Reflections of a Siamese Twin

A Natural and Inevitable Event

AND YET COUNTRIES BREAK UP. THIS is natural. There are countless examples. Groups which define themselves as a people, nation or race become independent. It has happened so many times. It is inevitable, as well as natural. The separation, independence, sovereignty of Quebec is therefore natural and inevitable.

There are those in British Columbia and Alberta who use variants on this argument to describe their own positions. However, the immediate subject is Quebec.

This theme of natural inevitability is repeated on a daily basis by those who seek to break up Canada. Premier Parizeau’s speech introducing the referendum question to the Quebec legislature began with a description of “the most natural decision . . . a people could take.”1 The formulae and logic in each of Lucien Bouchard’s referendum speeches were aimed at demonstrating the natural inevitability of breaking up Canada and of the rest of Canada accepting and cooperating in this kill with a well-placed blade. It was natural, he argued, to break up a country by a vote, specifically by a 50 per cent majority; inevitable that every group (linguistic? regional? racial?) should and would have its own country; inevitable that the rest of Canada would negotiate what the Quebec government wanted.

In politics—local, national or international—it is difficult to think of anything which is natural or inevitable. The death of individuals is inevitable, usually inside one hundred years. That is a reasonably predictable event. You can also state that individuals get hungry on a regular basis and so on. Countries, however, do not die for predictable or inevitable reasons.

They do come to an end, but rarely when and why people think.

If there is any identifiable rule in the politics of national longevity, it has to do with survival, not death. The longer a country lasts, the more likely it is that this is because some workable formula has been found. The longer it lasts, the longer it will continue to last.

Canada is now one of the oldest countries in the world, if you take into consideration stable borders and government attached to a peaceful and—more unusual—a democratic form. It has one of the world’s oldest constitutions. It has a survival record and yet also has a talent for avoiding the levels of violence which seem to be needed to permit most countries to survive.

What about natural and inevitable ends? The Roman Empire was on its way to oblivion in AD 117 when the rise of Hadrian put it back on track for more than three hundred years. The same could be said of the Vatican early in the Reformation. Indeed death-bed regenerations are quite common. An organism loses its way, slips close to disaster, then finds the path again.

A country can lose its way in several manners. The most common is a decline in the quality, drive, commitment and conscious understanding of its élite. I am referring to the large panoply of those with responsibilities, from ministers to intellectuals and businessmen. Canada’s crisis today is closely related to that problem. And the failure of the élite is equally distributed across both the country and the language communities.

This situation is neither natural nor inevitable, except in the most abstract use of those terms.

The standard way of establishing natural inevitability in public affairs is through ideology. The other way—not unrelated—is through example. This involves the use of theoretical parallels in the social science manner—that is, the false science of circumstantial evidence.

In order to explain the natural and inevitable break-up of Canada, a growing list of historical and contemporary examples is brought forward. In some way they are intended to represent models of destruction. They range from the United States, Slovakia and Catalonia to Scandinavia and Scotland. The Basques, Belgians, Corsicans, Irish and various bits of the ex–Soviet Union are rarely mentioned. Yugoslavia is sometimes brought up by those against a break-up.

But why invoke the American revolution? The simple explanation would be a continuing obsession with the United States among harder-line nationalists—an historical tradition going back to Papineau’s annexation proposals.

In the enabling document that Premier Parizeau tabled in the National Assembly before the referendum, he said that Quebec’s Declaration of Sovereignty would resemble the American Declaration of Independence.2

What would be the resemblance? The American Declaration accused the British of: the repeated dissolution of legislatures; the refusal to hold elections; maintaining standby armies without civil consent; the denial of trial by jury; imposing taxes without consent; and actual sustained violence against the people.

The principal Quebec government complaint? “To settle definitively the constitutional problem that has been confronting Quebec for several generations.” To put it gently, these are not parallels or equivalents.

