The North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was regarded as an economic agreement, but it is now realized that its social implications could overshadow its financial effects. The agreement has dramatically accentuated change in Mexico and created a need for paradigms facilitating understanding of the succession of crises facing the country. Political culture analysis, the authors argue, is a suitable lens through which post-NAFTA Mexico can be viewed, but it must struggle against outdated approaches flavored by Marxism and dependency theory.
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References
1.
Thomas Sowell , Race and Culture: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
2.
2. “This is a phrase that in recent years has been developed by political scientists to express in precise fashion what A. D. Lindsay was attempting to get at with the notion of `operative ideals.' Lindsay's starting point was the traditional one—the writings of philosophers—but he labored to select out those ideas that could be shown to underlie behavior. The student of political culture, by contrast, starts with the data of behavior and from them seeks to elicit an ideological system, using ideological writings only as a guide to research.”William T. Bluhm, Ideologies and Attitudes: Modern Political Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. xii.
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3. “For our purpose we may regard the political culture as a shorthand expression to denote the emotional and attitudinal environment within which the political system operates. It is the `particular pattern of orientations' in which, according to Gabriel Almond, every political system is embedded. Borrowing from Talcott Parsons, we can be a little more precise at this point, and say that we are concerned with orientations towards political objects. Orientations are predispositions to political action and are determined by such factors as traditions, historical memories, motives, norms, emotions and symbols.”Dennis Kavanah, Political Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 11.
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4. Roland H. Ebel and Raymond Taras, “Cultural Style and International Policymaking: The Latin American Tradition,” in Culture and International Relations, ed. Jongshuk Chay (New York: Praeger, 1990), p. 204.
5.
5. Jacqueline Fortes and Larissa Adler Lomnitz, Becoming a Scientist in Mexico: The Challenge of Creating a Scientific Community in an Underdeveloped Country (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 161.
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In it, Auda addresses the mounting tensions discomforting Islamic scholarship: “In Egypt—which from the beginning of the nineteenth century underwent a process of Westernization in culture, behavior, and institutions—attempts to translate Islamic concepts and ideas into social organizations and behaviors give the Islamic movement the character of a `dehegemonizing' movement, in the Gramscian sense of overturning a diffuse and all-encompassing structure and ideology of domination. The Islamic movement aims at reversing the acculturation process that allowed Western ideas, organizations and behaviors to advance in Egypt and strives to install instead an all-encompassing Islamic model. Guided by these theoretical concepts... analysis of political culture and change in Egypt will center around four factors: the modernizing elite's plans and records of modernization; the distribution of influence between the groups that subscribe to the values and organizations of Westernization (instrumental rationality) and those that espouse reliance on indigenous Islamic values in public policy; the development of state crises of legitimacy and solvency; and the co-optation and integration of more indigenous social classes, groups, and values into the state structure.” Ibid., p. 380.
7.
7. R.B.J. Walker, “The Concept of Culture in the Theory of International Relations,” in Culture and International Relations, ed. Chay, p. 4.
8.
8. Sidney Verba, “Comparative Political Culture,” in Political Culture and Political Development, ed. Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 514.
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“To say that political culture involves the important ways in which people are subjectively oriented toward the basic elements of their political system is an accurate but not yet satisfactory definition... so many different formulations have been offered (twenty-five by one count) that one might think he was grappling with the riddle of the Sphinx.” Ibid., p. 5.
10.
See also F. M. Barnard, “Introduction,” in J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, ed. J. G. Herder (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 23-27.
11.
“The... genealogy for cultural studies is more generic. It begins with Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Antonio Gramsci as representative cultural Marxist thinkers whose work retains an analysis of political economy and a concern with human emancipation alongside an understanding of culture, ideology, and human agency. In this context, culture is laced with power and power is shaped by culture. Subsequent links in this genealogy include the reconceptualizations required by the emergence of gender, race, and sexuality as analytic concepts deriving from social movements of feminists and their allies, members of historically subordinated racialized groups and their allies, and gays and lesbians and their allies. Such a genealogy problematizes previously taken-for-granted monolithic social unities.”Renato Rosaldo, “Whose Cultural Studies?”American Anthropologist, 96(3):525 (Sept. 1994).
12.
A few years earlier, working independently of Almond, Samuel Beer and Adam Ulam presented a somewhat different definition of the concept in a comparative government text of 1958 (Patterns of Government, New York: Random House, 1958).” Bluhm, Ideologies and Attitudes, p. xii.
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13. “But the development of a stable and effective democratic government depends upon more than the structures of government and politics: it depends upon the orientations that people have to the political process—upon the political culture. Unless the political culture is able to support a democratic system, the chances for the success of that system are slim.”Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 498.
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14. “Religious fundamentalism and revolutionary zeal, then, become substitutes for meaningless technical mumbo jumbo, discredited socialism, liberalism that has been misunderstood or badly implemented, and results so slow that they are barely perceptible.”Guy Sorman, The New Wealth of Nations (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1990), p. 198.
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“As I perceive them, the theoretical demands of the present indicate that the renaissance of political culture should not be conceived as a simple return to its origins in Almond's scientific approach, but it should incorporate other more continental—more sociological and interpretive—approaches as well.” Ibid., p. 132.
16.
16. Diamond, ed., Political Culture and Democracy, p. 412.
17.
17. Ibid., p. x.
18.
18. Packenham, Dependency Movement, pp. 15-16.
19.
19. Ibid., p. 264.
20.
20. Gabriel Almond, “Foreword,” in Political Culture and Democracy, ed. Diamond, p. xii.
21.
“But it is within political science that political culture is most naturally the object of some contention. We should note that the polemics within the discipline go far beyond arguments over whether the political culture approach has a place in the centrality of the discipline. Arguments—sometimes vitalizing, other times harsh—have marked professional discussion: it is no small measure of the debate that Gabriel Almond titled the volume containing a collection of his professional papers A Discipline Divided: Schools and Sects in Political Science.”Holly Carter and John Frankestein, “The Political Culture of China-Watching,” in The Political Culture of Foreign Area and International Studies: Essays in Honor of Lucian W. Pye, ed. Richard J. Samuels and Myron Weiner (Washington, DC: Brassey's, 1992), p. 79.
22.
22. Of course, en passant, such crises are hardly confined to the Muslim or Arab nations, and the same warnings about looking inward rather than outward apply to everyone. See Bluhm, Ideologies and Attitudes, pp. 376-377.
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23. “Every region has politically taboo subjects that are primarily, although not exclusively, shaped by the country under study. These subjects are typically those that shame the host society or threaten those who govern by revealing venal or grossly inefficient conduct. Few governments will permit studies of illegitimacy, infanticide, child labor, prison conditions, tribal conflicts, drug trafficking, prostitution, dowry deaths, or human rights violations.”Myron Weiner, “Political Culture in Foreign Area Studies,” in Political Culture, ed. Samuels and Weiner, p. 8.
