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BEYOND THE POLICY FRONTIER
Canada, Mexico, and the Ideological
Origins of NAFTA
By STEPHANIE R. GOLOB*
I
F politics is the art of the possible, foreign policy is also, quite frequently, the art of the impossible. Short of a credible, imminent
threat from an overwhelming external force (which, for example,
brought about Pakistan’s abandonment of its pro-Taliban policy), governments often take pride in and win popular acclaim by demonstrating their willingness—if not their ability—to stand up to external rivals
and project their national identity by refusing to abandon certain historic principles or ideas. Turkey and Greece still forge their modern relationship with an undercurrent of rivalry that often supersedes even
their legalized NATO bonds; similarly, China may be willing to facilitate
Taiwan’s entry into the WTO, but only if it preserves the right to deny
its prodigal territory official sovereign recognition abroad. Although
these gestures may seem symbolic and empty to hard-core realists, they
do represent the very real limits placed on governments’ policy choices
by “policy frontiers”—barriers erected by historically held and sacred
ideas of sovereignty, security, and national identity that make certain
choices unavailable as “normal” policy options. To go “beyond the policy frontier,” state elites must risk their own legitimacy, bound up as it
* The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship Program, the Institute for the Study of World Politics, the Mellon Foundation, the Harvard Center for
Latin American and Iberian Studies, the Tinker Foundation, the Fundación México en Harvard, the
Harvard Center for International Affairs’ Inter-American Dialogue Technopols Project, and the
Dean’s Office of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College. Also gratefully acknowledged for their institutional support are the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at
Carleton University in Ottawa; the Departamento de Estudios Internacionales of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) and the Centro de Investigación para el Desarrollo (CIDAC),
both in Mexico City; and the Institute of Latin American and Iberian Studies at Columbia University.
An earlier version of this study was presented at the 97th Annual Meeting of the American Political
Science Association (San Francisco, August 30–September 2, 2001). Research assistance was ably provided by André Ouellet in Ottawa and Danijela Milic in New York. The author is, above all, indebted
to the individuals who agreed to confidential interviews in Mexico City, Monterrey, Ottawa, Toronto,
Montreal, and Washington, D. C., and to the numerous colleagues—starting at Harvard and reaching
across the continent and beyond—who have generously commented on the many previous incarnations of this work.
World Politics 55 (April 2003), 361–98
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often is in the symbolic language of national pride, historical memory,
and defense of the nation.
Canada’s and Mexico’s negotiation and signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) represents a fascinating recent case
of the demise of long-standing policy frontiers. These two countries’
historical resistance to formalized economic integration with the
United States long defied the overwhelming material forces of geography, economic interdependence, and powerful sectoral interests for the
better part of their histories as independent nations. While many will
recall the resistance of Americans to NAFTA during the 1993 GorePerot debates, a longer historical lens reveals that for most of the twentieth century, Canadian and Mexican governments of various partisan
and ideological stripes internally resisted and publicly rejected the bilateral free-trade option, deeming any such arrangement as a fundamental threat to their independent existence. For these two countries,
the decision over whether to pursue free trade with the U.S. was not a
trade policy choice at all; it was a security policy choice, subject to the
same privileging and resorts to raison d’êtat (or national interest) that
enabled them to disregard the economic incentives that have traditionally been cited as the motor driving integration in North America.1
In this historical context, the surprising and precedent-defying decisions by Canada (1985) and Mexico (1990) to actively seek bilateral
free-trade negotiations with the United States raises a key question that
this article seeks to answer: under what conditions and through which
mechanisms can previously forbidden policy options become recoded,
enabling the policy frontier to be transcended?
The first section begins by constructing the concept of the policy
frontier, drawing both from studies of the national interest in international relations (IR) theory and from comparative historical institutionalism and path dependency, in order to identify and understand the
conditions and mechanisms that promote foreign policy stasis or continuity. This argument is unabashedly statist; it challenges both the
structural determinacy of neorealism in IR theory and the excessive
contingency of a pluralist or interest-group-based theory of foreign
policy change by arguing that the state itself and specific “home” institutions within the state construct and defend the policy frontier in ways
that render it less vulnerable to change than other policies.
1
See, for example, Walter Mattli, The Logic of Regional Integration: Europe and Beyond (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 49–50. For an argument that privileges the role of big business in
Mexico’s free-trade decision, see Strom C. Thacker, Big Business, the State, and Free Trade: Constructing
Coalitions in Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
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Next, I will briefly illustrate the concept of the historic free-trade
policy frontier in Canadian and Mexican foreign policies and consider
the analytical dimensions added by the comparison of these cases; their
differences, as well as their striking parallels, have important implications for the construction of a historical-institutionalist argument.
The remainder of the article will identify the conditions and the institutional and ideological mechanisms that led both Canada and Mexico to cross the free-trade policy frontier in the 1980s. Specifically, I
contend that the convergence of a “critical juncture” (the international
economic shock of 1981–82) with domestic legitimacy crises for both
countries’ governing elites (attributable to their failure to protect their
nations from the ravages of the world economy) weakened the institutional hegemony of nationalist foreign policy bureaucracies that had
defended the frontier as well as the ideological hegemony of statistnationalist ideas and symbols. In this uncertain context, idea-advocating
policy entrepreneurs operating inside the state apparatus made the case
to their superiors not only for the free-trade option but also for a
“bridge ideology” to enable a new conceptualization of sovereignty, security, and identity that would reconcile nationalist sentiments with
globalized aspirations. Thus, to go beyond the policy frontier, it was
deemed necessary not only to normalize the free-trade option, but to
actually place it at the very center of a new conceptualization of how
the national interest would be defined and advanced.
The comparison of the Canadian and Mexican cases reveals not only
their common trajectory but also the variations within the policy frontier model that will help modify and specify it for application to future
cases. Canada and Mexico—two countries differing in their level of development, political regime type, bureaucratic structure, societal access
to the policy-making process, and political culture—shared a similar
perspective on the free-trade option throughout their respective histories, yet both transcended the policy frontier in predictable ways distinctive to their specific institutional and ideological environments. In the
concluding section, I will consider these variations and their implications for the future study of historically resisted foreign policy change.
DO NOT CROSS THIS LINE: THE CONCEPT OF THE
POLICY FRONTIER
Why are certain foreign policy options considered taboo or simply kept
off the agenda as necessarily unthinkable or self-destructive? In other
words, how are policy frontiers exiling these offensive options
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developed, perpetuated, and defended over time, despite changes in
both international and domestic incentives? In international relations
theory, particularly as it is understood in the realist paradigm, policy
continuity is a reflection of the national interest, which is viewed as the
state’s overriding objectives—either its bedrock survival or its powerprojection imperatives. Such a minimalist and universalist view of the
national interest, however, cannot account for those limitations on policy choices that serve no objective strategic purpose, but rather reflect
subjective symbolic or historical understandings of the nation’s sovereignty, security, and identity. In certain cases, because of political and
ideological characteristics specific to a particular country perceiving a
threat to its survival, an analyst cannot simply read off the national interest by drawing on neorealists’ stock of material indicators (such as
menacing shifts in relative capabilities) or on neoliberals’ economic
cost-benefit calculus for cooperation.
At the same time, the concept of the national interest is not altogether useless, provided that (1) it is shifted from the smooth and automatic world of IR theory into the realm of foreign policy analysis and
(2) the content of the national interest is determined not only by the
abstract survival imperatives of the nation but also by those of the state,
its elites, and their strategies of legitimation. This entails three interrelated arguments.
First, by claiming that the content of the national interest may vary
according to a given state’s interpretation of its survival imperatives, I
am challenging structural arguments that view the state as a generic, reactive unit within the international system whose actions result from
materially driven “behavior” rather than self-determined “policy.”
Second, I am arguing against a pluralist or interest-group-based
model of the state, in which the state serves as a neutral arena for competition between societal groups, and foreign policy (like any other policy) is a mere output of that competitive process. Instead, I argue that
the national interest is defined and shaped primarily within a relatively
autonomous institutional entity called “the state,” which can, in fact, insulate certain policy options from societal pressure. These options can
then be interpreted according to paradigms that do not necessarily correspond to the so-called imperatives of a materially driven system.
Finally, I look inside the state and link the content of national interest to the legitimation needs of those who run the state, which is seen
most transparently in these elites’ own interpretations of what constitutes security for the nation (and for themselves). As Weber has
pointed out and as Gramsci has also observed, political authority can-
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not be maintained through coercion alone; it also depends upon persuasion or some form of ideational justification. Although modern liberal democracies rely less on coercion to retain power than do
authoritarian regimes, both nonetheless rely upon rhetorical and symbolic politics to justify their authority. Furthermore, both face the possibility (to different degrees, to be sure) of losing power if they fail to
fulfill their perceived obligations. Popular sovereignty, the idea that underlies and legitimates modern democratic regimes, is derived from the
inherent threat of revolt if the people sense that their will is not being
carried out—for example, when state actions threaten closely held values such as individual freedom or equality. Authoritarian regimes—
even those with vast repressive apparatuses—maintain power over time
only if they can convince a significant base of citizens that their regime
best upholds the nation’s values or protects its historic identity.
Foreign policy, with its focus on common threats and national unity,
is just the kind of policy that both types of regimes can rely upon to
make a high-impact, symbolic connection to the source of their legitimacy. Officials interpret the national interest in terms of what constructivists have called a nation’s “shared” or “corporate” identity;2 they
justify their own authority by equating the survival of the nation and its
distinct corporate identity with the survival of their state. Their ultimate goal is to shape the definition of national interest so as to reinforce the political and emotional connection between citizens and the
state through a core narrative of identity.3 In this way, they demonstrate
the state’s identification with, and commitment to, the nation’s highest
ideals and its most treasured self-schemas.
However, this selective interpretation of the national interest, particularly when it results in the elimination of certain policy options, may
not always produce “rational” policy preferences—that is, those that prioritize material (military or economic) interests predicted by systemic or
societal pressures. For example, the state may define the national interest in a way that exiles logical or lucrative options that favor private
and/or foreign interests, thus resisting its own capture and enhancing
its legitimacy by adding to the symbolic language of patriotism.4 Simi2
See Alexander Wendt, “Identity and Structural Change in International Politics,” in Yosef Lapid
and Friedrich Kratochwil, eds., The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne
Rienner, 1996).
3
In the domestic context, Rogers Smith refers to “constitutive stories” of citizenship. See Rogers
Smith, “Citizenship and the Politics of People-Building,” Citizenship Studies 5 ( January 2001), 75.
4
Here, I depart from Krasner’s statist “not the private interest” view of national interest, which relies on purely empirical tests—rather than interpretive analysis—to establish a separate, state-defined
set of foreign policy imperatives. See Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 10–14.
