AFTER CANADA. Canadians and Québécois huddle by their bonfires in the gathering darkness, warmed by wavering flames and unwavering certainties. They find comfort in magic and nostalgia — in hearing once more the cherished legends and songs of childhood and youth, tales of villainy and heroism, epic moments and missed opportunities. But some also suspect, at some level, that they are singing their songs in a foreign land, a post-Canadian terrain, shaped by a post-Referendum (or post-1976 or -1965 or -1945) process of dissolution whose paradoxical decisiveness has only slowly become apparent. They — we — sense, at some level, that the landscape surrounding our brave bonfire is that of the former Canada, that the narratives, institutions, flags, anthems, sports, legends and personalities that all once offered us a reassurance that we belong to a time and place, that allowed us to have a "We" separate from the "They", have faded and even disappeared. Many of these myths and symbols we barely remember; others we can see, on the far side of the Rubicon we crossed in 1995, perhaps without fully realizing that we were doing so. Outside its half-life in commercial messages, synthetic events and official self-celebration — all of which have become more and more stridently fervent precisely to the extent that the Canadian nationalism they are designed to invoke is no longer available — the complex of myths and symbols through which Canada was once constructed is visibly coming undone. Our brave bonfire songs and speeches fall into vast cavernous silences. Much of what we had once believed, many of the signs that had once spoken of an (illusory) national permanence and continuity over time, linger as shadows in a pre-millennial twilight. "I am Canadian" echoes weakly today — as a slogan from a beer commercial.

The vast library on the Canadian Crisis is an indication of this curious and explosive mixture of certainty and doubt, exaltation and anguish.[1] Here one finds a profusion of languages and yet few effective translations, a thousand authors and yet only the slightest hint of a (non-conscripted) audience, an infinity of close textual readings and speculations about possible or impossible worlds, yet a shortage of factual representations of the social world we do inhabit. Here, in short, one finds all the symptoms of postmodernity as a condition of life — and yet, of late, there are a few voices which, disregarding the narrative pay-offs of keeping the audience in suspense, announce that the dreaded "it" has already happened: that the bi-national, bi-cultural, liberal, egalitarian mythologies in which so many Canadians and Québécois had traced the outlines of their identities have had their day.[2] Are the crowds around the bonfires, proclaiming in unison the virtues of Us and the evils of Them, ready to attend to these voices?

Everywhere in this library of polemic and analysis one finds international examples: the rival camps delight in drawing parallels between their opponents and the most extremist of modern movements, from Nazism to Balkan nationalism to Islamic fundamentalism.[3] In this climate of global parallel-mongering, one hesitates to draw a further one. Still, if we want to understand what can happen if one takes the framework of an old monarchical empire, and injects into this husk both the new warm breath of nationalism and a universalizing "total" ideology, we could turn to the attempted transformation of the old liberal empire of the north into a "new democratic" Canada; or we could turn to the effort to construct a new, universal yet patriotic "Soviet Man" on the wreckage of old imperial Russia. In both cases, the national/universal projects have unavoidably come to terms with the contradictions inherent in the empires they inherited; in neither case did a program of "official nationalism" (to use a phrase adopted by Benedict Anderson)[4] succeed over the long term in integrating the new citizens into the new political project.

For many "Canadians" and (interestingly) perhaps also for some "Québécois", unable to face either a loss of history of this magnitude or the violence threatened by the future, to accept either the loss of Canada or the unlikelihood (under conditions of postmodernity) of a fully self-determining Québec, the present moment is articulated in nationalisms that are weightless, nostalgic and curiously shrill. In the former but nonetheless still bourgeois Canada, the tasteful and circumspect middle-class citizen would be wise to treat history not as a set of pressing problems in the present, but as a series of disconnected and pleasing moments — as a past-time or, more commonly, as a series of picturesque commercials. There are countervailing voices, but one wonders about the scope of their audience, as around our bonfires we listen to the truths of our story-tellers, as they one and all describe the inevitability and goodness of our respective nations, and the fiery and apocalyptic ends which will terminate our enemies. And still the darkness gathers, and in the depths of our nostalgia and fierce denials, we struggle to keep the wounds of time at bay, and to overcome the uncanny sadness evoked by the tarnished medals of our old soldiers, our mouldering books of reminiscences and crumbling statues, our fading ideals and faltering memories.

