David Polansky: Anti-Americanism cannot build a nation

A work such as Lament for a Nation, while compelling and even brilliant in places, assumes a national legacy that never wholly existed, writes Guest Contributor David Polansky.

(Image credit: ‘Elbows Up, Canada!’)

George Grant was an outstanding scholar, writer, and philosopher. He was also a mortal man, and his work is not infallible.

Lament for a Nation is essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of Canadian politics in the aftermath of Justin Trudeau’s “post-national” movement, and it has understandably become a touchstone for those who feel Canadian nationhood to be under threat.

Yet Grant’s brilliant little book, for all its insight into Canada’s relationship with the United States and its evocation of a “British Canada,” may have assumed too much, as we shall see in the third part of our series on Grant.

His most famous work is also one Grant admitted was flawed, and perhaps with good reason.

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Part III

David Polansky is a Toronto-based writer and political theorist.

When Justin Trudeau described Canada as the “first post-national state,” it came to be seen in retrospect as an expression of the governing philosophy behind a decade of LPC rule in Canada, particularly on the part of those inclined to be critical of this era. In response, many of those so inclined have found themselves returning to George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism in order to, well, lament the defeat of Canadian nationalism.

More broadly, it has enjoyed a certain rediscovery in recent years as a resource for those seeking to work out their own understanding of Canadian nationhood at a time when it appears under threat (despite being a non-Canadian, I was one of those).

I have since come to think, however, that Grant’s book, while compelling and even brilliant in places, too much assumes a national legacy that never wholly existed. For if one consults the global history of nation-formation, it is striking how much Canada’s particular story diverges from it. Canada, after all, emerged as the geographic expression of certain colonial/imperial interests in continental North America that took shape as a result of the outcomes of the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolutionary War.

This arrangement transitioned over time but never underwent a significant nationalist rupture in the manner of, say, Italy’s risorgimento. It is not incidental that the year of Canada’s birth is conventionally dated to 1867, but this was originally an Act of the British Parliament, and it represented an administrative shift more than a political one. And it is similarly not incidental that its first prime minister and the dominant figure of Canadian Confederation still maintained at the end of his life, “I am a British subject and British-born, and a British subject I hope to die”.

Over time, of course, the metropole’s centre of gravity shifted from London to Ottawa, but the fundamental relationship remained the same, and in many ways Ottawa functions more like an imperial capital than a national one today. This is not especially remarkable in geographic terms, Canada being an order of magnitude larger than the average country, but in demographic terms, it has resulted in a powerful central bureaucracy overseeing a population approximately that of the state of California.

Four decades ago, Peter Brimelow made a similar point about the dialectical relationship between weak Canadian nationhood and the country’s strong Laurentian elite. It has since only grown, and today the public sector accounts for a quarter of the country’s workforce.

This is not to say that Canada’s history has not furnished catalysts for national identity formation. The epic saga of westward expansion to occupy what would become the world’s second-largest country, as well as the remarkable heroism displayed in both World Wars (in which Canadians logged substantially more time than the Americans did), both qualify. But the former has become ideologically problematic, and arguably was always in tension with attempts to integrate the First Nations into the Canadian self-understanding.

And the latter was complicated by the country’s ties to its erstwhile mother country. Geographically, Canada’s relationship to the United Kingdom is not dissimilar to that of the United States, both being on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, but geopolitically it was implicated in the UK’s European concerns.

Consequently, the legacy of its experience in the World Wars has been less one of national unity than of Commonwealth unity, right down to its Remembrance Day traditions. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with this, and there is no reason in principle to elevate national traditions over any number of other kinds. The point here is not normative but structural: that these kinds of experiences, which have in other countries tended to unify elites and masses, have had limited purchase here.

The outstanding exception in the process of defining the Canadian nation, and one in which Grant himself participated, was anti-Americanism. This means not just a kind of affective disposition of antipathy towards certain elements of American culture and politics, but a shared mental concept against which to define Canadian identity. Whereas the United States imposes hegemonic English, Canada is proudly bilingual; the United States demands assimilation, but Canada respects the multicultural mosaic; the United States pursues aggressive foreign policies, whereas Canada engages in peacekeeping; and so on.

All of this is fine, up to a point, these sorts of agonistic comparisons between states are a common feature of nationalism. The trouble is its negative valence. There’s little sense of why these disparate elements are choice-worthy in their own right or how they combine together to produce a shared national self-understanding. Moreover, all of this is ironically qualified by the degree to which Canada’s culture and major institutions have become more Americanised over time.

In retrospect, then, and despite its title, Grant’s book was less a lament for something lost than an expression of what he wished his country might be. Such a work calls forth the nation it purports to defend. What he sought (and perhaps glimpsed under John Diefenbaker’s leadership) was a country whose leaders represented a nation of pious and hardworking small-business owners, sheltering them from the predations of a capitalistic and imperialistic United States and allowing them to maintain the orderly customs inherited from Great Britain in a North American context.

There is much to praise in that particular national vision, but it was at best one variant of Canadian nationhood that existed more on paper than in life. Six years after the publication of Grant’s book, Pierre Trudeau put paid to anything like a traditional vision of Canadian nationhood with his announcement of multiculturalism as an official government policy. Canada today is still grappling with the complications arising from that vision. To the extent that Grant’s book offers limited guidance in doing so, this owes less to any inherent flaws in that work and more to the particulars of Canada’s own history of nationhood, or lack thereof.

David Polansky has been published in The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy. Read more from him at Strange Frequencies.