Review: Uneasy Neighbo(U)RS

Abstract

UNEASY NEIGHBO(U)RS Canada, the USA and the Dynamics of State, Industry and Culture David T. Jones and David Kilgour Mississauga: John Wiley & Sons Canada, 2007. 352pp. $33.99 cloth (ISBN 978-0470153062)If Canada and the United States best friends, like it or not, the Socred leader Robert Thompson once famously put it 40 or so years ago, then according to David T. Jones and David Kilgour our two countries today are certainly in a 'not' portion of the cycle the relationship moves further into the 21st century (2). Jones is a former US diplomat who served in Ottawa and who in recent years, especially through a spate of thoughtful journal articles, has established himself a well-known Canada hand. Kilgour is a former politician who served for many years a member of parliament for Alberta under both the Progressive Conservative and Liberal colours, and an independent. They have together written a broad work that addresses the state and prospects of the Canada-US relationship, compares the two countries, and describes many aspects of each country in considerable detail.These two former practitioners of the diplomatic and political arts not especially interested in getting anywhere deep into the kind of theoretical approaches that many scholars of Canada-US relations tend to love. The Canada-US relationship, they say, can simply be thought of as akin to an accordion being played: regularly moving and squeezing closer and then changing harmony by pilling back. It is also analogous to the psychologist's approach /avoidance concept in which, two bodies move closer, the forces to be overcome increase and push them back apart (2). To be sure, the success ofthe Canada-US free trade agreement, followed by the North American free trade agreement, has drawn the two countries together over the past decade or so. Yet this has been offset by disagreements over foreign policy, including the land mines treaty, the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto accord on global warming and, of course, the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein. There has also been by a growing awareness of some social differences between Americans and Canadians. The result is an overall crankiness that spills over into the economic sector, especially on the Canadian side, where such disputes softwood lumber and Canadian beef exports to the US made into bigger deals than they really are. Therefore, Jones and Kilgour not expecting much change in the Canada-US relationship in the immediate future, especially not towards any steps that would deepen the trading relationship, such a common currency or a customs union. Where the Canada-US relationship is going right now, they conclude, is nowhere (305).The authors make it clear that they similarly uninterested in obsessing over any overarching theories, ranging from Michael Adams's notion of fire and ice to Seymour Martin Lipset's conceptions of individualism and collectivism, that explain differences between the essential natures of two countries. …