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[in Jorge I. Domínguez and Chappell Lawson, eds., Mexico's Pivotal Democratic Election: Candidates, Voters, and the Presidential Campaign of 2000 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 321-344]

Mexico's 2000 presidential election campaign mattered. It closed the breach between Fox and old–line panistas, somewhat distrustful of his candicacy. It stimulated PAN voters to turn out at rates higher than those of PRI supporters on election day. It solidified the Cáredenas base in the PRD. It demoralized the PRI machinery. It detached voters from Labastida, leading them to vote for another candidate or to stay home on election day. It informed opposition strategic voters to support Fox. The proportion of voters influenced by the campaign to change their voting preference was at least two to three times greater than in U.S. presidential campaigns and at least twice Fox's margin of victory. In fact, the proportion of strategic voters alone gave Fox nearly all of his margin of victory.

War and its aftermath serve as powerful motivators for the elaboration and transmission of individual, communal, and national histories. These histories both reflect and constitute human experience as they contour social memory and produce their truth effects. These histories use the past in a creative manner, combining and recombining elements of that past in service to interests in the present. In this sense, the conscious appropriation of history involves both memory and forgetting—both being dynamic processes permeated with intentionality.

In this essay I explore the political use of the narratives being elaborated in rural villages in the department of Ayacucho regarding the internal war that convulsed Peru for some fifteen years. I suggest that each narrative has a political intent and assumes both an internal and external audience. Indeed, the deployment of war narratives has much to do with forging new relations of power, ethnicity, and gender that are integral to the contemporary politics of the region. These new relations impact the construction of democratic practices and the model of citizenship being elaborated in the current context.

No issue better reveals the American tension between principle and pragmatism than the debate over affirmative action. This week the Supreme Court is expected to enter the debate with a widely anticipated ruling on the University of Michigan's admissions policies, which favor black and other minority applicants. More important than the decision the court reaches will be the reasoning it uses.

As pragmatic public policy, it is easy to show that the benefits of affirmative action far outweigh its social or individual costs. It ensures the integration of our best universities and thereby promotes (if indirectly) a heterogeneous professional elite. In conjunction with anti-discrimination laws, it has directly fostered the growth of an African-American and Latino middle class.

Corporate America has also embraced the policy, mostly by choice. As a result, minorities make up a large part of the middle and top ranks at many of the country's most recognizable firms. On Fortune magazine's latest list of the 50 best companies for minorities, for example, 24 percent of officials and managers are minorities. Affirmative action has transformed the American military, making it the most ethnically varied at all levels of its organization of all the world's great forces. And, along with changing ethnic and racial attitudes, affirmative action has helped promote a powerful global popular culture, many areas of which are dominated by minorities.

Negative achievements—that is, what affirmative action has spared us—are hard to prove. But it is surely reasonable to attribute the relative infrequency of ethnic or racial riots in America to the presence of minority leadership in many of the nation's mainstream institutions.

All these gains have been achieved at very little cost to America's economic or political efficiency: our economy dominates the world; our army is history's most awesome; our great universities have few equals; our arts, science and scholarship are the envy of the world.

There are indeed costs at the individual level, borne by those whites who may not have gained places or jobs as a result of preferences for minorities. But nearly all research indicates that these costs are minuscule. Repeated surveys indicate that no more than 7 percent of Americans of European heritage claim to have been adversely affected by affirmative action programs, and it has been shown that affirmative action reduces the chances of whites getting into top colleges by only 1.5 percentage points.

For all its achievements, however, many critics fear that affirmative action violates fundamental principles that have guided this country. It is indeed difficult to reconcile affirmative action with the nation's manifest ideals of individualism and merit-based competition. But America's history is replete with just such pragmatic fudging of these ideals.

In foreign policy the United States has defended dictators, destabilized democracies and invaded other countries in the pragmatic promotion of the national interest. Domestically, Congress regularly passes laws that favor special interests—veterans, millionaire ranchers, farmers, oil-well owners, holders of patents about to expire, people with home mortgages—many with no economic justification, all costing billions of tax dollars.

Why, then, the obsession with the principle of colorblindness, especially among right-wing activists who otherwise exhibit little enthusiasm for the equality principle enshrined in the Declaration of Independence? It is hard to resist the conclusion that principles are invoked in public life to rationalize the control of the vulnerable. In relations among equals, meanwhile, pragmatism trumps virtue.

