The permeable border, the great Lakes region, and the Canadian-American relationship.

Largely undefended, virtually invisible, and easily traversed, the Canada-United States border has meant different things at different moments in the lives of these two countries and in their relationship to each other, most frequently perhaps serving as a symbol for the intangible constructions of sovereignty and national identity.

In parsing the Canadian-American relationship on a practical level, the historiography of this subject has revolved largely around whether historians have stressed the permeability of the border or the fact that it nonetheless has been a border. The differing emphases have related not only to the fluctuating character of the border in different periods and circumstances, but also to the divergent perspectives of Canadian and American policymakers, ideologues, migrants, visitors, investors, manufacturers, traders, and others, who have viewed the border either from the north looking south or from the south looking north, but rarely if ever from both directions at once or squarely down the middle. It is no less true in historical writing that emphases have varied due to the differing interpretive frameworks of the historians who have written about these subjects and to the various influences on them and their work.

In the past thirty-five years, three books have used the phrase "permeable border" as part of their rifles and as a point of departure for their analyses; the approaches taken in these three studies tell us a great deal about how the Canadian-American relationship has evolved in recent decades and how the ways Canadians and Americans have viewed it have changed. The early 1970s, when the first of these volumes appeared, was a time of soul-searching in Canada about Canadian identity, nationalism and federalism, dependency and American imperialism, and, with the "Quiet Revolution" in Quebec as a backdrop, Canada's very survival as a unified country. In 1972 Harold M. Troper, Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy of Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto, published a slim book of documents and discussions of "issues" rifled The Permeable Border. Covering such topics as the migration of U.S. "draft dodgers" (Troper's term) to Canada, the Canadian "brain drain" to the United States, and the penetration of Canada by American media and culture, Troper stressed the need for Canada to maintain its "cultural independence," which he defined as "the ability of a group or nation to decide its own social, intellectual, artistic and educational development free of outside pressure." "For Canada," according to Troper, "this means to maintain a distinct identity on the same continent as the United States.... We Canadians are looking to our traditions and history to find that which makes us Canadian. We want to know what preserved Canada as a separate country in North America for over one hundred years, and how we can best continue to live in harmony with the United States while deciding our own destiny." The last section of the book, consisting of an editorial from the Toronto Daily Star, was titled "Stem the American cultural flood." (1)

The second Permeable Border, by Christine Boyanoski, then Assistant Curator of Canadian Historical Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, is a study of the "art of Canada and the United States, 1920-1940," which is also the book's subtitle. It was published in 1989, seventeen years after the Troper volume. Boyanoski's book was the catalogue for an exhibition organized at the Art Gallery of Ontario to coincide with a joint conference of the Canadian Association for American Studies and the American Studies Association held in Toronto. (2) In a dawning era of free trade between the two countries, Boyanoski's book stepped away from a defensive Canadian cultural nationalism to undertake "a comparison of Canadian and American art between the two world wars ... the common influences affecting North American art following World War I, American influence on Canadian art, and the indigenous differences in Canadian and American painting." (3) The introduction acknowledged that the exhibition and the catalogue appeared amidst "a burgeoning interest in Canadian studies in the United States" and a "heightened interest in bilateral relations." (4)

The third of these volumes, in which I myself collaborated, grew out of a conference held at Wayne State University in Detroit shortly after the appearance of the Boyanoski volume but was not published until 2005. (5) The book was coauthored by three historians and a geographer--two Americans, one Canadian, and one American of Canadian descent--reflective perhaps of the interdisciplinarity that marks the growing field of "border studies" and the increasing transnational connections linking Canadian and American academe. Although the book appeared a few years after events within the United States and abroad had reemphasized the border's barrier functions, (6) the authors retained the title Permeable Borden The Great Lakes Basin as Transnational Region, 1650-1990, undeterred by the tightening border-security regime descending upon the border during the book's preparation, which at the time seemed perhaps merely a temporary pause in a trend toward greater North American economic integration. Instead this book's authors sought to shift paradigms, from a focus on separate national entities linked, for better or for worse, by proximity, to a more dynamic examination of an economic region artificially bisected by a boundary line made more or less permeable by changes in policy involving the cross-border movement of people, goods, and capital. This third book historicized the "permeable border," treating it as a sometimes important and influential, reified construct that existed quite separate and apart from the various economic regions that anteceded the fixing of boundary lines. It was the fixing of the boundary that made those regions suddenly "transnational"; the regions themselves would function as regions regardless of whether a border had divided the interior of the continent into two or more countries. Therefore, although the border created a "borderlands" region, it was the connections formed by the movement of people, goods, and capital that formed the region, which was only "transnational" because of the intrusion of a bisecting boundary line. In some respects the movement of both goods and capital depended upon the movement of people, and therefore the history of the latter--of migration--was critical to understanding the definition, evolution, and operation of the region. Thus, the discussion of migration formed the central element of this third study of the "permeable border."

Historians of ...