Would America Be Better Off if It Broke Up into Separate Countries?
A thought experiment and a history lesson
When I was a woman in my early twenties full of self-righteous certainty and prone to black-and-white thinking, I had a T-shirt that read “U.S. Out of North America.” In those days I was high on a number of things, but most notably on the idea that the United States of America was not only racist, but an an actual evil force in the world and almost solely responsible for all of the suffering in Central and South America, among other places. My favorite writer was Noam Chomsky, especially his book What Uncle Sam Really Wants. What Uncle Sam really wanted, of course was world domination. I was against that, and could not see how my own country, Canada was (and is) racist and not always operating for the good of the people. I just thought, Canada good, the U.S. bad.
Fast forward forty years, I am married to an American citizen, I’ve moved from Canada to the United States, and I now find myself loving both countries equally, while still wishing each society could be more equitable and democratic, as well as less partisan and hostile.
The storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 seemed to herald a possible breakup of the United States into separate states. At the time, the polarization of American thought into two distinct camps was evident from the reactions to this event. Liberals saw the event as a deliberate attack on democracy, while conservatives tended to see it as an expression of freedom and a minor event where “not very many” people were killed.
(As a political moderate, I think that even one person killed, even if they were careless, is one too many, let alone five, but maybe that’s just me.)
This extreme political response, which has even been labeled an insurrection, I think, clearly illustrated how American society was divided against itself in the aftermath of the pandemic. At the time there was even talk of a possible civil war and a number of maps of a revised United States divided into separate nations appeared.
Now that the pandemic is officially over, however, the divisions remain as deep as ever, and violence continues to erupt everywhere in the form of mass shootings, angry political protests, family annihilations, and, most horrifyingly, protests that end in self-immolation.
This week, just over three months after the third anniversary of the January 6 storming of the Capitol, I saw the dystopian fantasy film Civil War, written and directed by Alex Garland, and starring Kirsten Dunst as a journalist reporting on a second American civil war that has started some time in the near future of our present time.
The critical reception of this film has been mixed. Some critics decry the unlikeliness of a civil war breaking out in the United States today that the film uses as its premise. Others praise its use of allegory to show the logical extreme conclusion of decades of hatred and animosity in the not-very-United States of America.
I personally found the film’s premise very believable: the senseless, horrifying violence, the obsession with guns, the extreme factions, the implacable hatred of one group for another, all ring true for me as a member of the most violent species on the planet, Homo sapiens, and as a resident of earth’s most powerful and divided country.
But however America actually, as opposed to cinematically, decides to deal with its deep divisions remains to be seen. Maybe the election in November will solve everything. Maybe not.
But what would happen if different regions of America did decide to go their separate ways? It could have happened in the 1860s, but it was prevented by the victory of the Union forces in the Civil War.
Is there even a precedent for such a thing?
It turns out there is, albeit one that failed by a narrow margin. What country am I talking about? Why Canada of course. My home and native land almost divided in two during the twentieth century. The issue wasn’t settled with violence; that’s no longer the Canadian way. It was settled with a referendum. The faction that wanted to divide Canada into two countries lost by only one percent.
This happened in 1995, just short of thirty years ago. But the idea, simmering for over 200 years, well before Canada was even a country, came to a boil in the fall of 1970 with a kidnapping, a murder, and a decidedly undemocratic decision by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
The Canadian crisis that started the ball rolling on separatism
Here are my recollections of this historical event. I grew up in Canada in the 1960s and seventies, and I remember well the time when the province of Quebec threatened to separate from the rest of Canada. The situation was somewhat similar to America’s today: the French population of Quebec felt threatened by the English-speaking majority, and created discriminatory laws and policies to promote the very different French Canadian culture over the English one. There was a terrorist organization called the FLQ or front de liberation du Quebec (Quebec liberation front), which had, in retrospect, some serious MAGA vibes. The inciting incident that started the drama happened in 1970 and was known as the October Crisis. It shook the country. Even though I was only nine years old when it happened, I clearly remember how much it was in the news and that pretty much every adult around me was talking about it.
Wikipedia summarizes the crisis succinctly:
The October Crisis (French: Crise d’Octobre) refers to a chain of events that started in October 1970 when members of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) kidnapped the provincial Deputy Premier Pierre Laporte and British diplomat James Cross from his Montreal residence. These events saw the Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoking the War Measures Act for the first time in Canadian history during peacetime.
