One of the topics that continues to draw North American and Mexican scholarly interest is the role of the state. In these two works, a U.S. academic and a former Mexican academic turned politician examine the state’s postrevolutionary evolution; but their two approaches could not be more different. Julie Erfani is primarily interested in exploring the state in terms of its sovereignty, and its portrayal in popular mythology as compared to its decision-making reality. Essentially, she sets forth her belief that Mexico’s claim of an all-powerful state is supported in its legal structure, but that the state’s actual power is minimal (p. 3).
After a brief overview of historical experiences relevant to state building, Erfani explores Mexico after 1924, initiating her search in terms of revolutionary nationalism as encoded in the 1917 Constitution. She attempts to demonstrate that Mexico established a number of myths about economic development and social justice to benefit the underclass, and that the notion of state sovereignty was a crucial element in allowing the state to act as benefactor. While this ideology was, according to the author, a major contribution of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), successive governments, if indeed they were interested in achieving such goals, were basically ill equipped (in terms of an autonomous and strong state) to fulfill such desires. Erfani correctly argues that the state’s legitimacy and strength were associated with the strength of the presidency; and as this institution and the party that controlled it declined in the eyes of the citizenry, so too did the state’s influence (p. 125).
Erfani concludes her work by arguing that state sovereignty and strength eventually became associated with technocracy and technocratic leadership, and that this recent trend was an attempt to shore up a declining state. One of the difficulties raised by her overall argument is that she tends to see Mexican development solely in terms of her conceptualization of a strong state, equated with an economically interventionist state. This limits the usefulness of other explanations of development, as well as other state conceptualizations. Also, her text lacks some clarity in establishing the linkages between the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexican political leadership, and the state. While her analysis of recent developments in the Mexican bureaucracy, and specifically the program and budget agency, is revealing and helpful, the inflexibility of her theoretical constructs limits her insights.
Luis Medina Peña takes a more traditional approach. Although, like Erfani, he argues that the state is the primary actor on the Mexican political scene, he credits it with resolving a longstanding Mexican dilemma: the peaceful transition of power while maintaining political continuity and stability. Furthermore, Medina believes that the dominance of a single party was a crucial variable in establishing the state’s role.
In a series of straightforward and objective chapters, he explores the strategies Mexico chose for economic and political development and the consequences of those strategies for the state. Unlike Erfani, he categorizes the state as strong; he even suggests, for the first time, that those historical strategies made it influential. He does not argue, however, that it was an ideal state; he agrees with most analysts that it sacrificed political pluralism, or at least did not represent equally the interests of all Mexicans. Indeed, he concludes that the advent of political liberalism hastened the Mexican state’s decline. He is highly critical of the Mexican elite culture that favored winning elections at any cost (p. 287). Yet he is more interested in speculating about the political changes pluralism has wrought, and (in 1993) views the increasing autonomy of local powers as not yet definitive.
Because Medina does not define the state’s role in such strict, narrow terms as Erfani’s, he does not mourn the state’s reduction in influence, seeing it instead as part of a global trend. If one accepts Erfani’s interpretations, Medina’s work can be read both as a descriptive analysis of Mexico’s political and economic evolution and a personal revelation of the political class that altered the state’s goals and influence in the 1980s and 1990s.
