Salinas’s reforms aimed to shift Mexico’s civilizational identity from Latin to North American.

Evidence

In the 1980s this changed. President Miguel de la Madrid began and his successor President Carlos Salinas de Gortari carried forward a full-scale redefinition of Mexican purposes, practices, and identity, the most sweeping effort at change since the Revolution of 1910. Salinas became, in effect, the Mustafa Kemal of Mexico. Ataturk promoted secularism and nationalism, dominant themes in the West of his time; Salinas promoted economic liberalism, one of two dominant themes in the West of his time (the other, political democracy, he did not embrace). As with Ataturk, these views were broadly shared by political and economic elites, many of whom, like Salinas and de la Madrid, had been educated in the United States. Salinas dramatically reduced inflation, privatized large numbers of public enterprises, promoted foreign investment, reduced tariffs and subsidies, restructured the foreign debt, challenged the power of labor unions, increased productivity, and brought Mexico into the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada. Just as Ataturk’s reforms were designed to transform Turkey from a Muslim Middle Eastern country into a secular European country, Salinas’s reforms were designed to change Mexico from a Latin American country into a North American country. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 407

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the Ataturk westernization discussed in earlier chapters of this book; also connects to the reshaping of national identity theme in the reader’s GK with communication-culture sources.