Legal Integration or Pluralism? American Exceptionalism and Mexican Vice in the NAFTA Morality Play.

This paper examines the framing of national character types in the discussion and implementation of the NAFTA agreement. The development of the side accord dispute resolution mechanisms hinged on the presumption that Mexican legal development and - by association - national character were underdeveloped relative to the US. The labor and environmental side accords have been dismissed by critics smokescreens for aggressive trade policies, yet the side accords contain within them dispute resolution processes which are "fair", transparent, and accessible. Given the transparency of this structure and democratic claims of this transnational "public sphere", the question to ask is where, within this discourse, did the historical tensions between the US and Mexico become embedded? I suggest that it is within the dispute resolution mechanisms of the side accords. The accords contain within them a moral imperative that Mexican citizens become agents in their own evolution toward legal maturity and modernity. This subtext elides important legal traditions within Mexico. I argue that this attitude emerges both specifically from US-Mexican relations and, more generally, from the Euro-American anthropological and enlightenment heritage of legal thought. For the latter, I will borrow examples specifically from Enlightenment philosphers and early anthropologists to illustrate the extent to which law has been used to measure the evolution of a society and, as a corollary, of national character or morality more generally. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]