Introduction: North American Integration: Paradoxes and Prospects

Abstract

In the wake of the American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), considerable attention is being paid today to the social, economic, and political landscape of America. With the rapid growth of north-south commerce, information transfers, capital flows, human migrations, and environmental networks, the process of continental integration is accelerating. Associated with this process is increased permeability of national boundaries--what Ivo Duchacek has called perforated sovereignties (1988). Transnational contacts and interactions have called into question the traditional national sovereignty function of borders, stirring controversy about new relationships and forms of association that transcend national frontiers. According to at least one analyst, the territorial state in America may be undergoing a form of unbundling, whereby traditional identities based on nation, state, or province are weakening and giving way to new attachments which reflect emerging forms of information, cultural, and political exchange (Elkins 1995). All of this presents special challenges in the effort to forge a transnational community and strengthen continental cooperation in America. Challenges to traditional scholarly interpretations of global issues across the disciplinary spectrum have also emerged as transborder linkages have accelerated and collective identities developed. Increasingly, observers of transnational phenomena seek to understand the divergent forces of sovereignty and exchange (Shapiro and Alker 1996), grapple with the effects of urban and demographic growth on communal values (Critchfield 1994), and comprehend the significance of movements of labor, information, commodities, and capital (Schiller 1994; Kearney 1995). As this work illustrates, the new realities beyond borders and state-centered politics demand more interdisciplinary methods and models. Dramatic increases in the volume and velocity of the flows of people, goods, and symbols reinforce the urgency for, and utility of, transnational approaches: that is, for informed transnational analysis. The papers in this volume represent one response to this imperative. The genesis of this theme issue was a Trilateral Symposium held at Western Washington University in February 1995. Scholars from Canada, the United States, and Mexico presented papers examining environmental, cultural, political, and economic implications of growing integration and interdependency in America. Much of the focus of the symposium was on borderland areas, because in such places north-south flows are most visible, and cross-cultural relationships are most clearly mediated. Borderlands, marked by complex forces of interdependence and dependence, function as transition zones between (and among) the three countries and, thus, serve as laboratories for broader, continent-wide changes. Once thought of as zones of demarcation or separation between nation states, in the new transnational context borderlands are characterized by their duality--they manifest both separating and integrating qualities. In shaping new American relationships, borderlands assume what Victor Konrad calls added significance as the joints of continental articulation (Randall and Konrad 1995, 182). Although growing transnationalization is in large part driven by economic forces, the emerging linkages among the societies of America cannot be understood or defined in economic terms alone. A major theme of the symposium was that the most crucial changes have to do with the development of new or altered meanings of America or North Americanness. Integration has both material and ideational dimensions. While the material reality of America as a web of public and private economic, social, and political transactions is well advanced, the idea of a redefined American community has not kept pace. We are able to imagine a transcendent American economy which is based in trilateral trade ties, capital flows, and labor mobility. …