Beyond Walls: Re-inventing the Canada-United States Borderlands

Victor Konrad,Heather Nicol

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351955454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

September 11, 2001 marked the beginning of a new era of security imperatives for many countries. The border between Canada and the United States suddenly emerged from relative obscurity to become a focus of constant attention by media, federal and state/provincial governments on both sides of the boundary, and the public at large. This book provides a comprehensive examination of the Canada-USA border in its 21st century form, placing it within the context of border and borderlands theory, globalization and the changing geopolitical dialogue. It argues that this border has been reinvented as a 'state of the art', technology-steeped crossing system, while the image of the border has been engineered to appear consistent with the 'friendly' border of the past. It shows how a border can evolve to a heightened level of security and yet continue to function well, sustaining the massive flow of trade. It argues whether, in doing so, the US-Canada border offers a model for future borderlands. Although this model is still evolving and still aspires toward better management practices, the template may prove useful, not only for North America, but also in conflict border zones as well as the meshed border regions of the EU, Africa's artificial line boundaries and other global situations.

Chapter 1

The Canada-United States Borderlands in the 21st Century

WASHINGTON—The United States is eager to install a battery of surveillance towers, motion sensors and infrared cameras to monitor the Canada-U.S. border.

Now if we can only find it.

After years of neglect and under funding by Washington and Ottawa, the International Boundary Commission admits it can no longer identify large swaths of the Canada-U.S. border, particularly in heavily forested areas overrun by dense shrubbery and sprouting trees. Last month, the Department of Homeland Security announced the first $67 million contract for its Secure Border Initiative, a surveillance plan expected to carry an overall price tag of about $2 billion.

By comparison, the International Boundary Commission receives just $1.27 million US from Washington to carry out its mandate. CanWest News¹

HOULTON, Maine—The Boeing Co. has been awarded a three-year contract to implement the first part of what could be a multi-billion dollar plan to reduce illegal entry along the 12,000 kilometres of border with Canada and Mexico using better technology, including cameras, sensors and even unmanned airplanes. Associated Press²

Canada and the United States of America share one of the longest, and, until recently, one of the most benign borders in the world. Since the events of September 11, 2001, this boundary has become a focus of anxiety for both governments, a target of extreme enforcement by authorities, and a flashpoint for growing public concern on both sides of the border. Yet, for more than a century this boundary was almost invisible as both the United States and Canada aligned their aspirations and goals along an acknowledged boundary between them. Each country had emerged along a different track. The United States grew vigorously and tumultuously from a revolution which defined its nature and destiny. Canada evolved more gradually from a measured and orchestrated beginning. Yet, at the border, differences were set aside once the boundary was finally established. The United States and Canada, it seemed, had invented the ideal border relationship where people, ideas, goods—almost everything, moved freely and relatively quickly and easily across the boundary.

Map 1.1 The Canada-U.S. Border and Canada’s Northern Boundaries

Credit: Stephen Gardiner, Trent University.

The border worked, and indeed it appeared to function very well as long as both countries exercised constraint, demonstrated trust, showed mutual respect, and operated together to achieve the primary common goal of prosperity. As the 20th century came to a close, economic integration had advanced to new heights under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the border had become a fulcrum of trade facilitation. Trucks moved millions and then billions of dollars worth of goods across the border, while the only major causes for anxiety revolved around the capacity and condition of roads and facilitating infrastructure, and issues surrounding deregulation and shipping. Cross-border regions of mutual interest defined a borderland of interaction where the two countries met. Cascadia along the Pacific rim, the Great Lakes heartland, the northeastern borderlands, and numerous regional and local corridors in-between comprised a working space where the two countries joined more than separated. A variety of programs and plans were in place to expedite border crossing for frequent travelers, and an even greater number of efforts were aimed at streamlining trade. This trade had become worth more than a billion dollars a day.

