Colin Woodard (48 page)

As of this writing the Mexican federation is in even worse shape. For years, leading foreign policy experts have been openly describing it as a failed state. Narcotics traffickers have bought the loyalty of state governors, police chiefs, and border guards while killing uncooperative judges, journalists, and officials; the situation has gotten so bad that the national army has been deployed to put down the drug cartels but doesn't appear to be winning. Ethnic Maya are fighting an ongoing independence struggle in Chiapas and other southern provinces. Northern Mexicans openly question what benefits they derive from their association with Mexico City, which takes their taxes and gives little in return. The capital region, in the words of political analyst Juan Enriquez, “continues to govern as if it were the old Aztec empire, extracting a tribute and expecting its wishes and demands to be catered to.” It's not hard to imagine Mexico shattering in a time of crisis—a climate-change-related disaster, a global financial collapse, a major act of terrorism—freeing the Mexican half of El Norte to orient itself northward.
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Canada's national fractures have been obvious for some time, with New France pushing for outright independence right up through 1995. In that year 60 percent of Québec's Francophones voted in support of an independence referendum. The measure was narrowly defeated by the overwhelming opposition not only of the province's English-speaking minority but of its First Nation sections, which voted 9 to 1 against. It was probably the Native people of Canada, ironically enough, who saved the federation from breaking up entirely. Independence has been tabled as a key issue ever since, with most Québécois recognizing that if they left Canada, they would probably have to leave the northern two-thirds of their province behind, as the people there aren't part of the New French nation and have occupied the land since before the existence of France itself. The other nations have also made substantial concessions to New France since the 1970s. The federal government is officially bilingual, even as the province of Québec is allowed to be officially French only. New Brunswick—long dominated by its Yankee core—is now the only officially bilingual province in Canada, in recognition of the fact that its northern and eastern reaches are part of New France. The lower house of the federal parliament has recognized Québec as a “distinct society,” while New French–style multiculturalism has become the civic religion of Canadians everywhere. Today, Canada is perhaps the most stable of the three North American federations, largely because the four Anglo nations, New France, and First Nation have made important compromises with one another. Canada has in effect rejected any illusion of being a nation-state with a single dominant culture. Whether that proves enough to preserve the federation in the long term remains to be seen.

 

One scenario that might preserve the status quo for the United States would be for its nations to follow the Canadian example and compromise on their respective cultural agendas for the sake of unity. Unfortunately, neither the Dixie bloc nor the Northern alliance is likely to agree to major concessions to the other. The majority of Yankees, New Netherlanders, and Left Coasters simply aren't going to accept living in an evangelical Christian theocracy with weak or nonexistent social, labor, or environmental protections, public school systems, and checks on corporate power in politics. Most Deep Southerners will resist paying higher taxes to underwrite the creation of a public health insurance system; a universal network of well-resourced, unionized, and avowedly secular public schools; tuition-free public universities where science—not the King James Bible—guides inquiry; taxpayer-subsidized public transportation, high-speed railroad networks, and renewable energy projects; or vigorous regulatory bodies to ensure compliance with strict financial, food safety, environmental, and campaign finance laws. Instead, the “red” and “blue” nations will continue to wrestle with one another for control over federal policy, each doing what it can to woo the “purple” ones to their cause, just as they have since they gathered at the First Continental Congress.

Another outside possibility is that, faced with a major crisis, the federation's leaders will betray their oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, the primary adhesive holding the union together. In the midst of, say, a deadly pandemic outbreak or the destruction of several cities by terrorists, a fearful public might condone the suspension of civil rights, the dissolution of Congress, or the incarceration of Supreme Court justices. One can easily imagine circumstances in which some nations are happy with the new order and others deeply opposed to it. With the Constitution abandoned, the federation could well disintegrate, forming one or more confederations of like-minded regions. Chances are these new sovereign entities would be based on state boundaries, because state governors and legislators would be the most politically legitimate actors in such a scenario. States dominated by the three Northern alliance nations—New York, New Jersey, and the New England, Great Lakes, and Pacific Northwest states—might form one or more confederations. States controlled by the Deep South—South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—might form another. The mountain and High Plains states of the Far West would constitute an obvious third. The situation might be more complicated within often-divided Greater Appalachia or the “nationally mixed” states of Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Arizona. It's not impossible to imagine some of the resulting coalitions extending into Canada or, in the case of El Norte, Mexico. If this extreme scenario were to come to pass, North America would likely be a far more dangerous, volatile, and unstable place, inviting meddling from imperial powers overseas. If this scenario of crisis and breakup seems far-fetched, consider the fact that, forty years ago, the leaders of the Soviet Union would have thought the same thing about their continent-spanning federation.

