{"id":3812,"date":"2026-03-08T19:10:16","date_gmt":"2026-03-08T19:10:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/?p=3812"},"modified":"2026-03-08T19:38:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T19:38:10","slug":"how-1860s-mexico-offered-an-alternative-vision-for-a-liberal-international-order","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/how-1860s-mexico-offered-an-alternative-vision-for-a-liberal-international-order\/","title":{"rendered":"How 1860s Mexico offered an alternative vision for a liberal international order"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Tom Long, Professor of International Relations, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick<\/strong><\/a> <\/p>\n

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In 1867, the world\u2019s most powerful statesmen, including Austria\u2019s Emperor Franz Josef, France\u2019s Napoleon III and US secretary of state, William H. Seward, petitioned the Mexican government to spare the life of a condemned man.<\/p>\n

Mexico\u2019s ragtag army and militias had just humbled France, then Europe\u2019s preeminent land power. The costly six-year campaign drained the French treasury and eroded Napoleon III\u2019s domestic support. Napoleon\u2019s ambition to transform Mexico into a client empire under a Vienna-born, Habsburg archduke, crowned Maximilian I, ended in spectacular failure.<\/p>\n

After his defeat, Maximilian was brought before a Mexican military tribunal. European monarchs regarded the prisoner as their peer<\/a>, but Mexican liberals convicted him as a piratical invader, usurper and traitor. Despite indignant appeals from European courts, President Benito Ju\u00e1rez refused to commute his sentence. The would-be emperor was executed by firing squad<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

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Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox.<\/strong> Sign up to our daily newsletter<\/a> to receive all The Conversation UK\u2019s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.<\/em><\/p>\n\n

The controversy went beyond one monarch\u2019s fate. It crystallised a clash between opposed visions of global order \u2014 as Peru\u2019s president Ram\u00f3n Castilla<\/a> said at the time, it was a \u201cwar of the crowns against liberty caps\u201d. <\/p>\n

Today, world politics are in flux. The so-called liberal international order, nominally grounded in multilateralism, open markets, human rights and the rule of law, is facing its gravest crisis since the second world war. Former advocates such as the United States now openly flout international law and undermine the very norms they once championed<\/a>. China remains ambivalent, while Russia unabashedly hastens the order\u2019s unravelling<\/a>. <\/p>\n

More broadly, the old post-second world war order appears out of step with the global south and with widespread anger over double standards<\/a> exposed by the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran.
\nAmid today\u2019s crises, a world order arranged for and by the great powers<\/a> looks both insufficient and doomed to lack legitimacy. Reordering will require support from diverse actors, including states across the global south.<\/p>\n

1860s: a turbulent decade<\/h2>\n

The 1860s were a turbulent, although often overlooked, moment of global reordering<\/a>. Technological shifts \u2013 the telegraph, electricity, steamships and railways \u2013 appeared as disruptive then as AI does today<\/a>. Combined with shifting power dynamics, these transformations accelerated imperial expansion. Yet the rules of the emerging order remained uncertain, even among the imperial powers themselves.<\/p>\n

In Europe, networks of dynastic rule still carried weight in international politics. Under growing pressure, the ancien r\u00e9gime<\/em> sought to reinvent and reassert itself. The old empires often justified their expansion by promising to bring order and progress to supposedly backward peoples. But that \u201ccivilising mission\u201d<\/a> clashed with a worldview emerging from Spanish America \u2013 where countries had thrown off colonial rule to establish independent republics. <\/p>\n

As we wrote in a recent article<\/a> in American Political Science Review, Spanish American diplomats articulated a republican vision of international order centred on the protection of weaker states from domination by great powers.<\/p>\n