Thirty years or more of the Canadian Crisis have generated a fierce need to mythologize our histories. Some would like to limit this long moment of dissolution by calling it the "constitutional crisis"[5] (or even more restrictively, "Meech Lake" or "Charlottetown"). But this is misleading: it is more a question of the collapse of the entire postwar myth-symbol complex[6] without which, inter alia, "Canadian history" cannot function in any of its familiar forms. Many rewards, monetary and symbolic, book contracts and television appearances, await those whose voices are the loudest and tell the best-loved and most familiar tales. So many authorities, fixed and sure in their command of the unchanging Canadian essence and of the Canadian landscape which is its stage, our truth and our destiny, now parade before us. On television and in this literature, we encounter achieved and final identities — the perpetually alienated Westerner, the fervent nationaliste, the ardent feminist Charterphile....To be in the former Canada and listen to these voices recalls the pathos of the former East Bloc, where one finds old soldiers earnestly reminding passers-by of the achievements of the Communist Party as they sell their medals. Now that we live in the former Canada, this patch of the globe whose political future was probably decided, at least in general terms, in the last quarter of the 20th century (no matter how many contorted formulae and constitutional compromises will be attempted in the years to come), such authorities, although they convey almost nothing of value about the challenges confronting those who have no choice but to come after Canada, at least give us the reassurance of a home. At least, we can think as we listen to these familiar voices with their age-old grievances and "positions", these echoes from the nation-state of our youth — at least not that much has changed, at least we have a home to return to.

But everything has changed — since 1975, certainly; since 1995, unmistakably. The myth of a bi-national, bi-cultural, bilingual, liberal democratic welfare state is dead, and it will not be reborn. Many of us have no home and no homeland. The climate is culturally complex, and for realists and skeptics, who will so easily be derided as traitors, perhaps somewhat dangerous. Do not question the story-tellers, most of them nationalists and nationalistes of one sort or another, if you value your respectability as a good citizen in this imaginary discursive universe of sound, sensible burghers. Do not question this "Canada" and this "Quebec", so effortlessly and flawlessly produced, so immensely well-documented, with their birth certificates, evolutionary narratives, heroes and villains, these magical structures which deliver us from our mortality and from our inconsequence. Do not doubt, if you are a loyal "Canadian", that Canada, founded sometime in the early to mid-19th century through a compact between the two principal European peoples, has from time immemorial been a liberal-democratic nation-state characterized by social inclusiveness and the pursuit of the "middle way". Do not fail to celebrate, even if you live in Southern Ontario, the northern austerities of "the land" itself,[7] the humane and generous values upon which we all agree (and which from time before memory have distinguished us from the Americans), our almost infinite flexibility, tolerance and love of honourable compromise.[8] Do not doubt, if you are a loyal Québécois, that Québec, a nation from time immemorial, has been characterized by the pursuit of collective dreams rather than an individualist liberalism, and that the Québécois have always and everywhere defended their identity against the "English" (or perhaps Canadian?) oppressor. Above all, do not, on either side — and this is quite difficult — find hilarious the endless dichotomization of the trivial, the ceaseless visual confrontations of the maple leaf[9] and the fleur-de-lis, the transformation of politics to a low-grade soap opera or a junior league hockey game. Do not fail to respect the voices of authority as they resound around you, and do not hesitate to regard the works of the Crisis, the ponderous utterances of a David Bercuson or a Pierre Bourgault, as profound writings of world-historic significance.

As a lapsed Canadian,[10] distant (at least to some extent) from, and suspicious of, most of the narratives of my childhood, I fear the hot breaths and fierce eyes of the faithful, the implacable certainties of so many of these Canadian and Québécois voices in this library of Crisis books. Many of them, perhaps unintentionally, and often with the appearance of the most benign universality and reason, prepare their listeners for violence. For them, Canada and Québec have the obviousness and the clarity of established facts. Canada is a country, a place, an essence, a spirit, above all a great continuity. A continuous national history, as necessary and inevitable as evolution itself, links the first "Canadians" struggling for survival in the Ice Age to today’s "Canadians" shopping at Walmart and eating at Burger King. (Thus, for those of one party, "Canadian" nationalism precedes, logically and chronologically and morally, its Québec antagonist). For both federalists and sovereigntists, Canada is a nation-state among nation-states; and "Canadian history" is obviously about everything that happened within that section of the planet now claimed by this sovereign nation-state. For some, Canada is a model — has not the United Nations said so, we are reminded with such sad insistence! — to the whole world. Or, at the bonfires of the other great orientation, it is also all equally obvious: Québec is a country, a place, an essence, a continuity, a future nation-state among nation-states; "Québec history" is about that which happened within the soon-to-be sovereign territory of Québec, the necessary, inevitable, evolutionary outcome of the Conquest and of ignorant "English Canadian" betrayals of the bi-national compact at the heart of Confederation.

