Fearful asymmetries: the challenge of analyzing continental systems in a globalizing world.

• Author: Clarkson, Stephen

Stephen Clarkson has been teaching political economy at the University of Toronto since 1964. Among his books are An Independent Foreign Policy for Canada? (1968); City Lib: Parties and Reform (1972); The Soviet Theory of Development: India and the Third World in Marxist-Leninist Scholarship (1979); Canada and the Reagan Challenge (1981, 1985); and, with Christina McCall, the prize-winning biography of Trudeau and Our Times (1990, 1994).

This essay is the result of a year in Italy at the European University Institute studying the European Union as an alternative to the North American model of continental integration. His work now focuses on how Canada is evolving within NAFTA into a multi-level state stretching from the city and the province through the federal to the continental and global tiers of governance. E-mail: clarkson@chass.utoronto.ca

Ever since Columbus opened up the western hemisphere to white settlement, Europe and the New World have been entangled in an obsessive embrace. The colonies of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and Great Britain combined utopian strivings towards purer societies with imperfect replications of familiar social systems, but they could not escape involvement in the never-ending battles among their mother countries for imperial mastery. Then, the American revolutionaries, with their audacious democratic constitution, made a conscious act of self-differentiation from the autocratic ways of the Old World, whose political theories they nonetheless borrowed and to which they in turn offered a subversive formula for republican government. Subsequently European intellectuals have been as intrigued with the virtues of American politics (Alexis de Tocqueville) as with its vices (Moisei Ostrogorsky), and Americans have remained as fascinated by the lure of Europe's mundane charms (Henry James) as by the horrors of its perpetual belligerence (Paul Fussell). This dialectic of revulsion and attraction intensified through the first part of the twentieth century when two successive European civil wars dragged North America into the maelstrom of their violence. It was from the apocalypse of their self-destructive vendetta that the European states gave birth, in the last fifty years, to a new utopianism, a determination to build a community of nations dedicated to maintaining peace through the construction of a common market and a common political system.

Up to this last half-century, Europe was seen less as a system in itself than as a site for international relations whether in war or peace, but scholars of the post-war European community have understandably treated their subject as sui generis since there existed no other remotely similar grouping of contiguous states formally linked by an inter-governmental, treaty-mandated, institutional superstructure. While no other grouping of multiple, geographically proximate states can yet rival the European Union (EU) in the strength of its institutions or the sophistication of its jurisprudence, the handful of free-trade areas or common markets that haveformed up elsewhere on the world stage in the 1990s is transforming the EU's international context -- and, ipso facto, scholarship about it. From a one-of, the EU is becoming one-among. It may still be primus inter pares, but pares there are, and they will have to be considered more and more by scholarship on the primus. Even fully to comprehend the distinctiveness of the EU will increasingly require a comparative knowledge of other economic blocs, however they may be constituted. Because it is the prototype, familiarity with the EU is necessary to understand the distinctive qualities of newer continental regimes, however dissimilar.

For its part, North America also existed long before "free trade" was negotiated, even if the Mexican revolution partly rolled back the forces of Americanization south of the Rio Grande and then kept them at bay till the 1970s. Although Canada's economic integration and cultural assimilation into the American market has been proceeding for over a century, North America was generally invisible to the social scientific eye as an entity in its own right because Canadian-American integration was weakly institutionalized. More latent than manifest, the North American system's elites doubled as national elites, its institutions were largely non-existent, its policy making was not formalized, and its identity as a self-conscious community was only rarely articulated even if it operated increasingly as a single, integrated market. As a result, little attention was paid in academe to a "continentalism" that was more de facto than de jure. (1)

Indeed, the very words "continent," "continental," or "continentalism" have never enjoyed intellectual status in social science. Continent is a geographer's concept connoting one of the half dozen major land masses on the face of the earth. In meteorology the word describes the climates of landlocked areas characterized by extremes of summer heat and winter cold because they are far from the moderating effects of a temperate ocean. Historians have studied North America in terms of such themes as its ever-receding frontier (2) and demographers have defied the national frontiers to denote its population as the "nine nations of North America" (3) without the word becoming a key heuristic tool in either discipline. In economics and politics the concept has had equally little analytical power outside Canada where it entered political -- but not academic -- discourse as a nationalist epithet to castigate the position of such economists as W.A. Mackintosh (4) and Harry Johnson, (5) who believed that increased economic and political integration with the United States was both unavoidable and desirable.

This essay's major premise is that there are enough similarities and enough differences between the EU and the present generation of trade blocs to warrant considering the potential value of their systematic comparison. The essay's minor premise is that continentalism is a notion that can be of analytical utility in this undertaking. (In this regard I recognize I am swimming against the international relations (IR) mainstream which confusingly prefers the same labels -- "regional," "regionalism," or "regionalization" - that are employed by scholars like Ohmae to denote the sub-national phenomenon of provinces, Laender or states in a federal union. (6) Outside IR, "continental" is now cropping up on occasion. (7))

This text cannot attempt to reflect the colossal and dynamic corpus of Europeology. It cannot even do justice to the much smaller, though rapidly growing body of scholarship on the many facets of North American integration. It does aspire to address the challenges involved in making horizontal comparisons between the historically senior system in Europe and the infant regimes that have been born not only in North America but in Southeast Asia and South America as well in the last ten years. The same decade has also witnessed the initiation of a new phase in the global trade order which must be taken into account in any attempt to develop a meaningful comparative capacity for the analysis of continental regime-building.

What follows is a discussion of the literature on continental regimes and an exploration of the new North America presented as a background for assessing the problems involved in comparing continentalisms. A consideration of the various ways in which continentalism and globalism interconnect leads to a discussion of the differing impact of these two phenomena on what remains the basic building block of the international order -- the nation state.

1. CONTINENTALISM AND POLITICAL SCIENCE: A LOOK AT THE LITERATURE

   If comparative continentalism is only now appearing as an alluring scholarly niche at the interstices of comparative politics, international relations, and global political economy, it is not because the existence of transnational systems is recent or that interest in contrasting their characteristics is novel. For centuries the globe's vast land masses have witnessed cultural, commercial, and migratory intercourse among the various peoples spread over their territories. "Europe" as a geographical, cultural, and political concept traces its roots back to centuries before the Enlightenment. The consolidation of nation-states and the erection of national boundaries aries during the past few centuries did not stop transnational interactions at the societal level. But for social scientists such sub-political, extra-economic reality has been of marginal interest. They have tended to study the more easily documentable intergovernmental relationships that states sustain with other states and the statistically analyzable trade or investment flows that economies foster with other economies. The recent crystallization of several continental, sub-continental, and inter-continental systems affects a number of scholarly disciplines. International relations specialists need to include in their field of vision how the EU and its member states deal with such overseas continental groupings as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mercosur (Southern Common Market) or the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN), and Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in their foreign economic and political relations. Global political economy also has to encompass these emerging regimes as an additional factor in its analysis of the reconfiguration of the world's economic spaces. Equally intriguing for practitioners of comparative politics is the prospect of a new academic sub-field offered by comparing these continental collectivities of states as phenomena in their own right.

   What has brought the comparing of continentalisms into focus as a candidate for valid analytical activity by social scientists is the constitutionalization of inter-state arrangements among contiguous groupings of countries in the form of...