Mexico’s Name-Change: A United States No Longer?

Shortly before leaving office, Mexican President Felipe Canderón sent to the Mexican legislature a proposal to amend the state’s constitution by renaming the country “Mexico,” from the “United Mexican States.” His rationale was that Mexico didn’t need “a name that emulates another country and which none of us Mexicans uses on a day-to-day basis.” Indeed, the emulation evinces a category mistake in that it treats what was province in an empire, that of New Spain, as an empire.

                                   Mexico's head of state, Felipe Calderon, who proposed the name-change.  

The full essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires, available at Amazon.

Moody’s: Statist France Lagging in the E.U.

Bashing the French in a major article on their lack of business competitiveness, the Economist was the target of la colère en Paris in November 2012. Just after the magazine’s warning that France could be the next danger-zone for the euro due to relatively high labor costs and unemployment, Moody’s cut the state’s rating to Aa1 from Aaa and kept a negative outlook on the rating. Moody’s cited the state’s economic weakness and the risks to the finances of the state government “posed by” France’s “persistent structural economic challenges.” In this way, Moody’s analysis dovetails with that of the Economist. Both pointed to a sort of impotence in French industrial policy. Moody’s decision excluded factors from the broader debt crisis in the E.U., focusing instead on the French government’s continued “reliance on borrowing to finance generous social-welfare programs” even as businesses in the state were laying-off employees. In other words, Francois Hollande had not gone far enough in his policies to make a dent in the state’s deficit as well as the downward trajectory of French competitiveness in the E.U. Meanwhile, deteriorating economic conditions in the E.U. were effectively closing the window of opportunity on even a one-party government being able to enact substantive reform. I contend that the gap between what the Socialist party could do, given its absolute majority in the legislature, and what it was actually doing contributed to the criticism.

Changes in real GDP in the state of France. A general downward trend-line is apparent.     
Source: World Bank

The full essay is in Essays on the E.U. Political Economy, available at Amazon. 

House of Commons Undercuts Cameron on E.U. Budget

In 2012, David Cameron of Britain “suffered his first major House of Commons defeat” in governing  “when some in his party failed to back his position on the budget negotiations and urged him to secure deeper cuts” in the pending 1 trillion euros E.U. budget for 2014-2020.  Although Cameron had stated he would veto the European Commission’s proposal to increase the overall E.U. budget by 5% annually for the seven-year period, he did not support cutting the federal budget. Because the vote in his state legislature for cuts in the federal budget was non-binding, the governor was free to ignore it in the European Council, where the state governments are represented. The European system of public governance suffered from at least two major weaknesses here.

The complete essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires, available at Amazon.

 David Cameron representing his state at the E.U.  (AFP/Getty)

States Pull Ahead of E.U. on Syria: A Compromised Foreign Policy?

In November 2012, the New York Times reported that the European Union was offering “crucial support for the new Syrian political opposition,” which the E.U. referred to as the “legitimate representative for the Syrian people.” The E.U. stopped short of “conferring full diplomatic recognition” to the new group—the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces—even though one of the E.U.’s states, France, had conferred such recognition one week earlier, and another state, Britain, would soon do likewise.

The full essay is at Essays on the E.U. Political Economy, available at Amazon.