But take the theoretical U.S. parallel a step further. There were three central desires lurking behind the nobler language of the American text. First, there was the strong desire to solidify the legal status of slavery at a time when parliamentary opposition to it was growing in London. Second, there was a festering desire to break the barriers protecting Indian lands. London was constantly attempting to hold back the ambitious colonial population and the law-breaking frontier land speculators, George Washington among them. And third, one of the principal demands of the American colonialists was the revocation of the Quebec Act of 1774, which was considered one of Britain’s “Intolerable Acts.” Why? In part because of its territorial implications. But just as important was the anger of the urban American merchant class over the granting of citizen and religious rights to the French-Canadian Catholics. The standard British religious tests would have eliminated the francophones from public life and, effectively, from the professions, leaving the territory open for recuperation by Bostonians and others. Suddenly, with the Quebec Act, francophones were back in the equation. Somehow the narrow nationalist’s worship of America always forgets this detail, as it does the fundamental difference between their often justified complaints and the list of major items which brought on the revolt of 1776.

The final and the most curious of the anomalies is the PQ’s desire to draw parallels with a Declaration, a constitution, a country which, from its beginning, has been determined to prevent any separation of pieces of its territory. The very idea of any breaking-away provoked a searing civil war, one of the most bloody modern wars. The American Supreme Court has consistently interpreted the original documents to represent the inviolability of territory and the supremacy of the central government. There have been some important moves towards state rights, particularly over the last two decades, as Washington has handed over programs to the lower level of government. But these have been driven by the desire of the ideological right wing to strangle social programs. By passing responsibilities to levels of government less able or willing to finance them, more open to corporatist influence and suffering from varying levels of poverty or prosperity, the neo-conservatives in Washington have hoped to bury the social progress of the previous half-century without ever having to carry such a program before the country as a whole.

Looking over the anomalies between the American Declaration and the projected Quebec declaration, the central point which sticks out is that Washington will use force to maintain the integrity of American territory. This is not a very original principle. It is an assumption present in the quasi-totality of countries. Britain and France built themselves by force and continue to defend their internal borders by the active use of the police, the constitution or law, the courts and, if necessary, the army.

But then perhaps none of the above points were among those in the imagination of Premier Parizeau and his allies when he invoked the American example.

Again, it isn’t terribly clear what was found to be so admirable about the process or the result. The velvet revolution was the product of back-room agreements between neo-conservative politicians in Prague and extreme-nationalist politicians in Bratislava. They were acting against the wishes of the Czech and Slovak populations. The two leaders prevented a democratic consultation which they would almost certainly have lost. The results for Slovakia (which plays the role of Quebec in these recurring projections) have been on balance unfortunate.

The scene is dominated by Prime Minister Meciar, a demagogue who plays on the negative emotions of nationalism with great skill. The result has been a steady and serious brain drain towards the Czech Republic and the rest of Europe from all sectors of society, particularly the cultural.

What are they fleeing? Prime Minister Meciar’s tactics have consisted in identifying successive enemies. The Czechs were followed by the Hungarian minority. Now the enemy is freedom of speech itself. The press, he insists, are the voice of foreign enemies. Television programs which criticize the government are cancelled through the self-censorship of management or through behind-the-scenes orders or threats. Incidents in which the police interfere with those citizens who act as if they are in a free country are increasingly common. All of this is laid out in detail in the annual human-rights reports of the United Nations, the United States, the EEC and various independent bodies. Kidnappings, beatings, threats. It would seem that so long as the government believes there is even a small chance of entry into the EEC, these sorts of incidents will not be taken the next step to straight violence.

At the same time, Meciar has pushed the economy and social structures far to the right with a radical privatization program. This has produced some growth, but not enough to make up for the sharp drop of approximately 30 per cent in living standards since independence. Worse still, the atmosphere surrounding Slovakia has discouraged foreign investors. Only a tiny percentage of the money entering the region has gone their way (2.1 per cent). This both nullifies the positive effects of moderate growth and makes it impossible to fund the infrastructure investment necessary to maintain that growth.

Nor has Meciar succeeded in any sort of velvet transition to partnerships with countries to the west. His first promise, a partnership with the Czechs, fell apart within a year. With that went such things as a shared currency and any close trade agreement. His second target—entry into the European Community—seems increasingly unlikely. The Europeans are keeping their distance precisely because of Slovakia’s flawed record on human rights, freedom of speech and minority rights. As a result he has had to turn, increasingly, towards Russia. This is a relationship in which Slovakia can only play the role of the weak dependant in search of help.

Although Slovakia’s economic neo-conservatism has produced some growth, this is based in large part on low production costs, which are in turn the result of low standards of living and wages.

