Is Canada soluble in nationalism? Ian Angus interviewed by Jean ‐Philippe Warren Available in French translation in Arguments: Politiques, Societié, and Histoire Most Québécois are ignorant of this stream of thought that was extremely influential in English Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. Can you say a few words on the principles and claims of “dependency theory”? Let me begin with Harold Innis. 1 He is one of the strongest influences in my work on Canada. Harold Innis is the key English Canadian dependency theorist. Innis’s work is the most important political economy oriented history of Canada because Canada is understood in terms of the staple resources that predominated both at certain points of time and in different regions. Resource extraction was by a dependent colony to the advantage of an imperial centre ruled by a capitalist class with both national and imperial connections. These relationships of communication and transportation structure social development to the advantage of the empire and the disadvantage of the colonial residents and workers. Paris fashions underlay the fur trade. On the basis of Innis’s economic dependency theory, one can begin to analyze phenomena throughout society and thought and to show how this dependency makes it difficult for us to address directly the political problems with which we are faced. This has been the task of much of my work, what one might call a political theory and even philosophy of dependency. Can you be more specific about this? The fish off the Grand Banks was probably the first of Canadian staples. The first period of Canadian history is shaped by Cod fisheries because it was this raw material that was exported to Europe. Then came the fur trade, and later on mining and materials of that sort, and then wheat (in a movement that goes from East to West). In British Columbia the export of lumber is still very important for our local economy (even to this day the number of new housing starts in the United States is an index of how good the economy in British Columbia is!). Innis had the great virtue of not treating the Canadian economy as a separate entity but in terms of its dependent relation to an Imperial center. First France, then England, and then the United States. It changed over time. To me that is the ground on which one asks any serious about Canada and its present situation and the future. While my own work is not political economy, I believe that any serious asking of political and philosophical questions must bear in mind the formative influence of economic interests. To begin from the problem of dependency is to keep foremost the notion that our national institutions derive from unequal economic and political relations. The debate between Marxism and dependency theory in the 1970’s was an important moment in which the specifics of this history and its present significance were debated. Unfortunately, that debate was abandoned rather than resolved because of the onslaught of aggressive free trade neo‐ liberalism that came after. In Latin America also, one has been cut off from these earlier debates. In order to confront the continuing legacy of dependency we need to uncover and push forward these issues. As you know there is a very ongoing strong debate in Quebec about the relevancy and necessity of nationalism in a modern or even postmodern society. Some argue that nationalism is by its own nature inevitably racist or xenophobic. On the opposite, some scholars, as George Grant, viewed favourably Quebec nationalism. What is your position on nationalism in general and on Quebec nationalism in particular? Perhaps I can break that question into two parts. I need first to separate the question of English Canadian nationalism from Quebec nationalism. This separation struck me somewhere around the mid‐1980s, I think. There were two influences. One was a francophone reviewer of a SSHRC proposal that I wrote. This reviewer pointed out that when I said Canadian I was really referring to strictly English Canadian writers. I had to admit that was true. I wanted to talk about Canada but didn’t know about Quebec sufficiently. Later Robert S. Schwartzwald (who is currently the editor of the International journal of Canadian Studies and has recently taken up a chair of English Studies at the Universite de Montreal.), with whom I worked a lot at the University of Massachusetts, said to me: why don’t you just talk about English Canada? And somehow (was it the time or my own stupidity?) this came like a revelation to me. It liberated me to say what I wanted to say without dealing with the problem of how to deal with the parts of Canada, and specifically the Francophone Canada with which I didn’t have first hand experience. For me thinking politically and philosophically is done in the first person; it’s I or WE. For that reason I always avoided speaking for others. Speaking for others is a way of continuing their dependency by appropriating an imperial, central, voice. I think one should speak about that to which one belongs. This was very important to me. It made me see that there are three main groupings of people in Canada: First Nations, the Francophones mainly in Quebec, and what I call English Canada. I emphasize that I use this name not because of the people’s origins but because of the language they speak. In Quebec you will easily understand this but, here, this statement is a very controversial one because people tend to think of individuals rather than the language. This is related to the fact that language and communication are quite often treated superficially in English‐Canada as simply a means, or transportation, of communication, as opposed to a forming influence in public life. I later focused on the notion of a medium of communication in developing what I call a dependency theory of communication. After that realization my work focused specifically on English Canada. My reflections came together in A Border Within. I was very concerned to address what was already a rising feeling mainly because of the problems in the Balkans at the time, that nationalism was necessarily a violent and exclusive creed. I went to some effort in that book to show that nationalism is amenable to many different forms and politics. It is what would be called in theoretical terms a floating signifier. Nationalism can be attached to a class proletarian dimension which we have seen earlier in history. It can be attached to a kind of peasant revolution or peasant movement for independence. It can be an aggressive nationalism of the fascist type. I tried to show that you can’t condemn nationalism outright. That was my first point. The second point that I wanted to make concerned the specific formation of English Canadian nationalism. This nationalism had tried to maintain independence from the American empire. In that context I considered it a progressive force. As for Quebec nationalism, it seems to me, and I am speaking as an outsider, but having watched politics in Quebec for quite a long time now, it seems to me that one of the most important things there, is that the nationalist moment has been the focus, the point of attraction as it were, for most progressive feelings and movements for a long time, that is from about 1965 through to at least 2000. Nationalism had, in Quebec (as well as in English‐Canada, but more or less without any relationship to each other), a positive connotation, a socially progressive connotation. Now we have entered into a new period again with the stronger forces of globalization and it is a difficult question to measure how much has changed with regards to this. But I would still say that any politics that seeks to be independent, either in English‐Canada or Quebec, is going to have to encounter the power of United States at some point. It is complicated in Quebec by your relation to English‐ Canada and Ottawa and so on; but this is true in Latin America too. The United States has always wanted to run the continent, the Americas. And any independent politics, be it here, in Venezuela or Cuba, always encounters the problem of the United States and therefore always to be sensible and genuine it has to have a nationalist component. I still think that. You spoke about a 35 year period that stretches between 1965 and 2000. During this period Quebec nationalist sentiment not only remained strong but it corresponded to a shift in the collective reference. French Canadians began referring to themselves as Québécois. We tend to overlook the fact that English‐ Canada underwent as well a formidable transformation of its national identity. It gave itself symbols; a national anthem, a flag, a multicultural policy, and so forth. How can we describe this transformation between Canada in the 1950s (with mainly a British component) to Canada as it is conceived now? In my essay published in the Cahiers de recherche sociologique, I used the linguistic term ‘slide’, to explain the way in which in English‐Canada we talk usually not of English‐Canada but of Canada. When we referred to Canada, up to perhaps recently, we thought simply of ourselves and not so much the First Nations and Quebec. Those people are different from us. So when we speak of Canada we should in some sense include them. We haven’t really done that. We slid from the sense of our particular language and culture to Canada ‐‐ and back and forth.