The Premier of Quebec, Robert Bourassa, and the Mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau, supported Trudeau’s invocation of the War Measures Act, which limited civil liberties and granted the police far-reaching powers, allowing them to arrest and detain 497 people. The Government of Quebec also requested military aid to support the civil authorities, with Canadian Forces being deployed throughout Quebec.
Although negotiations led to Cross’s release, Laporte was murdered by the kidnappers. The crisis affected the province of Quebec, Canada, especially the metropolitan area of Montreal, and ended on December 28.
Yes, “only” one person was killed. But that person was the deputy premier of the province. He was not any more important than anyone else, but when someone of high social standing and prestige is murdered for political reasons, it sends a message to the public at large that violence is an acceptable means of forcing your particular political agenda.
Just like America today, where certain people are engaging in violent acts in order to push an agenda of “freedom.”
I’m talking about everything from taunting and bullying people wearing masks at a cherry stand to attempting to kidnap the governor of Michigan over pandemic restrictions. Violence is happening everywhere. January sixth, 2021 is only the largest manifestation of this troubling phenomenon.
Here is the background to the the October Crisis of 1970 from The Canadian Encyclopedia:
The FLQ was founded in 1963, during a period of profound political, social and cultural change in Quebec… Members of the FLQ — or felquistes — were influenced by anti-colonial and communist movements in other parts of the world, particularly Algeria and Cuba. Felquistes shared a conviction that Quebec must liberate itself from anglophone domination and capitalism through armed struggle. Their objective was to destroy the influence of English colonialism by attacking its symbols. They hoped that Quebecers would follow their example and rise up to overthrow their colonial oppressors.
I think anyone alive today and paying attention to American politics can see the similarities to Trumpism, Q-Anon, and MAGA; the only difference is the political stripe. October 1970 was a violent, leftist attempt at a violent coup and January 2021 was a violent, rightest attempt.
Believe me, I don’t think the problems we are seeing today are essentially conservative or rightist in nature; the common denominator is human nature and its tendency towards extremism. This is how we behave when we give in to our tribal tendencies, and it is having a frightening effect on the body politic of America.
Going back to the October Crisis of 1970, the French president at the time, Charles de Gaulle, had engaged in some ill-advised grandstanding from a Quebec hotel balcony the previous July, crying, “Vive le Quebec Libre!” (long live a free Quebec). This arrogant, impulsive action by a prominent world leader arguably gave the FLQ permission to carry out its desperate and tragic plan the following October.
Such was the tenor of the times.
Leftism was having a moment in the late 1960s and seventies; conservatism has been having a moment since about 1980, one that appears possibly about to end with another extreme swing of the pendulum. Both of these twentieth-century swings included extremist elements that did nothing for the preservation of the fragile concept of democracy.
After the October 1970 incident, which was put down after Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, which temporarily suspended civil rights, and allowed police to quickly apprehend the kidnappers, Quebec created a separatist provincial party called the Parti Quebecois that advanced a separatist agenda for Quebec. (Pierre’s son, Justin Trudeau, the current Canadian prime minister, invoked a similar law, The Emergencies Act, to break up the so-called “Freedom Convoy” in January 2023).
The Parti Quebecois worked tirelessly throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s to convince Quebeckers that separating from the rest of Canada would protect their French culture from the predations of English Canada. This propaganda campaign culminated in a referendum in 1995 that proposed the separation of Quebec from the rest of Canada. The separatists were defeated by a narrow margin of 51%.
Yes, in 1995, Canada, my native country, almost split into two countries.
To this day, the province of Quebec has a somewhat different political structure from the other nine Canadian provinces. Here is a description:
“Canada’s government works on a federal system, with control over certain affairs belonging to the national government in Ottawa, and others under the control of the provincial governments. The province of Quebec has its own democratically-elected legislature known as the National Assembly of Quebec, which is located in the capital of Quebec City. There are 125 members elected to the Quebec National Assembly, each representing the interests of a specific geographic district. The current government is led by Premier Philippe Couillard of the Quebec Liberal Party.” (About Quebec: Canada’s French Province).
The present federal (as opposed to provincial) separatist party of Quebec was formed in 1993. It is called the Bloc Quebecois, (an obviously aggressive and pugnacious title meant to show that any attempts by English Canada to tell them what to do will be blocked), and expressed their dissatisfaction in fairly militant terms, giving lie to the myth of the polite Canadian (I’m thinking of common Quebecois terms like maudits Anglais, meaning, roughly, “damned English”).