On both sides, then, one finds continuous national histories, myth-symbol complexes with heroes, villains, turning-points and sacred landscapes, and finally the assurance (unless the nation’s Other is successful) of a happy ending. On both sides, historical continuity is secured by "reading back" into time the boundaries and certainties of the present: in the Historical Atlas of Canada, even the first nomads from Siberia somehow figure into the Canadian narrative. Ignorant themselves that they were "Canadian", Marie de l’Incarnation and the Marquis de Montcalm, Alexander Mackenzie and T. C. Haliburton are rebaptised as the ancestors of rival nations. Do not question, do not even notice, these practices, this vast project of using the past as a mine for a nationalism of reassurance, and do not hesitate to reconceptualize whole peoples and subcontinents as moments in the inevitability and goodness of the nation — Canada for most, Québec for the perhaps more discriminating palate. To do without this continuity is to do without the reassurances of understanding and identity. It is to live without the security and certainty of a country. And therein lies the difficulty of becoming a lapsed Canadian.

We face the worst crisis in our history, Canadians and Québécois are told so often and so emphatically. From an alternative point of view, however, it would be more correct to say we confront the crisis of Canadian history, as a nation-born-of-empire dissolves into the constituent contradictions which, left unresolved and even unnoticed at the time of the project’s initiation (i.e., primarily in the third quarter of the 20th century) have made the project of Canadian history impossible.[11] In its absence, we have myth-symbol complexes whose self-interested procedures for the generation of truths preclude the historians’ preoccupation with questions of evidence. We live fictitiously (and if we are posing as postmoderns, we attempt to celebrate this weightlessness along with Canada’s "fluidity" and "undecidability"); the "Canada" we inhabit, this place and this cultural essence, is beyond history and evidence. Or, better, this "Canada" is a whole, an ideal, whose completeness is now compromised by its enemies without and within.

The abundant literature on the Crisis repeats this imagery to the point of exhaustion — we have been asked Must Canada Fail? too many times; and visually, we have been assaulted by torn maple leafs, shattered three-dimensional maps, even towering lettering of a style more commonly associated with the latest horror movie. (Given the Fraser Institute provenance of so much of this violently right-wing material, the slasher-flick typography has a certain weird appropriateness).[12] On the other side, Québécois are repeatedly told, "It’s now or never"[13] although this "now" seems remarkably durable. To refuse to be alarmed by this propaganda of apocalypse is to confess to emotional autism in the company of well-practised, even professional, hysterics. To be a lapsed Canadian is to be ill-at-ease in this entire discussion.

And yet, despite or because of all the certainties we express about the past and the future, despite the intensity of the bonfire circles as they chant and sing the truths that the lapsed can no longer identify as their own, the darkness gathers. Is there safety in numbers? Perhaps not, if so much of what is chanted around our fires concerns the deep evil of Them and the spotless innocence of Us. Perhaps not, if so much of it is factually wrong — and carelessness with historical fact characterizes this Crisis, not as an incidental but an intrinsic aspect of its functioning.[14] Perhaps not, if so much of this literature suggests that within the former Canada one ethnic group or another bears the burden of being the country’s "essence"[15] (the other ethnicities, nationalisms and identities thereby becoming either oppressively hegemonic or derisively marginal). We live in a time when the historians’ pathetic little "facts", derided from both left and right, yield to the nationalists’ grand myths. Freed from the drab and mundane world of Canadian political history, we are free to explore the exalted rhetoric of violence. And we are being prepared for a violence that, quite apart from the critique one might make of it on ethical or religious grounds, is also susceptible to an aesthetic denunciation: this will be a stupid, pointless, banal, miniature, silly little violence; we shall destroy each other over causes that will never make the back pages of the world’s newspapers.[16] And, in anticipatory retrospect, some burden of responsibility for this outcome will rest on the shoulders of the loyal Canadians and Québécois who write so many of these volumes, discretely or otherwise dripping with venom.[17] At the very least, one would recommend, to readers susceptible to the violent magic of nationalist imagery, that they demand to be told the approximate price in lives entailed by the utopian projects of revanchism and revenge so often floated in these spirited texts.[18]

