Good Neighbor, Bad Neighbor: US-Canada and US-Mexico relations explained

For decades, most of the attention given to the United States’ borders has been concentrated on the Mexican border. Perhaps because of a relatively peaceful relationship with our northern neighbor, US-Canada relations have remained quietly out of the spotlight while issues such as Mexican border control and drug warfare have taken prominence instead. In fact, it is rare that bordering states remain peaceful for as long of a time as the United States and Canada have, in contrast to the historically shaky relationship between the US and Mexico. This imbalance between the relations the US holds with Canada and the relations it holds with Mexico can be explained through a liberal perspective. Such things as steady institutions of trade with Canada and joint war efforts between Canada and the US in many wars have kept this relationship strong, while unstable government, border conflict, and social issues like drug warfare in Mexico have worn on US-Mexico relations.

The modern confederation of Canada was established in 1867, and by that point the United States was well along in its own history with the region that was previously a British territory. US-Canada relations started off a bit shaky: with the War of 1812 behind them, the United States and Canada proceeded to hash out a dispute about the Alaskan territory in which Canada ended up being shorted (CBC News). However, soon after in 1904, trade relations began to become an interdependent system between the United States and Canada with the establishment of the first Ford automobile plant in Canada (CBC News). The St. Lawrence Seaway between Canada and the United States has been a method of transporting many of the goods and services exchanged between the two countries. By 1975, 64% of all Canadian exports were going to the United States. Current Canadian ambassador to the United States Gary Doer has said himself that Canada is “America’s largest customer”: comparatively, Canada represents the top export market for 34 states (Luxner 17) Eight millions US jobs rely specifically on the $1 million goods and services crossing Canada’s borders each day (Luxner 18). Finally, the first open trading agreement between the United States and Canada was established during the Reagan administration in part because of the agreeable relationships between the president and the Canadian prime minister. The most recent open trade agreement between the United States and its neighbors Canada and Mexico was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 (“CBC News”).

The United States and Canada share a very interrelated military identity in addition to their trade relations. Both countries fought in World War I and II as part of the Allied powers, and both fought as peacekeeping forces in the Korean War. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 deeply impacted both America and Canada, which both lost citizens in the incidents. This shared pain has certainly strengthened the joint identity shared by Canada and America. A result of this common sentiment led to a joint effort in the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Canadian and American troops have been fighting side by side in the war in Afghanistan for almost a decade now. Good friendships between American president and Canadian prime ministers have segued to strong alliances, one example being between Prime Minister Mulroney and President Reagan during the Cold War. The close relationship between these two particular leaders led to many missile-detecting radar systems being set up along the 55^th parallel in Canada. There have, however, been disruptions in this consistently calm relationship, such as the lack of communication between President Kennedy and Prime Minister Diefenbaker in 1962 when the United States blockaded Cuba without Canada’s prior knowledge (“CBC News”). Nevertheless, Canada and the United States have remained friendly despite some differences in policy and military action taken because of their strong pacifistic ties with each other, in addition to trade and shared identity.

The United States’ relationship with its southern neighbor, in contrast, is dynamically different than its relationship with Canada. Mexican territory has been disputed between Mexico and the United States throughout much of their history as bordering states. In 1845, still-budding relations between Mexico and the young United States were broken when Texas was annexed by the US. Directly following this upset was the greater conflict of the Mexican-American war of 1946, in which the United States attempted to further its Manifest Destiny by expanding into more Mexican territory, thus blatantly stepping all over any hope for peace between the two nations. Then came the Mexican War of 1910 where seventeen American civilians were killed in a border town in New Mexico, which until then had been totally uninvolved in the Mexican civil war (“Council on Foreign Relations”). The manifestation of the war also brought with it mass emigration of Mexicans to the States, which only grew the anti-Mexican sentiments Americans already held.

Trade and labor relations had started off on a bad note after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, because American railroad companies began to recruit large numbers of Mexican as cheap laborers to make up for the new deficit of Chinese workers (“Council on Foreign Relations”). Things grew worse when the Great Depression devastated the United States. Anti-Mexican sentiments continued to grow as Americans were put out of work and blamed more and more often Mexican immigrants for being drains on social services and employment. To this day, it is clear that there are still very obvious anti-Mexican sentiments concentrated in some parts of the US more than others. In recent years, things like the war on drugs around the Mexican-US border and widespread illegal immigration from Mexico have contributed to this sentiment. The most prominent event in Americans’ minds of this is the Arizona law passed in 2010 that allowed police officers to not only demand citizenship papers from any passerby, which inevitably led to racial profiling, but also arrest anyone who could not immediately present them.

There were a few redeeming incidents more recently in the history of US-Mexico relations, however, such as the Good Neighbor Policy instigated by President Roosevelt in 1933, which prevented the United States from armed intervention in Latin America, and the alliance of Mexico with the Allied Powers in WWII. Another example is the Rio Treaty, which stated that if one country in the Americas were under attack, it would be considered an attack against all of the countries and would be dealt with as such (“Council on Foreign Relations”). Mexico has only recently withdrawn from this agreement. Mexico was also part of the NAFTA agreement regarding free trade. These series of pacifying and allying actions taken have led to relative peace in some areas between the two countries for many years now.

Thus, from this broad assessment of history it can be seen that liberalism can explain why the majority of relations between the United States and Canada have been peaceful and mutually beneficial, while the majority of those between the United States and Mexico have not. The institutions of fair trade incentivize a peaceful relationship between nations, as demonstrated by the important trading bonds the United States and Canada have shared for many years. The lack of an ability to trust a bordering country, such as in the case of the United States and Mexico, can lead to a tense relationship and few institutions that help in developing strong bonds between nations. To be sure, Mexico and the United States are working together now to improve their associations to each other, and hopefully these liberal elements will help them to further develop a long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationship.

WORKS CITED

Luxner, Larry. "Remembering 9/11, Canada Honors Emotional and Economic Bonds with the U.S.." Washington Diplomat Sep 2011. 17-18, 22. Print.

Thompson, Justin. "The Canada-US Saga: A Timeline." CBC News. CBC News Online, 01 May 2003. Web. 16 Oct 2011. .

"U.S.-Mexico Relations (1810-present)." Council on Foreign Relations. Council on Foreign Relations, 2010. Web. 16 Oct 2011. .