John Semley
Recently, desirous of some Big Ideas, I began reading The Idea of Europe, George Steiner's essay on, well, the idea of Europe. In it, Steiner – once called "the polymath's polymath," and what a distinction – takes a stab at establishing a cohesive, binding notion of Europe and Europeanism in the early 21st century, in the face of looming superpowers effectively laying waste to a millennia of European imperialism, hegemony and philosophical-intellectual roost-ruling.
"It is vital," he writes, "that Europe reaffirm certain convictions and audacities of soul which the Americanization of the planet – with all its benefits and generosities – has obscured."
Steiner locates all kinds of axioms of contemporary, and historical, Europeanism: the primacy of the coffee house intellectual life, a shared debt to the intellectual and cultural traditions of Ancient Greece and Judaism, the walkability of the cities, and so on. But in the passage quoted above, the whole holistic Idea of Europe is defined negatively, in antagonism to the "Americanization of the planet." Whatever Europe is at the dawning of the new millennium, it's for sure not American.
It's a line we've grown accustomed to in Canada. Granted, we share something of Europe's tension between economic and political unity and social particularity (the whole "cultural mosaic thing"). But, most of all, we share this anxiety re: Americanization. Maybe this is why Canadians are often told to wear those dumb maple leaf patches on their knapsacks when they travel abroad, in Europe and elsewhere. To be not-American is a show of solidarity, pretty much everywhere in the world except America.
But what if our anxiety about the sleeping giant to the south isn't just a broad cultural neurosis? In War Plan Red, Kevin Lippert indexes the multiple instances in which Canada's concern about American colonization was more acute, more literal. The book looks at multiple instances in which the United States has idly schemed, and actually endeavoured, to move its military north, right into our own personal home and native land. Lippert also looks at cases of Canadians eyeballing an invasion of America, as when Brigadier-General James (Buster) Brown surveyed a number of border states to see if they were ripe for annexation, hoping to push back against the United States's "baleful influence on Canada."
The threat of America invading Canada has served a number of flights of fictional fancy, be it in books (the North American super-union of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which sees most of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico amalgamated into a European Union-style confederacy) or films (Michael Moore's Canadian Bacon and the South Park movie come to mind). There's a certain ludicrousness inherent in the idea – and not just because, strictly as a military scuffle, the whole thing would seemed wildly lopsided, like when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. It just seems silly. Why invade poor ol' Canada?
As War Plan Red points out, the more common question from America's perspective has been, "Well, why not?" With a comically light touch (verging on flippancy), Lippert runs through plenty of examples of American-Canadian hostilities: notorious warmongering Kentucky politician Henry Clay calling for an invasion of British North America, the Pork and Beans War of 1838-39 (where militias were rallied to square off over the territorial borders of New Brunswick), and an 1859 incident where a skirmish almost erupted after an American shot a pig belonging to a Hudson's Bay Company merchant (no shots were fired, save for the one that felled the swine).
About a third of the text is given over to a reproduction of the titular War Plan Red, a detailed plan for a full-scale U.S. invasion of Canada dating back to 1935, along with Defence Scheme No. 1, Lieutenant-Colonel Buster Brown's crudely sketched blueprint for a counterattack against the U.S. With classic Canadian passive-aggressiveness, Defence Scheme No. 1 was actually an offensive plot, framed as a counteroffensive. (Hilariously, Brown assumed that Japan and Mexico would swiftly rush to aid a Canadian assault on the United States.)
Beyond being funny, if a little harrowing, in that stranger-than-fiction way, War Plan Red comes around to arguing that a merging of Canada and America (halfway-parasitic, halfway-symbiotic) has already occurred. As Lippert notes, the formation of the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) following the Second World War constituted a "de facto absorption of Canada into the American military-industrial complex." The commingling of Canadian and American commerce and culture constituted other prongs in this silent invasion, yoking the two nations together even as they have "slipped quietly into peace."
It's the sort of thing that may kick-start another Canadian identity crisis. But then again, the Idea of Canada has rarely been resolved, with the question of what, exactly, it means to be Canadian seeming tantalizingly, frustratingly, unresolved. War Plan Red significantly undermines that common, anxious notion that to be Canadian is simply to be not-American. When WikiLeaks revealed a 2005 document detailing a "North American Initiative" to further entwine the Canadian and American economies (warning of restrictive Canadian regulatory measures), it seemed as if a different kind of War Plan Red was still on the table.
Why, after all, should that "Americanization of the planet" George Steiner warns about not extend to its neighbour to the north? Why is it so ludicrous to assume that some day, whether by full-scale military invasion or economic/culture commingling, we Canadians find ourselves paved into that great, sprawling Denny's parking lot known as the United States of America?