Death of the Nation-State? Global Mass Culture in the Twenty-First Century: A Roundtable Discussion

Abstract

Editor's Note: This essay is Professor Stuart's summation of the opening roundtable he moderated at the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations meeting in Toronto, Ryerson University, June 2000. Panelists: Tyler Cowen, Economics, George Mason University Matthew Fraser, Communications, Ryerson Polytechnic University Diane Pacom, Sociology, University of Ottawa Reginald C. Stuart, History and Politics, Mount Saint Vincent University Joel Swerdlow, National Geographic magazine Global has become a cliche with a speed that mirrors the pace of the Internet age. This panel probed how the substance beneath the glib surface in the case of Canadian-American cultural linkages might offer a new perspective for the study of this phenomenon in the context of United States foreign policy. Readers of Diplomatic History and other periodicals will have noted how the theme of has increasingly informed understanding of the origins, development, execution, and evolution of United States foreign affairs. No longer is foreign policy considered solely in terms of power in international relations. The United States's international stature and influence are now seen as a complex amalgam of economic interests, ideological perspectives, the values and preoccupations of its citizens as individuals and groups, as well as geopolitical considerations. James A. Field's study of American interests in the Mediterranean in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, as well as William Applem an Williams's many studies have prepared us to see Jack Valenti and Hollywood and America's entertainment industry as vital actors in United States foreign policy. Some seventy years ago, Carl Becker argued that the histories most characteristic of a time would reflect current social concerns. The current focus on global culture, and the worldwide appeal and success of American popular and mass culture, suggest a timeless wisdom to his insight. Not all, in Canada or elsewhere, see globalism in a positive light. For a contradictory set of reasons, a hodgepodge coalition of protestors from around the world in unlikely alliance virtually shut down the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in the fall of 1999, and threatened to do so again at Quebec City in April 2001. One form of globalism squared off against another. Over a decade ago, a coalition of Canadian groups protested the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement because they believed it would produce the denouement and eclipse of Canada as a distinct culture and nation-state. Save for a vocal few, such voices have mostly muted in contemporary Canada. Even so, as a global economic, military, political, and cultural superpower, the United States inevitably remains a homogenizing global eminence grise. The themes of this panel followed those explored by Joel Swerdlow and Erla Zwingle in one of the 1999 Millennial issues of National Geographic. Both authors found through whirlwind tours of cities and countries that international cultural mixing and diversity have a deep history, and suggest that local fears of foreign cultural dominance are often exaggerated and misunderstood. Societies have demonstrated an ability to absorb, change, and use foreign ideas and ways to refashion themselves and not only thrive, but flourish. This multidisciplinary panel took the same view in the end, not only in general but in the particular, of Canada and the United States over the past century. Each panelist saw the United States as the dominant, apparently overwhelming force in North America. Yet, the Canadian nation-state survived and flourished, they argued. Each also explored various definitions of culture, suggested ambiguity in the term itself. Withal, global mass culture emerged as America's mass produced and marketed products spread into Canada (and beyond) over the past century. To a surprising degree, the panelists (three Canadians and two Americans) discounted the Cassandra cries of doom that nationalists and traditionalists have so favored. …