empire

Notes from north of 49ºN

José’s post from late November, Exploding Empires, got me thinking about Canada’s postcolonial experience.  While the remnants of the British empire linger with political structures {including the viceregal Governor General} and the Queen on the money, before 1663 most of Canada was a part of New France.  If the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the siege of Québec City went differently, it would have been interesting to see the trajectory of Canada, if New France stayed under French control or if there was a long protracted war with Britain.  That’s neither here nor there, but the reality is that Canada does have the legacy of being a part of the British empire, while arguably subjugating the First Nations and francophone Québec, which I’ll come back to later.

So, in 1867, Canada became a Dominion in the British Commonwealth with its own Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald {who is on the $10 bill}. This was a trend with its “white settler” colonies. In 1931, The Statute of Westminster made the Canadian Parliament independent of British control and Canada ceased being a colony.  Nevertheless, there were and are ties to Britain. In fact, during WWII, many of the archives for Canada were destroyed in the Battle of Britain, which were housed in London, England, not Ottawa.

The relationship between Canada and Britain has shaped Canada’s character.  The obvious way to characterize the relationship is one of parent and child, but how to characterize it further? Canada as the abused Cinderella? Benign neglect? For decades, the British sought to assert imperial authority and reduce the influence of popular control of the government, which was viewed as a precursor to the American revolution [1]. Once British control began to wane, the rapid industrialization of the United States resulted in a dominant cultural and economic power at Canada’s doorstep.  Many argue that Canada traded one hegemon for another. Many Canadian writers, including Margaret Atwood, saw this pattern and sought to “decolonize” Canada, but what exactly does that entail?  What does a decolonized Canada look like? Is a strong national identity required?

The simmering legacy of the ghost of an old colonialism, i.e., New France, along with First Nations and immigrant communities, serve to further complicate matters by generating tensions from within.   Québec, a province with about 23.9% of the population where 40% of its residents support some form of sovereignty for Québec.  Urbanist Jane Jacobs around 1979-80 even went as far to say::

“Montréal cannot afford to behave like other Canadian regional cities without doing great damage to the economic well-being of the Québécois. It must instead become a creative economic centre in its own right… Yet there is probably no chance of this happening if Québec remains a province.” [2]

Despite hundreds of years passing since the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, there is definitely a strong francophone cultural identity in Québec and a resurgence of separatist politics enabled by the Quiet Revolution/Révolution Tranquille of the 1960s.

Add to the mix, globalization and the resultant Appaduraian flows of financial capital, human migration, media, ideologies [3, 4], and brands [5].

I feel all of these four factors::

1. Historical trajectory of British colonialism
2. Proximity to US cultural {media} and economic forces
3. The subjugation of francophone culture under a trajectory of British colonialism
4. Current state of globalization with flows of people, media, capital, ideologies and brands

serve to strongly decentre the very concept of Canada and Canadian identity, i.e., Canada as an “imagined community” in the Benedict Anderson sense [6]. Extending Anderson’s ideas about print capitalism being critical in defining the concept of nation, I would argue that Canadian identity is being undermined because of the dominance of US media, particularly film, television, and Internet content. I’ve argued for increased funding of the CBC and I feel it can and should play a role in defining nation.  This post isn’t meant to be an accusation or to sound an alarm, but open up a dialogue about the future trajectory of Canada.

If Canadian identity is indeed decentred, doesn’t this imply a fuzziness in people’s meaning systems regarding Canada and does this fuzziness lead to less resistance of hegemonic forces?  Does any of this even matter?  Aren’t these just market forces in action?  Antonio Gramsci says hegemony requires acquiescence [7], but as global consumers, aren’t we all willing to submit to hegemony if it strikes our fancy?  Sweet, glorious hegemony. Hasn’t China proven that global consumers are willing to purchase in ways that are detrimental to their own economies?

I think national identity matters, as does resistance to hegemonic forces.  Identity matters, as a shared sense of communitas and comradeship should guide policy and everyday actions. Citizens should derive meaning from the institution and social construction of nation. Resistance to hegemony matters, as this allows for culture to remain dynamic by allowing its redefinition, rather than continually self-replicating in the same fashion in the style created by the powers that be, i.e., the corporation and the state.

My next blog post will extend these ideas to Canadian politics.