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larly, rather than making wholesale distinctions between “security” issues and “economic” or “cultural” issues, the state is at liberty to define
which specific policy options threaten the nation as defined by the state,
and can then justify this “securitizing” accordingly.5 Thus, policy frontiers
are often erected in issue-areas in which a material threat to national integrity or survival is objectively absent but in which the defense of the national interest is weighted with (subjective) symbolic significance.
To better understand the mechanisms that limit a nation’s foreign
policy agenda, it is necessary to examine the historical nature of policymaking—how past decisions affect future choices. Comparative politics offers two approaches to this issue that can be fruitfully combined
to offer a compelling explanatory model of both the extreme continuity
implied in policy frontiers and the rupture that comes from transcending them. The literature on policy legacies provides insights into the
politics within the state that supplant (and defend against) public contestation in order to limit policy options over time. Here, the state is
neither a system-determined billiard ball nor a societally dominated
arena. Rather, it is viewed as a relatively autonomous concert of institutions whose constituent agencies form “policy legacies”—political,
ideational, and bureaucratic interest-based templates of acceptable and
nonacceptable policy options that remain relatively stable even in the
face of legislative or popular/electoral pressures.6 Conceived as types of
policy legacies, policy frontiers are constructed and perpetuated institutionally via the “permanent housing” of exiled options inside bureaucracies that not only are insulated from outside constituencies but also
are imbued with ideologies that venerate the role of the agency in defending the policy frontier against other agencies, as well as against future chief executives seeking to change course.7
However, the policy legacy approach, with its emphasis on continuity, does not adequately account for change. Here, a second approach to
the historical nature of policy making—historical institutionalism and
5
According to David Campbell, foreign policy is an ongoing exclusionary practice that separates
the (threatening) outside from the (legitimate) inside, and should be viewed as “one of the borderproducing practices central to the production and reproduction of the identity [of the state] in whose
name it operates.” See David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of
Identity, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 68.
6
For an analysis that uses policy legacies to explain national variations on the welfare state, see Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol, “State Structures and the Possibilities for ‘Keynesian’ Responses to the
Great Depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States,” in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer,
and Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
7
Krasner notes the ability of the state to shift “decision arenas” in order to insulate particular policies from private influence, but this shifting is strategic and reactive, whereas policy frontiers develop
permanent status and thus limit the state’s present and future ability to relocate policies. See Krasner
(fn. 4), 83–86.
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path dependency—provides a useful metaphoric vocabulary for identifying and comparing the processes that establish and may potentially
dislodge institutional and ideological barriers to policy change.8 The
first metaphor is that of the critical juncture—a destabilizing event that
sends a polity from path A onto path B and that also forecloses the future availability of policy options associated with either its former path
A or alternative paths C, D, and E. The shift to path B is not the random start of a process of blind or automatic perpetuation of practice
often associated with a path-dependent view of institutions; it is a moment of state relegitimation. The discontinuity itself must be incorporated into the core narrative of national identity—either as a heroic
moment or a shared national trauma—and institutions and ideology
must then be reoriented to equate the state’s new defense of limits on
the policy agenda with the defense of the nation writ large.
Next, a second metaphor—that of mechanisms of reproduction—can
account for the feedback processes that perpetuate the limits on an exiled policy option. For example, the quarantine of the option to a relatively insulated and privileged bureaucracy would represent a key
institutional mechanism of reproduction of policy frontiers. In turn, this
institutional mechanism would be reinforced ideologically both inside the
state through that institution’s internal philosophy and outside through
official rhetoric, public education, and, in some cases, propaganda.
Most notably, these metaphors can also adapt to both change and
continuity. It seems plausible that new critical junctures could destabilize the mechanisms of reproduction, thereby opening the way for a
reevaluation of options previously exiled by the policy frontier. It is only
in retrospect, however, that critical junctures may appear to “cause” policy change singlehandedly, and even then, appearances can be deceiving.
Over time, the feedback effects of the mechanisms of reproduction render policy frontiers self-perpetuating and resistant to crisis and uncertainty; therefore, some potential critical junctures have been incapable of
shifting the path. Instead, critical junctures are more appropriately regarded as necessary but not sufficient as causal factors: they trigger
processes of politics within the state that can potentially transform or undermine the institutions that defend policy frontiers and the ideological
messages that support them. At the same time, not all critical junctures
are created equal; those that combine a material shock with a damaging
blow to state legitimacy are the most critical and potentially destabilizing examples. In this context of state insecurity, the insulation and
8
On these metaphors and their use in the literature, see Kathleen Thelen, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999), 398.
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privileging of home institutions is liable to be compromised and the
search for new solutions and for new narratives of national destiny
greatly intensifies. It is thus the interaction of the critical juncture with
the mechanisms of reproduction—the form and the content of the policy frontier—that offers the greatest possibility of change.
THE FREE-TRADE POLICY FRONTIER IN NORTH AMERICA
How, then, was a policy frontier constructed to resist economic integration in North America? The answer lies in the historical connection
of sovereignty, security, and identity in the definition of national interest in Canada and Mexico. Historically, both countries have defined
national identity9 in contrast to and to be defended against the United
States.10 Despite the push factor of economic asymmetries and the positive material incentives of the vertical pull toward continentalism, officials successfully engineered various symbolic policies—including
state-enshrining industrial policy;11 foreign policy independence;12 and
the “sacred sectors” policy that protected culture in Canada13 and oil in
Mexico14—to connect nationalist state legitimation with resistance to
integration. Ideologically, economic sovereignty became equated with
political sovereignty in the conceptualization of national interest. Consequently, the security and identity of the nation—its continued independent existence—became dependent upon the state standing up (if only
9
I focus exclusively on “pan-Canadian nationalism,” or an ideology of national identification aimed
at all Canadians but resonating primarily with English-speaking citizens.
10
On Canada, see Sylvia B. Bashevkin, True Patriot Love: The Politics of Canadian Nationalism
(Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3–6; and Allan Smith, Canada—An American Nation? Essays on Continentalism, Identity and the Canadian Frame of Mind (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1994). On Mexico, see Héctor Águilar Camín, “La invención de México:
Notas sobre nacionalismo e identidad nacional,” Nexos 187 (1993); and Frederick Turner, The Dynamics of Mexican Nationalism (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 101–253.
11
Canada’s turn-of-the-century program of import substitution industrialization and national railroad construction was christened “The National Policy.” See Craig Brown, “The Nationalism of the
National Policy,” in Peter Russell, ed., Nationalism in Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Co. of Canada,
1966).
12
Canada sought a separate international identity through “middle-power multilateralism,” while
Mexico carved out a distinct role as a defender of “principles” based on international law. On Canada,
see Andrew F. Cooper, “Multilateral Leadership: The Changing Dynamics of Canadian Foreign Policy,” in John English and Norman Hillmer, eds., Making a Difference? Canada’s Foreign Policy in a
Changing World Order (Toronto: Lester Publishing, 1992). On Mexico, see Guadalupe González,
“Tradiciones y premisas: Política exterior de México,” in Rosario Green and Peter H. Smith, eds., La
política exterior y la agenda México y Estados Unidos (Foreign policy and the Mexico-U.S. agenda) (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989).
13
See Patricia M. Goff, “Invisible Borders: Economic Liberalization and National Identity,” International Studies Quarterly 44 (December 2000).
14
See Mario Ramón Beteta, “The Role of the Oil Industry in Mexico,” in Pamela S. Falk, ed., Petroleum and Mexico’s Future (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987).
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selectively and to symbolic effect) to the threat of absorption via the
Trojan horse of commerce. In this historical and ideological context, a
policy frontier was constructed in Canadian and Mexican foreign policies that made it virtually impossible for policymakers to treat the option of comprehensive bilateral free-trade with the United States as a
normal policy choice, despite the systemic pressures of interdependence
and the societal pressures of national and transnational business interests.
The comparison of the parallel Canadian and Mexican policy frontiers requires us to do more than simply determine how these counterintuitive barriers were erected and fortified over decades. It also
compels us to investigate why two countries at such different levels of
development and with such markedly different relative positions in the
international economy would follow parallel paths, contradicting the
classic comparative assumption that “most different” cases should diverge. One would also expect that the country with more resources
would be more likely to be successful in resisting external pressures to
change internal policy. However, Mexico defended its policy frontier
with equal if not greater vigor throughout the period under examination, while Canada, not Mexico, came closest to relenting in the late
1940s.15 Canada and Mexico also differed greatly in their dependence
upon foreign trade, but again, Canada, with a more open and tradedependent economy, resisted bilateral free-trade with the United States
even as it pursued multilateral trade via the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT) system. Therefore, something other than material, structural factors was responsible for pulling these very different
countries in this same, apparently illogical, direction.
The vast internal, institutional, and cultural differences between
these two countries make their parallel paths all the more remarkable.
First, countries with similar political and economic systems are considered more likely to integrate. Accordingly, Canadian resistance to freetrade with the U.S. appears more puzzling than Mexican intransigence.
Whereas U.S. differences with Spanish-speaking, revolutionary, and
authoritarian one-party Mexico seem obvious, the shared language and
similar liberal democratic political systems of Canada and the United
States made them better matched free-trade partners for the better part
of the twentieth century. Second, institutional and political-cultural
differences should logically translate into different, not similar, propensities to construct and maintain policy frontiers. Historically, Canada’s
tradition of open party competition, its free press, and its more trans15
See Michael Hart, “Almost But Not Quite: The 1947–48 Bilateral Canada-U.S. Negotiations,”
The American Review of Canadian Studies 19 (Spring 1989).
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parent and societally accessible policy-making process contrasted
greatly with Mexico’s political culture of the carro completo (loosely
translated as “the bandwagon”), in which political conflict was never exhibited openly, the ruling party made room for a broad range of societal
groups through co-optation and side payments, and the only politics
that mattered was factional and safely contained within the holy trinity
of state-party-government. One would therefore expect that policy
frontiers could not be sustained in the open, transparent, and depoliticized Canadian policy-making environment, whereas they would be
virtually indestructible in the relatively closed, clubby, and politicized
Mexican context.
Closer examination of the historical evidence reveals, however, that
these two dissimilar cases, contrary to the aforementioned expectations,
did indeed follow a common path toward policy frontier construction
and perpetuation (as outlined in Table 1). At the same time, within this
general pattern, Canada and Mexico could be seen as two points on a
continuum whose distance from one another reflected important differences in the depth and/or the vulnerability of their respective policy
frontiers within their distinct institutional contexts. For Canada, whose
historical touchstone was appropriately the signal 1911 election in
which the public punished the Liberal Party for supporting reciprocity
with the U.S., the policy frontier was out in the open and subject to the
kind of periodic public debate that made free-trade “the issue that
would not go away.”16 Political parties, interest groups (such as business
and labor), and individual citizens themselves voiced opposing viewpoints on this issue. Yet after 1911, debate was subject to self-censorship,
as no party dared endorse the free-trade option and no politician dared
campaign on its behalf. In that sense, the resurgence of the free-trade
option in the early 1980s was consistent with Canada’s historic pattern
of cyclical reconsideration; the key question to be answered, then, is
how the option became normalized within the state to the point where a
politician would be able to consider adopting it publicly.