It is a classic example of a reasonably high-technology, low-wage economy.

The initial breaking-apart was rapid because of the undemocratic process. Minorities on either side of the border had neither the time nor the opportunity to voice any concerns. However, the immediate result has been to exacerbate the relations with these minorities.

It is as if the closer a country comes to aligning itself on a clear ethnic base, the more minorities become agitated. In Slovakia there are 560,000 Hungarians and relations are now so bad that there is a real threat they may unilaterally declare territorial autonomy wherever they form a majority. This growing hysteria has awakened both genuinely sympathetic and malevolent forces in Hungary proper.

There is nothing unusual in this. An ethnic focus by the majority typically unleashes ethnic nerves on all sides. The situation is less threatening but equally awkward in the Czech Republic. The greatest personal wound Vaclav Havel has so far suffered in public life came from his inability in 1993 to prevent the nationalists and neo-conservatives from dividing the two peoples. It was a profound defeat for his ethical and humanist beliefs.

“Alone at last!” one of the most interesting Czech leaders wrote ironically not long after the break-up. There is a Slovak minority, but they seem to be integrating with the Czechs as fast as possible, as if they want nothing to do with their homeland. The only remaining large distinctive minority is the Roma (that is, the Gypsy) and somehow the very Czechness of the little republic has turned the two hundred thousand Roma into a bleeding sore for both the Czechs and themselves.

In fact, whatever their nationalist sentiments, most Czechs and Slovaks seem to feel lessened or cheapened by their inability to keep the seventy-year-old union together. When you are there you find that the division is the last thing the people want to talk about. Bitterness, a sense of isolation and failure are the predominant emotions lurking just beneath the surface. The Czechs are moving towards integration with the west and entry into the European Community. But they are doing so with a dirty taste in their mouths. The Slovaks are increasingly cut off from the west, slipping under Russian dominance, frightened to use the freedom of speech theoretically available to them and caught in an economic trap worse than that which preceded the departure of the Communist party. Their parliament has adopted an anti-subversion bill which allows them to charge people for demonstrating against the government.

In 1997, five years after the split, the two republics are still wrangling over finances. The Czech Republic won’t return forty-five tonnes of gold which belongs to Slovakia until Slovakia pays its outstanding debt of $1.2 billion. In March of 1997 the Slovakian government recalled their ambassador from Prague for a month. President Havel publicly said Meciar was mentally unstable and paranoid.

It is particularly strange that the PQ should be so fond of this example. After all, they insist that Quebec would be automatically admitted to NAFTA and other bodies. But the Czech–Slovak story is one which would tend to suggest the opposite. For myself, I don’t know what would happen in our case. I’m just pointing out how curious the example is.

As for the celebration of the Czech Republic’s success, if it seems tinged by sadness—for those who know how to look beyond Prague’s status as a tourist haven—it is explained by their sense of having failed as a bicultural nation.

Catalonia is a more recent and agreeable example. The visit by the Catalonian head of government, Jordi Pujol, to Quebec in July 1996 was an opportunity to explore parallels.

The result instead was the clarification of two essential differences. One historic and the other political. The history of Catalonia is not that of a region which had had full control over education and many other powers for the last 150 years. And Catalonian has not been an official language in Spain. Rather, the language was forbidden for 250 years. Catalonians, including Mr. Pujol, served lengthy prison terms for their nationalism. In the civil war of the 1930s, Catalonia was one of Franco’s principal victims. Tens of thousands died.

Mr. Pujol was made increasingly uncomfortable during his visit to Quebec by an assumption among his hosts of parallel experiences. Eventually he broke out in public with the phrase, “You don’t know what a real linguistic persecution is, thank goodness for you.”4 This wasn’t an unfriendly or unpleasant or unsupportive remark. Just a comment on reality. He spent the next day—under a great deal of pressure from the Quebec government—trying to reassure the press that he hadn’t intended to be rude.

The political difference is that Catalonia does not, even now, have the autonomous powers which Quebec possesses and has always possessed within Canada. While Pujol seeks some of these from Madrid, his aims are carefully defined. This is for several simple reasons.