The violence that lies so close to hand around our bonfires, the unanimity that one feels as one recites the long list of the crimes of the Other, exemplify in their own ways the conditions of postmodernity which shape this Crisis.[19] The Crisis places "the real" in question; it relativizes any truth-claims and makes even the concept of "telling the truth" seem distant. So many of the debates involved in this crisis have involved taking positions which cannot be founded even remotely on factual knowledge, concerning events which may never occur. Counterfactualism rules. Many of the sharpest disagreements of the past 30 years have been based on what might or might not happen, what might or might not be read into a text, or even what might or might not be read into the precise position of words in a text. We have been wrestling with discursive phantoms — but phantoms made "real" through repetition, fear and faith. The focus (but not the cause) of so much of the Crisis has been a "constitution" which exists not as a stable, verifiable phenomenon but as a perpetually re-imagined ideal in the minds of Supreme Court judges.[20] Many of those engaged in the construction of this crisis refer, as if to an ultimate ground of justification, to the facts of globalization, to the imperative of escaping datedness, to their own openness in the face of diversity.[21] Yet this appeal to "the world" is deceptive, for the rival discourses disdain to reveal any legitimate grounds upon which one might dissent from their representations of reality, and "the world" that emerges through the imposition of their opposed categories is one that suits specific political agendas, and only them. It does not seem an accident that, after reading so many rival predictions and authoritative but conflicting representations, many citizens retreat into a form of "internal exile". Many — perhaps most — people in Québec and Canada profess a bitter cynicism about the debate. Exhaustion and a profound sense of political powerlessness, interspersed with inexplicable bursts of emotion, characterize postmodern cultural experiences generally, from watching television to going to raves. This passivity may well be deceptive. At moments of high crisis, whipped back into patriotic line by the masters of apocalyptic rhetoric, the believers will rejoin the campfire circles.

There is another, more obvious link that could be explored between the literature of the Crisis and the condition of postmodernity. Particularly around the Canadian bonfire, one is encouraged to celebrate difference, ideological pluralism, fluidity, indecisiveness. It has become an orthodoxy that to be Canadian is to celebrate the unorthodox, to take delight in this crisis, to find joy in Canada’s paradox and "impossibility".[22] Those exploiting this well-worked vein — could they have a professional or even libidinal investment in postponing the climax of the Crisis? — suggest that the postmodernity of Canada is both fascinating and (somehow) liberating. These celebrators of diversity have become (at least in their own minds) World Citizens, master intellectuals who can differentiate with the interminable subtlety of a Hegel between a shallow and a deep diversity,[23] a state-nation and a nation-state,[24] the timeless truths of liberalism and the shallow evasions of "community" and so on and so forth. On Canadian soil, they are intellectual internal exiles, faithful citizens of nowhere but (generally) partisans of a global neoliberalism.[25]

Postmodernism as one encounters it in this Crisis seems profoundly ignorant of history. Its historicity seems confined to the ahistorical and decontextualized celebration of the supposed Canadian Art of Compromise. At least two objections arise: it is inaccurate to view the Canadian project as one entailing ideological uncertainty and "compromise", when there is abundant evidence to suggest the contrary — were the First Nations for instance really subjugated and subordinated through a policy of sensible compromise, or is it more accurate to speak of a consistent, thorough policy of liberalizing political/cultural transformation? And, second, it is at the least unoriginal and inconsistent to insist on bedrock liberal values in the same breath as one celebrates social and ideological heterogeneity as one of the charms of the Dominion — for if the "bedrock values" to which we are obliged to swear allegiance are those of liberalism, this must be the historical outcome of a process through which other values (say, those of the Ultramontanes, Family Compact Tories and Inuit) were subordinated if not eliminated. The primary advantage of the "postmodern tone" is that it creates the sensation of being above the fray. Perhaps these World Citizens have simply built themselves more comfortable bleachers around the same old fires.

