Abstract
This article addresses the role that ‘civilisation rallying’ (sometimes known as the ‘kin-country syndrome’) had in the orientation of both North American countries, Canada and the United States, towards the First World War, with special emphasis upon how France was being reconceptualised in debates taking place in each. France may have been ‘ousted’ from the geostrategic reality of North America back in 1763, but it had an uncanny way of failing to disappear. In fact, you could almost say that as strategic actors about to play an ‘independent’ role in global and European affairs, for both Canada and the US it was a case of France’s having been ‘present at their creation’. But while France figured in both North American countries’ kin-country rallying, it did so for different reasons. Notwithstanding the differences, the pull of a transatlantic ‘collective identity’ whose European point of reference for the North Americans was France (along, of course, with Britain) was packed with tremendous policy significance, and never more so than in the critical year, 1917.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Some say more, and they regard the ‘patriation’ of the Canadian constitution in 1982 to be the final step in the country’s long march to independence.
As with all symbols, the meaning can be contested, sometimes hotly so. Not everyone accepts that Vimy did constitute such a fundamental turning point in Canada’s political development. Frankly critical of this version are Ian McKay and Jamie Swift, The Vimy Trap: Or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2016). A more nuanced assessment of the meaning of Vimy is
Tim Cook, Vimy: The Battle and the Legend (Toronto: Allen Lane, 2017). For a pair of concise summaries of this dispute, see
Robert Everett-Green, ‘Vimy: Birthplace of a Nation — or a Myth?’, Globe and Mail (Toronto), April 1, 2017, F3; and
Amy Shaw, ‘Battle Wary’, Literary Review of Canada 25 (April 2017): 14–15.
Harvey A. DeWeerd, President Wilson Fights His War: World War I and the American Intervention (New York: Macmillan, 1968).
Roy McGregor, ‘This Was Canada at Its Best’, Globe and Mail, April 10, 2017, A1, A8
Ian Austen, ‘100 Years On, Battle Is a Pivotal Moment for Canada’, New York Times, April 10, 2017, A6.
John H. Finley, The French in the Heart of America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918).
Jean Jules Jusserand, Le sentiment américain pendant la guerre (Paris: Payot, 1931), 43.
Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer 1993): 22–49, quote at 22.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
Huntington, ‘Clash’, 35.
Kim Richard Nossal, ‘Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater? Huntington’s “Kin-Country” Thesis and Australian-Canadian Relations’, in Shaping Nations: Constitutionalism and Society in Australia and Canada, ed. Linda Cardinal and David Headon (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2002), 167–81, quote at 179. Readers possessing familiarity with German can figure out the meaning of that substance, ‘dreck’, deserving to be pitched (politely, rubbish); but they are likely to be confused by its adjective, ‘shonky’, which is Australian English for something poorly executed, or shoddily done. We thank Kim Nossal for this contribution to our linguistic edification.
For that claim, see Dennis J. Sandole, Peace and Security in the Postmodern World: The OSCE and Conflict Resolution (London: Routledge, 2007), 10.
Eric Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: The Decline of Dominant Ethnicity in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
In addition to ethnicity, markers of identity can include gender, sexual orientation, and even such various lifestyle choices as gun ownership; see Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1995).
In an era that saw a heightened consciousness of ‘race’, France was sometimes even being stylized not just as a near-surrogate of Anglo-Saxonism, but as one of the very members of the Anglo-Saxon ‘family’, as a result of a creative reading of French demography that rendered the country’s dominant ethnicity as Anglo-Norman’, therefore closely akin to that of Britain by dint of a common descent from both the Norsemen and the Saxons (in France’s case, represented by the Franks). See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 26–33, 62–7. Also see
Jacques Barzun, The French Race: Theories of Its Origins and their Social and Political Implications Prior to the Revolution (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1966; orig. pub. 1932).
Not excluding in Canada; see Edward P. Kohn, This Kindred People: Canadian-American Relations and the Anglo-Saxon Idea, 1895–1003 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004).
Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 7.
See Darrell Bates, The Fashoda Incident of 1898: Encounter on the Nile (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); and
Marshall Bertram, The Birth of Anglo-American Friendship: The Prime Facet of the Venezuelan Boundary Dispute–A Study of the Interrelation of Diplomacy and Public Opinion (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992).