Fending off Europe\u2019s empires<\/h2>\n

Divided by civil conflict, Mexico became an easy target for European empires. Mexico\u2019s Liberal party had regained power but faced internal dissent and crippling foreign debt. Britain, France and Spain formed a coalition to invade and demand repayment. France, however, had more ambitious designs<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Exploiting the distraction of the US civil war<\/a>, Napoleon III dreamed of transforming Mexico into a Latin stronghold against Yankee expansion. Best of all, Napoleon thought the scheme would turn a profit. A stable Mexican empire could repay the costs of the intervention \u2013 with interest \u2013 by increasing production from the country\u2019s famed silver mines. Meanwhile, France would gain a receptive market for its exports and a grateful geopolitical subordinate.<\/p>\n

Maximilian, a young Austrian prince of the house of Hapsburg, somewhat naively accepted the offer to rule a distant and unfamiliar land. He dreamed of regenerating Mexico through a liberal monarchy while reviving his family\u2019s declining dynasty. <\/p>\n

Led by Ju\u00e1rez, Mexico\u2019s liberals fiercely resisted Maximilian\u2019s rule<\/a>. While militarily Ju\u00e1rez was consistently on the defensive, he remained diplomatically proactive. The Juaristas encouraged US sympathies that proved decisive after the end of the civil war. They also enjoyed solidarity \u2013 though limited material support \u2013 from other Spanish American republics. Although the monarchies of Europe all recognised Maximilian as Mexican emperor, Ju\u00e1rez\u2019s defiance became a rallying point for liberals and republicans in Europe.<\/p>\n

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\n Hero to the liberals: a monument to Ju\u00e1rez in central Mexico City.<\/span>
\n Hajor~commonswiki<\/a>, CC BY-ND<\/a><\/span>
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Vision of a new order<\/h2>\n

Beyond stoking sympathies, Ju\u00e1rez and his followers offered trenchant critiques<\/a> of unequal international rules and practices cloaked in liberal guise.<\/p>\n

First, the \u201crepublican internationalism<\/a>\u201d of Mexico\u2019s Juaristas stood in direct opposition to European liberals\u2019 \u201ccivilising mission\u201d. Latin American republicans rejected the notion that progress could be imposed on their countries from abroad \u2013 though some echoed civilising rhetoric<\/a> toward their own non-white populations, who like in the US were subject to campaigns of violence and dispossession that stretched from northern Mexico to the Patagonia. Many Latin American liberals likewise remained silent about empire elsewhere<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Second, the Juarista vision placed popular sovereignty, not dynastic ties, at the heart of legitimate statehood. These ideas drew on Mexico\u2019s independence tradition and the principles enshrined in the 1857 constitution<\/a>. European intervention, in this view, aimed to suppress popular rule in the Americas and extend the reaction against the failed revolutions of 1848, which had seriously threatened the old order when they raged across Europe.<\/p>\n

Third, popular sovereign states were equal under international law, regardless of power, wealth, or internal disorder. Sovereign equality also underpinned Latin America\u2019s strong commitment to non-intervention. Liberal writer and diplomat Francisco Zarco<\/a>, a close confidante of Ju\u00e1rez, condemned frequent European economic justifications for intervention as the work of \u201csmugglers and profiteers who wrap themselves in the flags of powerful nations\u201d.<\/p>\n

Finally, Mexican liberals called for an international system premised on republican fraternity, drawing on aspirations for cooperation<\/a> that went back to liberator Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar. The independence leader and committed republican convened a conference in 1826, hoping that a confederation of the newly independent Spanish American states would \u201cbe the shield of our new destiny\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Similar arguments for an international order that advances non-domination still resonate<\/a> in the global south today. The Mexican experience also underscores that the architects of international order have never come exclusively from the global north \u2013 and those who shape its future will not either.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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This article written by Tom Long, Professor of International Relations, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick<\/strong> and is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Tom Long, Professor of International Relations, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick In 1867, the world\u2019s most powerful statesmen, including Austria\u2019s Emperor Franz Josef, France\u2019s Napoleon III and US secretary of state, William H. Seward, petitioned the Mexican government to spare the life of a condemned man. Mexico\u2019s ragtag army and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":179,"featured_media":3756,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"inline_featured_image":false,"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/179"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}