After some 70 years of continuous rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which based its long-term legitimacy to a considerable extent on an adversarial relationship with the United States, a new party and government have come to power. Elected in 2000, Vicente Fox represents the right of center National Action Party (PAN), which had long served as the major source of organized political opposition to the dominant PRI. As president, he has vowed not only to change his country’s domestic politics (for example, by reducing rampant corruption) but also to strengthen U.S.-Mexican relations in the context of a generally revamped and revitalized foreign policy. In the paper we will analyze the current relationship between the two countries and an assess its future prospects. The relation ship between the two countries evolved during the nineteenth century, when both young countries were struggling to establish their authority over adjoining territories. It was a relationship built on a foundation of mutual distrust resulting from the 1846 conflict that Mexicans refer to as the War of the North American Invasion. The anti-Americanism and xenophobia resulting from this conflict poisoned the relationship for many years to come and ultimately provided one of the ideological pillars for the Mexican Revolution.
Although the relations have a bitter history but several recent developments and trends have made partnership between the United States and Mexico inevitable. First, there is the easy movement of peoples and their associated cultures (not to mention economic goods) across a common two-thousand-mile border. From a neofunctional theoretical perspective, these flows can be seen as creating incentives for leaders of the two respective states to work more closely and cooperatively.
Mexico’s domestic changes are a second contributing factor. Mexico’s fundamental political, social, and economic restructuring over the past several decades as greatly increasing the probability of continuing improvement in interstate relations.........
