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Reconcilable Differences: A History of Canada-US Relations, by Stephen Azzi

Reviewed by: Edelgard Mahant, Glendon College, York UniversityIn the academic world, it is a truism that original research is published in scholarly books or journals whereas good textbooks summarize the best available published research. Stephen Azzi attempts to straddle this gulf; he has written a textbook that includes much original research as well as new interpretation of the history of Canada-US relations. At the same time, he tries to cover two aspects of Canadian-American relations that are often the subject of separate studies--intergovernmental relations and a comparison of the politics and political attitudes in the two countries. Amazingly, he has to a large extent succeeded in doing some of all of the above, and that in a relatively short book of less than 300 pages.The originality of Azzi's point of view lies in his rejection of the standard Hartz/Lipset interpretation that sees Canadians as having a political culture, derived from British toryism and Catholic authoritarianism, that differs from that of the US, which is based on individualism and Lockean liberalism. Azzi argues that Canadians and Americans have held similar political attitudes for as long as these two countries have existed. He makes a good case for the nineteenth century, although he underestimates the pro-British imperialist attitudes that suffused much of English Canada in the years before the First World War. His case is weaker when he discusses the second half of the twentieth and the beginnings of the twenty-first century. When Canadian and American political cultures appear to diverge, Azzi resorts to manipulating the facts to make them fit. If we exclude Quebec from Canada and the South from the US, well, yes, the differences are not so great. And what does it matter that Americans buy bigger cars than Canadians; that is because they have money. The real question is why Americans choose to spend their money as they do (250-251). In his determination to show that Canadians and Americans usually get along well and that 9/11 did not make much of a difference, he does not mention that Canadians and Americans now need passports to cross their common border, a circumstance that has probably done more than anything else since 1945 to discourage contact between the two peoples.The first third of the book includes much original research. There are many interesting stories of the relations between the people of Maine and New Brunswick and of the mistreatment of blacks on both sides of the border, regardless of the Underground Railway and the Canadian opposition to slavery, which was similar to that in the northern states. Azzi's account of the twentieth century is largely based on existing secondary sources, as is appropriate for a textbook. He also makes a valiant attempt to keep his last chapter as up to date as it could possibly be. …