There may be ways to think and act in the Crisis that entail neither an Olympian detachment from its "texts" nor an essentialist commitment to its violence. One could imagine a perspective drawing from both traditions, without being reducible to either one. From this perspective we are "After Canada" because Canada is best grasped, not as a place, an essence, a nation or a transcendental ideal, but as a process unfolding in time and space — a process which has now irretrievably reached a point of transformation.[26] Canadian history does not, from this perspective, entail "all that happened that was important to the inhabitants of northern North America" — a holistic "rethinking [of] Canada" that would somehow produce a narrative speaking equally to straights and gays, men and women, francophones and anglophones, etc., etc. — but rather what happened as part of the hegemonic process through which a "Canada" came into being and became a state in northern North America. Against the postmodernists and their curiously repetitive and "orthodox" celebrations of Canadian diffuseness, pluralism, etc., this approach would insist that the process of Canada was initially that of instituting, under the aegis of the British Empire, a liberal order in northern North America; it was not fundamentally about an ethnic or linguistic compact, a tradition of tolerance, any notion of popular sovereignty, the equality of men and women, or the founding of a "democracy". It was, to coin a phrase, about the formation of a "Dominion", a liberal territory secured, ultimately, by force of British arms.

All the literature of the Crisis which reads back into "Canada’s" 19th-century origins a blueprint of the contemporary welfare state[27] or of a warmhearted bilingual, bi-national, democratic compact of peoples is romanticizing the past. It incapacitates us in our efforts to think through the present. These books characteristically miss the extent to which the institutions and identities of Victorian "Canadians" were first and foremost those of Britain. The process of Canada underwent a significant if partial popular revolution in the 1940s, characterized inter alia by the invention of Canadian citizenship, and it is from the middle decades of the 20th century that most of what we now take for granted about "Canada" — its bilingualism, its flag, its democracy, its limited social egalitarianism — was constructed. From this perspective, "Canada" is short-hand for a complex process through which a British liberal empire was partially transformed into a democratic nation-state: Canada refers to a "moment" rather than an "object". And against essentialist nationalisms, a lapsed Canadian notes the relative discontinuity of Canadian history, the recency of Canada (although of course not of all of the elements incorporated by or influenced by the process).[28]

Both "Canada" and "Québec" as integral national projects emerged in a post-colonial setting; our present crisis is thus a distant echo, in this sense, of the collapse five decades ago of the British Empire. Both "Canada" and "Québec" as projects seek to mobilize concepts of sovereignty and citizenship in a northern North America vacated by an active and effective imperial presence. While conceding the significance of the construction of "ethnicity" as an active and significant process, we should find much in this competitive process of liberal national state-formation that cannot be reduced to a struggle between ethnic groups. And against postmodern cynicism, a more genuinely critical perspective affirms not only the possibility and necessity of accurate historical knowledge, which (at the limit) may mitigate the drive to violence that powers so much of the apocalyptic rhetoric of Crisis, but also argues for the logical coherence, extending even to epistemological and ontological assumptions, of the governing discourses of British North America’s and Canada’s rulers from the mid-19th century to the 1970s.

This alternative perspective, in which both "Québec" and "Canada" emerge as 20th-century "new liberal" responses to the challenge of ordering a northern North America previously conceptualized and governed as a British liberal dominion, may seem, and in fact is, a rather obvious interpretation which closely adheres to the available evidence. Many writers have described something close to this.[29] Still, these ways of thinking have not yet been consistently or rigorously pursued, and doing so would open up some new conceptual and political space. If both "Canada" and "Québec" were political projects, related to but also distinct from the antecedent British liberal dominion, neither one can claim a simple historical or ethical priority over the other. Neither one can be accurately depicted as the "natural" nation to which the Other is suitably cast as conqueror, victim or seducer. Since neither one "came first", and since neither one is intrinsically a perverse or atavistic "nationalism" counterposed to the Enlightenment rationality of the other (to cite a rather overworked federalist trope), nor contrariwise a "fragile," "artificial" and "unnatural" construction counterposed to a more sturdily rooted and natural nation (to cite an equally hackneyed nationaliste theme), all the narratives which produce such limited and biased understandings can be seen afresh as simplistic attempts at political mobilization rather than as useful guides to the complexities of the past.