Yet these critics miss a more compelling, and more subtle, argument against affirmative action. In spite of its benefits, there are serious problems in the long run for its beneficiaries if affirmative action is not decisively modified.

First, while diversity is a goal that deserves to be pursued in its own right, it was a major strategic error for African-American leaders to have advocated it as the main justification for affirmative action. In doing so, they greatly expanded the number of groups entitled to preferences—including millions of immigrants whose claims on the nation pale in comparison to those who have been historically discriminated against. Such a development understandably alarmed many whites who were otherwise prepared to turn a pragmatic blind eye to their principled concerns about affirmative action.

Using diversity as a rationale for affirmative action also distorts the aims of affirmative action. The original, morally incontestable goal of the policy was the integration of African-Americans in all important areas of the public and private sectors from which they had been historically excluded. But if diversity is the goal, the purpose of affirmative action shifts from improving the condition of blacks to transforming America into a multicultural society. Thus the pursuit of inclusion is replaced by the celebration of separate identities.

In a more profound sense, the diversity rationale undermines a hopeful view of America. If the purpose of affirmative action is to redress past wrongs, then it requires both the minority and the majority to do the cultural work necessary to create what Martin Luther King Jr. called the "beloved community" of an integrated nation. Instead, many of its supporters see affirmative action as an entitlement, requiring little or no effort on the part of minorities.

Another consequence of this view is that it allows no recognition of the brute historical fact that the very patterns of social, educational and cultural adjustments that ensured survival, and even conferred nobility, under the extreme conditions of racist oppression no longer apply. In fact, now they may even be dysfunctional.

The gravest danger, however, and what perhaps alarms the majority most, is the tendency to view affirmative action as a permanent program for preferred minorities and, simultaneously, the refusal even to consider it a topic for public discourse. Indeed, among the black middle class, especially on the nation's campuses, blind support for affirmative action has become an essential signal of ethnic solidarity and commitment.

The nation needs this policy, but it must be modified. For starters, it should exclude all immigrants and be confined to African-Americans, Native Americans and most Latinos. It should include an economic means test. Only those who are poor or grew up in deprived neighborhoods should benefit. At the same time, poor whites from deprived neighborhoods should be phased into the program, a development that would counter the arguments of right-wing critics.

Finally, affirmative action should be severed from the goal of diversity—which, as the legal scholar Peter Schuck has argued, is best left to the private sector. Middle-class blacks and Latinos would continue to benefit from such voluntary programs, properly understood as a sharing of diverse experiences and perspectives rather than a withdrawal into ethnic glorification. There is every reason to believe the nation's corporations and universities will continue to find such a policy to be in their own best interests, and the nation's.

Americans have always recognized that high ideals, however desirable, inevitably clash with reality, and that good public policy requires compromise. But only through the struggle of affirmative action are they coming to realize that such compromises, wisely pursued, can actually serve a higher principle: the supreme virtue of being fair to those who have been most unfairly treated.

"This comprehensive [book] takes a close look at the status of democratic regimes in Latin America and the Caribbean... This is a remarkable collaborative achievement and provides a quick, authoritative, and handy reference that will be invaluable to students."—Foreign Affairs, reviewing the first edition

Since the first edition of the acclaimed Constructing Democratic Governance was published in 1996, the democracies of Latin America and the Caribbean have undergone significant change. This new, one-volume edition, edited by Jorge I. Domínguez and Michael Shifter, offers a concise update to current scholarship in this important area of international studies.

The book is divided into two parts: Themes and Issues, and Country Studies. Countries not covered by individual studies are discussed in the introduction, conclusion, and thematic chapters. In the introduction, Michael Shifter provides an overview of new developments in Latin America and the Caribbean, with particular emphasis on civil society and problems of governance. The conclusion, by Jorge I. Domínguez, ties together the themes of the various chapters and discusses the role of parties and electoral politics.

Contributors: Felipe Agüero, University of Miami; John M. Carey, Washington University in St. Louis; Fernando Cepeda Ulloa, Universidad de los Andes; Michael Coppedge; University of Notre Dame; Javier Corrales, Amherst College; Carlos Iván Degregori, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos; Rut Diamint, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Denise Dresser, University of Southern California; Mala N. Htun, New School University; Marta Lagos, Latinobarómetro; Bolívar Lamounier, Augurium: Análise; Steven Levitsky, Harvard University; M. Victoria Murillo, Yale University.