Catalonia, as part of Spain, is also part of the European Community. And the European Community, unlike the FTA and NAFTA—which the separatist movement was so central to putting in place—includes social, cultural and economic Europe-wide standards.

This concept of relatively integrated and enforceable (through the European Court) standards is at the core of what most Europeans want, particularly the minorities such as the Catalans. These enforceable standards are precisely the elements which the PQ rejects in the social, cultural and economic areas.

It is important to keep repeating that the central meaning of the FTA, and now of NAFTA, was not free trade. We already as good as had that. Rather it was the rejection of enforceable social standards in favour of a nineteenth-century—now known as neo-conservative—theory by which an invisible economic hand would regulate our lives in the manner of an all-seeing, all-powerful god. Catalonia is on the side of enforceable standards.

In addition, Barcelona is, as Montreal was for Canada, the centre of Spanish innovation and initiative. The cultural, social and economic well-being of Catalans is seen to be built on a desire to retain that role. The nationalists are therefore extremely careful not to turn Catalonia inwards lest it cause them to lose that strength. A small example: Barcelona is the centre of Spanish-language publishing, much of it run by Catalans. Education is bilingual.

Catalonian suffers from all the problems that French suffers from in a dominant anglophone atmosphere. In fact, its situation is far worse. However, Barcelona has chosen an offensive rather than defensive route. The city is aggressively bilingual; and increasingly trilingual or more. The approach is one that LaFontaine or Laurier or, dare I say it, Trudeau would have identified with.

What is perhaps most remarkable is the Catalonian ability to turn its back on the centuries of linguistic interdiction and the massacre of its people, as recently as the middle of this century, to seek a stable, middle-of-the-road approach towards Spain and Europe.

The Scottish example in some ways resembles the Catalonian. Conquered and oppressed over a long period of time in all of the most concrete ways, they are now in a situation of relative strength. The English massacres, which ended only a few decades before the change of regime in Canada, were followed by an English political aggression which eradicated Gaelic and centralized most powers in London. The emigration of Scots, Catholic and Protestant, to Lower and Upper Canada was in good part the result of this effective English occupation and the accompanying social crises.

Scotland was saved by the growth of a new bourgeoisie in Edinburgh. Obsessed by innovation and learning, they used the capital produced from coal reserves to take full advantage of the early industrial revolution. This brought prosperity to the Lowlands and gave it a central role in the building of the British Empire.

The Scots would be hard-pressed to argue that in the last 150 years they have been marginal to the British process. Indeed they made themselves central to the creating of the first social-democratic country. And on a per capita basis, like Quebec, they have done as well and usually better than the other regions in the redistribution of public funds. If anything, the recent rise of Scottish nationalism was provoked by the central government’s move to the ideological right and the aggressive centralization of Margaret Thatcher. It was perfectly understandable. What the Scots have had in the way of powers on their own territory has been minuscule in comparison with those of the Canadian provinces. Apart from education and responsibility for law, their autonomy was reduced to a few superficial symbols, such as different images on the pound.

What most of the nationalists have sought, through decentralization, is a small part of what Canadian provinces have always had. For a start, they wanted a Scottish Assembly with basic local powers, in what had become the most centralized of the developed countries. In 1997 the conditions have been created for them to get it.

The discovery of off-shore energy and the development of the EEC system of enforceable standards gave them some protection from the worst of the relationship with London. With the creation of a Scottish Assembly, the practical conditions for sensible decentralization will be in place.

In other words, after centuries as a highly centralized country and two decades as the most centralized democracy in the world, Britain is now moving in the opposite direction, towards the Canadian model. But Scotland will still be lacking the real taxation powers which have made the Canadian federation so unusual. Perhaps these will come.

Some would argue that the Scandinavians found the way to achieve exactly this by breaking up, piece by piece, into separate countries and then turning around to cooperate closely with each other. There is a certain truth in this. But the breaking-up was the product of centuries of internal violence and classic colonial occupation. It is difficult to speak about these things without appearing to denigrate the very real incidents of inequality, prejudice and even small, periodic outbreaks of violence in Canada. However, it is important not to confuse two very different experiences. That is what drove the Catalonian leader to suddenly blurt out his lesson of historical accuracy.

