What are the sources of the American image around the world? How has it changed in recent years? And what, if anything, can the U.S. government do to shape that image? The American Interest posed these questions to a distinguished group of international observers. Their answers reflect diverse histories and circumstances, and offer some useful counsel.
Mexico has spent the better part of the past two centuries trying to define itself against the reflection of its powerful neighbor to the north. Why has this taken so long? Because Mexico has preferred the process of definition to definition itself. It has preferred ambiguity so that the responsibilities of being either a clear friend or an enemy of the United States did not impose themselves. In this way Mexico has maintained the pride of distance while still enjoying the practical benefits of propinquity.
Mexican perceptions, images and attitudes toward the United States have flowed ineluctably from this studied ambiguity. Americans may be greedy, but Mexicans still benefit from trading with them. Americans may be arrogant in their power, but Mexicans indirectly enjoy the security benefits of that power. Americans may be self-absorbed, but Mexico is too entwined with American life to be effectively ignored.
Ambiguity has its uses. Mexicans have found in recent years that neither Mexico nor the United States can gain what it wishes from the bilateral relationship without making new arrangements in this increasingly integrated world. That forces choices on both sides: How can the United States deal more effectively with migration and security issues, and how can Mexico transform itself socially and economically in such a way that it no longer exports its problems to the north? Since these are co-dependent problems, each country has a vital interest in the other’s success. That is the good news. Since the NAFTA years, however, neither side has been willing to spell this out with clarity. The other news, then, is that these are also deeply ingrained and difficult problems that will not be solved soon.
As Mexico and the United States grapple with their common futures, perceptions will change. Unlike the case in many other circumstances, in which images of the United States form mainly from intellectual abstractions, Mexican images of the United States are more concrete. Throw a rock in the Rio Grande, and someone on the other side gets wet.
The source of Mexican ambiguity toward the United States is both simple and longstanding: The United States has been a powerful and demanding neighbor that is both attractive and repulsive to Mexicans. Maintaining an unresolved vision of the United States proved a pragmatic way to balance profound nationalist currents inside Mexico against Mexico’s relative weakness. And the need for that balance runs very deep in Mexican history. Indeed, some historians claim that Mexico’s very sense of nationhood was born out of the American invasion of 1847. A few American ambassadors to Mexico, too, such as Joel Roberts Poinsett and Henry Lane Wilson, were exceptionally influential in defining key moments of Mexican history, particularly the two most deeply ingrained in the collective memory of the people: the founding of the nation after the Independence War of 1810–21, and the Revolution of 1910.
Even beyond pivotal moments like these, the United States has been an extremely powerful influence in shaping what Mexico is today. From the outset, the clash of traditions and cultures established both the tone and the pattern of the images each has garnered of the other. As Octavio Paz once remarked, the U.S.-Mexican border is not a geographical concept but a political and historical one: “To cross the border between the two countries is to change civilizations.” He observed that Americans are the children of the Reformation “and their origins are those of the modern world”, while Mexicans are the children of the Spanish empire, champions of the Counter-Reformation, “a movement that opposed modernity and failed.” It is no wonder history plays such a key role in defining what being Mexican is all about, and no wonder much of that definition stems from the contrast between Mexico and the United States.
Mexican intellectuals and politicians have developed one set of mixed perceptions of the United States, and ordinary Mexicans a parallel but different set. The average Mexican is a pragmatist. Despite the resentments nurtured by Mexican textbooks from primary through secondary school, most Mexicans are impressed by the United States. Various polls show that Mexicans appreciate the self-reliant character of Americans even while perceiving some haughtiness in them. One may say, then, that they are both disdainful and envious, detached and attracted.
Images, however, are no more static than life itself. Mexican images of the United States have been affected in recent years by the increasing visibility of Mexican-Americans who have joined the U.S. military. Several have died in Iraq, and have been returned for burial in Mexico with full military honors. Many Mexicans see the United States as a sort of second home: By now more than half of Mexico’s population has at least one close relative living there. This has brought each society into better focus for the other, but better focus has magnified raw nerves as well as affinities. The interesting but unsurprising fact is that, while they are far more practically-minded than their politicians, ordinary Mexicans also hold ambiguous perceptions of Americans.