Here is their agenda:
“The Bloc seeks to create the conditions necessary for the political secession of Quebec from Canada and campaigns exclusively within the province during federal elections. The party has been described as social democratic[5] and separatist (or "sovereigntist").[6][7] The Bloc supports the Kyoto Protocol,[8][9]abortion rights,[10] LGBTQ+ rights,[11] legalization of assisted suicide,[12] abolition of the Canadian Senate,[13] abolition of the monarchy,[14] the Quebec Secularism law,[15] and supports exempting Quebec from the requirements of the Multiculturalism Act.[16]” (Wikipedia)
This is clearly an anti-English Canada statement that only serves to deepen the divisions between Quebec and the rest of Canada. In my own personal experience of visiting Quebec, there is still a great deal of indifference, if not hostility to Anglophones. From this point of view, if someone visits the province, they ought to speak French. People in Montreal, a more cosmopolitan city than most in Quebec, might be willing to speak English to visitors, but outside of there they will either refuse to speak English, or make a political point of not even learning the language, showing hostility to any Anglophones who dare to speak the despised Anglais to them. French-speaking Quebeckers do not seem to feel much solidarity with the rest of Canada.
By the way, English speakers in Canada are required to take French in school from grade four up to the first year of high school. But it has almost no effect; almost everyone immediately forgets everything they learned about French in those seven years of their education. In general, few people in English Canada speak French, so the indifference and animosity go both ways.
In that sense, Canada is as divided as the United States. The two cultures, English and French have been referred to as the “two solitudes,” which is the title of a well-known Canadian novel from the 1940s which depicts this cultural schism. Arguably, American Republicans and Democrats also represent two solitudes that cannot hear each other.
As a young person, the idea of Quebec separating from the rest of Canada always seemed alarming to me; for one thing, the Maritime and Atlantic provinces, where I lived at the time of the October Crisis, would be geographically cut off from the rest of the country.
As an adult, I find what I read about some aspects of Quebec Francophone culture and politics to be quite disturbing. There is a law in Quebec, known as Bill 21, which is similar to laws in France, that prohibits the wearing of religious symbols at government jobs. That means, for example, that a teacher at a Quebec school cannot wear a hijab, a Star of David or a cross necklace to work. I don’t like this law, although I felt no desire when I was a teacher, and as a Jew, to wear my Magen David to work. If I were a Muslim teacher in Quebec, however, I would have been very upset were I to have been prevented from adhering to my religion’s rules of modesty which require, among other things, a head scarf.
Even more disturbing is the behaviour of some Quebecois to Muslim Quebeckers who wear hijabs or chadors in public. There was a case in 2021 that got national attention in which a passerby filmed a man verbally attacking a Muslim woman on the street wearing a headscarf, and telling her two-year-old child that he would rape her mother.
Despite my distaste for this kind of French Canadian racism (and English Canada is equally racist, but with a slightly different flavor), the thought of Quebec separating from the rest of Canada is still unsettling. We should try to get along, shouldn’t we? Surely two different cultures, separated by language differences and politics can find a way to get along, right?
But what if they can’t? Well, Alex Garland has one scenario that most Americans probably wouldn’t like: a vicious second civil war fought on three fronts with automatic weapons. But maybe it doesn’t have to come to that.
Maybe we could all live happily in separate countries based differing political ideologies. What might that look like? Tune in next week for a description of the imaginary Republic of Quebec compared to an equally imaginary Disunited States of America.
There’s too much money at stake for separatism to gain any real traction. Most of the red states would be poor if cut off from US government largesse. But we need them strategically because they supply natural resources and human bodies for defense and development purposes. Same would have been true if Quebec had separated.
If the Separatists had won the 1995 referendum (I remember it, even though I wasn't living in Canada yet) I doubt the transition would be as bloody as it will be if it happens again in the U.S. It famously took a war to resolve the last one, and honestly, I don't expect it to go well for liberals if it comes to that. I understand they're 'gunning up' more now but I honestly don't think they have the balls or labia to defend themselves and their families if it actually came to armed insurrection, coup d'etat, or whatever. Conservatives have a whole longstanding culture built around gun ownership, honour (or whatever passes for it anymore in the US) and strategic violence. Liberals will find there's more to defending your family than picking up a gun (although I expect untrained conservative Rambo wannabes won't fare very well either).
I worry about my family, who will be moving to a red state eventually to retire, not because they share their politics. They seem to think it will be okay. I don't know which of us is blind: Me, because I no longer live there and haven't for many years, or my fam, who may not see the danger because they live with it every day.