In the course of websurfing I came across the site of an organization called the Expansionist Party of the United States – the url is http://members.aol.com/XPUS/ – which exists to advocate U.S. territorial expansion, starting with the annexation of Canada and proceeding to, as a start, the rest of the English-speaking world – the U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, possibly South Africa, possibly the Philippines. All these regions, or their constituent provinces or states, are to be admitted as full states of the Union, not colonies or territories. The party also favors full statehood for all existing U.S. territory possessions such as Puerto Rico. In short, they want the British Empire, or parts of it, and what there has been of an American Empire, or parts of it, put back together under the United States Constitution. Notably, the Expansionist Party was AGAINST the Iraq war. They want our borders expanded peacefully, not by conquest.
I’m for it, I suppose, at least with regards to Canada. Merging with Canada would be a good thing for the Canadian people and an even better thing for the American people. The Canadians would be a very beneficial presence in the U.S. Congress. The Canadians have contributed troops to most of Britain’s conflicts but they have no significant war-glory tradition of their own, they are not afflicted with any national myth of “Canadian exceptionalism.” We could count on them to vote against any reckless foreign military adventures. We could also use some of those Canadian New Democrats in Congress – they’re much further left than our Democratic Party. I just wish we could arrange it so Canada annexes the United States rather than the other way around, so that
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we get single-payer health care out of the deal, and
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the FBI is merged into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, rather than vice-versa, so that in the future all federal agents in North America will have to attend public functions dressed up like Dudley Doright!
But I digress.
Before discussing this we have to acknowledge a couple of obvious facts. First, any future territorial expansion would be fundamentally different from all our earlier expansion, in that it would be a purely political change and would not be followed by any significant movements of population or geocultural changes. In the past, as the U.S. expanded westward across North America, acquisition of territory always was followed by a wave of Anglo-American settlers moving into it and making it their own. In some case (Texas, California, Hawaii) the Anglo-American settlers, or “filibusterers,” came first, and the U.S. government followed along later. But no more. Every place on the globe that might be colonized in this way, has been colonized. If the U.S. were to annex the Canadian provinces as American states, there would be no noticeable wave of migration north or south of the former border. The Canadian provincial governments would continue to operate, as going concerns, in substantially their present form. Daily life in Canada would not change. The only changes would be at the national-political level: Ottowa would no longer be the capital of anything. Canadians would elect senators and representatives to the U.S. Congress. The Canadian Army would be merged into the U.S. Army. All bureaucratic organs of the Canadian government would be abolished, or grafted onto their U.S. counterparts; Canadian civil servants would become U.S. civil servants and, most likely, would not have to worry about losing their jobs. The U.S. would inherit all of Canada’s problems, including relations with its Indians and Inuit.
Second, any further territorial expansion would require the U.S. to make a public decision we’ve never really made before, about what kind of state we are or want to be: Are we a nation-state, or an idea-state?
Some liberal commentators proclaim that everything that is important about America as a country is in our laws, constitution and political culture; that we are an idea-state, like the Soviet Union, only based on a better idea. One (I forget who) even declared that an America populated entirely by Martians would still be America, if it still had our constitution, etc.
At the opposite extreme, Michael Lind argued persuasively in his 1992 book, “The Next American Nation,” that we are, in fact, a nation-state, with a distinct national core culture that was formed by the experience of Anglo-Celtic settlers in North America, a culture that was already in existence long before we broke away from British rule. If the United States Constitution were scrapped, or other, equally momentous changes took place, America would remain America – just as Poland maintained its existence as an ethnocultural nation through all the centuries when there was no Polish national state.
Now, we can annex the Anglophone provinces of Canada without confronting this question. The English-speaking Canadians are not just exactly like us Yanks, but they are similar enough that you have to look close to spot the differences. Their dialect of English is actually much closer to standard U.S. “anchorman English” than is, for instance, the Southern drawl. As a regional American subculture, they would fit in just fine.
But if we annex Quebec, or grant statehood to Puerto Rico, we’re crossing a line: We would be extending full membership in the American polity to peoples who will NEVER be full members of the American cultural community. We’ve never done that before. Even Hawaii was not granted statehood until its predominant culture was English-speaking American culture. Puerto Rico will never become an Americanized, English-speaking territory in that sense. Neither will Quebec. Only the “idea-state” conception of American identity could justify taking them in.
So, what do the Teeming Millions think?
That’s the sort of arrogant attitude that makes Americans friends the world over. It’s the sort of thing that makes me want to unleash the hordes of Celine clones we have stockpiled the secret facilities in Trois Rivieres upon the US. In short, the comments and tone in the OP make me exceedingly angry, and my initial response was remarkably subdued.