French connection? Québec and anti-Americanism in the transatlantic community

Abstract

In the past few years, much attention has been accorded to the evident spread of anti-American sentiment throughout large parts of the world. In particular, there has been a focus upon what some have termed ‘friendly fire’ anti-Americanism, associated with opposition to American policy within the transatlantic community, made up as it is of US allies and friends. Within that community, anti-American orientations have of late appeared especially pronounced in a part of North America once regarded as being decidedly pro-American, namely the Canadian province of Québec. The apparent emergence of ‘lite’ anti-Americanism within Québec society poses some interesting questions, none perhaps of more salience for transatlantic studies than the potential creation of a transnational epistemic community linking France and Québec. This article seeks to determine whether, and to what extent, the recent change in Quebeckers’ attitudes toward the United States might testify to the existence of a ‘French connection’.

Keywords:

• Anti-Americanism
• transatlantic community
• Québec
• France
• Canada

Notes

1. Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 9.

2. See Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectual (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1957); Annie Kriegel, ‘Consistent Misapprehension: European Views of America and their Logic’, Daedalus 101 (Fall 1972): 87–102; Thierry Maulnier, ‘L'Antiaméricanisme et les Américains’, Revue des Deux Mondes 145 (March 1975): 522–6; and Marcus Cunliffe, ‘The Anatomy of Anti-Americanism’, in Anti-Americanism in Europe, eds Rob Kroes and Maarten van Rossem (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1986), 20–36.

3. Quoted in David G. Haglund, ‘Must NATO Fail? Theories, Myths, and Policy Dilemmas’, International Journal 50 (Autumn 1995): 651–74, quote at 651.

4. John Fonte, ‘Liberal Democracy and Transnational Progressivism: The Future of the Ideological Civil War within the West’, Orbis 46 (Winter 2002): 2–14.

5. Josef Joffe, Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America (NewYork: W.W. Norton, 2006); Christopher Coker, Twilight of the West (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998); Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000); Jean-Yves Haine, Les États-Unis ont-ils besoin d'alliés? (Paris: Payot, 2004).

6. On the generic category, see James W. Ceasar, ‘A Genealogy of Anti-Americanism’, Public Interest 152 (Summer 2003), 3–18; and Peter J. Katzenstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds, Anti-Americanisms in World Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).

7. Julia E. Sweig, Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2006); Moisés Naím, ‘The Perils of Lite Anti-Americanism’, Foreign Policy, no. 136 (May/June 2003): 95–6.

8. Quoted in Jean-François Lisée, In the Eye of the Eagle, trans. Arthur Holden, Kathe Rothe and Claire Rothman (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1990), 269–70.

9. In her 1976 book, Who's Afraid of Canadian Culture?, Susan Crean declaimed that ‘[c]ontinentalism is treason’; quoted in J.L. Granatstein, Yankee Go Home? Canadians and Anti-Americanism (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996), 245.

10. For contemporary criticisms of Québec's embrace of free trade, see Robert Chodos and Eric Hamovitch, Quebec and the American Dream (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991); and Philip Resnick, Letters to a Québécois Friend (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1990).

11. Rémi Maillard, comp., Lucien Bouchard: Mot à mot (Montréal: Stanké, 1996), 147–8.

12. On this correspondence between American grand strategy and Quebeckers’ preferences during the 1920s and 1930s, see David G. Haglund, ‘Le Canada dans l'entre-deux-guerres,’ Études internationales 31 (December 2000): 727–43.

13. See Elizabeth H. Armstrong, The Crisis of Quebec, 1914–1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937).

14. Quoted in Gregory A. Johnson and David A. Lenarcic, ‘The Decade of Transition: The North Atlantic Triangle during the 1920s’, in The North Atlantic Triangle in a Changing World: Anglo-American-Canadian Relations, 1902–1956, eds Brian McKercher and Lawrence Aronsen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 87.

15. This was when Québec's own French-speaking population stood at less than 1.2 million, meaning that some 30% of French Canadians were at the time living in New England.

