The European Roots of Canadian Identity (review)

Building on his informative explorations of the state, the nature of Anglophone Canadian identity, and the position of Quebec in Confederation, Philip Resnick uses this little book to add to and extend the work he has already done in these important areas. The main concern is to revisit both old and new formulations of the idea that Canada is an essentially North American society. Confronting all those who, from Goldwin Smith to the early twenty-first century defenders of deep Canadian-American integration, take Canada to be intelligible mainly in terms of its continental situation, Resnick insists that the picture has been – and remains – much more complicated. The nation's North American – and even its American – character is not set aside: Canada's place as 'a North American state, sharing the northern part of the continent with its powerful neighbour' (65) is, indeed, fully conceded. One chapter is wholly devoted to the theme of the American relationship, and the intimacy of the American link receives attention throughout. The book's insistently articulated sense that too much has been made of all this, that Canada needs to recover other dimensions of its past and experience, and that the European especially needs attention, nevertheless dominates. Tocqueville's view that 'Canada was identical with the United States' (74) is, in consequence, rejected in favour of ways of seeing associated with H.A. Innis, J.B. Brebner, Gad Horowitz, S.M. Lipset, Charles Taylor, and Will Kymlicka. Much material concerning Canada's similarity to Europe is drawn from work on the European Union. The result is a depiction of Canada as 'a Euro-American state, situated on the doorstep of the most unabashedly American of New World states, a state that would fit remarkably well into the European Union, were it to be located on the European continent, but which finds itself instead on the North American' (96–7).

Elaboration of this design proceeds along two main tracks. Some chapters explore broad themes and conceptions: 'Particularist and Universalistic Identities' and 'The Metaphysics of Canadian Identity' are examined, notions of citizenship, self-orientation, and public space come under review, and there is much attention to the argument that Canada's acceptance of group-based understandings of society has played an especially important part in putting it closer to Europe than the United States. More focused matters form the second path, on which the role of the state, the place of multiculturalism, the importance of the globalization effect, the significance of religion, and the nature of North American continentalism appear in especially high profile. There is attention throughout to differential use of government power, to comparative levels of government expenditure, to highly specified versus diffuse patterns of national identity, to the place of small states in relation to large, and to techniques and methods of position-taking and negotiation. Canada's experience with federal-provincial diplomacy is seen as making it sympathetic to the European model of 'multi-level government' (94). Canada's 'Europeanness,' the book insists, is exhibited institutionally and behaviourally as well as culturally.

Sometimes argument is underdetermined; readers may occasionally feel that too many extraneous allusions are being brought in, and – despite the author's best efforts to be even-handed – the balance between European and North American seems too relentlessly struck in favour of the former. In general, though, the book offers an exceptionally useful reminder of the measure in which Canada is structured and dynamized by something other than North American lines of force. Pointing to old associations, emphasizing Canadian-European commonalities, and showing how Canadian society continues to display European patterns and forms, it works towards recapture of an element in Canada's evolution and history that no properly stated view of that evolution and history can do without.