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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (139837)	7/11/2004 5:17:17 PM
From: marcos	Respond to of 281500

It's pretty hard to control people from across the sea .... which might be a central truism we can draw from these examples One thing often forgotten is the degree to which these were civil conflicts, the US, México, and much later [and in far different style] Canada breaking from their 'mother' countries ..... on superficial and official level, sure 'the US' [a newly invented and named entity] breaks from 'Great Britain', 'México' [just as newly invented as a state entity] from 'Spain' ..... but in both, the on-the-ground reality was civil war, literally brother against brother in some cases, regions and families and socio-economic classes quite split between the factions ..... we tend to look back on it with subsequent history in mind, and think it was all far more clear than it was to the contemporary participant ...... things got mixed up, there was the 'fog of war' of course, but also a 'fog of shifting politics', people changed their minds more than you might think now ...... for instance, the spanish officer who signed the treaty of Córdoba [which guaranteed that spanish troops leave México], made that peace, then resigned his commission and declared himself a mexicano, and stayed ... he was one of many ..... to the north, some of the loyalist refugees that fled to Canada ended up with members still in the US, also of course in Britain .... these were very much civil conflicts, to some extent developed into an Us vs Them situation, but not in simple fashion - there were both whigs and tories in both Britain and the US, conservativos and liberales within both México and Spain, with factions inside each party, differing on both policy and implementation ..... and on all sides, plenty of incompetence, perfidy, corruption, just general human stuff None of which is meant to advance any current point ..... except maybe that a little nuance [and a lot of listening] is in order from time to time, for the accomodation of complexity ....... got to go, cheers