In Mexico, by contrast, free-trade was more accurately characterized
as “the policy option that dare not speak its name.” There was no open
debate on the issue for decades, and any initiatives toward greater integration coming from north of the border were dismissed out of hand.
Moreover, as in other areas of policy making, nobody could take the
16
J. L. Granatstein, “Free Trade: The Issue That Will Not Go Away,” in Denis Stairs and Gilbert R.
Winham, eds., The Politics of Canada’s Economic Relationship with the United States, vol. 29 of The Collected Research Studies of the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for
Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985).
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TABLE 1
THE “FREE-TRADE POLICY FRONTIER” IN CANADIAN
MEXICAN FOREIGN POLICIES
Critical Juncture
Historical Touchstone
AND
Mechanisms of Reproduction
Institutional
Home of
Frontier Defense
Ideological
and Symbolic
Reinforcement
Canada 1911 free-trade election;
Tories defeat Liberals
by painting “reciprocity”
trade agreement with
the U.S. as the end of
Canada’s independent
existence
Department of External
Affairs; its status as the
home of Canadian international identity is
based upon its role as a
“linchpin” between
Britain and the U.S.;
“middle power multilateralism” and diversification of relations
public and diplomatic
rhetoric; support of
national broadcasting;
cultural policy of incentives for “national
content”; support for
Canadian studies programs; royal commissions
Mexico 1938 nationalization of
oil; the PRM (later PRI)
consolidates state power
and revolutionary legitimacy based on its
ability to fulfill the
promise of the Revolution (1910–20), expecially via gaining
national control over
subsoil rights from private foreign (mainly
U.S.) hands
Secretaría de Relaciones
Exteriores (SRE); its status as the home of
Mexican international
identity is based upon
principled defense of
sovereignty under international law; diversification of relations
public and diplomatic
rhetoric; president’s addresses to the nation
(Informes); control of
public education and
promulgation of the
“secular religion” of
Mexican revolutionary
nationalism
initiative until the President himself either indicated he would be open
to an idea or actually decided in its favor and was then open to post hoc
negotiations on implementation issues. The private sector, initially exiled from the official party (the PRI) in public for its counterrevolutionary profile and later controlled via peak organizations,17 was
conditioned to such backdoor reactive politics and was also overwhelmingly protectionist. Even within the state, those favoring more
market-oriented approaches who entered the Finance Ministry and the
Central Bank in the 1940s and 1950s understood that advancing the
17
John F. H. Purcell and Susan Kaufman Purcell, “Mexican Business and Public Policy,” in James
M. Malloy, ed., Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 194–96.
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free-trade option would end their careers. In the Mexican case, it was
the consideration—not only the selection—of the exiled policy option
that merits examination.
Looking more closely at the state itself, there were also differences
in the stability, professionalization, and autonomy of Canadian and
Mexican bureaucracies. In Mexico’s one-party, presidentialist system,
the portfolios and relative influence of agencies constantly changed to
accommodate a given president’s strategy for policy and for succession,
and politicized personnel continually turned over as factional teams
shifted across bureaucratic lines to follow their political patrons. By
contrast, Canada’s civil servants made more stable careers in agencies
with relatively fixed policy domains, working for and with political appointees of the various governing parties. At the same time, Canada’s
bureaucracy, in comparison with that of Mexico, was more autonomous
from its executive and from party politics, yet less autonomous from societal pressures. Both bureaucracies enjoyed central status as the gatekeeper of policy ideas from the upper reaches of decision making, but
Canada also had more transparent and regular avenues by which outside interest groups and citizens could access the policy process, most
notably via policy papers. Mexico’s bureaucracies often did have “clientele” that they served, but those clients were more often than not organized vertically in the corporatist fashion (that is, trade unions and
peasants inside the party, private sector peak organizations outside) and
socialized to express dissent only in private and to join the presidentled carro completo in public.
Given these distinct patterns, what might occur if the critical juncture were to interfere with the policy frontier’s institutional mechanisms of reproduction (the insulation of the home bureaucracy)? The
disjuncture implied in a critical juncture might render the insulated bureaucracies more “normal” and thereby open them to the regular and
distinct national patterns of policy making as previously outlined. In
the Canadian context, we might expect the free-trade policy frontier to
become vulnerable if the Department of External Affairs itself was to
become more penetrated by outside influences—either societal interest
groups or other groups advancing alternative ideas. In Mexico, however, the very volatility of the bureaucracy or a shift in the balance of
power within the state would seem more likely to weaken the Foreign
Ministry’s (SRE) institutional defenses than would the inflow of societal
pressure into its protective realm.
As we now turn to examining how anti-integrationist policy frontiers were transcended in Canada and Mexico, it will be important to
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note both the similar paths traced by dissimilar systems in line with
each state’s historic framing of the exiled option, and the variations exhibited by those dissimilar systems attributable to the structure, function, and staffing of the institutions at the center of such an ideational
historical-institutionalist argument.
BEYOND THE POLICY FRONTIER: CHOOSING BILATERAL FREETRADE WITH THE U.S.
When the anti-integrationist policy frontier was swept away by Canadian and Mexican state elites in the 1980s and early 1990s, it constituted a truly surprising and historic policy reversal. In this section, I will
argue that the process of challenging and ultimately dissolving the policy frontier paralleled that of its construction and consolidation; that is,
the change can be attributed to a critical juncture that joined external
dislocation with an internal crisis of state legitimacy. This double crisis
then destabilized each of the two primary mechanisms of reproduction,
opening the way for new institutional and ideational processes to consolidate behind a new “national project.” To respond to new, uncertain
international circumstances and rescue their own legitimacy, Canadian
and Mexican state elites saw to it that sovereignty, security, and identity—once equated with anti-integrationism—became consistent with
integration and that free-trade went from being a policy option without
a chance of being perceived as the only chance for the nation’s future
survival.
STEP 1: THE CRITICAL JUNCTURE—EXOGENOUS SHOCK
In both the comparative politics and international political economy
(IPE) literatures, an “exogenous shock,” such as a war or an international
economic crisis, is often cited as an explanation for policy change. For
IPE scholars, such shocks act as a single stimulus that yields varied national responses, thus providing the closest thing they have to a natural
laboratory for studying patterns of policy change. The concept of exogenous shock is also important for understanding path dependency
within an individual nation’s historical trajectory, since it stands to reason that if one critical juncture set a country onto path A, only another
such juncture (or shock) could possibly shift that country onto path B.
Finally, exogenous shock has been identified as a mechanism for bringing new ideas into the policy process by generating demand for new
approaches to cope with the resultant crisis and uncertainty.
In addition to generating new problems to be solved through policy,
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exogenous economic shocks have also served to discredit earlier policy
models that did not predict the crisis, that increased the degree with
which the crisis was felt within the domestic economy, or that were
deemed incompatible with the rules of the new international environment. Even more so than an endogenous shock, such a crisis underscores the emptiness of state promises to defend the nation from
external threats and thus may call into question not only a specific party
or policy but also an entire national project that had been used to legitimate the state. With demands for new solutions intensifying, what
John Keeler has called a “crisis-driven window for reform” may do more
than just allow new ideas onto the government’s agenda; it may actually broaden the scope of what constitutes an acceptable policy.18 Thus,
as Peter Hall has suggested (following Kuhn), “disjunctive experiences”
such as policy failures and exogenous shocks can set off processes that
lead to a more profound ideational change—the “paradigm shift”—
which constitutes a rethinking of policy goals, instruments, and even
the belief system through which policy issues have been perceived and
assessed over time.19
For both Canada and Mexico, the 1981–82 international recession
represented just this type of critical juncture, one that discredited the
nationalist and statist economic policies of the 1970s and opened up a
period of disillusionment and uncertainty over each country’s economic
health and international identity. Heading into the 1980s, both countries had adopted nationalist policies that prioritized the diversification
of economic and political relations and also sought to buffer the shocks
of participating in the world economy via state intervention and limiting foreign investment (often to the consternation of the U.S. government).20 In 1981–82, however, two exogenous shocks converged and
upended these statist strategies. First, the price of oil began to tumble,
negating the strategies adopted in both countries whereby the energy
sector would serve as the engine for industrial development. Second,
real interest rates, pressured by the ballooning U.S. deficit, began to soar.
Together, these shocks sent Canada into its worst recession since the
18
John T. S. Keeler, “Opening the Window for Reform: Mandates, Crises and Extraordinary PolicyMaking,” Comparative Political Studies 25 ( January 1993), 439–42.
19
Peter A. Hall, “Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State: The Case of Economic Policymaking in Britain,” Comparative Politics 25 (April 1993), 291.
20
On Canada’s controversial Foreign Investment Review Agency (FIRA) and National Energy Program (NEP), see Stephen Clarkson, Canada and the Reagan Challenge: Crisis and Adjustment, rev. ed.
(Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1985), 1–49. On the rationale for similar economic nationalist policies adopted in the 1970s in Mexico, see Rolando Cordera and Carlos Tello, México, la disputa por la
nación: Perspectivas y opciones del desarrollo (Mexico, the debate for the nation: Perspectives and options
for development) (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1981), 78–134.
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Great Depression and threw Mexico—along with other Third World
countries—into a staggering debt crisis.21 In the post-1982 environment,
policy options and instruments appeared more limited, particularly for
Mexico, which as a debtor was subject to the conditionality imposed by
the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These conditions generated by
this “critical juncture” arguably discredited the heart of the antiintegrationist agenda and opened the door to continentalist options.
The shock of 1981–82 alone did not topple the policy frontier, however. Critical junctures are decisive but not determinate; they shift
structural or external incentives and shape the range of alternatives, but
they do not determine policy choice, which remains firmly centered in
domestic political and ideational processes. While in Canada, the freetrade issue did arise again in the early 1980s, such a rapid reaction was
more consistent with institutional factors such as Canada’s “visible” policy frontier than with the actual material impact of the crisis, which arguably was much greater in Mexico. At the same time, the policy frontier
held and bilateral initiatives were purposefully limited to discussing
(though not concluding) “sectoral” negotiations designed to integrate
only Canada’s most competitive sectors and thereby defend the virtual
restriction on a comprehensive integration agreement.22 Meanwhile,
Canadian foreign policy, albeit quixotically through Trudeau’s antinuclear crusade, continued along a multilateralist track, and its trade policy focused first and foremost on the Uruguay Round of the GATT, with
bilateral accords seen only as a short-term, crisis-induced anomaly. As
will be discussed later, these events indicated that External Affairs—the
institutional home of the policy frontier—still controlled the agenda.
