One of the more unusual fea- tures of the Canadian political landscape, seldom explicitly noted, is that nationalist sentiment is far more pronounced on the left than it is on the right. This is actually some- thing that Quebec nationalism and English-Canadian nationalism share. In the United States, by contrast, national- ism is very much associated with the right wing of the political spectrum
This is incredibly obvious, once it has been pointed out, but I actually hadn’t noticed it until my colleague Andrew Potter drew my attention to it. Perhaps for the same reason, much of the discussion of North American inte- gration is marked by a failure to observe the reversed polarity of nationalism in Canada. This leads many commentators to forget that when it comes to concrete matters of public policy, nationalist sentiment in this country usually pulls in the oppo- site direction than it does in the United States. The recent dust-up over ballistic missile defence (BMD) provides a useful illustration.
The story of how nationalism in Canada came to be predominantly left-wing is a complicated one, having much to do with the status of English- Canadians as a cultural minority with- in North America (paralleling, of course, the status of francophone Quebecers as a cultural and linguistic minority within Canada). Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Atwood are probably the two most important fig- ures in this story.
On the right, by contrast, one can see the development of a marked infe- riority complex in the past 20 years with respect to the United States. It would be difficult, for instance, to find a national newspaper anywhere in the world that is more relentlessly hostile to its own country of publication than the National Post. Even Stephen Harper appears to have become seduced by this ethos, when he described Canada as a ”œsecond-tier socialist country,” or when he got together with Stockwell Day to write a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, apologizing for cer- tain Canadian foreign policy decisions.
By way of contrast, imagine the Republican Party contemplating the election of a leader who had described the United States as a ”œsecond- rate” country, or with a fondness for air- ing the nation’s dirty laundry by writing letters to the editor of Le Monde. Needless to say, it wouldn’t happen.
What are the consequences of this rather odd alignment of animal spirits in Canada? Nationalism carries with it a number of characteristic features, the most important being simply the ten- dency to assign the interests of one’s fellow citizens higher priority than those of foreigners (so-called ”œnational partiality”). This in turn generates a tendency, when push comes to shove, toward unilateralism in foreign affairs, along with a greater willingness to adopt ”œbeggar-thy-neighbour” policies.
Thus whenever greater integration (or even cooperation) is required between states, getting nationalist groups on-side, or at least defusing their potential opposition, is one of the most important challenges. This is much easier to do when these groups can themselves see the value of the project that creates the need for greater integration. As a result, it is much eas- ier to achieve cooperation between nations in which nationalist sentiment has the same left-right polarity.
The central barrier to increased political integration between Canada and the United States is that there is almost no policy overlap between nationalist groups in the two countries, and thus fewer projects that can motivate these groups to set aside national partiality in order to partici- pate in a joint undertaking.
In particular, nationalists in Canada are, for the most part, anti-military (or if not anti-military, at least anti-militarism). This made BMD a hard sell from the beginning. All of the arguments that have been advanced in its favor are essentially escalation arguments ”” the sort of collectively self-defeating reason- ing that has motivated arms races since the dawn of time. Thus opposition from the nationalist left in Canada was a given. The question was merely how influential it would become.
In this respect, the ”œstory” on BMD has almost nothing to do with how it played out in domestic Canadian politics, since nothing new or unpredictable happened there. The only real story was the failure of diplo- macy on the part of the Bush adminis- tration. Canada’s refusal to participate in BMD might serve as a textbook case, for future American presidents, of why one should not go to foreign countries, embarrass their leaders in public, act obtusely in private, then expect them to do your bidding.
Knowing that Prime Minister Paul Martin was essentially supportive of BMD, it was Bush’s job to make it easi- er for the government to endorse the project. Far from doing so, he made it impossible for the Canadian govern- ment to portray participation in BMD as anything other than capitulation in the face of American bullying. Perhaps it had not occurred to them that, in Canada, inflaming nationalist senti- ment shifts power to the left.