The United Nations at Niagara: Borderlands Collaboration and Emerging Globalism

Abstract

In 1946 a group of Western New York and Southern Ontario business leaders proposed locating United Nations headquarters on Navy Island, Canadian territory in the Niagara River. One of the most visionary proposals ever to come from the region, it was a genuinely binational project, grounded in the symbolism of the peaceful relationship along the Niagara after the War of 1812. The proposal revealed a high level of cross-border economic and cultural integration in the Niagara region that had been strengthened by the shared experience of World War II. However, the region was increasingly marginalized from its national and state/provincial cores as it struggled to integrate itself into an ever more globalized economy.