In some ways, ambiguity is a mercy. The U.S.-Mexico relationship is extraordinarily complex. Everything literally goes back and forth: drugs and legitimate trade, migrants and tourists, air and water, security liabilities and assets. It is impossible to deal with all the challenges inherent in the U.S.-Mexican relationship all at once. Late in the 1980s, the two governments agreed to compartmentalize the issues to prevent hard problems from impeding progress on more tractable ones. NAFTA was born out of that agreement. For the first time since each had become independent, both nations decided to exploit the advantages of being neighbors rather than to emphasize the curse of their differences.
The NAFTA exercise has been successful but also revealing. We have learned that economic integration has its limits, and that differences in approach and perception do not vanish with improved exchanges of goods and people. NAFTA was both a test and proof of mutual opportunity, but it turned out to be a showcase of ambiguity itself: Mexico got close enough to exploit the enormous economic power of the American economy and the vitality of its institutions, but it also erected as many barriers as possible to avoid “excessive” contamination.
From the start, Mexico pursued NAFTA not merely as a trade and investment agreement, but as a way to borrow the strength of American institutions to consolidate a more market-based approach to economic management and a more accountable and liberal political system. The results have been mixed. NAFTA has helped to reform Mexican institutions—for example, it not only created a legal structure to protect investment and investors, but moved Mexicans to transform key political institutions, including the Federal Electoral Institute and the Electoral Tribunal, a model for organizing, overseeing and settling electoral disputes. But NAFTA’s institutional impact was not as extensive as many hoped it would be. Democracy did not come to Mexico in a straight line from the United States, or anywhere else. Rather than having a clean, amicable and planned transition from a semi-authoritarian political system to a modern democracy, Mexico stumbled from one extreme to the other. Finally in 2000 Mexico experienced the first legal and peaceful alternation of parties in government since the middle of the 19th century. It appeared that it could develop a mature relationship of equals with the United States on that basis. But a combination of incompetence, bad luck and old baggage made that impossible. Ambiguity remained.
From the end of 2000 until the beginning of the fateful September of 2001, Mexico had displayed an extraordinary new foreign policy. The new administration of President Vicente Fox, showing off its new democracy with strength and self-confidence, called on the new Bush Administration to focus on its southern partner by fixing the issue of migration and providing funds to modernize Mexico. But the United States was not the Fox government’s only objective: The new Mexican democracy wanted to take on the world, and so the government worked its way to a seat on the Security Council of the United Nations without really knowing what to do with it. From that perch the Fox Administration tried to compel the United States to solve Mexico’s problems without offering anything in exchange. When 9/11 came, Mexico proved incapable of showing even token solidarity; instead, even at such a critical time, it fought against the United States in the UN Security Council.
Then and Now
Although the United States and Mexico each has its own preferences for the bilateral agenda and its own vision of the relationship as a whole, the two have proven capable of working together. Most challenging, however, are those controversial issues each sees as crucial to a closer understanding, particularly migration and security. These are the issues that will make or break the prospect of quickening economic integration while enhancing security cooperation. Given the nature of this peculiar relationship, Mexico tends to define both the direction and the speed of interaction despite the fact that the United States is the more powerful partner. At present, however, Mexicans appear incapable of engaging in a deeper commitment largely because their politicians want European-style benefits without the genuine economic integration that alone can establish the wealth required to finance them.
Migration, meanwhile, has become the number one foreign policy priority of Mexican politics. This topic overwhelms all else, from wars in faraway places to scandal and gossip of assorted types, when it comes to generating perceptions. All of the Mexican energy better spent on genuine internal reform is instead being disgorged as advice to Americans (and, implicitly, to Mexican residents in the United States) on what to do about immigration. That is why, in a country in which there is little agreement on anything these days, legalizing Mexicans living in the United States and liberalizing the (legal) flow of Mexicans to the United States have become proof-works of nationhood.