The nature of this border, with its focus upon trade and the movement of goods represents more than a brief moment in the late 20th century when free trade prevailed and borders adjusted accordingly. As we will illustrate in this book, the nature of this border and its contemporary role have been in the making for years. Nineteenth century border management policies were developed to regulate cross-border flows of goods long before the NAFTA came into effect, setting the tone for the “material” orientation of border policies in the 21st century. Even after the NAFTA was negotiated, significant changes were made to transportation policies to facilitate the new trans-border flow of goods which followed. In this sense the border has never been independent of a free trade arrangement, and free trade would have been impossible without the borderlands.

Yet, on a now infamous day in September 2001, what had already become by then a massive border crossing machinery ground to a virtual halt as the United States and Canada, and the world, reeled from the impact of the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, DC. On that day the border between Canada and the United States became very visible indeed as thousands of trucks waited in long lines on both sides of the border for permission to proceed, and as hundreds of thousands of people waited in cars, on busses and trains, and in airports for the “lockdown” to be lifted. Many turned back late in the day from what had begun as a routine border crossing early that morning. On that day in September the border relationship was scrutinized by all Americans and Canadians, by many for the first time, as they proceeded to reinvent the boundary and the border zone between them.

In this book we look both forward and back from the events of September 11, 2001, (9/11) in order to place the reinvention of the Canada-United States borderlands into context. We examine the nature and meaning of the boundary between the countries, and view the border construct of the United States and Canada in comparison to the boundaries between other countries. Are we unique in our border relationship, and if so why? How did the boundary emerge? What are its defining characteristics? What makes it work? These are among the questions that guide our exploration of a border relationship which is integral to the everyday lives of most Canadians and a substantial number of Americans.

A Vision for the Border

Let the 5,000 mile border between Canada and the United States stand as a symbol for the future. Let it forever be not a point of division but a meeting place between great and true friends.³

The rhetoric embracing the cooperative nature of the border relationship between the United States and Canada prevailed throughout the 20th century. Have we lost sight of this vision? Does this sentiment continue to define the Canada-United States border? We believe that this vision of the border broadly conceived, and indeed a romantic image of the Canada-U.S. border more narrowly conceived, continues to prevail in the post-9/11 era of security enhancement, divergent national imperatives in the United States and Canada, and apparent turbulence in trade. To this end, every one of these potential barriers to effective interaction across the border is in fact reshaped and mitigated at the border, or more specifically in the borderlands interaction zone through the ameliorating quality of the border, or even more specifically, through the cultural processes which shape border arrangements.⁴

Early in 2006, Mexicans demonstrated against the new fence under construction along the length of the United States border with Mexico.⁵ No chain link fence is proposed along the northern frontier of “fortress America”, however.⁶ Yet the time-worn political rhetoric about the “longest undefended border in the world”⁷ has disappeared both in Canada and the United States. In its place a new, “post-9/11” border culture has emerged in the Canada-U.S. borderlands. This border culture is not based upon the “continental divide” identified by Seymour Martin Lipset in his study of the values and institutions of the United States and Canada,⁸ although Lipset, in an earlier version of his text, refers to the confluence and distinction of American and Canadian values and culture.⁹ Instead, we now are seeing the formation of a new border culture which “does work” in the sense that it must increasingly build the context of cooperation or the cultural bridges required to keep the NAFTA and the binational context of Canada and the United States functioning. Canadians and Americans may have shared and not so shared values, but the border is now a place where values are not the main concerns which warrant definition by political boundaries.