Esta obra expone los resultados de un proyecto de análisis e investigación sobre conflictos y disputas territoriales en América Latina y el Caribe desarrollado por Diálogo Interamericano y originalmente impulsado por iniciativa del Embajador Luigi Einaudi, actual Secretario General Adjunto de la Organización de Estados Americanos, con el propósito de comprender mejor las posibilidades y estrategias de solución de disputas territoriales en el marco de los procesos de democratización de la región. El hilo conductor de este volumen, resultante del proyecto, apunta a resolver dos interrogantes clave. En primer lugar, por qué, pese a la existencia de una vasta gama de disputas y controversias limítrofes sin resolución, ha habido tan pocas guerras en nuestra región. Y, en segundo lugar, hasta qué punto la democracia ha jugado un papel en la limitada proliferación de conflictos fronterizos en América Latina y el Caribe. Ambos interrogantes orientan tanto el capítulo introductorio de este libro, que presenta un panorama y un análisis de los conflictos territoriales y limítrofes en América Latina y el Caribe, a cargo del doctor Jorge Domínguez, de la Universidad de Harvard, compilador del presente volumen, como el capítulo del doctor David Mares, profesor de la Universidad de California, quien realiza un análisis de los diferentes conflictos territoriales y su vinculación con el tipo de sistema político prevaleciente en los países en disputa.

Some fifteen years after the collapse of communism, the uniting of Western and Eastern Europe through a substantial enlargement of the EU is perhaps the most important single policy instrument available to further a more stable and prosperous continent. As many as eight post–communist states are poised to conclude negotiations with the EU for full membership by the end of 2002. In this essay we seek to outline in the very broadest strokes the most important structural forces of national interest and influence underlying the dynamics of enlargement itself and its future consequences for EU governance. We do not claim our analysis is comprehensive, only that it seeks to capture the most significant of the underlying forces in play.

Since the start of 2000, five Latin American boundary disputes between neigboring states have resulted in the use of force, and two others in its deployment. These incidents involved ten of the nineteen independent countries of South and Central America. In 1995, Ecuador and Peru went to war, resulting in more than a thousand deaths and injuries and significant economic loss. And yet, by international standards the Americas were comparatively free from interstate war during the twentieth century. Latin Americans for the most part do not fear aggression from their neighbors. They do not expect their countries to go to war with one another.

Published in Peaceworks no. 50 (August 2003): 42. United States Institute of Peace.

The Bush administration, like its two predecessors, has expressed strong support for democracy in the Americas. It is now time to put its money where its mouth is.

Argentina's story in the 1990s was, in many respects, exactly what the United States would like to see happen throughout the hemisphere. The country has been a democracy since 1983, its longest span of constitutional government since the 1920s.

It has undergone a major foreign policy shift. Argentina resolved territorial disputes that once brought it to the edge of war with its neighbors, dismantled programs that could have led to the development of nuclear weapons, downsized its armed forces and became one of the most reliable U.S. allies in Latin America.

Poster Child

Argentina also became a poster child for market-oriented economic reform in the 1990s. The 1991 Convertibility Law, which pegged the Argentine peso to the dollar at a one-to-one rate, ended a devastating period of hyperinflation and helped to reintegrate Argentina into the global economy. The first Bush administration was a key ally in this process, supporting Argentina politically and financially.

Yet today Argentina is bankrupt, and its hard-won democracy is in danger. Mass riots and looting left at least two dozen people dead and forced President Fernando de la Rúa to resign in December. After more riots last weekend, Adolfo Rodríguez Saá also resigned a week after being appointed interim president.

A nearly four-year-long recession has pushed the unemployment rate to almost 20 percent and, according to one study, more than three million people into poverty in the last year alone. Argentina now stands on the brink of a huge debt default and a political meltdown.

The causes of the current crisis are disputed, but most observers agree that the same convertibility scheme that had ended the hyperinflationary crisis a decade ago left Argentine governments without instruments to respond to the recession that hit the country in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Unable to increase the money supply or devalue the currency, governments were left only with fiscal policy instruments.

The de la Rúa government was also shackled by its $132 billion debt burden. Rather than boosting the economy through a fiscal or monetary stimulus, as governments normally do, Argentine governments did the opposite in their increasingly desperate effort to sustain international financial credibility: They cut spending in the face of recession and refused to dismantle the currency peg that once ended hyperinflation.

