Pulling Together, Pulling Apart

Despite its name, the United States was born in separation. Much of its history has been spent wrestling with divisions.

A century after the US, Canada was patterned to try to avoid the pitfalls of her neighbour that had just come out of the Civil War.

The Canadian Fathers of Confederation set out to create a central government strong enough to prevent such schisms. Yet today's Canada is among the most decentralized of the world's federations.

Every state lives in a tug-of-war between the centre and the parts that make it up. Federalism is an attempt to reconcile these forces in a "both/and" rather than an "either/or" context.

The governments of the US and Canada began at opposite poles of this debate, passed each other on the way, and are still at opposite poles--from each other and from where they began.

Joined by a need to separate from a King and Parliament they saw as oppressive--the Thirteen Colonist and the states that later joined them built the separation principle into the structure of their new government. They did this on four levels.

There was, first, an international separation. This was done for the purpose of taking their place with the other nations of the world. It entailed separation from an Empire in which they had previously had sub-national status.

But the impulse did not stop with achieving nationhood. It has continued in an isolationism and unilateralism that has marked American foreign policy for much of its existence.

Despite leaders such as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, Americans have had a tendency to draw into themselves, either in a "leave us alone" or "do it my way" in foreign affairs. This can be traced back to these themes in their Revolution.

Second, Americans have shown a decentralizing tendency in a Constituion based on separation of powers. Fearing both a tyranical King and a sovereign Parliament, they separated Executive and Legislative in a seesaw of checks and balances.

The President is Commander in Chief but only Congress can declare war. He signs treaties and nominates officials the Senate can refuse. Congress can pass legislation the President can veto.

Third, Americans emphasized separation in allocating powers between state and national governments. At first this was a practical measure. Later it become the dogma of States' Rights.

Eventually this separation became untenable in the War Between the States. But not before it was intensified by a fourth separation of slavery: a race-based rift within states and societies.

When some states tried to implicate others in their own internal divisions in the Fugitive Slave laws, civil war broke out. Even after this war, the separation principle continued in racial segregations in the doctrine of "separate but equal."

The tides of separation in the US were finally reversed by war. The Civil War settled the issue of secession from the Union and brought with it a lingering bitterness. Participation in foreign wars became a unifying force for internal tensions within the US.

But this created tensions of its own. In the first and second world wars, it separated German and Japanese Americans on the basis of race rather than their national allegiance. The Cold War created the rifts of McCarthyism.

The unwinnability of the Vietnam and Iraq wars made both sources of division at home. Yet the machinery to wage wars became an economic unifier in the Military Industrial Complex.

Canada's Fathers of Confederation looked at the US example, and chose to focus on integration rather than separation. First, they retained the connection with an international Crown.

Rather than an elected King who could prove unpopular to those who had voted for someone else, they opted for a hereditary throne that had been filled by French, Scots, Dutch and German sovereigns as well as English ones. Here the unifying factor was that of royalty, not nationality.

Rather than a separation of legislative and executive powers, they opted, second, for integration of the two in Parliament. The US is ruled by committees. Canadian Cabinet ministers combine the roles of US committee chairs and and Cabinet secretaries. They sit in Parliament, yet exercise their executive power in the name of the Crown which is outside the political process.

Third, States' Rights was dealt with in Canada by giving reserve powers to the Federal Government rather than the provinces. This Government could also disallow provincial legislation, or instruct a province's Lieutenant Governor to veto it.

Things turned out very differently in Canada from what the Fathers of Confederation intended. First, the British House of Lords remained the final court of appeal for Canadian civil cases until the 1950's, and frequently sided with the provinces in jurisdictional disputes. Its judgements expanded provincial powers and narrowed overlapping federal jurisdiction.

This created an opening where Quebec, which already had additional powers to protect French language and culture, led the way to the other provinces becoming becoming parallel powers to the federal government. The "Council of the Federation" made up of provincial premiers is more like a council of European heads of governments than of American state governors.

Both Canada and the United States have ended at opposite poles from where they began in the centralization and decentralization of power. In Canada the courts had a leading role in devolving power to the regions. In the US, war and the Military Industrial Complex had a role in centralizing it.

As we've noted earlier, the things we cling to often escape us, while those we reject return to haunt us. Americans have lost many of the local rights they set out to protect. Canadians are haunted by the decentralized system they set out to avoid.