The issue of Canadian and American similarities or differences in the Canadian and American post-World War II scholarly and academic worlds, was stimulated by and dominated by (and perhaps still is) by a book which began life as a Columbia University dissertation and which was published by the University of California Press in 1950 Agrarian Socialism: The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan, a Study in Political Sociology. In Agrarian Socialism up and coming sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset focused his gaze on the democratic socialist political party that largely governed Saskatchewan from the 1940s to the 1960s, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, in order to ask a larger question, namely why democratic socialism was successful in Canada but not in the most advanced industrial nation on the planet to its south, the United States, the place where it (along with Germany, the other industrialising giant of the nineteenth and early twentieth century) should have been successful if much socialist theory was correct and a question, not surprisingly, that has exercised the minds of many Western socialist intellectuals ever since.
In Agrarian Socialism and in subsequent books including The First New Nation, published in its first edition in 1963, Continental Divide, published in 1989, and American Exceptionalism, published in 1996, Lipset traced the differences between the Canada and the United States to several historical factors that, he argued, made the United States "exceptional" or unique. According to Lipset, the lack of feudalism in the United States (something Louis Hartz would emphasise in his Liberal Tradition in America of 1955 and in the collection of essays he edited and contributed to on the subject of Latin and English/British settler societies, The Founding of New Societies of 1964), the consequent prevalence of equality in the United States, an equality that opened up opportunities for many of European background in the United States (something that De Tocqueville made much of in his Democracy in America of 1935), and the migration, often forced, of British loyalists out of the new United States after the civil war that rent North America in the late eighteenth century, the war Americans refer to as the American Revolution, and into the nineteenth. These differences, Lipset argued, initially made Canada, born in Tory loyalty to Great Britain and the Crown and reaction to the more radically Whig United States, more conservative than the new United States. Paradoxically, according to Lipset, conservative Canada would prove more conducive to Western European style democratic socialism in part because of this British and consequent European heritage.
Others have followed in Lipset's footsteps. Social scientist and pollster Michael Adams, for instance, argued in his Fire and Ice
(2004) that the notion that Canadians and Americans were converging on a variety of social indices was more myth than reality. The Canadian historical geographer James Lemon, in contradistinction to those who argued that Canadian and American cities were similar and were converging even more in the post World War Ii era, argued that there were significant political, economic, central city, suburban, and planning differences that characterised Canadian cities like Toronto and American cities like Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles in his Liberal Dreams and Nature's Limits (1997).
Not everyone, of course, agreed with Lipset's conclusions despite the fact that Canadian exceptionalism had become and remains a central symbol of Canadian nationalism just as American exceptionalism was and is a central symbol of American nationalism. Some, including many politicians particularly south of the 49th parallel, have emphasised the similarities between Canada and the United States (and Australia and New Zealand) including their common federalisms, their common liberal heritage with its emphasis on liberty, freedom, equality, and private property, their common language (if you exclude French Canada), their common Protestant religious culture (again if one excludes French Quebec), their common Anglo-Saxon demographies and Anglo-Saxon political and economic dominance, their common capitalist economic culture, their common foreign policy interests, their similar immigration patterns, and their common popular culture, and pondered why the two nations have not yet merged (the high apologetical and polemical priests of what we would today call the Anglosphere which currently includes Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand), something the United States tried to bring about, of course, through force on several occasions via its several invasions of Canada in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a reflection of the ideology of American manifest destiny, a closely related symbol to the central symbol of the American nationalist faith, American exceptionalism.
Others, like Robert Bothwell, have emphasised both the similarities and differences between Canada and the United States. Bothwell's "unified" selective history of the two countries is, despite the claims of one truly deluded Amazon poster who claims that My Country, Your Country is an example of demonic social history, actually pretty standard traditional (meaning late nineteenth and most of twentieth century history) historical fare given its focus on great events, including wars, great treaties, and great men even though it does have a bit of quantitative social history and cultural history thrown into the mix for good measure.
Bothwell emphasises the role that both history and geography have played in making Canada and the United States both similar and different. Given the important role Great Britain has historically played in British North America, Canada, and the United States, Bothwell rightly notes that both Canada and the United States are English and British settler societies and that have both been impacted economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and even geographically (Great Britain, particularly its navy, served as protector of both in the nineteenth century) and hence united by the fact that they are both English and British settler societies. That doesn't mean, however, as Bothwell notes that there haven't been or aren't differences between the two. As Bothwell notes, the similarities and differences between Canada and the United Stares have ebbed and flowed across historical time and geographical space. In times of tension between the two nations, such as during the American Revolution and the civil war between Britain that followed in the early nineteenth century, periods of tensions over trade, periods of tension over civil rights for Blacks and over America's imperial adventures in Vietnam, they have ebbed. In periods of common political and economic purpose such as World War I, World War II, the early Cold War, and willingness to create an Canadian and American "free" trade zone, they have flowed.