Similarly, as a vast literature attests, the 1982 debt crisis may have increased incentives for Latin American countries to adopt neoliberal reforms, but the less than unanimous and unidirectional adoption of the
recommended reform package across these countries belied the oversimplified notion that the crisis “caused” uniform policy change.23 The
immediate reaction of the Mexican government in 1982 was bank
21
On Canada’s crisis, see Clarkson (fn. 20), 329–30; on Mexico’s crisis, see Nora Lustig, Mexico: The
Remaking of an Economy (Washington, D. C.: The Brookings Institution, 1992), 14–27.
22
This observation is corroborated by Simon Reisman, Canada’s chief negotiator of the similarlylimited 1965 Auto Pact. See Reisman, “The Issue of Free Trade,” in Edward R. Fried and Philip H.
Tresize, eds., U.S.-Canadian Economic Relations: Next Steps? (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1984), 41–42.
23
See, for example, Merilee S. Grindle, Challenging the State: Crisis and Innovation in Latin America
and Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman, eds., The Politics of Economic Adjustment: International Constraints, Distributive Conflict, and the
State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); and John Williamson, The Progress of Policy Reform in Latin America, Policy Analyses in International Economics, no. 28 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1990).
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nationalization, not market liberalization. Moreover, as a neoliberal reform, free-trade with the United States was hardly part of the IMF’s recommended daily allowance—as were debt renegotiation, privatization,
and unilateral trade liberalization.24
Finally, Mexico’s process of trade liberalization in the 1980s was arguably a study in delay and resistance, rather than a smooth, automatic
response to the crisis.25 Although avoiding American unilateral “dumping” sanctions and thus securing U.S. export markets became a priority
for Mexico as it gradually liberalized trade,26 its own bilateral trade initiatives in the mid- to late 1980s focused on sectoral accords and thus
reflected the same selective, self-protective logic that underlay the earlier Canadian sectoral project. In fact, even though the 1981–82 crisis
ostensibly had a more intense and constraining impact on Mexico than
on Canada, it took until June 1990—nearly a decade after the critical
juncture and five years after Canada shifted gears—for Mexico’s policy
frontier to relent. Indeed, as late as February 1990, Mexican president
Carlos Salinas de Gortari—a Harvard-educated technocrat known for
his enthusiasm for free-market reform—publicly insisted that freetrade with the United States was still not a realistic option for Mexico.27
In the absence of a go-ahead from the president, the Mexican trade
ministry (SECOFI) published no documents and carried out no internal
studies relating to the comprehensive bilateral free-trade option prior
to the spring of 1990, despite its role in advancing the sectoral initiatives.28 Thus, the causal chain leading from the critical juncture to the
policy change in Mexico was hardly solid and direct. Instead, it connected through state-based institutional factors such as the “depth” of
24
Lustig (fn. 21), 116.
See Luis Rubio, Cristina Rodríguez, and Roberto Blum, “Mexico’s Trade Policy and the Uruguay
Round,” in Henry R. Nau, ed., Domestic Politics and the Uruguay Round (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 167–85.
26
This evolutionary argument is made in Manuel Pastor and Carol Wise, “The Origins and Sustainability of Mexico’s Free Trade Policy,” International Organization 48 (Autumn 1994). See also Gustavo Del Castillo, “El proteccionismo estadunidense en la era de Reagan,” Comercio exterior 37
(November 1987), 893.
27
In his keynote address, Salinas stated: “The marked differences in level of development between
Mexico and the United States make a common market inadvisable in the foreseeable future.” Because
of this, he continued, efforts on bilateral negotiations would be limited to sectoral agreements, and diversification of trade relations with Europe and the Pacific Rim would accelerate. See Carlos Salinas de
Gortari, “Intervención del presidente Carlos Salinas de Gortari en la ceremonia inaugural del Foro
Económico Mundial, celebrado en la ciudad de Davos, 1 de febrero 1990 (Documento 18)” in Carlos
Arriola, ed., Documentos básicos sobre el Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte (NAFTA: Basic
documents) (Mexico City: SECOFI, 1994), 129.
28
My own documentary research in the SECOFI archives and searches through the ministry’s official
journal—Comercio exterior—yielded no such studies. This finding was confirmed by high-ranking
members of the policy advisory staff of the commerce secretary at SECOFI. Confidential interviews by
author, Mexico City, April 1994.
25
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the policy frontier and the institutional culture of bureaucratic politicization and subordination to presidential authority in ways that warrant further investigation.
Some recent analyses, echoing post hoc interviews with Salinas, cite
the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 as a more relevant exogenous
shock than the 1981–82 crisis,29 yet even that more proximate causal
connection cannot be made without first considering how the operation of ideological and institutional mechanisms linked to state legitimation shaped the actors’ perceptions. By the time of that international
structural shift, as will be outlined in greater detail, major changes in
the staffing and relative influence of key economic agencies had given
political and ideational support to Salinas, who had entered office
under a cloud of electoral illegitimacy and who additionally took up the
mantle of the PRI regime’s post-1982 fight for survival by championing
free-market reforms that relied heavily on attracting foreign investment. In a race against time to provide results and forestall societal demands for political reform, the Salinas strategy targeted an “external
constituency” of international investment bankers, fund managers, and
corporations whose confidence in Mexico, Salinas hoped, would bring
back flight capital and liberate Mexico from bank debt tied to the 1982
crisis. Moreover, during his first year in office, Salinas pursued a more
cordial relationship with the U.S. but put equal energy into diversifying
Mexico’s sources of foreign investment, traveling to Europe and Japan
once each, and meeting with a total of twenty-nine heads of state or
government.30 International image became an obsession for Salinas,
and he persisted in trumpeting diversification despite a lack of hard evidence that his strategy was making a dent in historic patterns of dependence upon U.S. investment.
Finally, Salinas’s already unrealistic expectations regarding diversification were raised by his invitation to give the keynote address at the
1990 World Economic Forum, the international power elite summit
held annually in Davos, Switzerland. While those accompanying him
confirmed the overwhelmingly positive response given to the Mexican
delegation, Salinas’s sobering meetings with European heads of state
prior to Davos primed him to see their interest in emerging Eastern European markets as a veritable regional stampede away from Mexico.31
29
See Lloyd Gruber, “Power Politics and the Free Trade Bandwagon,” Comparative Political Studies
34 (September 2001); and Nathan Gardels, “North American Free Trade: Mexico’s Route to Upward
Mobility,” New Perspectives Quarterly 8 (Winter 1991).
30
Salinas de Gortari, “Primer informe de gobierno,” Comercio exterior 39 (November 1989), 935–36.
31
Business leaders, journalists, and high-ranking officials present at Davos, confidential interviews
by author, Mexico City, April–July 1994, and Washington, D.C., September 1992.
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Viewed in this context, the liberation of Eastern Europe and Western Europe’s newfound interest in those markets posed a threat to
Mexico only because Salinas’s strategy was overly sensitive to flows of
foreign investment and because he was overly dependent upon the success of that strategy for his and his regime’s political survival. As Robert
Jervis argued in his study on perceptions in world politics, the analyst
must differentiate between the “subjective feeling of determinacy” and
true compulsion.32 In this case, we must also unpack that “subjective
feeling of determinacy” to understand how legitimation needs may have
bypassed or reprogrammed the institutional and ideological mechanisms of reproduction that had defended the policy frontier.
STEP 2: THE INSTITUTIONAL RETREAT—IDEAS AND IDEA
ADVOCATES IN THE STATE
As a crisis set off by an exogenous shock presents new problems and as
older policies and approaches become discredited due to their implication in the crisis or their inability to respond to it successfully, institutions associated with past policy—even those historically insulated
from external pressures—find their positions challenged. Agencies that
had formerly controlled the policy agenda are marginalized, and leaders
seek out new solutions from other agencies, or even from offices within
agencies that had long harbored a minority viewpoint.
“Policy entrepreneurs,” as John Kingdon refers to them, are central
to this process of ideational and institutional renewal.33 These individuals, usually organized into coherent teams, energetically (if not singlemindedly) operate within the bureaucracy to advance an idea or policy
option, and according to Kingdon, they play three key roles in transcending the policy frontier. First, they substantively and formally develop a formerly anathema option to make it appealing to decision
makers. Second, they try to form alliances inside and outside of the
state to broaden their option’s appeal. Third, and finally, they identify
the opening of a policy window and then doggedly advocate their idea
at the right time, in the process joining the three “streams” of problems,
policy, and politics that decision makers themselves must eventually
bring together to effectively sell an option to the electorate. In the next
section, I will add to Kingdon’s model a fourth stream—legitimacy—
which policy entrepreneurs join to the other three through their ideological framing of the option.
32
Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 21.
33
John Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy, 2d ed. (New York: HarperCollins College
Publishers, 1995), 179–83.
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The story of the Canadian policy entrepreneurs starts, ironically
enough, with that most unlikely advocate of continentalism, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, whose last years as prime minister coincided with the
1981–82 crisis and its immediate aftermath. Searching for policy options to cope with two persistent and unavoidable realities—an international recession and U.S. economic nationalism—Trudeau did what
any self-respecting Canadian prime minister would do: he called for a
formal review of trade policy.34 At the same time, motivated by the
crisis-driven search for new policy approaches, his government also
embarked upon a historic reorganization of the economic policy bureaucracy that merged the Department of Industry, Trade, and Commerce (ITC) into the Department of External Affairs and, along with it,
the task force of trade bureaucrats charged with generating and evaluating options as part of the trade policy review.35 This shift detached
the task force group from ITC’s traditional protectionist trade constituencies, while two Liberal trade ministers sympathetic to bilateral
approaches protected its autonomy within External behind the scenes.
In this task force, a small and cohesive team of policy entrepreneurs cut
its teeth on the trade policy review36 and then turned its attention to
debunking the mythology surrounding free-trade with the United
States and to pushing the bilateral free-trade option through the post1982 policy window.37
It initially appeared that the task force faced considerable institutional challenges. As a result of the reorganization, External Affairs
grew larger and more influential than ever, and the task force’s autonomy within External was in no way guaranteed. However, these policy
entrepreneurs recognized that the interaction of the critical juncture
with the institutional and ideological mechanisms of reproduction that
had been supporting the policy frontier in External provided key openings, which they skillfully played to their advantage. First, they recognized not only that the crisis discredited Trudeau’s statist and economic
34
See G. Bruce Doern and Brian Tomlin, Faith and Fear: The Free Trade Story (Toronto: Stoddart,
1991), 18–22. For an insider’s account, see Hart, Bill Dymond, and Colin Robertson, Decision at Midnight: Inside the Canada-US Free-Trade Negotiations (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press,
1994), 17–24.