For the cases, respectively, of France and the US, see Christopher Andrew, Théophile Del-cassé and the Making of the Entente Cordiale: A Reappraisal of French Foreign Policy, 1898–1905 (New York: Macmillan, 1968); and
Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895–1914 (New York: Atheneum, 1968).
See, for instance, Aaron L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895–1905 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). Also see
Zara S. Steiner, ‘Views of War: Britain Before the “Great War” — and After’, International Relations 17 (March 2003): 7–33.
See Stephen R. Rock, Why Peace Breaks Out: Great Power Rapprochement in Historical Perspective (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
For examples, see Neta C. Crawford, ‘The Passion of World Politics: Propositions on Emotion and Emotional Relationships’, International Security 24 (Spring 2000): 116–56
Rose McDermott, ‘The Feeling of Rationality: The Meaning of Neuroscientific Advances for Political Science’, Perspectives on Politics 2 (December 2004): 691–706
Andrew A.G. Ross, ‘Coming in from the Cold: Constructivism and Emotions’, European Journal of International Relations 12 (June 2006): 197–222
Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison, ‘Fear No More: Emotions and World Politics’, Review of International Studies 34 (January 2008): 115–35; and
Jean-Marc Coicaud, ‘Emotions and Passions in the Discipline of International Relations’, Japanese Journal of Political Science 15 (September 2014): 485–513.
Erwan Lagadec, Transatlantic Relations in the 21st Century: Europe, America and the Rise of the Rest (London: Routledge, 2012), 80.
Edward Ingram, ‘The Wonderland of the Political Scientist’, International Security 22 (Summer 1997): 53–63, quote at 56–7. For a similar view, see
Guy Arnold, America and Britain: Was There Ever a Special Relationship? (London: Hurst, 2014).
So named by us because of Lord Palmerston’s oft-cited 1848 comment in the House of Commons about Britain’s having neither eternal friends nor eternal adversaries, but only eternal interests.
Coral Bell, The Debatable Alliance: An Essay in Anglo-American Relations (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 1292–30. Also see
William Clark, Less than Kin: A Study of Anglo-American Relations (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).
See, in particular, Todd H. Hall, Emotional Diplomacy: Official Emotion on the International Stage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016); and
Idem, ‘On Provocation: Outrage, International Relations, and the Franco-Prussian War’, Security Studies 26 (January 2017): 1–29.
On the popularity of constructivism among academic specialists in foreign policy and IR, see David G. Haglund, ‘The Paradigm that Dare Not Speak Its Name: Canadian Foreign Policy’s Uneasy Relationship with Realist IR Theory’, International Journal 72 (June 2017): 230–42.
Especially in his final book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
W.B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, in The Importance of Language, ed. Max Black (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 123. On the ambiguities associated with identity, see
Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, ‘Beyond “Identity”’, Theory and Society 29 (February 2000): 1–47; as well as
Philip Gleason, ‘Identifying Identity: A Semantic History’, Journal of American History 69 (March 1983): 910–31.
William Bloom, Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).
See Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt and Bernhard Giesen, ‘The Construction of Collective Identity’, Archives of European Sociology 56 (1995): 72–102, where a distinction is made between three Weberian ideal types of collective identity: primordial (namely, ethnic), civic, and cultural.
The term is Jonathan Mercer’s, who defines it thus: An emotional belief is one where emotion constitutes and strengthens a belief and which makes possible a generalization about an actor that involves certainty beyond evidence.’ See Jonathan Mercer, ‘Emotional Beliefs’, International Organization 64 (Winter 2010): 1–31, quote at 2.
See C. Loring Brace, ‘Race’ Is a Four-Letter Word: The Genesis of the Concept (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley in Peace and War (Boston, MA: Small, Maynard, 1898), 54.
Paul A. Kramer, ‘Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule Between the British and US Empires, 1880–1910’, Journal of American History 88 (March 2002): 1315–53.
Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 34. His word-play in this passage constitutes a veiled critique of a competing theoretical claim regarding the formation of security communities, resting on the assumption that liberal democracies do not use or threaten violence against fellow liberal democracies with whom they might have disputes. This competing claim bears the label of ‘democratic peace theory’.
