Border Governance and the "Unruly" South

Theory and Practice

I. Hussain

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349466436, 9781137345370
• eBook ISBN: 9781137342614
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Gobierno estadounidense

Though 9/11 tightened borders against hard threats, why were soft threats able to create havoc in the cracks? The studies explored by the contributors of this volume lead to the conclusion that the state is not, and should not be, the only viable actor in successful border governance.

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Introduction: Non-Security Governance

Imtiaz Hussain

Governing an “Unruly” Southern Border¹

Frontier-mindedness speaks loudly—not only of US history but apparently also of globalization. We are familiar with how the US western frontier opened lands and lore in the late nineteenth century. It, apparently, did not turn out to be the “last” US frontier needing cultivation. Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers argued convincingly in the mid-1960s that the “Canadian North ha[d] replaced the American West” in that capacity.² In this volume, we similarly argue that the “Mexican South” is currently displacing the “Canadian North” in Washington policy-making calculations. While the McLuhan/Powers argument paved the way for introducing their global village thesis, ours is simply an assessment of how the southern US frontier shows so many of the symptoms of a global village within a regional context, and what policy-making framework may permit a more effective governance. For us, this frontier stretches not just along the official US boundary with Mexico, but also what George W. Bush called the third US border, that is, along Central America and the Caribbean, embracing parts of South America as well.³

Several factors point to the increasing regional complications: (a) 9/11 fortifications indicating the presence of myriad illegal flows, such as illegal migrants, drugs, weapons, and money; (b) the incremental growth of soft threats from these, illustrated by US border wall–construction; and (c) constantly expanding cross-border dynamics, such as the emergence of diasporic communities, with their linguistic overlaps as well as social alliances and business partnerships spanning across borders.

Where there were no walls even during the Cold War, there are now many more of them. Yet, though a hard threat (formal military threats, both conventional and unconventional) has been well thwarted, too many soft counterparts (threats such as illegal flows of migrants, drugs, money, and weapons) may be just as damaging but harder to identify and contain. Though both legitimate and illegitimate cross-border dynamics continue exploding, we address some of the lesser-discussed issues and the neglected dimensions of the more popular issues.

Regimes have been created and national policy regulations indicate both hard and soft threats get ample policy-making (and analytical) attention. Yet, the more we scrutinize these policies and assessments, the more the centrality of the state becomes apparent. This may ultimately be the way solutions could evolve, utilizing the state in governance matters; but we would like to turn the analytical screw in other directions as well, specifically to explore a non-state alternative: As the chapters will repeatedly expose, the state is not just increasingly unable to grapple with these multiplying cross-border forces, but also that these forces have acquired too multilateral a character to be effectively dealt with by any single state.

Two tasks demand attention: configuring collective policy-making; and spelling out a clear, coherent, and comprehensive explanatory paradigm to hang these dynamics. The upshot is clear: Though integrated, both formally (through the North American Free Trade Agreement—NAFTA) and informally (e.g., through maquiladoras from 1965), the region is so riddled with both landmines and intertwined opportunities that, if the past is any guide, economic integration alone cannot capture those social and political forces reshaping the region with arguably greater effect.

Reflecting the frontier’s “lure of the parlor or even the pub,” rather than the “call of the wild,” four themes have been borrowed from McLuhan and Powers to explore this “southern” US space from any level “beyond the state.”⁴ They are (a) a frontiersman spirit—that is, the capacity to adjust not just to the physical environment enveloping the human being, but also his/her “inner sensibilities” adjusting to invading technologies; (b) nostalgia—a reminder of the “the stability of times gone by” amid the increasingly crowded input; (c) suspended judgment—that is, holding back from immediately adopting a new technology since a better one will soon be forthcoming; and (d) accepting a sense of being a “nobody” since constantly changing environments would also ultimately alter identities.

Today’s “call of the wild” can arguably be found in the 3H attraction: Hollywood (our pastime indulgences), Harvard (our intellectual alternative), and Headline News (the information we need to thrive, even survive). These are neither new summons nor necessarily threshold-elevating springboards, but their combination informs us that the forces behind what McLuhan and Powers called the global village—information conquering time and space so that any part of the world is as close as one’s neighborhood—have picked up even more speed. Even the village may have been downsized to the irreducible individual level.

Hollywood, like sports and music, helped break time and space barriers as well as determine many people’s lifestyle anchors: how we play, talk, dress, eat, and work not only models what/who we see on celluloid, but also mimics them in a way that could be producing the most plagiarized or copycat society in human history. Similarly with Harvard, the symbol of education and erudition serving as sine qua non behind every child’s growth, so that we are left believing that the academic degree we carry separates one from the public at large and, the more coveted the degree, from competitors in the education field. Here too the dark side of plagiarism lurks, converting those degrees into assembly-lined, mass-produced goods of increasingly diminishing value (since so many are being produced for ever-shrinking needs). A third driving force rounds off the emerging nightmare: information from the media. This is the beast behind the McLuhan–Powers hypothesis. If it was revolutionary enough in the 1960s when the Internet was still a pipe-dream, today media information obtrudes just about every aspect of our thinking and action through the Internet. Combined, these forces push us to cross boundaries more readily, thereby opening opportunity windows, but since this is expensive, we increasingly indulge in shortcuts and stealth. Illegal flows mix easily with the legal.

