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It used to be the case in Mexico that only one man mattered, at least for the six years that particular man was Mexico’s president. This changed decisively in July 2000, when Vicente Fox, the candidate of the National Action Party (PAN), defeated the candidate of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) peacefully ending over 70 years of one-party rule. Mexico’s political system had been to all intents and purposes the "perfect dictatorship," which is how the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once described it. But since the electoral revolution that took place last year, Mexico’s politics have become infinitely more complicated and unpredictable and the democratization of Mexico has profound implications for North America as a whole. The outlines of these changes have still to fully emerge, but it is certain they will become one of the transformative marks of the twenty-first century, not least for the domestic politics of the United States.
During the second half of the twentieth century, Mexico had been the perfect Latin neighbor for the United States. Unlike Fidel Castro, the pesky, unrepentant, and it seems eternal revolutionary cacique of the large island to the south of Florida, Mexico was rhetorically hostile toward the United States but quietly accommodating; hot for the revolution in theory, but in practice extremely cautious and non-interventionist on the international stage; leftist and moralistic in prescription, but in reality state capitalistic and thoroughly corrupt.
For all its crusades for democracy, human rights, free elections, and transparency elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, the United States liked it that way. Washington found it convenient to mute its Wilsonian demands when it came to the Latin Americans closest to it across the southern border. And there was a good historical reason for this caution: Woodrow Wilson himself after all had been none too successful in his attempts to impose democracy on Mexico by force of arms in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. Jorge Castañeda, now foreign minister of Mexico, but once upon a time an aspiring academic, when speaking at a seminar I organized in New York over a decade ago concluded that as far as the United States was concerned Mexico was "too important for democracy." He was right, though no one at the time was supposed to say so officially.
Democracy was not so problematic north of the border. Canadian democracy is, however, self-consciously "un-American;" based on the Westminster parliamentary and monarchical model. Since the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 when most of French colonial rule in North America was supplanted by that of the British, the Canadian dilemma has been conciliating the separatist-minded Québec minority. London, then Ottawa, sought out mechanisms to dissuade the French-speaking Canadians from at some point proclaiming an independent state, or as General de Gaulle undiplomatically put it, establishing "Québec libre."
During the nineteenth century, Canada found membership within the British Empire an effective deterrent to U.S. expansionism north. But Mexico was cannibalized as vast territories along the Pacific Coast and in the interior West were seized or usurped by the United States. Mexico, unlike Canada, could not expect the aid of an European protector. Instead, in the harsh world of nineteenth-century realpolitik Mexico discovered only European predators, not least of which of course were the French. Canadians’ preoccupations with the United States, however, are not dissimilar from those that traditionally worried Mexicans. Not that this is surprising given the fact that both nations must share their North American bed with a very large elephant, and both Mexicans and Canadians hope that the elephant will not crush them if it moves unexpectedly. A Brazilian diplomat who served in Ottawa once said to me, the psychosis of English-speaking Canadians is that they seem "to live in perpetual fear of being annexed by North Dakota."
In any case Canada thought of itself as Atlanticist, at least until recently, when in 1990 it belatedly became a member of the Organization of American States (OAS). The U.S. State Department reflects this Canadian self-perception by attaching Canadian Affairs to the European Bureau. Canada is a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and contributed combat units in Europe during the first World War and in Asia and Europe in the second World War long before the United States entered either conflict.
Economic realities, strategic imperatives, and now demographic changes, however, tell a different story. Canada and the United States have long been each other’s dominant trading partners; seconded now by post-NAFTA Mexico, which in 1998 surpassed Japan to become the United States’ second largest trading partner. Between them the North American partners comprise a market of more than 400 million people with a combined GDP (purchasing power parity) of nearly $11 trillion. U.S.-Canada trade in the year 2000 totaled nearly $408 billion and U.S.-Mexico trade was almost $250 billion. [http://www.ita.doc.gov]
The processes which are deepening regional integration within North America are also drawing Central America and the Caribbean into this orbit, areas already strongly linked to the North American mainland, especially the United States, by means of immigration, social security payments to retirees, remittances from workers to their families at home, and markets. The Caribbean community does $8.6 billion in interregional trade with NAFTA; Central America moves $15.6 billion. Mexico is moving to solidify its role in this new constellation. Vicente Fox’s first act as president was to go to the border to welcome Mexicans returning for the Christmas holidays, and last week while President George W. Bush was on his first foray in Europe as president, Fox was traveling in Central America promoting the integration of Central America "from Panama to Puebla." President Fox is also quietly reaching out to Mexico’s third NAFTA partner, Canada, with its similar historical tradition of concern for sovereignty over national resources and experience with a state-run energy sector, as he seeks investment and expertise to reform Mexico’s vital and fiercely nationalistic energy sector.
