DOing the Continental: Conceptualizations of the Canadian-American Relationship in the Long Twentieth Century (2000)

I. AMERICAN POWER AND CANADIAN NATION-BUILDING In course of its rich, lengthy, and complicated history, analysis and discussion of Canadian-American relationship has moved through four main phases, each offering commentary on important aspects of that relationship, each reflecting changes in it, and each taking shape under influence of particular set of research methods, discursive practices, and conceptual tools. The first to emerge, and longest in field, arose out of compulsion - felt by Canadians and Americans alike - to grasp and understand situation created by vast and obvious disparities between Canadian and American power. Some observers thought nature of that situation so stark and clear that assimilating its meaning hardly required analysis at all: American strength was so patently superior that one had simply to register inevitability of its triumph over all of continent. Canadians, certainly, were not immune from this view: even before Goldwin Smith's celebrated dismissal of Canadian national pretensions in 1891, New Brunswicker Alexander Monro had set out his strong conviction that, since the United States and Canada belong as it were to each other, they should unite. [1] In main, however, insistence on force and implacability of American phenomenon was property of observers at heart of United States' life itself. Taking their text from John Q uincy Adams' 1819 declaration that our proper dominion [is] continent of North America, and very much influenced by doctrines of Manifest Destiny, commentators announced imminence of America's northern triumph with emphasis and regularity: indeed, insisted Samuel E. Moffett in 1907, that triumph was no longer for future; it was at hand; Canadians are already Americans without knowing it. [2] So obvious and sensible did American victory seem that even after passing of great age of nineteenth-century expansionism it continued to be proclaimed with force and enthusiasm. Mild statements of it left no doubt as to what was being avowed: Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 declaration that Canadians were at one with their neighbors in American orbit, anything but foreigners, differed from Moffett pronunciamento mainly in its greater solicitude for Canadian sensibilities. Less modulated remarks lost even that point of distinction: former Undersecretary of State George Ball's 1968 dismi ssal of Canadian attempts to resist American influence (they were, in his well-publicized phrase, a rear-guard action) sent its message with directness that went well beyond anything Moffett had mustered. And when journalist Joel Garreau re-mapped Canada outside Quebec as series of American regions projected northward, his work gave verdict on place and importance of Canadian national structures frankness of which transcended anything either Moffett or Ball had dared put forward. Economist Sidney Weinberg's 1994 claim that great free trade agreements of 1980s and 1990s were at last producing victory over Canada's east-west imperative -- this, as he saw it, was an undeniable fact, long-term implications of which will surely affect nature of Canadian society -- thus stood in long line of clear and explicit comments concerning impossibility of Canadian resistance to powerful forces shaping continental life. Possessing no character or identity to set it apart, l acking strength to assert what claims it did have, Canada could quite simply do no other than accept with resignation and fortitude domination of its great neighbor. [3] Plausible, compelling, and in harmony with brute facts of situation, conviction that United States was destined to triumph attracted no small measure of support. Yet for all enthusiasm with which its adherents upheld it, it never managed to monopolize discussion. …