The Danes and Swedes, for example, fought each other with the full force of uncontrolled violence over a long period. I mention, just for colourful illustration, one small example—the Stockholm bloodbath of 1520, when the new Danish king invited the Swedish leadership to a banquet. He then executed them. In the public square onto which the Swedish Academy now looks, thirty heads of the Swedish élite were piled up in a neat pyramid.

Even the early-twentieth-century departure of Finland from Russia was followed by forty years of disorder. For example, the civil war which ended in 1918 involved the massacre of some two thousand people and the locking-up of eighty thousand men plus their families in concentration camps. Ninety-five hundred of them died of hunger and disease. The end result was independence under a Russian shadow, followed by more invasions and violence during the Second World War, followed by another half-century of delicate independence, again under the Russian wing. A relatively compliant neutrality, as well as dependence on the Russian economic market, was the price of a guarantee that Soviet troops would stay away.

Now, faced by a weakened Russia and the European Community temptation, the whole of Scandinavia is in movement. For example, the Swedes are leading an attempted reconstruction of the old Baltic league. And the Danes are aiming at influence in the southern half of Sweden, which was always the most Danish part.

But the central point in these relationships is the overwhelming history of political and military rivalry. This is not a matter of distant romantic history. Reality reasserted itself only half a century ago when Hitler’s troops invaded Norway while Sweden remained neutral. The driving force in Scandinavian cooperation today is a desire—as it is between France and Germany—to turn their backs firmly on a difficult past and to solidify a shared and increasingly threatened humanist view of society.

And then there are all the parallels not mentioned.

What about Belgium? There, a French minority—the Walloons—had most of the advantages for a long time. A combination of nineteenth-century industries and the geopolitical weight of France gave them the advantage over the Dutch-speaking Flemish. The turning point in the rise of modern nationalism seems to have been World War One. Among all the other stupidities which this war provoked throughout the west, the Belgian French-speaking officers insisted on giving orders in French to Dutch-speaking soldiers. This sort of problem—involving English-speaking recruiting officers—may sound vaguely familiar to Canadians.

The eventual result was a painful, dragged-out linguistic/ethnic crisis. This was formalized through an even more painful move, from a unitary state to a federal one between 1970 and 1993. The result was a highly decentralized federal structure, in which most of the powers went to the regions. Since then the push for yet more decentralization has continued. In many ways, they are well on their way to sovereignty-association or a partenariat or some such formula.

In the meantime the French-speaking Walloons are now on the losing side and the Flemish population continues to grow stronger. The Walloons’ nineteenth-century rust-belt industrial base is closing down, as it is everywhere. The Flemish, on the other hand, seem to have been placed by fate on all the key geographical axes in order to benefit from the new European trade patterns and the high-technology economy.

All of this runs parallel to the recurrent waves of decentralization. Curiously enough these have not created a great sense of well-being and emancipation. Instead, the bitterness on both sides continues to grow. For a start, in an increasing number of areas, decentralization means that there is no flexible sharing of resources between the rich and poor regions. That is, the concept of equalization payments cannot seem to exist in a sovereignty-association system—any more than it would in a Canadian partenariat. In the abstract, a nationalist will say, ‘So what? We’ll manage our own money. You manage yours.’ In this era dominated by the shoddy economics of the Chicago School, they’ll add something infantile like, ‘Anyway, we’ll cut down on waste caused by the duplication of services.’

However, in Belgium, the applied reality of these theories is that the Walloon French-speaking education system is now being strangled for lack of funds and the richer Flemish areas think this is just too bad. They are tasting their revenge for years of mistreatment. In fact they want more decentralization. That is, they want to divide up the social-welfare system in the same way.

The Belgian experience has been that the more power is divided along ethnic/linguistic lines, the more those communities become self-interested and thus selfish. The rich parts of the community are encouraged to think of their interests as separate from those of others, in large part because they belong to another ethnic/linguistic group. As this corporatist yet linguistic/ethnic approach to state structures grows stronger, it becomes increasingly difficult to discuss ideas or content. In other words, the public interest is strangled in the name of the group interest. Debate is reduced to mine versus yours. Or, as Jacques de Decker, the leading Belgian writer, puts it, the conflict is reduced to “intelligence versus stupidity.” How can intelligence or equilibrium or humanism be applied when power is based on a voiding of ideas in favour of an abstraction called group self-interest?