These trade links within the North American region are fortified by a burgeoning integration "from below," as immigration and demographic changes transform the composition of the U.S. population. The new U.S. census returns demonstrate how remarkable and rapid these changes have been over the past decade. The Hispanic component within the U.S. population rose to 13% of the total population, surpassing the African American minority. The transformation is visible not only in traditional areas of Hispanic migration such as Texas and California, where half the Hispanic population of the United States live, but also in South Florida and in New York, where even the New York Times has now noticed, as it said in an editorial, that not all Latinos are Puerto Ricans. In fact, there are now, in the New York Metropolitan area, over two million documented "Latino" residents, representing all regions of the Western Hemisphere and doubtless, many thousands more (including Brazilians) who are "undocumented." Twenty-two percent of the U.S. Hispanic population in the year 2000 lived in four counties—Los Angeles County, California; Miami-Dade County, Florida; Harris County, Texas; and Cook County, Illinois. A 53 percent increase occurred in the number of people of Mexican origin in the United States between 1990 and 2000, comprising 13 million people. Mexicans now constitute 58 percent of the 35.5 million Latinos in the United States. [see http://www.census.gov for "The Hispanic Population" brief]. The increasing attention paid by politicians to the "Hispanic" or "Latino" vote reflects the political implications of these changes.
George W. Bush, despite his oddly dysfunctional syntax, is more fully aware of these momentous long term shifts than many of the old-line cold warriors he has appointed in the foreign policy and national security arena. George P. Bush, his handsome half-Mexican nephew, son of Jeb Bush, the Governor of Florida, became his special envoy to the Hispanic community during the presidential election. Bush has made "the neighborhood"—as his National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice likes to call the Western Hemisphere—a major item on his foreign policy agenda. This has made the "Europeans," as Washington likes to collectively lump together the peoples in the Eurasian Peninsula south of the Russian border and west of the Bosphoros, nervous. As well it should. Bush did not go off to see British Prime Minister Tony Blair, or French President Jacques Chirac, or German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder after his inauguration. He went to meet the new Mexican president on his home turf: Vicente Fox’s ranch in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato.
Thus, last week the predictable European whining which greets any new American president as he met his major European "allies—in "neutral" Sweden of all places, a tidy welfare state about as far in philosophy as one can imagine from that of Crawford, Texas (or even Guanajuato)—was quickly replaced by concern that this affable but distant new U.S. president might indeed be a different breed. And to add insult to injury, the "antiglobalization" demonstrators seem to have concluded the United States was already disengaging, and turned their full fury instead on the hapless leaders of the EU gathered in Gothenburg. The U.S. president meanwhile had by then moved to Poland, a friendly country to America which has not forgot the skill with which George Bush senior extracted them peacefully from behind the Iron Curtain, and whose immigrants and their descendants in the United States form a powerful conservative swing voting bloc in several major political battlefields in the Midwestern states.
Ronald Reagan made the Polish Americans a key component of the coalition that voted him in and kept him in the presidency for eight years over two terms. Democratic by tradition, but conservative Catholic in ethos, this bloc has been susceptible to the cultural messages of Republican presidents who are friends of Poland. Republican Party strategists are hoping Bush can pull off a similar coup by co-opting the socially conservative largely Catholic emerging Latino vote. George W.’s visit to Europe thus was crafted with as much of a domestic as an international agenda in mind. To Spain, where he first set down Air Force One, Bush could show off his "Espanglish" to Prime Minister "Anzar" [sic Aznar]; to Poland, to reassert the Bush legacy; and, because it was on the way, to Sweden where EU leaders were set to meet, and to show them affably just how different and unrepentant this U.S. president is about his agenda.
As President Bush said earlier introducing his National Security Adviser on Cuban Independence Day: "Another member of my team who is here, who helps us have a strong and certain foreign policy, is Señorita Condoleezza Arroz ... That means rice." And as El Tiempo of Bogotá, Colombia has reported about President George W. Bush, "cuando está frente a público latino, él mismo dice llamarse el president ‘Jorge Arbusto’." The only trouble with long term trends and the strategies based on them is that some times they get tripped up by short term politics. With the U.S. Senate split 50-50 as a result of the last election, the decision of Senator James M. Jeffords of Vermont, an independent-minded New Englander, to leave the Republican Party and vote with the Democrats shifted control of the Senate away from the party of President Bush [http://www.senate.gov/~jeffords].
It used to be in Mexico, not Washington, DC, that only one man mattered. No longer. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," William Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest. It is also of "such stuff," as Shakespeare might have said, that are made the ironies of history.