The recession deepened, unemployment soared, poverty widened and tax revenues plummeted.

No Easy Way Out

There is no easy way out of this crisis. Indeed, any interim government will have to undertake one or both of the two Ds that its predecessor desperately sought to avoid: default and devaluation. Both options will entail massive economic and political costs.

This is where the Bush administration can help. Argentina's successful economic adjustment requires approximately $50 billion in international support for its evolving international-debt and exchange-rate policies, consistent with its economic realities and its international financial obligations.

That large sum can be assembled only with the direct, active and immediate support of the Bush administration, working with the International Monetary Fund and other governments and public and private financial institutions. One reason to assemble the large sum is to deter a worse panic.

Why should the U.S. government help soften Argentina's difficult landing? During the 1990s, Republican and Democratic administrations actively pursued the twin goals of democracy and economic integration in the Americas. Those goals are now imperiled. Argentina's further collapse would directly or indirectly damage other South American economies, provoking cumulative financial panics. And the breakdown of one of the region's largest democracies would undermine two decades of gains across the hemisphere.

Only two decades ago, dictatorship, not democracy, dominated much of Latin America. Argentina suffered six military coups between 1930 and 1976.

Since 1983, Argentines have put political violence and instability behind them. Presidents are now regularly and freely elected, and power has passed peacefully several times from government to opposition. Civil liberties are now widely respected, and the country possesses a vibrant free press and civil society.

Losing Hope

The current crisis threatens to undo these democratic gains. After four years of recession, Argentines are beginning to lose hope. Trust in government has eroded. Many citizens no longer believe their elected leaders are able to address their most pressing problems.

The de la Rúa 2-year-old government suffered such a dramatic loss of support because it was increasingly perceived to be sacrificing its citizens' well-being to meet the demands of financial markets. In his wake, Rodríguez Saá's grace period lasted only a week.

The danger today is that frustration has spread to include the entire political elite, and perhaps even Argentina's political institutions—patterns similar to those that gave rise to Alberto Fujimori in Peru and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. If that occurs, the prospects for democracy will dim considerably.

It has not come to that yet. Neither de la Rúa's or Rodríguez Saá's resignation was a military coup, and no Argentine Hugo Chávez has yet emerged. No one doubts that the election to choose de la Rúa's successor will be free and fair. But if Argentina is to steer clear of a Venezuela-like fate, its new government must deliver economic solutions to Argentines. To do so, it will require external assistance.

A successful model of such U.S.-backed support was tested in Mexico. The U.S. government's decision to organize a financial assistance package to help Mexico address the 1994-95 financial panic was bold and politically risky. But it clearly worked. A worse panic was deterred, economic growth was soon restored and Mexico made an impressive transition to democracy.

Argentina deserves similar help. Few, if any, Latin American countries combined democracy and market reforms as successfully as Argentina did in the 1990s.

Argentine democracy has proven remarkably resilient, weathering hyperinflation and radical economic reform. But if something is not done soon to give Argentines a realistic expectation that their politicians and democratic institutions can provide solutions to their problems, someone else will try to convince them that those politicians and those institutions are themselves the problem.

If that happens, U.S. interests will suffer badly in Argentina and elsewhere in the Americas.

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the acceleration of global economic, political, and social pressures, Mexico, Central, and South America have undergone vast transformations. This collection details these changes and updates the scholarship on a region once defined by the cold war and now struggling to define itself within the era of economic globalization and democratization. Rapid changes in the area have produced new and contentious scholarship, the best of which is contained in this new five-volume set. Collected by one of the premiere authorities on the region, each volume contains a valuable introduction and considers a key discipline of study.

We argue that their exist three initial sending regions, India, China, and Hong–Kong (SAR) and two possible receiving regions, an entrepot destination (Canada–Europe) and the ROW (USA). The home destination is of course the original sending country.Furthermore, we argue that three options or types of movement exist for each emigrant after the initial move to the entrepot country in two separate periods. These options include staying in the new entrepot country (Canada), returning to the origin country or sojourning on to a third country (ROW). In addition, multiple permutations over these types of immigrant movements can arise and complex patterns appear which will now blur the traditional categories of temporary (less than one year) and permanent movers.

