In Mexico’s fiercely contested elections of July 2006, two battle-scarred ideas confronted each other: nationalism and neoliberalism. In the nationalist camp stood Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the candidate of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD); in the economically liberal camp, Felipe Calderón of the ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), the continuity candidate. Calderón won by a whisker – 35.89 per cent to 35.31 per cent – provoking an infuriated López Obrador, the challenger riding the wave of left-wing sentiment that has swept across Latin America since 2000, to denounce the electoral outcome as fraudulent.

Yet, despite their differences, both men had...

The discourse of Mexican nationalism has been of significant functional value to the state-building projects of liberal elites, offering a means of creating a unified citizenry from a divided and unequal society, nation-building. This doctrine evolved in a tense relationship with the economic liberalism espoused by those self-same elites, because of a structural characteristic of Mexican capitalist development: inequality.

A key question raised by the examination of nationalism in Mexico is to what extent national identity can be seen as a justificatory fiction constructed by elites in the pursuit of socio-political change; or as a causative agent in its own...

This chapter addresses a principal question generated by the Salinas reform process: whether nationalism remained of functional value as a legitimizing formula in Mexican politics in this neoliberal period. To do so, it examines how nationalism as a political doctrine was employed by President Salinas, his government and the PRI during hissexenio. Material from this period – speeches or published work by Salinas, his advisers and officials, and articles from the PRI magazineExamen– indicates that nationalism remained valuable to Salinas despite his ambition to reform the state based upon a neoliberal analysis, confirming the long-standing relationship in Mexico between...

The first of the two ways in which liberalism can be said to conflict with nationalism – at the level of the individual – can be examined by looking at discourses surrounding the reforms made in 1991–92 to Article 27 of the Constitution – Mexico’s nation-building charter. The debate surrounding the reforms coalesced around the themes of property ownership and social inclusion, and the changes to property rights they envisaged were accompanied by a changed conception of citizenship. This debate had at its core the tension between the liberal conception of individual property rights and notions of collective patrimony, and these positions,...

Salinistadiscourses on free trade reveal a second major way in which liberalism can be said to conflict with nation-building – at the level of sovereignty. Wedded to the concept of free trade, the Salinas administration redefined the traditional concept of national sovereignty in a way that was most amenable to Mexico’s full participation in the global economy.

The administration believed that Mexico could not separate external factors from internal change, a lesson Mexico had learned at great cost in the two previous decades: internal state reform had to be undertaken in tandem with the pressing demands of the new global...

State and PRI officials were not the only people to reassess nationalism during the Salinas period, and intellectuals across the political spectrum also turned their attention to the national question. Many had undertaken postgraduate studies at prestigious institutions of higher education in the US and France, conducted research at Mexico’s foremost research centres and universities, such as the Colegio de México, where Salinas’s Commerce Secretary, Jaime Serra Puche, taught during the 1980s, the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), or the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Many were linked to or wrote for the same influential publications, such...

During the Salinas era, the left also searched for a new legitimizing formula, and the emergence of a democratic left posing a significant challenge to the PRI was accompanied by a restatement of the struggle against inequality of political liberalism and the nation-building discourse underlying revolutionary nationalism. Yet discourses on the left, and in particular those of the main left-wing party in this period, the PRD, reveal how difficult this search was. The writing and comments of left-wing intellectuals in party documents and publications such asCoyunturaandMotivos, as well as in the mainstream press such as the magazines...

The discourse of members and supporters of the main conservative opposition party in Mexico, the PAN, in party documents, reported comments, and in the publicationsLa NaciónandPalabra, reveals that the right also searched for a new legitimizing formula during the Salinas period. In particular, individualizing trends in Mexican political culture associated with a new civil society contributed to the modification of traditional conceptions of nationality in much PAN discourse. PAN ideology had traditionally been constructed upon a non-materialist source of legitimacy delimiting the public and private realms with moral principles and generating a political vision opposed to both...