Regions Apart: The Four Societies of Canada and the United States (review)

Seymour Martin Lipset classically opined that the best way to learn about the United States was to study Canada, and vice versa. In Regions Apart, Grabb and Curtis advance this cause, while utilizing both historical and survey data to challenge some of Lipset's central hypotheses. Grabb and Curtis add a critical regional dimension to Canada-U.S. comparative research; they highlight the central role played by the unique "sub-societies" of Quebec, on the one hand, and the U.S. South, on the other. This regional perspective reveals long-term similarities between English Canada and the northern United States in contrast to divergent trends between Quebec and the American South.

The first half of the book presents historical evidence to challenge Lipset's "divergent origins" hypothesis. Lipset has contrasted the development of the United States and Canada as originating with the American Revolutionary War. While English "loyalists" who believed in the monarchy fled to Canada, Americans concerned with "individual liberty" fought to establish the United States.

As an alternative, Grabb and Curtis propose a "deep structural" hypothesis, arguing that long-standing English traditions account for similar developments in the conception of liberty in the northern United States and English Canada over roughly the same periods. Grabb and Curtis argue that early conceptions of liberty in these two sub-societies centered on communal conceptions of local control and not individual liberty or individualism, as we conceive of it today. As evidence, they point to the similarity between these two sub-societies, where most people lived and worked as family farmers, and observations from Tocqueville as well as historical research. Instead, they argue, it was in Quebec, where colonists lived in conditions developing out of French feudalism and under the control of the Roman Catholic Church, where people expressed greater deference to centralized authority and other traits Lipset associated with British "loyalists" in Canada. Grabb and Curtis argue that as a result of the plantation economy, the U.S. South also developed differently from the northern United States as more of a feudal society.

The second part of the book forwards to the contemporary period, using survey data – especially the World Values Survey – to challenge many of the myths about Canada-U.S. differences. This section also challenges several of Lipset's prominent hypotheses that Canadians are different from Americans, in critical dimensions such as collectivism, passivity, obedience to law and tolerance. In their comprehensive overview, Grabb and Curtis find that Canadians and Americans are largely similar in most of these dimensions, with notable exceptions that often relate to the divergent paths of Quebec and the U.S. South, which have developed very differently from their parallel feudal origins. While Quebec has rapidly become the most progressive sub-region in North America, people in the U.S. South continue to express the highest levels of religiosity, intolerance and anti-statist values. Grabb and Curtis show how the exceptionalism of these two regions helps explain what has in the previous research been attributed to national-level Canada-U.S. differences. In contrast, the northern United States and English Canada remain largely similar in most dimensions. Provocatively the authors challenge the conception of the United States as the world leader in citizen engagement, demonstrating how the differences between the two countries disappear in this domain when religious participation (which is higher in the United States) is excluded. They also argue that Canadians are more politically engaged than their U.S. counterparts.

The most important contribution of this book is the introduction of a regional lens to the comparative Canada – U.S. scholarship; a new perspective that advances the understanding of the development of both countries. Regions Apart also successfully challenges many theories and myths about Canada-U.S. differences, which should encourage scholars to examine the more nuts and bolts of policy differences, political structures, and political organizing to understand current national-level differences, rather than attributing them erroneously to...