This takes the practical form of political alliances based on power and completely cut off from ethics. We know that power and ethics are never ideally united in the real world. But nor need they be entirely separated; not in a normal state of affairs. In Belgium, power has been dependent for a long time now on alliances between right-wing, centre and left-wing parties constituted on ethnic/linguistic lines. Interestingly enough, this is the exact opposite of the idea-based pact between Lower and Upper Canada reformers, established by LaFontaine and Baldwin. The Belgian parties share only their desire for office, so the survival of the partnership requires the voiding of even the possibility of intelligence. Public life is therefore reduced to the occupying of positions and respect for the autonomy of the other. Human relations are, in the process, reduced to a false simplicity. This idea of political-interest groups cooperating over the structures of power on the basis of self-interest sounds very similar to Mr. Bouchard’s idea of a partenariat.

The funny thing is that if you think back to Magritte, Horta, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren and the many others who made Belgium such a central force in modern western culture, you discover that it was precisely the complexity brought on by the mixing of two cultures which was their common denomination. As the journalist Jacques Frank puts it, “Les oppositions étaient propices.”

Perhaps the relative absence of the Belgian example from the Canadian debate stems from the uncomfortable familiarity of this intelligence versus stupidity debate, by which is meant the stupidity of presenting group self-interest as a respectable solution to social problems. After all, even an intelligent, decent social-democrat like René Lévesque threw himself into an alliance led by the most conservative of provincial premiers. Such a fundamental internal contradiction alone guaranteed that it would end badly. Fifteen years later, premiers Harris and Klein found at the 1996 premiers’ conference that their only real ally was Premier Bouchard. Ideologically they had a great deal more in common than René Lévesque with his allies. But essentially their shared interest was not a political ethic. It was a group-based concept of cutting up the pie.

The other aspect of the Belgian experience of group-based political corporatism is that it undermines the ability of the state to defend its interests abroad. Foreign policy is a necessary bore for large powers, a useful magnifying effect for those in the middle and it is essential to those on the smaller side. When population size or economic weight do not force others to pay attention, a country must work very hard in the international arena to ensure that its interests and ideas are taken into account. Belgium has been fortunate or unfortunate enough to be placed at the crux of European events. But internal group rivalry so obsesses it and eats up all its time and energy that the country has gradually disappeared from the international map.

Canada has the disadvantage of sitting on the northern margins of the west in an overly exposed position beside the United States. But it has been just large enough, when intelligently led, to defend its turf. As the internal debate has grown over the last decades, so the ability to maintain an integrated and sustained foreign policy has slipped away. Like the Belgians, we are engaged in a form of self-inflicted castration.

We can guess why the Basques, the Irish and the Corsicans are never mentioned. Seven hundred and fifty dead in France and Spain since ETA, the Basque terrorist movement, began killing thirty years ago. Several thousand dead in Ireland. And in Corsica, eight thousand bombs in the last twenty years; seventeen political assassinations in the last three. There is a solid certainty about assassination figures. However, they leave out the wounded, who usually represent a multiple of those killed. In particular there are the seriously wounded who usually represent three or four times the dead. These are the blinded, the paralyzed, those who lost limbs and, perhaps most common, those whose faces were permanently disfigured. For example, a car bomb in Bastia on July 1, 1996, killed only one. But sixteen were wounded. To my mind the wounded offer a more accurate picture of reality because they remain among us as a tangible illustration.

In each of these three minorities there is no lack of a cause or of provocation from the controlling culture. Languages were forbidden in education and government services. In Corsica this persisted until very recently. There are high levels of centralization and long-festering memories of violent domination by an outside culture.

It must be said that there is no common measure between these experiences and those in Canada. However, there are elements worth noticing. The central point is that Spain, England and France have not treated the breaking-off of any part of their hard-conquered countries as either natural or inevitable. Remember that these stories are not necessarily older than our own. France got hold of Corsica at approximately the same time England got hold of Canada, not long after the last Scottish uprisings. In the Corsican case this involved a straight invasion and the overthrowing of the Corsican government, which under Pascal Paoli was the first western democratic republic. It had been the ideal of the Enlightenment thinkers. As for the Irish saga, it is almost too well known and too depressing to be repeated.

