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TIME: Almanac 1993
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TIME Almanac 1993.iso
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070990
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0709008.000
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1992-08-28
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WORLD, Page 34AMERICA ABROADThis Too Shall Pass
By Strobe Talbott
In 1967 a classified State Department study of
French-Canadian nationalism speculated that the secession of
Quebec might lead the other nine provinces to sue for union
with the U.S. Some Americanized Canadian businessmen dreamed
of the ultimate merger. But the author of the report called the
dissolution of Canada, even if it doubled the size and vastly
increased the natural resources of the U.S., a "worst-case
scenario."
Several years later, the KGB station in Ottawa leaked some
phony documents on CIA letterhead purporting to show that U.S.
agents were secretly aiding the Quebec Liberation Front and in
various other ways trying to destabilize the central
government. An American spook took his Soviet counterpart to
lunch and said, "You really want to play this game? Your
country may someday have secession problems a lot bigger than
Canada's."
Early in the Carter Administration, a flare-up of Quebec
separatism led a U.S. official to guess that the big divorce
would occur in 1990. He predicted that Pierre Elliott Trudeau,
still vigorous at 70, would come out of semiretirement and run
for the U.S. Congress. There were chuckles at the joke, but no
joy at the prospect of Canada's cracking up.
Secession is a fighting word in American history, and
territorial aggrandizement has been anathema to the North
American political experiment ever since the settlers reached
the Pacific. They had left behind two systems of government
that have brought grief as well as benefit to mankind: empire
and the nation-state. Imperialism, which has been around for
millenniums, is based on one people's conquering, ruling, often
suppressing others. The nation-state, an arrangement that came
into its own in the 16th century as the Holy Roman Empire began
to disintegrate, sounded like a good idea at the time: people
who spoke one language would band together under one flag
within one set of boundaries. But such entities -- sovereign
in their aspirations, anxieties and hatreds -- too often went
to war against one another, sending fresh waves of emigrants
fleeing across the Atlantic.
Nuclear weapons have made war harder to justify as the
conduct of politics by other means. To the extent that
countries are deprived of the option of getting their way by
force, they are gradually more willing to pool some of their
sovereignty in organizations like the European Community. Two
further inducements in that direction have been the salutary
phenomenon of economic interdependence and the ominous one of
ecological despoliation on a scale too daunting for any nation
to handle on its own. The United Nations, however imperfect and
maligned as an institution, is a powerful and promising idea.
Brian Mulroney has been a leader in redefining international
politics. He was instrumental in bringing about the U.S.-Canada
Free Trade Agreement and progress toward reducing the
cross-border curse of acid rain. So far, however, his luck and
skill have failed him at home. History and domestic politics
seem to be conspiring against him. Quebec today is a would-be
nation-state chafing against the vestiges of empire.
But a new, global trend may be on Mulroney's side. From the
old Russian empire to the new Europe, there is a devolution of
power not only upward toward supranational bodies and outward
toward commonwealths and common markets, but also downward
toward freer units of federation that would allow "distinct
societies" to preserve their identity and govern themselves --
without bolting altogether. If Canadians, French and English
speaking alike, choose to be part of that pattern, the current
crisis over Quebec will pass just as those earlier ones did,
perhaps never to be repeated again.