Bernard Descôteaux, ‘Prendre sa place’, Le Devoir (Montréal), May 7, 2008, A6
Gilles Toupin, ‘Le Bloc furieux’, La Presse (Montréal), May 8, 2008, A25.
Quoted in Robert Dutrisac and Isabelle Porter, ‘400e de Québec: Couillard corrige Charest’, Le Devoir, May 13, 2008, A1 (unless otherwise noted, all translations in the text are our own).
Michel De Waele, ‘De la commémoration au détournement de l’histoire’, Le Devoir, July 10, 2008, A7.
Quoted in Vincent Marissal, ‘On choisit ses amis, pas sa famille’, La Presse, October 18, 2008, A5.
Quoted in Malorie Beauchemin and Tommy Chouinard, ‘Les politiciens fêtent sous la pluie’, La Presse, July 4, 2008, A4; and
Antoine Robitaille, ‘Sarkozy choisit l’unité canadienne’, Le Devoir, October 18, 2008, A1.
Justin Massie, Francosphère: L’Importance de le France dans la culture stratégique du Canada (Québec: Presses de l’Université de Québec, 2013). The allusion here, of course, is to the more familiar recent concept in international relations, that of the ‘Anglosphere.’ See, for this concept
James C. Bennett, ‘The Emerging Anglosphere’, Orbis 46 (Winter 2002): 111–26; and
Idem, Anglosphere: The Future of the English-Speaking Nations in the Internet Era (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). For a critical assessment, see
Srdjan Vucetic, ‘Bound to Follow? The Anglosphere and US-Led Coalitions of the Willing, 1950–2001’, European Journal of International Relations 17 (March 2011): 27–49.
Quoted in Claire Harvey, ‘Le premier consulat de la France à Québec a été ouvert en 1858’, Le Devoir, September 27, 2008, H4.
In this article, we utilize interchangeably the terms ‘French-Canadians’ and ‘Quebeckers’, more for convenience’s sake and not because we think the terms apply to the same socio cultural collectivity today; words have a way of being employed historically in a manner that, to say the least, must look odd if taken in their contemporary sense. For instance, Que beckers considered themselves, during the time of New France, to be ‘Canadians’; after the Conquest of that colony, they self-identified as ‘French-Canadians’, and continued to do so until the last few decades of the twentieth century.
Quoted in Elizabeth H. Armstrong, The Crisis of Quebec, 1914–18 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 46.
We have written on this at some length; see David G. Haglund and Justin Massie, ‘L’Abandon de l’abandon: The Emergence of a Transatlantic “Francosphere” in Québec (and Canada’s) Strategic Culture’, Québec Studies 49 (Spring/Summer 2010): 59–85.
Notes one author, canvassing the mood in Vienna, [o]n May Day 1914, workers had marched on the Ringstrasse with the chant, ‘Frieden, Brot, und Freiheit!’… On August 1, many of the same crowd marched again with Alle Serben müssen sterben!’… In Paris workers had sung the ‘Internationale’ on May Day before returning to their tenements. Now their throats rang with the ‘Marseillaise’ while the Kaiser’s effigy went up in flames. Everywhere life leaped from lonely gray grind to grand national adventure. Hurrah! (Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 (New York: Scribner, 1989), 320–1)
Armstrong, Crisis of Quebec, 88.
Mason Wade, The French Canadians, 1760–1967, vol. 2 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968), 643.
Quoted in Yvan Lamonde and Claude Corbo, eds., Le rouge et le bleu: une anthologie de la pensée politique au Québec de la Conquête à la Révolution tranquille (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1999), 344–5.
Wade, French Canadians, 2: 650, 744.
Quoted in Joseph Levitt, Henri Bourassa on Imperialism and Biculturalism, 1900–1918 (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1970), 166, 168.
Armstrong, Crisis of Quebec, 121–2.
Quoted in Ernest R. May, ed., The Coming of War, 1917 (Chicago, IL: Rand-McNally, 1963), 1.
When the war began, America’s population was 92 million, of which 32 million were either foreign born or ‘first generation’. Notes one author, [w]hen the conflict did come, the entire foreign-language press and a majority of ethnic organizations, depending on the fortunes of their native lands, turned either for or against American principles of neutrality and isolationism, creating thereby many of the internal and external problems which were to plague the nation from then on. (Louis L. Gerson, The Hyphenate in Recent American Politics and Diplomacy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1964), 60–2)
Ernest R. May, The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 34.
