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Book Reviews
| John J. Bukowczyk, Nora Faires, David R. Smith, and Randy William Widdis. Permeable Border: The Great Lakes Basin as Transnational Region, 1650–1990. Pittsburgh and Calgary: University of Pittsburgh Press and University of Calgary Press, 2005. Pp. 298. Bibliography. Index. Maps. Notes. Photographs. Cloth, $34.95.
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From the Canadian side, in a time when I am now required to carry a passport to attend conferences in the United States and the U.S. Coast Guard has considered conducting live-fire exercises from its cutters on the Great Lakes (in violation of the Rush-Bagot Treaty in my opinion), it requires more than the usual amount of suspension of disbelief to take seriously a book with the title Permeable Border. From the U.S. side the authors risk the wrath of the Department of Homeland Security for raising unjustified alarms about terrorist incursions and a red-faced Lou Dobbs seizing upon it as further evidence of administrative malingering in the face of a tide of illegal immigration. |
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Yet the authors perform a useful service in a "once upon a time" kind of way by reminding us that once, for all intents and purposes, the border did not exist except as an imaginary line, and that historically free migration back and forth across that line was the norm. The armed barrier bristling on both sides with security apparatus is the aberration. As recently as Ronald Reagan, the president of the United States believed that it should be as easy to cross the border between Canada and the U.S. as it was to go from one U.S. state to another. The negotiators of the Free Trade Agreement thought that they had created a huge single market within which almost all goods and services could be freely exchanged without respect to borders. But the once fabled "longest undefended border in the world" is no more. It used to be that North America was the continent without borders. Now it is much easier to move between the countries of Europe than it is between the nations of the Americas. |
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I grew up in southwestern Ontario in the 1940s and 1950s. Then almost every family had relatives in "the states." Cross-border trips to see friends and family members were regular occurrences. Paperboys selling the Brantford Expositor won a trip to the fabled Olympia in Detroit to see Gordie Howe and the Red Wings, not to Maple Leaf Gardens. A childhood friend joined the Marines. Yet however much in some sense we inhabited a seemingly continuous space, across the bridge lay a different land defined largely by tempting delights unavailable at home: pizza, watery beer, Italian restaurants, neighborhood bars, shining household appliances, and cheap towels. Add to that the sometimes frightening mysteries of stump justice in the settlement of speeding offences and open, unashamed displays of patriotism. At that time the border was visible in some dimensions and invisible in others, at least on the personal level. |
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Have we perchance in memory exaggerated the integration of this prelapsarian world of transborder migration and exchange or has something fundamentally different happened since 9/11 to reinvent a real border? The answer is likely a little of both. |
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The multiple authors of this book—historians based in Michigan and a geographer from Saskatchewan—are simultaneously engaged in explaining the juridical act of drawing the boundary within the Great Lakes Basin and the social and economic process of border erasure. They are not much interested in the new reality along the border as the unusual delimiting dates of the subtitle suggest. Rather, they want to use an examination of the old order to construct a new framework for understanding interaction across the Canada-U.S. border as compared with the U.S.-Mexico border—though the comparison is more suggested than systematically examined. By implication they seem to be saying that the vitality of transnationalism continues to persist even in the era of Homeland Security, and that there is something transcendent about the degree of regional integration in the Great Lakes Basin even as borders are being redrawn. |
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