Twitterversion:: Thoughts about “postcolonial” Canada given its relationships with Britain, USA, & Quebec. Interplay b/t media & identity. http://url.ie/4q9t @Prof_K

Song:: Weakerthans-“One Great City”

References

[1] Smith, Simon (1998). British Imperialism 1750-1970. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052159930X.

[2] Philpot, R. (2006) “She Stayed Creative Until the End: The Rich Life of Jane Jacobs” counterpunch.org, retrieved 21 January 2010, from http://www.counterpunch.org/philpot04262006.html

[3] Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large. Cambridge, MA: University of Minnesota Press.

[4] Appadurai, A. (1990) “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” Retrieved 21 January 2010,  http://www.intcul.tohoku.ac.jp/~holden/MediatedSociety/Readings/2003_04/Appadurai.html

[5] Sherry, J.F. (1998) ‘The Soul of the Company Store: Nike Town Chicago and the Emplaced Brandscape’, in J.F. Sherry (ed.) ServiceScapes: The Concept of Place in Contemporary Markets, pp. 305–36. Chicago: NTC Business Books.

[6] Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities. Verso. http://books.google.com/books?id=4mmoZFtCpuoC&dq=benedict+anderson+imagined+communities&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=cZ9YS–eFcLO8QaZq-jKAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CCgQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=&f=false

[7] Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and Wishart.

I suppose it’s not surprising to hear Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas prime minister say, “We are witnessing the collapse of the American Empire.” Nor is it a surprise from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (“American empire in the world is reaching the end of its road”). Heck, we even expect to hear it from good old Lefties like Immanuel Wallerstein or “liberal professors” like Michael Ignatieff in the pages of the New York Times (who buried the American Empire back in 2003). What we don’t expect is to hear is political and economic elites acknowledging either the United States’ status as an imperial power or that our position as world leader might be slipping away from us. As Ignatieff notes, in 2002, President Bush went out of his way to deny our status as an imperial power, first saying, ”America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish” and later commenting, “[the U.S. has] no territorial ambitions. We don’t seek an empire. Our nation is committed to freedom for ourselves and for others.”

But with the American economy collapsing, we’re beginning to see tears shed for the good ol’ days of empire. In the New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten quotes “a top-ranking executive at a major global financial institution” as saying,

“In the past, in difficult times, Americans just worked harder,” he went on. “But there aren’t enough hours in the day, or enough incentives to work harder, and there’s nothing to work on. People, in the end, will find a way to work their way out of it. They’ll pay down their debts. They’ll have to. And then everyone will get bored with doom and gloom and dip their toes in again.

“Still, this one is so bad. After 9/11, it took people only six months to get stupid. This time, it will take ten years for people to become stupid again.” He continued, “America will just be less influential. It will be poorer. It may be the end of the empire.”

Maybe, like a bad break-up, American elites can only fully appreciate what they had now that it’s gone. Or perhaps, we’re living through a moment where the language of radicals is suddenly more permissible. John McCain’s language of “class warfare” appears to be falling flat. Critiques of free market capitalism abroad. For example, centrist Fareed Zakaria writes, “in the long run, countries are likely to seek independence from an unstable superpower … We cannot keep preaching about democracy and capitalism with our house so wildly out of order.” On the Washington Post/Newsweek online symposium, “On Faith,” Willis Elliott, a progressive minister suggests, “We should have a funeral for two dead false gods, the market and the American empire.” We even see conservative Republicans calling for more regulation! Aren’t these all ideas that would have been labeled “communist” just a few years ago?

Of course, before anybody gets too “gleeful” about the fall of Empire and the possibilities for more equitable distributions of wealth and power, perhaps we should consider Hardt and Negri’s notion of the new imperialism. In Multitude, they write,

“…[the] contemporary global order can no longer be understood adequately in terms of imperialism as it was practiced by the modern powers, based primarily on the sovereignty of the nation-state extended over foreign territory. Instead, a “network power,” a new form of sovereignty, is now emerging, and it includes…the dominant national-states along with supernational institutions, major capitalist corporations, and other powers.”

Thus, even if America loses some influence, the imperial “network” will remain in tact. So, perhaps, we’re all a bit too quick to pronounce the end of empire and the theology of the market. Maybe the empire of today will just lose a little of its American flavor.