Emulation and Apprehension: The Border Security Idea in US-Canada Relations

• In Event: Canadian Foreign Policy, Border Security, and the Environment

Abstract

In the US-Canada space, a great deal of international integration has revolved around enshrining an international boundary. This runs contrary to the intuitively disintegrative connotations of border strengthening. Elsewhere, international integration has corresponded with an attenuation of international boundaries through freedom of movement for labor and capital. This paper asks why the US-Canada border has been a locus of collaboration and security integration more than a site of geopolitical friction. Through a combination of process tracing and discourse analysis, this paper argues that a historically contingent combination of geopolitical and ideological conditions in Canada around the turn of the twentieth century marked a critical juncture in which policymakers’ apprehensiveness toward US power coincided with a willingness to emulate American immigration policy. These ideological conditions were undergirded by transnational civil society movements grounded in ideas of ethnic exclusion. This established a durable norm of integrative differentiation in the domain of US-Canada border politics. The paper’s assessment of the past speaks to contemporary concerns about the future of US-Canada relations, especially in light of heightened concerns about nativist politics in the region. It casts the relationship between borders, racism, and international integration in North America as a historically complex outcome not reducible to a dichotomy of openness and isolation.

Author

• Daniel Troup, University of Maine