For a discussion of the unintended complications Irish-Americans’ anti-English activities had on what had been heretofore a positive, if sentimental, relationship between the Irish and the French, see Jérôme Aan De Wiel, ‘Austria-Hungary, France, Germany and the Irish Crisis from 1899 to the Outbreak of the First World War’, Intelligence & National Security 21 (April 2006): 237–57.
Consider the claim made, for instance, by one scholar who has: searched in vain for evidence that the Administration’s policies were altered directly under pressure from Irish critics. Indirectly, however, Irish America contributed to the diplomacy of neutrality …. Though considerably weaker than the pro-Ally forces, Irish and German propagandists helped to create the divided nation that made war unfeasible for two and a half years.’ (Edward Cuddy, ‘Irish-American Propagandists and American Neutrality, 1914–1917’, Mid-America 49, no. 4 (1967): 252–75, quote at 274–75)
For valuable reminders of the epistemological bona fides of counterfactuals in IR, see
Richard Ned Lebow, ‘What’s So Different about a Counterfactual?’, World Politics 52 (July 2000): 550–85; as well as
James D. Fearon, ‘Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science’, World Politics 43 (January 1991): 169–95. Also see
Lebow, Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives: A World without World War I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
On the concept of ‘ontological security’, see Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma’, European Journal of International Relations 12, no. 3 (2006): 341–70; and
Brent J. Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations: Self-Identity and the IR State (London: Routledge, 2008).
Excluding the Irish Catholics (who also could be counted as British until the interwar years), America’s British-descended share of the overall population was more than 60% during the early decades of the twentieth century.
For a useful account of that contestation, written by someone who played an active role in it (on the German-American side), see George S. Viereck, Spreading Germs of Hate (New York: Horace Liveright, 1930).
For the two groups’ militancy during the neutrality years (and after, in the case of the Irish-Americans), see Clifton James Child, The German-Americans in Politics, 1914–1917 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1939); Charles Thomas Johnson, Culture at Twilight: The National German-American Alliance, 1901–1918 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999); and
Michael Doorley, Irish-American Diaspora Nationalism: The Friends of Irish Freedom, 1916–1935 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005).
John E. Moser, Twisting the Lion’s Tail: American Anglophobia between the World Wars (New York: New York University Press, 1999).
Stephen Tuffnell, ‘“Uncle Sam Is to Be Sacrificed”: Anglophobia in Late Nineteenth-Century Politics and Culture’, American Nineteenth Century History 12 (March 2011): 77–99.
Henry Blumenthal, France and the United States: Their Diplomatic Relations, 1789–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970).
Reflective of this resumed mood of amity, celebrating the centrality of France to the establishment of American independence, was James Breck Perkins, France in the American Revolution (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1911).
See David G. Haglund, ‘That Other Transatlantic “Great Rapprochement”: France, the United States, and Theodore Roosevelt’, in America’s Transatlantic Turn: Theodore Roosevelt and the ‘Discovery’ of Europe, ed. Hans Krabbendam and John M. Thompson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 103–19.
Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: Norton, 1969).
See Robert B. Bruce, A Fraternity of Arms: America and France in the Great War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), and
Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Notes on contributors
David Haglund is a Professor of Political Studies at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario). His research focuses on transatlantic security, and on Canadian and American international security policy. His most recent book is on ethnic diasporas and their impact upon security relations between the United States and Canada, entitled Ethnic Diasporas and the Canada–US Security Community: From the Civil War to the Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015).
Justin Massie is Associate Professor of political science at the University of Quebec in Montreal and Senior Fellow at the Canadian International Council (CIC) and Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur les relations internationales du Canada et du Québec (CIRRICQ). He is the author of numerous works on Canadian foreign and defence policy, including his latest book: Francosphère: L’importance de la France dans la culture stratégique du Canada (Montréal: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2013).
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Haglund, D.G., Massie, J. The French in the heart of North America? ‘Civilisation rallying’, national unity, and the geopolitical significance of 1917. J Transatl Stud 16, 117–136 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2018.1450885
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2018.1450885