Talk:Mexico

Southern Victory: Empire in name only
I've removed the "though in reality, it was an empire in name only" part from the Southern Victory section. It seams like a meaningless statement, and Alt Mexico is an imperial monarchy, not a republic that just happens to have the word "empire" in it's name. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 13:59, March 21, 2014 (UTC)


 * Good move. It's needless editorializing, and even if it is a somewhat grandiose name for a relative backwater, it's always been the prerogative of governments to give themselves misleading long names. Turtle Fan (talk) 01:01, March 22, 2014 (UTC)


 * I don't see how it's grandiose. Mexico, OTL and I presume Alt, has a huge territory, is a rich country, and most importantly is the heir to the Astac Empire. For that last reason alone, if any country in the Americas has the right to call itself an empire, it's Mexico. Why do you call Mexico a backwater? Mexico might not be as rich as America, but most country aren't. If you use America as the baseline, most countries could be called backwaters, so that's not a fair comparison. By world standards, Mexico is quite wealthy. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 04:47, March 23, 2014 (UTC)


 * . . . You did read the series, didn't you? At one point was Mexico portrayed as anything other than a pissant?


 * Also, if you've ever done any reading on the French Intervention, you've probably come away with the distinct impression that Maximillian's emperorship was always a joke. You'll recognize that he had almost no Mexican supporters. Even had Franco-conservative forces crushed the juaristas once and for all, the conservatives would have turned on him at the first opportunity.  To survive such an eventuality he would have been utterly dependent on a permanent French military commitment.  There never would have been such a commitment, opposition to the adventure in France steadily mounted throughout the 1860s, and of course the Franco-Prussian War would soon have made such a commitment impossible even were that not so.  The Franco-Prussian War did happen in TL-191 the same as it did in OTL so that should have been the end of Imperial Mexico.  The only thing that could have saved Max would have been if Confederate soldiers immediately stepped in to fill the void.  It's highly unlikely the Rebels would have been ready for such a commitment seven years after the War of Secession ended, and at any rate they were none too happy to have the French playing such games themselves, though they were prepared to tolerate it for the sake of European support.  So either we have Max hanging on by himself throughout the 1870s, which strains credibility past the breaking point, or we have him dependent on foreign support.  And an empire is a government that has foreign nations dependent on itself, not the other way around!


 * Since you seem to want to talk about stuff from outside our purview, however: Mexico is fourteenth on the list of countries by area (larger than it is in TL-191, since in that series it's down two states), eleventh on the list by population, and currently fourteenth by GDP. On another continent it would be considered a fairly major power. Here it's overshadowed by the US, but its location does offer a priceless advantage: It has an Atlantic coast, a Pacific coast, and a continuous stretch of easily passable terrain between the two.  Unlike Canada (sorry ML4E) it also has population density great enough to support a well-developed, economically sustainable infrastructure that allows for massive commercial activity.  George Friedman argues that, if they can get their political house in order (which can happen in a fairly short period of time, see for instance the rapidity with which China escaped the disastrous Cultural Revolution and emerged as a colossus of international trade) they're the only serious threat to American hegemony likely to emerge within a hundred years' time.  I find his argument persuasive.


 * By the way, calling Mexico the heir to the Aztec Empire is ridiculous. You might as well buy a house and then claim to be the next of kin to whomever lived there forty years ago. Turtle Fan (talk) 19:12, March 23, 2014 (UTC)


 * I started at Return Engagement and I'm partly through Drive to the East, the part of the series I read didn't say much of anything about Mexico. As for empire being "a government that has foreign nations dependent on itself, not the other way around", it can be but is isn't necessarily. "Empire" has allot of different meanings, one of them is "a monarchy where the monarch is of imperial rank" and my that definition Alt Mexico is indisputably an empire. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 09:28, March 24, 2014 (UTC)