16. Samuel de Champlain had explored the coast of New England 15 years before the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, and for a brief time the region was known as New France. And for many decades, beginning with the War of the League of Augsburg in 1689 and ending when the Seven Years War did in 1763, France and England disputed portions of present day New England, with a savagery that at times matched anything seen elsewhere in the world during the contemporary era of so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’. For the French exploration of the New England coast, see Allen Forbes and Paul Cadman, France and New England (Boston, MA: State Street Trust, 1929), 3: 1; for the intercolonial warfare, see Jean Pellerin, La Nouvelle-France démaquillée (Montréal: Éd. Varia, 2001); and Robert Leckie, ‘A Few Acres of Snow’: The Saga of the French and Indian Wars (New York: Wiley, 1999). The entire period is ably chronicled in Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l'Amérique française (Paris: Flammarion, 2003).

17. François Weil, Les Franco-Américains, 1860–1980 (Paris: Belin, 1989), 30–4.

18. I elaborate upon this argument in my article, ‘Québec's ‘‘America Problem’’: Differential Threat Perception in the North American Security Community’, American Review of Canadian Studies 36 (Winter 2006): 552–67.

19. As is argued in Yvan Lamonde, Allégeances et dépendances: L'histoire d'une ambivalence identitaire (Québec: Éd. Nota Bene, 2001).

20. The cycle is a long-running one. See Gustave Lanctot, Canada and the American Revolution, 1774–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); Louis-Georges Harvey, Le Printemps de l'Amérique française: Américanité, anticolonialisme et républicanisme dans le discours politique québécois, 1805–1837 (Montréal; Éd. du Boréal, 2005); Louis Balthazar and Alfred Hero, Jr, Le Québec dans l'espace américain (Montréal: Québec Amérique, 1999); and Gérard Bouchard, ‘Le Québec comme collectivité neuve: Le refus de l'américanité dans le discours de la survivance,’ in Québécois et Américains: La culture québécoise aux XIX ^e et XX ^e siècles, ed. Bouchard and Yvan Lamonde (Montréal: Éd. Fides, 1995), 15–60.

21. Based on data gleaned from a multi-country opinion poll sponsored by La Presse, the results of which were published several weeks before the 2004 American presidential election.

22. Paul C. Adams, ‘The September 11 Attacks as Viewed from Quebec: The Small-Nation Code in Geopolitical Discourse’, Political Geography 23 (August 2004): 765–95.

23. For an extreme statement of the position that Quebeckers are now, and have always been, pacificistic possessors of an ‘innocent past,’ see Jacques Dufresne, Le Courage et la lucidité: Essai sur la constitution du Québec souverain (Sillery; Septentrion, 1990), 28.

24. For the ‘Jacksonian’ ideal type in US grand strategy, see Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Knopf, 2001).

25. Jean-Sébastien Rioux, ‘Two Solitudes: Quebecers’ Attitudes Regarding Canadian Security and Defence Policy’, a paper prepared for the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute's (CDFAI) Research Paper Series, February 2005, 23. The words in single quotations are taken from a 2004 opinion survey commissioned by CDFAI, ‘Visions of Canadian Foreign Policy’.

26. Epistemic communities are formal and informal networks of policy intellectuals (and other experts), and are often argued to be prominent vehicles, in the transatlantic community especially, for the diffusion of policy ideas; typically, it is the Anglo-American context within transatlantic relations that has elicited the most sustained attention of students of such communities. See Emanuel Adler and Peter M. Haas, ‘Conclusion: Epistemic Communities, World Order, and the Creation of a Reflective Research Program’, International Organization 46 (Winter 1992): 367–98.

27. On the univocal media coverage of the Iraq war in France, see Alain Hertoghe, La Guerre à outrances: Comment la presse nous a désinformés sur l'Irak (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2003).

28. Quoted in Robert Wolfe, ‘Most Safely on the Fence? A Round Table on the Possibility of a Canadian Foreign Policy after 9/11’, Canadian Foreign Policy 11 (Fall 2004): 97–118, citation at 109.