35
See Gerald Wright, “Bureaucratic Politics and Canada’s Foreign Economic Policy,” in Stairs and
Winham, eds., Selected Problems in Formulating Foreign Economic Policy, vol. 30 of The Collected Research
Studies of the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1985), 16–18.
36
Government of Canada, A Review of Canadian Trade Policy (Ottawa: Department of External Affairs, 1983); and Government of Canada, Canadian Trade Policy for the 1980s: A Discussion Paper (Ottawa: Department of External Affairs, 1983).
37
Government officials, business and union leaders, and academics, confidential interviews by author, Ottawa, October–December 1994, and Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal, October 1996. These interviews informed my account of the Canadian policy entrepreneurs.
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nationalist policies, but also that it highlighted the detrimental impact
of increasing U.S. protectionism, while the failure of the 1982 GATT
ministerial meeting underscored the questionable commitment of the
U.S. to External’s pet solution, multilateralism. Playing upon the Liberals’ recent distrustful approach to the United States, the task force
recognized that it had to promote bilateralism as a more effective way
than multilateralism to confront U.S. rule breaking, at once discrediting
External’s central policy instrument while still appearing to share External’s nationalist ethos. Canada’s policy entrepreneurs also understood
that to further impede External’s control of the policy agenda, they had
to match their opponents with their own brand of religious conviction,
developing a millenarian streak that earned them a reputation for missionary zeal. At the same time, this group still realized the importance
of traditional Canadian policy-making rituals such as the production of
policy review documents and briefing papers for ministers and members of the Cabinet. Their ability to take advantage of the crisis-driven
demand for new ideas and to produce and distribute the traditional
paper trail—bypassing and surpassing their rivals at External—proved
to be among their most effective skills.
Finally, faced with a “visible” policy frontier quickly surfaced by the
crisis and a policy process made even more permeable by political and
societal actors, Canada’s policy entrepreneurs worked openly and effectively to build alliances with supporters both within and outside the state.
Here, they recognized their institutional power as the conduit of ideas
into a highly ritualized policy process within External in which societal
groups were traditionally consulted, but always in a top-down manner.
For example, the task force presented itself as a point of influence for
the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI), an advocacy group
representing big business and transnational corporations. BCNI’s president, lawyer and lobbyist Thomas D’Aquino, shared the continentalist,
free-trade religion and generated a stream of studies and policy position papers developing “market access” arguments that the task force could
communicate to its political superiors. Fortuitously, the bilateral option
was also being debated by social scientists involved in a Royal Commission on Canada’s economic prospects (the Macdonald Commission) convened to generate new policy ideas after the 1981–82 crisis.38 While
studies compiled by past royal commissions (most notably the Gordon
38
The findings are summarized in Report of the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada, 3 vols. (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1985). For a
critical view, see Richard Simeon, “Inside the Macdonald Commission,” Studies in Political Economy
22 (Spring 1987).
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Commission of the late 1950s) had provided intellectual and technical
support for the anti-integrationist policy frontier from what appeared
to be a unanimous national professorate, this time, a growing community of scholars emerged willing to confront the frontier, and the task
force sought out their ideas and provided a platform for them within
the state.39 The task force was also instrumental in the design and selective impact of the series of cross-country public consultations on
trade options carried out in the spring and summer of 1985. These developments provided proof for Prime Minister Brian Mulroney—
elected in 1984 on an anti-free-trade platform—of both the weakness
of anti-integrationist forces (such as labor and protectionist business)
and the vibrancy of societal support for bilateral free-trade, which had
long been assumed to be nonexistent.
Within the state, policy entrepreneurs forged their key alliance with
the task force’s reluctant adoptive leader, Derek Burney. Burney, a fastrising career foreign service officer and a dyed-in-the-wool External
multilateralist, inherited the task force in 1982 while he was assistant
undersecretary for trade and economic relations. Later that year, however, he was named assistant deputy minister for U.S. affairs, and as he
became immersed in the U.S.-Canada agenda at close range, Burney
shed his traditional beliefs in External’s “GATT theology” and embraced
the bilateral free-trade option as advanced by his advisors on the task
force. This was a coup for the policy entrepreneurs, as Burney performed four crucial tasks in advancing their ideas in the policy process
that led to the prime minister’s decision to pursue the bilateral option
in the fall of 1985. Burney harnessed their missionary zeal as a more
diplomatic spokesman; he battled senior officials in External, succeeding in the release of the 1985 Options Paper that first openly articulated and defended comprehensive bilateral free-trade;40 he found
political patrons within the new Mulroney cabinet, most notably newly
minted trade minister Jim Kelleher; and he built trust with his U.S.
counterparts both formally and informally, especially as the point man
for the trade declaration that came out of the March 1985 MulroneyReagan Shamrock Summit. Without Burney’s political skills and the
alliances he forged, the policy entrepreneurs would have found themselves isolated and outmatched, able to combine the problems and
39
One key policy entrepreneur, Michael Hart, himself contributed an academic study to the commission while on leave from the task force. See Hart, Canadian Economic Development and the International Trading System, vol. 53 of The Collected Research Studies of the Royal Commission on the Economic
Union and Development Prospects for Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985).
40
Hon. James F. Kelleher, How to Secure and Enhance Canadian Access to Export Markets (Ottawa:
Office of the Minister for International Trade/Department of External Affairs, 1985).
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policy streams yet unable to master the inside the state politics necessary
to push their option through the policy window.
This institutional perspective on the demise of the Canadian policy
frontier does not deny the contribution made by the exogenous shock.
It does, however, focus both on the precise mechanisms through which
the critical juncture upended the institutional protections that had long
guarded the policy frontier and on the resulting adaptation by agencies
and actors to enable a previously forbidden option to rise on the policy
agenda. It does not negate the influence of a powerful private sector
and other societal forces favoring bilateral free-trade; however, a closer
look at the Canadian state and the policy-making process reveals a
modified-pluralistic, vertically integrated system that limited interestgroup actors to a circumscribed, top-down set of entry points of influence and a form of self-censorship that made them dependent upon
finding allies within the state apparatus to articulate their positions to
the Cabinet. Thus, idea advocates inside the state deserve the credit for
opening a new point of entry within the state for continentalist ideas.
While Canadian policy entrepreneurs advocating free-trade in the
early to mid-1980s were few and far between, their Mexican counterparts in the first years of the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari
(1988–94) were relatively numerous, collected in teams within major
economic policy bureaucracies, and firmly practicing politics from
within the confines of the centralized and semiauthoritarian state. Taking advantage of the policy vacuum created by the perceived failure of
the statist policy paradigm, and trading on their advanced degrees and
knowledge of state-of-the-art economics, a cohesive generation of
young, foreign-educated economists arose through the Mexican economic policy bureaucracy together in the early 1980s.41 During these
years of crisis and adjustment, they built their reputations through their
technical expertise and established institutional “homes” in the ministries of finance, budget, and commerce, as well as in the central bank.
By 1985, many of them had also attached themselves politically to
Salinas as the center of a camarilla, or a personal-political clique, to accelerate their ascent.42 Careful to play by the rules of deference and to
reflect praise of their skills upward to their patron, several of these
41
The most comprehensive study of this generation is found in Miguel Ángel Centeno, Democracy
within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico, 2d ed. (University Park, Penn.: Penn State University
Press, 1997).
42
See Roderic A. Camp, “Camarillas in Mexican Politics: The Case of the Salinas Cabinet,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 6 (Winter 1990).
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young technocrats were rewarded with cabinet positions by Salinas
after his election.43
Like their Canadian counterparts, the Mexican policy entrepreneurs
were more than merely the right analysts with the right ideas at the
right time. Rather, they proved to be adept at playing politics inside the
state, recognizing the rules of the insider game in a system in which that
game was the only game in town. While the task force within External
was able to make the transition from Liberal to Conservative governance through pragmatic alliances that respected the line between civil
servants and partisans, the Mexican policy entrepreneurs formed teams,
in part, in order to be explicitly political, choosing sides by choosing patrons in the internecine factional struggles played out within the federal
bureaucracy, one of the key battlegrounds in pre-2000 Mexican oneparty politics. Moreover, with the deeply entrenched anti-integrationist
policy frontier slow to surface despite the impact of the crisis, Mexican
policy entrepreneurs recognized that the only way to change thinking
on this and other issues of national transformation was from within the
state, by mastering the insider game.
An element of bureaucratic instability greatly attenuated in the
Canadian context added to the insulated and politicized institutional
environment in which the Mexican policy entrepreneurs operated. Because of the presidentialist nature of Mexican system, access to the
chief executive was the only direct route to influence policy, and yet the
access channels accorded to any given state agency varied not only
across six-year, nonrenewable administrations, but often also within
them, depending upon the president’s political or economic strategy
and, most importantly, his orchestration of the succession process. Prior
to their ascent to cabinet roles after 1988, not only did Mexican policy
entrepreneurs have to find and support a winning patron, but they also
had to recruit and cultivate subteams of loyal followers within various
bureaucracies who would leverage their influence upward and militate
against sudden unforeseen shifts in the bureaucratic balance of power.
These inside the state networks, generated through their roles as parttime university professors and mentors to a new generation of students
going abroad for doctorates and returning to staff the state, gave
43
Most notably, Pedro Aspe (b. 1950, Ph.D., MIT, Finance); Jaime Serra (b. 1951, Ph.D., Yale,
Commerce); Ernesto Zedillo (b. 1951, Ph.D., Yale, Budget, then Education); and Herminio Blanco (b.
1950, Ph.D, University of Chicago, chief NAFTA negotiator). For biographical information, see Diccionario biográfico del gobierno mexicano (Biographical dictionary of the mexican government), 3d ed.
(Mexico City: Presidencia de la República, 1989).
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the policy entrepreneurs a collective base that was at once broadly and
flexibly influential, ideologically committed, and supremely deferential,
as per the requirements of the Mexican system.
In 1988, having weathered the institutional shifts and factional battles associated with two post-1982 succession processes, the Mexican
policy entrepreneurs reached the very pinnacle of policy-making influence—the president’s cabinet. Moreover, they shrewdly positioned
themselves to take advantage of three key institutional developments
that took place under Salinas, giving them added leverage to dislodge
the policy frontier from within the state. First, despite (or, perhaps because of ) the shadow of electoral fraud and political weakness that followed Salinas into office, he centralized presidential power to an
extremely noteworthy extent, even in the context of the Mexican system.44 This might appear to imply negative consequences for ministerial autonomy; however, because of a second development—the
elevation of the economic cabinet to primary advisory status—presidencialismo under Salinas gave those ministers as a team a greater chance
both to influence policy and to see that policy coordinated across government agencies. Policy entrepreneurs’ daily meetings with José Córdoba, the president’s chief of staff and closest adviser, brought them
into the president’s inner circle; their access to Córdoba (who had studied with several team members at Stanford) became the key to communicating their ideas in politically sensitive ways to the chief
executive.45 In the Mexican context, collective action and deference to
presidential power, rather than bureaucratic autonomy and multiple alliances, brought the new ideas to the fore.