This invariably and inevitably raises the question as to what is meant by border culture specifically, and culture as a process more generally. In the 1970s, Clifford Geertz suggested that culture could be defined as “a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions,”¹⁰ whose meaning could be found in “an array of cultural texts.”¹¹ Such a definition suggests that culture is not an object, as much as a construction to be understood in the details of “thick descriptions,” or as Michel Foucault suggests, in the “social frameworks that enable and limit ways of thinking and acting.”¹² Indeed, writing from a materialist approach, Don Mitchell builds upon these concepts but focuses more directly on the relationship between complex political and economic processes which contextualize culture in the post-industrial era.¹³ Mitchell suggests that culture is “an effect of struggles over power,” and that it is expressed “as a reification of meaning, certain ways of life, or patterns of social relations: it is a materially based idea or ideology about social difference.”¹⁴ He goes on to note that culture may be different from economic relations, but it cannot be understood as “severed from them.”¹⁵ For Mitchell, culture is thus a verb signifying the struggle to establish cultural value on the basis of broader economic and political values.

At the same time, he asserts that the place or spatial context in which struggle for a definition of meaning and value takes place matters significantly. “A cultural geography that is really meaningful will have to return to the fact that the world we live in” matters to the process of accumulation of capital, which is at the heart of a materialist perspective on culture.¹⁶ While we would not care to confine our understanding of culture as applied in this volume to a materialist perspective, such insights are useful in understanding the link between the physical context of the border, the changing economic and political purpose that it serves, and the overall cultural processes which are embedded in borderlands themselves. From this perspective culture is heavily implicated in politics, and it is tied intimately to power. Place is resistant or facilitative of the penetration of economic and political processes, while cultural landscapes themselves reflect and facilitate the economic and political processes at work. It is in this sense that post-structural concepts of culture, particularly from a materialist perspective, are useful, although not totalizing the theories we engage for our understanding of border processes. It means that “border culture”, is the way we live in, write about, talk about and construct policies about the border, and the way in which we have constructed actual cultural landscapes of binational regulation and exchange. As such, this border culture continues to enshrine our shared imperative for economic gain, and seeks to guard time-honored linkages, but it imposes an enhanced screen of security across the borderlands of traditional exchange and human engagement where goods are constantly expedited while people wait. And yet “border culture” is not a “thing”, a reified manifestation or concept to which one and all subscribe. It is instead, a dynamically evolving framework for encoding the meaning of border and for evaluating the efficacy of borders as new security and economic concerns unfold.¹⁷ It reflects, resists and also enables the now somewhat contradictory post-9/11 values of secure border and economically open border under the NAFTA, and makes sure that these issues retain their centrality in early 21st century definitions of security, nationalism, patriotism, and power relationships.

A dynamic new border culture process also accommodates the politically sharpened alternatives toward security in the United States, and consensus about a need for emergency preparedness in Canada. Whereas the United States Government has heightened security dramatically since 9/11, and essentially moved from the position of trust in the U.S.-Canada boundary reaffirmed by every United States President in the 20th century,¹⁸ Canada has aligned security elements on its side of the border to complement U.S. developments, but also defined its national security policy cautiously as a comprehensive emergency preparedness plan. In 2007, however, there are signs that the security imperative initiatives directed toward Canada by the Bush Administration finally are being challenged by the United States Congress. For example, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, perhaps emboldened by the new, slim Democratic Party majority in both houses of Congress, berated the United States Justice Secretary for his Department’s handling of the Maher Harar affair. The Canadian Citizen was detained by authorities in New York and sent to Syria where he was tortured, instead of being returned to Canada. Among his scolding remarks, Leahy underscored that the Bush Administration had lost sight of the fact that the United States and Canada share the “longest undefended border in the world.” On the other hand, there are also signs that the security imperative still has substantial momentum. The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative to heighten security was passed after all by the U.S. Congress. At the en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Canada-United States Borderlands in the 21st Century
• 2 Boundaries, Borders and Borderlands: Borderlands Theory in the Era of Globalization
• 3 A Retrospective on the Canada-United States Borderlands
• 4 Borderland Regions and Transnational Communities
• 5 Trade in an Era of Heightened Security: Sustaining the Prosperity Partnership
• 6 Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness
• 7 Passport Compliance
• 8 Environment
• 9 Arctic Boundaries and Northern Borderlands
• 10 Borderlands Culture
• Selected Bibliography
• Index