29. Denis Monière, Les Relations France-Québec: Pérégrinations d'un intellectuel Québécois en France, 2001–2004 (Montréal: Chaire Hector-Fabre d'histoire du Québec, Université du Québec), 2004, 94, 99 (unless otherwise noted, all translations are by me).

30. Timothy Garton Ash, Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West (New York: Random House, 2004). According to Garton Ash, Europe these days is poised between a ‘Euro-Gaullism’ championed by the French, and a ‘Euro-Atlanticism’ promoted by the British. ‘Americans,’ he says, ‘have not been wrong to see in France the political leader of Europe as Not-America’, 5.

31. Approvingly, for Noël Mamère and Olivier Warin, Non merci, Oncle Sam! (Paris: Éd. Ramsay, 1999); disapprovingly, for Pierre Rigoulot, L'Antiaméricanisme: Critique d'un prêt-à-penser rétrograde et chauvin (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2004).

32. On the bilateral tensions of the 1960s, a decade during which de Gaulle served as president of the Fifth Republic, see Vincent Jauvert, L'Amérique contre de Gaulle: Histoire secrète, 1961–1969 (Paris: Seuil, 2000); and Frank Costigliola, ‘The Failed Design: Kennedy, de Gaulle, and the Struggle for Europe’, Diplomatic History 8 (Summer 1984): 227–51.

33. Crane Brinton, The Americans and the French (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 246.

34. That official was Hubert Védrine; see his Les Cartes de la France: [Agrave] l'heure de le mondialisation (Paris: Fayard, 2000).

35. See Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, An Alliance at Risk: The United States and Europe since September 11, trans. George A. Holoch, Jr. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Also see Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

36. On that legitimacy crisis, see Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 105–58.

37. Walter Russell Mead, ‘Why Do They Hate Us? Two Books Take Aim at French Anti-Americanism’, Foreign Affairs 82 (March/April 2003): 139–42, quote at 139.

38. See the letter to the editor written by the director of Le Nouvel Observateur, in reaction to charges not only of French anti-Americanism but also of anti-Semitism. Regarding the latter, he observed that his country had never been less anti-Semitic than it now (late 2002) was, and as for its being anti-American, ‘I find the galloping Americanization of the French to be considerably more marked than their alleged anti-Americanism.’ Jean Daniel, ‘Anti-Semitism and Anti-Americanism’, International Herald Tribune 18 October 2002, 9.

39. See in particular, Jean-François Revel, L'Obsession anti-américaine: Son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses inconséquences (Paris: Plon, 2002); and Philippe Roger, L'Ennemi américain: Généalogie de l'antiaméricanisme français (Paris: Seuil, 2002).

40. Pascal Ory, ‘From Baudelaire to Duhamel: An Unlikely Antipathy’, in The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism: A Century of French Perception, eds Denis Lacorne, Jacques Rupnik and Marie-France Toinet (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990), 42–54.

41. See W.B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, in The Importance of Language, ed. Max Black (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 123; and William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), chap. 1: ‘Essentially Contested Concepts in Politics’.

42. Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2006).

43. Tony Judt and Denis Lacorne, With Us or Against Us: Studies in Global Anti-Americanism (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 13.

44. André Kaspi, Les États-Unis d'aujourd'hui: Mal connus, mal aimés, mal compris (Paris: Plon, 1999), 28–9.

45. See Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973); Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); Cushing Strout, The American Image of the Old World (New York: Harper & Row, 1963); Arthur P. Whitaker, The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1954); and Daniel J. Boorstin, America and the Image of Europe: Reflections on American Thought (New York: Meridian Books, 1960).

46. Josef Joffe, ‘Dissecting Anti-isms’, American Interest 1 (Summer 2006): 164–70. Also see this same author's Überpower, chap. 3: ‘The Rise of Anti-Americanism’.

47. Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Hating America: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), viii–ix.

48. For this relative emphasis upon capability, see Dominique David, ‘Pourquoi sommes-nous ‘anti-américains’?’ Études 398 (January 2003): 9–20.

