The Revolution, the State, and Economic Development in Mexico

Abstract

The legacy of the Mexican Revolution is still controversial today. This article reviews some of the transformations historians attribute to the Revolution: economic development, nationalism, an interventionist state, and a broader social policy and challenges the extent to which they can be attributed to the Revolution. It concludes that the state under Porfirio Diaz (1876–1911) was already making substantial advances in these areas. Far from being an ancien regime, backward, neo-feudal regime as is often asserted, the Porfiriato underwent great changes in spreading and monetarizing the market, building transportation and communications infrastructure, modernizing the banking and currency systems, and protecting industry. Far from being a laissez-faire regime, the state under Diaz followed policies of interventionist corporate liberalism. Despite great success at attracting foreign investment, the pre-revolutionary state also undertook nationalist policies by regulating and nationalizing foreign companies and asserting an independent foreign policy. Injustice was rampant, but rather than reflecting backwardness, it was the product of a primitive accumulation phase of modernization. The post-Revolution Mexican state is also compared with another regime that underwent no revolution, Brazil, to ascertain how much of the changes in Mexican policies were the responsibility of Mexico's revolution. It turns out that Brazil also came to follow nationalist and interventionist policies without the need of a social revolution. Changes in the world economy, particularly the Depression, and the new corportist ideologies it inspired were most important for explaining the change in state policy. The Mexican Revolution's main legacy was land reform, not economic modernization or nationalism.