Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- I Nationalism and Liberalism
- II Construction: State Discourses
- III Contestation: Opposition Discourses
- 5 The Intellectual Reassessment of National Ideology
- 6 Nationalism and the Left: The PRD
- 7 Nationalism and the Right: The PAN
- Conclusion: The Fate of Mexican National Ideology
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The Intellectual Reassessment of National Ideology
from III - Contestation: Opposition Discourses
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- I Nationalism and Liberalism
- II Construction: State Discourses
- III Contestation: Opposition Discourses
- 5 The Intellectual Reassessment of National Ideology
- 6 Nationalism and the Left: The PRD
- 7 Nationalism and the Right: The PAN
- Conclusion: The Fate of Mexican National Ideology
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
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 as the culturally conservative Vuelta magazine, associated with Mexico's most celebrated poet, Octavio Paz, the conservative Reforma newspaper, the pro-PRI Excélsior newspaper, the centre-left Nexos and Proceso magazines, and the left-of-centre newspaper La Jornada. The underlying aim of this intellectual reassessment was to understand how modernization was testing the national idea, and to discern the features of the new society that it would give rise to. Such a reassessment took the form of a newly critical approach to the hitherto dominant tenets of national ideology, which contributed to a wider transformation in intellectual life amounting to a paradigm shift. This ended an intellectual consensus in support of the national ideology as constructed by the post-revolutionary state and permitted a critical deconstruction of the national idea. There was a recognition that nationalism no longer served to legitimize modernization by the PRI state. The critical reassessment of nationalism translated into a dilemma: how to reconcile a unified national idea with the pluralism and interdependence implied by modernization. Deliberations on free trade with the US provided a particular focus for considering how globalization required a reconciliation between autonomy and internationalism. The most coherent efforts to imagine the new community sought to resolve such dilemmas by emphasizing the role of universal culture and exchange in Mexico's inheritance.
The Crisis of Revolutionary Nationalism
Early in the Salinas term, the influential writer and editor Héctor Aguilar Camín, who was sympathetic to Salinas and portrayed in the Mexican press as one of the intellectuals closest to him, and the historian Lorenzo Meyer, an important commentator on politics and often placed by observers towards the left, had become prominent proponents of the idea that Mexico was entering a new era in which the revolutionary tradition was drawing to a definitive end.
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- The Reinvention of MexicoNational Ideology in a Neoliberal Era, pp. 133 - 164Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010