Any Hope for Canadian-American Relations Scholarship?

The Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 12,No. 3, Winter 1981 AnyHope for Canadian-AmericanRelations Scholarship? John Sloan Dickey. Canada and the American Presence: The United States Interest in an Independent Canada. New York: New York University Press, 1975. 202 + xxi pp. Roger F.Swanson. Intergovernmental Perspectives on the Canadian-US. Relationship. New York: New York University Press, 1978.278 + xvii pp. Jamee L. Murray. ed., Canadian Cultural Nationalism. New York: New York University Press, 1977. 139 + ix pp. Elliot J. Feldman and Neil Nevitte. eds., The Future ofNorth America: Canada, the United States, and Quebec Nationalism. Cambridge: Harvard Center for International Affairs, 1979.375 pp. W.R. Willoughby. The Joint Organizations of Canada and the United States. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. 289 + xi pp. G. A. Raw(vk The Committee for an Independent Canada has atrophied into bleak oblivion . The Waffle Movement disintegrated into tiny sectarian cults and then disappeared from the Canadian political stage. Most Canadians in early 1981 obviously want more U.S. investment rather than less. Unemployment, recession, the threat that Quebec might leave Canada and the fact that the United States is perceived by many to be withdrawing from its ill-considered imperial hegemony, have all helped to neutralize anti-Americanism in the land. As a result, Canadian nationalism has apparently lost its cutting edge and Canadians are, as Michael Bliss has recently put it, "drifting and purposeless." They no longer care ''about national inspiration, national leadership, national visions." They are not over concerned with the threat from the south. Rather, many appear to have come to the realization that George Grant was right after all. The ethos of American liberal individualism seems to have undermined the fragile foundations of the national collective will. And the ideology of progress has made redundant the Canadian nation-state. The "True North, Strong and Free," for many, is no longer true, strong or free. In a largely neglected gem of an article first published in the Journal of Popular Culture in the Spring of 1971, Allan Smith, of the University of 406 G. A. Raw(vk British Columbia, may have put his sensitive finger on the way in which English-Canadians in particular were Americanized. As far as Smith is concerned , American popular culture, as early as 1900, had captured the Canadian imagination. It prevented Canadians "from comprehending alternative visions of reality" and compelled them to perceive their own experience through a borrowed American filter. He goes on to argue that The massive presence of American culture augmented Canadian knowledge of American affairs, deepened the Canadian tendency to think of Canadian problems in American terms, and intensified the Canadian conviction that the continent was an integrated whole .... With its face turned increasingly towards another society, it began to move within the framework of that society's attitudes, values, and concerns. It became a society characterized by a special and intense kind of other direction .... The fundamental myths upon which their sense of themselves and their society rested were similarly influenced by American ideological constructs. (pp. 1047-48) Smith then concludes his study in the following manner: Bycentury's end [19001 culture and ideas moving through space had fundamentally affected the picture of reality, and of their place in it, that many English Canadians had come to possess. They were rendered incapable of resisting the notion that the continent was an integrated and seamless whole. In this manner the way was prepared for the triumph of the continentalist ideology of the twentieth century. (pp. 1050-51) It may be argued that the Americanization of Canada, as Smith implies, neutralized significantly any damning Canadian collective critique of the United States and its way of life. Colonials always find it difficult to criticize the Mother Country. But they can be encouraged to savage one another in order to ensure that the "Colonizer's hegemony" is not fundamentally questioned or challenged. Regionalism and localism and "limited identities" are therefore encouraged and eventually, as Albert Memmi has suggested, the colonized may, unconsciously, come to believe and act according to the stereotypes imposed upon them by their "colonial masters." Dependence thus undergirds the socio-psychological dimension of the colonial mentality. For...