This combination of the rise of the economic cabinet with intensified presidencialismo under Salinas had institutional consequences for
foreign policy that effectively marginalized the Foreign Ministry (SRE)
and thereby weakened its defense of the anti-integrationist policy frontier. This process began under Salinas’s predecessor, Miguel de la
Madrid, with the elimination of the SRE’s Undersecretariat for International Economic Relations, which sidelined the Foreign Ministry from
Mexico’s trade negotiations. Under Salinas, these discussions then became a centerpiece in Mexico’s newly reconceived relationship with the
United States and the world, which was based upon diversifying
44
Federico Reyes Heroles, “CSG: De la debilidad al liderazgo.” Este país 6 (September 1991), 6.
On Córdoba’s access, see Centeno (fn. 41), 96. Centeno also notes that, as a naturalized Mexican
citizen and ineligible for the presidential succession, Córdoba was able to become “the second most
powerful man in Mexico” because Salinas did not have to worry about his ulterior motives regarding
personal advancement.
45
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sources of foreign investment.46 The Commerce Ministry, known as
SECOFI, also underwent a bureaucratic reorganization starting in the
mid-1980s, when de la Madrid accelerated trade liberalization and thus
dismantled the protectionist fiefdoms that had dominated the ministry
in the past.47 Under Jaime Serra Puche, Salinas’s commerce minister,
SECOFI became the epicenter of new generation teams primed for aggressive negotiation and fired up by the mission of selling Mexico
abroad. Moreover, management of U.S.-Mexico relations, including
diplomatic relations, was effectively shifted to Presidencia, the equivalent of the U.S. White House staff, where it came under direct presidential control via a handpicked ambassador and via Córdoba. To
further marginalize SRE, the Salinas team relied heavily upon American
public relations firms and lobbyists, overriding the principled refusal to
“play Washington’s game” that had typified SRE-directed diplomacy.48
Without the ability to place nationalist limits on the practice, if not the
content, of bilateral diplomacy, the policy frontier was left institutionally undefended.
With the institutional path cleared, the policy entrepreneurs successfully promoted their ideas favoring a more open and less defensive
Mexico and also made a direct impact in the first year of the Salinas
sexenio on the design of policies such as the normalization of bilateral
relations with the U.S., the renegotiation of the external debt, and the
acceleration of the privatization of state-owned enterprises. If they did
believe that bilateral free-trade was part of this broad program, however, they were careful never to mention it; rather than act as “free-trade
missionaries,” the Mexican policy entrepreneurs channeled their own
missionary zeal and hewed closely to the clandestine, indirect, and deferential mode of policy influence whose cardinal rule was that only the
president himself could place a once-forbidden option on the policy
agenda. When this happened in February 1990, ostensibly in response
to Salinas’s “Davos conversion,” Salinas’s ministers and their technocratic teams were more than prepared to provide both the technical
studies to normalize the option, and the political cover to allow the
president to reject it publicly if necessary. For example, in the early
46
Several top trade officials at this time, who described the demise of “Asuntos Económicos” in
1984, also related how the subsidies agreement of 1985 was purposefully negotiated in secret by an
elite SECOFI trade negotiation team and presented to SRE after the fact. Confidential interviews by author, Mexico City, August 1994.
47
For a full discussion of the pre-1985 trade policy-making process, see Rubio, Rodríguez, and
Blum (fn. 25), 169–72, 174–79.
48
See Todd Eisenstadt, “Cabildeo y relaciones públicas en Estados Unidos” Este país 15 ( June 1992);
and coverage of “Mexico’s Image Machine” in the U.S., International Herald Tribune, December 31,
1991, 1.
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spring of 1990, Jaime Serra and his advisory staff at SECOFI began to
work overtime to produce technical studies of Mexico’s trade policy options that, for the first time, included and scientifically advocated the
bilateral free-trade option.49 These studies, along with those of other
economic ministries and private sector groups (which also only moved
once the president did), were then solicited for a “Consultative Forum”
inaugurated in the PRI-controlled Senate and incorporated into its
Final Report that endorsed the “new commercial strategy.”50 While the
Canadian MacDonald Royal Commission and the 1985 public consultations were aimed at convincing the prime minister to consider the bilateral option, the Foro was in essence another manifestation of the
classic Mexican carro completo: once the president showed interest,
everyone jumped on the bandwagon. The Serra- and Córdoba-led secret delegation to Washington sent in March 1990 to gauge Bush administration support, like the more public-theatrical Foro was also a
vehicle for circling the wagons and demonstrating their absolute loyalty
to the president and his newly adopted historic vision.51 The policy entrepreneurs’ shrewd and self-effacing practices, along with their technical skills and formidable teams, allowed them to build executive trust
over time and leverage that trust at the crucial moment of decision
making.
In the Mexican case, the critical juncture did not immediately dislodge the policy frontier; rather, the combination of the historic “depth”
of the frontier, the resilience of the presidentialist one-party state, and
the politicized bureaucracy explains the gradual, uneven policy response
to the crisis. What the critical juncture did accomplish, albeit slowly,
was to open a window of opportunity for new ideas and to allow their
advocates to enter the state and make skillful use of the bureaucratic
rules of insider politics to advance solutions (and themselves) within
the presidentially centered policy process. These inside the state dynamics, attuned to the rules of the Mexican game, contributed to the marginalization of SRE—the institution historically charged with defending
the policy frontier—and to the concomitant empowerment of other in49
See, for example, Secretaría de Comercio y Fomento Industrial, Mexico’s International Trade Relations: Challenges and Opportunities, 2d ed. (Mexico City: SECOFI, 1990). Interviews with SECOFI officials
confirmed that these studies were commissioned only after February 1990 and that their aim was to introduce and justify the bilateral option. Confidential interviews by author, Mexico City, August 1994.
50
See Senado de la República, “Foro sobre la política comercial de México,” Comercio exterior 40
( June 1990); and Foro de Consulta sobre las Relaciones Comerciales de México con el Exterior, Relatoria: El comercio de México con el mundo, ¿Hacia dónde se dirige? (Summary of testimony: Mexico’s international trade: Where is it heading?) (Mexico City: Senado de la República, 1990).
51
See New York Times, March 29, 1990, A1, D23. It is widely believed that Córdoba engineered the
“self-leak” in order to galvanize the Bush administration into immediate action.
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stitutions that sought to move the foreign policy agenda away from nationalist taboos. The critical juncture shifted the opportunity structure,
but it cannot by itself account for the institutional or political dynamics that enabled new ideas to prevail.
Institutions and individuals within the state also played a more central role than societal actors, such as big business, in this process. It is
true that, in contrast with traditional PRI politicians, Salinas sought out
the support (financial and advisory) of Mexico’s most prominent and
internationally oriented businessmen, and that these businessmen stood
to gain a great deal from the adoption of economic reforms—most notably from privatization but also, potentially, from a free-trade agreement. It is also true, however, that Mexico’s private sector was
historically protected, subsidized, and risk averse. Without the state’s
withdrawal of its corporate safety net as it accelerated trade liberalization, even big business—which was best capitalized to adjust but had
benefited from the protected domestic market—would have been content to continue living off the state’s largesse.52 Further reinforcing traditional presidentialist norms, Salinas’s earlier personal recruitment of
the export-oriented segment of business into the inner circle, through
big-payoff policies like privatization, disciplined these business leaders
to the rules of the carro completo, and thus allowed him to take a step
that many saluted in theory but found painful in practice.53 Since the
policy entrepreneurs knew the president “had” his business allies, they
instead focused on what really mattered—advancing the reform project
inside the state and convincing the president himself.
STEP 3: THE IDEOLOGICAL REGROUPING—THE BRIDGE IDEOLOGY
AND STATE LEGITIMACY
As a critical juncture, the 1981–82 crisis did more than merely shift the
incentive structure away from state intervention in the economy and
facilitate a realignment of institutions and personnel within the state.
It also discredited the ideological messages state elites inculcated to
52
In a famous quote, Salinas’ finance minister, Pedro Aspe, claimed that a main goal of the economic
reform project was to “privatize the private sector.” See Reyes Heroles and René Delgado, “Pedro Aspe
Armella: La privatización del sector privado,” Este país 11 ( January 1992), 14.
53
Commenting on this discipline, both the chief economist for the main private sector think tank
and a prominent financial journalist for a Mexico City daily independently confirmed my finding that
there were virtually no formal studies of the free-trade option (or of sectoral impacts) commissioned or
released by the private sector until after the president’s call for the Foro in April 1990. Confidential
interviews by author, Mexico City, August 1992 and May 1994. According to one top entrepreneur
from an export-oriented Monterrey group, his colleagues in big business “got in line . . . like soldiers”
once the decision was made to negotiate, but then had to “protect ourselves from our government” and
its aim for speedy results as negotiations got underway. Confidential interview by author, Mexico City,
July 1994.
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connect their ruling policies to the core narrative of national identity
and thereby legitimate their rule, thus destabilizing the ideological
mechanism of reproduction that had been enforcing the antiintegrationist policy frontier. In Canada, where the choice had been
“the state or the States,” the post-1982 economic environment called
into question the government’s ability to maintain policies such as universal health care and limits on direct foreign investment that had distinguished Canada from the U.S. and thus fostered its separate identity.
Similarly, the crisis also reignited the fundamental historic debate over
the Canadian state’s raison d’être and the distributional dimensions of
the federalist social contract uniting Canada’s geographically dispersed
and linguistically, regionally, and ethnically diverse polity. In Mexico,
the “lost decade” of the 1980s further undermined the legitimacy of the
PRI and its claim that it embodied the “ongoing Revolution,” particularly given the popular perception that the nation’s oil patrimony had
ended up in party coffers. Moreover, the PRI’s claim to a monopoly on
representing the national interest was further undermined by the increasingly effective challenge to its traditional electoral alchemy, first in
the mid-1980s by the center-right Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN)
and later by the center-left Frente Cardenista (later the PRD) in the
1988 elections.
