Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies

Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies

John Herd Thompson and Stephen J. Randall
Reviewed by By David C. Hendrickson
May/June 1995
Print Email
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.
John Herd Thompson and Stephen J. Randall
University Of Georgia Press
1994
387 pp.
$45.00

The ninth volume in a distinguished series, edited by Lester Langley, on the United States and the Americas. Thompson and Randall, professors at Duke and Calgary, provide a judicious overview of the "asymmetrical" and "essentially one-sided" relationship between the United States and Canada. While Americans, as a Canadian columnist once complained, "know and care the square root of squat" about their northern neighbor, Canadian identities have been deeply shaped by an ambivalent and normally obsessive relationship with the American behemoth. Given the range of years and topics covered (the authors begin with the revolutionary collapse of the first British Empire in 1776 and devote considerable attention to social and cultural factors along the way), the book tends to proceed by way of summary judgment and witty anecdote but is nevertheless impartial and authoritative. The authors see the alignment of policies from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, under the Tories and Republicans, as a deviation from the norm and believe that the weight of history will set strict limits on the emergence of "a new consensus and convergence" between the two countries.

Related

Essay, Oct 1961
Canada and the United States in World Politics
John W. Holmes

About a decade ago a Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs created a furor on both sides of the border by saying that "the days of relatively easy and automatic political relations with our neighbors are, I think, over." Nourished for years, as we all had been, on post-prandial pap about the unfortified frontier and the capacity of North American good will to mellow away all differences, Americans and Canadians were unduly shocked. They disregarded the fact that Mr. Pearson had not said relations were deteriorating; he merely said they had become more complex. They had become more complex be cause they were no longer a simple matter of line- fence disputes over borders and waterways. We had both ceased isolating ourselves from the troubles of the world and, for that reason, we were likely to have differences on a great many more subjects than in the past. Mr. Pearson aimed to persuade people on both sides of the border to adopt an adult attitude to our relations, to abandon the persistent North American illusion that good will without understanding was adequate and that problems could be smiled away in intercommunity singing, to recognize that any two countries in close proximity were bound to go on having disputes and differences and that the mark of intelligence was not to pretend they did not exist but to approach them tolerantly, judiciously, and unemotionally-and, in a sense, to take them for granted.

Read
Essay, Jan 1965
Good Neighborhood
Lester B. Pearson

A Distinguished former United States Ambassador to Canada, Mr. Livingston Merchant, was recently quoted as saying, "Canada is more important to the United States than any other single country." This will startle the average American who thinks of Canada-when he thinks of it at all-as a land of snow, wheat, "Northern Dancer," tourist camps and discontented people who speak French.

Read
Essay, Winter 1981
Canada, the United States and the World Economy
Marie-Josee Drouin and Harald B. Malmgren

Relations between Canada and the United States have become more strained than at any time in recent memory. There have been many earlier periods of tension, but the policy orientations of the two capitals in late 1981 appear to be far more divergent than in the past. The two governments seem to be on a collision course, in a context that political leaders cannot fully control.

Read