And, more radically, they should be set aside by anyone interested in thinking the Crisis without falling into dichotomies. This also applies to those many writings which now depict an "English Canada", supposedly the closet case that dared not speak its own name, now timidly whispering its identity and finding its "essential voice", which is (of course!) one which urges us to keep to the path of the "commonsensical middle way", that sane sensible voice of compromise and order which so many Canadian historians have idealized and reified as the essence of Canada itself.[30] One finds it paradoxical, however, that when this "English Canada" comes out, it promptly assumes a stance of epistemological and ethical primacy over all others, to the point of describing (and denouncing) their "nationalism" while remaining discretely silent about its own.[31] And of course one might question with equal severity the many texts that produce a unilinear continuous narrative, from the Conquest to Meech Lake, of "Québec’s" victimization — narratives which have apparently attained the status of hegemonic common sense within nationalist circles in francophone Québec, but which work only by rigorously excluding a huge realm of cultural and political phenomena — Cartier, Laurier, Tarte, St. Laurent, Trudeau to name only a few political figures — as somehow extraneous to (or betrayers of) the nation’s true essence.[32] It may prove genuinely liberating to shelve these tropes of victimization, perversity and naturalness, and to regard both Canada and Québec as relatively recent, and eminently political, constructions, each as "natural" and as "unnatural", as "tolerant" and as "intolerant", as the other.

Historians in the former Canada, "Canadian", "Québécois", and those many whose analyses largely skirt the question of nation altogether,[33] barely register on the scale measuring the seismic disturbances of this Crisis. They have produced not one significant work which explores its dynamics.[34] Instead they have merely repeated the fine old narratives of yesteryear, blissfully unaware, it would seem, that narrating the history of Canada as a continuous and successful national experiment, while an attractive option if one is addressing a public school assembly or constructing a beer commercial, is not the most promising way to explore (and to survive) a myth-symbol complex in deep crisis. The burden of "explaining" the Crisis has generally fallen on the shoulders of political scientists, sociologists and constitutional lawyers, for most of whom even the 1980s are "ancient history". Even historians writing in these social-science-oriented volumes tend to become present-minded.[35] A realist school of Canadian history, if one can imagine such a thing, could make a real difference in this situation, by continually interrupting the steady flow of nationalist stories. Paradoxically, a hard-boiled, unsentimental and neo-Marxist approach, which refuses to privilege either Canada or Québec as political projects, and which never forgets the costs of the liberal project for subaltern classes and groups, could rescue this debate from its tendentious essentialism and violence. But one should not forget the small detail that there is at present no discursive space for the development of any such non-nationalist perspective. Almost everyone who writes or speaks on this question has become an "official nationalist" of one description or another. It is, apparently, the price of admission to the debate.

The relative absence of theoretically-informed historians has not deterred all and sundry from invoking the authority of the past. "History" obligingly justifies the most surprising things in this discussion. Political polemics unceasingly urge us to sign up as bit players in grand narratives, as gripping and violent as the latest Hollywood epics. The crisis infantilizes its participants and simplifies historical understanding; often it gives us a comic-book world, with villains and heroes, "progress" and "decline", and above all, operatic dramas of betrayal or faithful love. Canadian history is grasped in charming vignettes — John Ralston Saul’s preposterously overworked "golden handshake" of Lafontaine and Baldwin, a classic example of the nationalist uses of the "reassurance of fratricide",[36] the reconceptualization of John A. Macdonald as an ardent democrat,[37] Mulroney or Trudeau as the Great Men who betrayed the Canadian (or conversely the Québec) dream.[38] We are asked to forget about 20th-century social science, philosophy and critical theory, and enter the hero-and-villain frameworks of a time before relativity, historical materialism, cultural theories of nationalism, the linguistic turn. Even Social Darwinism escapes from its historical demise and in this literature enjoys a moment of rejuvenation — which would be a charming anachronism for the cultural historian, were he or she not reminded of the rather dismal political outcomes often associated with such deterministic evolutionary metaphors.[39]

Most "traditional political historians", some of whom are notoriously apt to blame "social historians" for the dismemberment of the national narrative, have simply added their cultural authority to one or other of the powerful nationalisms. This is not surprising. In most nationalist projects, from "Canada" to "Bosnia", it falls to conventional bourgeois historians to describe the necessity and goodness of the nation, that transcendental project in which one is asked to invest one’s life. Coated decorously with footnotes, hedged about with evasions, staunchly empiricist in epistemology, conveyed with the aloof disparagement and sly patronage that are the average ironic Canadian intellectual’s stock-in-trade, much of the literature on the Crisis is so sure in its certainty that it itself underwrites violence against the imagined Other. One reads over and over again, either explicitly or between the lines: "They must be crazy..." Canadian and Québec historians have become experts in describing the weirdness, atavism, oppressiveness and datedness of all nationalisms — except, of course, their own.

