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 20th 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.
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 51st 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 21st 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.
This piece (and the Edgy Optimist in general) has the worthy goal of giving sober second thought to knee jerk reactions, and always trying to see things in a bigger context in order to help us keep things in proportion when something concerning happens. However I do think this piece misses a huge part of why people, Canadians in particular, have reacted the way they have to Trump's joke/casual disrespect/veiled threat.
It's not because people are somehow clinging to this abstract idea that borders are 'morally sacrosanct'. No one is upset because they don't like the idea of a line changing on a map, or because changing a line on a map would be somehow morally wrong. It's because the institutions and the norms of the polity that line represents the limits of actually matters to them.
I don't care what happens to the geographical limits of the 49th parallel. I do care if American cultural and political/institutional impetus interferes with how my own government administers policies where I live. The reality is that there is cross border contagion, even with things like trends in policies. And this can range from benign to downright pernicious.
Trump may or may not be joking when he spouts whatever, but those unconsidered words have real, damaging consequences: I work for a small family owned business whose clientele are mostly in the US. We make a custom, handmade, speciality product that costs several thousand dollars per item and requires an enormous amount of skilled labour, and those skills are NOT common. It took us the last two years to finally find and train up our staff so that our workshop can function properly, and so that we can finally expand. We were set to start a new year with a tight team of rare and talented people who may literally be one in a million.
And now that Trump has decided that hiking up prices for his own citizens by a blanket 25% is somehow a good flex that won't tank affordability for everybody, we've already had to have the heartbreaking conversation among senior staff about who we might have to fire if those tariffs are enacted. And even if they aren't enacted, the uncertainty created my Trump just SAYING he might is enough to dismantle literal years of investment in our new employees. And we're only ONE small manufacturer in Ontario. I can't imagine the tens of thousands of jobs in both countries that already at actual risk.
And quite aside from the ways that Trump's word vomit in the US may directly ruin my livelihood here in Ontario, the latest Lavendar (Pink vs Blue?) Panic fomenting in the US has had real effects on how safe me and my wife (who is trans) are in our own country. Alberta, New Brunswick, and Saskatchewan have already enacted extremely harmful anti-trans policies that came north to us in large part because of how they've been successfully enacted in many states. Places in North America where me and my wife can exist safely with our rights in tact have been disappearing in front of our eyes for the last four years; I have family in Texas I ache to spent time with, but we can never safely set foot in that state again until those policies are undone. My home province is Alberta, and because Premier Danielle Smith is intent on copying right-wing rhetoric from the UK and US to stay in power, we had to seriously consider whether it would be safe for us to go home to family this summer for our wedding. Hateful policies give permission for hateful behaviour and increases harm in vulnerable populations; More trans and queer people we know of all ages are measurably less safe now that this Pink&Blue Panic crap has been passed north over the last half decade.
You may argue that cultural influence or contagious policy trends don't have anything to do with border sanctity, but it's not actually the border we're worried about. You may be right that strong reactions to Trumps '51st state' comments are overblown and even silly, but that's not because we think he's actually going to do anything about it or that we're somehow worried about a real repeat of 1812.
The point is that him SAYING it is already having an effect, and his previous presidency already had an effect, and that the border is the most salient symbol of the unwanted and harmful cultural and political influence we're already contending with in our daily lives.
Trumps 'jokes' become real meetings about firing coworkers and real conversations about whether we're going to be harassed or physically assaulted if we go back to our home town.
Your goal may be to help us all panic a little less, which is cool, but the increased stress and risk so many people are experiencing as a direct result of this man's comments and actions is not imaginary. If that pent up concern comes out sideways when a head of state can't stop himself from saying something he should know could be inflammatory and insulting to the face of another head of state, I think it's missing the mark to say we're overreacting about the idea of a border changing, or that we all just have to chill out and remember that borders aren't, like, really real when you think about it in historical context.
I guess what I'm really trying to say is that framing this as if it's actually about borders and ideas about borders and not about people being upset at demonstrably harmful political influence (and the flippant way in which Trump continually treats it all) seems ... off topic. It doesn't expand perspective on the issue in a way that I feel is particularly relevant or helpful, at least in this case.
Being reminded that nation states and national borders are a recent construct doesn't make my feel like my job is more secure or that my wife will be more safe or that Trump (and folks in in power who agree with him) can't directly make my life much much harder. I don't think it's unfair to have assumed or hoped that an entire national border and separate sovereign government apparatus between me and him would be enough to stop that (or at least give him pause), nor unreasonable to be upset when he states clearly that he doesn't care.
Having said all that, I do appreciate the work you're doing here. Thanks for the article.
Dems just don't get it. This was Trump trolling them once again, and silly ones, like The Edgy Optimist fell for it. Obviously, it was not a serious post. Lighten up, libs....