In both countries, disillusioned publics awaited new messages to
keep them believing in their country’s future, and top decision makers
needed those new messages for their own political survival. Thus, it was
a crisis of legitimacy, more than simply “uncertainty” or “policy failure,”
that opened the policy environment to the promulgation of new ideas
and ideologies that challenged the policy frontier. Goldstein and Keohane have argued that under conditions of uncertainty, new ideas can
play a crucial role in foreign policy change by providing decision makers with a “roadmap” of new routes and strategies.54 However, since policy frontiers tend to persist over time and across periods of certainty
and uncertainty, in order for them to be dislodged, there has to be not
only objective uncertainty, or the search for new technical solutions to
solve immediate policy problems; there must also be subjective uncertainty, or the search for new symbols and emotional appeals to shore up
state legitimacy undermined by the shock.
Here, policy entrepreneurs must join the fourth stream—legitimacy—at the policy window by (1) providing a new conceptual frame54
Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, “Ideas and Foreign Policy: An Analytical Framework,”
in Goldstein and Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Political Change
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 17.
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work in which the formerly exiled option would now advance the national interest, and (2) creating a “bridge ideology” that will enable state
elites to reinvent, or reinterpret, the core narrative to reconcile old and
new state identities, associate national pride and historic values with
the exiled option, and thereby rescue the state from its crisis of legitimacy. It is impossible to go only a few metaphoric inches beyond the
policy frontier. Indeed, in this process, the formerly taboo option becomes the very heart of a new strategy of legitimation.
The ideas continentalist policy entrepreneurs in Canada and Mexico
advanced during the 1980s are best understood not simply as the appropriate technical economic model for a free-market era but also as a
potential bridge ideology that attempted—rhetorically and symbolically—to imbue the revised understanding of identity implicit in these
policies with emotional meaning. The “strength through integration”
narrative that was employed, with some variation, by both sets of policy
entrepreneurs had three main appeals, each of which reimagined a segment of the sovereignty-security-identity triad within the conceptualization of national interest.
First, the definition of national interest was no longer equated with
economic and political sovereignty. It may have been necessary and to
some extent possible in the past to view policy instruments such as tariffs and foreign investment regulation as measures of, or shields to protect against, national political independence from the United States. In
the context of a globalizing world economy, it was now argued that sovereignty was less about defending a static whole than about invigorating the nation with an outward-looking dynamism that would become
the source of internal strength. These new ideas about sovereignty were
well summarized in a speech given by Canadian Secretary of State for
External Affairs Joe Clark, the Mulroney government’s top foreign policy official, in early October 1985:
The decision to open negotiations with the United States will not weaken our
sovereignty. It is an assertion of sovereignty in an increasingly interdependence
[sic] world. It demonstrates our confidence that we can be as productive, innovative, ingenious, and efficient as our American partners. Sovereignty is a dynamic, not a static thing. It is constantly changing. It is not an artifact to be kept
under glass and protected from the intrusion of change.55
Even before the Davos conversion, Salinas’s speeches—drafted by the
Presidencia and imbued with the “new thinking” on sovereignty—also
55
“Statement by the Right Honourable Joe Clark, Secretary of State for External Affairs, to the
Canadian Institute for International Affairs, Toronto, October 4, 1985,” Statement/Discours 85/58
(1985), 12–13, emphasis in the original.
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focused on openness, change, and dynamism as sources of national
strength. For Salinas, however, the bridge ideology specifically had to
reconcile liberalization with the Revolution, just as oil nationalization
had fulfilled the Revolution’s promise by asserting national will over international (read bilateral) demands. In his first annual address to the
nation in late 1989, Salinas claimed that “modernization is the means
by which . . . we fulfill the Revolution’s mandate,” because “there is
nothing more revolutionary than making Mexico stronger and more respected in the world.”56 This respect, Salinas argued during his keynote
address at Davos, would result from Mexico’s participation in the world
economy, which his nation pursued “to strengthen our sovereignty.”57 A
stronger, more open Mexico would also demand a more direct and less
mythologized relationship with the United States, based upon the notion of “two countries [with] vigorous peoples, proud of their respective
pasts and with the vitality and sovereign ability to construct their respective futures.”58
Turning traditional nationalism on its head, formalizing economic
integration could thus be presented as the expression of national independence; through direct, comprehensive negotiations, de facto U.S.
commercial invasion could be fended off and transformed into de jure
(that is, rule-based and enforceable) limits on U.S. unilateralism. Conceiving of sovereignty as a dynamic resource implied trading off some
economic sovereignty for greater certainty, defined as market access for
Canada and foreign investment for Mexico. This tradeoff metaphorically guaranteed future prosperity, which would in turn provide the resources to “protect” and “defend” national values. Clark’s October 1985
speech continued in this vein, stating that “the increased prosperity resulting from larger markets and a more competitive economy would
surely make us more able and willing to pursue political and social policies appropriate to our own conceptions, values, and needs, [which] is
the essence of sovereignty.”59
The “strength through integration” narrative was also premised on
the perception that the rules of the game had changed internationally,
translating into a new vision of economic security. In this new environment characterized by intensifying globalization and interdependence,
states would prove their mettle by opening their markets; therefore, a
56
Salinas de Gortari (fn. 30), 932.
Salinas de Gortari (fn. 27), 127.
58
Salinas de Gortari., “México-Estados Unidos: Una nueva era de cooperación y amistad” (Speech
before a joint session of the United States Congress, Washington, D.C., October 4, 1989), Comercio
exterior 39 (October 1989), 911.
59
Clark (fn. 55), 12.
57
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dynamic, internationally competitive private sector and a fearless government promoting open trade relations, rather than a static wall of
economic barriers that only served as a sign of weakness, would best
project national prestige abroad.
In Canada, the private sector, rather than the diplomats at External,
were deployed as the envoys abroad for Canada’s new image of confidence and competitiveness. As Canadian Trade Minister Jim Kelleher
told a conference organized in the spring of 1985 by the Toronto newspaper The Financial Post, in his consultations with the public he was
impressed most of all with the “conviction”—shared by even those sectors of the economy thought to be weakest—“that they can compete”
internationally.60 Likewise, in the aftermath of the decision to negotiate, Kelleher again connected business competitiveness internationally
with national security, arguing that “only a strong economy can guarantee our sovereignty.”61
In Mexico, the discourse connecting integration and security reconciled the new bilateral focus with the bedrock foreign policy principle
of diversification. Indeed, before Davos, Salinas’s new approach to
U.S.-Mexican relations had been legitimated by stressing that it, along
with intensified relations with both Europe and Japan, was part of a
global strategy to maximize Mexico’s geographic position “between the
Atlantic and the Pacific.”62 In fact, the National Development Plan,
published in May 1989, argued that “expanded economic interrelations
do not imply, nor will we allow them to include, political integration;
on the contrary, we will diversify our international relations in order to
be stronger politically and we will derive economic strength internally
from an active participation in the regions where the world’s most dynamic growth is concentrated.”63
After Davos, however, a governing elite unduly vulnerable to external financial flows and image abroad for its legitimacy perceived an urgent need to lock in trade with (and investment from) the U.S. in order
60
“Notes for an Address by the Honourable James Kelleher, Minister for International Trade, to the
Financial Post Conference, Toronto, April 25, 1985,” Statement/Discours 85/23 (1985), 6. Emphasis in
the original.
61
“Notes for Remarks by the Honourable James Kelleher, Minister for International Trade, to the
Sault Ste. Marie Chamber of Commerce and Export Club, Sault Ste. Marie, September 30, 1985,”
Statement/Discours 85/53 (1985), 7.
62
For a prescient analysis, see Francisco Gil Villegas, “México entre el Pacífico y el Atlántico,” Foro
internacional 29 (October–December 1988).
63
Secretaría de Programación y Presupuesto, “Plan Nacional de Desarrollo, 1989–94,” in La política
exterior de México en el nuevo orden mundial: Antología de principios y temas (Mexican foreign policy in
the new world order: Anthology of principles and themes) (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1993), 120.
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for their strategy to survive. To dramatize this perceived exigency, Salinas’s rhetoric following his request for negotiations in June 1990 emphasized the historic significance of his choice and his conviction that
Mexico stood at the crossroads between two very distinct futures. In an
interview published in 1991, Salinas claimed that after Davos it appeared to him that “world trade [was] concentrating in three huge
blocs,” and that “either you have access to the huge trading blocs or you
are left out of the dynamics of development.”64 This black-and-white
distinction, often seen in security-related rhetoric, also reflects the
ironic result of transcending the policy frontier—free-trade with the
United States, once anathema to national security, had become not
simply a “normal” policy option, but rather the very centerpiece of
Mexico’s new strategy for its future survival.
Finally, the themes of maturity, confidence, and historical destiny all
came together to form a new concept of identity that bridged the antiintegrationist past with an integrationist future. On the Canadian side,
the key was to accept a new, prouder, and more confident national selfimage—traditionally associated with American bravado and negatively
contrasted with Canadian modesty—as a natural result of a historical
process of national maturation. The Final Report of the Macdonald
Royal Commission, which proclaimed Canada’s liberation from “that
enervating sense of uncertainty that derives from self-perceived ‘colonial’ status,” argued that “the day of the apologetic Canadian is gone,”
and that by eliminating “artificial protection,” Canada and its people
would finally experience “the exhilaration that can come from a true
sense of maturity.”65 Likewise, speaking almost directly from a symbolic
script shaped by the Burney team’s Communication Strategy,66 Prime
Minister Mulroney told the House of Commons in the fall of 1985
that he would seek free-trade negotiations with the U.S. because “to
shrink from this challenge and opportunity would be an act of timidity
unworthy of Canada.”67
Inversely, the invocation of heroic historical memories served as the
linchpin in the reshaping of Mexican identity to conform with integra64
Gardels (fn. 29), 4.
Report of the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada, vol. 1
(Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1985), 353–54.
66
Prime Minister’s Office, “Communication Strategy for the Canada-U.S. Bilateral Trade Initiative, September 1985,” in Duncan Cameron, ed., The Free Trade Papers (Toronto: James Lorimer &
Co., 1986). This document, leaked to the press, caused a sensation in nationalist circles as an indication
that the government had resorted to slick marketing techniques to make its case.
67
“Canada/USA Trade Negotiations (Statement by the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney, Prime
Minister, to the House of Commons, Ottawa, September 26, 1985),” Statements and Speeches 85/11
(1985), 3.
