Political Transformation and National Identity Change: Comparative Perspectives by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138978904
Google: boD6jwEACAAJ
Amazon: B00G24VV60
Barnesnoble: B00G24VV60
Goodreads: 19694153
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-01-31T12:26:14+00:00

The Impact of Economic Change on Mexican Political Culture: Questions

Even before the term globalization came into common usage, students of economic integration had expected that the increasing interdependence of societies engaged in integration projects might lead to profound change in national and other social identities.4 Indeed, many students of European integration have argued that for the successful extension of the political integration project of the European Union, the development of political attachment to Europe must either displace or come to complement the national identities now prevalent there.5 In the enthusiasm with which many scholars and public intellectuals treated the end of the Cold War and the apparent rapid acceleration of globalization in the early 1990s, many predicted that nationalist attachments would come under severe threat by the extension of mass communications systems and the global popular culture spread by them.6 Indeed, some observers greeted the prospect of the dissolution of national identity warmly, expecting thereby to discourage the prospect of international conflict associated with aggressive ethno-nationalism.7 Within Mexico, public intellectuals began debating the consequences of economic change for Mexican national identity as early as the late 1980s. The prominent anthropologist, Roger Bartra, for instance, posed the issue of a post-Mexican identity in a series of articles, concluding in a 1999 book:

We may speak of a post-Mexican condition, not only because the [North American Free Trade Area] era immerses us in so-called "globalization," but mainly because the crisis of the political system has put an end to the specifically "Mexican" forms of legitimation and identity.8

Other scholars quickly pointed out that globalization tended to produce cultural backlash, as national and local cultures threatened by globalizing forces rallied to present defenses against cultural homogenization.9 Yet others highlighted the ways that regions previously suppressed within nation-states took advantage of globalization and, in some cases, economic integration processes, to develop regional autonomy and thereby preserve aspects of regional culture from submersion in the broader nation.10 After more than a decade of debate on globalization and identity, scholars are as likely to identify the emergence of cultural liybridities as the consequence of globalization than to lament homogenization and the dissolution of cultural diversity.11

The Mexican experience with globalization and its most intense expression in the Mexican context, economic, integration into the North American economy dominated by the U.S., raises questions about consequences for national identity, perspectives on national sovereignty, and definitions of the national interest at the mass level. Those questions follow from these impacts of globalization and economic integration for Mexico:

the emigration of millions of Mexicans to the U.S. and the resultant formation of extended families stretching across the two societies as well as the return to Mexico of millions who lived for extended periods in the U.S.;

the acceleration of the inflow of U.S. investment, especially in consumer goods markets and popular culture;

a reorientation of the Mexican economy from an import-substitution model to an export orientation, with millions losing and changing jobs in the adjustment;

greatly increased imports of consumer goods and food, the latter forcing many

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