Constitutional Imaginings and the Nation-State

Abstract

Introduction Students of Canadian politics periodically rummage through cultural artifacts in an effort to discover whether there are characteristic value orientations which distinguish Canadian political attitudes from those of citizens of other nations, particularly those of its closest neighbor, the United States. Interest in such cultural investigations has been motivated by a number of reasons. For students of comparative politics, the presence of two abutting countries with a shared political heritage, a common language, and a notoriously permeable border offers splendid opportunities to test hypotheses about the effects of political culture. Whether such investigations take the form of historical studies informed by assumptions about ideological formations (the Hartzian fragment thesis, for instance), or proceed according to the canons of empirical cross-cultural attitudinal surveys (of the type pioneered by Almond and Verba), a common theme is that ideas are important independent causes of political behavior. Yet what is so often missing in such studies is any sense of the material and conjunctural context which lends a particular assortment of ideas political significance. This paper seeks to redress this lacuna by applying some of the insights found in Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities to the study of Canadian political culture. Specifically, the paper will track developments in the policy area of Canadian constitutionalism, conceived broadly as a set of attitudes to the proprieties and efficacy of constitutional law. The purpose of this investigation is to trace the degree to which a sense of Canadian-ness has been refracted through political administration--in short, how efforts of administrators to generate and elaborate public policy contribute to the creation of a commonly imagined community involving a sense of reciprocal rights and obligations shared by a politically bounded group of people. The virtue of attending to national imaginings implicit or explicit in public policy as a starting point for the investigation of political culture is that it allows for a more textured and nuanced appreciation of the role of ideas in politics. For instance, the debate amongst laurentian and liberal historians over the exceptionalism of Canadian political history might better be reread through the framing device of the development of nationalism. To better understand how such a framing device can be employed in a systematically historical fashion, it is useful to consider briefly Anderson's contributions to the study of nation-ness. Benedict Anderson's effort at supplying a Marxist analysis of the phenomenon of nationalism consists of a far-ranging study of the conditions which give rise to national imaginings, imaginings which always and everywhere involve conceptions of deep, horizontal comradeship. (1) He identifies four historical prototypes for those national imaginings which contributed to the emergence of nation-states. The first of these were the creole pioneers of the Americas who, chafing at the limitations which imperial rule placed on their economic and political ambitions, experienced a slowly sharpening frame of vision. (2) It was by means of this frame of vision that the European settlers were eventually able to imagine themselves as residing in geographic nations coextensive with the administrative boundaries of their respective colonies, and affective nations where, at least in political rhetoric, distinctions of class and caste become replaced by the fraternal concept of common citizenship. The second manifestation of national imaginings occurs in post-Napoleonic Europe where the national models both of the Americas, and, of closer proximity and propinquity, revolutionary France, were to serve as goals to which whole populations could consciously aspire. Besides appearing as more self-conscious undertakings, European popular national movements of the nineteenth century were integrally linked to vernacular languages, indeed invariably justified themselves as legitimate political aspirations to realize volk identities already embedded in finite linguistic communities. …