Shaping Network Society

The Ignored Elephant: Mexico in the Atlantic Community

When we think of the Atlantic Community, we think of Europe and the United States. In the 1990s a movement to include a focus on Canada, when studying North-Atlantic relations, has been fairly successful and has added value to the discourse. Mexico, however, even today, is under-appreciated in the U.S., transatlantic, and German policy discourses. The challenge is to map the issue areas in which Mexico impacts European-U.S. relations, where it should not be ignored, if one wants to fully describe, understand, and shape transatlantic policy processes.

Mexico is an interesting case of an ignored elephant. It is a fairly big country with 105 Million inhabitants. It is an OECD-country, with a GDP per capita that is around 10 times that of China. Around 10% of the U.S. population is of Mexican descent. Mexico is one of the main oil-producing countries of the world. The richest man in the world is from Mexico, Mexican multinational companies like CEMEX control most of the market for “building solutions” in both the U.S. and Germany. German industry, especially automotive companies have major manufacturing bases in Mexico to comply with NAFTA local content rules and to be closer to the U.S. market. And Mexico is the main supplier for illegal drugs in the United States.

Therefore, Mexico should be the most important topic on the US foreign policy agenda and an important one on the transatlantic agenda. However, if we take the results of a recent survey in foreign policy, Mexico (and all of Latin America) is not very high on the minds of the foreign policy elite. Why?

My hypothesis is simple: the policy communities that care about the Euro-US transatlantic corridor and the Latin American Studies communities do not have shared cultures.

If that is true, what can we do?

About Philipp

Philipp Müller works in the IT industry and is academic dean of the SMBS. Author of "Machiavelli.net". Proud father of three amazing children. The views expressed in this blog are his own.

16. August 2007 by Philipp
Categories: Blog | 4 comments