These forces directly and indirectly unleash and manipulate such cross-border forces as languages (perhaps the Hollywood movies circulating accent the diffusion of English in information-receiving countries, just as migrant-emitting countries, such as Mexico, will find the diffusion of Spanish in US societies through those migrants), or both unionism and elitism (NAFTA, binding workers of three countries through principles, expanded their cross-border deliberations, just as the technocrats implementing NAFTA find themselves negotiating across borders), or even diasporic dynamics from the settlement of job-seeking migrants (much like what has made Florida’s Cubans so pivotal a voting bloc in that state and as a screen for US policies toward Cuba; much the same can be said of Chinese settlers, on a softer note, across the entire Western Hemisphere).

Just as we experience the gap between what we think our identity to be and what it is widening into, so too the policy-makers the gap between what s/he believes s/he should deliver but no longer can. McLuhan and Powers call this gap the resonant interval—the “invisible borderline” between what we know and the space from which something new will emanate. Symbols and legends from the American West, for instance, included the Wild West filled with cowboys, the railroad leading into that open frontier, and, of course, the gold rush symbolizing the treasurable end-point. The Canadian North also had its distinguishing characteristics: a sanctuary from either an invasive media deluge or war-enlistment befitting an age of growing individualism; an information wilderness matching the territorial and material counterparts of the nineteenth-century West; more clean water, oil, and other inputs to supply the United States its infinite material and growing ideational desires; and so forth. In the same vein, this volume probes what the American South might generate in the twenty-first century, particularly against the budding soft threats. Nothing short of wholesale instinctual, ideological, and institutional innovation may be needed to both overcome the soft threats, and push the positive cross-border flows to their limits.

Our mission is not new, but our puzzle is. Since extant International Relations (IR) theories/models have become so useless in interpreting the southern US border (even neglected in empirical testing), we look outside the traditional boxes, hoping to find a paradigm that can handle the multifarious cross-border dynamics. Ultimately, we hope to derive a model we can take to our classrooms to help students draw a clearer and more comprehensive picture of the region, hoping that one day policy-making might itself profit from such an approach.

Glancing at mainstream theories (developed more elaborately later) exposes the abyss. On the one hand, even though the realist and constructivist schools of thought dominated IR explanations until the Cold War ended, the former ignored and the latter is too shy to even “touch” soft-threat doors. The so-called IR “father,” Hans J. Morgenthau, immortalized national interests as the be-all and end-all of realist policy-making, thus eliminating non-state actors, such as cartels or elites, from the picture.⁵ Idealists like Woodrow Wilson had more faith in collective action, but their hope for a world government (or even an inter-governmental arrangement like the League of Nations/United Nations) proved to be a bridge too far to cross in an age of new states and excessive nationalism. Kenneth N. Waltz’s neorealism, on the other hand, monopolized, at least US, interpretations of the Cold War (and died as sudden a death as the Cold War itself),⁶ rarely, if ever, looking beyond the global power distribution as a determinant. On the other hand, although, by highlighting identities over interests, constructivism captures possible shifts from Westphalia’s state-driven institutions toward region-based counterparts (as with the European Community, EC), the gap between legitimate and illegitimate identities (such as formed by drug-trafficking) have not been narrowed (nor even addressed).⁷

On the other hand, liberal arguments leave us with an overflowing cup, discussing every dynamic under the sun in the explanatory crucible, from economic interactions to moral judgments, institution-building, and even war-making. They generate more intellectual indigestion than cutting-edge explanations. Analytical order is needed in utilizing liberalist arguments. When the going is, sort of, good (i.e., dynamics push interstate cooperation to the limit), we can substitute instincts and rusty state-based institutions for something more cultivated “beyond” the state, a space stubbornly occupied by neo-functionalists since the late 1950s,⁸ encouraging also regional economic integration (REI) to flourish. New technologically driven calls of the wild have come out of them (e.g., pooling fiscal and monetary policies or creating a new currency), but their models have just not been replicated elsewhere, nor do they even bring illegitimate forces into their constructs (Europe is itself drowning under its own illegal flows—drugs, prostitutes, mafias, and gangs—even as its commissioners squeeze for more out of the established “closer union”). When the going gets tough, the regression to realism seems almost automatic, like the recent French reaction against the Romas (gypsies), resembling the features of security communities more than REI. Since the 1950s, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) set the contending stage for explaining European integration (security-based or economic),⁹ fascinatingly recreating the liberalist–realist IR dialectic. When the going is mixed, which is more likely than not given the expansion of states, interdependence has helped us navigate the pitfalls (selfish be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction: Non-Security Governance
• 2 Elite Networks and NAFTA Governance: Beyond State- and Multi-centricism
• 3 Languages as Borders: The NAFTA Experience and Perspectives in Language Governance
• 4 Of Porous Borders, Privileged Gatekeeping, and the Fading Iron-Curtain: Cuba’s Reluctant Multi-centricism?
• 5 Diasporic Chinese across North America: Mi casa no es su casa
• 6 Governance, Networks, and Drug Trafficking in North America
• 7 Tackling Southern Turbulence: Mexico’s Immigration Problems and Multi-centric Response
• 8 Two Mexicos or Beyond Mexico? Comparative Cross-Border Governance
• 9 Conclusions: Tracking Turbulence and Post-Westphalian Opportunities
• Notes on Contributors
• Index