The Carlos Salinas years (1988–94) were an eminently polarising period in Mexico, and this book is a marvellous attempt at outlining one major ideological fault line, namely the meaning and content of Mexican nationalism. By ‘the reinvention of Mexico’ Gavin O'Toole means principally the reinvention of nationalism and its concrete use as a political tool by the PRI regime. O'Toole's key claim is that nationalism remained of functional value as a legitimising discourse to elites pursuing radical reform of the state. As Salinas deepened an essentially neoliberal economic programme, the regime launched a concerted attempt to use nationalism to support these very policies.
Given the nature of Mexico's drastic transformation from a heavily state-led to a market-oriented economy under a party that claimed continuity with the Mexican Revolution, it is hardly surprising that the ruling PRI sought to justify its conversion. This book, a richly detailed scholarly endeavour that is, moreover, highly readable, excels in depicting the great strides the party took to distance itself from statism while maintaining its revolutionary credentials.
O'Toole deems the years ‘key junctures of modernity’ (p. 4), with renewed interest in ideology and ‘contestation of the national idea’ (p. 16) across the political spectrum. The PRI's key challenge was to separate nationalism from its heritage of ‘revolutionary nationalism’, a term Salinas even had removed from the party's official discourse. In its stead, Salinas presented ‘social liberalism’, a reinvented nationalism permeated by anti-statism. Advisers such as Jesús Reyes Heroles and Juan Rebolledo outlined and disseminated the new ideas chiefly through the PRI's Fundación Mexicana and the party organ, Examen.
O'Toole does not give Salinas short shrift, but takes his discourse and ideas seriously. Social liberalism is analysed as an ‘assertive democratic discourse’ (p. 60) in favour of a stronger civil society autonomous from the tutelage of a state that had appropriated its rights. The tie between economic reform and ‘sovereignty’ is here crucial: ‘Salinas argued that inequality threatened the country's unity and thus its power of self-determination; sovereignty, as a function of unity, could be strengthened by the pursuit of social justice’ (p. 61), from economic growth rather than the old social pacts.
The reform of Article 27 of the Constitution was a key battleground, where Salinas directly confronted the ‘nationalist mythology’ (p. 84) of the ejido. With the redistribution of land a crowning achievement of the Mexican Revolution, ending the right of campesinos to petition for land and allowing ejido privatisation was bound to be controversial. President Lázaro Cárdenas, who redistributed most ejido land, was now regarded as an aberration and even a counter-revolutionary. In Salinas' discourse, Cárdenas was accused of ending campesino autonomy, while expanding a paternalistic and corporatist state. Even the earlier revolutionary icon, Emiliano Zapata, was enlisted in this battle, with zapatismo redefined as pro-capitalist, against the collectivist and socialist ideas of Cárdenas.
Salinas comes across as highly sensitive to accusations of endangering sovereignty, while deeply fearing instability, a paradox given the extent and content of his reforms. In the case of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Salinas placed social liberalism in opposition also to neoliberalism, which ‘invited intervention’ (p. 59). In this view, NAFTA would make Mexico less ‘at the whim’ (p. 123) of the United States. Salinas dramatically declared that ‘not all the nations that we know today will survive as sovereign states’ (p. 107). With national sovereignty redefined in relation to participation in the global economy, Mexico needed to reduce its vulnerability by becoming more competitive: its ‘cactus curtain’ (p. 112) had to fall.
Yet this book is not merely about Salinas. By the 1980s economic nationalism no longer appeared a modernising force, and intellectuals such as Roger Bartra found it at odds with Mexico's incipient democratisation. O'Toole argues that on the Left the opposition Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD) nonetheless failed to capitalise on the new situation, remaining ambiguous on developments such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1994 Chiapas rebellion. Despite modernising pressures within the party, its leadership merely restated traditional revolutionary nationalism.
Yet here it is not clear what yardstick the author uses to judge the PRD's lack of success, or the consequences thereof. Do an inconsistent discourse and ‘ideological paralysis’ (p. 168) actually explain the PRD's failure to win elections? The PRD was here reacting not merely to new liberalising trends, but also to the PRI's classic brutality. With both parties hurling charges of treason, the discursive interaction between the PRI and PRD could well have been addressed, as neither was acting in a vacuum.
This critique also applies to the account of the centre-right Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN), where new preoccupations with individual enterprise, human rights and social pluralism challenged traditional party ideas. Yet was the ascent of a modernising democratic wing chiefly a product of structural changes, or linked to the Salinas administration's policies? O'Toole has done a masterful job of recovering these internal debates, yet, given the interpretation of Salinas as a radical moderniser, the interplay between the actors should have been more fully explored.
It is perhaps not the main task of a discursive work to point out gaps between rhetoric and practice, however blatant the contradictions of the Salinas regime, and the book rarely explores such disjunctures, though it notes that Salinas' economic programme ‘contradicted its often negative depictions of neoliberalism by reproducing neoliberal prescriptions internally’ (p. 123). Given O'Toole's key argument of nationalism's legitimising value, a more important omission is any clear measure of this function. Did the discourse serve to reorient the future course of Mexico, or merely to justify, either a priori or post hoc, isolated policies? He concludes that Salinas was ‘only partially successful’ in ‘his quest to marry nationalism and the market’ (p. 230), yet without specifying the criteria for success. Should Salinas be judged in terms of producing a functional discourse, the successes in implementing programmes, or their subsequent performance?
O'Toole, in the end, questions interpretations of nationalism that see it displaced, and points to the 2006 elections in Mexico as evidence of its importance. This is not the same as using it as a legitimising tool to implement new reforms; as he acknowledges, scant evidence exists in the current administration. Yet nationalism is rarely far removed from current Mexican politics. Those who desire a thorough exploration of its content, or the definitive account of the PRI's attempt to redefine it in the 1990s, would do well to read this book.
