The Idea of Identification

Chapter 6: Identification and Commitment in Civic Culture

Chapter 6 IDENTIFICATION AND COMMITMENT IN CIVIC CULTURE Every nation’s nationalism is the search for a principle that distinguishes insiders from outsiders and elevates the former over the latter. —Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams His country was built with words, and for a little time, while he talked, he lived there. —Mary Cantwell, Manhattan Memoir To many observers beyond its borders, the idea of Canada must sometimes seem like an implausibility. As a former Prime Minister once observed, the sprawling nation has too much geography and not enough history.1 And therein lies its dilemma. A relatively small population of thirty-one million people live in a necklace of a half-dozen cities spread along its thirty-four hundred-mile border with the United States. The residents of Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto share a proximity and outlook on life that often has more in common with their American neighbors to the south than their distant compatriots at the far ends of the continent. Most of the television shows and films Canadians see are American.2 Magazines and books from American authors dominate the top-seller lists. And economic and trade policies are designed to accommodate the gigantic U.S. economy to which Canada is partly dependent . The premier of Ontario recently told an American audience that “What happens in Newfoundland and British Columbia economically does not affect us as much as what happens in Michigan, Ohio, [and] New York.”3 He was probably too courteous to note that the deference is rarely reciprocated. This quiet society has had to 121 122 THE IDEA OF IDENTIFICATION get used to the boisterous and continuous block party next door, where the revelers sometimes appear to have more money than common sense. And then there is the country’s evolutionary rather than revolutionary political history. Canada never forged a mythic national identity in rhetorical and military battles for independence, nor in a civil war that would give it a redemptive ideology to carry into the future. It has evolved from its British and French origins incrementally and without much bloodshed.4 That it continues to struggle to gain ratification of a constitution acceptable to its confederation of increasingly independent-minded provinces speaks to its reluctance to use politics in the American mold: to impose a legislative outcome in the name of the national interest.5 If these factors were not enough to weaken the prospects for Canadian identity, there is the continuing question of the status of French Quebec. Fed by the deep passions of a linguistic culture war, the quest for protection of Quebec’s unique standing has produced most of the political earthquakes in Canada’s civil life since 1960. Leaders in the huge eastern province—which includes the largest metropolitan area in the country—have defined it as “different” from the rest of British Canada. Even the most accommodating of separatists insist that federal leaders in Ottawa recognize its “special status.” In a little more than a decade separatists nearly succeeded in creating an independent state. The Meech Lake Accord of 1990 would have granted special status to Quebec, but failed because of an eleventh-hour revolt of provincial leaders who needed to sign on. And a 1995 referendum on independence for Quebec was defeated by the province’s citizens with just a 50.6 percent margin. Half of Quebec’s voters wanted to move toward independence; half wanted to stay in the confederation. In the new century separatism has lost some of its appeal.6 But this continuing impasse has tested the patience of Anglos on the vast Canadian prairies, and the increasingly powerful Asian communities in the West. They have grown weary of these old battles, as well as the politicians from Ontario and Quebec who tend to dominate national politics. But even with these rifts, perhaps no other part of the world remains so agreeably civil and peaceful in the face of such profound geographical and political fractures. 123 Identification and Commitment My concern here is not primarily about the struggle to find Canadian identity, though it is a fascinating story, and provides a useful comparison to the American experience.7 Rather, the focus of this concluding chapter is on civic identifications at the levels of the nation and the identity group. Among the many features of our self-definitions, we often include national identity as an important marker...