ABSTRACT
Mexico, like Canada, may be destined for embrace in a North Americaneconomic zone dominated by the United States but between Mexico and the United States there is a historic feud which is more easily forgotten in the latter than in the former. Mexico lost Texas to the United States in 1836. Ten years later US troops occupied Mexico City. One-third of what was then Mexico became the southwestern United States. In 1862 a French debt-collecting expedition (with British and Spanish encouragement) turned into an imperial adventure and created a short-lived Mexican empire with an Austrian archduke as emperor. This regime was followed after a short interval by the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, which lasted from 1876 to 1910 with only one four-year interlude. His remorseless, modernizing rule ended in revolution and seven years of civil war in which the United States intervened on the side of counter-revolution and a war between Mexico and the United States was only narrowly avoided. The long dictatorship of Diaz was succeeded by the even longer rule of a single party called, eventually, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and committed to social mobility and economic reform. But the years eroded the party’s revolutionary zeal, it never grasped the nettles of taxing the rich and reforming a notoriously inefficient agriculture, and it became the political vehicle of the well-to-do. In 1938 President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized oil reserves and the oil industry. Presidents succeeded one another decorously and constitutionally and by the end of the Second World War Mexico was a stable country under civilian rule. Relations with the United States had proceeded to a dignified wariness.
