Nationalism and the Left: The PRD

Abstract

During the Salinas era, the left also searched for a new legitimizing formula, and the emergence of a democratic left posing a significant challenge to the PRI was accompanied by a restatement of the struggle against inequality of political liberalism and the nation-building discourse underlying revolutionary nationalism. Yet discourses on the left, and in particular those of the main left-wing party in this period, the PRD, reveal how difficult this search was. The writing and comments of left-wing intellectuals in party documents and publications such as Coyuntura and Motivos , as well as in the mainstream press such as the magazines Proceso and Nexos , reveal how the PRD's own composition as a fragile coalition between revolutionary nationalism and socialism was responsible for a lack of ideological unity, hampering the development of a coherent formula of national citizenship. While left-wing intellectuals coincided with the analysis of salinismo to the extent that they identified a conflict between the individual and social realms, that is, between the modernity offered by individualism and the Mexican national idea, the PRD failed to establish its social-democratic credentials and remained wedded to a strong, interventionist state and a limited private realm in this period. Its vision was of a statist political economy and the preference of many perredistas was for an integral, corporate democracy founded upon a social pact that substituted that of revolutionary nationalism. The PRD's vision of a broad social pact mediated by a powerful state envisaged a return to notions of nationality based upon a limited individualism.