Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada by Robert Bothwell, and: Entangling Migration History: Borderlands and Transnationalism in the United States and Canada eds. by Benjamin Bryce and Alexander Freund (review)

These two volumes offer contrasting approaches to the study of relations between the United States and Canada. Bothwell's monograph emphasizes common aspects of the two nations' respective histories, downplaying the historical significance of the international border to undertake a deep history of what he contends are largely similar worldviews, attitudes, and values among the Canadian and American populations. The essays in Bryce and Freund's collection, on the other hand, foreground the international boundary in their analyses in order to demonstrate how it has led to the creation of entangled spaces in which people have moved (and continue to move) transnationally, living lives that question and rearrange borders. Read in the post-9/11 context of an increasingly less permeable boundary between the two nations, these studies offer compelling insights while raising intriguing questions.

Bothwell aims to provide a broad narrative history of patterns of convergence between the peoples and cultures of Canada and the thirteen colonies that became the United States of America from the seventeenth century to the present. He identifies two key differential statistics that have remained relatively constant over time: (1) the population of the United States (or its antecedents) usually maintains a ten to one proportional advantage over that of Canada at any given time (e.g., p. 106), and (2) per capita American Gross Domestic Product, "the traditional and never-insignificant measure of the income gap between the citizens of the two countries" [pp. 22, 324 (quote)] has exceeded (and continues to exceed) that of Canada by a margin of at least twenty percent. Beyond these points of distinction, Bothwell finds a great deal of commonality and he contends, through a predominantly political historical narrative, that a better appreciation of the continuities spanning the forty-ninth parallel tells us more about the continent's history than an approach that projects modern national boundaries back into time and adopts a more oppositional perspective between Canada and the United States.

Written in part as a response to the work of Seymour Martin Lipset, whose scholarship has long argued for the fundamental divergence of Canadian and American histories since the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, Bothwell claims that notwithstanding apparent large-scale differences in forms of governance and official bilingualism, these are best understood as differences of degree rather than of kind. He further contends that citizens of each nation recognize in that of the other a broadly shared "cultural universe" (p. 108) with Canada as effectively a smaller, poorer, and more conservative cousin of the United States. Citing evidence of easy movement across the international border (at least prior to 9/11) for tourism, waves of (predominantly Caucasian) immigration moving in each direction as economic opportunity dictated, reciprocal trade agreements, and increasing convergence of day-to-day experience with mass-produced consumer goods and urban architecture, Bothwell demonstrates that Canada cleaved more closely to the United States as her political bond with the British monarchy diminished steadily after 1867 to a largely ceremonial phenomenon.

The end of World War II and the ascent of the United States to global superpower status marked a key change in Canadian-American relations—Canada became one ally among many and Americans expected their northern neighbor to remain loyal in exchange for the protection of the United States military against foreign threats. After 1960, these arrangements permitted Canadian politicians to reallocate monies allotted for defense to the domestic welfare state and eventually Canada surpassed the United States in providing a social safety net for its citizens. As Canadian priorities shifted to accommodate this objective, the willingness of...