Can we do otherwise? The darkness gathers, and the bonfires give their comfort. Chanting our war cries, in these diminished and diminishing circles of light, at least we find ourselves among our own kind (or so we may fondly imagine). In the former Canada, as in the former Yugoslavia (although of course much more was at stake in the latter, such as the noble if unsuccessful dream of workers’ self-management) to be confused, or — worse — a hybrid, is potentially dangerous. Many intellectuals who once identified, however critically, with the Enlightenment political project, find safety and solace in deconstructing their former positions and renouncing a possible politics altogether.

If one could do otherwise, what would a critical historian’s agenda be? First, a ruthless criticism of all the historical narratives which so powerfully structure public debate — that is, a campaign, armed with as much critical and social theory as is necessary, to confront their simplicity with a more complex and analytical historical understanding. This should not just take the form of the historians’ favourite game of pedantry — although the crop of simple factual errors in so many of these books suggests the need for publishers to hire some fact-checkers and writers to read some history.[40] No, it should also take the form of a critique of the plausible but extremely partial accounts of the Crisis in which one individual, one group, one event is treated as primary. It should include critical analysis of the higher romanticism which, in sentimentalizing the Canadian project, obscures the power relations and cultural hegemony which were its conditions of possibility and which also account for its contemporary crisis. The stories we tell in this context are not harmless, and many of the most popular and respected narratives of the Crisis are brutally simplistic, reductionist, dangerous and stupid.

Second, we should embark on an extended examination of the history of "sovereignty" as a concept in northern North America.[41] In a few years, after all, we may well be firing at each other over questions of "sovereignty", and this exercise might be a bit more interesting if we first know what the concept really means. This should not be allowed to become an effort monopolized by philosophers or critical theorists, helpful as they might be in other contexts. Rather, we want to know how the discourse of sovereignty has functioned historically in Canada. Just when did "Ottawa" become the "sovereign" government (if in fact it ever did)? How have other sovereignties within Canada been conceptualized? What was the "common-sense" understanding of Canadian sovereignty in, say, the 1890s or the 1960s? How did the liberal project of British North America articulate the concept of sovereignty? Was Confederation in fact generally seen as an exercise in sovereignty-association?

Third, we need to work on what was continuous and discontinuous in northern North American history. This would entail an exploration of what Confederation did or did not mean; that is, the extent to which its conventional placement as the birthday of the liberal and bi-national democratic state of Canada is accurate in anything more than a conventional sense.[42] This would also entail an exploration of the "second moment" of Canada, that post-imperial attempt at constructing a new democracy in the postwar period, which was in an important sense a project of the social democratic left, driven in part by a concept of people’s sovereignty that emerged from the Second World War and its massive social disturbances. It would also entail an exploration of how Quebec, that similarly post-imperial and increasingly social democratic project of the 1950s-1970s, also confronted a revaluation of popular sovereignty. So far, this reconceptualization only places in a more critical light developments which are already well known. But what could be more strikingly original would be the exploration of the extent to which the two national projects, seemingly antithetical, also drew powerfully on each others’ energies, myths and symbols; for one of the most complicated and fascinating parts of the Crisis is the extent to which the two great nationalisms have been constructed against, but also in collaboration with, each other — they have rarely been "two solitudes" in reality. They have been more like two software programs for political integration, running paradoxically (and problematically) within the same system and generating its characteristic "system errors".

