The 51st State

It’s been an eerily calm month. It’s as if everyone is collectively holding their breath ahead of Donald Trump’s January 20th inauguration for his second (non-consecutive) term. Will Day One be roiling? Early indications are that it will come with a slew of executive orders, many of which will sound authoritative but many of which will also not be…executable. This is not just a Trump issue. It is also true of a slew of executive orders over the past decades. Such orders have become more plentiful with each administration, more sweeping in language and yet often less substantive or enforceable in practice.

The president can issue any executive order he wants, but that doesn’t mean that it can then become legal policy. Some executive orders carry “the force of law.” Others must go through an arduous process before they go into effect. It’s likely that the Trump administration will push the boundaries of what is permissible and then be enjoined by courts. Or not. Or then later.

One thing Trump will likely not order is the creation of a new state. That is, however, what he suggested on his social media platform Truth Social in the wee hours this week:

“No one can answer why we subsidize Canada to the tune of over $100,000,000 a year? Makes no sense! Many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st State. They would save massively on taxes and military protection. I think it is a great idea. 51st State!!!”

Why Trump is trolling Canada at 3 AM midweek is anybody’s guess. And let’s just say that separate from whether this would find much support north of the border (given that fewer than 15% of Canadians like it), it’s not a well-thought-out idea from a purely Republican perspective. Most conservative Canadians support universal health care, a robust safety net, bilingualism, special protections for Indigenous Peoples. Most (albeit not all) of Canada’s conservatives would be right-leaning Democrats in the United States, and a fair number of left-leaning Canadians would be the left of AOC. So, if in some alternative Freaky Friday universe, Trump’s idea became a reality, it would be an immense boon to the American Democratic Party.

The Canada-U.S. tie up was briefly contemplated 200 years ago. With the outcome of the Revolutionary War and then the War of 1812, it never happened. There was another imbroglio in 1844, when the dark horse candidate James Polk coasted to electoral victory buoyed by Oregon fever and the slogan “Fifty-four Forty or Fight,” in reference to the northern latitude line of the territory. The United States ultimately compromised with the British on the northern extent of the U.S. in the Pacific Northwest. Since then, and since Canadian independence from Britain in 1867, the lines have been stable and set.

Other than some random Trump musings, there appears to be no real interest in revisiting this question. But while this specific far-fetched idea may not be portentous, it does raise the intriguing issue of how national boundaries came to be invested with such moral and political weight in the first place. The Westphalian system that emerged at the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648 is often taken as the beginning of the modern world order where states are the primary political unit. After World War II, with the United Nations and attendant global organizations, there was a widespread determination to establish a permanent system of states with clear boundaries that could not be changed. While a wave of new states was formed between 1950 and the early 1970s as European powers departed from their colonies in Africa and Asia, the idea that state borders are sacrosanct and not to be altered - especially by force - took wide hold.

Yet, there is nothing sacrosanct about lines drawn on a map. Some states have histories and rough borders that have lasted centuries. Egypt has been Egypt long before it was a recognized state, though its southern and western borders have changed frequently, and its eastern border as well when it acquired control of the Sinai Peninsula in 1982 after its peace accord with Israel.

Most states, however, are inorganic elastic creations that have congealed and then dissipated. Borders were created often by nature (a river, mountain range) and frequently by force. Sometimes states were defined by one ethnic or linguistic population but usually not. Borders weren’t inherently moral; they simply existed. And a government’s ability to defend those borders against incursions or outright annexation of avaricious and opportunistic neighbors was one of the only hallmarks of sovereignty.

The experience of the first half of the 20^th century and the violence of world wars created a strong global movement to enshrine and freeze national borders. As the wave of new states and decolonization wound down by the early 1970s, it seemed as though the world was neatly organized into 144 nations, up from 51 in 1945. And yet it wasn’t. Over the past fifty years, the U.N. has added nearly 50 more states, many from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 (13 more states) and then of Yugoslavia, others from various civil wars and secession movements such as South Sudan (2011, the last state to join). There are also several quasi-independent states that aren’t recognized, such as Somaliland and Iraqi Kurdistan.

The immediate recoil from the suggestion that a border ought to be changed, therefore, is in contrast to just how frequently and for various reasons borders have changed and continue to. Borders are not morally sacrosanct. They are created, and they evolve, even if the use of force to change them is no longer accepted as a legitimate way to do so, hence the recoil at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Read ‘President Trump Has Done Almost Nothing’ (2017) by Zachary Karabell

So, while Trump’s out-of-nowhere suggestion may go exactly nowhere, it should be a reminder that none of this current map is necessarily the map of the future, nor does it need to be. Populations shift; sentiment changes; what seemed right and proper once upon a time may no longer work for people in the present. We should not snap react to idea of these evolutions as chaotic or wrong or motivated only by the baser drives of peoples and leaders. After all, the change most Americans celebrate was itself a political reordering: the independence of the United States that began in 1776 and was formalized in 1783. That was quite a border shift, which we might recoil from and decry if it happened today but which we lionize.

No, Canada will not become the 51^st state in the next few years, nor will California and New York join Canada. But that doesn’t mean the idea of those changes is patently absurd, or that it should never be considered. The European Union is a stalled experiment in the creation of a larger states comprised of national entities, which seemed utopian in the 1960s and then became a reality in the 1990s only to have further integration stall. The EU was an act of unlikely imagination that recognized that the histories and traditions of myriad peoples of Europe could be honored and protected with different lines drawn and with different levels of sovereignty.

The act of imagining different futures can be a deeply creative and constructive. All states, as the scholar Benedict Anderson so brilliantly put it, are imagined communities. And as long as there is human striving for better futures, communities will shift and evolve. That can mean new boundaries or reinforcing existing ones. We need to remain open to these changes, or we risk defending ossified systems simply because they are, nor because they should be.

I’ve no idea what the world will look like politically at the end of the 21^st century, but if that past is prologue, it will be different. New states will emerge, and others will cease to be. Some of that will be tragic; but some of it will be an act of liberation or creation or just change, neither great nor terrible but with a new national airline and different travel documents. Let’s not let short-term fears of change stand in the way of embracing the inevitability of it.