, while he was supplied with arms, credits and nuclear and chemical technology, demonstrate that, according to Juan Goytisolo, there are two types of people in the world. Human beings, for example, the Kurds assassinated by Hussein: Nobody raises a finger for them. And the petro-humans, like the Kuwaitis: For them--and their oil--800,000 troops and the most impressive armed forces in history are mobilized. What will Mexicans be in these new circumstances: dispensable human beings or indispensable petroleum-humans?

In the new international situation, relations with the United States offer not only opportunities, but great danger as well. Economic integration has precise limits; it is not infinite nor does it lead to the abolition of borders and other signs of national existence, which are still necessary. President Carlos Salinas puts it quite clearly: “Negotiations for the type of treaty we seek with the U.S. do not include any subject other than commerce. Our autonomy in other areas will remain intact.” The Mexican president expressly excludes borders and armies from the integration process.

But a second warning about the limits of global integration is much broader and goes far beyond Mexico and the United States. Because if, on the one hand, there is a clear tendency toward economic integration on a world scale, on the other hand, the ethnic revolts, violent separatisms and revived nationalisms multiply. Integration on the one hand. Balkanization on the other.

It is not too late to build a political bridge between both: federalism. Eric Hobsbawm points out that the high degree of devolution imposed on Germany and Italy by the Allies of World War II has prevented this type of separatist outbreak (Bavarians, Sicilians) in what before were highly centralized fascist regimes. In contrast, from the Soviet Union to Ireland, from Canada to Yugoslavia, nationalist pretensions put in doubt not only national political unity but international economic integration.

This is not the case of Mexico or Latin America, and I think we should understand this and use it in our dealings with the rest of the world. In Mexico and Latin America we still have the advantage of cultural coincidence with the nation.

The result of our historical experience has been a culture contained within the limits of the nation, which is not monolithic because of this. Within each Latin American national unit we have made room for indigenous, European, black and, above all, mestizo and mulatto multicultures. But outside the national limits, we have been intimately linked to the Iberian cultures and, through them, to the Mediterranean. This, in turn, has linked us to the other cultures of this hemisphere--Anglo Saxon, French, Dutch--as well as to the rest of the world without a loss of our own cultural personality.

But culture has to have a political counterpart that, until now, has been called the nation. This concept is not eternal. Culture can produce another political relationship that is not the nation. Our nationalism is besieged by the forces that move us toward integration and by proximity with a nationalism more powerful than ours. Where can we find the political counterpart, the qualitative leap, that will save the nation and our culture?

The unfulfilled promise of all our projects for modernization has been democracy. It is time we give it to ourselves, before its absence acts as a pretext for North American nationalism to come rescue us for liberty. But we also have to resume economic development that cannot deny itself its political partner, democracy, nor its social partner, justice, nor its spiritual partner, culture.

Democracy as a center of identification, coherent with culture and society, allows us to close the wounds ourselves. With the support of internal democracy and justice, Mexico will be able to move more securely in the wide world of economic integration. I do not seek the defense of the nation in nationalism. Maybe they are actually in decay. But I do look for the defense of society, culture and those of us who create one and the other, as projects born of our imagination and our will, of our memory and our desire.