From Hubert Aquin to Maurice Séguin and Jean Bouthillette, there was the presumption that the Quebec nation bore within itself the reasons for its failure as a country. Even if they attribute their failure to the Canadian federal government, the sovereignists would find themselves in front of a mirror reflecting their own image, from Trudeau to Chrétien to Trudeau…
However, it will never cross anyone’s mind to invoke such a pathology to explain the obvious failure of other non-sovereign nations, such as Catalonia, Scotland, Tibet or Kabylia. We will agree that the impasse actually comes from the stubborn refusal of a power to grant any form of independence to one of its components. Conversely, if it is true that Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia have been covered with new sovereign states over the past sixty years, this cannot be explained by the psychologizing explanations that we delude ourselves into yet to explain the Quebec case.
What if the best explanation for Quebec’s failure to achieve success was not atavistic, but rather lay in the fact that North America has been plunged into a veritable geopolitical freezer for almost two centuries?
The current contours of the states of North America were roughly fixed in the middle of the 19th century.e century around the desire of the United States to develop its own territory. In the north, the Webster-Ashburton treaty of 1842 first served the Americans to settle territorial disputes with Great Britain, roughly by fixing the border along the 49e parallel, so as to give free hands to the south in order to crush the Mexican neighbor, between 1846 to 1848, and to suddenly increase the surface area of the Union by 30%, from Oregon to Arizona.
From 1861 to 1865, the secession of seven southern states constituted the final threat to the continental order imposed by Washington. However, we know how high the price was to pay in order to reestablish unity and to what extent the Americans have since maintained the cult of an indivisible Union fixed for eternity. Certainly, the States of America continued to evolve: Mexico experienced its share of revolutions and Cuba even adopted a communist regime. However, like Asia and Africa, which will, in the meantime, break up into a myriad of states, nothing has since changed on Uncle Sam’s continent.
Threat to stability
Few researchers have looked into it since Jean-François Lisée (In the eagle’s eye. Washington versus Quebec, Boréal, 1990) on the determination of the United States, on a diplomatic, economic and cultural level, to preserve the unity and territorial integrity of Canada. The successive declarations of Clinton or Obama in favor of a “friendly and united” Canada nevertheless regularly remind us of the importance that Uncle Sam gives to the political stability of the continent, especially if he must in the meantime intervene on points otherwise hot elsewhere in the world.
It is therefore clear the role that American power, and in particular the Ottawa-Washington tandem, has historically been able to play so that Quebec nationalism never leads to the creation of a new sovereign state which would immediately have been perceived as a threat. to stability in the region.
However, the United States is currently experiencing a period of disruption likely to undermine its vigilance regarding what is happening elsewhere on the continent; whether or not Donald Trump is elected this fall, the United States is already showing itself less capable of ensuring its control over the internal affairs of its neighbors, especially if they are swept away by an isolationist wave that the New York billionaire calls of all his wishes.
In this context, what place will Canadian unity occupy with regard to domestic issues? For example, what importance would a Trump government place on preserving the unity of Justin Trudeau’s Canada at all costs? In short, the election most likely to reshuffle the cards in Quebec is perhaps not the one we think. With the 2025-2026 federal and provincial elections on the horizon, it could well be that the election to watch from a Quebec point of view is that of next November which will designate the next president of the United States.