Two Views of the Concept of Sovereignty: Canadian — Canadien

Abstract

T ALCOTT PARSONS, his work The Social System, has argued that the study of politics (and certainly of something as classical as the concept of sovereignty) cannot be handled in terms of a specifically specialized conceptual scheme precisely for the reason that the political problem of the social system is a focus for the integration of all its analytically distinguished components, not of a specially differentiated class of these components.1 While this caveat is undeniable, it must be that certain problems within the wide-gauge approach to general sociology can be shunted onto a narrow-gauge line for more specific-albeit still somewhat arbitraryanalysis. Unless we can arbitrarily define a problem and shunt it onto our own line we can never see it to grapple with it, hypothetically or otherwise. I have chosen, full the face of Parsons' warning, to examine briefly something as arbitrary and as hypothetical and as classical as the concept of sovereignty. Within the United States, the past year or so, the general public has become accustomed to reading the press of the new and vital, even dashing, Prime Minister of Canada, M. Pierre Elliott Trudeau. It is not without surprise that some Americans find that not all Canadians fit the stereotype usually accorded our neighbors to the North, viz., hard working, thrifty; plain to the point of dullness; and very, very quiet.2 If M. Trudeau is anything, he is not dull and he is not a quiet person. How then explain M. Trudeau? In much of the United States press reference is made to his French-Canadian background, as if this fact of language, culture, and ethnology were a causal explanation. Obviously, it is not. Yet it is interesting that some Americans are ready to perceive the reason for difference the behavior of different Canadians as being somehow related to such factors. Within Canada itself there are today two mapor groups defined here as English-Canadian and French-Canadian, or simply Canadian and Canadien-each of which perceives itself and the other group (society) just such terms of language, culture, symbol system, and race.3 What is more, each group tends to perceive its