A discussion about how Mexico became a state
Learning from governments in progress.
There is nothing I love more than learning how countries became countries. It’s fascinating to learn how groups of people decide to come together, form a government, spend money and build infrastructure, decide what laws they should have, and figure out how to enforce them.
Learning how countries are built from the ground up is very telling about human nature—about what we build out of necessity. That’s why I loved this recent deep dive from
by Robin Grier. Let’s read her article “How Mexico Built a State,” then come discuss it with us in the literary salon. 👇🏻
Sorry I'm late to this discussion - one I'm very interested in. My home country is Indonesia - another example a populous, large, heterogenous, geographical area, an archipelago (non-contiguous geography!). Achieving independence only in 1945 (yet the ex-colonist, The Netherlands, only acknowledged it in 1949). So barely 80 years of state creation. I (and my parents and grandparents) was a witness (and participant) in the effort. And yes, it does require some complex and nuanced trade-offs. And the progress is not always linear.
As German physicist Max Planck somewhat cynically declared, science advances one funeral at a time. Planck noted “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
It seems that country development may be much the same. Indeed all human progress that is not technical, and even some technical issues may only advance one funeral at a time. It seems that the more advanced the plutocracy of the country, or institution the more this is true.
This is something that we do not seem to take into account in our evaluation of other countries, and ignore in our own.