There is, to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld, nothing wrong with My Country, Your Country generally or with Bothwell's understandably, given the length of the book and its subject matter, traditionalist approach to the history of Canadian and American interactions and similarities and differences. Nor is there anything wrong with Bothwell's ruminations on a theme one also finds in a book by two Canadian sociologists, Edward Grabb and James Curtis, Regions Apart (2010) and the American Joel Garreau's The Nine Nations of North America (1982), namely that there are more similarities than differences between certain Canadian and American regions than to other parts of their respective nations. Clearly oil rich Alberta, (the dominance of oil in the Albertan economy makes that province vulnerable to the ebb and flows of the speculative stock market as recent history shows) and other parts of the Canadian Prairies, for instance, share more with parts of the American West, South, Midwest, Oklahoma and most of all Texas than with Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes, and even British Columbia while the American Northeast shares a lot with Ontario. All this, if it is true, of course, means that Canada and the US are not really nations but nations within nations, a fact that increases tensions within both states.
There are a lot of things to like about Bothwell's book. I appreciated his integration of the mother country, well one of the mother countries, Great Britain, into the book. I appreciated Bothwell's emphasis on history and change as being important in the study of Canadian and American similarities and differences. I appreciated Bothwell's attentiveness, if more in theory than in practise, to the reality of subcultural and countercultural variants of the dominant or hegemonic culture of difference and similarity in both nations.
That said, I did find things to criticise, as critics always do, in Bothwell's book. Some readers would, I am sure, myself included, have liked to have seen a healthier dose of cultural analysis in My Country, Your Country, something that Bothwell could have done, for instance, by exploring the playful depictions of Canadian and American similarities and differences in a Canadian and American television show that made Canadian similarities and differences and their myths and realities central to its tale, Due South. An exploration of Due South (CTV, CBS) would also have allowed Bothwell to explore the vast differences in American and Canadian power given that the show was on life support twice thanks to CBS pulling its money out of the show. It remained on the air, though in shorter form and somewhat changed, thanks, in part, to the BBC, a fact that would have allowed Bothwell to explore the continuing ties between Canada and Great Britain (a relationship that also ebbed and flowed), something that he makes so much of in My Country, Your Country. Others would probably liked to have seen greater exploration of the sketchy comparisons Bothwell makes between Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, British settler societies all, that are simultaneously similar and different (and whose similarities and differences have also ebbed and flowed) from one another thanks to their somewhat different post-colonial histories. Some, like myself, likely will have preferred a more systematic and analytical exploration of Canadian and American identity and identities as opposed to the implied one Bothwell offers. Some, like myself, may object to Bothwell's manichean division between Western democracies and authoritarian regimes and find this binary problematic given that Canada and the US have long been oligarchies and, with the coming of managerial capitalism in the Victorian era, became even more oligarchic thanks to their corporate economic and political bureaucracies, something that resulted in the increasing political power of economic elites. Needless to say, the USSR was also a modern oligarchic bureaucracy. Some, like myself, may find Bothwell's speculation that one may be able to usefully compare post-1960s "reliably" liberal (but not reliably Liberal) francophones with post-1960s reliably liberal Hispanics in the US interesting while at the same time recognising that it was a prophecy that would prove rather premature given the success of Republicans in places like Texas with some Hispanic voter. Some, like myself, may find Bothwell's book a bit too gossipy at times.
So whither Canada and the United States? Both Canada and the United States have changed, as Bothwell notes, just as they have before, during that era dominated by the theocratic Church of Neoliberalism in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States (and Australia and New Zealand) with its powerful mandarin priesthood. All three countries have experienced a radical increase in the chasm between the rich class and status group and other class and status groups and a consequent increase in the power of economic oligarchs to determine "public" policy. They have also experienced, perhaps even more worryingly, a decline in fact if not in mythhistocially inscribed fiction, in social mobility, so much so, in fact, that the old Canadian and American dream of opportunity, mobility, and making it, seems to be more alive and well in the more democratic socialist nations with higher tax rates and larger social security or social insurance nets of the Nordicsphere than in the increasingly lower taxes, shrinking social security net states of increasingly neoliberal Canada and the United States. And perhaps, as Bothwell suggests, that is why there is increasing regional political, cultural, and ideological tensions within both Canada and the US these days, something both the demagogic Trump and his increasingly looney Republican Party and the demagogues in the increasingly looney and once again renamed Conservative Party of Canada manipulate for fun and/or electoral profit.
In the end, Bothwell and others are right. regardless of how alike and how different Canada and the United States are in the end both Canada and the US serve as a reflecting and deflecting mirrors for the mythhistories, whatever those mythhistories might be and however these mythhistories are interpreted by dominant, subcultural, or countercultural elements in each country, of each other. And that makes the comparative study of the similarities and differences--economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic--between Canada and the United States, fascinating. I highly recommend Bothwell's book to anyone interested in comparative history, comparative settler society history, Canadian history, American history, and relations between the two.