I could work my way through dozens of other possible parallels; the ex-Soviet republics for example. To understand the battle in Chechnia, it is enough to read Tolstoy’s novella “Hadji Murat.” For forty-three years, from 1816 to 1859, the Russians pacified Chechnia by raiding villages, burning crops and slaughtering stock. That is, they made life impossible by following a scorched-earth policy. The revolt and war of the 1990s was merely the latest chapter in their difficult, bloody relationship.

What is the point of this long soliloquy on false parallels—some claimed, some denied? Perhaps it is that, one way or another, through their violent origins or their lost opportunities for reconciliation or the demeaning bickering or the reward of selfishness, these are all sad stories. Since the invention of the western nation-state, the standard approach towards bicultural or minority relations has been at best unpleasant and most commonly one of violence, cultural castration and the centralization of power. This is true of our closest friends—the United States, England and France. We cannot condemn them for this. It is an approach they have shared with almost every nation-state.

The levels of violence used by these countries to install a central mythology has required high multiples of anything unpleasant experienced in Canada. The degree of centralization and cultural interdiction has been terrifying in comparison with our own unfortunate errors and acts of ambitious, selfish stupidity. None of which excuses our treatment of the Métis or Manitoba’s and Ontario’s anti-French-language school regulations or Quebec’s Padlock Law under Maurice Duplessis or B.C.’s Chinese head tax and internment of Japanese Canadians. But this chapter is a discussion of the theory of the natural and inevitable break-up of Canada, not of relative innocence.

Some of these stories from elsewhere are also moving. For example, the ability of the Catalans to turn their backs on such a disturbing past seems to show a strength of character which I find almost unimaginable. Or there is the determination of the Scandinavians not simply to work together and trade together, but to develop what can only be called a northern ethic, which combines internal egalitarianism with a matching view of the world.

There are, of course, literally hundreds of examples of minorities which exist within larger countries. This is a normal characteristic of the nation-state. The normal and inevitable story throughout the west is that some sort of cohabitation within state structures is necessary. In most cases, the tragedy is that this cohabitation is based on the aggressive enforcement of a monolithic national mythology.

In the parallels described above, this gross centralization has failed. In some way or other the minority has refused acquiescence. The reaction of the central authority has, in general, been violent. In some cases the result has been a modest level (by Canadian standards) of decentralization. In a few there has been massive decentralization and the result seems to have been the rise of self-destructive self-interest. Those examples represent not nationalism, but the rise of the negative aspects of nationalism.

There is another characteristic common to all of them. The minority lies as a geographical unit on one side of the nation-state. Most often they live in a frontier area added on during some expansive burst from the centre. There is the marginality of Scotland off in the north, Slovakia in the poor south; Corsica, an isolated island; the Catalonians on the distant eastern frontier of the Castilian centre; just as the Basques lie to their north in a frontier area between Spain and France; Sweden, the far northern province of Denmark; Norway and Finland, the even more marginal frontiers of Sweden and Russia; the Irish on an island off England.

It is in part geographical eccentricity which drives these movements. And in that sense, the complaints of British Columbia fit into an historical pattern. But there is no example of a minority lying at the geographical heart of a country successfully leaving it. This element of geography is particularly important when the minority has played a central role in the design and direction of the country over more than a century; in other words, when they have worked hard for the country to be shaped around many of their concerns and with their central role in mind.

In passing I should mention one more example of a break-up, because it is cited approvingly by Daniel Turp, who seems to be Mr. Bouchard’s unofficial constitutional expert and is now a Bloc MP.5 Singapore and Malaysia did indeed break up peacefully in August 1965. On the other hand, their active marriage of convenience had only been in effect for two years. In fact, Lee Kuan Yew had manoeuvred the alliance in order to rid himself of the British, then set out to so annoy the Malays that they would actually expel Singapore from the Federation. The break-up was done without democratic consultation and the process included Prime Minister Lee arresting several hundred leading opposition figures. And in case Mr. Turp hasn’t looked at a map, Singapore is a small island off the extreme south coast of Malaysia. It was never an integral part of the Federation—not socially, not politically and not geographically. It played no role in building the mythology or consciousness of Malaysia. Its leaders never ran the Federation, which remained in Malay hands. Singapore was a temporary and extraneous add-on.

