Thoughts about empire
In the introduction to Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, author Laura Briggs goes on something of a tangent about the constitutional status of Puerto Rico vis-a-vis the United States. Mainland liberals, she writes, are often confused about why Puerto Ricans seem satisfied with free association, the colonial status they have currently. Liberals, she writes, imagine that Puerto Ricans should prefer either independence or statehood, and probably independence. Yet in multiple referendums (the freeness of which are highly debatable), voters have chosen the status quo. She posits that this is because Puerto Ricans understand the breadth of American Empire far more than Mainland citizens can. They understand, she says, that all people in the Western Hemisphere–indeed, around the world–are to some extent a part of the American Empire. As long as they are, Briggs’s Puerto Ricans figure, better to get the advantages of Free Association–citizenship, tax breaks favoring industrial development–than not. In other words, better to be colonized Puerto Rico, collecting on the obligations the Mainland U.S. takes on, than to be theoretically independent Mexico, still under American control but without any formal obligation.
Today on the blog I want to interrogate this idea using Canada as an example of a still different relationship with the United States. Two things got me thinking about this: the Conrad Black trial I mentioned in my earlier post, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s continuing trip to South America and the Caribbean. I’d be interested in other people’s thoughts on this from their own studies, experiences, and travels. Please comment on this entry or write your own!
Conrad Black is a transnational man. He was born in Canada, where he built his business empire, and where is primary home is located. He is a member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and the Order of Canada. But he gave up his Canadian citizenship in order to become a member of the British House of Lords, and he is currently a British citizen. At its height, Black’s newspaper empire included the National Post (Canada), the Telegram (Britain), the Chicago Sun-Times (U.S.), and the Jerusalem Post (Israel). He owned and owns various operating companies, holding companies, and shell companies in Canada, the United States, and various Caribbean countries (and probably other tax havens). Last week, Black was convicted of four charges in a U.S. District Court in Chicago: three counts of mail fraud and one count of obstruction of justice. The mail fraud cases revolved around fraudulent non-compete agreements mailed internationally; this amounted to stealing about $3.5 million. What’s interesting here is the last, obstruction count. He was convicted of taking from his Toronto office bunch of boxes with incriminating documents to his house in Toronto, contravening an order by the United States Security and Exchange Commission.
As I mentioned in my previous post, this story has gotten far more coverage in Canada than it has in the United States. The entire front section of the Globe and Mail (essentially Canada’s equivalent of the New York Times) on Saturday was devoted to the Black verdict, and not a day has gone by since that it hasn’t been somewhere on the front page. Today’s story was about the Prime Minister’s promising that Black would receive no special treatment should he apply (as an alien) to come to Toronto before he is sentenced.
There is often talk about how Canada has effectively outsourced its national defense to the United States, which allows it to spend money on social programs while falling under American military protection. It seems to me that in the Black case, Canada is doing the same thing with criminal justice. Here is a man who committed a crime in Canada, who lives in Canada, whose company for practical (if not legal) purposes was Canadian, and about whom, apparently, Canadians care a great deal–but it is the United States that is prosecuting him, American courts and prosecutors and investigators and corrections authorities that are doing the work. Black himself (although making a separate point from mine) compared the trial to a “foreign war.”
This week, Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister, has been traveling through South American and the Caribbean. First he went to Colombia, where he plumped for a free trade agreement and dismissed as “ridiculous” the rejection by U.S. Democrats of an equivalent bilateral agreement. (Democrats rejected it because, among other things, Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world in which to be a trade unionist, the Colombian president has political and familial ties to right-wing death squads, and the sort of development encouraged by such free trade agreements only increase the persecution of unionists and the dispossession of indigenous people.) Today he’s in Barbados to talk about restoring non-tourist ties to the Caribbean. (As my history department colleague Paula Hastings studies, there is a long history of Canadian imperialism toward various Caribbean islands.) And yesterday he was in Chile, where he gave a speech that described Canada as a “third way” between Hugo Chavez’s anti-capitalism and the United States.
Some people thought that Harper was staking out an anti-American position. See, for example, this Globe and Mail cartoon by Brian Gable. 
Harper’s speech comes on the heels of an announcement he gave that Canada would build light-duty ice breakers and a new arctic deep-sea port for them to be harbored. The purpose of these new patrol ships is to defend Canada’s claims to sovereignty over newly passable waterways in the arctic. The United States (and others) say that these are international waters; Canada says they’re theirs.
Finally, a third element to Canada’s imperial status vis-a-vis the U.S. The Canadian economy is extractive. While there’s some manufacturing, especially in Central Canada, and there’s a growing service sector, much like in the U.S. But the real driver of Canadian prosperity are the Alberta oil fields–and there’s also the timber industry and the hydroelectric industry, and the (fervently hoped for around where I am) coming oil and natural gas industry in the waters off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. This is, of course, the classical colonial economy.
So here’s my question: if Briggs is rights about Puerto Rico, where is Canada is that continuum between independent and not? If Puerto Rico trades its independence for the right to migrate freely to the mainland and and the ability to offer bonuses to American-based industry that relocates there, is Canada doing something equivalent? And if, as many scholars claim, the mainland U.S. is constituted by its relationship with its empire, is it also constituted by its relationship to Canada?
-jacob
UPDATE: Let me try to be a bit more explict about how I’m trying to think about the analogy between Puerto Rico and Canada here. (In the post proper I got a bit distracted by trying to give the background on Black, the Harper trip, and the Canadian economy–sorry about that.) (1) If, as Briggs says, Puerto Rico gives up its sovereignty in exchange for the obligations the Mainland takes on, is this true for Canada as well? What is Canada giving up–and what does it get in exchange? If we argue that Canada accepts limited sovereignty in exchange for military and legal protection, how is this different or the same as Puerto Rico, with its explicitly colonial constitution? (2) How are we, as the “liberal Mainland Americans” whom Briggs implicitly criticizes, to read Canadian politicians episodic invokations of Canadian sovereignty, as with Harper’s newfound interest in the North? Are they merely ceremonial? Are they serious declarations of independence? Or are they like Briggs’s Puerto Rican referendums, really votes for “none of the above?” I really don’t know the answers to these questions, so I’m appealing to my fellow Unis for ideas.