And what is this advice? The analytical basis of this advice stems from demographic compatibility: Mexico has surplus semi-skilled and unskilled labor, and the United States needs that labor. The political and moral argument stems from the abuse that some illegal, or undocumented, Mexicans face at the U.S. border or in U.S. territory once they have crossed. Mexicans see immigration into the United States as a right (or, at the very least, as an “inescapable need” for both economic reasons and political stability) and thus expect the American government to make big strides on this front as its primary focus of the bilateral relationship.
Security is an equally relevant issue and both sides agree, at least conceptually, on what it requires. Mexico’s government wants to secure the country’s borders to guarantee the safety of Americans living in Mexico and to make certain that no terrorist exploits Mexico to get to the United States. There is further agreement on the means necessary to do this and the Mexican government has made great strides on this front, particularly on immigration controls. It is not as clear, however, what would happen in Mexico should the immigration issue be dealt with effectively in Washington. Significant U.S. immigration reform would compel Mexico to actually control its borders and enforce its laws, and that would likely wreak havoc on Mexico’s domestic consensus on migration: As with any bilateral relationship, it is far easier to maintain consensus when somebody else has to bear the main burden.
Where To?
Globalization requires the Mexican government and Mexican society as a whole to make certain choices. Effective and functional economic integration is necessary, and the vehicle for it, NAFTA, already exists. Everybody in Mexico knows that there is no alternative to a closer and more effective economic relationship with the United States, but what is rational is not always palatable to those holding a philosophical, ideological or pragmatic preference for distance.
Ever since NAFTA was negotiated, Mexico has been a domestic policy and political issue in the United States. Rapidly growing immigration flows accentuated this fact, with the result that there are no easy solutions to existing problems and the perceptions that arise from them. Even worse, the fact Mexico and the United States are factors within each other’s domestic politics creates perverse dynamics that affect perceptions and reduce the room for compromise. Those perceptions say that the United States can never be open and accommodating enough for Mexico, and Mexico can never be responsible and reliable enough for the United States.
There is, in the end, only one way to break this lock, and that involves reducing the disparity of wealth between the United States and Mexico. Immigration and security will always be in the process of being solved, but will never actually be solved, until the core issue of Mexico’s long-term development is overcome. Only then can there be a truly normal and unambiguous U.S.-Mexican relationship, and that is why the American administration must be willing to think “outside the box” about how to help Mexico help itself, and why the Mexican government must be willing to stop exporting its responsibilities as well as its laborers and get its act together.
Obviously, these issues are affecting the current electoral process in Mexico, which will culminate on December 1, 2006 when a new president will assume office. Though most Mexicans are clear about what they want with and from the United States, there are divisions over how Mexico can best get it. Two of the three leading candidates—Roberto Madrazo from PRI and Felipe Calderón from PAN—see the United States as part of the solution to Mexico’s ills, and would support a closer creative working relationship. The third, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, would emphasize Mexico’s differences with the United States and avoid close contact, very much along the lines of Mexico’s deeply nationalistic era of the PRI years, particularly of the 1970s. He would rather privilege the development of the domestic market and reduce exchanges with the United States than further integrate the two economies.
However, despite some ideological similarities with other leftist governments in the south of the continent, the content of a potential Lopez Obrador Administration would be rather different: more emphasis on the domestic social and political arena and less on cross border exchanges; more distance vis-à-vis the United States, but no conflict with it. Although populist in thrust, Mr. Lopez Obrador is not an anti-American along the lines of Hugo Chavez or Evo Morales. But both the relationship with and the image of the United States in Mexico would be deeply affected by such a political outcome. At its core, a Lopez Obrador administration would entail a critical departure from the era of modernization and reform that brought closeness, economic as well as political, among these two contrasting neighbors. The best one could hope for in such a scenario would be an era of benign neglect until conditions made it imperative, once again, to deal with each other.
It is astonishing, when one thinks about it, that with all the discussion about development and nation-building in the Middle East, so few North Americans—U.S. and Mexican nationals alike—realize that the most urgent and strategically significant case for creative development and nation-building is between the United States and Mexico. But, as in tango, both nations will have to step up to the challenge this implies.