The Canada Us Border In The 21st Century

Borders are critical to the development and survival of modern states, offer security against external threats, and mark public policy and identity difference. At the same time, borders, and borderlands, are places where people, ideas, and economic goods meet and intermingle. The United States-Canada border demonstrates all of the characteristics of modern borders, and epitomises the debates that surround them. This book examines the development of the US-Canada border, provides a detailed analysis of its current operation, and concludes with an evaluation of the border’s future. The central objective is to examine how the border functions in practice, presenting a series of case studies on its operation. This book will be of interest to scholars of North American integration and border studies, and to policy practitioners, who will be particularly interested in the case studies and what they say about the impact of border reform.

The northern and southern borders and borderlands of the United States should have much in common; instead they offer mirror articulations of the complex relationships and engagements between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. In North American Borders in Comparative Perspectiveleading experts provide a contemporary analysis of how globalization and security imperatives have redefined the shared border regions of these three nations. This volume offers a comparative perspective on North American borders and reveals the distinctive nature first of the overportrayed Mexico-U.S. border and then of the largely overlooked Canada-U.S. border. The perspectives on either border are rarely compared. Essays in this volume bring North American borders into comparative focus; the contributors advance the understanding of borders in a variety of theoretical and empirical contexts pertaining to North America with an intense sharing of knowledge, ideas, and perspectives. Adding to the regional analysis of North American borders and borderlands, this book cuts across disciplinary and topical areas to provide a balanced, comparative view of borders. Scholars, policy makers, and practitioners convey perspectives on current research and understanding of the United States’ borders with its immediate neighbors. Developing current border theories, the authors address timely and practical border issues that are significant to our understanding and management of North American borderlands. The future of borders demands a deep understanding of borderlands and borders. This volume is a major step in that direction. Contributors Bruce Agnew Donald K. Alper Alan D. Bersin Christopher Brown Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly Irasema Coronado Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera Michelle Keck Victor Konrad Francisco Lara-Valencia Tony Payan Kathleen Staudt Rick Van Schoik Christopher Wilson

September 11, 2001 marked the beginning of a new era of security imperatives for many countries. The border between Canada and the United States suddenly emerged from relative obscurity to become a focus of constant attention by media, federal and state/provincial governments on both sides of the boundary, and the public at large. This book provides a comprehensive examination of the Canada-USA border in its 21st century form, placing it within the context of border and borderlands theory, globalization and the changing geopolitical dialogue. It argues that this border has been reinvented as a 'state of the art', technology-steeped crossing system, while the image of the border has been engineered to appear consistent with the 'friendly' border of the past. It shows how a border can evolve to a heightened level of security and yet continue to function well, sustaining the massive flow of trade. It argues whether, in doing so, the US-Canada border offers a model for future borderlands. Although this model is still evolving and still aspires toward better management practices, the template may prove useful, not only for North America, but also in conflict border zones as well as the meshed border regions of the EU, Africa's artificial line boundaries and other global situations.

Declining access to fresh water is one of the twenty-first century's most pressing environmental and human rights challenges, yet the struggle for water is not a new cause. The 8,800-kilometer border dividing Canada and the United States contains more than 20 percent of the world's total freshwater resources, and Border Flows traces the century-long effort by Canada and the United States to manage and care for their ecologically and economically shared rivers and lakes. Ranging across the continent, from the Great Lakes to the Northwest Passage to the Salish Sea, the histories in Border Flows offer critical insights into the historical struggle to care for these vital waters. From multiple perspectives, the book reveals alternative paradigms in water history, law, and policy at scales from the local to the transnational. Students, concerned citizens, and policymakers alike will benefit from the lessons to be found along this critical international border.

The Fence and the Bridge is about the development of the Canada-US border-security relationship as an outgrowth of the much lengthier Canada-US relationship. It suggests that this relationship has been both highly reflexive and hegemonic over time, and that such realities are embodied in the metaphorical images and texts that describe the Canada-US border over its history. Nicol argues that prominent security motifs, such as themes of free trade, illegal immigration, cross-border crime, terrorism, and territorial sovereignty are not new, nor are they limited to the post-9/11 era. They have developed and evolved at different times and become part of a larger quilt, whose patches are stitched together to create a new fabric and design. Each of the security motifs that now characterize Canada-US border perceptions and relations has a precedent in border-management strategies and border relations in earlier periods. In some cases, these have deep historical roots that date back not just years or decades but centuries. They are part of an evolving North American geopolitical logic that inscribes how borders are perceived, how they function, and what they mean.

Historically, national borders have evolved in ways that serve the interests of central states in security and the regulation of trade. This volume explores Canada–US border and security policies that have evolved from successive trade agreements since the 1950s, punctuated by new and emerging challenges to security in the twenty-first century. The sectoral and geographical diversity of cross-border interdependence of what remains the world’s largest bilateral trade relationship makes the Canada–US border a living laboratory for studying the interaction of trade, security, and other border policies that challenge traditional centralized approaches to national security. The book’s findings show that border governance straddles multiple regional, sectoral, and security scales in ways rarely documented in such detail. These developments have precipitated an Open Border Paradox: extensive, regionally varied flows of trade and people have resulted in a series of nested but interdependent security regimes that function on different scales and vary across economic and policy sectors. These realities have given rise to regional and sectoral specialization in related security regimes. For instance, just-in-time automotive production in the Great Lakes region varies considerably from the governance of maritime and intermodal trade (and port systems) on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, which in turn is quite different from commodity-based systems that manage diverse agricultural and food trade in the Canadian Prairies and US Great Plains. The paradox of open borders and their legitimacy is a function of robust bilateral and multilevel governance based on effective partnerships with substate governments and the private sector. Effective policy accounts for regional variation in integrated binational security and trade imperatives. At the same time, binational and continental policies are embedded in each country’s trade and security relationships beyond North America.

So Near Yet So Far provides in-depth look at the multiple dimensions of Canada–US relations, particularly since 9/11. Based on almost 200 interviews with government policy makers, opinion-shapers, and interest group leaders in both countries, this book considers the interaction of domestic and cross-border politics at several levels, including political-strategic, trade-commercial, cultural-psychological, and institutional-procedural. It will appeal to practitioners, scholars, and citizens of both countries who want a better understanding of how the Canada–US relationship works – and can be made to work more effectively. Balanced and fair, it gets to the core issues without distorting perspectives on either side of the border.

The 49th parallel has long held a symbolic importance to Canadian cultural nationalists as a strong, though permeable, border. But in contemporary Canadian culture, the border has multiple meanings, and imbalances of cultural power occur both across the Canada-US border as well as within Canada. Discrepant Parallels examines divergent relationships to, and investments in, the Canada-US border in a variety of media, such as travel writing, fiction, poetry, drama, and television. Tracing cultural production in Canada since the 1980s through the periods of FTA and NAFTA negotiations, and into the current, post-9/11 context, Gillian Roberts grapples with the border's changing relevance to Canadian nationalist, Indigenous, African Canadian, and Latin American perspectives. Drawing on Kant and Derrida, she theorizes the 49th parallel to account for the imbalance of cultural, political, and economic power between the two countries, as well as the current challenges to dominant definitions of Canadianness. Focusing on a border that is often overshadowed by the contentious US-Mexico divide, Discrepant Parallels analyzes the desire to establish Canadian-American sameness and difference from a multitude of perspectives, as well as its implications for how Canada is represented within and outside its national borders.