The Chinese government's nationwide campaign to exterminate the Falun Gong meditation group has inaugurated a new era in Communist Party rule. The 1990s were shrouded by the shadow of Tiananmen, but today it is the campaign against "evil cults," or as most Westerners view it, religious repression, that casts the shadow. But the regime's war on cults extends far beyond the Falun Gong. Dozens of unofficial religious and spiritual groups have sprouted across the country in recent decades, creating followings of up to several million adherents. China's central government has labeled at least 15 such groups "evil cults," yet most continue to operate and even to expand.

In the presence of uncertainty about what a country can be good at producing, there can be great social value to discovering costs of domestic activities because such discoveries can be easily imitated. We develop a general–equilibrium framework for a small open economy to clarify the analytical and normative issues. We highlight two failures of the laissez–faire outcome: there is too little investment and entrepreneurship ex ante, and too much production diversification ex post. Optimal policy consists of counteracting these distortions: to encourage investments in the modern sector ex ante, but to rationalize production ex post. We provide some informal evidence on the building blocks of our model.

¿Es posible imaginar relaciones "formales, correctas y pacíficas" entre Estados Unidos y Cuba?... Junto a los esfuerzos por promover cambios políticos en Cuba, se han dado en las diferentes administraciones de Estados Unidos algunas manifestaciones de flexibilización ante la posibilidad de crisis mayores.

Prepared for delivery at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 29–September 1, 2002, Boston, Panel 11–25.

What is a "perfect dictatorship"? Such a regime provokes little societal resistance at installation. Its leaders act jointly to consolidate the regime and to broaden the support coalition by agreeing upon succession rules to rotate the presidency within the authoritarian regime. They delegate policy– making authority to civilians in areas of their competence. They emphasize consultation, not open contestation, prefer cooptation to repression, eschew ideological appeals, compel social actors into regime– licensed organizations, and deactivate civil society. South Korea under Park Chung Hee is compared on these dimensions to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, all at a time when authoritarian regimes governed them.

The ideal introduction to U.S.-Mexican relations, The United States and Mexico moves from the conflicts all through the nineteenth century up to the current democratic elections in Mexico. Domínguez and Castro deftly trace the path of the relationship between these North American neighbors from bloody conflict to (wary) partnership. By covering immigration, drug trafficking, NAFTA, democracy, environmental problems and economic instability, this volume provides a thorough look back and an informed vision of the future.

EL PARTEAGUAS MUNDIAL DE FINES DE LOS OCHENTA y comienzos de los noventa no dejó de afectar a Cuba. El derrumbe de los regímenes comunistas europeos y, en particular, de la Unión Soviética puso fin también a una larga etapa de la historia de Cuba comenzada en 1960. En su sistema político, económico y social, Cuba había sido distinta del resto de América durante las últimas tres décadas de la Guerra Fría en Europa. Con la desaparición de su principal aliado internacional, el gobierno de Cuba, acorralado, se vio obligado a iniciar un viraje en la conducción de su política nacional e internacional. Ese viraje, sin embargo, fue un golpe de timón de un buque anclado, cuyo piloto reorienta el barco sin alterar su equilibrio a pesar de un fuerte oleaje.

How are constitutional rules sustained? The general problem concerns how to structure the political game so that all the players – elected officials, the military, economic actors, and citizens – have incentives to respect the rules. In this paper, we investigate this problem in the context of how the institutions of federalism are sustained. A central design problem of federalism is how to create institutions that at once grant the central government enough authority to provide central goods and police the sub–units, but not so much that it usurps all of public authority. Using a game theoretic model of institutional choice, we show that, to survive, federal structures must be self–enforcing: the center and the states must have incentives to fulfill their obligations within the limits of federal bargains. Our model investigates the tradeoffs among the benefits from central goods provision, the ability of the center to impose penalties for non–compliance, and the costs of states to exit. We also show that federal constitutions can act as coordinating devices or focal solutions that allow the units to coordinate on trigger strategies in order to police the center. We apply our approach to a range of federations, including the United States under the Articles and the Constitution, modern China, and Russia.

Markets are so routinely regarded as fundamentally economic institutions that long–standing and quite varied anthropological perspectives on them are often overlooked. Anthropological attention focuses on patterns of individual and small–group exchange relationships within specific markets, on institutional structures that organize markets, and on the social, political, and spatial hierarchies through which markets link social classes, ethnic groups, or regional societies into larger systems. Anthropological studies of markets analyze them as nodes of complex social processes and generators of cultural activity as well as realms for economic exchange. Anthropologists' interests in markets, therefore, are partially distinct from – although certainly overlapping with – the concerns of economists.