The Kosovo Crisis (Part Eight), The Effects on the United States

During the last decade the United States’ activity in the Balkans has “established a very novel and dangerous principle whereby long-established borders could be redrawn and long-established nations dismembered with U.S. support on the principle that a disaffected national minority in a single province refused to accept the overall rule of the state.”

What effect will this precedent have on the United States itself? The United States too has a large national minority (Mexican-Americans). Like the Albanians in Kosovo, this minority is most concentrated in one region (the south-west). This minority is at times disaffected. Has the United States in fact created a precedent for the Mexican-Americans of the south-west to someday break away from the United States and create their own autonomous region or to connect with Mexico and create a greater Mexican state?

While it is impossible to predict the future and while it is a little premature for these predictions, the United States has set a dangerous precedent that could in fact come back to harm it.

Tony Dolz writes that for the past 160 years Mexican school children have been taught that United States stole the southwestern states from Mexico and that Mexico will take them back one day. Ten percent of Mexico’s population has recently moved to the United States. If they were to be radicalized and mobilized there could be a demographic takeover similar to that of Kosovo by Albanians.

Years ago Samuel Huntington wrote that immigrants from Mexico had the potential to divide the United States. He wrote that Mexican immigrants have come in far greater numbers than immigrant groups of the past and unlike immigrant groups of the past, the current Mexican immigrants are living in ethnic enclaves that allow them to remain unintegrated into society. Like the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo they have immigrated in large numbers and have a birth rate that far exceeds the local population. And like the Kosovars they refuse to assimilate. Could the south-west go the same way as Kosovo? Will there be reconquista of the south-west?

According to Huntington, many think so. For example, Professor Charles Truxillo of the University of New Mexico predicts that by 2080 the southwestern states of the United States and the northern states of Mexico will form La República del Norte (The Republic of the North). Other writers have referred to the southwestern United States plus northern Mexico as “MexAmerica” or “Amexica” or “Mexifornia.”

The failure of Mexicans to integrate into American culture is confirmed in the fact that many recent Mexican immigrants define themselves primarily as Mexican and not American. This is seen in both anecdotal and empirical evidence.

For example, in 1994, Mexican Americans vigorously demonstrated against California's Proposition 187—which limited welfare benefits to children of illegal immigrants—by marching through the streets of Los Angeles waving scores of Mexican flags and carrying U.S. flags upside down. In 1998, at a Mexico-United States soccer match in Los Angeles, Mexican Americans booed the U.S. national anthem and assaulted U.S. players.

Empirical evidence as well confirms this trend. A 1992 study of children of immigrants in Southern California and South Florida posed the following question: “How do you identify, that is, what do you call yourself?” None of the children born in Mexico answered “American.”. The largest percentage of Mexican-born children (41.2 percent) identified themselves as “Hispanic,” and the second largest (36.2 percent) chose “Mexican.” Among Mexican-American children born in the United States, less than 4 percent responded “American.” Whether born in Mexico or in the United States, Mexican children overwhelmingly did not choose “American” as their primary identification.

The recent unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo and its recognition and defense by many members of the international community legitimated a radical notion of democracy. A group of people that constituted a majority in an isolated region declared themselves a sovereign nation. Their sovereignty rested on the simple fact that they were the majority group in the region. Many claim that this is democracy in action.

Going back at least to the time of Wilson the United States has sought to export its democratic values. But what type of democracy? Simple majority rule has the potential to bring chaos to the international order and can be used to oppress national minorities. These are not the values Americans have in mind when they seek to export their democracy. Yet unmitigated democracy leads to these conclusions. What if the example of Kosovo was repeated worldwide? There would mass chaos. To bring the point home, we will consider what it would be like if it happened here.

Imagine if the Mexicans in the southwest (who constitute a majority in the region) declared themselves an independent state. Could we imagine the United States without Los Angeles, the Grand Canyon, and Texas? Think of the effect that would have on our political structure? What would happen to our economic system, our education system, and our sports leagues? Now imagine further that our fellow Americans were subject to systematic rape, intimidation, assault, property damage, and murder? Consider how we would feel if we knew that grave yards, churches, and other sites of cultural importance were being systematically defiled and destroyed. Would we not act like Lincoln did to protect the integrity of our boarders?

Say we did act like Lincoln and fought to preserve our union. How would we feel if Russia and China bombed New York and Washington DC, relentlessly terrorizing our civilians until we finally surrendered? Then put in troops to protect the newly created state; troops that in fact allowed the Mexicans to continue to cleanse non-Mexicans from the region and destroy our historical heritage.

That scenario is maddening. We cannot imagine it, we would not concede to it. We would conclude that if legitimacy is based on majoritarian democracy and majoritarian democracy can produce those results, then majoritarian democracy cannot be a valid source of legitimacy for a nation-state, we must look elsewhere for legitimacy. Historic rights to a region appear to be a far better legitimator of rule.