49. For an elaboration of this comment, see David G. Haglund, ‘Les mythes qui nous font vivre et mentir’, in Les Relations transatlantiques: De la tourmente à l'apaisement? ed. Arthur Paecht (Paris: Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques/Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), 227–36.

50. On respective American and French forays into public diplomacy in the bilateral context, see Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Robert J. Young, Marketing Marianne: French Propaganda in America, 1900–1940 (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2004).

51. André Tardieu, France and America: Some Experiences in Cooperation (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 3–4. Tardieu was a major figure in the French political class of the early twentieth century, having represented Georges Clemenceau as special commissioner in Washington during the latter years of the First World War, been an important drafter of French positions at the Versailles peace talks, and subsequently a cabinet member in several governments of the 1920s and 1930s, twice serving as prime minister (technically, président du Conseil). He was also a political journalist, and a leading intellectual of his era.

52. Michel Fortmann and Hélène Viau, ‘A Model Ally? France and the US during the Kosovo Crisis of 1998–99’, in The France-US Leadership Race: Closely Watched Allies, ed. David G. Haglund (Kingston, ON: Queen's Quarterly, 2000), 87–110, quote at 97.

53. Polls conducted at the time found 38% of the French expressing a preference for Reagan, and 25% favouring Mondale; at the same time, according to a survey conducted by Le Monde, 44% of the public identified themselves as pro-American, versus 15% who professed to be anti-American. Jacques Rupnik, ‘Anti-Americanism and the Modern: The Image of the United States in French Public Opinion’, in France and Modernisation, ed. John Gaffney (Aldershot: Avebury, 1988), 189–205, citation at 223–4.

54. See Ernst Weisenfeld, Quelle Allemagne pour la France? La politique étrangère et l'unité allemande depuis 1944 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1989), 155–58.

55. Denis Lacorne and Jacques Rupnik, ‘Introduction: France Bewitched by America’, in Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism, 1–31. Also see Diana Pinto, ‘De l'antiaméricanisme à l'américanophile: L'itinéraire de l'intelligentsia française’, Commentaire 8 (Autumn 1985): 874–79.

56. I say ‘just about’, because some in France might recall a remark made in early December 1999 by Senator John McCain, who was venting his frustration at another in a series of diplomatic tussles between America and France, and let slip the undiplomatic observation that this was ‘one of the many reasons I hate the French’. Quoted in Howard Kurtz, ‘Shocking Candor: McCain Gets the Press's Attention’, International Herald Tribune, 9 December 1999, 3.

57. See Dominique Moïsi, ‘Chirac of France: A New Leader of the West?’, Foreign Affairs 74 (November/December 1995): 8–13; and Gilles Delafon and Thomas Sancton, Dear Jacques, Cher Bill: Au cœur de l'Elysée et de la Maison Blanche, 1995–1999 (Paris: Plon, 1999), 16–17.

58. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, ‘The Israel Lobby’, London Review of Books, 23 March 2006.

59. The literature is vast. For examples, see Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Alexander De Conde, Ethnicity, Race, and American Foreign Policy: A History (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1992); Denis Lacorne, La Crise de l'identité américaine: Du melting-pot au multiculturalisme (Paris: Fayard, 1997); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998); and Louis L. Gerson, The Hyphenate in Recent American Politics and Diplomacy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1964).

60. David H. Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press), 1989.

61. Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, France and the United States: From the Beginnings to the Present, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 46–8.

62. See for one attempt to gauge the impact of ethnic diasporas upon American foreign policy in this period, Joseph P. O'Grady, ed., The Immigrants’ Influence on Wilson's Peace Politics (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967). Tellingly, O'Grady's research project included case studies of the following diasporas in the US: German, Irish, British, Italian, Magyar, South Slav, Czech, Slovak/Carpatho-Ruthenian, Polish, Jewish, and even ‘Mid-European Union’ – but no chapter on the French.