Or perhaps the federation will simply reach accommodation over time as its component nations come to agree that the status quo isn't serving anyone well. A time might come when the only issue on which the nations find common ground is the need to free themselves from one another's veto power. Perhaps they'd join together on Capitol Hill to pass laws and constitutional amendments granting more powers to the states or liquidating many of the functions of the central government. The United States might continue to exist, but its powers might be limited to national defense, foreign policy, and the negotiation of interstate trade agreements. It would, in other words, resemble the European Union or the original Confederation of 1781. If that were to happen, its component states could be counted on to behave in accordance with their respective national heritages. Yankee New Englanders might cooperate closely with one another, much as the Scandinavian countries do within Europe. Texans might finally utilize their constitutional right (under the terms of their annexation to the United States) to split into as many as five individual states. Illinoisans might agree to divide downstate from Chicagoland. Southern, northern, and interior California might each become a separate state. The external borders of this retooled United States might remain in place, or perhaps some Canadian or Mexican provinces might apply for membership in this looser, more decentralized federation. Throughout history far stranger things than this have happened.

But one thing is certain: if Americans seriously want the United States to continue to exist in something like its current form, they had best respect the fundamental tenets of our unlikely union. It cannot survive if we end the separation of church and state or institute the Baptist equivalent of Sharia law. We won't hold together if presidents appoint political ideologues to the Justice Department or the Supreme Court of the United States, or if party loyalists try to win elections by trying to stop people from voting rather than winning them over with their ideas. The union can't function if national coalitions continue to use House and Senate rules to prevent important issues from being debated in the open because members know their positions wouldn't withstand public scrutiny. Other sovereign democratic states have central governments more corrupted than our own, but most can fall back on unifying elements we lack: common ethnicity, a shared religion, or near-universal consensus on many fundamental political issues. The United States needs its central government to function cleanly, openly, and efficiently because it's one of the few things binding us together.

What might North America have been like if none of the ten Euro-Atlantic nations had ever been established? If the original Indian nations—the First Nations in Canadian parlance—had avoided the devastating epidemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and continued to develop on their own terms, what might they have been like today?

Actually, it seems we're about to find out.

In the far north a very old nation is reemerging after centuries in the cold. Across the northern third of the continent, aboriginal people have been reclaiming sovereignty over traditional territories from northern Alaska to Greenland and nearly everywhere in between. In this sprawling region of dense boreal forests, Arctic tundra, and treeless, glaciated islands, many native peoples never signed away the rights to their land, which they still occupy and, to a surprising degree, continue to live off using the techniques of their forefathers. They've won key legal decisions in Canada and Greenland that give them considerable leverage over what happens in their territories, forcing energy, mining, and timber companies to come to them, hat in hand, for permission to move forward on resource extraction projects. In 1999 Canada's Inuit—they don't want to be called “Eskimos”—won their own Canadian territory, Nunavut, which is larger than Alaska. The Inuit of Greenland control their own affairs as an autonomous, self-governing unit of the Kingdom of Denmark and are moving aggressively toward full independence.

Together with the Innu, Kaska, Dene, Cree, and dozens of other tribes, the northern aboriginal people have cultural dominance over much of Alaska, the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Labrador, all of Nunavut and Greenland, northwestern interior British Columbia, and the northern swaths of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Québec. This eleventh nation—First Nation—is far and away the largest of all by geography (much bigger than the continental United States), but the smallest by population (less than 300,000, all told).

First Nation is a highly communalistic society. Most tribal land in the far north is owned in common under a form of title that prevents it from ever being sold to an individual or exploited in such a way that diminishes its value to future generations. In Greenland there is no private property at all: everyone is allowed to responsibly use the people's shared land, but it is thought the height of absurdity that any one person should “own” it, which would be comparable to someone's asserting ownership of the wind. Inuit—whether dwelling in Labrador, Nunavut, Greenland, or Alaska—still hunt, fish, and gather a substantial amount of their food, and all of those “home foods” and the implements associated with them are generally regarded as common property as well. If a hunter kills a seal, it's handed over to whoever needs it. Villages have communal freezers that anyone can access—free of charge or accounting—because food cannot belong to one person. If the tribe engages in an industrial enterprise, the proceeds belong to everyone.
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Not surprisingly, First Nation has an extremely strong environmental ethic. In Canada—where a revolutionary 1999 supreme court decision recognized Indian oral histories as legitimate evidence in establishing precolonial territories—aboriginal people are setting the terms by which oil, gas, mining, and timber companies have to abide. The 2,000-person Innu nation in Labrador has created a top-notch, ecosystem-based forestry management plan for their ancestral lands in Labrador, which at 17.5 million acres, are larger than West Virginia. They hired professional forest ecologists to identify areas that shouldn't be cut for the good of wildlife and water quality and added their own hunting, fishing, and trapping grounds. In the end, 60 percent of their territory was placed off-limits to loggers; the rest is sustainably harvested for the good of the collective nation. Similar interventions have resulted in a 57.6-million-acre forestry plan for Kaska lands in northern British Columbia and the Yukon and a new national park and wildlife refuge in the Northwest Territories that is eleven times the size of Yellowstone. “There's a new game in town where First Nations are driving outcomes across the board and trying to achieve a balance between their land, history, the modern economy, and the future,” says Larry Innes, who has worked with tribes across the Canadian north as director of the Canadian Boreal Initiative, an environmental initiative financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts. “Canada is really one of the last, best places where we can get the balance right.”
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