Invencion del sistema politico mexicano: Forma de gobierno y gobernabilidad en Mexico en el siglo XIX (review)

A sequel to his Hacia el nuevo estado: México, 1920-1993 (1995), Luis Medina presents here an ambitious and remarkable synthesis of Mexican political history, this time from independence to the present, with a substantive emphasis on the first half of the nineteenth century. Whereas his previous work was weighted toward economics, he brings to this history constitutional law and particularly "neo-institutionalism" from political science. His focus is on political systems and their elements as opposed to regimes, and he posits that Mexico achieved a distinctive system during the late-nineteenth century and during the years 1920-1940. A political system for Medina is based on a stable relationship from informal rules established between central authority and various political actors, such as legislatures, the judiciary, political parties, the Church, governors, municipalities, and the people, whether of the political class or rural communities.

Medina's argument is that Mexico failed in the post-independence years to establish a political system, because the central political concern was to find the proper formal constitutional arrangement for the country, instead of developing effective informal arrangements that could lead to stability. The country moved from monarchy in 1812, to a federal republic in 1824, a central republic in 1835, and finally a return to federalism in 1857. Medina points out that legislatures were more consequential than executives until the Reforma, and he demonstrates this imbalance with detailed evidence from available parliamentary debates, plans, and pronunciamientos. Without strong executives to institute informal rules, factionalism reigned. Medina places considerable emphasis on the efforts at conciliation by the moderates of the central republic years (1835-1854) and appears to regard them as presaging the system of Porfirio Díaz. Medina sees the Reforma as a watershed, not only because Benito Juárez emerged as a strong civil-war executive despite the limitations of the Constitution of 1857, but also because of his efforts after 1867 to conciliate former imperialists and conservatives, again paving the way for Díaz.

The heart of Medina's argument rests on the "creation" of the political system under Díaz, despite the fact that at least two-thirds of the book's content is devoted to the pre-Reforma era. Thus treatment of the Porfiriato is brief, though concise and clear. According to Medina, Díaz could not make major changes in the Constitution of 1857 and thus turned to informal arrangements. He tolerated all political action and actors (until at least 1903), drawing the line only at sedition and revolt. He gave governors a free hand in dealing with internal matters in the states and localities; he allowed a resurgence of the Church; he replaced the popular guardia nacional of mid-century and the former military leadership with "auxiliary" forces; he did not, insists Medina, alienate the peasantry by abetting an attack by landowners on communal property. He tolerated the opposition press until it turned seditious after 1903. The result was peace and stability for three decades. Following the revolutionary upheaval, a new system developed from 1920-40, which Medina treats briefly. It included two new political actors, the peasantry and labor (reflected formally in articles 27 and 123 of the Constitution of 1917). The system's center was again a strong executive, but now institutionalized, thus avoiding the ultimate pitfall of the Porfiriato, personal power that came to equate the regime with the system.

This complex and nuanced argument, based on a wealth of sources, both primary and secondary, has several notable and sometimes troubling characteristics. Medina dismisses "traditional" interpretations and accounts in favor of those that are "revisionist." He rejects "federalism versus centralism" and "liberalism versus conservatism" as guiding political themes of the pre-1867 period. He does not accept the reformist policies of 1833-34 under Valentín Gómez Farías as a...