Fourth, we need to critique the role of "marginal peoples" in the Crisis of Canada — all those subaltern identities that the two major nationalisms either shove to one side or opportunistically exploit.[43] It would be a question of exploring the contemporary usages of the Amerindian question, not only the attempts to assimilate it to the existent narratives of nation-formation and to incorporate Amerindian groups into ahistorical models of the "nation", but also the attempts to "play the Amerindian card", in the apparently unceasing attempts to show the moral inferiority of the other nationalism.[44] It would also entail an analysis of the symbolic role of the Atlantic and other regions. Generally constructed in this literature as a basket-case, hopelessly dependent on Ottawa, the East’s own distinctive "Atlantic Revolution" and the neo-nationalist energies marshalled by liberal province-building should be seen as important elements in the transformation of the liberal dominion into a new democracy.[45] So, too, should the ambiguity of the West’s role, as both communitarian critic and last bastion of neo-liberal verities. Indeed, kicking the habit of simpleminded dualism would help us gain new insights into the complex inner workings of the rival national projects themselves.[46] It will also help us recall, at a moment of danger, the memory of class solidarity and united people’s struggle that, in the working-class movement and on the left, have shone out as moments of genuine possibility and understanding, and which, in holding up a "real ideal" of an unrealized new social order, have given progressives within both national projects grounds upon which they can struggle together. A generally untheorized practice of sovereignty-association, imperfectly developed but not powerless, can already be traced within the working-class movement and the intellectual community.

Fifth, we need to step back from the lush melodrama of apocalypse that sweeps through this literature of crisis, threatening readers with fragmentation, collapse, impoverishment and dismemberment. One could write a book on the rhetoric of breakage through which a generation of irresponsible intellectuals has sought to instill panic responses in the Canadian and Québec publics.[47] Nothing is more cherished by many of these intellectuals of the Crisis than projections, the more economistic and question-begging the better, which predict the dire (or beneficent) consequences of Québec’s independence.[48] This frantically manic-depressive literature often oscillates between contented celebrations of the good burghers of Canada, those wise, middle-of-the-road Fathers of this happy land, and out-of-control explosions of rage against the strange, perverted aliens who have pulled their work into the dust. In this imaginary world of Crisis, it is always five minutes to midnight.

From an alternative perspective, however, neither complacency nor panic are justified. We live in the former Canada, and we are already dealing culturally and politically with the consequences of Québec’s socio-psychological independence. Québec’s independence is a matter of contemporary history, and in and of itself is unlikely either to liberate or enslave; rather, under conditions of peaceful coexistence in northern North America, and after a period of economic and social disequilibrium, Québec may well function as a prosperous liberal bourgeois democracy like scores of others on the planet.[49] It may even remain part of some over-arching political arrangement with the rest of Canada.

This is not the same as saying, however, that those conditions of peaceful coexistence will be easily attained, and that the rhetoric of apocalypse and ultra-nationalism indulged in on both sides, and by a disturbing number of well-paid and tenured intellectuals, has not created risks of a far worse outcome. The non-resolution of Amerindian issues, particularly, threatens any easy "bi-national" compromise, because in these issues ethnicity, nationality and territoriality are all fatally combined.[50] To deconstruct these rhetorics of violence and exclusion, to subject both national projects to the informed scrutiny of critical scholarship, would serve some purpose if it worked to insulate at least some people from the rhetorical violence which, subtly or otherwise, insinuates itself into public rhetoric. After Canada, we need post-nationalist historians, who will forego the symbolic and monetary rewards of ultra-patriotism and punditry for the critical, even clinical re-examination of the preconditions and consequences of instituting political order in northern North America. Not for them the exquisite pleasures enjoyed by so many of the crisis intellectuals who have enjoyed rather more than their 15 minutes of postmodern fame, as they parade before the cameras as outraged westerners, zealous Québécois nationalists, "concerned Canadians", all equally vituperative, shallow and futile. Rather, they will need to cut new paths in a strange world and venture beyond the comfort of campfires.

For, after all our words upon words upon words have fallen into silence, after our proud demonizations and our sacred moments, our brave if inevitably forlorn efforts to place a pattern on formlessness — after all our bold words and deeds, the darkness falls and our bonfires grow cold. Time to venture into the cleansing, cold, bright morning world beyond the dark, beyond the comforting and comfortable circles of the faithful, beyond the moment of Canada which, like it or not, has now come to an end. The time for mourning or celebration has passed. We must get on. As Margaret Conrad reminded us in 1992, "since nations as we know them are relatively recent historical phenomena, it is also very likely that they are also fleeting ones".[51] Or as Great Big Sea has more recently sung, "time brings all things to an end" — even this long-running crisis of Canada.

IAN McKAY