(Page 2 of 50) - Anti-Americanism in North America: Canada and Mexico authored by Bow, Brian., Katzenstein, Peter. and Santa-Cruz, Arturo.

Geographic proximity has created growing ties of interest rooted in a web of

mutual dependence, for example on questions of labor migration, energy supplies, and
market access. The interpenetration of the Canadian and American economies has
accelerated since the signing of the bilateral free trade agreement in 1987, with the share
of Canada’s exports that goes to the United States reaching 85 percent.

A similar pattern

has evolved since Mexico joined its two North American neighbors in the 1994 North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), with Mexico now shipping about the same
percentage of its exports as Canada to the United States (Banco de México 2006).
Furthermore, Mexico’s Vicente Fox vowed before his election in 2000 that he would
govern on behalf of 118 million Mexicans – the 100 million living in Mexico and the
nearly 18 million of Mexican descent living in the United States (Rodriguez 2000). In
March 2005 the leaders of the United States, Canada and Mexico committed themselves
to build a “North American Alliance for Prosperity and Security,” an extension of the
1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. Enhanced security cooperation is aiming at
tighter border controls and the sharing of intelligence. Increased economic cooperation
focuses on energy, transportation, financial services and technology sharing (Authers
2005). Timed to support this diplomatic initiative, a report of the Council on Foreign
Relations Building a North American Community (2005) analyzes the different
constellations of interest that, in its views are pushing developments toward a more fully
integrated community. Yet the report studiously avoids addressing the issue of
sovereignty, has no solution to the rise of anti-immigrant sentiments in the American
Southwest and in the right wing of the Republican party, and says little about how
economic conflicts from lumber to beef can be avoided in the future relations between
Canada and the United States. The community the report evokes in its title is, at best, an
aspiration. Anti-American sentiments in Canada and Mexico occur in political settings
marked by malleable interests rather than enduring North American identities.

Those sentiments have varied greatly over time and by type. Canada became part

of the British empire after the end of the French Indian wars. Its population was
augmented greatly by Empire Loyalists who fled the American colonies during the
revolutionary wars. It was soldiers of British North America, in the service of the British
Crown but drawn from the land and society that would become Canada, that burned
down the White House in the war of 1812. J.L. Granatstein’s (1996) history of Canadian
anti-Americanism details how anti-American sentiments have nourished the
psychological ties to empire, even after Canada started down the road to independent
statehood in 1867. But with the decline of British influence in world affairs, imperial
anti-Americanism morphed into national anti-Americanism -- bred by the fear of the
cultural dynamism, economic size, and political and military assertiveness of a world
power that threatened to overwhelm Canadian sovereignty. Anti-Americanism became a

Production has also become thoroughly transnationalized in many sectors. The Canadian auto

industry, for example, estimated that the slow-down of border traffic immediately after 9/11 cost
Canadian-based producers at least $1 million per hour (Andreas 2003, 8).