Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley: Currents
Fall 1994
Michael Watts, Professor of Geography
Director, Institute of International Studies
n January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) sent trade barriers tumbling in Mexico, Canada, and the United
States, a guerrilla group seized half a dozen towns in Chiapas, southern
Mexico. Contrary to much U.S. press coverage, Chiapan society is neither
a provincial backwater nor an unexploited region at the margins of the
Mexican economy. Indeed, one of its striking characteristics is its
considerable resource wealth -- the state produces over half of Mexico's
hydroelectric power and is a major exporter of coffee, petroleum,
cattle, and lumber. However, Chiapas is also deeply mired in poverty:
according to Roger Burbach, it has the worst indices of poverty and
social marginality of Mexico's thirty-two states. The Indian uprising
led by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) was, in other
words, incubated amidst marked inequality and in a region that has been
transformed -- politically, economically, and culturally -- by twenty-five
years of rapid and often brutal modernization. Against a backdrop of
various commodity booms, a complex array of actors including ranchers,
peasant organizations, caciques, liberation theologists, bureaucrats,
politicians, and Indian communities had converted Chiapas into a theater
of social and political upheaval. While land in particular emerged as a
source of serious contention, during the 1980s the combination of debt,
falling petroleum prices, and neo-liberal reforms reverberated across
the region, exacerbating social and class tensions within and between
peasant and Indian communities. The neo-liberal modernization policies
of President Salinas de Gotari deepened these cleavages by reducing
subsidies and price supports, but most especially by gutting the
agrarian reform of Article 27 of the Mexican constitution in 1992. It
was on this canvas of political, economic, and social change that the
guerrilla leader Subcommandante Marcos -- a charismatic and telegenic
figure with strikingly quotable opinions on everything from modernity to
sexual preference -- could claim that NAFTA represented a "death sentence
for the poor."
uch has been made of the Chiapas rebellion, some seeing in its tactics
and strategies a sort of postmodern politics. Neither a simple rebellion
against a dictatorial leader nor an archetypical heroic guerrilla
struggle, the EZLN presents itself as a broad-based movement of civil
society rooted in a sophisticated sensitivity to both the nuances of
contemporary post-Cold War politics and to the recent history of
liberation struggles in Latin America. Whatever one makes of the
movement's fluid and shadowy governing structure and its negotiations
for regional autonomy and land reform, the EZLN comes in the wake of the
collapse of Cold War polarities and is framed by a debate, often
ideological in character, over the purported virtues of the global
marketplace and the fallibility of Adam Smith.
he Chiapas uprising speaks directly to a number of issues that the
Institute of International Studies -- indeed, any program concerned with
comparative studies and transnational processes -- must seek to address.
Social theory is perhaps ill equipped to address some of these concerns
because the uprising may give reason to question some of the underlying
assumptions about the nation-state, the national economy, political
movements, development, or modernity itself. As Director of the
Institute, I plan to focus on four broad themes as a way of helping to
frame an agenda for international studies. What is distinctive about
these themes, in my view, is that they are profoundly transdisciplinary,
demanding a sort of intellectual cosmopolitanism.
he first theme is to deepen our understanding of transnational and
comparative political economy through an examination of what Allan Scott
and Michael Storper call the "global mosaic of regional economies." The
global economy is less a core - periphery system than a set of specialized
regional production systems (each with its own dense intra-regional
transactional arrangements), inextricably intertwined with global flows
and networks of investment, interindustry linkages, and people. To
understand these regional trajectories -- whether NAFTA, the Yen bloc, the
hybrid character of Chinese industrialization, the shifting political
economy of ASEAN, the European Union, or the Gulf Cooperative
Council -- requires a sensitivity to institutional arrangements at the
global level (interfirm alliances, global agreements and regulatory
institutions, or multinational enterprises) and to nation states whose
role remains central precisely because of the constraints imposed on
national economic management by the forces of globalization.
second concern speaks to the relationship between sustainability and
development. The 1992 UNCED conference in Rio reflected the ascendance
of sustainability as a touchstone for national and global development
strategies. Sustainability is, of course, a highly contested term
infused with a multiplicity of meanings, but it has clearly emerged from
the second wave of environmentalism driven by the profusion of locally
based community groups and nongovernmental organizations on the one hand
and by the growing awareness of serious, perhaps catastrophic, global
environmental problems on the other. The UNCED conference, and more
recently, the Cairo Population Conference, highlight the complexity of
global environmental regulation as well as the tensions between the
large NGO community and the multilateral regulatory agencies. The
definition and negotiation of ecological limits and the new
environmental risks of late twentieth-century modernization provide
ample opportunity to debate development theory and practice in new and
wide-ranging ways. The experiences of the new social movements and of
community-based resource management, for example, suggest that civil
society -- or more properly, the reinstitutionalization of civil
society -- has emerged in the 1990s as a sphere in which the older debates
over growth versus development and markets versus planning can be
extended and deepened. The Institute sponsored a workshop on these issues, focusing in particular on the languages and discourses of development as a way of understanding the history of development practice.
Next page: Chiapas and Identity Politics; Chiapas and the post-Cold War World
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