Repeatedly during the referendum campaign Lucien Bouchard referred to the other side of the river, in the way nineteenth-century nationalists referred to the Rhine or the Channel as a great divide. Our historical experience suggests the exact opposite. In Canada, rivers have always been the highways of communication, not of division. They have played the unifying role of movement, not the static role of division. The first great highway of French Canada ran up the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa to the Mattawa, through Lake Nipissing and down the French River to la mer Douce (Georgian Bay) and on across the country. This was Canada’s principal means of internal communication for 250 years. The role of the rivers here has been that of moving waters not opposing shores.

Besides, anyone who frequents the brief Ottawa–Montreal car-shuttles or the plane-hops between Montreal and Toronto, Toronto and Ottawa, knows that this is not a great divide, but the core of national power. That centrality of Quebec and Ontario is precisely what causes discomfort in the West and the East.

Quebec does not lie on one side of Canada. Canada surrounds it on three sides. Some will argue in an age of fast communications that geography no longer matters. But that is theory. In reality there is no example of a country surviving when cut in half by great or even small distances. From an historical point of view, the departure of Quebec would mean the condemnation of what remains to further fracturing.

Those in Quebec or Ontario or the West would do well to remember that Maritimers see themselves as the primary victim of this argument between national and provincial powers. The north of Canada aside, the Maritimes have the smallest population and the most fragile economy. The national debate has dragged on and the result there has been a growth in fatalism. As the historian Margaret Conrad puts it, they see “decisions being made elsewhere over whether Quebec will leave. The Maritimes have no say.” Or Rick Williams, the political economist—they are “now treated as a client-state.”6 In other words, they may receive funds from the national treasury, but their view of the effects of changes in Canada on the Maritimes, let alone their view of how the whole should evolve, is not considered.

This brings me back to the concept that the departure of a part of a country is a normal inevitability. Those with the courage to listen to the words of public debate will notice that all attempts by federalists to defend Canada are described by the other side as “excessive language and provocation” or “political radicalization.” These words of Premier Bouchard at the 1996 national convention of the PQ are merely small examples of the political position which asserts that fracture is normal and coexistence a provocation. I’m not suggesting approval of the federal government’s approach. Far from it. But whether their defence were intelligent or stupid, the PQ would, given the forces of natural inevitability, describe it as irresponsible.

The only reasonable observation that an interested observer can make after looking at all of these examples is that there is no case of a country’s breaking-up being perceived or treated as normal or inevitable. The shape that such a process would take cannot therefore be reasonably predicted any more than the result can be discussed with any accuracy. The only sensible comment would be that, if you throw the structures, habits, ideas and rules of behaviour for coexistence up in the air, no one can expect to have predictable control over the way they come down.

In the quasi-totality of the parallels invoked or avoided by those who seek to break up Canada, the central powers have been ready to use force in order to protect their union, and the effects have been long-term unpleasantness as well as damage to one or both of the parties. Is this because the Americans or the Spanish or the French or English are lesser people than us? That would be an awkward position to defend. Is it then because these are real countries while Canada, in Premier Bouchard’s words, is not?

That seems an even more peculiar argument. It would depend upon your definition of a real country. If it is exclusively limited to the description of those who have forcibly integrated their minorities through violence, language interdiction and centralization, then Premier Bouchard is right. Canada has not been rough enough to count as a real country. However, by evoking the parallels they do and invoking this very hard-edged definition of a nation, the PQ are actually saying that Canada must act like a ‘real’ country or cease to exist. Surely that’s not what they intended. Perhaps it is. Extremes of necessity produce extremes. The eagerness with which Mr. Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc québécois, has invoked the bogey of Preston Manning and vice versa would suggest that they are natural reflections of each other.

Surely, however, it is not necessary to remain the prisoner of such an old-fashioned view of the nation-state. Surely it could be broadened to include cultural complexity and a decentralized framework. But in that case Mr. Bouchard would be wrong and the ‘natural inevitability’ argument wouldn’t stand. In other words, the comparative argument against Canada’s right to survive is actually based not on comparisons, but on the rejection of an approach to nationhood which is more relaxed and decentralized than is usual; a more inclusive and humanist approach. I must say that is not an argument I would enjoy having to make.