Congruence, Conflict, and Continental Governance: Canada's and Mexico's Responses to Paradigm Shift in the United States

Abstract

The context for this study is a broader inquiry into continental governance under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in which three approaches have yielded relatively meager evidence of an emerging transnational political reality. Continentalism from above falters due to NAFTA's institutional deficit. Continentalism from below has produced little lasting solidarity among the major civil society organizations. Meanwhile, continentalism in the marketplace has not demonstrated much structural integration that is specifically North American in character. This quest has brought us back to the notion that, NAFTA notwithstanding, governance in North America is still comprised basically of three national governing systems linked together in two major asymmetric dyads. Intergovernmental relations in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 provide material for exploring this reality. ********** Introduction The catastrophic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on the Pentagon and on New York's World Trade Center impelled the administration of George W. Bush to bolster the policing powers of the American state, declare war on terrorism, engage in regime change among rogue states, and--of particular salience for this study--secure its territorial borders. With the defense of national security legitimating its unilateralist proclivities, a strongly neo-conservative White House a threat and built a world order around it, prompting every other sovereign state to reconfigure its relationship to the crusading hegemon. (2) The new global stance adopted by Washington engendered particular consternation in its two contiguous neighbors, whose economies and societies were so intermestically integrated that any action it took to deal with militant Islamist terrorism could seriously compromise their interests. Despite the common nature of the United States' challenge to both its peripheries, observers were not used to analyzing the problem posed by American hegemony comparatively since the evolution of scholarship on Canada's and Mexico's place in the North American continent had long proceeded in its own two vacuums. (3) Developments in the U.S. had influenced domestic policy responses in Canada throughout the twentieth century, because, by the end of the nineteenth, the two countries' economies, societies, and polities had already become deeply interconnected. Given its greater autarchy for seven decades following its revolution (1910-17), Mexico had been far less responsive to American trends until its adoption of neoconservative liberalization in the mid-1980s, when it had quickly become deeply dependent on the world's only superpower. Even then, each periphery still had good reason to believe in the uniqueness of its own contested relationship with Uncle Sam. Where one belonged to the First World, the other was located unmistakably in the Third. Where the former was culturally anchored in a Protestant, North Atlantic, Anglo-Saxon triangle, the latter found its references in the Catholic Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella and the Latinate Americas of Simon Bolivar. It was only in 1994, when NAFTA brought Mexico into an intimate association with the other two continental cohabitants under a common set of economic rules, that it became evident how many commonalities--both past (4) and recent (5)--Ottawa and Mexico City already shared. These historical, diachronic differences and more recent, synchronic similarities make the responses of the global hegemon's two neighbors in the aftermath of September 11th a fruitful subject for comparison. Two principal approaches have already yielded welcome insights into the present complexities of the U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico relationships. International relations scholarship has focused on the actions of the three federal leaders and their governments in the fallout from Ground Zero. (6) Political economy presents the continental dynamic in terms of more structural relationships. …