65
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tionism. Although PRI governments traditionally justified all types of
policies under the rubric of “the ongoing Revolution,” Salinas used a
longer historical lens. Specifically, he deepened the affective connection
of his new “national project” to Mexican identity by placing it in a long
line of historic battles dating back before the Revolution that citizens had
also been long socialized to identify with proudly:
We have reconquered our collective confidence. Our accomplishments have
given us a new common bond. It is a legacy shared by all who have advanced
our nation’s ideals and goals . . . the legacy of an unbreakable will: the decisiveness that fought for and won Independence; the tenacity that forged the Liberal Republic; the passion that crystallized in a Revolution of lasting
commitment to social justice. It is the will of our people, the will of Mexico. . . .
destiny is ours and we are going to conquer it.68
Connecting to the past, however, built only half of the ideological
bridge; the other half had to be constructed toward the future. Since
the president and his team were particularly vulnerable to accusations
of cosmopolitan or Americanized inauthenticity, Salinas’s speeches
manufactured an emotional hook designed to connect the futureoriented pursuit of modernity with nationalist passions venerating the
past. In his inaugural address, he stated:
A nation is a community that shares a past and a future. A past, that is, a history,
a culture and values that are essential to its tradition; and a future, a historical
project that brings together diverse wills into a common effort. A pact between
the past and the future, the nation is the memory of what we have been and the
affirmation of what we will become. If the nostalgia for the past were stronger
than our decision to stand prepared to face tomorrow, the nation would repeat
itself until it was nothing but the shadow of its former self; if, on the contrary,
we allow the memory of what we were to fade, our identity would surely end up
disappearing as well. Because of this, so that we Mexicans will be loyal to our
past, we must move forward to give substance and name to our future.69
Such rhetoric was further reinforced over the course of the Salinas sexenio
through various ideological mechanisms of reproduction still controlled
or heavily influenced by the state. For example, the content of new primary school history textbooks—and even telenovelas (dramatic miniseries) aired by the officialist Televisa network—were designed to
rehabilitate the cosmopolitan modernizing of the pre-Revolutionary
era. Moreover, the government itself, through a special office in the
commerce ministry, also worked after the fact to promote an official
68
69
Salinas de Gortari (fn. 30), 946.
Idem., “Discurso de toma de posesión,” Comercio exterior 38 (December 1988), 1144.
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history of the decision to negotiate comprehensive free-trade with the
U.S. that compiled documents and speeches to demonstrate, post hoc,
a natural and inevitable progression toward the free-trade option despite the fact that the option had been publicly rejected and internally
unstudied until the spring of 1990.70 Finally, press coverage relentlessly
cast the president’s trade initiative in a positive light, associating it with
increasing Mexican international stature and national pride. These were
all techniques designed to make what had once been an unacceptable
policy option appear to be not only normal but also central to the nation’s new affirmation of its identity.
CONCLUSION
In this article, I have developed the concept of the “policy frontier” to
capture the process through which governments exile a particular foreign policy option from normal consideration due to ideological proscription or state legitimation exigencies. In so doing, I posed the
following two fundamental questions: (1) how are policy frontiers
formed and defended, and (2) how can they be made vulnerable and
even dissolved? Policy frontiers are constructed in a path-dependent
fashion—through a critical juncture that first establishes the frontier—
and are maintained over time by institutional and ideological mechanisms of reproduction. The policy frontier is defended as an embodiment
of the national interest as seen through the lens of state legitimation, a
dynamic exemplified by Canada’s and Mexico’s long-standing freetrade policy frontiers that inhibited formalized bilateral economic integration with the U.S. I then argued that for the frontier to be
transcended, a critical juncture combining an exogenous shock with an
internal legitimacy crisis was needed to undermine and then reconfigure the institutional and ideological mechanisms of reproduction. The
origins of NAFTA in the Canadian and Mexican embrace of the onceforbidden bilateral free-trade option in 1985 and 1990, respectively, illustrates this dynamic.
This argument, which highlights institutions and ideas within the
state as the main causal mechanisms in foreign policy change, challenges two classic explanations derived from distinct theories of the
state. First, structural explanations, based upon realist and neorealist
theory’s “black box” view of the state as a unit in the international system, attribute policy change to shifts in the external incentive structure
70
Arriola (fn. 27).
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rather than to the internal attributes of these units. Without denying
that exogenous shock plays a key role in opening the way for foreign
policy change, the policy frontier model does challenge the mechanistic logic of structural compulsion by citing both the persistence of policy frontiers despite rational incentives for change and the broad range
of voluntary action the state retains to choose from options merely narrowed or reconfigured by systemic change.
A second set of explanations views foreign policy change through the
prism of the pluralist model of the state, in which the state itself is primarily an arena in which societal groups compete and that policy
change reflects the outcome of that competition. Unlike “normal” policy processes, however, policy frontiers are insulated from such distributional conflicts and societal pressures, even in highly pluralistic
polities such as Canada. Under the policy frontier model, the state is
hardly a passive arena, but rather an active entity with its own interests;
by preserving policy frontiers within institutions as embodiments of the
national interest, the state acts in its own defense, most often against
domestic and foreign private interests. Thus, in order to argue that
powerful interest groups “caused” the demise of the policy frontier, one
must give precedence to a state-based explanation, and first explain the
institutional change that rendered the frontier vulnerable.
The comparison of Canada and Mexico—in particular, the similar
paths these most different countries took both in defense of, and in retreat from, their anti-integrationist policy frontiers—also undermine
these alternative explanations. In the neorealist model, vast differences
in the two countries’ levels of development would translate into differences in their relative capabilities that would have predicted that Mexico would capitulate to systemic economic forces long before Canada.
In reality, however, both countries maintained their free-trade policy
frontiers for nearly a century, despite overwhelming material incentives
for integration and a variety of external shocks and system changes that
also should have forced them to readjust their policies accordingly.
Similarly, the power and participation of American-based multinational capital in both the Canadian and Mexican economies during
that time did not bring about the adoption of free-trade policies. Instead, the subordinate relationship of capital to the state in the policy
process was similar in these two countries, despite the striking differences between Canada’s more pluralist, consultative, and democratic
system and Mexico’s one-party, semiauthoritarian system.
The similarities in the ideological construction of the Canadian and
Mexican anti-integrationist policy frontiers also debunk the myth that
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foreign policy nationalism or extremism is a measure of political or economic underdevelopment. In both countries, the policy frontier arose
as part of a sophisticated nation-building and state-consolidation
process. Canada retained and reinforced the policy frontier even as it
left its colonial past far behind and asserted itself as a member of the
G-7 group of advanced industrialized nations. The most overtly nationalist period in Mexican foreign policy came in the 1970s, when that nation’s burgeoning oil wealth gave it its greatest leverage over the U.S.
and accordingly might have eased its fear of integration by infusing it
with the confidence to extract an advantageous deal to guarantee access
for Mexican non-oil exports. Institutionalized polities have at their disposal a powerful tool for perpetuating limits on policy agendas over
time that are more stable and reliable than personalized power.
Finally, symbolic policies coded to evoke an affective connection between citizens and the state proved not to be the province only of authoritarian regimes that use ideology to supplant popular sovereignty as
the justification for their rule. While Canadian elections were clearly
more meaningful than their Mexican equivalents and state legitimacy
there was more stable than in Mexico, in both systems, the “imagined
community” looked to the state to define the content and meaning of
national identity through foreign policy (as well as through domestic
policies and institutions).
At the same time, within the template provided by the statisthistorical institutionalist model, Canada and Mexico did present individual variations on a common theme; examining and comparing these
variations can provide even greater insights into the process of going
beyond the policy frontier. The Canadian case represents one end of the
spectrum—a democracy in which free elections were contested by competitive political parties and in which the policy frontier was defended
by a stable and professionalized state bureaucracy. Here, the policy
frontier was more visible (in other words, accessible for public debate
and for private group advocacy) but still protected by the state’s vertical
management of the consultation process. The critical juncture by itself
was unlikely to break down such a legalized and institutionalized defense; instead, it shook up the frontier-defending bureaucracy just
enough to create an autonomous space for new ideas to enter and for
their advocates to establish themselves and build alliances with key officials in both governing political parties, as well as with private sector
and academic supporters outside the state.
In Mexico, by contrast, the process of institutional transformation
was both far slower and less predictable, the policy frontier was buried
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deeper, and the inside the state game was far more politicized and insular. Even as the critical juncture galvanized a new generation to champion new solutions within the economic bureaucracy, Mexico’s
one-party-dominant presidentialist system tightly controlled the policy
agenda and manipulated the balance of power within the bureaucracy
such that those idea advocates had to practice extreme self-censorship
in order to advance the broad package of their ideas through their own
political careers. Integration and ingratiation trumped autonomy as the
coin of the bureaucratic realm, and alliances were built first and foremost within the state, upwards toward patrons and downwards toward
loyal teams. Without direct and relatively depoliticized means to advance the bilateral option, Mexico’s policy entrepreneurs instead focused on actions over words, positioning themselves and their teams in
issue areas (such as bilateral relations and trade negotiations) in which
the policy frontier had previously been defended institutionally by a
now-sidelined SRE. The policy window in Mexico opened only at the
presidential level, but these policy entrepreneurs were poised to push
their ideas through because they had astutely played the inside the state
political game.
In addition to the depth of the policy frontier, the permeability of institutions to societal influence, and the system-specific skills of policy
entrepreneurs in mastering the institutional contexts in which they operated, a fourth element—the flexibility of the core narrative of national
identity tied in to state legitimation—is present in these two ideal case
types. In Canada, a more fully dimensioned public debate required any
given government to hew closely to the state’s historic promise to project a “not the United States” identity. By contrast, Mexico’s less transparent system permitted a more flexible ideological narrative to justify
the compatibility of a broad range of Washington-friendly policies with
the “ongoing Revolution.” It is no wonder, then, that the transformative
“strength through integration” paradigm focused almost entirely on forging a “new” Canadian identity (which also entailed a new raison d’etre for
the state as promoter of Canadian entrepreneurial success abroad),
while Salinas could still lay claim to the emotional symbolism of the
PRI-led state and reinvoke it as the repository for historical memory and
aspirations. These represented two distinct strategies for coping with a
legitimacy crisis; one sought to dramatically reformulate the emotional
tie between citizens and the state, while the other sought to reinvigorate and reinvent a connection whose credibility had been undermined.
Future research on policy frontiers should illuminate the area between these two ends of the spectrum and clarify the various system-
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specific ways in which the conjuncture of external crisis and internal institutional and ideological dynamics translate into radical departures
from traditional policy agendas. Such an understanding of how lines in
the sand are drawn and defended over time via institutions and ideologies will greatly help to properly gauge the current and future behavior
of states whose choices appear to be “irrational” from a purely materialist perspective. Likewise, the template provided in this article, along
with the two variations also identified, will help those analyzing specific national contexts to predict scenarios for how policy frontiers
might break down; it should also give policymakers more realistic expectations regarding the locus of, and timetable for, policy change in an
ally or adversary. For as we have seen, going beyond the policy frontier
is never easy and always risky, but not impossible. At key historical conjunctures, politics inside the state can be transformed into a realm of previously unthinkable possibility.