63. Koenraad W. Swart, The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964).

64. Shelby Cullom Davis, The French War Machine (London: Allen and Unwin, 1937), 29–30.

65. Michel Winock, La Belle Époque: La France de 1900 à 1914 (Paris: Perrin, 2002), 34–41; Joseph J. Spengler, France Faces Depopulation: Postlude Edition, 1936–1976 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979), chap. 6.

66. Austin J. App, ‘The Germans’, in O'Grady, The Immigrants’ Influence on Wilson's Peace Politics, 30–55.

67. Elizabeth Brett White, American Opinion of France: From Lafayette to Poincaré (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 1927, xi–xii.

68. Tardieu, France and America, 302–3.

69. Jean Heffer, ‘Préface’ to Weil, Les Franco-Américains, 5.

70. Gabriel Sheffer, Diaspora Politics: At Home and Abroad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 9.

71. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 71.

72. See Ramsay Cook, Canada and the French-Canadian Question (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1986, orig. pub. 1966), 37, 107; and Desmond Morton, A Military History of Canada: From Champlain to the Gulf War, 3rd edn (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992), 152.

73. See John MacFarlane, Ernest Lapointe and Quebec's Influence on Canadian Foreign Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). Also see David G. Haglund, ‘Are We the Isolationists?’ North American Isolationism in a Comparative Context’, International Journal 58 (Winter 2002–2003): 1–23.

74. Georges Vattier, Essai sur la mentalité canadienne-française (Paris: Champion, 1928), 1–2.

75. Gaston Henry-Haye, La Grande Éclipse franco-américaine (Paris: Plon, 1972); Esther Delisle, Essais sur l'imprégnation fasciste au Québec (Montréal: Éd. Varia, 2002); and Guy Fritsch-Estrangin, New York entre de Gaulle et Pétain: Les Français aux États-Unis de 1940 à 1946 (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1969). Also see the preface written by Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge, ‘Histoire d'une querelle’, in Robert Charbonneau, La France et nous: Journal d'une querelle (Québec: Bibliothèque québécoise), 1993, 7–26.

76. See Eldon Black, Direct Intervention: Canada-France Relations, 1967–1974 (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1996); J.F. Bosher, The Gaullist Attack on Canada, 1967–1997 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999); and Frédéric Bastien, Relations particulières: La France face au Québec après de Gaulle (Montréal: Éd. du Boréal, 1999).

77. Quoted in Lamonde, Allégeances et dependances, 149.

78. Quoted in Narcisse Faucher de Saint-Maurice, Le Canada et les canadiens-français pendant la guerre franco-prussienne (Québec: A. Coté, 1888), 14–15.

79. On the transformation of France under republican rule, see Jean Touchard, La Gauche en France depuis 1900 (Paris: Éd. du Seuil), 1981.

80. See Damien-Claude Bélanger, ‘Lionel Groulx and Franco-America’, American Review of Canadian Studies 33 (Autumn 2003): 373–89.

81. Jacques Ferron, ‘Tout recommence en '40’, in his collection of essays, Escarmouches: La longue passe, vol. 1 (Montréal: Leméac, 1975), 51–7.

82. James C. Bennett, ‘The Emerging Anglosphere’, Orbis 46 (Winter 2002): 111–26. For a critical analysis of this concept, see David G. Haglund, ‘Relating to the Anglosphere: Canada, ‘‘Culture,’’ and the Question of Military Intervention’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies 3 (Autumn 2005): 179–98.

83. ‘Orwellian’ in the sense conveyed in Animal Farm, paraphrasing the revolution's degradation of the original commitment to equality among all the denizens of the farm, as expressed in the new, single, commandment of the ruling pigs: ‘all the animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’. George Orwell, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951; orig. pub., 1945), 114.

84. The imagery employed by one author to describe an earlier period of societal interpenetration by which America saws itself inserted into a transatlantic ‘civilisation’ notwithstanding the conviction that the ‘meaning’ of America could only be found in the establishment of a social order different from, and better than, that prevailing on the European shores of the Atlantic. See Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).