Nationalism, an Emancipatory Project? 1968 and After

During the summer of 1968 I was employed as a student assistant in the office of the local hospital in a small southern Ontario city. There was one other student, a young woman who would be entering her senior university year in the fall. I had just finished my first year at the University of Toronto, and we spent coffee breaks in conversation sharing impressions and experiences. Her major was French, and one day she commented that she had just spent her third year abroad in Paris. I imagine my eyes must have widened: “You were in Paris in May?!” “Yes,” her answer came, “and it was horrible. I was fortunate to get a flight out before the airport closed.” It’s hard to believe my disappointment was not palpably visible. I must have said something noncommittal because our working relationship did not change, nor did our coffee-break conversations, but the thought I had not voiced was insistently loud in my head: I would have stayed for the revolution.

My reaction was undeniably bound up with youthful romanticism: Paris was the City of Light in the nation of Enlightenment. I was especially drawn to the slogan “sous les pavés la plage” [under the cobblestones, the beach], whose metaphor, unraveling into visions of utopia, attracted a young woman committed to reading and studying literature. That builders’ sand, hard-packed under a paving stone, could transform in imagination into an expansive space of possibility and freedom, suggesting new, undreamt-of futures, was irresistibly compelling. I was years away from encountering Ernst Bloch’s theorizing of utopian hope, but the inventive figuration of that image conjured up dreams of unrealized potential.

It was clear that the American war in Vietnam sought to intervene in the national self-determination of that far-off country. For Canadian students the question of nationalism was especially vexing. On the one hand, it was obvious that postwar nationalisms were to be welcomed: the emergence of newly independent nations from former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, the struggles for national liberation in others. The Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Portuguese African Colonies (TCLPAC), focusing on Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau, was a powerful presence on the University of Toronto campus, with speakers, debates and films. Most of all, the national question took the form of Québec’s right to self-determination. By the end of the ’60s, claims for Québec sovereignty had emerged in the form of the Parti Québecois, which eventually won the 1976 provincial election under René Lévesque, and in the more militant Le Front de la Libération de Québec (FLQ), whose actions in 1971 would push Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to invoke the War Measures Act.¹

On the other hand, it seemed disquieting to advocate nationalism as an emancipatory project in a developed Western context. Canadian capital engaged in exploitative investments at home and within the developing world; of particular interest in the late 1960s were the loans the hugely successful Canadian banking industry made to governments across Latin America. The 1967 celebrations of the centenary of Confederation (the creation of the Dominion of Canada within the British Empire) had been unproblematically buoyant and optimistic, with no references to dark moments of history: centuries of oppression of indigenous peoples; exploitation of Chinese labor in building the transcontinental railways and the west-coast forest industries; the Komagata Maru incident in 1914, in which Sikh migrants were denied entry to Vancouver; the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II, all of which should have been but were not yet a part of general knowledge. And, if Québec had sensitized us to progressive claims of nationalism, were not Anglophone Canadians the villains in that narrative of self-determination?

A possibility of disentangling the tensions and contradictions around nationalism came into view with the emergence of the Waffle movement in the social democratic parliamentary party, the New Democratic Party (NDP). The odd name was suggested, in John Bullen’s account, when someone, “responding to an uncertain position on the question of public ownership...