Ethnic Diasporas and the Canada-United States Security Community by Haglund David G.;

Author:Haglund, David G.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

North American “Waziristan”: The United States as a Threat to Canadian (and British) Security

If meiosis, as some grammarians instruct us, can be an antonym for hyperbole,[56] then the verdict rendered by Mabel Gregory Walker on Irish American diasporic activism surely represents the apex of geostrategic meiosis. Writing more than four decades ago, she noted that while Irish Americans had, along with other ethnic groups, contributed to enriching American society, they had also, more than any other such group, “occasionally complicated affairs, both domestic and foreign, for the land of their adoption.”[57] In chapter two, we saw why the celebration of North America’s “long peace” as somehow being directly dateable from the Treaty of Ghent in 1814 is so woefully anachronistic. Geopolitically speaking, what happened that year in Ghent, stayed in Ghent. It would take nearly an entire century for anyone credibly to argue that a North American security community either was emerging or had already emerged. Though not the only reason for their security community’s tardy appearance on the regional scene, Canadians’ and Americans’ rather differing assessments of the merits of the continent’s Irish diaspora had more than a little to do with delaying the onset of healthier security cooperation between the two countries.

In the preceding section, we looked at the Irish diaspora in the United States. Here, a word or two must be offered in respect of the Irish diaspora in Canada, which was not only much smaller than that in the neighboring United States, but also tended, as time went on in the nineteenth century, to be relatively more Protestant in religious orientation than the increasingly Roman Catholic one to the south. This does not mean that the kind of diasporic activism associated with the generic brand of Fenianism, about which we will shortly learn a bit more, had no impact upon Canada; it is simply to recognize that to the extent a North American-based Irish diaspora was to trouble (or, to use Mabel Walker’s emollient variant, “occasionally complicate”) Anglo-American and therefore Canadian-American security relations, it was almost entirely due to the exertions of Irish-American activists. There had been a not insignificant outflow from Catholic counties of Ireland to Canada during the time of the great famine, but after the mid-1850s Irish emigration to Britain’s North American provinces would greatly subside, and this, coupled with the fact that pre-famine Irish inflows to Canada had consisted mainly of Protestants, made Canada’s Irish reality greatly different from America’s. And to the extent that Irish Catholic nationalist impulses could be felt north of the U.S. border, as they could, especially in the large cities of Canada,[58] these manifested themselves mostly through a general preference for solving the Irish Question through constitutional means instead of violent ones. As David Wilson has written, a constant refrain would be heard when Irish-Catholic Canadians took to proffering policy advice: “From the late 1840s, the same message was repeated over and over again: if Ireland could get what Canada already had . . . then Ireland would be satisfied.

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