America Abroad: This Too Shall Pass

In 1967 a classified State Department study of French-Canadian nationalism speculated that the secession of Quebec might lead the other nine provinces to sue for union with the U.S. Some Americanized Canadian businessmen dreamed of the ultimate merger. But the author of the report called the dissolution of Canada, even if it doubled the size and vastly increased the natural resources of the U.S., a “worst-case scenario.”

! Several years later, the KGB station in Ottawa leaked some phony documents on CIA letterhead purporting to show that U.S. agents were secretly aiding the Quebec Liberation Front and in various other ways trying to destabilize the central government. An American spook took his Soviet counterpart to lunch and said, “You really want to play this game? Your country may someday have secession problems a lot bigger than Canada’s.”

Early in the Carter Administration, a flare-up of Quebec separatism led a U.S. official to guess that the big divorce would occur in 1990. He predicted that Pierre Elliott Trudeau, still vigorous at 70, would come out of semiretirement and run for the U.S. Congress. There were chuckles at the joke, but no joy at the prospect of Canada’s cracking up.

Secession is a fighting word in American history, and territorial aggrandizement has been anathema to the North American political experiment ever since the settlers reached the Pacific. They had left behind two systems of government that have brought grief as well as benefit to mankind: empire and the nation-state. Imperialism, which has been around for millenniums, is based on one people’s conquering, ruling, often suppressing others. The nation-state, an arrangement that came into its own in the 16th century as the Holy Roman Empire began to disintegrate, sounded like a good idea at the time: people who spoke one language would band together under one flag within one set of boundaries. But such entities — sovereign in their aspirations, anxieties and hatreds — too often went to war against one another, sending fresh waves of emigrants fleeing across the Atlantic.

Nuclear weapons have made war harder to justify as the conduct of politics by other means. To the extent that countries are deprived of the option of getting their way by force, they are gradually more willing to pool some of their sovereignty in organizations like the European Community. Two further inducements in that direction have been the salutary phenomenon of economic interdependence and the ominous one of ecological despoliation on a scale too daunting for any nation to handle on its own. The United Nations, however imperfect and maligned as an institution, is a powerful and promising idea.

Brian Mulroney has been a leader in redefining international politics. He was instrumental in bringing about the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement and progress toward reducing the cross-border curse of acid rain. So far, however, his luck and skill have failed him at home. History and domestic politics seem to be conspiring against him. Quebec today is a would-be nation-state chafing against the vestiges of empire.

But a new, global trend may be on Mulroney’s side. From the old Russian empire to the new Europe, there is a devolution of power not only upward toward supranational bodies and outward toward commonwealths and common markets, but also downward toward freer units of federation that would allow “distinct societies” to preserve their identity and govern themselves — without bolting altogether. If Canadians, French and English speaking alike, choose to be part of that pattern, the current crisis over Quebec will pass just as those earlier ones did, perhaps never to be repeated again.